Tag Archives: moral systems

A cold wind from the east

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eastern invasionI live in a country that I have known and loved for more than half of my life. I feel part of its living, breathing fabric and it’s an indelible part of who I am. Building on my vestigial instincts, England is what made me the bleeding-heart, doubting, tormented cosmopolitan I feel that I am meant to be. Slowly but surely, it rubbed away most signs of who I was before I knew it. I belong here, it is my home.

Lately, our government has been working hard to raise alert about the impending invasion of my countrymen, rebranded bogeymen. Romania and Bulgaria’s seven-year “transitionary” restrictions to the EU labour market are coming to an end, which in theory should make all EU citizens equal. We are told they are poised to invade these fragile shores and pilfer our lowest-status jobs, seduce our women, and push in front of us in the queue at Sainsbury’s. Or something like that. We don’t know how many will turn up and what untold chaos they will wreak, but we await them nervously. The appalling barbarians must be dissuaded from believing they will have a fun time in these parts, so we are making TV adverts assuring them they won’t. In their grotesque lack of sophistication, they will think twice about moving to a country where it rains a lot and where they won’t find a ‘welcome’ dole office at the border so that they can take advantage the second they arrive.

Inconvenient truths must be cast aside to protect the nation – such as that migrants have been shown to be substantially less inclined to claim benefits than their bona fide British brothers and sisters.

I for one didn’t turn up on these shores for the weather nor for the legendary 60 pounds per week of Jobseekers’ Allowance. I wasn’t terribly interested in reaping the benefits of Western neoliberal capitalism either. I came to the UK because I felt at home among its self-deprecating, open-minded and reflective people. In time, I grew accustomed to unyielding gravity-fed hot water systems, mint sauce and harassment at the border control desk. It was a price I could happily pay to live in a society of like-minded folk. I am now told I was miss-seeing things. England didn’t mean it. We are not all born equal. My presence is worrisome. England had rather I stopped playing with its toys.

The incensed are right to a large degree. Their innate sense of fairness is quite rightly ringing alarm bells. Some people out there are indeed taking advantage. They are stoking up our basest fearful instincts, hopeful that we might overlook the real abuses they themselves are carrying out. Frothing with rage at the thought of – largely imaginary – outsiders benefiting unduly from a society they do not contribute to, we close our eyes to those robbing us blind from their privileged positions near the centre of power. It is the dismantling of the public service system and its selling off to a variety of friendly bidders that should make us angry, and the demonization of the state in its protective – but never its coercive – capacity. It’s the dissolution of our employment and social security rights that should incense us. These are the things making life much worse for us and those who will come after us. Not the Eastern European bogeyman.

Prone still to a rather Romanian penchant for drama and overreaction, I half-expect to be escorted off the island.

Self-evident truths

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Two hospitals could be privatised and another will lose its accident and emergency department in the first test of the government’s determination to deal with bankrupt NHS trusts, it has been revealed.

Plans for South London NHS trust were outlined on Monday morning by the special administrator Matthew Kershaw. He said that without action the trust, already losing £1m a week, would accumulate a deficit of more than £240m by the end of 2015. (The Guardian, 29 October)

With the risk of sounding like a moral relativist – even though the self-restraint of dispassionate analysis usually eludes me – all assumptions at the heart of how human society is run are mere conventions – moral, intellectual and often purely accidental. What they are not is universal truths external to human endeavour. They are alive and tacitly accepted for as long as no one successfully challenges them (enter here the 20th century social revolution of your choosing).

So there is nothing self-evident therefore about our requirement to accept a public life permeated by the utilitarian and economistic language and assumptions of the free market system. Its unquestioned aura of scientific authority is our golden cage, comforting us with its promise of trickling prosperity and rigorous efficiency but also locking us into an inescapable logic. A logic of measuring the value of everything primarily and inflexibly in financial terms, with the narrow ideal of pecuniary profit as our only guidance.

