Many commentators have remarked, almost in passing, on the carnivalesque nature of protests in recent years. In fact, during the writing of this piece, it was difficult not to notice the peppering of coverage surrounding actions planned around the Copenhagen climate summit with phrases like, ‘behind the blue face-paint and carnival atmosphere…’ (BBC News, 2009), and ‘the city centre will become a carnival of parades…’ (Independent, 2009). Yet few have considered the particular commonalities shared between carnival and contemporary protests in greater detail or considered the implications that such ritualised displays of dissent may have in terms of representing a dynamic process for social change.

Carnival as ‘Revolution’

In many cases this comparison is not unwarranted, as many groups actively seek to recreate the carnivalesque in their protest actions. For example, one author writes that contemporary forms of ‘direct action’ ‘do-it-yourself’ protest are ‘finally breaking down the barriers between art and protest’ and that, ‘new forms of creative and poetic resistance have finally found their time’ (Jordan, 1998: 129). A broad range of groups, from the ‘Biotic Baking Brigade’ (which uses public ‘pieing’ as their weapon of choice) to Reclaim the Streets, attempt to emulate what they see as the subversive nature of the carnival:

‘From the Middle Ages onward, the carnival has offered glimpses of the world turned upside down… [It] celebrates the temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and the established order; it marks the suspension of hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions’ (BBB, 2004:39; RTS, 2002).

Such groups have described their use of carnival as:

‘an attempt to make Carnival the revolutionary moment. Placing “what could be” in the path of “what is” and celebrating the “here and now” in the road of the rush for “there and later”... It is an expansive desire; for freedom, for creativity; to truly live. This desire, for the present social order, is revolutionary’ (‘Reclaim the Streets!’,1997).

For many practitioners, including those who participated in 1999’s ‘Carnival Against Capital’, carnival’s appeal lies in its being ‘halfway between party and protest’ bringing together the ‘volatile mixture of carnival and revolution, creativity and conflict, using rhythm and music to reclaim space, transform the streets, and inject pleasure into politics’ (Notes from Nowhere, 2003: 174). It is a ‘ludic protest’ offering flexibility, the expression of a diversity of identities, encouraging ‘people to enjoy and imagine other possible worlds’ and ‘solicit contributions to a counterculture fantasia, or a human community garden’ (Bogad, 2006:55).

Even those outside of activist movements have celebrated the growing propensity for demonstrations, regardless of their outcome, to represent expressions of ‘collective joy’ in modern societies which apparently share fewer public rituals (Ehrenreich, 2007: 260). Moreover, unlike many of the sources cited above, not all actions resembling carnival do so with such consciousness of purpose. So common have carnivalesque themes in protest become that it is difficult to imagine an action which does not demonstrate some aspect thereof, from masking, dance, music and street theatre at April’s G20 protests to a lone attendee at an oil refinery strike clad in a grim reaper costume (and to whom a fellow striker had yelled, ‘the placard would have been enough!’ [Black, 2009]).

Indeed, protests may play a similar role in modern social structures as former public rituals like the carnival of feudal times, but whether one is consciously mobilising what one theorist calls ‘tactical carnival’ (Bogad, 2006) or, like the lone grim reaper, merely going through the motions because ‘that’s what one does’, the effect is nonetheless more likely to be the complete opposite of what most practitioners probably have in mind.  As will hopefully become clear momentarily, far from being ‘revolution itself’ as the introduction to Mikhail Bakhtin’s oft-cited volume celebrating the subversive nature of the carnivalesque would have it, it is about as ‘revolutionary’ as a new hair product, and equally anti-capitalist. That is, not only do the vast majority of such demonstrations by and large fail to threaten the existing order, but they are actually both part of and reflective of that order, and further, act as a reaffirmation of existing hierarchies and social structures.

Carnivals Against Capitalism

It should be noted that although this critique might be extended to a broad range of protest, I recognise that not every action has lofty aims of bringing down the existing social order. However, with activists brandishing placards and banners reading, ‘System Change, Not Climate Change’ and ‘Abolish Capitalism Now!’, one wonders how the actual realisation of such goals might be accomplished with anything less than a ‘revolution’ of a very different sort than those involving hairspray and collective displays of public frustration.

In addition, more and more there is a propensity for the ends to be subordinated to a primary concern with the means—to planning actions, responding to a perpetual state of crisis and raising awareness and converts. What precisely a movement hopes to achieve in the long run and how best such a goal might be attained seems a peripheral (and sometimes altogether absent) consideration. As one commentator has pointed out:

‘It seems we have very little idea of what it might actually require to bring down capitalism. As if all it needed was some sort of critical mass of activists occupying offices to be reached and then we’d have a revolution…’  (‘Give up Activism’, 2001)

If those carrying banners proclaiming that, ‘Capitalism isn’t working—another world is possible’ truly believe their own words, the first step is to realise that, personally liberating though it may be, it may actually be little more than a subtle reaffirmation of capitalism in the guide of protest.

Anthropology of Ritual and Protest

Any anthropologist would be keenly aware of Victor Turner’s 1969 thesis concerning the role played by what he termed the ‘liminal’ in social rituals, and the propensity for ritualised public expressions of dissent to reaffirm and sustain the existing social order. In particular, his description of what he calls, ‘rituals of status reversal’ bears a striking resemblance to protest actions and demonstrations of the present day. For Turner, these rituals are characterised by their ‘liminality’: lying at the threshold ‘betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial’ (Turner, 1969: 95).

In them, hierarchies are temporarily inverted and normal codes of behaviour suspended. ‘The stronger are made weaker; the weak act as though they were strong’, often engaging in mimicry, masking and public castigation of structural superiors (ibid.: 168). Although such events may be calendrical or cyclical in nature, they can also erupt during times when those superiors are perceived to have so disrupted the ‘balance between society and nature that disturbances in the former have provoked imbalances in the latter’ (ibid.: 184). If this description reveals a number of striking parallels, then it is likely that the two also share many of the same functions. According to this conception, whether calendrical or arising at moments when ‘the whole community is threatened’ due to ‘historical irregularities’ altering the ‘natural balance between what are conceived to be permanent structural categories’, carnivalesque demonstrations of dissent perform the function of ‘bringing social structure and communitas into right mutual relation once again’ (ibid.:178). That is, for all the attempts to rehabilitate the notion of carnival as a subversive practice intrinsically valuable in its representation of resistance and ‘modelling of a different, pleasurable and communal ideal’, its essential problematic remains. Namely, ‘its failure to do away with the official dominant culture, its licensed complicity’ (Stallybrass and White 1986:19).

This would not be so problematic however, if it were not for the fact that demonstrations seem less and less to act as a symbolic tool in a larger repertoire of resistance than a go-to method for a vast array of causes. At the risk of being far too pessimistic, it is important to delineate clearly the limits of this type of activism and to point out that ‘doing’ cannot be a substitute for ‘thinking’. Serious change cannot be effected without action, but ‘aimless hyper-activism’—doing because ‘something must be done’—can actually channel energies away from any seriously progressive project aimed at large-scale social change. Moreover, while many actions have an immediately recognisable carnival-like atmosphere (ie, mask, music, dance, etc.), even those that appear more serious may nonetheless possess many of these aforementioned qualities. In order to draw out some of these parallels, it is necessary to look in more detail at three aspects of carnival that are becoming more and more commonplace in protest today—liminality, the suspension of norms and codes of behaviour and the ritual inversion of hierarchies—and to consider their role in sustaining the existing social order.

1. Liminality

The liminal is defined as the ‘in between’ state set temporarily apart from the normal pace of everyday life. It is an event in the life cycle of a society whose transience arises from the fact that its social purpose is not to actually overthrow existing hierarchies but to therapeutically engage in role play, to act out revolutionary emotions as a form of catharsis, providing a ‘discharge of all the ill-feeling that has accumulated’ (Turner, 1969: 179).

So unreflectively is the term ‘temporary’ used by many protest movements when describing their aims to ‘open up spaces’, or to, in the words of a banner unravelled at a Camden street party/demonstration in 1995, ‘RECLAIM THE STREETS—FREE THE CITY’, that it would be easy to believe that such actions are really, ‘challenging official culture’s claims to authority, stability, sobriety, immutability and immortality by cheekily taking over a main traffic artery’ (Jordan, 1998: 141). However, it is precisely its temporary nature that leads to the exact opposite end.

Interestingly, while Bakhtin was writing his now famous Rabelais book to which so many practitioners trace the roots of their ‘revolutionary’ acts of subversion through carnival, another early Soviet thinker Anatoly Lunacharsky warned that ‘carnival is a safety valve for passions that otherwise might erupt in revolution’, an occasion which allows the lower orders to ‘let off steam in a harmless, temporary event’ (Docker, 1994:171). Indeed, when the liminal phase comes to an end, it is often the case that frustratingly little ground has been gained. When the ‘ludic’ protest disbands, spaces that had been freed up for temporary countercultural demonstrations of resistance are harmoniously handed back to the hustle and bustle of everyday life and commerce.

2. Norms and laws are suspended, public spaces are given over to the common people

During carnival, ordered spaces are given over to disorder and mockery and traditional norms and expectations of behaviour are lifted. The streets are taken over by the festivities and in some places city halls are given to courts of ‘fools’. Women might cut men’s ties or kiss any man that comes their way, and everywhere the rules of modesty and order, both written and unwritten are temporarily suspended. Hierarchical societies dissolve into ‘communitas’ (a transient community of equals formed from an otherwise stratified social structure) and those structurally subordinate are given license, during that liminal sphere of time, to break the rules in an act of ritualised transgression.

Similarly, in many protest activities, the streets are given over to the festivities, to the marchers and demonstrators. Those who would not normally associate often intermix and intermingle in a playing out of communitas and, as in the sanctioned carnival, the ordinary social norms and order are temporarily suspended. Often, participants attempt to make their rule breaking more visible, through risqué dress, costuming, impromptu dance, performance and other art. However, contrary to what many proponents assert, this mobilisation of carnivalesque forms does not, as one author writes, ‘break the rules in order to make them more visible’ and in so doing, ‘open up paradoxical space’ and the ‘opportunity for critique’ (Rhodes, 2002:135), but rather it implicitly strengthens the very rules it hopes to transcend.

It is when rules are broken that their necessity becomes all the more vivid. In our daily lives we usually fail to appreciate the importance of structured narrative in communication until someone breaks the unwritten codes that render that communication coherent. In the same way, when the abandoned placards have been swept up and the first cars and pedestrians are released from the bottleneck to take back the formerly ‘liberated’ streets and town squares, the city seems to breathe a collective sigh of relief as the normal routine resumes unscathed.

The stark contrast between order and disorder serves as a reminder of why the streets aren’t ‘our streets!’ (as protestors at the G-20 shouted while clashing with police) to do with what we like (or, to an outsider, alienated from the display, what ‘they’ like). Moreover, as Zizek (2003) illustrates using The Matrix as a metaphor, like the countercultural heroes of the film, one might think that liberation is being practised through the act of breaking natural laws, but the paradox is that these ‘miracles’ are possible only if we remain within the virtual reality sustained by the Matrix and merely bend or change its rules; our ‘real’ status is still that of slaves’. The question becomes then, whether to perform a ‘postmodern strategy of “resistance”, of endlessly “subverting” or “displacing” the power system, or a more radical attempt at annihilating it’ (Zizek, 2003). However, unlike the film, the breaking of rules and the temporary liberation of space are often described as being ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’ in and of themselves, and the larger questions are so subordinated to practice that even asking them has become taboo.

Ritual inversion of hierarchical roles and the castigation of superiors

As previously mentioned, in the liminal space of the traditional carnival, the usual hierarchical roles are reversed. In the Rhineland a woman dressed in black storms the city hall and is given the key to the city by the mayor; elsewhere, a mock king and queen are paraded through the streets or a cast of fools might parody an assembly of their governors. Similarly, in protest activities, these themes may be accomplished in a number of ways, from theatrical performances to costumes, masking and mimicry. A protest in July against the UK’s complicity with Israeli actions in the Gaza Strip, which made its way through Hyde Park, saw some protesters donning anti-semitic dress and acting out ethnic stereotypes, while others, dressed as skeletons and holding plastic severed limbs, engaged in a symbolic dance in front of a blood soaked Israeli flag. At the G20 march protesters dressed as bankers, businessmen and top hatted capitalists. Elsewhere, a group of mock ‘pro-capitalists’ march in suits or gowns and pearls, spraying champagne while holding a giant banner that shouts, ‘Capitalism Rocks!’ accompanied by signs reading, ‘Money is My Life’ and ‘Privatize More Stuff!’

In a description of the aforementioned Gaza Strip protest, one commentator captioned a photo of a portrayal of a particularly taboo anti-semitic sight with the remark that, ‘Protesters were unfazed by this scene’ (Rothschild, 2009). As we have already seen, typical social norms are lifted in the transitory liminal sphere of the protest/carnival. A symbolic realm is created where people are given licence to castigate their superiors, to break taboos, act out revolution and ultimately to discharge the accumulated tensions in a display where all can get their just deserts.

An ethnographer writing in the 1960s describes the Hindu festival of Holi as one in which a highly structured society dissolves into a communitas, and the low are given license to candidly confront and castigate their superiors for their accumulated sins. ‘In front of whose house was a burlesque dirge being sung by a professional ascetic of the village?’ the anthropologist describes, ‘It was the house of a very much alive moneylender, notorious for his punctual collections and his insufficient charities’ (Marriott in Turner, 1969:187). In 1920s Ghana, eight days were given over to a time when ‘the perfect lampooning of liberty was allowed’, scandal placed on a pedestal, and villagers allowed to freely shout the faults of superiors and inferiors alike without the threat of punishment (Bosman in Turner, 1969:178). Paradoxically however, this ‘purifying power of mutual honesty’ has the effect of ‘regenerating the principles of classification and ordering on which social structure rests’, since through levelling, the liminal phase reminds and implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed (Turner, 1969:180). As Turner writes,

...nothing underlines regularity so well as absurdity or paradox. Emotionally, nothing satisfies as much as extravagent or temporarily permitted elicit behavior. Rituals of status reversal accommodate both aspects. By making the low high and the high low, they reaffirm the hierarchical principle. By making the low mimic (often to the point of caricature) the behavior of the high, and by restraining the initiative of the proud, they underline the reasonableness of everyday culturally predictable behavior between the various estates of society (1969:176).

