Buy to Let

I thought it a wild goose chase, but my wife pressed me to give it a go. She was worried about our financial situation, "If only we had a little security...."

"Security is a menace to the development of character." 

"What?"

"Henry Miller."

"If he's so clever, maybe he'd like to put bread on our table." 

"He's dead."

A bookkeeper friend had made a fortune by buying properties and renting them out. Lots of people were doing it; so why not us? She didn't mean "us", of course - she was working hard enough as it was - she meant "me".

Advice on the web recommended property auctions, so I did a little research and picked out Manchester and Blackpool as having good prospects. Our savings didn't amount to much, and I knew it was no use looking in London or the Cotswolds. Also Manchester and Blackpool were close together so I could visit both on the same trip. My thinking was pretty simple, I suppose, and muddled. But what did I know? A Lancashire auctioneer sent me a catalogue and a calendar of viewing dates.

During the train journey north I marked up the properties I thought might be interesting. It was wintry, mid-February. Rain fell unremittingly during the journey, and the clouds, low and heavy, cast a gloom over the countryside. Inside the train, passengers sat wrapped in overcoats and scarves against an icy current of air streaming from the ventilation system. No apology came from the rail operator for the lack of heating, nor when the train stopped for an hour and fifty-four minutes north west of Wolverhampton, though we did get an explanation: a dead dog on the line.

I'd been hoping to visit the auctioneer's office, but the train delay meant that it was closed by the time we drew in at Manchester. I booked into a small downtown hotel for the night and the next day took a taxi to my first viewing. 

Regenerated and with an air of prosperity, the city centre proved to be no more than a deceptive enclave. Beyond it, the urban landscape resembled an abandoned backstage lot, a wasteland of overflowing litter bins, polythene garbage bags, discarded pallets, empty shops and warehouses, shuttered pubs, houses boarded up with weather-stained plywood sheets. Vacant plots were strewn with rubble from demolished buildings. For the last mile of the journey, the driver had to dodge broken bricks, pieces of twisted iron and chunks of concrete left lying in the streets. "Wouldn't like to drive round 'ere in the dark," he said as I paid him. "If they 'ad any sense, they'd clear it all away and start again. Used to be lively round 'ere when I was a kid. Look at it now."

A handful of people had shown up for the viewing and were gathered in front of the house. 

"Agent's late as usual," one of them muttered. 

I glanced up and down the street of terraced redbricks. Half a dozen of the dwellings were vacant and creeping towards dereliction, but attempts had been made to brighten up the others. Front doors were painted in bright reds, yellows and greens. Several displayed vases of fresh flowers in their front windows. Crossing the road to take a perspective on the sale property, I spotted a tiny, middle-aged woman struggling along the pavement with shopping bags. I approached and offered to carry them.

"You're a big strapping lad," she said. "You're not going to run off with my groceries, are you?"

She spoke in a broad Lancashire brogue of gentle, unpasteurised vowels. "Just as far as number 12, then. It's very kind."        

I asked her if she liked living in the district.

 "B'in 'ere all me life, I 'ave. Wouldn't catch me no place else. Not no more. Too old to move now even if I could afford it. It's really quite nice. And the rent is ever so reasonable." 

We passed two women in curlers and housecoats, chatting. They, too, were tiny with skin and bone faces and spindle arms. Their clothes drooped from them in shapeless folds.

"Thanks for 'elping 'er love," one of them said. "Not as young as she used to be, are you our Aida?"

"Never mind my age," Aida retorted. "You'll be there afore you know't."

We reached Aida's house and I set her bags on the doorstep. 

"They shouldn't 'ave stopped the buses, mind you," she said. "Used to come every ten minutes, just up there in Pickling Street. All through the war we 'ad buses. Stopped 'em five year ago now. They don't care about the poor no more. You comin' to live 'ere?"

"Perhaps."

Aida rang the bell and the front door opened to reveal a spindly young man in jeans, hollow chested, face pale and pitted with acne scars. 

"Me son. He's a good lad really."

The good lad glanced at me briefly then, without saying a word, took the bags inside. I turned to go.

"You'll like it 'ere," Aida called after me. "People are ever so nice."

A battered red Ford drew up in front of the house I had come to see. Two men got out. One wore a cloth cap and a threadbare overcoat, the other a padded nylon jacket and grey trousers shiny with age.

