Common-sense neoliberalism

Stuart Hall and Alan OShea

And let this be our message common sense for the common good.
David Cameron, 24.4.11

hen politicians try to win consent or mobilise support for

their policies, they frequently assert that these are endorsed by
hard-working families up and down the country. Their
policies cannot be impractical, unreasonable or extreme, they imply,
because they are solidly in the groove of popular thinking what
everybody knows, takes-for-granted and agrees with the folk wisdom
of the age. This claim by the politicians, if correct, confers on their
policies popular legitimacy.
In fact, what they are really doing is not just invoking popular
opinion but shaping and influencing it so they can harness it in their
favour. By asserting that popular opinion already agrees, they hope to
produce agreement as an effect. This is the circular strategy of the selffulfilling prophecy.
But what exactly is common sense? It is a form of everyday thinking
which offers us frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the
world. It is a form of popular, easily-available knowledge which
contains no complicated ideas, requires no sophisticated argument and
does not depend on deep thought or wide reading. It works intuitively,
without forethought or reflection. It is pragmatic and empirical, giving
the illusion of arising directly from experience, reflecting only the
realities of daily life and answering the needs of the common people
for practical guidance and advice.
It is not the property of the rich, the well-educated or the powerful,
but is shared to some extent by everybody, regardless of class, status,
creed, income or wealth. Typically, it expresses itself in the vernacular,

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the familiar language of the street, the home, the pub, the workplace
and the terraces. The popularity and influence of the tabloid press one
of its main repositories depends on how well it imitates, or better,
ventriloquises the language and gnomic speech patterns of ordinary
folk. In the now-famous example, it must say not British Navy Sinks
Argentinean Cruiser but, simply, Gotcha.
According to Antonio Gramsci, the Italian political philosopher who
has written perceptively on this subject, common sense is not critical
and coherent but disjointed and episodic.1 However, it does have a
logic and a history. It is always, Gramsci argues, a response to certain
problems posed by reality which are quite specific and original in
their relevance. It draws on past ideas and traditions; but it also keeps
evolving to give meaning to new developments, solve new problems,
unravel new dilemmas. Common sense, as Gramsci argued, is not
something rigid and immobile, but is continually transforming itself.
It also has a content. It is a compendium of well-tried knowledge,
customary beliefs, wise sayings, popular nostrums and prejudices,
some of which like a little of what you fancy does you good seem
eminently sensible, others wildly inaccurate. Its virtue is that it is
obvious. Its watchword is, Of course!. It seems to be outside time.
Indeed it may be persuasive precisely because we think of it as a
product of Nature rather than of history.
Common sense tends to be socially conservative, leaning towards
tradition (even if, as Eric Hobsbawm argued, much tradition was only
invented yesterday!). Its pace of change seems glacial. In fact, it is
constantly being reconstructed and refashioned by external pressures
and influences.
Common sense feels coherent. But Gramsci argues that, like the
personality, it is strangely composite. It contains Stone Age elements
and principles of a more advanced science, prejudices from all past
phases of history and intuitions of a future philosophy. For these
and other reasons, it is fundamentally contradictory. It tells not one
narrative, but several conflicting stories stitched together while
failing to resolve the differences between them. Bits and pieces of ideas
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from many sources what Gramsci calls stratified deposits have

