What's the most left-wing country in the world?

[Mugwump]

^ Tannin,
Firstly, Thatcher is loathed in some places. But she also won three elections and the average Brit (at least south of the Scottish border) will say, as I do, that she was not lovable, but she was necessary. In all societies, those that hate the hardest hate the loudest, but they only have a majority in decibels, not in numbers.

If there is an argument here, it probably depends on the definition of a “mixed economy”. I think you mean by this term an economy in which large public corporations act as major players. If so, then read on. If you mean only that there is a role for government in running things are a natural monopoly, then we can end now. I accept that this is sometimes necessary.

You said that the car industry in England was crap, and you were right – but equally so were the other nationalised corporations in coal, electricity generation, defence, airline, steel, health, ship-building, railroad, telecoms inter alia. Most of these industries had some private competitors but they were crowded out by the immense flab of vast, state-owned monopolies with massive resources, regulatory protection and preferential access to infrastructure.

As the list of nationalised corporations above shows, Britain was very nearly a centrally-planned high-tax socialist economy after the Second World War, and was it failing per the template. This was not just because of the bad management and ossified practices you referenced, though that was part of the reason. It also failed because all large diversified organisations (private and public) are inefficient, and governments are the largest of the large. It also failed because politics is usually driven by short-term priorities and thus interferes with the kind of strategic decision-making and investment, and the nimble evolutionary shifts required by industry. It failed because massive capital taxes deter investment and drive high-earners offshore (Lennon and the Rolling Stones, Burton and Taylor). “Yes Minister” is exaggerated, but it is funny because it reflects a truth that everyone knew in British society by the late 1970s.

Interestingly, the only British international success stories post 1945 were the oil industry and insurance and banking, as they were the only major corporate sectors largely in private hands (though farming has claims as well).

So the Uk from 1945-1980 was a mixed economy with strong public corporations, which I think you admire (and which were a cornerstone of Whitlamite political belief). And that failed. One can argue endlessly over whether it was systemic or just bad management, or a lack of post-war rejuvenation. I quite agree that it was all of these things. A German union leader after 1945 wanted to build things, where a British union leader wanted to build a socialist state and fight over a shrinking pie. But history seems to support our intuition that large state-owned enterprises are not efficient or fair economic actors, and the British economy was built on them. Thatcher knew it, and acted on it.

Perhaps the greatest factor, which you did not mention, was that British industry was built on imperial trading relationships and demand and supply chains which were disrupted spectacularly from about 1930 on. This made change especially urgent. Instead of recognising this, amputating industries and corporations that were economically gangrenous, Britian fed the rot with state subsidy. Thatcher’s great contribution was to perform the necessary surgery, even when it meant a low-key civil war.

We agree that the benefits of post-1980 reforms have not been ubiquitous. Few reforms ever are, and we have no way of knowing just how degraded the North and Scotland would be without the reforms that took place. But
I know from real experience that large parts of the North are palpably far better than they were in 1979. Liverpool by 1979 was a hell-hole with rampant crime and civic dysfunction. Today it is a passably pleasant place to live work and shop, with some fine civic spaces again.

No nation ever prospered by propping up uncompetitive industries with public money and feeding the interest groups – labour and capital - that demand it. Thatcherism was harsh, as Germany has been harsh to Greece – we must all pay our way in the world, and otherwise there is a welfare net – but we cannot expect others to pay us wages for products that no one wants. That is very painful, and it can look like wrecking, but in reality it is the prerequisite of building something sustainable.

I have lived here for many years, and there is no doubt that the economic trajectory of most of the country was changed for the better by that fierce and revolutionary democrat. She was not a nice person. But a nice person simply could not have got it done.

[stui magpie]

^

I'm reading both Tannin's and Mugwumps posts here with interest.

My rudimentary understanding is that at the end of WWII, the Socialist movement was very strong in England and effectively took over the Labour party.

They were the ones to blame for the malaise that beset England, they put all the foundations in place. It needed someone to come in and do a demolition job on what was in place and rebuild. It needed hard measures.

Whether Thatcher was too harsh is subjective. There was certainly collateral damage and to this day she's as popular as a turd in the swimming pool with those of socialist leanings, but whether a softer approach would have achieved a better result is near impossible to say. Even if hindsight makes geniuses of us all.

[Mugwump]

^ Thanks Stui - I'm glad long notes about England aren't as completely boring as I fear they might be. Still, I'll try to keep them to a minimum.

Your analysis above is largely right, in my view. Tannin is also right about the dreadful British class system which hindered development through 1945 and beyond. In many ways, France and (non-Nazi) Germany were far more meritocratic than England through 1900-1945, and British management was poor for the same reason that some British generals had been poor - the best were very good indeed, but too many of the mid-rankers were promoted on class, not on ability. I would argue that Thatcher really changed that, too.

