Is he smarter than you?(Leon Neal/Getty Images)
The Centrists are back, baby, and this time they are bringing with them the solution for our polarised times. Such seems to be the theme of the past week, what with former MP and would-be Prime Minister Rory Stewart talking about his new book and how to fix the system, and George Osborne and Ed Balls announcing a new podcast, “Political Currency”. It is billed as two formerly bitter rivals now talking in civilised fashion about the economy, and drawing upon the great reserves of expertise shared between them.
With a straight face, the multi-millionaire architect of Tory austerity under Cameron tells us that new podcast will “expose how the powerful become powerless when faced with economic forces they can’t control”. Meanwhile, Balls has been filmed drumming in a band called Centrist Dad, performing a Sex Pistols number alongside ITV’s Robert Peston. Who ever said that middle-aged technocrats don’t have a sense of humour?
Certainly, in terms of exhibiting the traditional technocratic vice of advertising expertise as a way of consolidating personal power, the pair seem off to a flying start. Their podcast has already been glowingly endorsed by influential cronies. David Cameron has tweeted that the podcasters “really know their stuff”. Michael Gove has remarked — perhaps with the sort of sincerity he has become renowned for — that these are “two of the sharpest minds I know”.
Stewart, meanwhile, already has a very popular podcast with Alastair Campbell called “The Rest is Politics”. Like the Osborne and Balls roadshow, this too is framed as bringing sensible, well-informed discussion to the masses from rather different political perspectives, modelling reasonable disagreement along the way. In reality, though, it’s a chummy love-in between two liberals with similarly middle-of-the-road instincts. In a recent episode, the pair spent a lot of time talking about which of them looked better in a kilt at Stewart’s birthday party, and how nice it was to see Theresa May and “Willie Dalrymple” on the dancefloor there too. Vidal versus Buckley this is not.
Though their schtick suggests otherwise, a typical discussion between Stewart and Campbell tends to be quite superficial — citing a few facts gleaned from the broadsheets, a sprinkling of views from this “really, really interesting guy” or that “amazing professor”, but hardly venturing to explain to any sceptics listening what exactly makes their views so interesting and amazing. (In an episode last month, a listener asked which literary character each presenter would most like to be. Stewart chose Prince Andrei from War and Peace; Campbell chose Faust. When pressed by Stewart to justify his choice, Campbell answered: “I think that would be really interesting, yeah.”)
But for me, the most irritating thing about “The Rest Is Politics” is that it has pretensions to de-escalate and depolarise, and yet still patronises the life out of a huge number of voters: namely the supposedly weak-minded fools who voted for Johnson or Trump. “Populist” leaders are habitually presented as an obvious enemy, and the most charitable explanation Stewart and Campbell can muster for anyone voting for them inevitably involves susceptibility to manipulation, either by a corrupt media or by the politicians directly. Perhaps they assume that it is more palatable for grown adults to be called gullible than iniquitous, but I’m not so sure.
Stewart’s new book, meanwhile, is basically a plea for more intelligence in politics. He first entered parliament with a lively, inquisitive mind, a strong sense of duty, and a frankly astonishing CV that included tutoring Prince William, acting as governor of an Iraqi province under occupation, and running a NGO in Afghanistan. Yet once an MP, every aspect of the Tory party system seemed to conspire to subdue his native wit and initiative.
He soon discovered that the only acceptable activities for a newbie were toadying up to leaders and slavishly following orders. If you asked a searching question about an incoming piece of legislation, you were mocked. If you knew more than the average person about a particular policy area, this would be treated as a positive reason to keep you away from it. Phones pinged constantly with the latest messaging to be memorised, and the whips were ruthless in crushing free thought and free movement. Working for Liz Truss at Defra, she advised Stewart to “never be interesting”, though he didn’t listen.
Little by little, Stewart started to feel that parliament “reduced” him. Soon after giving a maiden speech comparing himself to Scott of the Antarctic, he found himself hiding in the toilets rather than voting as directed by the whips. A funny speech of his went viral — in which he talks Latin about hedgehogs — but few of his carefully prepared, serious interventions made a dent. Once he started to get slightly bigger political jobs, the list of people who wouldn’t listen to his good ideas grew longer by the year. Civil servants, ministers and prime ministers, ambassadors, foreign dignitaries, and world leaders all remained stubbornly oblivious. Eventually he got a job as prisons minister, and was for the first time allowed the autonomy and resources to make a tangible positive difference.