slowly settled or sedimented, in truncated and simplified forms, into
popular philosophy, without leaving behind an inventory of their
sources. The Manifesto Framing Statement argues that, for example,
contemporary neoliberal ideas about free markets derive from and are
consistent with the eighteenth-century theories of Adam Smith and the
early political economists, though most people have never heard of, let
alone read them. Many common-sense moral judgements for example
about sexuality have a Judeo-Christian lineage, though we do not
know where in the Bible they are to be found.
Many people intuitively favour an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth
conception of justice while at the same time believing that Muslim
Sharia Law is a barbarous form of law. Some who depend on benefits to
survive believe all the other claimants are scroungers. Some who hold
that unbridled competition driven by self-interest is the only way to
succeed also believe we should love our neighbours as ourselves.
Margaret Thatcher, the mistress of common-sense language, and of
squaring circles, supported both the free market (i.e. one without
much state regulation) and a strong state.
However, as well as being conservative in outlook, common sense
also contains critical or utopian elements, which Gramsci calls the
healthy nucleus which deserves to be made more unitary and
coherent. He is referring to the apparently obvious taken-for granted
understandings that express a sense of unfairness and injustice about
how the world works: landlords tend to exploit tenants, banks
responsible for the credit crunch expect to be bailed out by taxpayers
rather than take the crunch themselves. CEOs receive immense bonuses
even when their companies perform badly; profitable businesses will
avoid paying tax if they can; and companies profiting from a fall in
commodity prices will not pass the gains on to consumers.
Gramsci called these apparently natural insights into the wicked
ways of the world good sense. And good sense provides a basis on
which the left could develop a popular strategy for radical change if it
takes on board the idea that common sense is a site of political struggle.
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Common sense and good sense co-exist. Our ability to live with this
incoherent structure may be due to the fact that the stratified deposits
of common sense represent the outlook and interests of very different
social groups: Every philosophical current leaves behind a
sedimentation of common sense: this is the document of its historical
effectiveness. It is this that allows us to hold contradictory opinions
simultaneously, and to take up contradictory subject-positions.
As citizens, we expect public services in return for paying taxes. But
as taxpayers we are invited to think that we should pay as few taxes as
possible, whatever the social consequences. Margaret Thatcher
exploited such contradictions, arguing that, as workers, we have
sectional interests, but we are all consumers and as consumers we want
a choice. We want the best value for money. Hence: the same trade
unionists, as consumers, want an open market. The difficulty is that
most of us are simultaneously citizens, taxpayers and workers. So
discourses which try to win us over must privilege one way of
positioning ourselves over others. Common sense thus becomes a
contested arena. As Doreen Massey argued in Vocabularies of the
Economy, we know that doctor/patient, teacher/student, citizen/state,
client/provider, shopper/supermarket relationships all have specific,
and very different, social contents. However, if we can be persuaded to
see ourselves simply as customers, then all the other relationships are
reduced to one common denominator: the fact that we are consuming a
product [sic] in a market [sic] which only has value because we pay for
it [sic]. Everything becomes a commodity, and this aspect of our
activities over-rides everything. In this way a whole new way of seeing
society (as a market) is coming into play. If developed, it could provide
the cornerstone for a new kind of (neoliberal) common sense.
The Framing Statement argues that this is indeed what is happening.
Slowly but surely, neoliberal ideas have permeated society and are
transforming what passes as common sense. The broadly egalitarian
and collectivist attitudes that underpinned the welfare state era are
giving way to a more competitive, individualistic market-driven,
entrepreneurial, profit-oriented outlook. There is no proof as to how far
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this process has gone: the evidence is hard to read, and the trend is
certainly not one-way. However, after forty years of a concerted
neoliberal ideological assault, this new version of common sense is fast
becoming the dominant one.
One common-sense assertion that has become widely acceptable is:
You cant solve a problem just by throwing money at it often aimed at
Labours tax and spend policies. True, perhaps. But there are very few
problems which would not be considerably alleviated by being better
funded rather than having their budgets savagely cut. The rights use of
this slogan is of course highly selective: they have no qualms about
money being thrown at the banks or at the economy via quantitative
easing.
Taxpayers, it is said, want value for money and greater efficiency.
Citizens certainly have a right to see their money well spent. But are the
fire service, the police, ambulance crews, youth and community
workers, mental health staff, or child-minders necessarily more efficient
because there are fewer of them? Can their benefit to society be
measured exclusively in terms of their exchange value? If policing is
more efficient when information-led, how come the backroom staff
who provide the information are seen as dispensable, on the grounds
that they are not front-line staff? More and more, these common-sense
truths serve as a cover-up for savaging the public sector in line with the
dominant neoliberal, anti-state ideology.
These days, we are told, we all want greater freedom and personal
choice. Indeed, not only are we given freedom to choose, we are
required to choose: which hospital to be ill in, which life-style to adopt,
which identity to fashion, which celebrity role-model to imitate.
Certainly, there is no reason why only the well-off should exercise
choice. However, there is also strong evidence that the responsibility
which comes with so much choice can create unfulfillable expectations,
anxiety and a sense of the precariousness of life.2 This sense of
insecurity is then further exacerbated by the increasing introduction in
the workplace of personal targets, appraisals and performance-related
pay, to keep staff up to the mark. Michael Gove now plans to introduce
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the latter into the teaching profession. But its all down to us apart
from being untrue is a hard truth to live with. What if we make the
wrong choice?
The structural consequences of neoliberalism the individualisation
of everyone, the privatisation of public troubles and the requirement to
make competitive choices at every turn has been paralleled by an
upsurge in feelings of insecurity, anxiety, stress and depression. These
are now responsible for one in every three days sick leave from work.3
We need to acknowledge these affective dimensions that are in play, and
which underpin common sense.
How then does common sense make sense of these changes in lived
experience? Have most people accepted that it is inevitable and natural
to understand most of our life as consumers and market competitors?
There are in fact many signs of resistance to be found. These include
older forms of political protest, such as the trade unions, and newer,
emerging, forms such as Occupy, UK Uncut or 38 Degrees. However
these do not in any way constitute a single social force, as happened to
some extent with the GLC in the 1980s, when, although the traditional
left and the new social movements did not always agree and certainly
were not unified they did occupy the same space, and struggle over
the same budget, and together offered a broader and more effective
political force than we have seen since then.
There is also much individualised disaffection. To fall ill with anxiety
is itself a symptom that some people are finding it difficult to live with
neoliberal culture. Another is a marked retreat, in popular culture, to an
isolated self-sufficiency. There is unfocused anger, a grudging,
grumbling resentment at ones lot, and a troubled uncertainty about
what to do next. There is a sense of being abandoned by the political
class and widespread cynicism, disaffiliation and de-politicisation.
Many groups, of course, do have cultural resources to resist these
trends and these include historic working-class solidarities, defensive
organisations, strong local loyalties and a culture of mutual support.
Others have insight into new processes, such as digital technologies and
communication, which are changing the shape of society. But these
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have not resulted in any coming together in a vigorous, effective

