Neoliberalisms in British Politics

Christopher Byrne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351010719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Taking a chronological approach, this book challenges established economistic and ideologistic narratives of neoliberalism in Britain by charting the gradual diffusion of an increasingly interventionist neoliberal governmental rationality in British politics since the late 1970s, and the various means by which the project has furnished itself with a hegemonic basis for its popular support.

Spanning five decades of British political history and drawing on rich empirical evidence to bring conceptual clarity to, and chart the effects of, a style of government bound up with a host of epochal changes, it concludes by considering Brexit and the rise of Corbynism as the final act in the neoliberal saga. It then poses the question, Is British politics on the verge of a major reconstruction representing a decisive rejection of neoliberalism?

This book will be of key interest to scholars and students of British politics and neoliberalism, liberalism and, more broadly to political theory, political economy and public policy.

1 Introduction

This research arose out of an interest in the complex relationship between Tony Blair’s New Labour and what is commonly referred to as Thatcherism. In some respects, there appeared to be a great deal of continuity between Thatcherism and New Labour. For example, it is not difficult to identify lines of continuity between Thatcherism and New Labour in the area of economic policy. The Thatcher governments’ monetarist escapades in the early 1980s, their eschewing of the goal of full employment, and repeated attempts to rein in what was called irresponsible public spending after 1979 were all echoed in Gordon Brown’s adoption of his lauded ‘golden rules’ in relation to fiscal policy and the 1997 decision to shift responsibility for the setting of interest rates over to the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England. Likewise, looking at New Labour’s social policies, it is easy to draw parallels between the private finance initiatives of Labour governments after 1997 and the earlier public–private partnership arrangements explored by John Major’s Conservative government in the early 1990s and, to a slightly lesser extent, Thatcher in the mid-1980s.

However, it is also clear that, for as many lines of continuity there were between Thatcherism and New Labour, there were as many lines of discontinuity separating the two. Not only was the public persona and overall political style of Blair very different to that of Thatcher, but Blair’s own version of Thatcher’s ‘There Is No Alternative’ – namely, his articulation of globalisation discourse – amounted to a much more complicated defence of neoclassical economics. Added to that, Thatcher’s famous assertion that ‘There is no such thing as society’ seems a long way from the Third Way ideas that were so crucial early on in the New Labour project, which not only drew heavily on communitarianism but also envisioned a continuing ‘enabling’ role for the state in an era of globalisation.

The literature on New Labour, despite its voluminous nature, fails to account for these lines of continuity and discontinuity in a satisfactory way. This literature will be explored in greater detail in Chapter 3, but the part of it which is of interest for present purposes – namely, the part addressing the relationship between Thatcherism and New Labour – can be roughly divided into two camps: in one camp we have the broadly realist accounts of authors like Hay (1999) and Heffernan (2000), and in the other we have Bevir’s (2005) ‘interpretivist’ account. The argument Hay sets out is that, in order to understand New Labour, we first have to arrive at an understanding of the contradictions which inhered in the regime of accumulation characteristic of the advanced industrialised nations in the immediate post-war period, as well as to account for the ideological offensive mounted by the New Right from the late 1970s onwards. Parts of Hay’s account would fit within an orthodox Gramscian reading of New Labour and could be considered deterministic in nature, for reasons which are set out below, but he is also keen to elucidate the role of certain key elements of New Right ideology, such as Anthony Downs’ (1957) theory of electoral competition, in the transformation of the Labour Party of old into New Labour, as well as the influence of ideas, such as the class dealignment and structural dependence theses, formulated by left-wing academics in response to the electoral and other successes of the New Right. Hay (1999: 94) argues that New Labour acted in a manner consistent with Downs’ theory of electoral competition – that is, it rejected a bimodal view of the distribution of voter preferences in favour of a ‘unimodal and normally distributed’ one – for ‘ideational and contingent’ reasons or, more specifically, because of the reliance of key members of the New Labour project on professional market researchers and advertising executives who subscribed to Downs’ theory, rather than because of a straightforward capitulation to the ideas developed by the academics, commentators and politicians of the New Right.