This is not a lecture on money being the devil’s eye, as the Eastern European saying goes. It’s an expression of concern that the only thing that remains where social purpose used to exist is the unforgiving orthodoxy of neo-liberal capitalism.

“Bankrupt” NHS trusts, hospitals “losing” money, profit-driven private sector service providers beckoned to impart their wisdom on efficient delivery… This language has no place in the healthcare system, because it represents a set of values that belong to the world of business transactions. The NHS has one sole purpose, of an entirely moral nature: that of keeping us all alive and well, irrespectively of who we are.

I agree that this is a moral convention, not an immovable truth. Therefore, when it is being challenged, we need to acknowledge it overtly, so that we can soberly explore whatever new moral conventions are being put in its place.

I have just re-read Nye Bevan’s “In Place of Fear” (Heinemann, 1952) after many years, wanting to better understand the moral order that produced the NHS and public service as we know it today. As an aside, it’s remarkable how little ground we’ve covered in public debate over 60 years – we are slaves to the same political dichotomy, but we have, rather tragically, given up on arguing morally about our social purpose.

You may like to contrast and compare with the Guardian quote above, bearing in mind your own ideas about the purpose of society:

“The field in which the claims of individual commercialism come into most immediate conflict with reputable notions of social value is that of health.” (Pg. 73)

“[Contagious diseases] are kept at bay by the constant war society is waging in the form of collective action conducted by men and women who are paid fixed salaries. Neither payment by result nor the profit motive are relevant.” (Pg. 74)

“They do not flow from [competitive society]. They have come in spite of it. They stem from a different order of values. They have established themselves and they are still winning their way by hard struggle. In claiming them, capitalism proudly displays battles it has lost.” (Pg. 74)

“The collective principle asserts that the resources of medical skill and the apparatus of healing shall be placed at the disposal of the patient, without charge, when he or she needs them; that medical treatment and care should be a communal responsibility, that they should be made available to rich or poor alike in accordance with medical need and by no other criteria.” (Pg. 75)

“The National Health Service and the Welfare State have come to be used as interchangeable terms, and in the mouths of some people as terms of reproach. Why this is so it is not difficult to understand, if you view everything from the angle of a strictly individualistic Competitive Society.” (Pg. 81)

“[The NHS] is therefore an act of collective goodwill and public enterprise and not a commodity privately bought and sold.” (Pg. 82)

“A free Health Services is a triumphant example of the superiority of collective action and public initiative applied to a segment of society where commercial principles are seen at their worst.” (Pg. 85)

I am not quoting from Bevan for the purposes of argumentation in public debate. His aura and legacy may inspire, but do not serve as evidence. We do not owe the architects of our public services unwavering loyalty to their ideas. I am using his words to highlight the worldview that produced the services and guarantees we now take for granted. For we must put something in its place if we decide to bring it down.

There is nothing self-evident about requiring the NHS to be profitable or about assuming that private service delivery will bring with it increased efficiency. Both of these assumptions stem from a worldview incompatible with that which conceived the NHS. The latter is doomed to fail even against the criteria of its own neo-liberal value system:

“… the worst sort of ‘mixed economy’: individual enterprise indefinitely underwritten by public funds. In Britain, newly privatised National Health Service Hospital Groups periodically fail – typically because they are encouraged to make all manner of profits but forbidden to charge what they think the Market might bear.

[…] The result is moral hazard” (Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land, Pg. 111-112)

But that’s a different debate altogether.

The way we talk

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We must question the narratives that shape our public space if we are to have any certainty in the body of policies that guide us.

A political battle is won when your opponents adopt your framing of an issue in their own arguments. The way we talk about social problems, their sources and their dangers shapes our amenability to specific policy remedies. It primes us to accept a particular worldview as accurate, along with the social problems it identifies and the course of action it proposes. I have talked about this many times already. It is a key issue at the heart of what Amplified seeks to do and obvious though it may sound, it’s usually ignored – particularly in an age in which political debate is underpinned by a tacit consensus on the usefulness of neo-liberal economics.