response.

Fairness
The resistance which lies in the good sense components of common
sense is more elusive, but still possible to illustrate. To attempt this, and
to demonstrate why this understanding of common sense is valuable for
fighting the spread of neoliberal discourse, we will now focus on one
pivotal element the idea of fairness and its role in popular discourse
during the winter of 2012/13. We have selected fairness as our instance
because no one is against it. It is a term that the whole political spectrum
struggles to inflect to their own project.
First we outline the role of fairness in recent political history; then
we look at material from readers comments attached to one news report
in the Sun. We draw on this, first, to give an indication of the range of
appropriations which are in play in popular discourse at any one
moment, and, second, to take a more detailed look at the ways in which
one particular commenter cuts and pastes various beliefs, terms and
political positions into what Gramsci called a strangely composite
common sense one which combines its elements differently and
flexibly to address different contexts and topics. In the course of this we
point up the danger of politicians getting too fixated on the public
opinion provided by polls.
What counts as fair has been pivotal to our political history. The
welfare state was set up in the 1940s as a collective contract between all
members of the society to guarantee a fairer distribution of wealth, and
a chance for everyone to flourish and make a useful contribution. These
aspirations were supported by a broad consensus across the population.
The neoliberal right has been working hard to undermine and transcode this inclusive meaning of fairness since the 1970s. Margaret
Thatcher made it her project to break up the consensus and substitute a
market approach. But she also validated this by a common sense appeal
to what we all already think:
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A great number of people in Britain are becoming increasingly

alarmed about a society which depends on the states help on
entitlement. What has happened is that so many of the people who
have done everything right and saved for their old age and put a bit
by, seem to have had a raw deal. Some of those who have done only
too little and have not done it very well have been on the beneficial
end of what has been going You cant have welfare before
someone else has created national wealth.
Speech to party workers, Berwick, 30.8.78

Two decades later, David Cameron echoed the same sentiment:

For too long weve lived in an upside down world where people who
do the right thing, the responsible thing, are taxed and punished,
whereas those who do the wrong thing are rewarded And for that
person intent on ripping off the system, we are saying we will not let
you live off the hard work of others. Tough sanctions. Tougher limits.
In short were building a system that matches effort with reward
instead of a system that rewards those who make no effort.
Speech, 23.05.114

