This blog is adapted from a speech by Billy Bragg at Portcullis House, Houses of Parliament, on Monday 24 June
Outside of Broadcasting House in London, the BBC has erected a statue to one of its former employees, George Orwell. Tall, thin, with a cigarette between his fingers, the author of 1984 leans forward as if to make a point. On the wall beside the statue, a quote from the writer’s work has been chiselled into the Portland stone.
I’m sure most of us can think of an Orwell quote that we would like to see cut into the edifice of Broadcasting House. ‘Big Brother Is Watching You’ comes to mind, but is a bit harsh on the BBC. And ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’ sounds like a dreadful 1970s suburban sitcom. My choice would have been “England is a family in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts”.
However, the BBC have chosen a line that Orwell wrote for an intended preface to Animal Farm: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear”. I find that statement a little troubling. Because, in my experience, people don’t want to hear a misogynist YouTuber make rape threats to a female MP; they don’t want to hear that George Soros is plotting to take over the world or that Islamophobia really doesn’t exist.
The implication of Orwell’s words is that liberty alone is sufficient to guarantee our freedom, that simply by adhering to this one principle, we may sleep safely in our beds. Yet if liberty means anything at all, it should surely protect us from people who assert that 2+2=5.
The right to say what you think, to whomever you want, whenever you choose, with no regard to whether they want to hear it, is not the definition of being free. One only has to look at the Twitter feed of President Trump to realise that liberty and freedom are not the same thing. When Trump makes ad hominem attacks those who challenge him, he’s undermining the principle that ensures the scope of freedom is as broad as humanity itself: the dimension of equality.
Freedom is empowering, but it requires reciprocity in order that all can enjoy its fruits. You have the right to express yourself, but you must also respect that right in others, and not just those that you agree with. “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” as the famous maxim goes, is a recognition that free speech alone is not enough to guarantee freedom.
By offering to put your life on the line for the right of an opponent to be heard, you are taking a stand on equality, willing to pay the highest price to ensure a fair hearing for those you may disagree with. Yet even when practiced together, liberty and equality are insufficient to guarantee civil discourse, never mind uphold the principles of veracity and justice. Such a two-dimensional freedom would give everyone to speak, but do little to challenge those with the loudest voices who angrily argue that 2+2 must equal five.
In order to protect the weak from the strong, freedom requires a third dimension, one that gives agency to the individual: accountability. Liberty without equality is privilege, but liberty without accountability is the most dangerous of all types of freedom: impunity.
Throughout history, freedom has had many meanings. In its broadest sense, it speaks of liberation. Yet it also has a dark side: history has been marred by those who claimed the freedom to act without any restraint. Democracy arose as the result of citizens demanding their natural rights in opposition to absolutist monarchs.
Now a new breed of politician has emerged for whom impunity is a key factor in their appeal to the electorate. Donald Trump is just the most obvious example of how much you can get away with if you ignore all attempts at accountability. We must not imagine that we are immune to this tendency in the UK. A party with no policies has just won the highest number of votes in the European elections and now threatens to stand in every constituency at the next parliamentary elections.
Given that democracy is the form of accountability that most of us are familiar with, it is often assumed that the two concepts are synonymous. In truth, their relationship is more akin to a Venn diagram. In times of consensus, the overlap between the two is considerable, but in the past decade, they have been drifting apart like tectonic plates.
The relationship between democracy and accountability has been put under huge pressure by the forces of neoliberalism. Governments have ceded power to the free market. Where once regulation and collective action in the workplace sought to hold employers to account, decisions are now left to the whims of market forces that recognise no authority other than the bottom line. Yes, we are free to vote in elections, but the choices on offer are constrained by the neoliberal maxim that there is no alternative to free market liberalisation.
The complacency of politicians who rely on economic indicators to argue that all is well with society is resented by voters whose lived experience suggests otherwise. When record levels of employment coincide with record levels of poverty, something fundamental is wrong with the system. Voters want change, but the current disparity between democracy and accountability has frustrated their efforts.
The 2010 general election was unlike any other in the previous 75 years in that it failed to deliver a majority government. The First-Past-the-Post electoral system is recognised as producing results that are out of perspective with votes cast, but its advocates claim that, for all its faults, it can be relied on to deliver a mandate to govern. Not anymore.
Frustration at the way things are done at Westminster can be seen in national voting trends since the 2008 crash. The hung parliament of 2010; the narrow victory in the Scottish independence referendum; the scrappy majority won by the Tories in 2015; and another hung parliament in 2017. But the most powerful expression of this frustration with the political class came in the result the EU referendum in 2016.
The Leave campaign’s slogan of ‘Take Back Control’ resonated powerfully with those who believe they no longer have any agency over their lives. And recent polling by the Hansard Society suggests citizens are looking for radical solutions to this problem. Their 2019 Audit of Political Engagement found 47% feel they have no influence over national decision-making. This is the highest level of disengagement that Hansard have recorded in the 15 years that they have been asking this question – worse now than in the aftermath of the MPs expenses scandal.
More worryingly, 54% say Britain needs a strong leader who is willing to break the rules and 42% think many of the country’s problems could be dealt with more effectively if the government didn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament. With authoritarianism on the rise and some candidates for the Tory leadership arguing that the best way to resolve difficult issues is to suspend Parliament, we face a crisis of accountability.
Frustrated at their lack of agency, the public want to see changes, with 72% saying that the system of governing needs ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a great deal’ of improving. I would suggest that locking MPs out of the Commons or the dictatorship of the privately educated is not an improvement on democratic deliberation, but if we don’t act to make our system of governing more responsive to the electorate, we may find that someone comes along to resolve this crisis by force.
