by Paul Connell

It’s not meant to be easy being a lefty. If it were, everyone would be doing it.

Being so at the moment is as testing of stamina as ever. In the face of a global financial crisis that has demonstrated the truth of just about every criticism of capitalism ever made, the alternatives we are offering, or being offered, seem scant.

Ed M and every other European mainstream socialist party leader must be casting nervous glances at France where electoral victory has soured so quickly that le pauvre Hollande has managed to pass from glory to ignominy without passing through indifference. He is paying the price of disappointed expectations, curious as he didn’t actually raise any except not being Sarkozy, on which he has done quite well. There’s that and there is the Mori-Ipsos poll of generation Y which suggests a strong rejection of welfarism in the shape of redistributive tax and benefit policies by the electorate of the future.

Let us leave aside for the moment the question of the contribution of public spending to current economic woes (answer – not much). Let’s just acknowledge that there isn’t going to be the money for a large scale regeneration of state-run services anytime soon and people aren’t going to vote for a party proposing it. Back to the future won’t work. Labour has to plan for government without a commitment to expanding the state.

Of this necessity let us construct a virtue. Where, after all, is it written that socialism means a big state, generous benefits or “something for nothing?” Lots of places, in fact, but let’s leave that as a rhetorical question.

Having spent the best part of the last 30 years working in the UK public sector at local government, civil service and voluntary sector levels, I experienced periods of austerity and spending booms. Clearly, periods of plenty were more enjoyable than the thin years but it wasn’t as simple as big spending= good, low spending = bad.

When Labour got back in in ‘97 and after the brief reign of Queen Prudence, we had an explosion of czars, rollouts and initiatives, followed by a breathless rush to delivery. Delivery of what? Not results but evidence of results. Local Authority departments became machines for recording performance indicators.

Take one example, school exclusion. It had been well established that children excluded from mainstream schooling were at higher risk of low attainment, early parenthood, criminality and substance misuse. Evidence based policy dictated that kids should not be excluded. So they weren’t. Some great work went into keeping difficult kids in school and supporting teachers to keep them there. Some, inevitably, were just too difficult. So, many no longer went to school but, with a bit of imagination, could be found another designation for their status and the excluded box didn’t have to be ticked. Success!

There was a surreal lack of empiricism about services on the part of many managers, who learned to run department from a PC screen, tweaking and adjusting stats, avoiding like the plague spending time with actual service users. I was never very surprised at that time to find out that many senior local authority figures had a past in the Marxist left, and a predilection for a “scientific” approach to society. It wasn’t that they weren’t keen to engage with reality; their reality was what was visible on their spread-sheet.

Models of the state have, through different governments, often involved familial analogies. Callaghan’s style was avuncular, if in the manner of a slightly erratic, disreputable uncle. Thatcher’s (and Major’s) approach could be termed paternalism if the model of paternity was Viz’s Victorian dad; hypocritical, demanding respect at the end of a stick and willing to see his children succumb to the effects of the physic they prescribed.

With the arrival of Blair and Brown the model of paternalism became more Simon Day’s competitive dad of Fast Show fame: impatient, hectoring and, fundamentally, uncaring about anything but achievement.

But the state isn’t a family or a relative; it’s a structure we create by our common political consent to provide for resolving social tensions and meeting common needs in security, health, education and so on. Strange that Labour as the party of the state has never really understood how state services work.

The state has never cured an ailment, taught a class, investigated a crime or cultivated the talent of a young athlete –people do so in spite of, rather than for the state. The state is merely the superstructure above them which can help or hinder, often both. It is people who have relationships – the state is impersonal. During the New Labour years it became, for some, so impersonal as to be felt just as oppressive as the Tory model. Politicians necessarily see services top down but they are delivered and experienced bottom up.

This is not to suggest that higher public spending did not lead to improved services. Quite the contrary; long-neglected infrastructure was updated as were antiquated practices. Given reasonable resources and the right sort of encouragement, most public servants want to deliver good services. Some don’t; they’re just warming a seat till retirement. The well intentioned are motivated to be so on behalf of the people with and for whom they work, not by government, whatever its colour.

More spending can improve things and the urge amongst public service workers to expand and keep expanding services is natural. Every one of us can see every day where a little more money could justifiably be spent. But it’s the guys with the PCs who are on the 6 figure salaries while the poor bloody infantry are on humbler wages.

The left no longer really discuss the role of state; the right do. “Because something needs to be done doesn’t mean the state needs to do it,” as one David Cameron put it in opposition. He’s right but nor does it need to be Sodexho. Ayn Rand has never managed to be quite as trendy in the UK as the USA but withering the state to leave the way clear for plundering corporations and heroically brutal John Galt figures is as much a part of Tory thinking as the GOP’s. One role of the state, I would suggest, is the protection of individuals from the very attentions of all those who would limit personal autonomy and responsibility: multi-national business, big media and the equally real threats of “tradition” and “community.”

Living as I now do in Spain, I can see how ideas associated with anarchism have become part of the political wallpaper here as they remain alien in the UK. Co-operation, syndicalism, local action and collectives offer a whole range of options between the state and the open market. That this arose in a vacuum of state intervention during the Franco years is not to devalue a range of provision that is now, in the current economic crisis, offering more people a buffer against despair than the official services are capable of.

Of course such entities are beyond the reach of the state’s urge to standardise, regulate and oversee. That is their strength if we are prepared to let one novel factor enter into our calculations of what makes a service a good one; risk. If you remove the inspector peering over their shoulder sometimes people will do something other than what you think is good for them, and quite bloody right too. Folk being contrary is the very well-spring of socialism. We must take autonomy and responsibility more seriously, not just as a moral imperative but as a practical one. Charlie Leadbetter at Demos has already outlined the idea of personalisation of services in which service users decide and form their own services based on their own needs. Why stop there?

The state can fund, it can provide for protection, nurturing and facilitation; it can also leave the actual doing to others. Its priorities in times of restricted budget must be tighter, focused on empowerment not superstructure.

It’s not as if we’re going to have the choice.

Paul Connell is a former social worker who worked for 30 years in the public and voluntary sectors and now lives in Spain

Tags: Ayn Rand, New Labour, Paul Connell, performance indicators, size of the state