Chris Dillow – The end of modernity

Recently, I’ve been listening to a lot of Public Service Broadcasting, a side-effect of which has been to remind me of a big and largely overlooked difference between this Labour government and that of Tony Blair.

What I mean is that much of PSB’s work celebrates progress and modernity. Their latest single is Electra (“the future of flying”); an earlier song was called (I believe in) progress; and they’ve made albums about the founding of the BBC and the space race.

This invocation of futurity and modernity draws our attention, however, to the fact that this is precisely what Starmer is not doing. As Nesrine Malik writes in an acclaimed article, “Starmer’s weakest feature is his inability to paint a rousing vision of our modern country.”

Which is of course a huge contrast to Blair who in the 1990s could barely open his mouth without speaking of modernization, not only of the Labour party but of government and the economy: “modernising social security…is a central plank of building a modern Britain”; “modern application of progressive values”; “a modern education system and a modern NHS”; and so on. A collection of his early speeches was titled New Britain: my vision of a young country. And even today he believes – based perhaps more on faith than evidence – that AI can transform government. Alan Finlayson wrote in Making Sense of New Labour that:

If there is a single word that might capture the essence of New Labour’s social and political project then it is ‘modernisation’.

In this, Blair was treading the path of his predecessors. Harold Wilson famously spoke of the “white heat” of the technological revolution wherein modern technocrats would replace outmoded aristocrats as rulers of industry. And one of Thatcher’s motives for trades union reform was precisely to give managers the power to modernise the economy.

With one or two exceptions (which I’ll come to), however, the Starmer government rarely speaks of progress, futurity or modernity.

Why not? You might think it’s because modernity has failed. We see this every day, be it in the legacy of modern car-centric town planning left by men like Konrad Smigielski or Robert Moses or in the fact that many of Blair’s improvements in public services were subsequently reversed.

And indeed PSB remind us of the failures of modernity. The high-mindedness of the BBC’s founders contrasts horribly with today’s intellectual pollution that is Jeremy Vine or Laura Kuenssberg; the manned space programme petered out; and Amelia Earhart’s Electra crashed.

Fans of the late James C Scott (of whom I’m one) will think there’s a good reason for the failure of what he called “high modernist ideology.” Planners, he said, had much less omniscience than they thought; people were not mere pawns to be pushed around; and societies and cities were just too complex to be controlled from the top down:

If I were asked to condense the reasons behind these failures into a single sentence, I would say that the progenitors of such plans regarded themselves as far smarter and farseeing than they really were and, at the same time, regarded their subjects as far more stupid and incompetent than they really were. (Seeing Like A State, p 343).

Granted, Scott might overstate his case, but he surely has a point.

But it’s one that Labour doesn’t seem to grasp. One of the rare modernist exceptions in the party’s programme is the plan to build new towns. And its distancing itself from anti-fascist street protests betokens a distrust of decentralized popular action. Both betoken a flat rejection of Scott’s thinking.

For good or ill, therefore, we cannot attribute Labour’s rowing back from modernization to Scottian ideas.

Instead, I suggest there’s another reason why Labour doesn’t talk of modernity and optimism – economic stagnation.

Basic maths tells us that if the economy is growing by 2% a year then it will double in size after 35 years. That doesn’t just mean we’ll have more stuff. It means the economy (and therefore society) will be different: economic growth, as Eric Beinhocker and Joseph Schumpeter said, is a process of creative destruction and increasing variety.

A growing economy, therefore, delivers change whether we want it or not, and so we must look ahead to a different future. In a stagnant economy, however, there is less need to do so. Yes, John Stuart Mill wrote that a stationary state would have “as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture, and moral and social progress”, but the recent racist riots show that he was too optimistic.

But there’s more than mere maths behind the decline of modernity. Economic stagnation shows us that today’s capitalism (whether you call it neoliberalism, rentierism or whatever) is failing most people. Our ruling class senses this if only as a barely articulated gut instinct, and so doesn’t want to talk about the future simply because capitalism doesn’t offer much of one. A big reason why the right talks so much about immigration is that to talk about anything else – climate change, the cost of living, failing public services, unaffordable housing, flatlining real wages and so on – would be to bring capitalism into question. And that it must not do.

Yes, Labour isn’t quite as squeamish as the right. But even so, it has a problem. And it’s reluctance to even articulate this is one reason for its silence about modernity.

It’s that even quite centrist plans to restart economic progress and productivity growth require an attack upon vested interests – upon what Joel Mokyr called the “forces of conservatism”. Tax simplification would put lawyers and accountants out of work; cutting house prices or shifting tax onto land will hurt landlords; tougher competition policy, the break-up of monopolies or measures to encourage business start-ups will be resisted by incumbent companies; and Nimbys will oppose infrastructure spending and housebuilding.

Modernization today, therefore, means something very different from that in Thatcher and Blair’s time. Back then, it meant attacking unions and the poor; today, it requires attacking the rich and powerful. The centre-left resiles from such a prospect. Hence we have less talk about modernity.

But this comes at a cost. Although modernisation has often disappointed even in its own terms it has offered something – hope. And that is lacking now. We have a joyless polity which offers little optimism for either individual or collective action. That threatens to undermine the legitimacy of the existing order – and, as we saw with the racist riots, the backlash to this might not take a rational form.

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