Furthermore, the use of symbolic objects, masking and other forms of symbolic dress serves as a visual representation of the hierarchical role reversal where the low are temporarily empowered in a ‘world turned upside down’ (but even, it should be noted, this temporary empowerment is illusory since it is ‘licensed or sanctioned by the authorities themselves’ [Sales, 1983:169]). Second, it takes the power out of those objects by identifying with them, since ‘[t]o draw off power from a strong being is to weaken that being’ in our perceptions of it (Turner, 1969:174). This counts not only for our mimicry of our superiors who have become a threat to us, but also for the identification with similarly threatening but unseen objects. So for example, protestors paint their faces blue and mimic a giant blue wave marching through the streets. In turning the threat into a carnival, fears that may act as a driver are dissipated and aggressors are made into harmless caricatures.

Unable to understand our problems and fearful of their consequences, we

‘mobilize affect-loaded symbols of great power. Rituals of status reversal, according to this principle, mask the weak in strength and demand that the strong be passive and patiently endure the symbolic and even real aggression shown against them by structural inferiors’ (ibid.:176).

Through the submission of superiors to levelling mechanisms (think of the police lined up along a parade route, the space given over for the protest) it submits superiors to levelling mechanisms, sustaining the illusion that ‘we’ are the ones who hold the power and ‘they’ are truly accountable to us.

Unequal societies inevitably create tensions, and thus the greater the drift of the very high from the very low, the greater the potential for accumulated tensions to erupt. Thus, the growth in such carnivalesque outbursts are less a measure of the strength of a resistance movement than a measure of the degree of deviation from the foundational ideal of ‘communitas’—the illusion that underneath a hierarchical society everyone is nonetheless equal—and the reality of the hierarchy itself.

Demonstrations are a popular form of protest precisely because they are not revolutionary, because they do not threaten the social order but nonetheless allow for the discharge of tensions, which is allowed and sanctioned because such channelling of grievances make them ‘easier to police in the long term’ (Sales, 1983:169).Thus, in role playing our powerfulness, the roles of ‘citizens’ and ‘representatives’ are reaffirmed through role reversal so that the representatives are subject to the will of the people instead of the other way around. Just as in the examples of non-Western rituals and festivals, structure is ‘cleansed’ of the ‘accumulated sins’ and reborn the day after the festival.

The Discharge of Discontent

These three aspects could be extended to include other elements like the reaffirmation of tradition—wherein demonstrators play out non-violent rituals of protest not because it is the best way to achieve an aim but because it reaffirms the founding myths of Western (capitalist) societies as achieving revolution by peaceful means. However, these three form the core of a striking parallel between carnival and protest demonstrations as functional elements of unequal social structures. Demonstrations form a valuable part of any resistance movement since, as previously mentioned, nothing can be achieved without action. The problem arises when action becomes a substitute for deliberation. In order to solve a problem, the majority of one’s energies should be devoted to understanding it. Should an anti-capitalist movement or a movement to stop a war use the same tactics as one which hopes to raise awareness of breast cancer?

This perfunctory use of public displays reveals both a disorientation with regard to social issues and a paucity of thinking about the future. Many of the valuable elements revealed in contemporary protest movements—the creativity of direct action tactics, the sheer mass of people who care enough to leave their houses, the value and necessity inherent in opposition itself—are ultimately diffused and dispersed through aimless activity that can name no common enemy and thus claim no common goals except to share in collective discontent. Indeed, as the protests surrounding the Copenhagen climate summit attest, participants came from a varied milieu, from climate activists to indigenous peoples, denouncing markets, consumerism, animal cruelty, the power wielded by the global north, and so on (Kanter, The New York Times:2009). Discontent is a valuable driver toward social change, but if people truly want the goals emblazoned on their placards, it is not enough to overturn a social system. Displays of anger and resistance are not ‘revolution itself’; unless channelled toward a rational consideration of the problems that face us, they risk being dispersed in a display that actually upholds the system it is supposed to challenge.

 

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BBC (2009). ‘Climate change protests ahead of Copenhagen summit’
Black, Tim (2009). ‘This is only the beginning’. spiked, June 24.
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Ehrenreich, Barbara (2007). Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. London: Granta Books.
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Rhodes, Carl (2002). ‘Politics and popular culture: Organizational carnival in the Springfield nuclear power plant’. Management and Organizational Paradoxes. Ed. Stewart R. Clegg. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Rothschild, Nathalie (2009). Creating their own private Gazas. spiked, December 18.
RTS (Reclaim the Streets) (2002). Reclaim the Streets! Carnival! Carnivaaaall….
Sales, R. (1983). English Literature in History 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics. London: Hutchinson.
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Zizek, Slavoj (2003). Ideology Reloaded. In These Times, June 6.

November is a sombre month with long dark evenings that not even the early Christmas lights quite succeed in cheering. No wonder our ancestors associated the time of year with death and dying. For the families of those who have died serving in the armed forces it is a time of sad memories. The sale of poppies and the national rituals of remembrance become a poignant reminder of their own loss and grief.

It is not just aging widows with distant memories of the 1940s who feel this way. Every time a casualty of a current conflict is announced on the news with the line that ‘members of the family have been informed’, a new widow is created, another mother loses a son and more children become fatherless. Or, it might be a young woman – a daughter, wife and mother – whose body is flown home for burial.

Forty years ago, as the veterans of the two world wars dwindled in numbers, many thought that poppy day and the observance of the two-minutes’ silence would quietly fade away. It was a time when it was very rare for a member of the British forces to die in action and honouring the dead of war meant less and less to the peacetime young. But then came the Falklands War and the Gulf Wars and today British troops are engaged in Afghanistan. So veterans wearing berets and medals continue to be a familiar sight as they stand outside supermarkets and in town centres with their collecting tins and trays of poppies. And the sale of poppies, although supported by a national advertising campaign, remains essentially a local effort involving thousands of volunteers and is the British Legion’s core money-raising activity.

The British Legion was set up after the First World War to help the thousands of soldiers, many suffering from horrendous disabilities, who had returned from war to find themselves betrayed by the political classes. They did not find the land fit for heroes that they had supposedly fought for, but one of deprivation and unemployment.

Within 20 years an even greater betrayal became evident. Far from being the war to end all wars, the politicians had so badly handled the peace that a second military conflagration engulfed Europe and spread to the rest of the world.  By 1945 a new cohort of war victims required British Legion help. The income from the sale of poppies enabled the British Legion to carry out this important work.

Sixty years on and the role of the British Legion has changed. While it continues in its charitable role, it has also become the custodian of national remembrance. It organises the poppy appeal; plays a central role at the cenotaph ceremony; members are involved at every local war memorial; and the Legion arranges the annual Festival of Remembrance at the Albert Hall.

The British Legion, now with the prefix Royal, is a thoroughly establishment body which endorses the view that soldiers are heroes and those who die have sacrificed themselves so that we who are left may enjoy freedom and live in peace. When a small boy presented a poppy at the festivities in the Albert Hall this year he did so, reciting the words he was given to say, ‘to say thank you from children to those who gave their lives so that we can live and be free’.

But this view is a dangerous half-truth. It is part fiction and part propaganda designed to reassure those bereaved, traumatised or wounded in warfare that their ‘sacrifice’ had a noble purpose. While some soldiers have indeed died courageously in battle defending the innocent or protecting colleagues, huge numbers have not. They died because of incompetence, inadequate preparation, disease, and sometimes in pursuit of futile objectives. Many fought because as conscripts they had no choice; or, they joined up through peer pressure; they signed on through immature bravado; or because they had no other chance of work.

Few wars present a clear-cut moral choice. The second Gulf war divided the nation. Wars are fought to defend the economic interests of the powerful and to enable politicians to save face, or bolster their popularity, as much as to defend freedom or maintain the peace. Even well intentioned wars designed as peace-keeping operations can have unintended consequences and lead to greater loss of life than ever intended. It ought to be recalled too that some Britain’s enemies of the last 100 years have believed that they were fighting for freedom and that Britain and its allies were the aggressors.

In recent times one of the best-known soldiers from the First World War has been Private 29295 Harry Patch, whose longevity earned him a special place in national affections. He had been an ordinary Tommy and not a great hero. He had not volunteered to fight in a youthful blaze of jingoistic bravado, but had been conscripted and wore his uniform dutifully, but reluctantly. Interestingly, he considered Remembrance Day ‘just showbusiness’, and war, ‘organised murder, and nothing else’.

His memories of war had little to do with marching bands in the Royal Albert Hall and politicians stealing photo-opportunities outside Westminster Abbey, but were stark and vivid. He lost three close friends in the slaughter of one night. ‘Those chaps are always with me. I can see that damned explosion now’.

The realities of conflict, whether the pointless trench warfare of the First World War, or the ‘collateral damage’ to civilians of aerial bombing, or the bloody and terrifying consequences of a suicide bomb, or the deaths by ‘friendly fire’, bear no resemblance to the sentimental, sanitised and sugar-pilled jingoism of the Albert Hall’s annual Festival of Remembrance.

Harry Patch didn’t live to see Faryl Smith, finalist in Britain’s Got Talent appearing at the Albert Hall in 2009; neither did he see ‘B’ list celebrity Hayley Westenra on the same bill singing, ‘Every day’s a gift from heaven, welcome as a long lost friend’; but he might have watched Katherine Jenkins two years earlier standing in a pool of ethereal blue light with full schmaltzy orchestra giving voice to these words:

‘In fields of sacrifice
Heroes paid the price
Young men who died for old men’s wars
Gone to paradise.’

At one point during the traditional Festival of Remembrance, thousands of poppies flutter down from the roof of the Albert Hall. It is a moment of riveting theatricality as young men and women in their spick and span uniforms stand to attention and let the silent flowers settle on their shoulders and on their heads. Yet, we need to be reminded how the poppy came to be adopted as such a powerful symbol.

It started with a Canadian doctor, John McCrae, back in 1915 looking at the freshly-filled graves of the scores of young men slaughtered in some of the bloodiest fighting of the war and writing the poem ‘In Flanders’ Field’.

‘In Flanders’ fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scare heard amid the guns below.’

And the poem concludes with the lines:

‘If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders’ Fields.’

After the war an American, Moina Michael, moved and inspired by the imagery of the poem, began to sell poppies to raise money for the war wounded.

In Britain and several other countries, the poppy icon now dominates all aspects of remembrance. It is not just in the Albert Hall that the poppy is the central symbol. At the cenotaph on the Sunday before 11 November, the Queen and the politicians lay wreaths of poppies. A temporary garden of crosses and poppies is set out at Westminster Abbey. Directives go out to newsreaders and others appearing on television that they should sport a poppy in the lapel. So, by doing all this are we keeping faith with those who died in Flanders’ Field 95 years ago?

What would the message of the victims of the trench warfare be to us today? Do the ghosts sleep of those young men lying in the newly dug graves seen by Dr McCrae? Or do they want to speak out, and if so, what do they wish to say? Do they wish to echo the words of Harry Patch and call war ‘organised murder’? ‘Too many died,’ he once told the BBC,  ‘War isn’t worth one life.’ For the sake of future generations and of peace we must be certain that the blood-red poppy as worn and displayed today serves not to glorify the war dead but to warn against the evils of war.

Sadly an element of glorification is contained in the message being given out by the traditional remembrance-tide ceremonies. The pomp and ceremony, and the showbiz element, can be seen to endorse militarism, giving it a place of honour in our society and suggesting, if only implicitly, that the use of arm force is a respectable and moral option for governments.

However, if the poppy was originally intended to act as a warning against the evils of war, then poppy day is a failure. Young men are still being sent to their deaths by the politicians, who today in Britain do not even give them adequate equipment to fight their wars. The public at large, the mass of people who do not lay down their lives abroad, still support violence as a means to settle scores and secure the nation’s economic interests. As at the time of the Falklands conflict, jingoism lies only just below the surface of the national character.

How might the traditions of remembrance tide be changed to minimise the dangers of glorifying war, while at the same time enabling those who grieve to find comfort and purpose in their sorrow? To abolish poppy day and the other rituals of the year would be a hurtful and ungrateful gesture. Changes however are long overdue. Maybe the following suggestions could be considered:

The tradition of the party political leaders laying wreathes at the cenotaph should be discontinued. A clear distinction should be made between those whose failures result in wars and those whose duty it is to risk being killed in conflict

Serving members of the armed forces should not wear ceremonial uniforms, but appear as they have to when performing their duties. Bearskins and scarlet tunics might have a role in attracting tourists, but it is specialist protective combat kit that is worn in Helmand province. This symbolic change would remind onlookers that the bearing of arms may be a necessary profession, but it should not be glamorised. Similarly members of the royal family should be advised not to appear in uniform unless currently serving in the forces.

There should be no formal marching and wearing of military insignia by the former service men and women who take part. They should be invited to walk solemnly past the cenotaph, not in military formation with their comrades abreast, but in the company of the civilians bereaved by war, widows and families. They might even be encouraged to invite veterans from former enemy countries to accompany them.

Music played should not be rousing or militaristic, but quiet and sorrowful.

Two new forms of observance could be introduced. Bell ringers at churches around the country could be asked to ring a half-muffled peal for at least an hour on 11 November. This is a traditional mark of respect for the dead and would be rung in memory of the civilian dead of all wars.

Secondly, every year a list of perhaps 1000 of those who have died in wars since 1914, should be drawn up. The personal details of each person on the list would be made available on a website and include a photograph together with a brief peacetime and wartime history. The place of their burial would be recorded and the circumstances of death. The list would represent a wide range of men, women and children; soldiers and civilians; heroes of battle, victims of the blitz; British, Americans, Russians, Argentinians, Germans. Furthermore, every poppy sold would have one of the 1000 names printed on the back. And those who buy and wear a poppy would be encouraged to go to the website and learn more about the individual with whom they have been linked.