His story certainly illustrates a pressing issue. Running a country these days involves oversight of hundreds of highly complex systems and sub-systems — economic, technological, judicial, diplomatic — directed at whatever goals currently judged socially desirable by voters or their representatives. Yet as Stewart said in an interview this week: The truth is… politicians don’t really know what’s going on. And yet we pretend to the public that we do.”
One suggestion in the book is that those destined for ministerial portfolios should be recruited from relevant specialist backgrounds, and then given enough time to see their initiatives through to the end. He bemoans the fact that “fluent Chinese speakers, decorated colonels, physicians, lawyers and many successful businessmen” were left on the backbenches by Cameron and May. New ministers are “amateur outsiders on very short tours, whose successors could introduce completely different agendas”.
Stewart clearly dreams of a system in which brilliant MPs of the right vision and experience are left to get on with innovation at the operational level, unhampered by the gloomy obstructions of The Blob and the reshuffling whims of their leaders. He is less clear about why the experts he wants in the system have to be MPs; why could they not, say, be members of a reformed, more collegiate, and less obstructive civil service? The implied answer seems to be: because that way, Stewart wouldn’t get to run things.
Still, few could disagree with his general sentiment. The cost of the Tories’ phobia of details are vividly sketched. At their most surreal, Stewart’s recollected exchanges with those in charge of the country read like the darkest of Evelyn Waugh satires. As Secretary of State for Defra, Liz Truss tells him: “I don’t believe in rural affairs, Rory. I think there is no relevant difference between rural and urban populations.” As Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson asks him to “sort out Libya”, describing it as a “bite-sized problem”. When Stewart demurs that the UK has no embassy there and so no real diplomatic influence, Johnson tells him to be more optimistic: he just has to motivate people.
The obvious dangers of technocracy include corruption and voter disenfranchisement. Stewart seems to think the antidote is a more participatory politics, involving things such as citizens’ assemblies to “build consensus”. If there had been a citizens’ assembly on Brexit, he thinks, “you would have ended up with a customs union”. This is a common enough technocratic fantasy, floated many times before by those such as Obama and Clinton: that if people with adequate intelligence are given access to the right sort of detailed information and time to think about it, their conclusions about practical decision-making will converge.
But to me, this just further betrays the extent to which, for all his talk of avoiding polarisation, Stewart is still mired in the classic patrician attitude of the educated liberal who equates “clever” with “good” with “what me and my friends think”. His fantasy just isn’t true. Even when people agree about all the relevant facts in some domain, their radically different values will affect how they each respectively order and prioritise those facts, and what outcomes they then favour. And this does not necessarily make one side or other stupid.
Arguably, to genuinely lessen political polarisation, what the public needs is to witness robust, reasoned disagreement between people who differ radically on both facts and values, and yet who don’t resort to lazily dismissing each other’s characters or intellects in the process. But this is not what they get from “The Rest Is Politics”, and I suspect it won’t be what we get from “Political Currency” either. In the latter case, I predict many casual references to really really interesting guys, quite a lot of unconvincing football banter, and a bit of ribbing about Keble versus Magdalen. It seems we have no shortage of former politicians who think they are clever and interesting. We may even have some actually clever ones, like Stewart. But what we really could do with is a few wiser ones.
***
In the latest episode of These Times, Tom McTague sits down with Rory Stewart. Listen here.
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SubscribeUnion bureaucrats are not union members.
Why is Trump double-crossing the organised working class, having explicitly appealed to it during the 2024 campaign? The answer is obvious. The organised working class has now voted for him, and accordingly is of no further use to him.
We should understand that unions as they exist today are nothing like the unions of the Gilded Age. Those early unions were often illegal and fought both the robber barons and the government. The law itself was against them. They had few allies in government, which was, then as now, dominated by money. It was a long struggle, and it ultimately resulted in mostly a victory for the unions during the FDR administration. The National Labor Relations Act that created the NLRB was essentially a peace treaty that ended decades of conflict between employees and labor, but like all peace treaties, future circumstances can make it irrelevant or untenable. This is a case of the former. Since FDR, there have been a lot of other laws passed and almost all of what the unions fought for and more besides has since been codified into the law itself. We don’t need a union to negotiate safety standards because OSHA exists. We don’t need them to limit work hours or force them to pay overtime because they are legally required to adhere to the standard 40 hour week. We don’t need unions to negotiate wages because there is a minimum wage law, though it should probably be raised.