"I'm the agent's man," the latter said to the assembled group of viewers. "Name's Jack. Sorry I'm late. Bit of trouble with the car. That right Derek?"

Derek, his companion nodded.

Both men were in their fifties. Jack, the taller by a head, carried a bunch of keys. He tried several before he found one that fitted.

"I'm in charge, right Derek?" He pushed open the door and ushered us in.

A two-up and two-down worker's cottage, it smelled musty and damp. On both floors,  the rear wall bulged with crumbling mortar.

"Better to knock these houses down," someone remarked.

“They were going to do that according to what I heard," Jack volunteered. 

In ten minutes we were all outside again. 

Jack led us to a second house in the next block. This too was damp, empty and dispiriting.

"Waste of time." One of our group said, in a voice redolent of the Indian sub-continent. "Came round just to see. But we're sticking to the better areas nowadays. All this lot should be condemned and the sooner it goes the better if you ask me."

He got into a silver BMW, and roared off. Gradually, the other viewers also left. Lacking transportation of my own I asked Jack if could give me a lift to the next house on his list.

"Dunno about that," said Jack. "I've already got Derek, and there's not much room."

He was right. The rear seat of his car was occupied by a miscellany of tools, a large cardboard box, several pairs old shoes, bundles of magazines and newspapers.

"Still," said Jack, "It's only Derek, He'll manage in the back, that right Derek?"

Derek managed, and I got into the front passenger seat, placing my feet on a pile of oily rags. The interior stank of petrol fumes. Jack started the car, but stopped it again.

"Fuel leak."

He jumped out and raised the bonnet.

Derek and I got out too.

"What do you think, Derek?" Jack asked.

Derek stuck his head into the bonnet for a moment and muttered unintelligibly.

"You may well think that, Derek," said Jack, "But I think otherwise. No offence meant Derek. But you're no mechanic, are you? Fetch my tool box Derek, there's a good man. It's in the boot."

Derek duly complied. Jack selected a trio of spanners of different gauges with which he adjusted nuts on the carburettor and fuel filter, alternatively tightening then loosening them. 

"That'll 'ave to do," he said at length. 

We clambered in and set off. 

"Still smells of fuel," said Jack. "Right Derek?"

Derek mumbled what sounded like assent.

At the next house, in a neighbourhood called Moston, scarcely less dreary than the first though as yet unassailed by demolition crews, a women was waiting in a green two-seater MG. An ashtray full of butts rested on the passenger seat beside her.

"Thought you weren't coming," she said to Jack. 

In her mid-fifties, she was dressed in a red woollen suit flecked with grey cigarette ash. "Bought a property last year in Brighouse and it's doing ever so well," she said, taking a last long draw of her cigarette before dropping the butt on the pavement. Her yellowed-stained fingers shook nervously.

The house we had come to see was occupied but the tenants were out. This one too smelled of damp and wood rot. Mould grew on the ceilings. Wallpaper hung limply from walls that glistened with moisture and salts. Beds stood in every room except the kitchen which was furnished with a hot plate, an upholstered armchair with a broken arm, four upright chairs, and a formica table on which lay a partially completed application form for entry to a local college of nursing. The applicant's name - Miss Mumtoza Butalezi - was written in blue ballpoint at the top of the page.

"They'll all be blacks in this house," said the woman in red. "You can smell them."

Last house of the tour was in yet another district, Gorton, whose streetscape of dreary terraces and decaying shops was by now familiar. I was struck by the absence of vegetation: no hedges, or shrubs in front gardens, no parks, no playgrounds for children, no evidence of civic pride. People in the street looked undernourished, like trees clinging to life on a blasted heath. Even the buildings looked gaunt and cold as if the sun never warmed them.

We had not yet reached our destination when the car's engine began to scream. Jack shifted into neutral, cut the ignition and steered us into the roadside. 

"Problem this time we have Derek."

The accelerator pedal had jettisoned its spring and now lay flat and loose beneath Jack's feet. For a moment he was nonplussed. I offered a few suggestions from the encyclopaedia of my ignorance and when these were rejected, proposed that we call a breakdown service.

"They'll charge more than the car's worth," Jack said. "I didn't buy it new, you know. Twenty-five years old is this car. Pretty good for its age. We can fix this. No trouble at all." 

He turned to Derek.

"Now then, young man, look sharp. There's a ball of twine back there somewhere."

Derek mumbled, and it occurred to me that his slurred speech was probably the result of a stroke. He flapped around inconclusively until Jack directed him to the cardboard box.