This would encourage more people to see warfare in terms of individual cost and not in misleading broad-brush generalisations. Indeed, the purpose of the changes taken together would be to refocus remembrance tide, which has become too stuck in an unhelpful rut. It would not dishonour anyone who has died in the service of their country, but would be a timely reminder of the true cost of war and a check against the glorifying, sanitising or sentimentalising of war. It would be a reminder of war’s true cost and a renewed warning to politicians that the use of arms should never be embarked upon lightly.

Author

Dr Ted Harrison is a writer, artist and theologian. He is former BBC Religious Affairs correspondent, Radio 4 presenter and independent television producer.

With the impact of the financial crash having spread to all parts of the economy, most people today are concerned about the actuality or threat of unemployment. However whilst many worry about not having a job, there are some who continue to argue for shifting the work-life balance more away from ‘work’ and in favour of ‘life’.  In a speech to the Trades Union Congress, the Archbishop of Canterbury argued against the way that ‘companies have entrenched a working culture that undermines the family’ (1). In October 2009, Cristina Odone from the Centre for Policy Studies took a similar perspective when she celerated the outcome of a YouGov poll about working women and men: only 12% of mothers wanted to work full time and 31% did not want to work at all. Furthermore the survey showed that a ‘whopping 28% of men working full time don’t want to’ (2). This poll was quickly followed by an Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) report that suggested that most working fathers want to spend more time with their children. The EHRC ‘Fathers, Family and Work’ report aims to re-balance the way that the work-life balance debate has usually focused on working mums (3). Whilst mums and dads apparently fight over rights to be at home rather than at work, it was recently reported that employees are using swine flu as an excuse for throwing a Monday morning ‘sickie’ so unappealing do people find work these days (4).  One journalist went so far as to question if we are still living in the Victorian era when it comes to the working environment: long hours and harsh working conditions.

The European Quality of Life Index compiled by price comparison site uSwitch.com echoes this view. It says that we Britons endure longer working hours with fewer holidays and a higher cost of living than others in Europe. Although we may earn more than our European counterparts we do not enjoy a better quality of life (5). It is interesting that this discussion is happening in the context of increasing unemployment and a fear by many that their jobs are at stake.  Does the anxiety about having a job not push this work-life balance discussion into the background for most people?  Or are all these commentators and polls still on the button in pointing the finger of reproach at Work and arguing that we need a different work-life balance in favour of more leisure time?  To address these big questions, there are a few myths about modern work that are worth exploring here.

The myth of the worsening working environment

The first myth underlying the current discussion is the assumption that we are all unhappy at work because of the worsening working environment. The reality is that over the last few decades, working conditions have improved for us. John Philpott, Director of Public Policy and Chief Economist of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), argues that there been much ‘improvement in most objective measures of job quality such as growth in real earnings and reductions in hours of work, aided by improvements in basic employment rights such as the introduction of the national minimum wage and management practices that consist of things like creative job design, continuous appraisal and autonomous or semi-autonomous team working’ (6).  Writing in a similar vein, Professor JR Shackleton, Professor of Economics and Dean of the Business at the University of East London makes the following points: ‘Pay averages, in real terms, three times what it was half a century ago. We work fewer hours and have longer holidays. Our jobs are less dangerous, less dirty and less noisy. Far more of us (55%) are in white collar, managerial and professional occupations than 50 years ago (30%). … Discrimination and harassment are illegal (7).” The idea that working conditions are worse than ever clearly does not hold up against the historical comparisons.

The myth of the long hour’s culture

Another common assumption of the ‘stay at home brigade’ is that we are working longer hours than before and as a result find work onerous. Whilst there will always be people who work long hours, average working hours have in fact declined. A century ago people in Britain worked more than 50 hours a week according to the ONS, but by 2008 full time workers averaged 37 hours a week (8).

However the perception that we work long hours persists. This could be due to the fact that most households have two people working. Across the OECD countries, the proportion of two adult families working more than a total of 60 weekly hours rose from 37% in 1985 to 47% in 2002 (9). This can give working couples the sense that their lives are consumed by working and that there is no time for themselves. This can be seen in formal surveys of individuals: for example, in successive time-use surveys the proportion of Americans reporting that they ‘always feel rushed’ rose from 24% in 1965 to 38% in 1992 (10).

This perception is further heightened for people with children. Most parents would be the first to admit that their weekends are totally consumed by their children’s activities whether it is taking them to ballet on a Saturday morning or for practise at the football pitch or to other childrens’ parties. Meanwhile during the working week there are parent teacher meetings to attend. All in all most parents are busy individuals, juggling work and home. This sense of ‘being busy’ all the time can easily be refracted to the workplace when questioned about working hours.

The myth of intensified stress at work

Whilst it is difficult to contest the facts about the improving physical environment at work, many would still assert that our mental state suffers as a result of being at work. It is a widely shared presumption that work is more stressful these days. It is argued that mental illness is rising, costing the economy about 13.5 million working days a year compared with 12.9 million at the peak of the ‘winter of discontent’ (11). One explanation for this rise in stress has been the introduction of new technology.  For example, employment researcher Dr Bernard Casey argues: ‘Computers mean they can be monitored more and made to work to tighter deadlines which can take its toll’ (12). Dr Casey goes on to say that these levels of stress mean more absenteeism and people leaving the workforce through mental illness. 

You only have to consider how call centre employees are monitored to recognise that there is some truth to the idea of a greater ease of monitoring of work these days. However it does not follow that because of this, levels of mental illness are rising. One of the reasons the latter is the case is because the definition of what constitutes ‘mental illness’ has broadened so much that every ill-fated or sad experience of work has a tendency to be labelled as mental illness. Simon Wesseley, professor of psychiatry at Kings College London recently said that in his trade, for example, ‘states of sadness are now seen as depression, shyness has become a “social phobia” and all sorts of variations in childhood temperament, personality, emotions and behaviour have become characterised as diseases that need treatment’ (13). The therapeutic culture being described here, both in the workplace and in society in general, helps to reinforce the sense that work has become problematic.

Some factors that perpetuate the myths

It is worth reviewing some of the changes in society over the past generation to understand how these may have had an impact in how we experience our working life. At the level of politics, few would disagree that there is an absence of vision from our leaders. The discrediting of politicians is compounded by the fact that most solutions they put forward seem to be reactive and short-termist. This lack of longer-term vision and clear sense of direction also prevails in large parts of business. Most organisations are continuously re-organising themselves within the workplace. No sooner has one set of short-term policies and changes been introduced, than another follows. Management rarely lead with a clear strategic long term purpose. This produces uncertainty in the workplace. So even if employees are able to have their own discretion over what they do at work, a lack of clear leadership by management means employees will lack ‘the big picture’. This inevitably makes them feel less in control which in turns paves the way for feelings of greater anxiety and ‘stress’.

Aligned with this is the fact that our public activities have much narrowed over the decades.  Compared to earlier generations, our attachment to religious institutions, trade unions and other community-oriented bodies has declined. Individuation characterises our life. This undoubtedly has an impact in that work can appear to be the key constant social thing in our lives, so that it takes on an enormous responsibility for shaping one’s outlook and one’s identity. By default, work becomes the focus for interrogation. It is thus not surprising that it receives the onslaught of all our negative feelings, whether work-derived or more often not.

Conclusion

Whilst all work and no play is not a recipe for anyone’s good health, nor is the one-sided encouragement by many to ‘stay at home’, metaphorically and, for some, literally. When it comes down to it, most women, for example, would secretly admit that they would rather be at work than stay at home doing the domestic chores. They would prefer the need to juggle between all their tasks at home and work rather than be confined to the home. A campaign for affordable good quality childcare would serve a better purpose than all the advice that is given about changing the ‘work-life balance’. With unemployment set to increase, most people would prefer to have a job than stay at home and ‘enjoy a rebalanced life’.  If we feel coerced at work, let’s fight for better working conditions. If we think that management is not giving us vision and direction, why not be courageous and state this.  The answer is not to withdraw into the home.  Societies that look inwards and pontificate about leisure time, about feeling stressed and are negative about work will have a tendency to stagnate and decay. By all means let us try to relax more but let’s also have a sense of perspective that work, and the material and immaterial benefits that come from work, help us achieve a much fuller life as individuals.

Para Mullan is operations director at cScape Strategic Internet Services Ltd and a fellow member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development

1) Archbishop of Canterbury hits at City culture, James Boxell, Financial Times, 17 November, 2009
2) What women and want and how they can get it, Cristina Odone, Centre for Policy Studies, September 2009
3) The Fathers, Family and Work Report [PDF], October 2009, EHRC
4) Flu rise points to Monday ‘sickies’, Andrew Jack, Financial Times 3 September 2009
5)  Why money doesn’t buy you happiness in UK, Aidan Radnedge, Metro, 12 October 2009
6) Advancing opportunity: the future of good work, The Smith Institute, April 2009
7) ibid
8) Office for National Statistics (2009) Labour Force Survey
9) Demanding Work, Francis Green, Princeton University Press, 2006
10) ibid
11) Stress costs more working days to be lost than 1970s strikes, Daily Mail, 24 June 2009
12) ibid
13) Britain: the incapacity capital of Europe, Mick Hume, spiked, 28 June 2008

For a piece championing impartial documentaries, David Cox’s article, Is this the end of the line for the impartial documentary?, is hilariously partial. Cox rather ungraciously describes the Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation’s work as ‘mating up indigent film-makers with institutional grubstakers,’ and yes, we have a growing expertise in matching ambitious filmmaking with foundations and NGOs to build new ways to create, distribute and use documentaries. We have done so with many major award winning films. including the BAFTA-winning Chosen, The End of the Line, which played at Sundance, The Yes Men Fix the World, which won the audience award at Berlin, and Erasing David, which premiered at Sheffield last week. The BBC’s Nick Fraser is quoted to give the impression that he disagrees with our approach when in fact he clearly stated that he agreed with it completely. I hope Sheffield Doc/Fest can put up a recording of the event so that people can hear that for themselves.

David says, ‘The campaigners are winning and the journalists are losing,’ but these two aren’t in opposition to each other. The End of the Line is a campaigning documentary based on the book by ex-Telegraph journalist Charles Clover. Once you have established the facts about the state of the world’s oceans, it’s surely natural you’d want to do something about it. All documentaries should employ good journalism (factual accuracy, fairness and respect for the truth), but documentaries cannot simply be reduced to news programmes. David says the journalists wants documentary to remain ‘impartial’ and ‘detached’ but I think he’s confusing them with the news. Documentaries tell stories, they are the filmmaker’s point of view on the world. They seek to move and engage. They are as philosophical as journalistic since they raise questions, either head-on or obliquely, about how we should understand the world around us and live our lives. They have heart as well as head and that’s what makes them so wonderful.

David seems to regret the passing of some bygone golden age when these ‘impartial’ documentaries were funded by commissioners solely concerned with letting independent filmmakers arrive at the truth. But money always had a colour, and filmmakers have always been very aware of it. TV commissioning editors need press attention and ratings and are very interventionist to protect their investment. NGOs need different things; tools to help them drive campaigns or to help lobby politicians, to raise public awareness, fundraise etc. So they get involved in films for different reasons, although in all the films we have been involved with, NGOs have had no editorial control. So in fact they have given the filmmaker a greater editorial independence that TV would offer.

Plus their involvement is far richer and more interesting that simply financial. In most partnerships the NGOs do not even put money into the budget but work with and around the film once it’s finished. Chosen, about abuse in public schools, will be used as an education and training tool for a generation thanks to the non-profit partners on board. It’s a brilliant moving film, independently made, that passed a high bar of good journalism, played on More4, won a BAFTA and is now part of an important campaign to tighten child protection in private schools. David is very cynical and dismissive about these partnerships and ‘the benefits they supposedly confer’. We’re not.

In the end it seems like David’s problem is just that he doesn’t like campaigning films. Fair enough. I don’t like horror films. Luckily for both us, there is a great diversity of filmmaking in Britain and a place for everything in the mix. Most documentaries will not be campaigns and not funded by NGOs but every year a few great ones will be.

Jess Search is the chief executive of The Channel 4 BRITDOC Foundation. The Foundation has given grants to enable feature documentaries such as The End of the Line, The Yes Men Fix the World, Sundance winner Afghan Star, BAFTA winner Chosen and now Moving to Mars.

Jess is also co-founder of the independent film-makers’ network Shooting People, through which she published Get Your Documentary Funded and Distributed (2005). In recent years Jess was the editor of Independent Film and Video for Channel 4 TV, responsible for a department commissioning documentaries and drama with an emphasis on new talent and innovation.

Jess took part in the Battle of Ideas Satellite event, Campaigning documentaries: the thin line between passion and propaganda at Sheffield Doc/Fest on Friday 6 November 2009

This essay was inspired by a presentation delivered to the Cabinet Office by Ben Page, Chair of the research institute Ipsos MORI (Page, 2008). In this presentation Page noted a very interesting fact. This is that in spite of significant increases in expenditure, and some examples of improved delivery, the public remains stubbornly dissatisfied with overall quality of state services. Further, members of the public will somewhat paradoxically express satisfaction with their own experiences and dissatisfaction with provision nationally.

Page’s observation is most clearly illustrated in relation to the National Health Service (NHS). Here recent surveys have recorded remarkably high levels of patient satisfaction. 87% are satisfied with their GPs, 86% with their outpatient experience, 79% with inpatient treatment and 74% with Accident and Emergency provision. Yet only 65% of the public is satisfied with the NHS overall and 56% perceive it to be in crisis. For the public the NHS appears to be significantly less than the sum of its parts. In education a similar pattern applies. Statistics arguably demonstrate some improvements in delivery and surprisingly high levels of parental satisfaction, combined with inconsistent support from the general public.

For New Labour this presents a real problem, as they are clearly failing to accrue political capital from the state service that they claimed as their first political priority. In 1997 Blair promised to deliver on ‘education, education, education’ but all Brown has inherited is ‘crisis, crisis, crisis’.

This tells us is that in spite of all its furious spending, government has failed to invest education, and its institutions, with a sense of purpose that resonates with the wider public. Teachers plough on, many parents seem surprisingly satisfied, but in the absence of a positive narrative of social progress and enlightenment, schools have not become institutions to which public attaches consistent support. Sadly, perceptions of this sort have a real impact, not least on teachers’ sense of themselves and ability project authority in the classroom.