Here fairness is a quasi-market relation, a reward for personal effort a

long way from the collectivism of the 1940s.
Recent attitude surveys (from the Joseph Rowntree and Resolution
Foundations) suggest that the decades of playing off hard-working
families against those who for one reason or another are unable to find
work have achieved the intended result. The surveys found a decline in
sympathy for the poor and those on benefits. The concept of fairness
was generally disconnected from any notion of rights (No-one is owed
a living), and seen simply in terms of fair rewards for effort.
The 2012-13 fairness debate focused on George Osbornes decision
to cap benefit payments below the rate of inflation, and Duncan Smiths
welfare reforms, which were accompanied by the launch of a large-scale
moral panic demonising claimants, which was amplified
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enthusiastically by the press, and not strongly resisted by broadcasters

(including the BBC).
In his now notorious contribution, Osborne asked:
Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in
the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed
blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits?
When we say were all in this together, we speak for that worker. We
speak for all those who want to work hard and get on.
Conservative Party Conference, 8.10.12

This vivid image has been amplified by personal stories, and profiles of
specific out-of-work families on benefits greater than the average wage
(with no reference to the fact that a very large chunk of this is housing
benefit paid directly to profiteering landlords). A YouGov poll found
that people on average thought that 41 per cent of the welfare budget
went on benefits to the unemployed, while the true figure is 3 per cent;
and that 27 per cent of the welfare budget was claimed fraudulently,
while the governments own figure is 0.7 per cent.5 This suggests that
the folk devil figure of the scrounger/skiver/shirker/fraudster living
a life of idle luxury has resonated with many peoples concerns,
resentments and insecurities.
This is the ideological climate in which both polling and online
responses have to be understood. The debate has been conducted
within a neoliberal framing of the agenda across most of the political
spectrum and media output. This frame takes for granted that the
market relation is central (you can only have what you pay for), the
deficit is the problem, and cutting public expenditure is the only
solution; and, within this, cutting welfare benefits is the priority and
its all a result of Labours mess. (The Labour Party itself hasnt strongly
challenged this!) In the context of this closing down of the debate, along
with the onslaught of propaganda and misinformation, it is not
surprising that polls show that support for capping benefits below the
rate of inflation can be rallied.
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But we have to beware taking poll findings as the unquestionable

truth, or as reflecting deeply held political positions. The YouGov poll
also showed that when respondents were given the correct figures, their
views changed and they became more sympathetic towards benefit
claimants. This demonstrates that the earlier responses were a result of
an effective misinformation campaign by the government and the press,
and not of some uncontaminated opinion of those polled. As David
Stuckler has recently pointed out:
Peoples support for welfare depends greatly on how the question is
framed. When the question links taxes to specific programmes and
recipients, the young tend to express stronger support. For
example, only 20 per cent of British youth agree with the very broad
idea of giving more money to the poor, but when asked about
support for specific vulnerable groups, such as the disabled or
working parents, more than 90 per cent would like to increase or
maintain existing levels of support.6

