A Free Left Blog

A few questions: 1) What sort of country (and indeed world) do we want to leave to our children and grandchildren? 2) Do we care about quality of life and, if so, what does it mean? 3) Are we serious about valuing our environment and the natural world, or are we happy to keep on despoiling and degrading them? 4) Are we serious about tackling climate change, and if not, are we prepared to face the consequences of it? 5) What priority does economic activity take in relation to these things, and is this priority indefinite or time-limited? These questions seem pretty important and fundamental to me, but they are questions that hardly ever get asked in our mainstream political debate, let alone answered. We have a democratic political system, but it often seems more dedicated to avoiding big and difficult questions rather than confronting them. Ironically perhaps, the latter point is not far from the position of the aviation lobby and its media supporters...

At first sight, Labour’s proposed National Infrastructure Commission seems like another example of politicians lacking in confidence, giving away their democratic powers to unelected ‘experts’ in unaccountable quangoes; taking the democracy out of politics; depoliticisation as authoritarianism . There is perhaps a little bit of truth in that, at least in presentational terms– through the cult of the ‘independent’, ‘impartial’, ‘expert’, taking an apparently neutral approach to political decision-making. But the handover of power proposed by Sir John Armitt in his Draft Infrastructure Bill for Labour – backed by Ed Miliband – isn’t so much out of the Whitehall jungle as straight into the arms of its big beast: the Treasury. The Commission would be answerable to the Treasury, appointed (mostly) by the Treasury, told what to focus on by the Treasury, and its plans presented by the Treasury in a form decided by the Treasury. Its headline role would be to carry out a big ...

There is a beauty to liberalism: a certain degree of modesty and respect for our limitations as human beings, especially our knowledge; a righteous scepticism towards the ability of bureaucracies and control freaks to prescribe what is right and good for the rest of us. In the real world of here and now however, liberalism has jumped over the fence of moderation and is pronouncing here there and everywhere what is best for everyone, actively prescribing huge changes in the social fabric of modern societies while also, notably, demanding strict social conformity. It is perhaps worth invoking John Stuart Mill’s famous ‘harm principle’ here: “ That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others .” This principle seems frightfully out of date now: as a platform for government, it is minimalist and clearly inadequate. But it also makes little sense when pressed up agains...

This article was originally published on Shifting Grounds on 19th February 2013. Since then I have been interested to see in Sir George Cox's review of short-termism in business, commissioned by the Labour Party, the proposal that infrastructure be removed from democratic political control (see page 11). That is precisely the sort of thing I mean by "A Stealthy Form of Authoritarianism":  perhaps not so stealthy though... “I think we really are the victims of a discursive shift, since the late 1970′s, toward economics”, the late historian Tony Judt said in a recent book. “Intellectuals don’t ask if something is right or wrong, but whether a policy is efficient or inefficient. They don’t ask if a measure is good or bad, but whether or not it improves productivity…Until you’ve generated resources, goes the refrain, there’s no point in having a conversation about distributing them. This, it seems to me, comes close to a sort of soft blackmail.” Judt talked ...