In an analysis which in many ways resembles Hay’s, Heffernan employs a realist epistemology and methodology to argue that New Labour was the product of a combination of structural economic change and the waging of a largely successful ideological war of position by the New Right, and – again like Hay – he also discusses Downs’ economic theory of democracy. However, unlike Hay, who argues that the significance of Downs’ theory lies not in its ability to explain (Hay argues that it is merely descriptive in nature), but rather in the ideological role it plays, Heffernan argues that Downs’ theory does indeed have some explanatory capacity, so long as it is complemented by a theory of electoral competition which allows for the determining effect of ideology in select historical conjunctures. In his own words,

Arising from their interactions with electors (and other parties), parties do alter their positions in a competitive space (as Downs’ model suggests); some parties can successfully preference shape … while others can alternatively preference accommodate.

(Heffernan, 2000: 107)

He goes on to argue that New Labour is distinct from the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher because the latter was able to preference shape, and hence was a ‘directional’ political party, while the former was forced to preference accommodate and was, therefore, a ‘positional’ political party.

Furthermore, while no explanation is given as to precisely how Thatcher’s Conservatives were able to carve out a space for themselves as a directional political party, he explains New Labour’s willingness to perform the role of a positional party by arguing that ‘parties do come to accept the primacy of a dominant microideological alternative if it enhances their office-seeking role and can be linked to their historical ethos’ (Heffernan, 2000: 151). In other words, for Heffernan, the transformation of the Labour Party into New Labour can best be understood as the result of the latter’s purely ‘office-seeking’ nature, and its ability to articulate its office seeking as compatible with the core tenets of the social-democratic tradition out of which it came. Meanwhile, those sections of Heffernan’s analysis which focus on the role of structural factors in the formation of New Labour are based on the notion that, after an initial period of success in the 1950s and 1960s, the post-war settlement, incorporating a distinct accumulation regime and accompanying mode of regulation, ceased in the 1970s to be able to achieve its stated goals, thanks mainly to increases in the price of oil. The result of this was widespread dissatisfaction and a willingness on the part of the general public to embrace change, and the installation of a new economic and political order (Heffernan, 2000: 6).

From the perspective of figures such as Bevir, these realist accounts of the emergence of New Labour and its interrelationship with Thatcherism are problematic due to their ‘objectification’ of social categories which cannot be said to have an objective essence. Bevir (2005: 3) argues that

positivists [and realists, to the extent that they also posit an objectively existing extra-discursive realm] treat institutions, social categories, or rationality as the givens that constitute actions, rather than as the contingent products or properties of actions themselves and, in so doing, they fail to recognise their contingency and indeterminateness.

In the work of Hay and Heffernan, instances of objectification are not hard to find: one obvious example is Heffernan’s conceptualisation of New Labour as a purely office-seeking entity. Another is his reliance on the concepts of ideology and ‘paradigm’. This is illustrated in his claim that ‘The politics of the New Right, enacted into policy over a 20-year cycle, now bound the policy horizon, reflecting the cognitive maps fashioned by a newly dominant neoliberal paradigm’ (Heffernan, 2000: 19), but perhaps the most telling form of objectification present in the work of both Hay and Heffernan relates to the signifying elements of ‘the economy’ and ‘Fordism’. In Heffernan’s work this is manifested in an oversimplified narrative premised on the crisis of Keynesianism and the inevitable rise of neoliberalism.

In Hay’s work, it appears in a somewhat more sophisticated guise. Consider the following passage taken from Hay’s discussion of the literature on post-Fordism:

If the political economy of the current stage of capitalist development is held to be synonymous with neoliberalism, then the logic of the argument is that New Labour has no choice but to capitulate to the latter’s inexorable embrace. If, on the other hand, post-Fordism (as in Jessop’s formulation) can sustain a variety of different regimes (neoliberal, corporatist and social democratic) then all that this implies is that Labour needs to revise its social democracy in tune with such post-Fordist tendencies.

(Hay, 1999: 30)

While Hay is careful to avoid the most common form of objectification found in the literature on post-Fordism – namely, that which conceives of ‘economic change’ such that it allows for a single superstructural response – he nevertheless still objectifies the economy and ascribes to it the function of limiting the range of possible state responses to post-Fordism. The ultimate result of which is to engender a degree of fatalism with regard to the scope of the politically possible in the post-Thatcher era. Hay rightly criticises the more simplistic accounts of post-Fordism for diffusing a logic which renders neoliberalism necessary and inevitable, yet he himself is similarly fatalistic with regard to the inevitability of either a neoliberal, neocorporatist or neostatist response to post-Fordism. Ultimately, Hay’s major criticism of Thatcherism is that it failed to construct an internationally competitive Schumpeterian workfare regime due to its overriding ideological preference for market solutions to society’s problems, but he levels this criticism while accepting certain Thatcherite parameters (Hay, 1999: 68).

