"I've Never Known a More Right-Wing Britain"

How clever people can believe extraordinary things and the insight it provides into Labour's poor start in office

A few weeks ago I was listening to a conversation between Andrew Marr and Tom McTague on the New Statesman podcast when Marr made an extraordinary claim that made me laugh out loud. He said he had never known a more right-wing Britain. Tom McTague did not demur, in fact he congratulated him on having such an arresting thought.

I don’t wish to be too harsh on Andrew. He wrote some excellent essays for me when I edited Prospect magazine, including an updating of George Orwell’s famous essay Politics and the English Language. I admired him as the BBC Political Editor though found his subsequent journalism a wee bit too centre-left group think.

Andrew is 66 years old, so would have become a politically conscious young adult in the late 1970s just as Labour was giving way to the new Thatcher era. So he lived through the Thatcher and Major years. And we are now more right-wing?

After I stopped giggling, my immediate thought was that this is wrong on almost any dimension you care to consider, (bar one that might have prompted Marr’s peculiar statement, which I will consider later). The size of the state; levels of tax and redistribution; public spending on health, welfare and disabilities; income and wealth inequality, poverty levels; the level of the minimum wage; regulation of business; representation of women and minorities in the professions and political class; social mobility/openness of the elite; proportion of school-leavers going to university; protection of human rights (including the rights of those who are not British citizens); scale and speed of immigration; levels of value and ethnic diversity; investment in de-carbonisation.

Eton College. Still running the country? Photo Annie Spratt on Unsplash

What would one expect the most right-wing Britain since the late 1970s to look like? For convenience one might divide the answer into economic and socio-cultural. On the economic side one would expect the size of the state to be below 40%; the tax burden overall, and especially on the rich, to be relatively light; social spending to be lower than the 1980s, probably thanks to private insurance having increasingly replaced the NHS and other once publicly-funded services among the middle class; levels of inequality and poverty to be at all time highs with a privately educated elite more entrenched than ever; the minimum wage to have fallen sharply relative to average earnings, and an easy hire and fire business culture.

Is this an accurate picture of modern Britain? No it is not. The size of the state is currently 45% and heading north. As Robert Colvile put it recently we have had “one-way Keynesianism” in which Chancellors are happy to run deficits when times are tough but don’t then pay them down when recovery comes. The overall tax burden is on track to reach 38% of GDP the highest level since the war and a full 11 percentage points higher than in 1993. And believe it or not Britain has the most progressive tax system in Europe, with high earners paying more relative to the average than anywhere else (the top 0.1% of earners pay more income tax than the bottom 50%).

Social spending, depending on how you count it and partly thanks to the historic decline in defence spending, has never been higher in both absolute and per capita terms. Nearly 25% of GDP is spent on health and welfare, the highest proportion ever. There are many benefits, especially those associated with disability, that didn’t exist at all through much of Andrew’s adult life, and others such as housing benefit and SEN that now pay out many multiples of what was being paid in the 1980s and 1990s. To give just one example, on current trends we will be spending £30bn a year on personal independence payments at the end of the decade compared with £12.5bn at the start.

Income inequality has been high by international standards since the Thatcher/Lawson reforms of the late 1980s but the Gini co-efficient inequality metric at 32.9% is now significantly lower than it was during most of the New Labour era, peaking at 38% in 2008. Wealth inequality is low by international standards because of home ownership and private pensions being widely spread but has not changed much in relative terms in recent years, despite asset price rises. The poverty rate - a relative measure, so it is really a measure of how compressed incomes are - is around 21% but markedly lower than in the 1980s and 1990s, partly thanks to a reduction in pensioner poverty.

The minimum wage is now two-thirds of median hourly earnings, the highest it has ever been, and one of the highest in Europe. Meanwhile, the regulatory burden on business has never been higher and the relative ease of hiring and firing established during the Thatcher era has been substantially reversed, even before the current employment legislation is enacted.

Considering the two economic crises of recent times, the financial crash and the pandemic, what one might call the “right wing” one caused by complacent and greedy bankers (albeit abetted by governments) has been far less costly than the “left wing” one caused by the need to protect people from harm and pay people not to work. The first crisis is estimated to have cost a bit more than 1% of GDP, the pandemic closer to 15%.

How about the socio-cultural sphere? What would the most right-wing Britain of the past 40 years look like here? It would not have an Equalities Act and extensive anti-discrimination legislation, nor a Human Rights Act, both of which are the product of the last 25 years. Women and minorities would be barely visible in politics and the higher professions and there would be large ethnic and gender pay gaps. Only about 15% of the population would go to university and elite universities and most institutions, including Parliament, would be dominated by those educated at public school. This is more or less how Britain looked in the 1980s.

Does it look anything like today’s Britain? Of course not. The forward march of women and minorities has accelerated fast since the 1980s in both the higher professions and the political class. Ethnic and gender pay gaps are at all time lows. Women represent 47% of public appointments and 40% of MPs, both records. In the past decade ethnic minority individuals have occupied all the great political offices of state, including PM.