"There you are," Jack said his confidence evidently intact. "You just have to use your eyes."

Derek handed him the ball of twine which he flourished as if it were a lottery win.

"Look and you shall find, Derek. Look and you shall find."

Derek's role, I understood, was not to contribute but to stand as evidence that there was someone in Jack's world who stood below him in life's pecking order. 

Jack busied himself with the repair. He attached a line to the throttle which he then threaded first through the side of the bonnet and then the window on the driver's side. By pulling or slackening the line he was able control the tension on the throttle. We climbed in, Jack restarted the engine and we move off. Somehow he managed to change gears, maintain steering, and control the revs all with his hands. His timing was so excellent that it was hard to tell he wasn't using a conventional accelerator.

When at length we arrived at the next house, last of the day, we were already an hour behind schedule. No one was waiting. Pinned to the front door was a notice stating that the building was structurally dangerous and warning people not to enter. 

"You can see it from the outside," Jack said. 

I pretended to look but lacked stomach for the fight.

A few steps away, on the main road, was a little cafe with a menu board outside. I invited my companions to lunch as a way of thanking them for taking me as passenger. Jack responded with enthusiasm. It was hungry work showing all these houses, what with the car breaking down and all that.

The cafe consisted of half a dozen tables covered with plastic red and white cloths. A counter divided the dining area from the kitchen at the rear. Steam mingled with the odour of lard and tobacco smoke. Jack and Derek ordered egg and chips; I less wisely opted for the day's special - Irish stew - which came as a mélange of soggy cabbage, unseasoned dumplings and thin gravy. Afterwards we all had suet pudding and custard and a mug of tea.

Jack gave me his card, one side of which had a telephone number and a message: “If you have a problem. I can help. Just call Jack.” Printed on the reverse were a sketch of an angel and the words: “Complaints Department”.

“Anything that needs doing, I can do it," Jack said. "Derek here will vouch for that." 

We parted outside the café: Jack - with Derek's moral support - to make a more permanent fix for the accelerator pedal, and I to the bus stop across the road from where the number 34 would take me to the railway station and thence to Blackpool.

"You won't mention the car problems to Pethers & Wilson?" Jack asked as we shook hands. "They won't pay me if they find out I was late for the some of the viewings." 

My reassurances brought a smile to his lips.

"Don't forget," he said, "You can always come to the Complaints Department. Jack'll solve the problem."

I spent the night in one of Blackpool's featureless B&Bs, a charmless, draughty warren with red flower-pattern carpet, red flower-pattern wallpaper and cream curtains printed with red flowers. The landlords, a young couple who had just acquired the premises were worried about covering their mortgage payments and begged me to write them a recommendation. They seemed to think it would help them qualify for a seal of approval from the local chamber of commerce, or the tourist board. After an uncomfortable night in a tiny bed, a lukewarm shower in front of a window that wouldn't close, and a squalid breakfast of egg and sausage drenched in fat, I wrote them a glowing testimonial. On leaving, I wished them good luck, for in a town where every other building offered accommodation, and where theirs had so little to recommend it, luck was about all they had to fall back on.

Blackpool was rumoured to be the next - the first - British Las Vegas. Casinos occupied a central plank of the government's latest economic strategy - a means of counteracting the city's and the nation's terminal industrial decline. Where better to re-create Las Vegas than Blackpool, playground of the people, host of annual Party conferences, bingo-hall capital of little England? Soon the town would be humming with gamblers, and with carpetbaggers vying for ways to relieve them of their money. Property prices would sky-rocket. In no time, the demand for accommodation would exceed even the immense supply already available. 

You couldn't lose in Blackpool.

This confident assessment came courtesy of a middle-aged businessman wearing designer jeans and an expensive leather coat whom I met on the doorstep of the house we had both come to see.

One block from the southerly - less fashionable - end of Blackpool's immense beachfront, it stood in a line of Victorian semis whose flaking paint, cracked cornices and sagging roof-gutters could not disguise that they had once been the castle keep of respectable middle-class families. After Manchester's dank terraces, I could hardly contain my excitement that here, at last, was a house worth the inspection, a house for all that it might have come down in the world since the Empress of India had presided over an empire on which the sun never set, still stood as evidence of a more gracious era and would surely require little more than a lick of paint and a new carpet to put it in condition to earn a handsome rent.