This is the real reason manufacturing in the US is more expensive. It has nothing to do with unions and strikes and everything to do with the various laws and regulations that have made unions largely unnecessary. Factories in the US have to meet standards for wages, safety, and environmental impact that are much lower or nonexistent in the several places jobs have been offshored. Through free trade doctrine, they then get to import the stuff duty free and pay only the cost of transportation, which is much less. Globalism has decimated union membership as much as it has American manufacturing and for the same reasons. The unions are neither a cause of the loss of manufacturing nor are they a solution. The solution, if there is one, is to end the free trade era and enact tariffs that reflect the differences in labor and environmental standards between nations and basically acknowledging that countries exist and borders are drawn for a reason. Trump is admittedly not the populist champion of the people I had hoped for, but to the extent he embraces tariffs as a way to balance the scales of trade and start to rebuild a manufacturing base, he’s better than the alternative.
Further, the unions we have today are often corrupt and political. For most of the period from the National Labor Relations Act, it was legal for states to have closed shop laws that required all employees to join a union if there was one, which made the union and the company essentially codependent organizations that would collaborate to a significant extent because keeping the factory open and employees employed kept both organizations intact, regardless of the wishes or interests of the workers themselves. A lot of the corruption came from this system, which was finally outlawed in 2017, long after unions became largely irrelevant anyway. Seven years isn’t long enough to undo decades of corruption and the symbiotic relationships that grew between unions and closed shop employers.
Even so, I’m not terribly surprised to hear Trump isn’t really defending workers and I am equally not surprised to hear Josh Hawley’s name backing another piece of legislation that is actually populist. Had Trump nominated Hawley as his VP, I might have actually voted in the election, hoping that somehow Hawley could succeed Trump, preferably not by assassination, and be the Teddy Roosevelt to Trump’s McKinley. Sadly, these days VP isn’t regarded as a political graveyard and they don’t put people in the position to get them out of the way because. of what happened back then.
I always figured there was a possibility that once they realized globalism was truly finished, many or most of the wealthy elites would then conclude that Trump’s version of economic nationalism was preferable to the wealth taxes and monopoly busting that Bernie Sanders, or Josh Hawley, might have done. Lo and behold, that’s what seems to be happening. I once again lament that the Democratic powers that be squashed Bernie’s campaign twice and instead doubled down on Trump bashing, woke virtue signaling, and racial grievance peddling. I once again call for the Democrats to ditch the woke nonsense of academia, ween your party off the crack of racial grievance peddling, get off the globalist ship before its entirely sunk, and find your own version of Trump. Maybe Fetterman, as he had the chutzpah to attend the signing of the Laken Riley act, which is a perfect example of a law that shouldn’t be needed, but is because of the pervasiveness of globalist ideology in our bureaucratic institutions. Then we could have two parties that have different visions of America and two differing opinions of how best to advance the interests of the American people, not a de facto global government trying to bring liberty and justice for all like some wannabe Superman.
Are you as boring in real life as you are online?
Actually I am way more boring. Are you as insufferably juvenile in reality as you are online?
Very interesting read (disregard disparaging comments from people who object to substance). But do you really think unions have no role now in raising living standards? When I was a teacher in the Netherlands I remember getting a 5% pay rise in 2022 through a collective agreement between govt and the AOB, while I have a friend at Siemens in Germany who says she’s eligible for certain privileges as a unionised worker which the non-unionised do not enjoy (in a system that creates financial incentives for the individual to join, which seems like a great way to rebuild the movement).
Also how likely do you think it is that Trump’s tariffs will do anything to protect or improve the lot of American workers? Are there any examples of tariffs being helpful for ordinary people around the world? I can only think of the example of the medieval English wool merchants being protected by Edward III from trade with the Flemish weavers, though doubtful how helpful that was to English people actually working with wool!
UAW workers are in the top 25% of the income distribution. If they were universal, we’d all be there.
But all the talk of the Big 3 is about layoffs. Whereas Toyota is constantly hiring. And they make good money. Anyone who’s been through Georgetown, KY where the Toyota plant is (the largest Toyota plant in the world) could testify to the prosperity it’s brought to a whole region.
If only the UAW could say the same for Detroit or the USW for Allentown and Gary.
The recent picketing at some Amazon facilities was not by their employees. It was by Teamster professionals paid to do it. Inside those facilities, the employees start at $18/hour with health and other benefits. Not bad for unskilled labor.
