Six of the Best 441

Gaby Hinsliff in the Guardian reviews David Marquand's 'Mammon's Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now'.

"An eventual Conservative victory by just 22 votes (after four recounts) the Earndale campaign was also noticeable for the burgeoning love between the Labour and Conservative candidates and for the fact that no sooner had the Conservative candidate been elected than his uncle’s death elevated him to the Lords voiding the result of the election." Philip Cowley and Matthew Bailey on The Conversation look at the 1959 satire on politics 'Left, Right and Centre'.

"Since I first wrote about the Ladybird books obsession with modernism ... I've become increasingly fascinated by the role they played in fostering a spirit of excitement in Britain's postwar schemes to modernise," says Dirty Modern Scoundrel.

"He stands now as an exemplary figure, a committed artist working simultaneously against and within a medium that might speak to everyone. His work remains to embody a kind of joy that things, at least on television, really are all right." Also in the Guardian, Michael Newton pays tribute to Dennis Potter.

Our Statures Touch the Skies on Paul Wittgenstein (brother of the philosopher) who lost an arm in the First World War but still enjoyed a career as a concert pianist.

ViralSpell has some of the colour photographs Denys and Margaret Gardiner took on their honeymoon as they drove 900 miles up and down the east coast of England in August 1939, just weeks before the Second World War broke out.

Edmund Burke, liberals and social democrats

I have lost track of which party David Marquand is in these days, but I was pleased to see him nominate Edmund Burke as his hero in the Guardian this morning.

These days Burke is usually described as the founder of British Conservatism, but that is a description chiefly used by people who have not read him. The truth is that he was for many years the intellectual force behind the Whig leader Charles James Fox.

Burke broke with him only after Fox uncritically endorsed the French Revolution. Burke foresaw the inevitably of the succeeding Terror, much as some 19th century anarchists realised that Marx's teachings would lead to tyranny.

Marquand puts it well:

A profound, sometimes anguished fellow-feeling for the victims of arbitrary power ran, like a golden thread, through Burke's 30 years in parliament. He loathed the Protestant ascendancy in his native Ireland, was a persistent thorn in the flesh of George III, whom he suspected of seeking to undermine the Commons, and fought to conciliate the disaffected American colonies, instead of repressing them.

He spent more than a decade campaigning for the voiceless millions subjected to oppression at the hands of Britain's East India Company. His campaign against the French revolution sprang from the same loathing for injustice: to him, mob rule was as oppressive as the unchecked rule of a king.

The last is a hard lesson for liberals and social democrats. All the more necessary for the left to reclaim him.

The only thing I would add is that it is probably a harder lesson for social democrats than it is for liberals. We have, or at least good liberals have, an instinctive feel for the dangers of government power. Social democrats tend to be more relaxed about (or blind to) it.

I recall that in the Alliance years it was perfectly possible for liberals and social democrats to agree on a faintly uninspiring programme of moderate reforms. But if the talk between us ever turned to ideology or philosophy, the debate often became heated.

Keynesian economics do not mean a permanent deficit

When I was a student at York, the Trots tried every year to persuade the Student Union to spend more than it had coming in as income. They called it "deficit financing". The implication was that if only you read Keynes you would understand what they were getting at.

The irony is that today this caricature has become the accepted view of Keynes even among the mainstream left.

Let us remind ourselves what Keynes really said. He was concerned that the capitalist system was given to waves of rising and falling demand and that people suffered as a result. He therefore proposed that government should affect its fiscal policy to smooth these waves out.

At a time of falling demand in the economy, Keynes argued, government should increase spending and cut taxes and borrow to enable to do this.

When demand was rising, however, it should increase taxes or cut spending to cool the economy down, and pay off its debt.

But today Keynesian economics are more likely to be seen as the belief that the government should always run a large deficit.

Take David Marquand (I have generally forgotten which party he is in these days), as quoted by Timothy Garton Ash in today's Guardian:

David Marquand, a veteran observer of British politics, draws the stark conclusion that this budget, dictated by fear of global bond markets, is incompatible with liberal politics, which – "at least as they have been practised in this country for more than a century" – seek to tame capitalism in the interest of social justice.

"Incompatible with liberal politics"? This is nonsense. The budget was merely a recognition of the fact that if you borrow billions of pounds you have to pay it back some time.

Marquand sounds like a slacker who goes thousands overdrawn and then complains about "The Man" when he gets a letter from his bank. The truth is that if you are billions in debt, it is bound to affect your room for manoeuvre,

The deeper question is whether, as I asked last year, Keynesian demand management is politically possible. When the economy is doing well we demand more government spending: when it is doing badly we are up for spending cuts and austerity.

Keynesian economics may well be right but they have to be properly understood and they may well be politically impossible to implement.