The businessman had arrived at the wheel of a shiny black Mercedes with tinted windows. He was smoking a large cigar.

"Bloody estate agent's not here again," he said.

"Again?"

"They often don't bother with crummy properties. Too embarrassed."

He knocked loudly on the door and then pushed it open. I followed him in. A young man greeted us and offered to show us round. Painfully thin, he wore loose sweat pants that hung from him like sails in a calm, and a fleece with a large hole in the right sleeve. He led us along a dark corridor to an empty room at the back of the house. 

"Supposed to be the kitchen," our guide informed us, "but we can't afford a cooker and the landlord won't put one in. The downstairs toilet's in there." He indicated a door to the left of the corridor. "Don't work though. We have to use the public toilets on the sea front."

My companion had seen enough. He turned on his heels and left, leaving behind a parting comment that the place was falling down and he had better things to do."

According to the catalogue, the house was divided into two apartments. I asked the young man how they were arranged.

"No flats here," he said, "Just one house. Look here."

He led me part of the way back along the corridor to another room partitioned with a plastic curtain.

"I put this shower in. Runs on a hose from the garden tap. We had nowhere to wash. I mean you can't live like that, can you?"

The young man's father was sitting on an upright armchair in the front room before a single-bar electric fire.

"My dad's got cancer. He's still working mind you. Can't afford to retire." 

My guide raised his voice to address his father as if the latter were hard of hearing.

"All right dad? This man's come to look at the house."

The old man looked at me with defeated eyes, but he held out his hand and I grasped it.

"Going to buy the place, are you?” 

His son answered for me. "He's just looking ,dad." 

"Hope it works for you," the father said.

Upstairs was a warren of mainly empty rooms divided by plywood partitions. The floors sloped uniformly to one side like the deck of sailboat in a breeze.

"My sister had this room," said my guide, showing me a bare space with a torn curtain over the window. "Left last week. Gone to Manchester."

"No bed?"

"Slept on the floor."

We moved to the only furnished room on the second floor - a double bed with a sheet over the window. 

"This is where I sleep. It's dry in here. All the other rooms leak."

I asked him about the rent.

"My dad pays £95 a week and I pay £45. My sister paid £50 because they said she had a better room. Don't ask me how they work these things out. When it rained she had water running down her wall."

"Been here long?"

"More than four years now. We lost our council house. It's terrible here but we can't afford nothing else. I've got a pregnant wife, but how can she live like this?"

"Is she here?" 

"Went home to her mum. I mean she couldn't stay here, could she? Not with the baby coming."

 "Couldn't you get the owner to fix a few things at least?"

"Dunno who owns the place. Some company in Liverpool they say. I only know the rent collector. Says it's nothing to do with him. Just does what he's told"

"If I buy the house I'll fix it up for you," I said. But we both knew I wasn't going to buy it.

Nor did I attend the auction. There seemed no point.

Shakespeare the revolutionary

This piece is published by Open Democracy and can be found here.

Neoliberalism is it…?

Samuel Beckett once remarked that he switched to writing in French rather than English because he considered it impossible to express anything in English that was not ambiguous. Linguistic reform under the auspices of the Académie Française in 17th century France resulted in a literary language stripped of foreign borrowings and regional accretions, and about which a century later  Rivarol famously claimed that “If it isn’t clear, it isn’t French”. [1] English, by contrast, has always been accumulative, happily borrowing from everywhere, unruffled by neologisms, grammatical innovations and ambivalence.

It thus came as a surprise to read in William Davies recent piece that the term neoliberalism has been savagely dismissed as ‘vacuous’ and that so ‘distinguished’ a pressure group as Progress as well as various other soothsayers have described it as a mindless insult employed by intellectually lazy people who have no sense of what it might mean.

In rejecting these complaints, Davies tells us that ‘neoliberalism’ is both complex and ambiguous because, like other watchwords of political discourse, it is an abstraction capable of multiple interpretations and shades of meaning, just like capitalism, communism, democracy, and liberty.  What concepts like these have in common is that they resist one-line interpretation; and the more we try to pin them down, the more complex and contentious they seem to become.  Inability to elucidate a notion, however, is not the same as lacking a general grasp of its sense.  Called upon to define our daily use of words of more than one syllable, many of us would probably flunk the test. However, that doesn’t make what we say unintelligible. 