The elite is also more socially open than most people think, thanks in part to the unfortunate coincidence of two Etonian PMs in quick succession. The privately educated are still over-represented but they have less of a grip on the higher echelons of British society than was the case in the 1980s/1990s. When Andrew went to Cambridge in the late 1970s, the public school educated like him (and me) were around 50% or more of the intake at both Cambridge and Oxford, it is now down to 25% or lower. And in the House of Commons the change, though little noticed, has been even more dramatic. The Commons was majority privately educated through much of the 1980s until the Tory party switched to being majority state educated in the 2010s. Today’s huge Labour majority means the Commons is now 23% privately educated, but even after the 2019 Tory victory the overall proportion was 29%. Moreover, today’s percentage does not represent a huge public school over-representation as the 7% figure usually quoted of the cohort privately educated is a significant under-estimate if you include those who have spent two years or more in private education which pushes the number up to around 12 or even 15%. (And judging by opinion polls and from the personal experience of giving political talks at public schools, never have the children of privilege been more woke in worldview. I literally made pupils cry on one occasion by pointing to some of the facts cited earlier.)

Social mobility is notoriously difficult to measure and it is probably true that movement into the professional and managerial class by people from lower status backgrounds has slowed somewhat in recent decades. That is caused primarily by the slowdown in the expansion of those professional and managerial jobs which expanded rapidly from the 1960s to the 1990s. There is now less room at the top but that does not mean that mobility does not still happen. A further contribution to the slow-down is probably attributable to the expansion of a higher education system dominated by the middle and upper-middle classes, whose children, even those of very average abilities, have acquired credentials to prevent the downward mobility that might otherwise have been their fate. But that is an unintended “right wing” outcome from what is still usually regarded as a “left wing” development, the expansion of HE. When Andrew went to university less that 10% of school leavers did so, meaning that most professional people acquired qualifications on the job, while today nearly 50% of school leavers go to college, and substantially more women than men.

Looking at education more broadly, the explicit and central goal of the Department for Education, under governments of all stripes, has been to reduce the social class gap in educational outcomes. There has been limited success in achieving this goal but the Gove reforms contributed to some progress towards narrowing the gap, at least until the pandemic. And Britain has one of the best records in Europe for the educational outcomes of ethnic minorities.

The incorporation of the Human Rights Act into UK law in 1998, notwithstanding its failings and unintended consequences, has undoubtedly given more rights and protections to both British people and anyone in the legal space of the UK. To take just one example, until the late 1980s illegal immigrants were simply detained and removed. Then a series of ECHR judgements made that harder until the incorporation of the HRA made it impossible. And we live with the all too visible consequences today.

Assuming being open to immigration is more left-wing than right-wing then Britain has swung substantially to the left since 1997 when the immigration “pause” of the 1980/90s came to an end. Since 2000 around 18m immigrants have come to Britain, that translates into a net total of 7m, a large proportion of whom will be here permanently. The ethnic composition of the UK has changed dramatically since the turn of the century when almost 90% of the population was white British, that has now fallen to around 70%, and maybe as low as 66/67% in England alone, meaning an increasing number of cities, towns and neighbourhoods are now majority-minority. In London only 20% of school-children are white British. Also, the foreign-born share of the UK population has risen from 8.3% in 2001 to around 20% now.

Diversity has trumped solidarity out of a mixture of path dependency and active political decisions such as the 2004 New Labour decision to open the UK labour market to the new arrivals into the EU from eastern/central Europe seven years before necessary.

Finally, assuming environmentalism and tackling climate change counts as an idea with its roots on the left, then again the UK has swung substantially to the left in the past 20 years. The country boasts the fastest reduction in emissions of any large country and has disincentivised oil extraction in the UK North Sea, though we now merely import our emissions and bear crushingly high energy prices, especially for industry.

Taking into account all of the above it would be far more plausible to argue the opposite of Marr’s claim - that Britain has never been more left-wing in his lifetime - though that doesn’t feel quite right either. The continuing widening of the North-South divide and the detachment of London from the rest of the country plus the decline of international connection and collaboration - consider the grotesque failure of cooperation between the UK and France on Channel boats - might be classified as right-wing failings. The latter is partly the result of Brexit, though it is often forgotten that nearly two-thirds of Tory MPs voted remain in 2016. The former is a failure of both major parties and it was the Tories who came up with the most concerted plan for levelling up in 2019 before it was de-railed by the pandemic.

British society currently feels blocked and gloomy, and low growth makes society feel less fair than in, say, the higher growth 1990s/2000s, even if by most objective measures it isn’t. Yet, applying the famous veil of ignorance test - meaning if you had no idea what position in society you were going to be born into when would you choose to be born in recent decades - it would be hard not to choose the present.