Public debate is swamped with denials of the social causes of deprivation and disadvantage. Perversely, there is no such thing as society in the Big Society. The individual alone is the subject of praise and recrimination, the recipient of reward, incentive and admonishment. Individual responsibility and merit alone explain success and failure; they also justify coercion and recompense. Inequality of opportunity has all but vanished from the public space. All that remains is individual choice.

The worthy wealth creators and hardworking homeowners sit in one camp while the destitute, the invalid and the jobless are shown the error of their ways. If society plays no part in their predicament, the wicked must be shown the virtuous path through penitence. The law is no longer there for the vulnerable, but for the upright citizens and the paragons of success – for their economic and social advantages are a reflection of their own merit. No example is better than the abolishment of the so-called “squatters’ rights” to offer further protection than what already existed for hardworking homeowners. This riles me despite my own experience as a homeowner whose house was quite literally devastated by an unwelcome guest. The law should favour the needy, the vulnerable and the disadvantaged. It’s the very least it can do.

I write about the stories we tell in our public space because they are the mechanism via which ideology becomes indistinguishable from common sense. I make no secret of my own ideological bias in my writing – indeed, it would be very hard to. I truly fear that by denying the social causes of deprivation and disadvantage, we also remove our obligation to care, our very capacity for compassion, and ultimately the precious bonds that hold us together as a community with a social purpose.

The way we talk shapes the way we think and, in turn, the way we act. When ideology becomes common sense, there is little room left for manoeuvre and debate. That is why the right questions need to be asked at the right time. We must question the narratives that shape our public space if we are to have any certainty in the body of policies that guide us.

Individual merit

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As a political communicator, I cannot help but find language a rich resource of insight into the preconceptions and moral priorities that underpin public policy. One of the most interesting aspects of Big Society discourse, for example, is its seamless combination of communitarian “let’s do it”, “we’re all in this together” language with individualist ideas of responsibility, merit and a reward/punishment moral accounting system. Of course, all language hides a moral system, with ideological elements that are accepted as common sense. And naturally, there is no such thing as common sense, or rather, there is nothing common about it. Our ideas of what constitutes common sense are very much tied in with the moral and ideological conventions we subscribe to.

Take poverty and inequality for example. They are universally deplored as unacceptable and in Big Society discourse their eradication is as much a priority as in leftwing traditions. Poverty is a moral issue, an immoral state of affairs or a moral failure – in that it is morally unacceptable for deprivation to exist in our broadly shared ideas about society. That may sound nurturing and communitarian, but a closer look reveals a different story. Welfare in Big Society discourse is a trap (this is actually a commonly used metaphor) and welfare dependency very much an individual issue. That is, a failure of the individual as opposed to a systemic deficiency. Here’s how deprivation is explained in the DWP’s Social Justice blueprint from March 2012:

« Though low income is a useful proxy measure, it does not tell the full story of an individual’s well-being. Frequently, very low income is a symptom of deeper problems, whether that is family breakdown, educational failure, welfare dependency, debt, drug dependency, or some other relevant factor.»

This is a story of individuals erring from the moral path of small-c conservative righteousness, which would stipulate strongly fused family units, educational accomplishment, economic self-reliance, thrift and a healthy and wholesome lifestyle. Therefore it follows that economic deprivation is a symptom of individual moral failure, as opposed to being an effect of societal inequality of opportunity.

Why does this matter? It matters because the moral assumptions underpinning the DWP’s current outlook may well end up monopolising the welfare debate, as they are pretty much unchallenged in mainstream political debate, at the level of narratives. Which means the idea of individual merit is likely to become a prevalent explanation of economic success and deprivation. And this will affect the way we look at poverty and the amount of sympathy we are willing to allocate to it for generations to come. We may one day not so long from now be talking about the “undeserving poor”. I can accept this, although it goes against my own ideological bias, as long as we are aware of it happening, and conscious of the moral choice we are making – for it is a moral choice, as opposed to something self-evident, belonging to the realm of common sense. This is why peeling the layers of the language of politics is a satisfying and worthwhile pastime.