Who will be Britain's Mussolini?

A year ago, I wrote about some of the – very negative – consequences of life without economic growth… at its simplest, that a win-win economy would be replaced by a zero sum game in which everyone has to scramble to get a slice of the pie. Not, of course, that things would be so simple in a complex western economy where huge discretionary social superstructures have been constructed atop an increasingly pressured material world. The two examples I gave were, first, the liberal penal system in which the death penalty was replaced (outside the USA) by ever shorter terms of imprisonment, and hard labour was replaced with community orders. But, as a growing inability to afford so vast and costly a system bites, calls for a return of both extreme forms of punishment will inevitably become mainstream. Second, public health systems like the UK’s massive National Health Service, will have no choice but to ration many treatments while withdrawing the most expensive treatments entirely – diseases that currently have a good treatment prognosis would become deadly again.

These were but two systemic impacts of a world without growth… and I raised them as a counter to the naïve belief in some quarters that it is possible to have a rational and fair “de-growth” in which we agree to accept the hardships involved in foregoing our current way of life in favour of a more sustainable but far less material one. Even if, absent some new and abundant energy source more energy-dense than fossil fuels, such an economy is our ultimate destination anyway. But simply that, starting from here, de-growth is likely to be red in tooth and claw as those with wealth and power throw everyone and everything under the bus in an attempt to hang onto their gains.

Indeed, an argument can be made that the wealth and power elites have been doing just this for the best part of half a century, but it is only becoming apparent now because the pressure put on those in the bottom half of the income and wealth distribution is reaching a breaking point. The whole point of the neoliberal turn in the late-1970s, for example, was to break the link between rising productivity and rising working class living standards which had prevailed through the post-war boom. In the aftermath of the depression of the early-1980s, the rich became obscenely wealthy even as the prosperity of the masses began to shrink. The deregulation of banking and finance in 1986 added to the benefits enjoyed by those at the top, even as it created the mountain of debt which collapsed in 2008. But even then, those with wealth and power were able to protect their own positions while forcing the masses to pay the price for the bailouts. And in the depressed years that followed, the old assumptions about hard work and getting a foot on the housing ladder became a chimera for younger generations… at least those whose parents lacked the means to hand wealth down.

Hard as the economic policies of Thatcher and Reagan had been, those of us who came of age at the time had still been able to find routes out of poverty. Hard work could still pay. And further education could still unlock a professional career. Meanwhile, those seeking to create their own jobs could even obtain government grants for entrepreneurs – one of the unforeseen consequences of this is that many of the groups which emerged as “Brit Pop” in the 1990s had bought their instruments and equipment and recorded their first albums using government grants. Gradually though, these routes became dead ends as government funds were withdrawn and austerity became the order of the day. This created what I refer to as “the thwarted bourgeoisie” – a generation of over-qualified and over-indebted university graduates with little prospect of securing genuine graduate employment or of earning anything like the salaries enjoyed by graduates two decades previously. It also produced the burgeoning precariat class in the bottom half of the income distribution, pinballing between an increasingly punitive social security system and part-time, zero-hours, and gig economy roles which often failed to meet the cost of essentials… fuelling the vast network of food banks which have become so commonplace that politicians now celebrate opening them.

This was happening even before western states chose self-harming approaches to what turned out to be an incredibly mild pandemic, and to a war in Ukraine largely prompted by their own neocon factions. Three years ago, we were promised that the war would be over, the Putin regime overthrown, and Europe would be prospering on the back of the energy and resources plundered from a balkanised Russia. Now, instead, Europe is de-industrialising because of the vastly higher cost of energy and resources from elsewhere in the world. Meanwhile, here in the UK a change of government has proved to be no change in government at all. The Labour (in name only) administration has more or less continued where the Conservative (in name only) administration left off… with a string of manifesto pledges already broken and with what barely passed as an economic policy already being rewritten for a third time in the face of global headwinds that expose the UK’s dangerously vulnerable situation. Far from being surprised that common mental illnesses have mushroomed among the young – one of the pretexts for the highly divisive proposals to cut social security payments to disabled people (which includes not paying social security at all to disabled people under 22 years of age) – it is a miracle that the numbers are so low.

A withdrawal into some version of despair seems to have been a common response since the Covid-19 world tour began. While poorer youngsters may have retreated into the depths of depression, a sizable number of affluent parents have simply funded their offspring’s retreat from the system entirely. And at the upper end of the age range, many of those with private pensions opted to take these early rather than attempt the soul-destroying and unending search for over-50s employment. But as the new government – building on its neoliberal predecessor – has made clear, there is no place in a declining Britain for anyone seeking to find a way out… work you must do, even if it offers no prospect of a living wage, even if it renders impossible the givens of a previous age, like owning a home or raising a family.

This, surely, brings into question the government itself. For decades, the illusion of democracy (in which you can have any government you want so long as it is neoliberal) has been used to disguise the fact that western states have operated in the interests of global corporations, and particularly global banking and financial corporations – bodies, that is, who act as rentiers, speculating in unproductive assets rather than investing in the productive capacity which might, just, have mitigated the approaching disaster. The idea that “they” have a plan seems disproven by the gross stupidity of the policies they have been pursuing… then again, perhaps plundering Russia’s resources was their last hope.