Some statistical evidence

Statistics, no doubt, are open to manipulation, and governments will naturally attempt to be selective in their presentation. What is interesting about the current juncture however, is that parents can record surprisingly positive experiences of education, and the government can provide statistics to support this, but the wider public will simply not believe that education is improving.

Between 1997 and 2008 education spending increased as a proportion of GDP from 4.44% to 5.31%, or from the equivalent of £47 billion to £75 billion (inflation adjusted, Houses of Parliament, 2009a). The number of students reaching the expected level of literacy by the end of primary education also improved, from 63% to 80% (DCFS, 2009a). Similarly 70% of students now get 5 A*-C grades in their GCSEs, up 25% from 1997 (DCFS, 2009b). Greater numbers are also participating in education post-16, with 64% of 16-18 year olds in full time education, compared to 56% in 1997 (Houses of Parliament, 2009b).

Now, statistics such as these can of course be questioned on a number of levels. Extra classes can be put on for students on the borderline of any statistical measure and teachers can teach to the test. Equally, schools can abandon non-measured but important aspects of the curriculum, in order to concentrate on those parts that are examined. In relation to this, the Cambridge academic Robin Alexander has pointed out that primaries now effectively run two parallel curriculums, one which is measured and taken seriously – Maths and English – and the rest, or the ‘trimmings’, which are the subject of platitudes, but little else.

But perhaps the most significant charge that can be levelled against New Labour’s statistics is that they don’t actually measure what should be valued; that whilst it may be true that more students are participating and achieving, the actual content of their studies is of diminishing cultural value.

Generally, there is a lot of truth to this charge, but it is far from clear that that the public’s general dissatisfaction with education can be explained in these terms. To put this point more concretely, few are demanding more history in the curriculum – something that is no longer a requirement for 14 year olds - or raising serious objections the current dilution of the science curriculum. Rather, the public has a more generalised sense that the purpose and effectiveness of schools is uncertain. 

A national crisis of education

A recent report published by the Department for Children, Schools and Families summarised interviews with a representative sample of 1016 parents (DCFS, 2009c). Amongst other questions, they were asked how they rated all sectors of education in terms their ability to ‘achieve world class standards of education’. Generally, all sectors, from preschool through to higher education, were rated as good, with rates varying at between 87%-95%. Secondary schools, were, however, a notable exception of this, scoring by far the lowest satisfaction rate of 80%.

A companion study of broader public perceptions noted a similar trend, based on a 1000 interviews conducted between June and July 2008. Again secondary schools were rated the lowest, with 56% rating secondary schools as good and 15% very good - a figure that excluded the 15% odd percent who felt unable to give any opinion (DCFS, 2009d).

These figures would suggest broad public support for schools, but strikingly different findings were then gathered by another study conducted by ComRes for the BBC’s Newsnight in August 2009 (BBC, 2009). This asked 850 respondents about New Labour’s contribution to education and found that more than half believed government had failed to improve the quality of education since coming to power, with 47% saying that it had actually got worse.

Studies such as these suggest that levels of support for education, like the NHS, are highest where people have direct experiences and are lower where they don’t. It seems that government has failed in the project of convincing the wider electorate that schools are systematically improving.

This presents New Labour with a serious problem in the forthcoming general election campaign, but it also undermines the work of all educators. Parents may be broadly supportive, but if teachers feel that wider society doesn’t consistently recognise the value of their work, then all but the very strongest individuals will always be on the back-foot in the classroom. So how is the crisis of education to be explained?

Marketisation
One common explanation of the crisis in public services is the idea that the introduction of a free market has undermined the ethos and commitment of those who work in the system. In education it is certainly true that many aspects of school provision, such as catering, are now provided by commercial contractors. Equally, government has encouraged a variety of social entrepreneurs, including business leaders, to set up independently run Academies. Further, teachers pay progression is increasingly performance related. But whilst there are many criticisms that can be made of these initiatives, the overall charge of marketisation doesn’t quite hold true, as schools remain state funded institutions.

What we do have, however, is something that Micheal Sandel drew our attention to in his recent Reith Lecture, and this is ‘market-mimicking governance’ (Sandel, 2009). Sandel’s point is that Western states have in the recent period attempted to avoid moral contestation in the public sphere and have instead tended to rely on quantitative mechanisms for measuring and incentivising moral behaviour. In doing so, he argues, they have emptied out public discourse and administration of anything that might give it vitality and meaning.

Sandel’s notion of the ‘market-mimicking’ state provides us with a useful way of characterising and explaining why quantitative measures and incentives have come to dominate the lives of professional educators. It isn’t that education has been marketised, but that a morally evasive state has taken to aping the private sector because it feels incapable of articulating a convincing view of what education should be.

Consequently, the whole system has reoriented itself around statistics and figures, rather than values. For this reason the fate of schools, colleges and individual teachers now rests on their capacity to perform in line with national figures. Similarly, students are regularly advised to avoid subjects if they are statistically unlikely to achieve. Whilst discussions between staff and management typically take the form of disputes over numbers, rather than a debate over fundamental educational principles. 

Nonetheless, it is important to point out that there nothing per se wrong with quantification or measurement, and in attempting to challenge the emptying out of educational discourse, we shouldn’t simultaneously reject those mechanisms that enable us objectively and effectively to measure a student’s understanding, such as public examinations. Indeed statistics and targets can be useful, as they can provide a mechanism for focusing the activities of both teachers and students. The point is that quantification dominates education today because the state, and society more broadly, lack a set of ideas that might enable us to offer an adequate qualitative description of our educational aspirations.

Politicisation

Another popular explanation of the crisis in the public sector is the notion of politicisation. Again there is some basis to this charge, as the professional activities of teachers have indeed been disrupted as a consequence of schools coming to occupy a more central position within national political discourse. 

Interestingly, the political class, or at the least the Conservative section of it, now seems to have adopted this critique as a means of furthering its own arguments against ‘big government’. The shadow Secretary of State for Schools Michael Gove, for example, recently gave a lecture at the Royal Society for the Arts on ‘What is Education For?’ (Gove, 2009). In this he suggested that education has been perverted under New Labour, with schools being used as ‘instruments to advance central government’s social agenda’.

On many levels Gove is right, as the curriculum has mistakenly been used to address specific and immediate social problems, such as political disengagement and obesity. Added to this is the frustration caused by the micro management of the daily interactions between teachers and students, which is often justified on the somewhat dubious principle that research evidence can demonstrate that one particular teaching technique will always represent ‘best practice’.

It would be a mistake, however, to understand the problem of politicisation in the terms in which it is frequently presented, as whilst it may be that a true that New Labour’s brand of social engineering has disrupted and distracted educationalists from their core tasks, we shouldn’t therefore assume that politics is necessarily negative force. Ultimately, teachers need operational freedom, and the space to learn from their own experiences, but they also need public support, and require a sense of direction to be provided at the level of the curriculum. Today teachers feel high degrees of alienation from national politics, but these need not be so. Indeed, it is only through politics that the crisis of education might be resolved.

The effects of the crisis

To conclude, it would seem that conventional explanations of the problems of education fail to fully account for its crisis of meaning. Market-mimicking measures are a symptom, not a cause, of the crisis. Likewise, politics is not so much the cause as the solution, as it is through political discussion and contestation that the crisis might be resolved.

New Labour, for its part, has clearly found it difficult to build support for the activities of schools amongst the public. This should come as no surprise as it has never really articulated an optimistic view of the cultural potential of education itself. Rather schools have been viewed in more negative terms, as institutions that can used to address a variety of social problems, for which they are often ill equipped. New Labour’s failure to make the positive case means that the public is inconsistent in its support for education and this discontent has become particularly focussed around its final compulsory phase at secondary level.

At the same time, and for the same reason, government has failed to motivate those who it now employs in public services. Teachers are often the most vocal critics of targets, examinations and the politicisation of education, which testifies to their alienation from the New Labour’s technocratic forms of public service management.

The consequence of the crisis of public support is that teachers themselves are uncertain of their authority. A survey published by the General Teaching Council in 2005 asked teachers to rate their status, and only a small fraction rated teachers as being above mid point, in spite of the fact that for the public more broadly it remains the second most highly regarded profession, after medicine (GTC, 2005). Indeed, a follow up study of 2,500 teachers published last year recorded that only 59% of teachers described themselves as either unlikely or highly unlikely to seek work outside of teaching within five years.

Teachers, government, and the public need to engage in a debate about our educational aspirations. To give this debate meaning and purchase it needs to address fundamental questions, such as what knowledge one requires to be considered an educated person. In doing so, the authority and status of teachers might be restored.

Toby Marshall is Curriculum Manager at Havering College of Further and Higher Education and a member of the IoI Education Forum.

BBC (2009) Poll dismay over Labour education
Department of Children, Families and Schools (2009a) Schools Minister welcomes Key Stage 2 test results which show good overall progress but guards against complacency
Department of Children, Families and Schools (2009b) Substantial rise in maintained schools’ GCSE results
Department of Children, Families and Schools (2009c) Customer Perception Tracking Research - Parents Survey
Department of Children, Families and Schools (2009d) Customer Perception Tracking Research Public Survey
General Teaching Council (2005) Survey of Teachers 2005 Final Report
General Teaching Council (2008) Survey of Teachers 2007 Report One
Gove, M (2009) What is Education For?
House of Parliament (2009a) Education Spending in the UK
House of Parliament (2009b) Participation in education and training: 16-18 year olds
Page, Ben (2008) The Perils of Perception – or why are people so ”ungrateful”?
Sandel, M (2009) Lecture 4: A New Politics of the Common Good

In Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom draws our attention to a contemporary irony in Othello’s famous cry, on losing his sense of personal honour, that ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’ (1). The irony is that for most contemporary audiences Othello’s profession has gone before the play begins. Military values, the honour and the glory of war, of being a general in the Venetian army, or any other, are ones that elicit no sympathy today. 

I want to cry the same about the occupation of philosophy, but for entirely the opposite reason. Philosophy now seems to have become very popular. The spate of philosophy books being published for the ordinary reader, and an increased interest in teaching philosophy from primary school to university, encourages the thought that the profession of philosopher is at its zenith. However, it would be an act of self-delusion for philosophers to think that everyone wants to be a Socrates now, and I want to claim that ‘Plato’s profession’s gone!’

The basis for this claim is a straightforward and simple sociological critique of contemporary philosophy, particularly but by no means exclusively, applied or popular philosophy. Plato’s profession has gone because of sociological and cultural changes. When philosophers sought to question rigid assumptions and fixed truths and to act as under-labourers in the pursuit of knowledge, the unspoken sociological assumption of philosophy was that there was a socio-cultural necessity to shake people out of their unquestioning, confident beliefs and unreflective opining, and turn them into critical thinkers. This was always a dangerous business for philosophers and their willing or unwilling students. More dangerous for the philosophers, though, who might suffer opprobrium, or be forced to take the hemlock, whereas students could expect at worse the ‘offence’ of the aporia.

When I was a student my tutors complained that I illegitimately crossed disciplines and brought philosophical analysis into the study of literature and sociology. ‘So much under-labouring to do,’ was my response. Like Socrates listening to Protagoras’s lengthy rhetoric I wanted to ask ‘What did you mean by ‘x’ in the first sentence?’

Unrepentant about my illegitimate crossing of disciplinary boundaries, I want to make three sociological observations about key aspects of philosophy in defence of my claim, and no doubt now, as then, I will be marked down!

Scepticism

Philosophical scepticism, questioning the alleged foundations of knowledge, is perhaps the basic job of the philosopher. Do we know what we think we know? Do our moral values stand up to challenge and counter-example? Such questioning used to cause friction and ferment in the agora, but in the shopping mall it will be met with ready agreement. No one will defend any knowledge or value. Roger Scruton, in his Modern Philosophy, called moral relativism the ‘first refuge of a scoundrel’ but this is too facile (2). It doesn’t seem like that anymore. The new therapeutic relativism demands the non-judgemental moral high ground. Allan Bloom in The Closing of the American Mind reminds us that ‘Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labour, that he was ignorant. Now every high school student knows that. How did it become so easy?’ (3) The contemporary openness to all viewpoints is an expression of therapeutic relativism, and although it covers up a deeply cynical lack of commitment to any knowledge or morality, it condemns those who are not so open, or those who think they are right about anything, as epistemological tyrants. Philosophers can await the first charge of epistemological bullying.

Even in more academic environments the situation is the same. When the late Terry McLaughlin spoke to Faculty of Education at Canterbury Christ Church University, he gave a traditional speech about questioning the concepts and definitions we use. Instead of this being a wake-up call to analyse ideas, it reinforced the cynical idea that everything must be questioned and that no knowledge or value was ‘absolute.’ ‘Absolute’ is the adjective that now suggests the best epistemological state is the know-nothing state, not ignorance but constant therapeutic questioning. This ‘question therapy’ is often called ‘Socratic’ by colleagues who do not see that endless questioning becomes an end in itself. Even some philosophers see the elenchus and aporia as therapeutic devices. (4)

Knowing

Complementary to therapeutic scepticism is another basic philosophy teacher’s staple, the Kantian distinction between ‘knowledge’ and ‘opining’. Stanley Fish is a model of the old-style philosopher with this rant: ‘I told my students I hadn’t the slightest interest in whatever opinions they might have and didn’t want to hear any. I told them that while they may have been taught that the purpose of writing is to express oneself, the selves they had were not worth expressing, and it would be good if they actually learnt something.’ (quoted in Times Higher Education 11 December 2008). Fish’s students are supposed to do some reading and research and, when they have some knowledge, to come back with informed comment. They must find this hard when they have been taught that giving opinions is what ‘thinking’ means in the non-judgemental classroom. Isn’t opposing ‘opinion therapy’ in this way worthwhile, then?