If UAW workers are in the top 25% for income, than does that not prove unions are good for workers?
When combined with the fact that they’re also laying people off, it suggests that employee wages matter to profitability of the company, and if unions distort wages far enough, the profitability of the company will begin to suffer. The government has already bailed out two of the three American auto companies, and where does that money come from? Same as the rest of it, the printing press, and inflation. From the perspective of a national government, both profitable companies and high wages are worthy goals. The government should strive to strike a balance between the two, but over the past couple of decades, it has pretty much sucked at both and instead made the CCP and the likes of Warren Buffett and George Soros fabulously wealthy. I don’t love Trump but at least he’s not doing the same thing and hoping for different results.
If the only way a company can survive is by paying its employees too little to live off then they don’t have a viable business. It’s much better they fail and their market share be taken by a more productive rival.
Let’s not pretend low wages benefit anybody but the already wealthy
I agree actually. The burden is as much on management and ownership to find ways to make a profit while paying a fair wage. If they can’t do that, they fail at post-New Deal capitalism. The burden in capitalism must fall on both. The investor must put his investment at risk. These companies have failed to be profitable, and then took government bailouts, so the government took away that risk. Bailouts are arguably the most socialist thing our government has ever done.
Union membership has dropped to 9.9% of the labor force and the great majority of that is public union membership. Trump has zero hope of support from them. That’s why California, Illinois, and NY are irredeemably Democrat.
So Trump has little incentive to kowtow to unions and the unions have little power to make him beyond that which they’ve exerted already.
Exactly. Private employer union membership is around 6% and continues to fall. Organized labor is irrelevent.
Which is exactly why workers need to organize and fight, or continue to be crushed
Cut their own throats?
The reason people have a beef with unions is not because of rank and file workers. Its because of the intellectuals that claim to speak for them. This is nothing but a veiled threat. It’s a provocation. If you want to build popular sympathy how about talking to the people doing hard jobs instead of telling everyone of your plans to orchestrate economic disruption. There’s nothing more annoying than performative protests.
If you truly care about protecting the jobs of hard working people than speak about the bureacracy and red tape around manufacturing. The goal is for wages to keep up with prices.
Regulations are inherently inflationary. They introduce additional time and costs for any business. Businesses will pass on that cost to consumers and create inflation. Higher costs mean more people need help which leads to increased welfare payments requiring more spending. The money supply continues growing and it weakens purchasing power. Its a feedback loop of inflation.
So yes, fight for unions by seriously addressing price inflation caused by excess regulations. High wages are relative to prices. That’s why the minimum wage movements are silly. Everywhere min wages rise so does the cost of living. So nobody is getting ahead even if their wages are rising.
That to me appears to be nothing but a distraction. Trump campaigned on improving the lives and wages of working class voters, who in turn gave him their backing.
Since then he has sided with the tech barons in the visa row and now done the billionaire class another favour by trying to severely weaken the unions.
Whilst I may agree with him in regards to immigration, the scaling back of environmental red tape and the cancelling of the diversity nonsense, the man is an absolute snake who I wouldn’t trust as far as I could throw him
More TDS
You crack me up. Let me see if I understand you correctly based on this and past responses.
1) There’s not a single politician that you respect and you can’t name a living politician you respect more than Trump but your character attacks on Trump should he taken seriously.
2) You don’t particularly care about American politics, your interest is just based on the comedy of the “hypocrisy” and gullibility of the median Trump voter. You as an occasional watcher of headlines is more in tune with the desires of median Trump voter than I am as an actual Trump voter.
3) You speak of the desirability of wage increases without considering their relation to prices. Do you think its a win if wages go up 3% but prices go up 5%?
4) Robinhood. All Rich people are bad. All labor advocates are good.
I’ve said numerous times I think Trump is an imbecile, if he wasn’t born a billionaire he’d have struggled to hold down a job on the bins, but despite that if I was a yank I’d have probably chose him over the alternative.
I agree with his stated policies on immigration, the environmental stuff, the equality stuff etc, but I find the influence of unelected tech barons such as Musk & Co rather uncomfortable. You rightly ranted about the likes of Soros using his wealth to influence policy yet support others doing the same now it’s your preferred side in power, which to me seems rather hypocritical.
Trump campaigned on improving the lives of the workers, yet once in power has twice now sided with his wealthy backers over his working class support base, which wouldn’t fill me with confidence going forward if I had voted for him
He campaigned with Elon Musk, Steve Wynn and Steve Witkoff. He did not campaign with bureacrats from the NLRB.
