Book review: Ill Fares the Land

Published on Friday 9 April 2010 19:15

Ill Fares the Land BY Tony Judt Allen Lane, 256pp, £20 Review by ANDREW NEATHER

IT IS perhaps a measure of how far our political discourse has shifted to the right that Tony Judt, in most respects an old-fashioned social democrat, manages to sound so left-wing today.

Judt's case for a new progressive politics based on equality is eminently reasonable. The financial crisis and recession have made many free-market orthodoxies unfashionable. Yet, we are facing an election with the two major parties perhaps more similar than ever in their tired adherence to neo-liberal assumptions.

Judt starts this short and readable treatise with the declaration "something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today": material self-interest has taken over from "collective purpose". He traces this to the steady breakdown, over the past 30 years, of the models of the welfare state developed in Britain, the US, continental Europe and Scandinavia following the 1930s depression and the Second World War.

Ironically, it was the baby-boomer generation, the first to grow up protected by the welfare state that rejected its security blanket, instead championing a more individualistic politics. Their subjectivism and the concomitant fragmentation of the Left, together with the ascendancy of the neo-liberal Right, led to the steady erosion of the post-war, social-democratic consensus. That turn was most dramatic in Britain and the US but evident across Europe and the Anglophone world.

The collapse of communism in 1989-1991 accelerated that process by further disorientating the centre-left, for European social democrats had always defined themselves in relation to the communists, and as part of the same "historically buttressed narrative". The end result, Judt believes, is that the political opportunity offered by the collapse of communism was lost and "the years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts".

There has been wealth redistribution in favour of the wealthy. Privatisation has hollowed out the public sphere, which has contributed to the atomisation of society.

In an era typified by boondoggles such as the Tube's public-private partnership, it isn't just banks which are "too big to fail", the state has to step in whenever private-sector greed and inefficiency leads basic services to breaking point. It is no surprise the public's faith in politicians has collapsed – and Judt has little but contempt for the Blair-Brown-Sarkozy-Clinton generation, leaders who "convey neither conviction nor authority".

Where he is on less certain ground is in trying to map out an alternative. He is surely right to emphasise the non-market nature of basic values such as fairness and wellbeing. He emphasises that the reduction of inequality must come first: drawing heavily on the evidence of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett's The Spirit Level, he argues that inequality is inefficient as well as morally troubling. Indeed, as has become increasingly clear from the financial crisis, only the state can guarantee the market, which is otherwise always pulled out of shape by some participants.

Yet this is only a faltering battle cry for social democracy, a "mongrel politics" he sees as ultimately the least-worst option. Its moment should surely have come again with the manifest failure of the market.

Yet without the passion that drove earlier politicians such as Nye Bevan to fight public squalor and want, it is hard to envisage a real resurgence of left-wing politics. Perhaps people aren't angry enough yet: in which case, if not now, when?