Opinion polls are taken especially by the media as objective fixities,

as an indisputable tide against which politicians turn at their peril
rather than as yes/no answers to questions framed from within the
dominant agenda of the moment. They are a tool in the struggle over
common sense, rather than an objective reflection of it.
People are less decided about issues than polls suggest. To get a
better sense of the way discourse works, and of how people are
engaging with neoliberal frames and agendas and reworking their
common sense in response, we need to do more than work with simple
answers to questions commissioned by vested interests. We have to
capture discourse which is volunteered, which arises from the writers
own set of concerns, and is as spontaneous and unfettered by what
others may think as possible. Online comments are rather like this,
especially as everyone contributes under a pseudonym.
Online responses to newspaper articles are often very thin, and
dominated by egotists and spoilers, but the Suns blogs are voluminous
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and richly varied, with an energy that comes from genuine anger,
irony, moving accounts of peoples own difficulties, unashamed
prejudice, etc. This is why weve chosen to use material from the 158
comments in response to the Suns report (8.1.13) of Iain Duncan
Smiths introduction of the bill to cap benefits below the rate of
inflation as an indication of how notions of fairness are currently
being contested. The contributors are, of course, in no way
representative of any social group. The analysis of common sense
isnt about representativeness; it is about how the field of discourse is
constituted at any particular moment in time. Each contribution is
unique to the speaker their own specific inflection of elements from
within that field. As Gramsci said, there are as many Catholicisms as
there are Catholics each one appropriates, inflects and deploys their
Catholicism differently.
It should also be noted that some of the contributors are fairly
obviously not even regular readers of the Sun, and are intervening from
outside. This includes those who are consciously trying to shift the
discourse for political reasons, and even the newspaper proprietors
themselves. But they all have to address the benefits issue on the terrain
of common sense and in everyday language. By looking at the
discursive strategies each contribution uses, we can see in greater detail
how they establish a field of debate, contend with each other, and
privilege particular common-sense framings of an issue.
The following quotations give an indication of some of the different
inflections of fairness in play. A good number joined enthusiastically in
the demonisation of benefit claimants:
About time these lazy dole lovers got a taste of what everyone else has.
In the coming days well hear all the benefit scroungers moaning
that its not fair, blah, blah, blah. The ones I know of can afford 2
holidays a year, a new top of the range phone every year, new TV etc
and say its their right!!! No its not their right, the benefit system is
there for you to get by, not live the life of two holidays a year, out on
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the razz every weekend etc. Time to wake up and smell the coffee,
about time too.

But one contributor vehemently and wittily challenged these

stereotypes:
Thank you to some of the commenters here. With all of your
scroungers, iPhones/iPads, Sky subscriptions, widescreen TVs,
backsides, lazies, work shies, immigrants, expensive holidays
and Jeremy Kyles I managed to complete my internet idiot bingo
card for the day, despite the absence of booze and fags. Seriously, I
actually wonder if some of you are even human beings or just a
bunch of spambots.

Others openly directed their scorn against the rich not so surprisingly,
since outrage against the bankers bonuses has become widespread. Iain
Duncan Smith was often seen as an agent of the toffs attacking the
weak and vulnerable. George Osborne was almost universally
condemned as an enemy of the poor. Also many saw MPs in general as a
greedy, self-serving section of the wealthy:
The only scroungers are in the GOVERNMENT, they have high
wages and claim large amounts in expenses. We are all in this
together, Ha Ha Ha.
Could we have 1 per cent cap on MPs expenses too. After all, were
all in this together.

Others, however, echo the distinction between the deserving and

undeserving unemployed, based on the nineteenth-century Poor Law,
which Iain Duncan Smith regularly borrows. Some also used this
distinction to attack immigration; and, as is common when immigration
is being debated, race and animosity towards foreigners is often
implied, though they may not be mentioned explicitly:
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While I am of the opinion that no-one who is too lazy to work

should be better off on welfare than some working families, I do not
think it fair that someone who has worked for many years and then
finds themself out of work through no fault of their own and has
contributed tax and national insurance, should be getting the same
paltry benefit as someone who has never worked a day in their life. I
also object to immigrants who have never contributed to our
economy being given handouts and for those with large families,
being put up in mansions that the general working public could
never afford but are expected to subsidise. It is high time that we
closed our borders to those who are not able or willing to contribute
to our economy.

This contribution accepts Camerons definition of fairness as a system

that matches reward with effort, a right to get out only what you put in.
The reasonable-sounding nature of this position serves to deflect the
criticism one might expect toward the xenophobic undercurrents it
relies on. It represents a success for neoliberalism a dismantling of any
collective social responsibility and a reduction of citizens to barterers
something for something: worlds away from the collective social
model. However the next example reintroduces this into the debate,
and also recognises that the attempt to equate benefits with the workshy
is deceitful, given that most recipients are in work:
There is a reason for benefits: quite literally no-one knows when
they might need the welfare state. This government cannot claim to
be on the side of strivers while also taking their benefits away. Every
time Iain Duncan Smith portrays benefit cuts as targeted on the
workshy, remember: three-quarters of the families getting tax
credits are in work. If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it,
people will eventually come to believe it.

