The waxen lips might soften, the hay-stuffed corpse may settle more comfortably into its mahogany cabinet. No one is sure why the philosopher Jeremy Bentham insisted that his body be preserved, but perhaps he has been waiting for vindication: only when happiness is at the heart of government can the “Father of Utilitarianism” rest in peace.
The time may be close. A quiet revolution is under way in Whitehall, and already its subtle influence is being felt in local and national affairs. Happy politics has arrived.
It was a damp November afternoon in 2002 when, over tea and biscuits at the Treasury, strategists plotted the first steps in a pamphlet entitled Life Satisfaction: the state of knowledge and implications for government. It was circulated the following month and clearly stamped: “This is not a statement of government policy.” Its motive was grander. “This is a revolution in how we think about everything,” argued the economist Professor Richard Layard, one of those gathered in Room 2/18 that day.
The apparently innocuous conclusion of the 2002 tract was that “there is a case for state intervention to boost life satisfaction”. Who could argue with that? But it implied a redefinition of political purpose. Instead of simply making us richer, politicians should aim to make Britain happier. “Government has got to rethink its priorities,” insisted Layard. “I am hoping that each department will review its objectives and see how closely they are in line with the idea of promoting the happiness of the people.”
Over the past three years, new utilitarians have tried to nudge the government towards a happy agenda. They are muted radicals, preferring to whisper in ministers’ ears that encouraging “a more leisured work-life balance, and a more positive appraisal of public spending and progressive taxation” has a feel-good pay-off.
Among the most influential of the happy evangelists is Tony Blair’s senior policy adviser David Halpern. “I know it’s difficult for us to believe,” he told me recently, “but – at least at a certain level – it looks like taxes are likely to increase the well-being of the population.” The “certain level” at which taxes make us happy is, he calculates, about where taxes are now. Indeed, much of the new scientific literature is being translated into policies with a distinctly New Labour look.
Happiness is dangerous territory, however. The science cuts across ideology. Progressive politicians enthusiastically embrace findings which suggest that the redistribution of wealth is good for our well-being; that state intervention in public services raises joy in the national heart; that policies encouraging a work-life balance are good for the general jollity. But traditionalists prefer the scientific papers showing that marriage (rather than cohabitation) has a hugely positive effect on happiness; and that God and the Boy Scouts add to the sum of human contentment while entertainment TV and multiculturalism tend to reduce it.
That last finding has, understandably, caused some head-scratching among those on the centre left who see happiness as the justification for a new form of social politics.
The chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, does not shy away from the scientific evidence. “We’ve done work here which shows that people, frankly, when there aren’t other pressures, like to live within a comfort zone which is defined by racial sameness,” he told me. “People feel happier if they’re with people who are like themselves. But the question is: what does ‘like themselves’ mean?”
There is now a committee called the Whitehall Well-being Working Group (W3G to those in the know), but you will be hard put to find it listed anywhere. The disciples of happiness tend to hide themselves away. Their nervousness is not just that their creed is controversial, but that they would be houn-ded as advocates of a super-nanny state. Imagine the headlines in the Sun or the Daily Mail if it became publicly known that our politicians saw their primary objective as being to adjust our emotional state.
So happy cells operate in the shadows. One is secreted in a quango funded by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Sustainable Development Research Network. Sustainability and happiness don’t actually have much to do with each other, but the SDRN is promising a plan for how well-being “could be used to inform future policy development and spending decisions”.
Defra is Happy Central. The introduction to its “five-year strategy” states the departmental determination to increase people’s happiness – although this is wrapped up in the language of improving the environment. Margaret Beckett may one day be remembered as the first minister for happiness.
But the real guinea pigs for new utilitarianism are local authorities in England, which now have a duty “to promote well-being” enshrined in legislation. Some councils, such as South Tyneside, take this to mean that it is their job to make people happier. “We believe that it’s absolutely fundamental to quality of life that we take account of happiness,” says Irene Lucas, chief executive of the council. Some local schools now teach children how to be happy. “We would like our children to be able to put as much of a premium on happiness in their life as they do on being very good at geography or very good at history,” Lucas says.
North of the border, the Scottish Executive supports an organisation called the Centre for Confidence and Well-being which aims to make Scotland 15 per cent more optimistic within ten years. “Optimism is a major component of happiness and I think it’s the part that we can most immediately see is missing from Scottish life,” says the centre founder, Carol Craig.
Apparently, most of Scotland’s optimists emigrated to America, leaving a land soaked in pessimism. Fittingly, a “positive psycho-logist” from the US has been invited to turn the nation around.
In Dumfries and Galloway, the director of public health (one of Scotland’s optimists) is so convinced by the power of happiness that he is changing the focus of his campaigning. “There is mounting evidence that happiness might be a more powerful predictor of good health than cigarette smoking, diet, physical activity and those kind of things,” says Dr Derek Cox.
His plan is to recruit an army of volunteers to go out and help people cheer up. They will attend a four-day course in cognitive behavioural therapy, which is known to be effective in countering depression and anxiety. Cox has big ideas. “I’d love to make the people of Dumfries and Galloway the happiest and healthiest people in Scotland.”
It is a vision shared by Richard Layard, who has been pressing the government to employ another 10,000 fully trained psychotherapists. His book Happiness: lessons from a new science is the bible of Britain’s new utilitarians – a sweeping manifesto for well-being, arguing for policies that would lower consumer spending, reduce mobility of labour and restrict growth – heretical talk, one imagines, inside the Treasury.
What has inspired this radicalism is the quite sensational scientific claim that it is now possible to measure happiness at least as well as we measure GDP. “This is the real breakthrough in the past 20 years in psychology,” Layard says. “We know that happiness is an objective phenomenon, and it can be the basis for discussing what we want to do with our social policy and our personal lives.”
It was the subjective nature of happiness that scuppered utilitarianism the first time around. Money was a tangible surrogate and so it was economists, not social scientists, who were invited to sit closest to the seat of power. Political strategists are giving the theory a second chance, however, not least because our huge increase in wealth over the past 50 years has not translated into increased well-being. By some measures, developed nations are becoming slightly more miserable.
Throughout the western world, this disturbing development has forced leaders to ponder on the purpose of politics. “Money isn’t everything,” wrote Blair a few years ago. “In the past governments have seemed to forget this. Success has been measured by economic growth alone. Delivering the best possible quality of life depends on devising ways of assessing how we are doing.”
The Conservative leader, David Cameron, put it to me this way: “We should be thinking not just what is good for putting money in people’s pockets but what is good for putting joy in people’s hearts.”
What the new utilitarians are hoping is that, alongside familiar measures of political performance such as growth or inflation, governments will be assessed according to how happy they make people. As David Halpern puts it: “If we don’t do it someone else will – and, in fact, already are.”
Bentham’s stuffed cadaver may be trying to muster a smile.
Mark Easton is the BBC’s home editor. His six-part series The Happiness Formula begins on Wednesday 3 May on BBC2 (7pm)
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