I used to find the distinction useful, but its employment in this way, without being explicitly part of a critique of therapeutic philosophy – a critique of being so ‘open-minded’ that your brains fall out – does not merely silence stupid, thoughtless and ill-founded opinions, but all opinions. There is a whiff of such a critique in Fish’s rebuke, but not much. What he offers in its absence is merely a more demanding therapy that silences students because they are ignorant. It resembles a form of ‘directive therapy’, but in the end it will just reinforce self-doubt and makes it less rather than more likely that students will come back as robust and assertive knowing beings. They will be more ‘open’ either as a device to ward off another ad hominem attack or because they have discovered that it is morally better to be open than opinionated.

Criticism

The job of the philosopher is criticism. But now everyone is critical of everything. Criticism is welcomed. Training in ‘critical thinking’ is popular everywhere. For the most part this involves techniques and games that are not related to any particular context and therefore encourage a view of ‘criticism’ as a simple set of techniques that can be an aspect of an individual’s psychological framework of character. Criticism, literally, has become an attitude. This can only exacerbate societal problem such as the rejection of adult or any other authority. Criticism of this ‘cool’ kind is not criticism but cynicism.

Recently, when I was talking to a group of students about the university as a place to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable, and made a defence of criticism, one insightful student told me that the lecturers she most disliked were those that were exclusively ‘critical’ and never offered anything. She was right, and that comment started to change my view of the role of philosophy.

Philosophical tradition tells many stories of philosophers who were unpopular because they were sceptics, challenged conventional knowledge and wisdom, and taught the art of criticism. In the present sociological and cultural context, however, these three attributes turn philosophy into therapy and makes it a saleable commodity. It should come as no surprise then, that in the increasingly therapeutic workplace environment, philosophers are thought of as flexible and creative employees, and candidates with philosophy degrees are wanted by the top employers.

If philosophers are not to continue to sell philosophy as therapy they have to do three things that will challenge contemporary attitudes. They must negate their own working principles and argue for knowledge, for the assertion and defence of opinion, and make a stand against idle criticism.

In a special issue of the Philosophers’ Magazine published in 2007, its anniversary year, Stephen Law noted in his contribution to a forum special on ‘the making of minds,’ that the rise in wacky and dodgy religious and other beliefs now left him only cautiously optimistic over the Enlightenment belief in reason (5). I am more sanguine, with this caveat. A belief in Enlightenment values is not a philosophical but a social and political matter. If Enlightenment values are to be defended, then philosophers must learn from sociology and regain their profession by becoming once again difficult and dangerous individuals.

Dennis Hayes is Professor of Education at the University of Derby and the author, with Kathryn Ecclestone, of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, (Routledge, 2009).

1) Harold Bloom (1998) Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, New York: Riverhead Books.
2) Roger Scruton (1994) Modern Philosophy, London: Sinclair-Stevenson.
3) Allan Bloom (1987/1993) The Closing of the American Mind: how higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of today’s students, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books: p43.
4) see Higgins, C (1994) Socrates’ Effect/Meno’s Affect: Socratic Elenchus as Kathartic Therapy
5) Stephen Law (2007) ‘The Making of Minds,’ Philosophers’ Magazine, 38: 55-7.

As the authors of ‘Therapy culture?: attitudes to emotional support in Britain’, published as part of last year’s British Social Attitudes report, we take issue with a number of points made by Kathryn Ecclestone in her Battle in Print essay, which refers extensively to our article, making similar criticisms to those made by Jennie Bristow on spiked. In particular, we reject the suggestion that by questioning one aspect of the therapeutic culture thesis, we are therefore ‘in denial’, as Jennie Bristow puts it, about the wider social ramifications of the therapeutic turn.

Ecclestone and Bristow both argue that we have misunderstood Furedi’s thesis about ‘therapy culture’, which they correctly point out is not simply about dependency on therapeutic professionals but represents a broader critique of emotional conformism or the ‘tyranny of emotional etiquette’. In fact, in the opening paragraph of our chapter we clearly acknowledge that understandings of therapeutic culture are much broader than beliefs about and uses of formal therapeutic services but indicate that our interest in the survey is with one part of this assumed cultural shift: the general population’s beliefs and practices about formal and informal emotional support. We do not, then, reduce arguments about therapeutic culture simply to these beliefs and practices. But it would be curious indeed if such beliefs and practices did not tell us something about this broader cultural shift towards the therapeutic. In fact, in his book Therapy Culture, Furedi draws heavily on evidence of the expansion of the provision and use of counselling services as a key part of his broader critique.

That said, we do not set out (or claim) to disprove the wider thesis from this relatively narrow start. Indeed, we clearly acknowledge the limitations of the focus and methods of the research in that regard. We also highlight the ways in which the findings concur with the broad thrust of Furedi’s argument (for example, in relation to the apparent growing acceptance of the value of ‘emotions talk’). Therapeutic culture is, indeed, a much more subtle and nuanced phenomenon than the simple recourse to formal therapeutic practices (which is why the survey work reported on in the British Social Attitudes book has been accompanied by a second phase of more detailed qualitative investigation). However, it is precisely because it is subtle and nuanced that rigorous, systematic research is necessary. The aim of the module in the BSA was quite specific: to provide an empirical mapping of actual beliefs and practices around formal and informal emotional support and the significance of talk in relation to both. Significantly, this mapping involved differentiating therapeutic culture, rather than constructing it as moving en bloc across UK society, impacting uniformly on everyone in its path. Our work is not about the denial of therapeutic culture, then, but about researching people’s actual experiences of it. In doing so, it allows for the possibility that there may be a gap between that experience and the dominant discourses of media and policy.

Ecclestone implies that we dispute that more people are actually seeking or being given specialist therapeutic interventions than in the past. We don’t. Our research is a snapshot and has no longitudinal dimension. We simply point out that, at this particular point in time, such interventions remain the experience of a small minority and could by no means be described as a widespread or dominant cultural phenomenon.

We are not questioning the wider spread of therapeutic discourses or assuming a position in opposition to or in defence of the therapeutic: we are just pointing out that, in the critical realm of emotional support, the vast majority of the population continues to be overwhelmingly dependent on close personal relationships and sceptical about or resistant to ideas of professional intervention in the face of emotional difficulties. In other words, therapeutic ideas may encounter resistance in the everyday and not just in the realm of academic debate.

Simon Anderson and Julie Brownlie are the authors of ‘Therapy culture?: attitudes to emotional support in Britain’, in Park, A., Curtice, J., Thomson, K., Phillips, M and Cleary, M. (eds) (2009) British Social Attitudes 25th Report (London, Sage)

Twenty years ago, the revolution of 1989/90, the implosion of Stalinism in Europe and the end of German partition were celebrated as a triumph for democracy and freedom. The iron curtain fell, the East German party dictatorship and shortage economy were vanquished and, as in the rest of Eastern Europe, pluralist party democracy was introduced along with the market. In the GDR, the spectacular uprising of eastern Germans had tipped the scale, put the final nail into the moribund Stalinist order across Eastern Europe, ending the division of the continent and Germany. Enthusiasm about this historical transformation was therefore especially strong in Germany.

But it was short-lived. The mood of renewal in 1989/90 soon gave way to disappointment and new insecurities. This applied not only in Germany, but across Eastern Europe, where market and multi-party systems were established at different speeds in the course of the 1990s. Everywhere, a short period of euphoria was followed by a long and still continuing phase of disillusionment. And everywhere, the transformation was soon marked, at least temporarily, by the growth of right-wing and nationalist trends that cast a shadow on the positive experience of the new freedoms gained. In Germany, that turning point came in 1991 with the pogroms in Hoyerswerda that sent disconcerting images of violence against immigrants around the world. Antiforeigner violence had been an almost daily occurrence in Western Germany throughout the 1980s, and Hoyerswerda was followed by similar events in the Western German cities of Solingen and Mölln. Nonetheless the city in Saxony became a symbol of a new sense of estrangement from, if not disdain for their eastern fellow Germans among westerners and a reference point for therapeutically oriented discussions about the ‘problems’ of German unification that continue to this day.

The big difference between the transformation in eastern Germany and the rest of the former Warsaw Pact countries is that, in Germany the confrontation between the western market and eastern state socialist life worlds was politicised in a form that the other previously undivided countries of Eastern Europe were spared. To put it simply: during the Cold War, Germans were politically divided, but did not feel estranged in human terms; this only happened once the country was reunited. And that sense of difference was promoted and institutionalised by the way western German politicians and opinion-formers soon began to rationalise the economic and social dislocation brought about by the process of market transformation in the east.

The notion that eastern Germans were somehow ‘different’ gained momentum only a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989. The western German left played a particularly sorry role in this regard. Otto Schily, later minister of the interior in the Social Democratic (SPD)/Green coalition government under Gerhard Schröder from 1998-2005, quit the Greens to joint the SPD in November 1989. He soon recommended himself to his new party colleagues by a remarkable television performance. When asked, after the last elections to the GDR parliament in March 1990, why so many people in the east had voted for the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), he silently held a banana into the camera. And in preparation for the first national elections of the united country in December the same year, Oskar Lafontaine, then SPD candidate for the chancellery, banked on mobilising western fears of the economic consequences of German unity against chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU).

While Schily expressed unabashed contempt for eastern German desires for a modest share in western prosperity, Lafontaine played the other side of the same card, stoking fears that economic transformation in the east and labour migration from there would put a big dent into accustomed western living standards. This was the welcome given to the people who had just overthrown the Honecker regime by the SPD – along with the groupings on the radical left who more or less unanimously misconstrued the fall of the Berlin Wall as an expansionist capitalist conspiracy to conquer the east and disparaged eastern ‘consumerism’. That Helmut Kohl and the CDU/CSU in turn tried to recharge the stuttering batteries of German conservatism with the images of the popular pro-market uprising in the GDR was a comparatively harmless political manoeuvre. Nonetheless: taken together, the effect from the start was to saddle the process of unification with the degenerate political impulses of the decaying western party system.

“Demokratischer Aufbruch“, whilst being the fraction of the popular opposition in the GDR that was its first and strongest proponent of unification, nonetheless quite sensibly wanted to prevent the dissolution of the eastern opposition groupings in the western political parties. Commenting on the left-right divide in the western German parliamentary system, the DA leadership declared in January 1990: “We regard this distinction as a myth, as an ideological illusion.“ (1) By the December 1990 elections, the different strands of the GDR opposition nonetheless dissolved themselves virtually without trace into the western German parties. Inevitable as that was, since none of them presented an alternative strategic vision, it nonetheless meant that the experience of 40 years of GDR history and the popular uprising in which it had just culminated found no place in the political universe of the united Germany. Eastern Germans had to make do with the imported western party machines along with all their symptoms of political exhaustion. It is consequently not surprising that the GDR state party SED, renamed Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) and since 2005 called Die Linke, soon made a stunning recovery, nor that opinion surveys show that eastern Germans doggedly express high regard for democracy in the abstract, but not for its currently practiced form.

The political unification of Germany which was consummated on October 3, 1990, therefore entailed a certain institutional imbalance from the start, which encouraged eastern Germans, who had just made the liberating experienced of collective political action, to regard themselves as passive objects of economic and social transformation. To make things worse, the government under chancellor Kohl proved incapable of filling the concept of unification with positive meaning beyond stilted phraseology. Eastern Germans joined a tired republic. The great historical moment that could have sparked a real sense of social renewal consequently remained strangely flat, without lasting power, and soon vanished in the machinery of administrative restructuring and adjustment processes. A first simple truth that is generally ignored in all the debates about the problems of German unification follows: the progress of German unity could only be as good as the society – and the political order – which eastern Germans joined twenty years ago was.

The trouble was that the intellectual exhaustion in both the left and right spectrum of western party politics at the same time encouraged the politicisation of differences in life experience between eastern and western Germans. Hostility to materialism among the western left, which had long exchanged its former affinity with working class politics for ‘post-conventional values’, inevitably had to strike the eastern “workerly society”, as which the sociologist Wolfgang Engler has described the GDR, as exceedingly odd. In a society that, as Engler wrote, “attributed exceptional importance to work, whether loved or unloved, for people’s personal lives”, people had been accustomed to “clothe their critique of social conditions in the silent demonstration of workerly virtues.“ (2) The productively employed Werktätige were the sole moral authority of GDR society. That the western left now met their aspiration for modest prosperity and functioning factories with at best incomprehension and at worst derision was barely suited to build bridges of understanding between east and west.

The same applied to the other side of the political spectrum. For the best part of the past 20 years, the Christian Democratic CDU/CSU made up for the lack of a political vision for the present by a more or less incessant rant against the loathsome features of the long defunct GDR –  partly in an ill conceived attempt to continue to draw dividends from Cold War anticommunism, and partly as a reaction to discontent with ‘really existing’ eastern German capitalism, which proved rather less dynamic and prosperous than originally expected once the short-lived unification boom was over. Here too, a defensive political reflex generated dissonance. The simplistic formula of anti-socialist rhetoric, according to which life in the GDR had consisted of nothing but the oppression of “victims” by “perpetrators” simply did not square with the real life experience of eastern Germans before 1989. That experience naturally also included other things like a sense of shared destiny, shared partly desperate and partly ironical distance from the regime, and certain opportunities for self-assertion that a western-style market economy does not always provide workers with. As the Bulgarian sociologist Ivan Krastev notes in a recent article, even members of the state elite in eastern European countries had to befriend their greengrocer, because he decided who got what. The greengrocer was powerless, but still had a certain informal power (3). At exactly the same time as the market destroyed such social networks that provided people with at least a certain sense of orientation and self-esteem, eastern Germans increasingly faced the charge of mental contamination by their totalitarian past. That, too, could only promote anger and a sense of estrangement. And it is therefore not surprising to learn that eastern Germans now often say things had not really been ‘quite that bad’.

The hand-wringing with which experts in academia and social research often respond to utterances of this kind betrays a certain lack of understanding of the forces at play. The mechanisms generated by the effort to compensate the ideological vacuum at the heart of western politics at the turn of the century are responsible for the fact that simple differences in life experience in east and west have taken on the form of politicised misunderstanding. In the process, the debate about German unity has taken the form of a rather degraded obsession with the eastern German ‘mentality’. The focus on eastern ‘difference’ has given birth to an entire research industry that has probed the souls of the new German citizens down to their finest crevices. It occasionally brought forth the most hilariously pseudo-Freudian insights such as the famous “potty thesis” of the criminologist Christian Pfeiffer, according to which anti-foreigner sentiment among eastern German youth was a late consequence of socialist kindergarten education.