A few others have an even starker political analysis a deliberate refusal

of the neoliberal frame:
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These benefit changes will hit the poor and lowest paid the hardest.
But that is what the greed driven and morally corrupt Tories do.
They target the weakest in society, to deflect from their own
ineptitude and thievery. They have given the rich tax cuts, allowed
tax avoidance to continue to the tune of 60+ billion a year, and
given 4 billion in bonuses to publicly owned banks since 2010.
This is a very horrible Government, led by people who only know
the world of public schools.

We also find an incipient critique of competitive individualism:

The vast majority of people on disability benefits are disabled.
Many of those go through life suffering and struggling with their
afflictions. Making it so they have to struggle to survive financially
on top of that is nothing short of cruelty and is the sign of a broken
society where people are only out for themselves.

These are just a few of the range of fairnesses currently in play

contesting the issue of welfare benefits. We will discuss in the final
section how political movements could engage with this material. But
first we want to illustrate the strangely composite nature of common
sense at the level of the individual how most (all?) of us articulate
together ideological elements from very disparate sources, such that
there is an unresolved struggle over common sense within the individual
as well as between individuals and groups an instability that can be
addressed by the left.
The next contributor demonstrates just this: we find a cluster of very
disparate common senses inhabited and held together by the same
individual. In her three contributions to the discussion, she draws upon
a hotchpotch of different discourses including the radical insight that
the decline in wages is a major cause of rising benefit payments:
Instead of Labour banging on about people losing their tax credits
whilst working (their core voters), they should be asking themselves
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WHY 9 out of 10 people needed tax credits to work for a living in

the first place. Minimum wages should have been increased under
their watch, but it was more profitable election wise to throw money
at people to bribe them to vote for them. Always the party of the
gutless, Labour always take the road of least resistance no matter
what the cost to the public and the cost now is being born by their
grass roots voters disgraceful performance.

However, in other comments, the same contributor uses the shirkers

discourse of the Tory right, echoing the harsh moralism of Margaret
Thatcher:
People moaning about benefit cuts must be benefit claimants. Every
time someone moans on here about the amount they receive not
being enough according to them it is always to pay for store cards/
credit cards, phone bills etc. Benefits are for food and rent
fullstop! If you have anything else you normally pay for whilst
working that is your fault, especially items on subscription or
contracts or loans, anyone with a brain does not spend money they
know they do not have coming in to pay in cash! That is the
problem with this country, the people have been living well beyond
their means for years.

In yet another contribution she combines her call for a living wage with
hostility to immigration:
There are going to be riots in the street before long because even
though the benefit system needs reforming, wages are far too low
and people IN work cannot survive on what they are being paid, so
they will be marching for an increase in the minimum wage and so
they should, also for a complete halt in immigration. How can you
even begin to consider creating extra jobs when Romanians and
Bulgarians in their thousands are panting at the bit to get here for
either jobs or benefits. It is a disgrace, something has to be done.
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In this sequence, then, on the one hand declining wages are identified
as the underlying cause of the rise in benefit bills: everyone, she implies,
needs enough to live on and wages should be high enough to deliver
this. But on the other hand she makes the argument that benefit
claimants should not be able to afford telephones, etc, but only food
and rent, and again identifies immigration as a major cause of the
present crisis. Its a patchwork of received ideas not yet reconciled into a
coherent perspective, and applied selectively and to different effect in
different contexts though it clearly includes elements of good sense
alongside the othering of immigrants and benefit claimants.
What can we learn from this material? Firstly that while neoliberal
discourse is increasingly hegemonic and setting the agendas for debate,
there are other currents in play empathy for others, a liking for
co-operation rather than competition, or a sense of injustice, for example.
We can also learn how people connect together contradictory
aspects of their understanding of society how, for example, they marry
class anger with the politics of UKIP or the BNP; what anxieties
underpin these links; and how scapegoats are deployed to
simultaneously address and disavow underlying social problems.
The left and the Labour Party must take the struggle over common
sense seriously. Politics, as Gramsci insisted, is always educative. We
must acknowledge the insecurities which underlie common senses
confusions and contradictions, and harness the intensity and anger
which comes through in many of the readers comments. Labour must
use every policy issue as an opportunity, not only to examine the
pragmatics, but to highlight the underlying principle, slowly building
an alternative consensus or popular philosophy. It must harness to this
the already strongly existing sense of unfairness and injustice. In other
words, it must engage in a two-way learning process, leading to what
Gramsci called an organic cohesion in which feeling-passion becomes
understanding. This may be complicated in the context of a popular
cynicism toward the political class in general, but there is no alternative.
The Labour Party may be busy developing alternative policies, but
theres no sign that it is breaking with the neoliberal framing of debates,
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of challenging the taken-for-granted assumptions listed earlier. Rather,

