18 October 2012

We need to look beyond the politics of growth

The next election must not simply be fought over who can put the most money in our pockets.

Sometimes when I read the paper, the world reveals itself as if by some editorial fluke. Stories connect as the pages turn, like the stars in the night sky that make up the great constellations, individual dots join to paint a bigger picture.

It happened again last Sunday reading the Observer. It started on the front page with a story headlined “World hunger crisis looms as extreme weather hits harvest”, which was developed as a double page spread further in. On page three we had “Don’t carpet bomb the NHS with competition, says health chief”, followed on pages six-seven with a story on “Sixth formers pay up to £350 in bid to cheat the university admissions system”. Stay with me, there are a few more dots. Also on page seven, we had “Audit costing £1m might have stopped west coast rail fiasco”, on page 10, “IMF austerity warning gives Osborne a £76bn headache” and then, in the business section, an article headlined, “Treating food stocks like stocks and shares is a recipe for disaster.”

So what is reveled is nothing less than a society and culture that is being steadily marketised. A world where we feed multiple times more grain to cattle for hamburgers to make profit, rather than feed people directly. A world where rising temperatures caused by the fossil fuel burning necessary to ramp up even further our turbo-consumer culture, are reaching a level that crops are failing and sending food prices for the poorest through the roof. A world where nothing is sacred and nothing is beyond the toxic reach of competition – even our health. A world where the state is cut back so far to stop it ‘crowding out’ the private sector that it can no longer save the market from wrecking the utility industries on which society depends – like rail and banking. A world where our children are under such intense pressure to ‘succeed’ in the learn to earn rat race that the market of course provides a short cut – at a price.

A picture of market fundamentalism emerges out of these disjointed dots and seemingly unconnected news items. It is the story of the unrelenting, disciplined and organised march of the market into every aspect of our lives. It succeeds through lobbying power, intellectual arguments, clever framing of language and through the seductive power of consumption. We want this stuff, we desire it, it makes us who and what we are. Why fight it? And yet at the same time we know many of us have more clothes that we can wear and yet no time to be with the people we love. We know we buy things we didn’t know we needed with money we don’t have. And we know others don’t even have that dubious choice – and instead face the daily humiliation of not being able to keep up and take their place as a ‘normal’ member of our consumer society.

If the economy picks up again – then what is our story? Is it just to go back to “business as usual” as fast as possible? A politics of growth, jobs, money, consumption and choice at any cost? For the last thirty years, growth has masked the redistribution of income and wealth from the bottom to the top. Are we happy for that to just kick-start again?

The Labour Party has worked for a century around the politics of more. But the “more” in question has increasingly just been stuff. More money to buy more things. On one level, it reflects the problem that, for most, real incomes have been flatlining and the spoils have gone to those at the top. This, by the way, is the inevitable and necessary result of a marketised society. But what if, by some miracle, capitalism defied its genetic impulses and distributed goods more evenly? Is that all there is? What of the social recession and not just its economic counterpart? What of a planet that continues to burn? What has happened to the well being and happiness debates? When is enough ever enough?

If the next election is fought mainly on the terrain of who puts more money in our pockets, then I fear for the outcome. Yes, people need jobs , but not at any cost. We have to find a way of addressing the complex insecurity people feel – not just economic, but social and emotional. The politics of time, mental illness, loneliness and what it means to be human in the 21^st century. I long to pick up the paper and see the invisible lines that join stories about more hope, care, respect, tolerance, autonomy and a world in which the market serves us and not the other way round.