Her insistence that the ability to make money in a competitive field was the primary marker of talent, not class or accent, was brash and unseemly, but it too was necessary. Australia and the USA had always known something like that. Britain really needed a dose of that thinking and started to get it in the 1980s, I think. Britain today is not noticeably more class-bound than Australia - and in fact a snooty accent is probably more of a hindrance than a help, outside a few professions such as law.

[ronrat]

You will probably find a small pacific nation will just about fit the bill. Their local village cultures assures their is no unemployment, labour is given freely to build houses, and the chiefs in council make all the big decisions. The village owns the land, not the person. Those outside the the system send money back. All the things we crave such as affordable education and child care are free. If you are sick neighbours and relatives help. Instead of chucking kids in gaol for minor offences they sent back to the village where they are gainfully employed.It might upset the feminists as they tend to be male dominated but the women don't seem to mind and the oldies aren't bunged into a clinic so their kids can add a man cave or buy a new car.

[David]

^ Interesting point, RR! Are traditional tribal societies more 'left' than 'right'? They would certainly score highly on socially conservative measures. But economically, I suppose they are more or less collectivist.

[roar]

[pietillidie]

Just a quick allo passing by.

Political categories have a very short lifespan because they're vague, unlike, say, groups of elements in the periodic table. We use these categories to represent something we think we see at a certain time. But let's not take them too seriously; as mentioned many-a-time, "openness to novel stimuli" is about the only thing we have found so far which separates "more- and less-conservative" people.

Part of the present malaise is that we keep dragging outdated, idealised categories into the present, which I can guess is why David even introduced the topic.

Take hardcore Corbynites; here they are regurgitating views they imagine were once aligned with some distinct "Left" back in 1972, feeling all pure about it like a religious sect. But many of their old ideas are unattainable fantasies today. This is not because people "have forgotten the true roots of 'Left'", as they imagine, but because the world, and our understanding of it, has changed.

Thatcher made the same kind of ideological error. She completely mis-analysed her own socioeconomy and geography, being blindly committed to a non-scientific, non-proven economic dogma, rather than to the world as it actually was. While the US replaced the rust belt with a new technology industry elsewhere, and decaying inner cities with new suburbs elsewhere, Thatcher took productive capability away from people as a matter of ideology, leaving them to rot in deteriorating second- and third-order cities without a way out. Apparently, Jesus forgot to reward everyone for following the new religious dogma.

Whole swathes of the UK are still locked in Thatcher's Poorhouse geography, which is why productivity and real wages are so bad, and why you won't find a single UK city in a quality of living list anywhere.

The UK over-reliance on the City was only heightened by this; what the hell else could there be but a concentration of smart, mobile traders and lawyers taking advantage of London's geography, education, law, liberality and mobility to make good?

The US, in contrast, had the power, mobility, geography and technology industry to adjust, despite Reagan being a dim-witted version of Thatcher. (But, of course, even that "success" is substantially illusory, given the US sweeps its ugliness into peasant states and corners, and turns the lights off on its hellholes).

Meanwhile, in Oz, H-K took a pragmatic, moderate view *of the sort the UK should've taken*, navigating between agility and adjustment on one side, and social cohesion and productivity on the other.

The UK still doesn't have sufficient broad-based productivity to lift wages because (a) no one has had the knackers to do an H-K without relying on the cheap free kick of extremist ideology; (b) the world has changed, so one can hardly expect the 1980s H-K solution to make sense today; and, following from that, (c) everyone's minds have turned to mush, trapped in painfully outdated Left/Right straight jackets as they are.

Unfortunately, Cardigan Corbyn thinks that dragging everyone back decades to fight the ghost of Thatcher with fiercer determination is the solution. Plainly, it's much harder to collect taxes in today's services/info/borderless transaction economy, and to bring skills up-to-par, and keep them there. What is more, the UK is only losing its ability to enforce greater local corporate responsibility in league with other nations, scuppering efforts on that front and making it far easier for multinationals to play wedge politics with Europe.

Saliently, as we speak, the EU is trying to force Apple to pay tax to the Irish state. But the Irish elites don't want the money, despite Ireland being far more under-developed than outsiders imagine.

Apparently, Ireland is going to tax haven itself to infrastructure and quality-of-life! Of course, by now, the havenists are half-right: Ireland is trapped in a discounting cycle, like a retailer selling off stock trying to survive; it can't demand more in many cases because it needs to take what it can to survive. (I have often wondered if there is a sense of dis-empowerment here, and, if so, if it has something to do with the Republic's divided, postcolonial status. But, who knows).

Somehow, Ireland has to gradually rebuild its human resource base and hold more people here, but the usual Old Right and Old Left divide is making that a very hard ask

Far from being something like the ideal "decentralised decision-makers" we read about, two-party or two-sided polities are brain-dead, flexibility-sapping, brain-eating, national menaces.

[David]

^ One hopes you're advocating a three (or more) party polity and not fewer.

I agree that pragmatics, as a general rule, must be placed ahead of ideological purity. Though Clinton, Shorten et al show that even that paradigm can have its breaking point.

[pietillidie]