The first step we need to take is to bring decision making closer to the people. The asymmetrical nature of devolution has left the majority of UK citizens relying on national policy emanating from a distant Westminster. The 47million people living in England outside of Greater London are reliant for funding of local services on the most centralised system of governing in the developed world.
As a result, London dominates the UK economy. A recent report estimated that the City has damaged economic growth to the tune of £4.5trillion over the past 20 years by sucking talent and investment from other productive uses such as manufacturing and research while inflating asset prices. The disparities of government spending between London and the north of England are stark. Recent analysis by the IPPR found that under austerity, total public spending fell by £6.3billion in real terms in the North - more than in any other region of the UK.
London’s economy has grown over 50% faster than the rest of England over the past two decades. The average number of jobs accessible within an hour by rail for people in the north-west was estimated to be 187,000, compared to 1.7million for those in London.
England is not a level playing field. Its economy and much else are rigged in favour of London. The obvious answer to this problem is to redistribute power away from the centre, to build on Labour’s programme of devolution by creating an English parliament. But such an institution would only exacerbate the problem by amplifying the power of London. To bring decision making closer to the people requires the creation of English regional assemblies.
Elected by proportional representation and with similar powers to the Scottish parliament, issues such as housing, health and social care, transport and education – all highly relevant to our daily lives – would come under much greater local control. Studies show that decentralisation is associated with both stronger growth and improvements in public services. Devolution allows communities to focus on priorities that may not be shared by central government: in Scotland, for instance, spending on social care is now 30% higher than it is in England.
But such a radical shift of accountability will need to be matched by a refocussing of funds for the English regions, both in terms of their own Barnett formula and an infrastructure capable of bringing investment into the area.
I’m pleased to say that the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, has already expressed support for regional development banks capable of taking advantage of local networks and experience within his plans for a national investment bank. The overall aim is to promote sustainable, regionally-balanced growth.
While the creation of regional assemblies would help take back control from Whitehall, the greater challenge comes in the form of neoliberalism. If we hope to give citizens a sense of agency over their lives, we need to extend accountability into the workplace, the boardrooms and onto the trading floors.
Populism is on the rise across the globe as opportunist figures whip up division while offering to make everything great like it used to be. Yet for all their rhetoric, few populists are willing to make the significant changes necessary to restore the standard of living enjoyed in the post-war years: job security; a decent wage; an affordable home; and the sense of a bright future for our children.
The first step is to tackle exploitation. In recent years too many employers have replaced permanent jobs on a decent wage with insecure conditions such as zero hours contracts or temp work. Some have even gone so far as to claim their workers are actually self-employed. Often the motivation behind such casualisation is a determination to cuts costs by depriving workers of their employment rights.
I’m pleased to say that many of these problems have already been identified by John McDonnell, who, along with Rebecca Long Bailey, the shadow business secretary, recently commissioned two independent reports on how to reform corporate governance and our broken auditing system.
The Labour Party was built on the struggle for liberty of the individual, equality for all and accountability in the workplace. Basing their policies on these principles, Labour was able to deliver a sense of agency to generations of working people who had been marginalised by social structures and economic exploitation.
Over recent decades, however, those principles have suffered as neoliberalism sought to change the priorities of society to reflect the values of the free market. Private profit has taken priority over public need in housebuilding, education, health care, transport and utilities. Unsustainable levels of growth threaten our environment.
Labour needs to build on its tradition of devolution to address the issue of England, offering regional assemblies that take back control from Westminster. Where information technology and artificial intelligence are bringing changes to traditional working practices, Labour must ensure that communities affected by deindustrialisation are given a say in the shaping of the new work environment.
The power of algorithms needs to be carefully regulated to prevent bias and profiteering.
Climate change is the greatest challenge we face and one which requires us all to be accountable as individuals, corporations and states. I’m pleased to see that today John McDonnell has stated that, under a Labour government, the full might of the Treasury will be harnessed to tackle climate change.
Under Jeremy Corbyn, Labour has become the largest political party in Europe, the promise of a democratic policy making process offering a real sense of agency to individual members. As a result, the party is in great shape to make the case for regulatory democracy.
For neoliberals will always prioritise deregulation. The Brexit project began as a campaign against red tape. Free marketeers are ideologically opposed to accountability. They want less regulations for the same reason that criminals want less police.
Now, the ideology of getting away with it has leapt like a virus from the corporate world into the political sphere in the US, where a rogue president brazenly rejects any notion at accountability, no matter how timid. We are about to see that mentality take centre stage at Westminster, with the roguish figure of Boris Johnson seems set to gain the keys to No10 while declining to answer difficult questions about his past behaviour and future policies.
Trump is dangerous because he’s a rule breaker driven by spite and a need for revenge. Johnson wants to be affable, but his expressed desire to have his cake and eat it is a sure sign that he believes the rules do not apply to him. Both men think nothing of using discriminatory language. Neither can be trusted to tell the truth.
In such trying times, I would argue that we can’t afford to rely on Orwell’s one-dimensional definition of liberty to protect us from a creeping authoritarianism that broaches no criticism and a neoliberal project that denies the existence of any alternative economic system.
In the same essay intended to be a preface to Animal Farm, Orwell added a caveat to his definition of liberty: “everyone shall have the right to say and print what (they) believe to be the truth, provided only that it does not harm the rest of the community in some quite unmistakable way”.
I would argue that the new breed of populist politicians are already harming our community with their divisive rhetoric and promotion of falsehoods. Our first step in combating them is to recognise that without equality and accountability, we are not truly free and to do everything we can to ensure that these principles are upheld, in our social discourse, in our economy and in our battle against authoritarianism.
One last thing: If you’re still around when someone decides to put up a statue to me with an accompanying quote, please don’t let it be “I don’t want to change the world”.
The Three Dimensions of Freedom by Billy Bragg is out now from Faber