During the past 15 years, innumerable studies have diagnosed a high level of dissatisfaction with economic and political development as well as an increased tendency to a more benign view of certain features of the GDR past among eastern Germans. Given the situation described, these findings are not at all surprising. But, what is perhaps even more worthy of note is that more recent studies have shown that the difference between east and west as regards the level of dissatisfaction with social and political trends has narrowed considerably – without this having so far had any noticeable impact on the firmly established notion that eastern Germans are somehow ‘different’. As the sociologist Claus Leggewie recently noted, survey data present “a rather undramatic picture of the situation between east and west which, in view of current discourse, is the real sensation“ (4). Nonetheless, the media continue propagating the image of the easterner as the ‘other’ with derogatory neologisms like Ostalgie (eastalgia) and Jammerossi (moan-easterner), thereby attributing to the eastern psyche responsibility for all real and imagined ills in the united Germany. A kind of ethnisation has taken hold of the German political imagination – with the doubly unfortunate effect that reality becomes progressively even less comprehensible than it already appears and that understanding between eastern and western Germans is undermined.

However, 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this period of construed difference may hopefully draw to a close. The new generation of young Germans who now start out on their training or working life have no living memory of the divided Germany. The high level of cross-migration between both parts of the country ensures that personal contact mitigates the impact of prejudice and politicised misunderstanding. And, last but not least, the now shared experience of economic crisis and political stagnation can become the source of a new sense of common identity and purpose. But this is likely to happen only to the extent that the distancing view of a contrived sociology of otherness gives way to a focus on real life experience.

Sabine is the Society and Politics editor of the German magazine NovoArgumente and writes regularly on German and European politics as well as contemporary social theory in this and other publications.

1 Erhart Neubert, Unsere Revolution. Die Geschichte der Jahre 1989/90, Piper München 2009
2 Wolfgang Engler, Die Ostdeutschen als Avantgarde, Aufbau Verlag Berlin 2002.
3 Ivan Krastev, The Greengrocer’s Revenge, Prospect, Oktober 2009
4 Claus Leggewie, Veröstlichung oder: Vom Zäsur- zum Differenzbewusstsei, in: Eckart Jesse/Eberhard Sandschneider, Neues Deutschland. Eine Bilanz der deutschen Wiedervereinigung, Nomos Freiburg 2008.

Earlier this year, powers granted under section 10 of the Criminal Justice Act meant that the first Diplock trial, or trial by a single judge, could take place in England. This rejuvenated the old debate about jury trial and stirred up ancient platitudes about the jury’s role in defending the common man from the powers of the state. As anyone who has ever typed ‘jury’ into google will know, it was held as the ‘lamp that shows that freedom lives’ by Lord Devlin and many liberal legal commentators still hold it in similar esteem. It seems that as long as the jury remain in the room, listen passively, and make a decision as to a defendant’s guilt, we can be reasonably happy that our system of administering justice is as fair as it can be. But we should not be complacent. Whist liberal lawyers fetishise the jury as the pinnacle of democratic justice, the government continues to pass legislation to manage exactly what can and can’t be said in the courtroom, whilst simultaneously trying to remove the jury from the courtroom altogether. In an environment so stifled by regulation, what kind of freedom does the lamp illuminate, and what about it is worth defending?

Today, to question the fairness of a trial is usually to question how the evidence was presented. This is because our current system functions under the assumption that the evidence against an accused must go extremely far to demonstrate guilt (formalised in the famous burden of proof ‘beyond reasonable doubt’). Interestingly, there was no such thing as ‘evidence’ in the jury trial before the 16th Century. Prior to this courts were based in small communities and the testimonies of those who lived in the jurisdiction were treated as proofs in and of themselves. Because the local population was absolutely trusted to deliver the best verdict for their community, any objective ‘proof’’ was surplus to requirement. Whilst this system seems arbitrary by today’s standard, royal justices would report that convictions were extremely low with the accused usually walking free on the basis that he held a decent reputation and contributed something to the community. This was a source of great frustration for those in government who believed that the locals were literally getting away with murder.

The low conviction rates led to the introduction of property qualifications, meaning that in order to qualify for jury membership, a candidate had to earn a certain amount in property rents in each year (shockingly, such qualifications remained in place until the 1970s). This meant that jurors had to move around the country far more, as there were simply not enough middle class landowners to make up each regional jury. Those sitting on a jury would no longer have lived in the area and so may have not had any idea about the character of the defendant or what they were accused of. This meant that jurors would have to be supplied with external resources to help prove what had taken place and this introduced the concept of evidence into English criminal law. It is arguable that the concept of evidence was necessitated by the demise of localised courts, and the exclusion of local working people from the courtroom.

The development of evidence gave the state a mechanism to regulate the administration of justice. By 1540, Henry VIII had passed law allowing judges to issue fines and imprisonment for juries who returned verdicts that were ‘untrue..against the king, contrary to good and pregnant evidence’ In 1554 following the acquittal of Nikolas Throckmorton for treason, Judges Thomas Bromiley and Thomas White committed the jury to prison for returning a verdict that was ‘perverse by the evidence’. By 1750 it was an accepted legal convention that judges retained the power to imprison or fine any jury who appeared to have failed to properly understand the evidence and to deliver the proper verdict. The notion of evidence allowed the state to dominate and manage the jury in a way that had not been possible in the community based courts of the 13th and 14th centuries.

In one sense, very little has changed. The state still exhibits a great distrust in the public to make decisions in the administration of justice and continues to express this distrust through its regulation of evidence. This mechanism has led to attempts to drive the jury from the courtroom completely, or alternatively, to retain control over exactly what is and what is not heard. The former has been explicit in the recent debate over fraud trials. The discussion over fraud originates with the establishment of the Roskill committee in 1986 and its brief to investigate and recommend ‘just, expedious and economical disposal’ of ‘criminal proceedings in England and Wales arising from Fraud’. Predictably the committee, made up in the majority of financial experts, found that a jury made up of average citizens could not be expected to absorb the complex evidence that is involved in proving fraud.

This was followed up in 2001 by Lord Auld in his Review of the Criminal Courts, who recommended that in serious fraud trials the nominated trial judge should have the power to direct a trial by himself and two lay members drawn from a panel established by the Lord Chancellor for the purpose, or, if the defendant so requests, by himself alone. This led to a provision in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 that allowed the prosecution to make an application for a fraud trial to be heard by a single judge. If the judge was satisfied that the case was either sufficiently complex or time consuming the application could be allowed.

Even if we accept the conclusion that fraud trials are in some way too complex, there is of course a more straightforward means of dealing with the problem of complexity without restricting the public’s involvement in the trial: simply allow less evidence to be admitted. At he heart of all offences under the Fraud act is the relatively straight forward requirement that the defendant be proved to have behaved ‘dishonestly’. Ask any lawyer or juror who has been involved in trying fraud and they will tell you that a case almost exclusively sinks or swims on the basis of a tiny proportion of the exhibits.

Yet as well as making trials more straightforward, which is a benefit in itself, I would argue that the public can handle complexity. A peculiarity of both the Roskill committee and the Lord Auld review was that neither established that juries in cases involving complex money offences had been returning onerous verdicts. The Roskill committee was based on hypothetical juries no doubt informed by the committee members’ dim views of what the public could handle; later Lord Auld’s report similarly failed to give any mention whatsoever of prior jury performance. Yet the combination of both has established a mechanism for allowing the complete exclusion of a jury from a trial. This shows that the state would sooner assume that the public is too stupid to make these decisions, than trust in its intelligence and objectivity.

Even once the jury has made it into the courtroom, the state retains control over what evidence is heard. The current regime of disclosure means that it is the Crown Prosecution Service (who pursue almost the entirety of prosecutions in England and Wales) who decides what gets seen by defence team. It is then the responsibility of the defence to actively seek out any evidence they want to admit and to apply to have that evidence admitted. Of course, it then falls to a judge to decide whether or not the jury should consider the evidence. Even if the disclosure of evidence is managed so poorly that the defence form the view that a fair trial cannot take place, they then must make an ‘abuse of process’ application to a single judge to stay proceedings. If the judge refuses, then the jury hears the case anyway. Should we be entirely comfortable with the level of control that the prosecution has over disclosure? I would argue that this is an area of the trial by jury system that frequently avoids critique because lawyers are too worried about picking holes in a system that is so highly esteemed. We should defend the principle of trial by jury, whilst not being afraid of subjecting undemocratic elements of its practice to scrutiny.

The current context of the debate shows that trial by jury is under attack on two fronts. Firstly, the practice of jury trials is under fire from those who argue that it is both too expensive and inefficient or that the public cannot be trusted to make informed decisions in the administration of justice. Secondly, the democratic principles of trial by jury are being undermined by the increasing regulation and micro-management of evidence by the state. The majority of legal professionals and commentators compound these attacks by reciting platitudes about the jury rather than forming coherent arguments. We should look to rejuvenate normative debate about the administration of justice, and respond with intellectual clarity when the state looks to take these important decisions out of our hands.

Luke is a trainee barrister at BPP law school. He regularly writes for the IoI online review Culture Wars.

The beginnings of the welfare state can be traced back as far as the dissolution of the monasteries, followed by the establishment of the Poor Laws legally obliging parishes to raise funds in their place, the introduction of the workhouses in the early 18th century, and their toughening up following a Royal Commission into the escalating costs of welfare provision in 1834. One commissioner complained that despite the escalating costs of welfare provision, it was ‘the dreadful effects which the system produces on the morals and happiness of the lower orders’ that was most concerning. Another complained that the dependent’s clothes are ‘ragged’ and his children dirty and undisciplined, whereas the labourer, for all his poverty, at least has a ‘sense of moral feeling and dignity’. In response to the narrowing of state-funded welfare, friendly societies sprang up to protect people in their old age, when sick or out of work, supported through the contributions of their ordinary working members – insurance schemes that were effectively nationalised between 1908-11 by the Liberals.

But it was what former Labour leader Michael Foot described as ‘the blissful dawn of July 1945 … [and] the promise of a new society’ that most of us associate with the establishment of the welfare state. Both the post-war euphoria, and a political class that still had something about it were real enough. The welfare state was both an elite response to revolt and Labourism at home and revolution and socialism abroad, and made possible by the ‘apparent success of the government organisation of the war effort’. 600,000 copies of the Beveridge report were sold in 1942, some of them circulated to the troops soon to return home from the battlefields. It ‘answered a kind of longing’, says one conservative critic. (1) The welfare settlement eventually began to unravel in the mid-1970s as the post-war world came to an end.

But it is only now it seems, as David Green at Civitas argues, that ‘the economic downturn has forced us to question … whether our welfare system is worthy of the challenges it now faces.’(2) According to the Treasury Committee, there has been a ‘sharp increase in public spending … borrowing is now forecast to be higher than at any time since World War II, and the national debt is set to remain high for at least a generation.’(3) According to Andrew Haldenby, director of Reform, ‘coffee needs to be smelt across the political spectrum’ (4). To his credit David Cameron says, ‘we’ve got to ask ourselves what we really value in the public sector’, and start ‘reversing those extensions of the state that do more harm than good’. Reform recommend a cut of 4%, or £29 billion, in next year’s budget, a substantial chunk of the £150 billion a year spent on welfare. This can be done, they and others argue, by abolishing so-called ‘middle class benefits’ (5).

But the focus on ‘austerity’ and ‘savage’ cuts in the absence of a convincing investment strategy to grow the economy, and to get people into work and off benefits, only confirms the lack of ideas on the part of those who should be leading us out of this crisis. The Labour government may be talking about investing their way out of it but their record speaks for itself. To be fair, the current crisis has only exacerbated a more long-standing problem with the welfare state and the assumptions upon which it was based. Its creators failed to anticipate the onset of mass unemployment, and the large take-up of means-tested benefits that were a consequence of the economic slump between the wars (6). And we’re facing a similar problem now. There are 3.3 million households today – or 1 in 6 – without an adult who works. According to the Policy Exchange ‘the number of people out of work and living off benefits’ is now ‘above 4 million’ (7). Nearly a million of these are NEETS – that is young people not in education, employment or training – or as Frank Furedi puts it, ‘not engaged in any socially useful activity’ (8). In 1951, 4% of the population was on National Assistance. Its modern day equivalent – income support – is claimed by 17%, and as many as 1 in 4 people are now claiming a means-tested benefit (9).
 
Instead of asking why this should be, or what is it about the economy that generates such worklessness, the critics of welfare go into moral mode. Sounding like an uppity Victorian Commissioner, former social security minister, Michael Portillo asks if this is ‘morally affordable?’ We shouldn’t ‘subsidise slobbery’ he says or ‘boost idleness’. It encourages ‘moral degeneration’. A report from the Runnymede Trust described how the likes of Portillo ‘deride and ridicule the feckless and the undeserving poor, who have squandered the opportunities gracefully given to them by the welfare state’ (10). But this is more than an old Tory pastime; it is becoming something of a national blood sport. It was Labour MP Tom Harris who caused a stir when he complained that Britain’s ‘army of teenage mothers’ are a ‘national catastrophe’ (11). While these ideas are as despicable as the policies they inspire, the problem of dependency does indeed exact more than just a financial cost. A leader in the Independent last year described how ‘generations are being brought up on sink estates mired in welfare dependency, drug abuse and a culture of joblessness’. There is an element of Hogarthian caricature and ‘Broken Britain’-speak in there but the portrait is hardly one that can be dismissed out-of-hand. 

Maybe we do have a ‘can work, won’t work culture’ as a former minister at the Department for Work and Pensions put it. In 1979 there were 600,000 people claiming invalidity (now ‘incapacity’) benefit. By 1995, it had more than doubled to 1.5 million, and by 2002 it was 2.4 million. Over half of claimants were suffering problems like stress and backache, and were concentrated particularly in areas of high unemployment – leading to the not unreasonable suspicion that people were claiming this slightly more generous benefit, rather than claiming income support or jumping through the hoops associated with job seekers allowance. The government has now abolished incapacity benefit, replacing it with Employment and Support Allowance, and introduced something called Pathways to Work. The intention is to ‘focus on what people can do rather than what they can’t’. Which sounds fair enough but have they tackled the underlying problem? 

