Why are some British politicians so keen on injecting “competition” into the lives of working people?
Andy Beckett: “In the early years of the 21st century, the inevitability of an ever more competitive, deregulated, internationally orientated market economy, to which both government and society were subordinate – a doctrine often called neoliberalism – was accepted right across the mainstream of British politics: from the Thatcherites who still dominated the Conservative party; to the increasingly pro-business Liberal Democrats, who would soon form a coalition government with the Tories; to the Scottish National party, whose then leader Alex Salmond praised Ireland and Iceland for their low corporate taxes; to the Blair cabinet itself, where, I was told by a senior Labour figure in 2001, “You won’t find a single member with anything critical to say about capitalism.” It was assumed by the main parties that most voters felt the same way.”
Tony Blair, 2005: “… there is no mystery about what works: an open, liberal economy, prepared constantly to change to remain competitive.”
Then…
Will Davies: “At a key moment in the history of neoliberal thought, its advocates shifted from defending markets as competitive arenas amongst many, to viewing society-as-a-whole as one big competitive arena. Under the latter model, there is no distinction between arenas of politics, economics and society.”
Which becomes Cameron’s stripped back “Big society” in which “We’re in this together.”.
Except that “… wealthy Britons have stashed about £300bn – equivalent to 15% of our GDP – in offshore tax havens”.
So: We’re not all in it together. We’re not competing on a level playing field.
A lot of ink has been spilt about the benefits and mechanics of competition.
Competition soaks up a lot of the time and energy of working people.
Perhaps competition isn’t just about increased productivity.
Perhaps it’s also used to distract, to keep working people too busy to think too deeply.
Marx saw constant change and competition as part of capitalism:
“Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
Competition as distraction
Update for 2022. Kojo Koram is succinct. Not only can competition tie up and exhaust the “lower” classes who may want to redistribute wealth, it is also a useful story. The story can be deployed by the rich and powerful people as a shield to hide behind, distracting the less powerful from the elites’ entrenched privilege – helping them to avoid the pointless competitions they build and promote to others.
Competition as stressor
Competition can be used to distract voters. Over time, the stress it induces can also encourage voters to accept simplistic half-true explanations about how societies function. Stressed voters may not be capable of rationally examining their environment.
As Jaron Lanier points out, when a “whole population has their fight or flight responses activated a little more than they would have otherwise… the ambient result is an increase in paranoia and irritability. Those are the mildest versions of fight or flight.
“So you start to have a politics based on paranoia and irritability.”
Competition as Conservative code
Beyond being a useful distraction,
competition is also a useful code word for Conservative politicians.
2013 Margaret Thatcher Lecture, Boris Johnson:
“But sometimes in politics you have to recognise that you are dealing with feeling, not reason. After five years of recession people are feeling this inequality –much greater, after all, than it was in the 1980s – and rightly or wrongly they care about it.
“It seems to me therefore that though it would be wrong to persecute the rich, and madness to try and stifle wealth creation, and futile to try to stamp out inequality, that we should only tolerate this wealth gap on two conditions: one, that we help those who genuinely cannot compete; and, two, that we provide opportunity for those who can.”
When a Conservative politician talks about competition, they’re often speaking in code to their supporters.
Competition is a code word for inequality,
inequality is a code word for the acceptance of selfishness.
(& reform usually means privatisation, but that’ll be the subject of another article).
See also
How the media and the Royal Family use the competition story
The battle for Britain’s story
Elsewhere
An alternative view: “The left wing duping hypothesis is wrong. Politics at the national level is more like religion than it is like shopping. It’s more about a moral vision that unifies a nation and calls it to greatness than it is about self-interest or specific policies.”
Leave a Reply