Marr made his statement in the context of a discussion of the minor differences in outlook between the two candidates for Labour deputy leader - Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell. He was comparing the dullness and conformism of that contest with the romantic days of his leftist youth and the Healey v Benn battle for the Labour deputy leadership in 1981. There was then a real ideological battle between the mixed economy status quo represented by Healey and the socialist Alternative Economic Plan of import controls and state ownership. It is true that proposals for public ownership - with the exception of trains and water - do not feature much today in mainstream politics, though the former Bennite Jeremy Corbyn is still with us and his party, along with the Greens, speak for at least 15% of the electorate.

I suspect the main inspiration for Marr’s claim, however, is the way that rhetoric on immigration has shifted in recent months, so that the mass deportation of immigrants is now part of mainstream debate. It is an emotional response, a kind of Anywhere lament, to flags, Reform riding high in the polls etc. But this movement in the Overton window has come in response to big changes in the real world, notably the truly astonishing inflows of the so-called Boriswave. It is true that the small number of real racists in British society seem to have been emboldened by this shift - as Shabana Mahmood reported so dramatically in the House of Commons - and it is a sad fact that thanks to the amplification effect of social media a small number of bad actors can have an outsize effect. This is not, however, a good reason to reject robust measures, and language, to deal with unprecedented levels of legal and illegal migration, as Mahmood so powerfully argued. Suppressing discussion about things that people can see in their daily lives does not make peoples’ fears and resentments disappear, rather it magnifies them. Considering the damage that has been caused by excessive sensitivity to the racism accusation - from the grooming gangs to the Manchester arena bomb - more honesty and direct language is welcome.

A final reflection. The fact that two leading members of the centre-left establishment should apparently agree on such an outlandish assertion does tell us something interesting about these times, and maybe about the failure of the current Labour Government. Marr, I think, reflects the damaging effect of the hyper-partisan rhetoric that surrounded the long period of Tory rule, and especially its declining years.

The reality of British politics is that there is a high degree of consensus across the two main parties on everything from the need to control immigration more effectively, to slashing regulation in order to build more houses and boost economic growth, to reining in welfare spending and promoting more public and private investment. Yet commentators, especially on the left, instead of seeing the large degree of continuity between the New Labour years and the 14 years of Tory rule have focused ovewhelmingly on austerity, the limited attempt to hold back public spending, and an imaginary increase in inequality. (I have lost count of the number of times I have read or heard people on the left confidently asserting that inequality has increased sharply in recent years.)

We live in a somewhat social democratic liberal democracy, and 14 years of Tory rule did little to dent it. The fact that so few people appear to believe that may be a function of the so-called De Toqueville paradox. The idea that when social conditions improve, expectations of further improvement become more powerful than satisfaction with what has been achieved. This might be said to describe the state of mind of a fair number of Labour MPs, and voters.

Judging by their preferred rhetoric about the Tories and the rich, Labour leaders seem to genuinely believe that they are rebalancing the country in the interests of “working people”—more workers rights, more NHS spending—after a period in which their interests have been ignored by a hard-nosed, right-wing Government.

This collective mis-reading of the recent past has left Labour psychologically ill-equipped to tackle so many of our current problems, most of which are the unintended consequence, or overshoots, of centre-left priorities established in the New Labour era: unsustainable welfare/disability spending, erosion of work ethic, over-regulation of business and crippling energy costs, declining productivity in the NHS and elsewhere in the public sector, an education/training system that over-produces people with generalist academic qualifications and under produces people with the manual and technical skills to build houses and power stations, unpopular levels of both legal and illegal immigration.

A disinclination to consider that its own past policy priorities may have contributed to Britain’s torpor is one reason Labour was so poorly prepared for office. Prior to the election little thought was given to, among other things, how to reduce welfare spending in a humane way or how to distinguish the productive from the unproductive rich in the tax system and increase the tax burden fairly on the average earner.

It is rightly said that in the 1980s the right won the economic argument but the left won the social and cultural argument. This was both cause and consequence of two generations of middle class professionals turning to the left. But it turns out that winning the social and cultural argument is the more important of the two for it places strict limits on right-wing, or even just sensible, economics. The capacity failure of the modern state, ever rising social spending, the crisis of the family, the epidemic of mental fragility among young people, the proliferation of bull-shit jobs for the academically credentialised, computer-says-no regulatory overkill, the excesses of progressive liberalism, could all be seen as the unintended consequences, the costly invoices, attached to the genuine progress that Andrew seems so reluctant to recognise.

The cultural adjustment our country needs does not require reversing either of the two great post-war revolutions - the welfare/redistribution revolution of the 1940s/50s or the equality revolution of the 1960/70s - and no government would get elected that proposed to do so. But both revolutions have also delivered us to this point: a low growth social democratic equilibrium that is not sustainable in its current form. A clear eyed programme of adjustment untethered from shibboleths of left or right is badly needed. It will not be delivered by people who still believe we are living in the 1980s.