Robin McAlpine – The fight for universalism

The technocrats are all-out in a battle formation clearly designed to do one thing – to undermine the concept of universalism

Robin McAlpine is Head of Strategic Development at the Common Weal think-tank in Scotland.

Cross-posted from Common Weal

There is so much talk about what or who is the biggest threat to democracy that we often lose site of the erosion of democratic debate carried out by the people often moaning most about the decline of democracy. It is strange how often the propensity to justify destructive military action to ‘protect democracy’ come from people who are also adamant that democracy is just plain wrong when they say it is.

They’re called ‘technocrats’ and they know what you want but they are also certain you’re wrong. In many was it is they who represent the real threat to democracy. And the technocrats are all-out in a battle formation clearly designed to do one thing – to undermine the concept of universalism.

Why do they want to do this? Because technocrats are always right wing and their mission is always to dismantle the post-war welfare state settlement. They have already achieved that almost completely with the economy but they are deeply frustrated that the public keep clinging on to the welfare state model for their public services. It drives the technocrats (and the full-on hardcore right) mad.

In their minds, markets are there to meet your needs and collective provision just represents a failure in markets. In fact, many of them see collective provision as the reason for the failure in the market. It is really, really obvious to them; every problem is about debt levels and taxation and every solution is about spending less.

They love attacking universalism because it contains within it easy scope for the use of logical fallacy. When you create a policy that is explicitly and intentionally designed to cover everyone equally irrespective of circumstances, two things are inevitable. The first is that there will be outlier cases which seem strange (billionaires getting winter fuel payments). The second is that people will use these outliers to undermine the whole concept.

But that’s just a ‘Chopping Fallacy’, deliberately ignoring the main argument to focus on a single minor objection. That also allows the Nirvana Fallacy to be rolled out – that if something isn’t perfect it must be rotten. And of course the whole thing is drenched in the False Dichotomy Fallacy – that your only options are means testing so the poor get the most or not means testing so money that should be invested in the poor instead goes to the rich.

So before I prove overwhelmingly that universalism is one of the most politically successful strategies and ideologies ever, let me just address all this logical fallacy. This is the reality; the thing about universalism that provides case studies at the edges that look wrong is the thing that makes it work so well. It works so well because it is a right we all have, not a threshold we have to cross.

This is the thing about universalism which is so incredibly effective and this is why it is so popular. You get ill, you get treated. There is no ifs and no buts. You don’t need to check your eligibility criteria, you don’t need to fill in paperwork, you don’t need to prove you deserve it. It is there when you need it.

Let me give you another example of universalism; roads. We could quite easily have a privatised road system with a host of different companies owning different roads and seeking to create a ‘market’ in road transport. I could look and say ‘hmmmm, got to get to Edinburgh – will I take the Serco A701 at three pence a mile or the slightly longer Ticketmaster A702 which takes me to the wrong part of Edinburgh but costs half a pence less per mile’.

This is what you won’t hear though; you won’t hear technocrats telling you that roads are madly inefficient because it costs the same for a billionaire to drive on them (nothing) as it costs a low-income pensioner (also nothing). The right thing to do is therefore surely to means test roads, right? That’s not saving you a hundred million quid, that’s a full-on money printing machine.

So why are you not hearing this? Because technocrats are the most dreadful hypocrites who have created a ‘scientifically immutable’ set of ‘technical’ realities which, coincidentally, wind their way neatly round the self-interest of this category of people. They literally don’t care about £100 to heat the house, but they would rather hate paying a means-tested, unsubsidised share of the £1 billion roads budget.

You know what can’t be afforded when money is tight? Generous pensions relief for the middle classes, massive discounts and write-offs in Inheritance and Capital Gains tax, that sort of thing. Those dwarf the cost of free school meals and winter fuel payments, but those are Technocrat Perks so we don’t talk about those.

So very quickly, in the real policy debate over universalism, why did universalism win hands-down? First, it works. No social policy approach in a hundred years has had a bigger impact. It turns out that when you target things you do the minimum and when we all share in things we do them right. And when we do them right it benefits the poorest the most.

Or put another way, if you want to address poverty-related ill health then don’t do it with badly funded Poor Hospitals, badly funded because the poor always gets the minimum. Instead create services we all share in and you get the public consent to make that a good service. And it is good services, ones which lift us all, which lift the poor by far the most.

This is the first gigantic benefit of universalism. At a time of screaming, rampant individualism which most people now accept is tearing our social fabric apart, nothing unites a society like universalism. That is why the NHS is so totemic for us; it is the realisation of everything we were trying to achieve. A better society for all.

When we create services for the poor they always turn into poor services because forget what they say, politicians don’t care about the poor because the poor don’t vote. And when we provide poor services to the poor, everything gets worse.

The second great benefit of universalism is efficiency. In the years after free prescription charges were introduced in Scotland there was technocrat moaning about the £60 million cost. (Again, they didn’t moan about price gouging by Big Pharma, but selective hearing is as important to technocrats as hypocrisy.) Except do you know what it was costing to administer the means tested system from before hand? £30 million.

Half the money you saved you instantly lose on paying lots of people lots of money to punish people for not being poor enough. Administering means tested schemes is hopelessly resource-intensive, always gets things wrong and always fails to get help to everyone who is eligible. The case for means testing is dreadfully weak.

Because I bet there is a chance you have missed the arithmetic in that. See that £60 million being spent on medicine? You know how much of that was being spent on medicine before? It was (duh duh duh!) £60 million. People needed the same medicine. You were paying the same – plus an extra £30 million from your taxes for the pleasure of you being able to pay your bit of the £60 million directly out of your pocket.

Also you can’t really defraud a universal system because it just does what it does equally and to all. You can’t double-claim, you can’t falsely claim. Rates of fraud in means tested benefits are about 50 times higher than in universal benefits. Technically they are hopelessly inefficient.

This is just a toe in the water on the evidence of why universalism works. I was an author on a paper from more than ten years ago that showed the benefits of universalism conclusively based on clear, empirical evidence. And in doing so it reminded us how to slay that last logical fallacy that holds the technocratic assault on universal services together – the False Dichotomy Fallacy, that it is either services for people who do need them or it is services for people who don’t.

Cutting services is socialist, you see, because it is redistributing wealth through targeting. Except that is a total distortion of the truth. The truth is that socialism was based on a simple principle; “from each according to ability to pay to each according to need’. Rationing is not, is never socialist. Taxing the rich is.

If we have a problem with affording universal services and there is a category of people who can afford to lose that service, that is because the same category of people can afford to pay the tax to maintain that service.

You’d think with their famed technical prowess the Technocrats would have worked that out by now. It’s almost as if they’re… misleading you deliberately.

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