The ‘economic slowdown’, we are told in a recent report by the Young Foundation (12), ‘is like a receding tide which reveals the many who are struggling’. In other words, the economic crisis exposes us as fish-like, helplessly flipping around on the shores edge waiting for the sea’s return to wash us back out again. But the notion that people are increasingly vulnerable and dependent is not primarily a consequence of the workings of ‘the system’, whether that is the downturn in the economy, or the damage done by the welfare state. It is our political culture that has such low expectations of what people can achieve, that encourages us to turn inward, adopt the ‘sick role’ and claim sickness benefits rather than find or fight for jobs; that promotes the relentless expansion and escalation of people’s needs by the likes of the Young Foundation, and that diminishes our potential to effect change in our own lives and in society more broadly.

In other words, getting tougher on the work-shy or blaming lone parents for the decline of civilisation as we know it isn’t going to solve the problem of dependency. The end of the contest between competing forces in society and the rise of the anxious and atomised politics of the personal in its place, has given rise to a reworking of the relationship between individuals and the state. While the ‘safety net’ has long been stretched and full of holes, the shift to welfare as a therapeutic buttressing of vulnerable individuals unable to cope with life is something else. It encourages us to invite the state into our lives to sort out our problems or to help us manage our relationships.

But the critics of the welfare state tend to miss this. One anti-welfare diatribe, for instance, combines a healthy hostility to ‘the tendrils of the state reaching into every aspect of our lives’, with more than a little contempt for welfare dependents. It takes their dependency at face value rather than interrogating it. While they are absolutely right to point out in the plainest of terms that ‘most of us could get by just fine if only the government would get out of the way and leave us alone’. But they do not put up a principled challenge against unwanted state intervention, never mind try to understand the new politics that legitimates it. Instead they turn their fire on those that they say are ‘dragging the rest of us down’; in the hope that at least we (whoever ‘we’ may be) will be left alone (13).

Which is a shame – today’s elite, lacking a faith in their ability to solve social problems that was so apparent with the architects of the welfare state, are more exposed than ever. Writing in 1912, former Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald said: ‘Poverty is nothing but a disease of the state caused by a failure of the machinery of distribution’ (14).These were more optimistic times and a world away from the depressed outlook we are familiar with now. Today, despite the wider economic and political crisis, the Labour government is itself in a state of ‘moral collapse’, abandoning policies in quick succession that it once apparently held dear (15 and 16). In the absence of old elite values or any urge to transmit them, the apolitical class may be relentlessly intrusive but they are hopelessly uninspiring too.

‘To live on benefits’, says Portillo, ‘has become a lifestyle choice.’ But it is the lifestyle politics of today’s elite that is so much more of a problem than what people may or may not get up to on council estates. It is the political class who are dodging their responsibilities to come up with a vision for society and to put people’s talents to productive ends. The irony is that demands (mostly emanating from within the political elite itself) for people to have greater autonomy, greater control over their lives and greater involvement in ‘civil society’ are built on this evasion of responsibility, on a desperation to connect and a failure of nerve.

Nevertheless, while a return to the parishes would be a step backwards, we should support those modern-day equivalents of the self-help approach and the friendly societies of old that want to go it alone, and defend them from a political class that doesn’t know when to leave alone. David Green argues that ‘the mistake we made during the twentieth century was to believe that the state was the best agency for discharging the common good’. But even Green, like most of the critics of the welfare state, is in fact a defender of the welfare state as it once was, or at least as it was intended – as a ‘safety net’.

Who provides welfare, today, is less important than what the welfare state is for. The ‘state vs. the market’ stand-off was always a phoney debate anyway, and not particularly helpful. Personally, I think we can and should still make certain demands of the state, however reluctant it may be to accept them: for a universal entitlement to a good education, to a nice home, to a decent income for all, to free childcare around-the-clock and to health and social care when and where we need it. At the same time we should insist that beyond this the state must remove itself from our lives.

Whatever it looks like, a new welfare settlement – or social contract, as the Conservatives prefer to call it – can only emerge out of a shared set of values, or at least a public contestation of what those values should be. Green’s call for ‘welfare reform befitting a free people’ is a good start and something that I can go along with. But we can’t imagine or coax a ‘free people’ into being by shaking up the welfare system. We need to challenge the cultural trends that keep people from claiming their independence and asserting their autonomy, as well as the material limits (when they come up against them) that stand in their way. What we need, in my view, is a welfare system – whatever form it takes – that is informed by a culture that is conducive to people having more control over their lives; a welfare system that assumes that people are, on the whole, robust and resilient, and able to get on; and a welfare system that is able to support people when they need it, rather than blaming them for all of society’s problems and holding them back from achieving their own potential.

Dave Clements is a freelance writer on social policy and related issues, convenor of the IoI Social Policy Forum and a founding member of the Future Cities Project. He lives in East London and continues to work in local government. He has written for publications including Guardian Unlimited, The Architects’ Journal, spiked-online and Community Care Magazine, is a member of the Battle of Ideas organising committee and regularly debates on public platforms. He is co-editor of The Future of Community, published in October 2008.

1) Bartholomew, J (2004) The Welfare State We’re In, Politico
2) Green, D (2009) Individualists Who Co-operate: Education and welfare reform befitting a free people, Civitas
3) http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmtreasy/438/438.pdf
4) http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/apr/20/public-spending-tax-reform 
5) http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/jul/15/public-spending-middle-class-welfare
6) http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article6814986.ece
7) http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/publications/publication.cgi?id=83
8) http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0923/p06s01-wogn.html
9) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/3645067/Karen-Matthews-and-the-underclass-thrive-on-Labours-welfare-state.html
10) http://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/WhoCaresAboutTheWhiteWorkingClass-2009.pdf
11) http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2009/mar/04/tom-harris-teenage-mothers
12)  http://www.youngfoundation.org.uk/publications/reports/receding-tide-understanding-unmet-needs-a-harsher-economic-climate-january-2009
13) http://www.cis.org.au/occasional_papers/op111.pdf
14) http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7173/
15) http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7257
16) http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/7109

Conventional opinion puts the blame for the current recession on the shoulders of greedy bankers; on the increased financialisation of the British economy over the last twenty years. In some ways, however, this is unfair since there has been a much longer term decline in British manufacturing industry which hole, it could be argued, the growth in financial services and public spending has been attempting to plug. Although some commentators now call for a return to productive investment and a regeneration of manufacturing to set the balance right again, is this at all realistic? Is there something intrinsically wrong with an economy based on services and on consumption? Something better and sounder in an economy based on production? What should the balance be? In a capitalist economy - where production after all is organised for profit - there is little to be gained by a naive and moralistic reaction against services in the name of manufacturing, against consumption in the name of production. We need, instead, to take a closer look at what is really happening in the economy in terms of the creation of new value and the ability of British capitalists to turn a profit.

Britain has ‘an utter contempt for skill. If one talks to people who dig coal and drive trains, or to doctors, nurses, dentists or tool-makers, one discovers that no one in Britain is interested in them. The whole of the so-called entrepreneurial society is focused on the City news that we get in every bulletin’. So said Tony Benn in 1990 and that was merely a repeat of what he said in 1975 warning against the dangers of a contracting number of manufacturing workers. Will Hutton, writing in 2009, shares Benn’s distaste for the City as opposed to manufacturing: ‘The City, spreading a virus that for generations has obstructed a fair society and productive, high-investment economy, has at last been dislodged. Britain will be the better for it.’ He urges the state to control and reform the banks and argues that ‘companies have chased after too high returns for too long and undervalued innovation and production.’ Libby Purves, writing in The Times, agrees that finance and other services are not enough for the economy: ‘To feel good about your work, as an individual and a society, to be both emotionally satisfied and economically safe, you have to make stuff.’ Apparently we have been making bad, short-term, get-rich quick choices for over thirty years now and it is long overdue for us to wise up.

In the wake of the recession there are many voices raised demanding that we get back to productive growth and move away from a consumption based service economy. The financial service sector in particular is blamed for the recession and so is ruled out of being the basis of a future recovery. In its place are posited the old fashioned virtues of making things. While we do get some arguments for consuming more - spending our way out of recession - they are soon tarred with the same brush of irresponsible self-interested unsustainable greed that blackens the risk-taking financiers. Can we restore some balance to the economy through revitalising the manufacturing sector even though it has been - almost paradoxically - much more severely impacted by the recession than the services sector?

After all, it is not as if Germany and Japan have done well out of this recession - for them and for Britain the real shocks have been felt in manufacturing as businesses that have been surviving on credit now find their financial lifelines choked off. One could go so far as to argue that exposing ourselves any further to the manufacturing sector might be very unwise. It does appear that the manufacturing sector is more fragile and open to shocks than the service sector. Not only more fragile but also much weaker in terms of the economy as a whole, compared to services which make up 75% of the economy. It has been known since the 1970s that British industry was in a long-term decline - services have in fact played their role in offsetting this decline. To such a degree that in the heady days of the 1990s we were told that we need not fear the loss of industry since the dirty business of actually making things was being eclipsed forever by the information economy where knowledge was money. Are we now then really to go back to making ships and things? If manufacturing wasn’t working then, why would it hold the keys to our economic future now?

It is undeniable that manufacturing has been in a decline in the UK. Manufacturing today represents 13% of GDP and 10% of employment: in 1970 it was 34% of the economy. Great Britain is number six in the world rankings in terms of manufacturing output but the volume of goods produced has fallen by 25% since 1997. The UK has disposed of Westinghouse, Airbus, Vestas… One million manufacturing jobs have gone in the last 10 years. The city makes up 3.5-4% of GDP and one in five people are employed by the state - mainly in education, health and administration. Public debt stands at £1000bn and public spending equals half the economy. By way of comparison, after WW1 it was 20% and after WW2 30%.

Although Britain might be at number six in the world, it is also on the way down the list:

Manufacturing output, $bn, 2006

1. US     1663
2. Japan     954
3. China     751
4. Germany   584
5. Italy     299
6. UK     270
7. Canada   260
8. France   248
9 S Korea   220
10. Brazil   169

Looking at this table - and allowing for currency fluctuations - it remains true that the G7 produce most of the world’s manufactures but equally we can see that the emerging economies are catching up. Why then would the UK try and compete in this sector? To understand its chances we need to take a more serious look at the types of manufacturing that the economy engages in and at the contribution services make in generating prosperity.

So, what does Britain make? The picture is not one of decline right across the board. In the wake of the recession, Rolls-Royce, supported by state investment, is to open four new plants and create or guarantee 800 jobs. The plants will produce advanced aerospace technology and parts for new nuclear power stations. ‘This practical package of measures will help equip British manufacturers of all sizes and sectors to take advantage of the advanced technologies and new market opportunities now shaping our low-carbon industrial future’ said Lord Mandelson of the £150m to be invested by the government in support of ‘more real engineering and less financial engineering’. Britain does compete in a number of high-tech industries: robotics; renewable energy; stem cell research; cybernetics; nanotech; biotech; nutraceuticals; and computer gaming. Aerospace factories in Bristol are involved in advanced manufactures like carbon-fibre materials. Industrial sectors like this or the production of specialist chemical products such as automotive catalysts are able to resist low wage pressure from elsewhere due to the high levels of engineering skill involved.

Despite the shortage of venture capital available to this sector from private investors, crippled by contemporary risk aversion, and despite the paltry £150m promised by the state, Gordon Brown still says: ‘our future lies in low-carbon, high-technology manufacturing and services’ albeit that all that depends on ‘a reformed and more responsible banking system’. The state is still investing in ‘science, green jobs, skills and the digital backbone’. These are not necessarily empty promises. UK manufacturing output is 2.5 higher in real terms than it was in 1950. As the examples above show, Britain can still compete in aerospace, biotech, big pharma and even automobiles. A more optimistic look at the economy might perceive, rather than a decline in manufacturing, an even faster growth in the service sector and in disposable income.

After all, some economists have always argued that the norm for developed countries is for manufacturing to grow to a certain point and then for services to become more and more important. After all we have to spend the money on something and every manufacturing job typically generates at least 2-3 times as many supporting jobs in the service sector. Britain with 13% of the economy in manufacturing is actually doing better than France and the US where it is only 12%. As Philip Whyte has argued in The Times, one could rightly say that ‘declining employment reflects the strength of efficiency gains in manufacturing’. So, just looking at the number of people employed in manufacturing is maybe no reliable indicator of its strength: rising productivity is the result of more automation and fewer hands to the pump after all. Why then are we so concerned about the disproportionate impact on the manufacturing sector, here, in Japan and in Germany? If it is hard to raise productivity in these already highly efficient industries - should our challenge not to be raise productivity in the service sector instead? Why not concentrate on financial services, the professions, even tourism, restaurants and the media?

If it is not a simple truism that Britain does not make stuff anymore - that in certain sectors it is actually extremely productive - it is equally not even the case that we have been consuming too much. Britain is in debt: that is true. Credit card debt is the highest of any nation in Europe and household debt as a percentage of disposable income has risen from 100% in 1990 to nearly 170% now. The US by comparison stands at only 130%. But whereas household consumption as a percentage of GDP rose by nearly 3 points in the ‘80s, in the ‘00s it has fallen by nearly 1.5 points. Instead of individual consumption, it is the state that has been spending. Spending - and largely wasting - tax revenues from the financial sector. We are so much in debt now, not because of a spending spree, but because of a doubling of house prices. Lest Britain be said to be an exception to the rule that the West is consuming too much and producing too little, it is worth noting that it is not even true that the Chinese are not consuming enough. Chinese consumption is increasing - some 10% in 2008 (electronics, clothing and above all cars are the main drivers). Consumer spending in emerging Asia has grown 6.5% annually on average over the last 5 years. Investment and exports of course have grown even faster.

So, if Britain is still productive and is not necessarily consuming too much, why all this talk about things being out of balance between production and consumption? Both at home and globally? It is striking that one recent report from a London investment advisory firm estimated that Asia spends some 25% of GDP on net capital investment and the West only 5% (Re-thinking Emerging Markets, May 2009, CrossBorder Capital). Profitable businesses tend to invest which drives employment and consumption: unprofitable ones try to reduce costs and downsize. Low investment speaks - as do historically low interest rates - to the fact that ‘the current crisis owes far more to the falling rate of profit in the West, than to fragile finance or poor regulation.’