it is nervously responding to polls which frame their questions within
this neoliberal agenda, fearful to go against the public opinion derived
from it which suggests that the public want benefits to be cut further.
A recent instance of this is Ed Milibands speech (6.6.13) on his
policy for social security reform. He could have begun with a searing
critique of the Coalition project and its neoliberal principles, and then
marked out a qualitatively different set of values which will inform
Labours project, and the policies which follow from those principles. As
it was, he began by stressing how little money there will be to spend, and
saying that hed handle it with decent values at the heart of the system
(but only very loosely indicating what these are One Nation values of
greater fairness and co-operation and inclusiveness rather than conflict),
before going on to work through the policy areas, arguing for his
alternatives. There was no critique of the austerity agenda as a whole.
The policy which made the headlines in most of the media was that
Labour, if elected, will match the Coalitions cap on welfare spending,
for the first year at least. This came towards the end of the speech,
although it was hinted at earlier. The detail of the speech proposes that
the plan is to achieve this limit through alternative strategies such as
pushing the minimum wage upwards towards a living wage; controlling
the housing budget by supporting councils to get a better deal from
private landlords; subsidising youth employment; and urgent
infrastructural spending to create more jobs and build more houses.
Such measures would reduce the need for benefits, rather than reducing
actual payments. But while many people became aware of the
headlines, only a few managed to take in these details. And even if they
did, at best the speech reads as a more humane way of realising the
austerity agenda. Those policies could have been framed within a
radical critique of the whole Coalition project, but they werent. Our
local canvassing experience is of traditional Labour voters having taken
in the headlines and in response asking why bother? no-one is
offering an alternative to austerity.
This headline must have been expected and indeed intended. It was
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a push for the middle ground (and Blairites responded favourably). But
it is such a short-term tactic, and one that makes no impact on the
neoliberal hegemony. The speech repeatedly stresses that the strategy is
long-termist, but ultimately it reads as a series of alternative policies to
the same end, when it could have been framed as a campaign for a
different kind of society. Far better to recognise the widespread good
sense of the anger towards the banks, and at the widespread social
injustice in contemporary Britain, the growing support for the living
wage, the widespread sense of insecurity, and to reject boldly the
inequalities produced by a laissez-faire market; to frame Labour policies
as a crusade for a society which harnesses the market to the needs of its
people, rather than letting it dictate how we have to live. If this were to
become the framing agenda, we might find polls asking Should
someone who does a full-time job be paid enough to live on?. Or If
someone is made redundant, should the state provide support while he/
she is finding a new job? As David Stuckler argues above, if we did so
we would find a public opinion of a different order.
Labour can only win the battle of ideas if it takes its role as a popular
educator seriously. Each crisis provides an opportunity to shift the
direction of popular thinking, instead of simply mirroring the rights
populist touch or pursuing short-term opportunism. The left, and Labour
in particular, must adopt a more courageous, innovative, educative and
path-breaking strategic approach if they are to gain ground.

Notes
1. All quotations from Gramsci are from Selections from the Prison Notebooks,
Lawrence and Wishart 1972.
2. Renata Salecl, Choice, Profile Books 2010.
3. The Young Foundation, Sinking and Swimming, online report, 2011.
4. www.conservatives.com/News/Speeches/2011/05/David_Cameron_
Building_a_bigger_stronger_society.aspx.
5. www.tuc.org.uk/social/tuc-21796-f0.cfm.
6. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jul/30/generation-yhalfhearted-its-a-lie?INTCMP=SRCH.
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