Americans and Brits see the world differently. We don’t see everything as zero-sum. If my neighbor gets filthy rich off a product that makes trains travel at light speed, I don’t get poorer. But I do get poorer when some bureacrat organizes an economic shutdown of the economy
But that’s a false analogy. A neighbours financial situation is completely irrelevant. A better example would be an employer becoming more wealthy by refusing to give his workers a pay rise in line with inflation, as in that way he’s making himself richer by actively making his workers poorer. By siding with the likes of Musk when it comes to importing cheap labour or busting the unions that’s exactly what he’s doing
In order to improve workers conditions one needs to educate them so they leave un and semi skilled employment and enter skilled employment. Germany largely moved the German population out of un and semi skilled employment into skilled employment in the late 1990s. Immigrants did unskilled work.
The Swiss have high wages but make very expensive products, the basic watch is £5K. Compare the vast majority of American education and training to Switzerland.
One way of assessing product is Value per kilo. A 100 gramme Swiss watch at £5K works out at £50M/tonne.
Switzerland has ETH Zurich. If the USA had the same density of technical skill it would have 33 MITs.
Riots and high unionised wages drove the car makers out of Detroit from late 1960s. Now most car makes are outside of Democrat run cities/states.
Regulations should to promote the good and prevent the bad. What they become is way of employing people which increases costs.
Where selection and training is based upon the conditions encounted in employment, high tech companies paying well can exist. Once the schools no longer provide the education and training need for well paid high tech jobs and unions insist on overpayment of wages for the value of the products and services produced, jobs disappear.
We should fight for union members, not the unions themselves. It’s been a very long time since they were the same thing. The NLRB is a relic of a past age that has long since outlived its usefulness. It’s a peace treaty that ended a war whose basic axes of conflict have been overtaken by history and replaced with other conflicts that demand our present attention..
We shouldn’t forget that regulations are ultimately laws, and laws are about preventing things that are harmful and keeping civil order. Since the industrial era, labor laws have been a part of that, as the very violent history of the labor movement shows us what can happen when there aren’t laws in place. So some regulations, some laws, are necessary, and to the extent that makes things more expensive, perhaps they should be.
Right now, they’re not because they’re made overseas where there are a lot fewer laws and regulations, which should never have been regarded as an adequate solution by anybody, but it was, and here we are two decades later paying for it after all in other ways. In hindsight, maybe we should have just paid more for our big screen TVs, smart phones, and appliances after all. You pay the piper one way or another.
I’m sure there are quite a few useless rules that can be eliminated. That’s the nature of bureaucracy. It needs regular reforms to eliminate inefficiencies that creep in over time. Still, I stop short of advocating for a return to the bad old days before the New Deal and modern labor laws. If the problem is the lack of any standards or laws in countries we trade with and a resulting lack of manufacturing jobs, surely the solution shouldn’t be to recreate those conditions here.
Too many propose a race to the bottom as a path to prosperity
‘Everywhere min wages rise so does the cost of living’ – evidence please?
If you can’t find any, let me point you to plenty showing the opposite (see links below). Raising the minimum wage raises living standards – and yes – increases jobs (more money in the pockets of ordinary people does a whole lot more good for the economy than in those of the super rich who make our lives more expensive by trying to monopolise businesses and competing for assets in short supply, including housing and land and, to think of political assets, our media and politicians).
Yours is a popular misconception pedalled by a press largely owned by the super rich to discourage people from fighting for a fairer deal, even as owners and bosses take a larger and larger chunk of the pie, often in return for doing nothing, if you’re say Rishi Sunak who makes half a million a week in passive income.
https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/press-releases/the-minimum-wage-is-the-single-most-successful-economic-policy-in-a-generation-and-has-boosted-the-wages-of-millions-of-britains-lowest-earners-by-6000-a-year/
https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/higher-minimum-wages-are-creating-more-jobs-with-michael-reich/
Trade unions are an important part of civil society, a crucial counterweight against corporate and political tyranny. Unions brought us so much from the weekend to protections against child labour. They even helped bring down the Soviet Union in the case of Poland. And yet so many on the right seem to have forgotten this to the point that I question whether they can even be called conservatives at all, insofar as a conservative is supposed to be concerned with giving peope agency and rewarding honest work sufficiently that family life can flourish.
ps BB – it’s great to see you still being one of the few traditional left voices standing up for workers on here, keep it up!