Bevir (2005: 4) speculates that the reason why political analysts seek to objectify parts of the social world in this manner is because they seek objective knowledge of social processes that allows for a kind of predictive science of the social:

Whenever positivists objectify institutions, social categories, or rationality, they divorce the objects they study from the contingent beliefs and desires embedded within them: they portray the Labour Party, the working class, or bureaucrats as objects whose properties and actions they can explain, correlate, or model without having to take cognizance of the possibly diverse and conflicting beliefs, desires, and actions of Party members, workers, or civil servants. In doing so, positivists establish the possibility of their claiming a certain expertise. They can claim to reveal how and why political events and processes occur through the application of their abstract explanations, correlations, or models. Sometimes they even claim that their explanations, correlations, or models can predict what will happen under certain circumstances. Hence they can offer expert advice to elite actors about what these latter might achieve and how they might do so.

Bevir aims to deploy a type of analysis which is not motivated by the desire to attach to itself an aura of scientificity in the manner described above. Given his interpretive starting point, this means that he does not take for granted the existence of an empirical world which can in part or in whole be observed by the impartial political analyst using categories such as ‘regime of accumulation’, ‘mode of regulation’ and ‘paradigm’. On the contrary, he argues that all human experience has precise discursive conditions of emergence and that it is the job of the political analyst to reveal the contingent nature of taken-for-granted social phenomena. In the case of New Labour, the task is not to identify the structural economic preconditions for the emergence of a new mode of regulation, or to determine the precise nature of the paradigm shift brought about by the diffusion of neoliberal ideology, but to unearth the diverse ideological influences upon the New Labour project and to show how, as an ideology, the latter is distinct from, and yet imbricated with, Thatcherism in all of its intricate details (Bevir, 2005: 126).

Bevir presents the argument that New Labour was a response to questions posed by the New Right – for example, in relation to the supposedly enervating effects of inflation and the bureaucratic and inflexible nature of the Keynesian welfare state – but one which answers those questions in a manner consistent with both New Labour’s social-democratic heritage and its later opening up to communitarianism and the new institutionalism, like this:

Although New Labour accepts that markets can be an appropriate means of delivering public services, it insists that markets often are not the most efficient way to deliver services because they can go against the public interest, reinforce inequalities, and entrench privilege, all of which can damage economic performance. For New Labour, the problem with public services is one of adapting them to new times, rather than of rolling back the state to promote market competition.… New Labour’s supply-side vision [therefore] reflects the new institutionalism — and the heritage of Wilsonian socialism — more than it does neoliberalism.

(Bevir, 2005: 45)

However, the kind of interpretivist account of New Labour and its relationship with Thatcherism put forward by Bevir is arguably based on a logical short circuit. This is because, despite cautioning other authors against objectifying social categories, Bevir himself objectifies a range of social categories which have no greater claim to an objective essence than those used by the positivists and realists he sets himself in opposition to. In setting out the case against accounts of New Labour which treat ideology in an ‘aggregated’ manner, and which ascribe to it a determining function in relation to political change, Bevir (2005: 60) argues that we ought to ‘define ideologies not by reference to a given content – whether perennial or contingent – but, rather, pragmatically in relation to that which they explain.’ However, in attempting to bring to light the contingent, non-necessary nature of New Labour ideology and the diverse range of influences which fashioned the Third Way, he falls back on the notion of ‘tradition’, which is ultimately little different to that of ideology, in accounting for the lines of continuity between old-style social democracy and the Labour Party of Blair and Brown. This is illustrated in the following passage:

In the case of New Labour’s Third Way, we will find, first, that agents operating against the background of a tradition of social democracy generally constructed issues such as state overload in ways subtly different from the New Right. We will find, second, that their different responses to these issues reflect their tradition and their particular construction of the problems. And we will discover, finally, that New Labour conceives of the problems, and responds to them, in ways that are entwined with the new institutionalism.

(Bevir: 2005: 60)

However, to say that Bevir is guilty of his own form of objectification should not be taken as an assertion of the need to avoid objectification at all costs in order to arrive at a correct understanding of New Labour. This is because some kind of objectification is a necessary part of any kind of political analysis. The reason why is set out in an exchange between Butler (2000) and Laclau (2000).