The real problem lies with profitability, with the ability of investors to find areas in the British economy in which to make healthy returns. Profitability in manufacturing is low precisely due to its high levels of productivity - meaning that the cost of the machinery and automation required to remain competitive and take it to the next level is prohibitive. The financial services sector can take a share of profits through speculation and rents and title ownership but it is hard to raise productivity in the service sector due to the importance of intangibles like quality or knowledge: let alone the tiny amounts of R&D committed to services. The British legal sector, for example, is strong due to the depth of case precedent and the benefit of the English language and of Engllsh law being internationally respected. It can’t be automated though. Against the background of declining profitability in the manufacturing sector and decreasing international competitiveness, it is hard to argue that deindustrialisation is a benign process. Productivity growth may be average at best but output growth has been sluggish which has resulted in labour shedding and outsourcing. What remains is productive sure but less and less profitable.

Counterposing manufacturing and services is not a very useful way of understanding the economy: if for no other reason that most of the economy now is services. Nor is counterposing production and consumption. Neither really make the economy tick. Capitalism is a system based on producing for a profit - a way of organising society that is far from ideal; that is, in truth, not very social at all, not based on meeting our needs and not under our control, not a rational system. That said, in the absence of any real alternatives - rather than just palliatives - and in the absence of social movements calling for radical change, if we want to ensure any kind of increase in productivity for the benefit of society as a whole, we have to recognise that profitability is the crucial factor.

What matters is making profits and we adjudge labour to be productive or unproductive in terms of the way in which it relates to the production of profit or surplus value. The NHS for example, state funded, is largely unproductive. In the US on the other hand heath care is privately owned and directly contributes to the production of profits. We need to have something to exchange. Manufacturing creates new value which is easier to exchange: hence the reason that manufacturing items tend to be traded more heavily internationally. Services generally speaking do not create new value and so must be exchanged with some other country that is producing value.

We actually need a debate about which capital intensive industries should be taken on by the state - free of the dictates of profitability - and which unproductive areas of state expenditure might be better handled by the private sector. It is not enough to look at the superficial structural aspects of the economy. Instead we need to examine the underlying national capability, what is happening at the level of capital accumulation. If we look at the economy in terms of which sectors are profitable and productive and which are not a different perspective on the problem open up. The economy is increasingly dependent on the state more so than it is on services and even the service economy is dependent on the state (eg, building Docklands for the finance sector). What is more important is the attitudes of society to the production of wealth - where we see it as being generated from and where we pin our hopes for the future. And risk-aversion is critically important here in that it holds us back from productive investments where they do exist. Arguably it also holds us back from making a break with the past. Just as there is an imperative to invest to create the new, so there is a need to destroy the old, to clear the decks and shake out the cobwebs. We must find ways to fund initiatives that break the cycle of low profitability, low investment, low productivity, low profitability and we must realise that this will necessarily involve the destruction of unprofitable sections of the economy.

In that sense the future might look more than a little bleak in that our main hopes appear to be attached to the low carbon economy. In particular, to those areas that can generate a lot of jobs - irrespective of productivity - and are clean in terms of energy usage. While it may be a good thing (albeit a qualified good) for someone to get a job in a windfarm - in terms of their narrow self-interest - it may not be in terms of the economy and society as a whole in terms of maximising the production of profits. Equally, the low carbon economy can also be the low productivity economy: either because of the nature or limited scale of the technology. That said, areas of green technology that do offer profitable investment opportunities should be taken up. What we should not do is look for areas in which we can employ the most people at making stuff. Sheer numbers of jobs created is obviously not enough: if it was then we should argue for low productivity industries and low wages…

In addition, the attachment to the green economy is a way of avoiding the increasingly uncomfortable fact that manufacturing creates products for us to consume. When we see consumption as a matter of personal greed rather than a matter of fulfilling our needs and wants, then we start to realise that the arguments in favour of making more stuff are more than a little ‘nuanced’ - it is about making the right kind of stuff: clean green stuff. It is actually about making less - because the industries are less productive - and about consuming less: the only value attached to the economy is in terms of how little carbon it can produce. Making a buck doesn’t count any more: we are in danger of forgetting that in a capitalist economy nothing is worth producing if not for a profit. There is a sense in which the economy based on making profit is seen overall as simply too dangerous, too exuberant, too out of control and it appears better to keep it restrained and moderated by basing the economy around doing less. That means less for us all, however, not just for the City bankers. It means an economy that almost literally makes no sense since the meaning of the economy lies in us creating new value. If the economy is now to be based on producing less it is fair to ask just who might benefit from that? Nature maybe but not us.

If we were instead to repose the debate in terms of what is profitable economic activity and what is not, we might sharpen the debate in society between those who want to limit progress in the name of cost-cutting austerity and those who really want to advance growth and living standards to the benefit of all. This means arguing for productive investment in the economy and breaking up the existing barriers of low profitability and low investment. That means re-politicising the economy and arguing for the growth and dynamism needed to move society forward.

Angus is a Battle of Ideas committee member, has written for spiked, and reviewed for Culture Wars.

• Building Britain’s Future, chapter 3
• Management Today, De-industrialisation: Made in Britain
• Rob Killick, Should we be making more things? Part I & Should we be making more things? Part II  and
• Peter Howell, Once more on productive and unproductive labour 
• Daniel Ben-Ami, Getting to the root of the economic crisis 
• Gordon Brown, We will put people first, not bankers 
• Graeme Wearden, Rolls-Royce announces £300m UK factory plan 
• Peter Marsh, Complexity is key to overcoming recession 
• Carl Mortished, The West can’t spend, China won’t spend 
• Libby Purves, Save the nation: log off and invent a machine 
• Philip Whyte, It’s a fabrication that Britain doesn’t make things anymore 
• Will Hutton, Yes it’s bad, but at long last the government is getting it right 
• Dave Hill, We must sell Britain to avoid recession 
• FT, UK economy’s misconception of consumption 
• Finance markets, Rise in UK’s service sector is good news for the economy 
• FT, Data show sharp fall in output

‘But that’s just your opinion, isn’t it?’ is the question that hovers, if unspoken, above arts seminar tables in universities everywhere. As an undergraduate English student, I have noted that many, even most, of my fellow students believe what they say about a given text or author is every bit as valid as the arguments of an academic specialist in the field, and these often informed by decades of experience. Yet, this relativism is not the liberating, enlivening force that many imagine it to be. In fact, this attitude actually closes down discussion and prevents students’ ideas from being challenged. Ironically, it also scuppers any challenge to the ideas of the loathed critical authorities: if I can’t be right, how can you be wrong?

The atmosphere of relativism in the academy leaves us with a situation in which it makes about as much sense to challenge a student’s opinion on Henry James as it does to lambast them for preferring chocolate over strawberry ice cream. Many students take so much care to preface their contributions with comments about how it’s really impossible to say anything meaningful about a text, that they walk around cocooned in a secure complacency, confident that their ideas can never be challenged. After all, how can a direct intellectual challenge so much as touch subjective whims?

The malaise is not confined to the student body. Whilst there remain academics in every institution who continue to value and defend the legitimacy of criticism, a lack of confidence in aesthetic judgement reaches to the top of the academy. The vacuum left by the evacuation of judgement is often filled with Literary Theory, a shabby gauze of politically interested stock responses and clichés where sensitive, flexible judgement should be. Of course, aesthetic judgements must take place in a theoretical framework, but such a framework should be philosophical, and as disinterested as is humanly possible. The abandonment of judgement has allowed fads such as ‘ecocriticism’, which seeks to do for the environment what feminist criticism is supposed to have done for women (although quite how esoteric Lit Crit has ever managed to help advance the cause of women is unclear. The idea that the place to stage the fight for civil rights is the literary journal has never made much sense to me). In place of serious engagement with texts we have modish postures which positively flaunt their political interest.

Judgement has always been more vulnerable in the arts than in the sciences. Everyone has some gut aesthetic instinct, a sense of what type of wallpaper they like. This is what makes it seemingly impossible to distinguish a person’s casual liking of Lady Gaga’s pop music from their appreciation of Mozart. By contrast, few members of the public would hazard an opinion on the finer points of particle physics. Admittedly, the arts and sciences are different. There is no science of the aesthetic, no such thing as genuine objective judgement in the humanities (however, it should be remembered that there is also always disagreement between scientists, and necessarily an element of interpretation in ascertaining what the results of an experiment mean, though these same results appear each time). Still, some aesthetic judgements are better than others, and some are plain wrong, for taste (itself a dirty word in most arts circles) is learned and cultivated over years. It is not something we are just born with.

Meaningful judgements about taste are possible. Immanuel Kant argued in his Critique of the Power of Judgement that aesthetic appreciation can be grounded in Reason. Kant postulated that a person may claim an ‘intersubjective’ (if not objective) validity for the pleasurable feelings they experience in response to a beautiful object because this pleasure is produced by the free play of the faculties of imagination and understanding, and not a mere concern for how advantageous it would be to possess the observed object. As the cognitive faculties that produce this feeling of pleasure are common to all human beings, and work more or less the in the same manner in all of us, a person’s aesthetic responses have a validity that is more than subjective. Clearly, the nuances of Kant’s argument cannot be explored here, but the Enlightenment assumption that people are reasonable agents can show us that there are ways of talking about literature, and indeed all art, which have a place at the discussion table. Everything else should be left at the door.

Whims, and mere brute responses such as ‘I like chocolate’ have no place on the seminar table, or in any public exchange of ideas. Even academic critics often couch their ideas in terms of these weak positive feelings. A critic as important as John Carey (the emeritus Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford) was able to preface a final chapter asserting that literature is the superior art form in What Good Are the Arts? with the caveat that all of that followed was purely subjective. If so, why should we care? Why are these words any more worth reading than the average undergraduate student essay? Few believed for a second that Carey really believed in his caveat, but the fact that he felt he should believe it is troubling.

It is not the place of universities to flatter the ‘tastes’ that students have when they arrive. Students need to be informed so that they can begin to develop a serious appreciation of art. This is not to say that it is any more the place of a university to mould its students, indoctrinating them with a uniform, orthodox taste. A careful balance must be struck between relativism and authority. I will turn to this issue soon, though not before looking at how an unwillingness to challenge students on matters of taste is part of a problem facing wider society

The ‘all must have prizes’ culture is familiar by now. Stories of school sports days in which every child is awarded a medal, just for taking part, and classrooms in which teachers are afraid to criticise pupils for fear of hurting their feelings, abound. The problem is not confined to academic and media criticism of the arts: society as a whole is reticent about all forms of criticism. Commentators who question the required orthodox response to climate change, or verbally attack religion, are either shouted down, or worse, they self-censor. The problem manifests itself not just in the hesitancy of critics to speak with an authoritative voice, but in the violence of the reaction of a public when they are told, as they see it, what and what not to like. The ferocious response of someone who has just been told that their taste in poetry is dubious, or even that the latest Harry Potter film wasn’t that great after all, is matched only by that of a person who has just had their religious faith challenged.

Why should this be? After all, a someone’s taste is just another of their ideas. Why should they view an attack on their ideas as an attack on themselves, or their very identity? It is because matters of taste have been so thoroughly subjectivised that it is no longer possible to dissociate the person from the idea. To the injured fan of a mediocre writer, the critic might as well be attacking their personal appearance. This childish withdrawal into secure solipsism has left many people, and perhaps a generation of students, without the confidence to take partake in a serious, grown up debate. When taste becomes unchallengeable, it ceases to be something that can be taken seriously, and is reduced to a crutch for the insecure; something to assure them that their views, whatever they are, really do matter.

The attitude of the academic who eases off on his students, and even reassures them from the start that discussions will take place in a non-confrontational spirit, is fundamentally a patronising one. Critics of all kinds, instead of showing their audience intellectual respect, and expecting its members to come back with a still more devilish counter arguments when they are challenged, instead act as though they are talking to children who can’t bear not to get their own way. Such a take on instruction and teaching leaves prejudices unchallenged, and ideas still-born, stultifying the minds of students and ordinary people alike, and making it all the more difficult for them to grow both intellectually and as people.

But excessive faith in authority can be just as stifling. I am not recommending a university in which students are the passive recipients of knowledge passed down from on high, too timid to ever dare question what the expert is saying. This is why a balance must be struck between authority and ‘anything goes’ relativism. There is a common misconception among students of the arts, perhaps even held especially among those who are least pessimistic about the bounds of human knowledge, that they are apprentices, being trained up to become authorities, by authorities. It is a fact of the academy that if there are authorities in the humanities, they are often overturned by the very next generation. The greatest authorities are still students at heart, focused on the process of enquiry itself, and not on the chimera of some final, authoritative truth of their chosen subject that they will be able to impart to their students. The greatest critics are their own greatest critics.

Students should remember that while their teachers’ ideas are bound to be more informed than their own, supplemented by years of sensitive appreciation and both inward and outward debate, and fired by an impressive intelligence, they should not be afraid to challenge them. This is where the real intelligence lies; in being able to spot the flaws in an argument constructed by an expert in the topic, and defend a counter-argument of your own, despite the fact that as a student, you will know comparatively little about the topic. And it is through facing down criticism that authorities are not only confirmed, but also made.

In the early part of the 20th century, in my own field of English, critics like IA Richards, William Empson and TS Eliot fought to replace the vain, ‘flight of fancy’ writing that passed for criticism much of the time in the 19th century with a serious, intellectually defensible criticism. It was only then that English was taken seriously by the academy as an intellectual discipline. At the beginning of this century, the failure of confidence in critical judgement, and its widespread replacement with subjective ‘I feel’-ism, puts the position of English, as well as the standing of art history and musicology, into doubt once more. Without a belief in judgement, the arts will be taken less and less seriously within and without the universities. Indeed, without judgement, the arts, as they are today, deserve a place not in the academy, but at the ice cream stand.

Chris Kerr is an English undergraduate at the University of Cambridge.