Compared with some other candidates, ‘neoliberalism’ does not seem to be an especially elusive abstraction. I take it to mean marketisation of the public realm as a political project. Its current popularity among political leaders of a certain hue is that it has the appearance of offering value-free decision-making because it allows market competition rather than ideological bias to determine value. They are thereby absolved - at least in theory - from responsibility for the provision of important public services. In their place, the private sector runs the services on a competitive basis, or alternatively individuals and self-organised collectives take charge of their own needs. A recent example of the latter is the flood defence initiative in the North Yorkshire town of Pickering.

A core principle of neoliberalism is that citizens are to be defined first and foremost as consumers. Hence why ‘neoliberal’ governments insist on ‘consumer choice’ in sectors like like health and education, a proposition that derives its force from a now widely discredited but still vital element of classical economic theory which posits that consumers act rationally in their own interests. “Rational” is another word capable of multiple interpretations, but for economists it means optimising the benefit or utility of a transaction; and it is supposed to be what we do, even though three hundred and fifty years ago Pascal had already worked out that we don’t - not always at any rate.[2]  Here, therefore,  we must wave good-bye to Freud, Jung and the subconscious.

Critical to the idea  of ‘consumer choice’ is that, in exercising their decisions, consumers have clear awareness of the options available. Misleading advertising doesn’t exist in such an ideal world, patients can easily work out which hospital is safest for having their appendix removed, parents can select the best school for their progeny from a range of alternatives and, if they are sufficiently market savvy, can bag a place there before the “full up” sign appears on the gate.

Friedrich von Hayek (1899-1992) is often touted as the titular deity of neoliberal thought. [3]. He believed that free markets lead to spontaneous order (i.e. without the need for significant human intervention); and much of his work in this area can be considered as prolonged libertarian footnotes to Adam Smith’s ‘Wealth of Nations’. Where Hayek would have seriously parted from Adam Smith is that, in Hayek ‘s ideal universe, altruism is an aberration and either non-existent in fact or, as Ayn Rand would have it, irrational: “The principal of trade is the only rational ethical principle for all human relationships, personal and social, private and public, spiritual and material.” [4] If we want to do good,  Hayek contended, then we should look to our own interests because: “The morals of the market do lead us to benefit others, not by our intending to do so, but by making us act in a manner which, nonetheless, will have just that effect.” [5] This is, of course, a precise if less elegant rendering of Smith’s celebrated image of the “invisible hand’, the difference being that Smith didn’t believe commerce to be the sole pathway to benevolence.[6]

Not entirely careless of human deprivation, Hayek conceded: “…. that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody… there is no incompatibility in principle between the state providing greater security in this way and the preservation of individual freedom…” [7]

On the other hand, he disapproved of welfare, and of its corollary progressive taxation:   “…the principle of distributive justice, once introduced, would  not be fulfilled until the whole of society was organised in accordance with it. This would produce a kind of society which in all essential respects would be the opposite of a free society.” [8]

His answer to this rather muddy distinction came in a phrase that the UK electorate will readily recognise: the Great Society. Unsurprisingly, it involves, as far as possible, the withdrawal of the state from the provision of welfare, in the expectation that charities and individual volunteers will take up the reins. David Cameron’s slightly modified version -  the Big Society - about which we hear less and less, has been savaged by The Independent as  a sham because local charities that are supposed to carry part of the welfare burden have effectively become sub-contractors to powerful corporations which have taken over services formerly run by the state. Yet this is exactly what Hayek had in mind, as the UK’s current prime minister and chancellor are doubtless aware.

When, under neoliberalism, an absence of state involvement produces negative results, such as the 2008 banking crisis, or when  the private sector fails to meet minimum standards of service expected by the public, the state intervenes generally by imposing regulatory frameworks and inspection regimes, but not by restoring state provision.  This exposes a fundamental weakness in the theoretical foundation of neoliberalism because it rubs up against the demands of democracy. If the electorate votes for a set of policies aimed at re-nationalisation, for example, it cannot then be argued on neoliberal grounds that the public is failing to exercise ‘consumer choice’, and it would be simply perverse to contend that the government knows better.  Such an obvious  contradiction may be one of the reasons why Hayek, among others, had an equivocal attitude towards democracy. While he was all for democratically-elected governments, he called for a system in which they would be free of any obligation to do what the electors had voted for. According to Yale history professor Greg Grandin, Hayek told an interviewer during a visit to Augusto Pinochet’s Chile: “My personal preference leans toward a liberal dictatorship rather than toward a democratic government devoid of liberalism.”  Milton Friedman, a card-carrying neoliberal and Hayek fellow-traveller, thought fit to act as an adviser to Pinochet while the latter was engaged in the torture and murder of political opponents; and Margaret Thatcher, a Hayek acolyte, apparently saw no problem in befriending Pinochet nor, for that matter, in cosying up to other dictatorial regimes - especially if there were lucrative arms sales in the offing. Let us not forget that, in the stark neoliberal world, commerce is altruistic. Nor should we complain if neoliberal governments ignore their electoral promises. That is what Hayek would have them do.