Butler takes issue with Laclau’s theory of subject formation and, in particular, his depiction of a subject whose sense of self is necessarily permeated by a kind of auto-negativity stemming from the failure of discursive systems of representation to achieve a final ‘suturing’ of the social world. She argues that positing such a subject amounts to the imposition of a ‘structural limitation’ that is not theoretically valid, given the entirely social, cultural and context-dependent determinants of subject formation in any given historical conjuncture (Butler, 2000: 13). Laclau’s response is to argue that the very notion of a ‘radical historicism’ of the kind Butler advocates is an impossibility given the unacknowledged structural limitation the concept implies. Laclau (2000: 184) cites Butler’s assertion that ‘no assertion of universality takes place apart from a cultural norm, and, given the array of contesting norms that constitute the international field, no assertion can be made without at once requiring a cultural translation’, and in reply asks if the assertation that ‘no assertion of universality takes place apart from a cultural norm’ is not merely one more context-dependent assertion requiring its own cultural translation. With this, Butler is faced with the dilemma of either accepting the assertion that ‘no assertion of universality takes place apart from a cultural norm’ is transhistorically valid, in which case her position becomes illogical, or that this assertion is also entirely context-dependent, in which case we have to accept the possibility of there existing some contexts in which the prevailing social and cultural conditions do grant certain ‘assertions of universality’ validity apart from any social or cultural norms.

As such, for Laclau, the imposition of some kind of structural limitation – or ‘objectification’ to use Bevir’s terminology – is not so much an analytical faux pas as a necessary precondition, not just for carrying out political analysis, but for communicating any meaning whatsoever. What this implies, for example, in relation to Laclau’s use of the category of discourse is that, in order to make his form of political analysis possible, it is necessary to posit this category as pure objectivity and to act as if it is transhistorically valid, albeit while bearing in mind its precarious grounding and, in consequence, the precarious grounding of any knowledge which its application produces. It follows that the stance taken by Bevir, of seeking to avoid objectification at all costs, is faulty and the criticisms of postmodernism of the kind put forward by Hay (2002) and Eagleton (1996) are misplaced. Hay (2002: 249) argues that postmodernism necessitates an ‘epistemological scepticism’ and a deconstructivist methodology concerned with endlessly deconstructing, in ‘parasitic’ fashion, the givens of modernist thought. On this basis, he poses the question, ‘To be a consistent postmodernist … should we not dispense with narratives and metanarratives alike?’ and concludes that ‘to be a postmodernist is indeed to take a self-imposed vow of absolute silence.’ Clearly, Laclau’s discourse theory does not see an epistemological scepticism as necessarily leading to a purely deconstructivist methodology and, from this perspective, no such ‘vow of absolute silence’ is necessary.

However, all of this does beg the question, If some form of structural limitation is a necessary part of any kind of political analysis, how do we determine which form in particular we ought to take as our starting point? Phrased differently, if all knowledge represents an ultimately unjustified imposition of decidability in a context of radical undecidability, there is no immediately apparent, rational way of choosing between, for example, the categories Heffernan chooses to objectify and those preferred by Bevir. This is because there is no such way, whether immediately apparent or not and, ultimately, the only sensible way of deciding which set of categories we ought to objectify is to base our choice on the admittedly partial criteria of how well they seem to explain political phenomena. This is not in the sense that they can help us make sense of an objectively existing social reality but in the sense that they can allow us to overcome some of the problems and dead ends encountered by other political analysts seeking to understand the same phenomena. With this being the case, the argument put forward in what follows is that the major fault of Heffernan and Hay, as well as Bevir, is that they objectify the wrong sets of categories and that, given the inescapability of objectification in political analysis, the ultimate criterion of the validity of the ontological, epistemological and methodological starting points which underpin this research, as well as its general approach to political analysis, is whether or not it provides a convincing account of the neoliberal project that New Labour formed such an important part of.

Bevir’s historical account of the ideological lineage of the New Labo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Thatcherism, authoritarian populism and roll-back neoliberalism
• 3 New Labour, modernisation and roll-out neoliberalism
• 4 The Big Society and neoliberalism after the crash
• 5 Conclusion: explaining neoliberal resilience
• Bibliography
• Index