The Ministry Of Truth

First, a warning: this post concerns A Julie Birchill Column.

The Minister is no fan of Julie Birchill. Although she still produces the occasional paragraph infused with panache, she has barely spoken a sensible word in the past 20 years. She must now be nudging 50 but her writing often still resembles that of a teenager – too many exclamation marks and wink, nudge references to how very clever she is for taking drugs. And the whole ‘sleeping with Brother and Sister Raven’ thing is just deeply weird – even for a Bristolian.

That said, I forced myself on a train journey at the start of this week to read an extract from her most recent book that appeared in last week’s Guardian Weekend magazine. The book, I believe, chronicles her decade as a resident of Brighton. As premises for books go, that’s pretty flimsy. Nonetheless I persevered.

I don’t know whether or not I am (a) ill, (b) confused, or (c) becoming a Tory, but I have to admit I agreed with a large part of what she wrote. For instance:

All the people of this country want from the government, via their taxes, are decent public services: schools, hospitals and transport; this is the covenant that has served us well, in our modest way, since the end of the war. But even as taxes continue to rise, a lower proportion than ever goes on these essentials. Instead, it goes on bailing out the private companies that screw up our utilities and on lame “initiatives”…

Government By Gameshow, you could call it; the rubbish lies uncollected and the trains won’t work when the weather is “wrong”, but look on the bright side: you can always divert yourself with a council-lent camcorder for a few weeks…

What is it with New Labour and privatisation? Even Mrs Thatcher would not touch the post office and the railways, let alone start dicking around with the prison system. And at least in her case privatisation was about ideology, so understandable if misguided. With Labour, getting rid of public utilities or, in the case of local Labour councils, farming out contracts to private companies, seems like some sort of bizarre obsessive-compulsive disorder (“Eww, trains… dirty!”), like with those weird women who have one thing surgically altered then can’t stop until everything’s been renovated. If this country looked like a person right now, it would be Michael Jackson; a perfectly decent specimen to start with which for some reason convinced itself it would look a lot better with everything taken off and put back on inside out and upside down.

It works both ways: half the country couldn’t be bothered to vote because the election was like a really dull gameshow in which you know who’s going to win and don’t like any of them anyway. And that being so, gimmicky initiatives are the last thing that will win them over. It’s a bit of a joke that politicians are meant to be the serious-minded grown-ups and the electorate the frivolous thrill-seeking types; voters have never, to my knowledge, expressed an actual desire for prizes and makeovers among the political options offered to them. No, all we generally want is to have our loved ones educated decently when young, treated decently when sick and old, and to be able to get from London to Manchester in slightly less time and for marginally less money than it takes to get from Montreal to London…

OK, so she’s criticising New Labour from the right; I’m criticising it from the left. She’s saying (I think) that it’s OK to privatise everything if it’s done for ideological means; I’m saying that privatisation is, for the large part, a social experiment that borders on evil. Nevertheless, I have to agree with her. New Labour is a risible exercise in style over substance and its fetish for privatisation is inexplicable and inexcusable.

The Labour council that took power over [Brighton] in the mid-90s and still has power today is a very New Labour council, led by thwarted idealists, among others, who in the political wilderness of the Thatcher years mutated into strange, free-falling beings to whom power was not a means to an end, but an end in itself. In short, they became Pod Politicians: like their big brothers in government proper, they still went on about social justice and the brotherhood of man, but inside they’d gone all cold and creepy. Peter Mandelson is the greatest example, and in his irresistible rise from Lambeth councillor to Chief European Commissioner for Straight Bananas he serves as a lesson to all ambitious local bean-counters. They say politics is show business for ugly people, and in not one word or deed of Randy Mandy’s have I ever been able to discern exactly why he chose to be in politics, apart from the fact that he isn’t personable enough to make it in showbiz, which is obviously his first love. Every time I see Dale Winton I want to shout, “You’ve got Peter Mandelson’s life – give it back to him!”

More and more I’m starting to believe that politicians – contrary to common wisdom – are generally less mature than most of us. And that this is because they missed out on the giddiness of youth when they had it, and are seeking instead to have their silly, show-offy salad days now. Swanking wallflowers, the lot of them – those horrible brats who used to simper, “Go on, then, muck about! But I’m going to be rich and powerful one day, and then I’ll show you all!” Now, true to their collective word, on quangos and committees and local councils up and down the country, they’re making us pay, hitting us in the pocket, where it hurts, for their vile vanity projects galore. The dome, the city bids, the United States of Europe: we held their heads down the toilets a beat too long, and now it’s our turn to suffer…

The comparison of Peter Mandelson with Dale Winton genuinely made me laugh out loud: absolutely spot on.

Birchill criticises New Labour for chasing power for power’s sake rather than for ideological principle: I agree wholeheartedly. I, however, recognise that that’s precisely what the Conservative Party did under Winston Churchill in the late 1940s. By adopting wholesale the interventionist policies that proved so alluring to the electorate in 1945, the Tories regained power in 1951 and stayed there for 13 years. (There was no ideological battle within Britain during the height of the Cold War: both Tories and Labour alike agreed with the principles of state education, state ownership of utilities, state planning, state-provided healthcare and the welfare state – the political debate then surrounded who could best manage the services the state should provide. Ideology did not begin to play a major role in post-War British politics until the mid-1970s when the two parties began to diverge, that divergence reaching its widest point at the 1983 General Election.)

Blair simply repeated Churchill’s trick and adopted Maggie’s Mantras – our politicians are now back to the 1950s position of really only arguing about the style of management by which public services should be provided. Ironically, Thatcherism truly took hold AFTER Thatcher was ejected from Number 10, when the Labour Party turned its back on everything that could be termed loosely as ‘socialist’ in outlook. I contend that the reason why a lot of people are not voting in the 21st century is because a lot of people have simply been disenfranchised by Labour’s embrace of Thatcherite policies. (It’s getting even worse now that the Liberal Democrats are becoming more ‘liberal’ than ‘social democrat’ in their outlook.)

Towards the end of the extract, Birchill turns her attention to Brighton Council’s attempts to flog off its social housing. This is where the ground begins to erode beneath her feet.

Even when council housing stays in the hands of housing “trusts”, evictions of tenants rises by more than a third, rents are more than a quarter higher and management costs around 40% higher. As the chief executive of one such organisation helpfully put it, “We’re a business and our divisions are expected to make a surplus.”

Last spring, Defend Council Housing Brighton reported that, not content with spending millions of pounds of public money trying to con council house tenants, some among the pro-privatisation lobby were going round tearing down the anti-privatisation posters tenants put up in their own blocks. Oh, and to sweeten the pill, these charmers were planning to spend another £25,000 of public money on a video telling tenants to lie back and enjoy it – the latest incidence of government, both local and national, robbing Peter the Pauper to pay Paul the PR man.

So, having spent the first 80% of the article bigging up those who truly believe in supply side economics and free markets, she then criticises private housing trusts for, er, running themselves as profit centres. That’s the law, Julie; that’s what they have to do. The overarching obligation for a limited company is to seek to increase shareholder value to the exclusion of all other considerations bar the law. If the managers of a limited company fail to do that, they commit an offence. Birchill’s argument, if she has one, should not be against the behaviour of the private housing trusts but against those who believe that social services should be provided by the private sector.

Still she probably can’t waste her valuable time following her thoughts through to a conclusion; there are more episodes of Sugar Rush to write, I guess.  Bless…