William Davies writes that neoliberalism is “…about extending (markets or competition) to address fundamental problems of modernity…” ,   but except for the word itself, there is nothing especially modern about either the practice or the political programme that it implies. Rather it seems more like a reversal to a nineteenth century idea of social Darwinism whereby competition is supposed to ensure that the strongest rise to the top for the benefit of society as a whole.  Apart, possibly, from some misguided followers of Herbert Spencer, social Darwinism caught on solely in the disturbed minds of racial supremacists and disappeared with the defeat of nazism. That is until neoliberalism unearthed it in modified form later in the same century.
Readers of Dickens will be all too aware of what life held out for the poor in nineteenth century England under governments relatively unconcerned with the general welfare. Go back a little further to the eighteenth century and we can entertain ourselves with delightful descriptions of the lamentable condition of national infrastructure and policing, courtesy in this case of historian Christopher Hibbert:
“Coaches became stuck in the mud or overturned, their axles broke, their horses were lamed, their occupants thrown out with the  luggage into the ditch…..Horace Walpole described the roads in Sussex as ‘bad beyond all badness’…..Even the road between the court suburb of Kensington and Piccadilly was so ‘infamously bad’ in 1736 that Lord Hervey complained of living ‘in the same solitude as if cast upon a rock in the middle of the ocean.”[9]

Nor was travel safe from predation by highwaymen.  Hibbert writes that in 1774 even Lord North, the prime minister, was robbed in London’s Gunnersbury Lane; and that foreigners were astonished at the extent to which highway robbery seemed to be entirely normal. The Abbé le Blanc, on a visit to the capital, “recorded that in the 1720s highwaymen…. 'fixed up papers at the doors of the rich people about London, expressly forbidding all persons of what condition or quality soever, to go out of town without ten guineas and a watch about them, upon pain of death’.”[10]

Government involvement in social welfare, services and infrastructure thus came about not as the enactment of an ideology but for purely pragmatic reasons, namely that the private sector couldn’t or wouldn’t undertake the tasks nor make the necessary investments.
Long-term investment is not of course, an attractive proposition to the private sector, which is why successive UK governments have struggled to find investors for major projects. Distant returns are no return at all. It has taken years for a UK government to  be brought kicking and screaming  to the realisation that power stations will not be constructed without government involvement. The UK’s infamous Private Finance Initiative, initiated by John Major and enthusiastically adopted by the Blair/Brown government, has worked by dint of expensive income guarantees to the private sector.  What these and many other examples have highlighted, emphatically so since the 2008 economic crisis,  is that free markets are not free, that when they are poorly regulated they can and do lead to ruin, and that neoliberalism is sustained paradoxically by government intervention - though on a discretionary basis. The element of discretion is important because it tends to operate in favour of vested interests. Quantitative Easing didn’t go to the public but to banks and insurance companies.

Neoliberalism is not difficult to understand. It is a simplistic ideology worked out, one suspects, on the back of a payslip in the cafeteria of an ivory tower by professors who had little faith in human intelligence except, perhaps, their own. The overt objective is to make people subservient to the market because it is supposed to operate more intelligently than humans.  Isaiah Berlin would have recognised the neoliberal project as a tributary of “positive liberty” in which self realisation depends on the obedience of citizens to paradigmatic rules established “for their own good”.  Free trade deals offer a contemporary example in that, once they are signed and sealed,  they are difficult to undo; and parties that try to backtrack face the prospect at the very least of uncomfortable reverses in their terms of trade. The fetters of freedom.

Proponents of neoliberalism must necessarily ignore the history of economic development not only in the West but also in countries like present-day China and Korea where government responsibility for progress has been pivotal. To understand the potential dangers of neoliberal policies, especially to countries long-since run on social democratic principles (the UK still qualifies - just), we could do worse than look back to the extremes of inequality that prevailed in centuries gone by and to which we now risk returning; and we might recall the dispiriting features of unregulated capitalism that fired Marx’s outrage, and Dickens’ indignation.
“The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.”
 So wrote Wordsworth. Before anyone had ever heard of ‘neoliberalism’, the poet knew well enough that defining us simply as consumers impoverishes us all.

[1] “Ce qui n’est pas clair n’est pas français."
[2] “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.” (The heart has its reasons that reason knows nothing of.) Pensées, 477, ed. Pléiade.
[3] Along with Ludwig von Mises (1881 - 1973) as the supposed ‘eminence grise’
[4] Quoted in The Journal of Ayn Rand Studies 6, No. 2, Spring 2005, p.378
[5] Hayek: The Fatal Conceit, 1989
[6] “However selfish man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though they derive nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.”  Adam Smith: The Theory of Moral Sentiments, I.i.1.1 (1759 - 1770)
[7] Hayek: The Road to Serfdom, 1944
[8] Hayek: Law, Legislation and Liberty, the mirage of social justice, Ch.12, 1973
[9] Christopher Hibbert, The English, A Social History, p 348, 1987
[10] ibid, p. 349

American Disdain

A friend in New York sent me the following links to pieces from the New York Times and Foreign Affairs. Here is my reply.
As often seems to happen with pieces about the UK or Europe written from the superb aspect of a New York skyscraper,  the first is a silly piece that could just as easily have been written about the UK’s or Europe’s ecclesiastical heritage - all those marvellous gothic cathedrals paid for by contributions from the common people and built by artisans many of whom couldn’t read or write and certainly wouldn’t have been able to follow the Latin liturgy.
 Now let’s look at the great masterpieces of European painting: where would Michelangelo have been without the Medici family? How many of Titian’s masterpieces would never have seen the light of day without the Habsburgs, or Goya’s without the Dukes of Osuna, or Van Dyke’s without Charles 1 etc. etc. etc.? Where would the history of European art be without the great patrons - monarchs and aristocrats, symbols of inequality, many of whom, if they are remembered at all, it is for their cruelty and corruption (Dante meets more than a few of them in ‘Inferno’)?
The UK’s aristocratic houses - from the medieval castles to the Palladian palaces and “Gothic Revival” extravagances of Pugin and contemporaries - all embody the duality of great art and great inequity. Where Charles Lambert is not simply wrong but - even worse - shows himself to be little more than a simpleton - is his inability to separate the art from the finance. It is a curiously American failing, a kind of pseudo demotic ideology - in which Americans fondly imagine that they have no aristocracy and can thereby pride themselves on having no stately homes or medieval castles. Of course, the Americans do have an artistocracy as anyone knows who has read Henry James; and what there is of significant artistic endeavour in the US is heavily dependent on the patronage of the wealthy (take a look at the Board of Directors of the Chicago Symphony or the New York Philharmonic).
What the Americans don’t have is a great artistic heritage. In the UK (and the rest of Europe for that matter) we have largely dispensed with the aristocrats - they are no longer important - but we have kept the masterpieces they paid for - not in hommage to them (Noel Coward was already behind the times) but because they are masterpieces. Lambert mocks the idea that National Trust “heritage buildings” could ever be thought to be “ours’. But he is wrong. The National Trust is ours. We the people have taken over those buildings from the original owners - most of whom over the centuries fell on hard times and couldn’t afford to keep them. Some remain in private hands, but they are run as businesses entirely dependent on the public for their survival, and since many of them are full of spectacular works of art and furniture, we don’t want them to follow the fate of so much great European art which is that of being sold to callow, super-rich Americans for their personal delectation and that of their wealthy friends. Here, these works are enjoyed by the public (and no they are not too high to be seen even by Lambert provided he is of reasonably normal adult height). In the US they hang in private homes. The US - in its mindless immaturity - is at a stage of socio-cultural development that Europe superceded in the wake of the First World War. And the patrician disadain with which some American writers depict Europe is regarded on this side of the Atlantic as the ridiculous prejudice of the ignorant, and the stupidity engendered by a surfeit of cash and a deficit of culture.
It is not beyond the bounds of possibility, of course, that the Americans are a little jealous of what they manifestly don’t have. Because what they don’t have most of all is cultural discernment. I well remember my first and only visit some years ago to the Getty museum(s) in Los Angeles (reportedly the wealthiest on the planet). My reaction? Among the genuine works were - it seemed to me - innumberable fakes. What bothered me was either that I was wrong or that the curators had no idea what they had bought and had a great deal more money than sense. Only much later did I learn that a newly-appointed British curator had bought himself a load of trouble by questioning the authenticity of some of the Getty drawings. My own reaction was less about the drawings (some of which were horribly crude) than about the “ancient” Greek sculptures at the "Getty Villa" which itself is a tasteless pastiche of an imaginary graeco-roman original. Conclusion? Americans think you can buy culture; Europeans know you can be a patron of the arts and of artists, but you can’t buy the sensitivity and discernment required to distinguished art from kitsch. That requires education, knowlege, and a degree of humility.
The other article - The Failure of Mutliculturalism - suffers from similar problems: a distant, patrician disdain whose occasional aperçus are vitiated by a wholesale lack of understanding of the immense - and I mean immense - advances that have taken place here in race relations and the enormous absorptive capacity of this small island to take in upwards of half a million immigrants a year of whom over half are not from the EU . Personally, I don’t think we have anything to learn about race relations from a country whose entire history is one of exploitation and discrimination against non-whites (including native American “Indians”); nor about immigration from a country that fences off its southern border against migrants from Latin America, and whose wealthy citizens hide themselves from the vulgar herd in gated communities in case they should be contaminated by contact with common humanity.

Disrespect and Freedom of Speech

Of the many reactions to the recent terrorist events in Paris, perhaps the most controversial concerns the degree to which it is permissible to pillory religion and religious institutions. Should free speech extend to mockery of the great faiths, or should respect for their followers stay the hand of satirists and silence the scoffers? Do those who fail to show “appropriate” respect deserve, if not a bullet in the head then at least, as the Pontiff seems to believe, a punch on the nose? “You cannot,” his holiness tells us, “insult the faith of others.” Implicit in this pronouncement is that religions are and should be inviolable and therefore unlike other kinds of human institution.

Let’s begin by recognizing that spiritual beliefs tend come in two basic varieties: polytheistic which accommodate multiple deities, and monotheistic which acknowledge only one.

Hindus, Buddhists, followers of Tao and the philosophy of Kung Fu-Tzu (Confucius) belong to the first variety. They make no claims to exclusivity. Their adherents seldom demand that others should worship as they do, nor insist on their superiority to others. Above all they don’t stipulate that theirs are the only beliefs worthy of veneration. Hinduism is notably generous in its readiness to acknowledge multiple incarnations of the divine, as many as three hundred and thirty million in some accounts, meaning an infinite number, the more the merrier, bring yours along - He or She will do as well as any other - for all are ways to reach Brahman, the sacred power that sustains all things.

Monotheists belong largely to the Abrahamic faiths. They tend to view infidels (that part of humanity that doesn’t share their version of God) as at best misguided and at worst inferior and even contemptible. And they have a long history of making war both against the heathen and notably against each other. Overtly jealous[1], their God enjoins them to destroy “false” idols, shrines and other evidence of competing deities. Here is Moses issuing orders to his troops on how to deal with the Canaanites: “Ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire.”[2] King Josiah of Judah swept away Baal with no less enthusiasm: “...the images that were on high above them he cut down; and the groves, and the carved images, and the molten images, he brake in pieces, and made dust of them, and scattered it upon the graves of them that had sacrificed unto them.”[3]

Though acolytes may think of themselves as peaceful, the Abrahamic faiths are grounded in violence and war. God may have awarded the Holy Land to the Israelites, but he seems to have expected them to fight for it. Here they are, conquering the land of milk and honey:

“...Joshua drew not his hand back, wherewith he stretched out the spear, until he had utterly destroyed all the inhabitants of Ai.”[4]

“...And Joshua took Hazor....

And...smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them.”[5]

And so on until Israel had wiped out the main opposition and occupied the country. Too bad about the folk who lived there before; but since they weren’t God’s people they didn’t matter too much.

By the same token, killing individuals seemed almost a routine matter in biblical times. Voltaire provides an entertaining list of Old Testament (Torah) murders: “David killed Uriah...Absalom killed Amnon, Joab killed Absalom...” and so on. “If the Holy Spirit wrote this tale,” he concludes, “He didn’t choose a very edifying subject”.[6] And here are the generous sentiments (much approved by Christians) of the exiled Jews of Babylon in the famous Psalm: “O daughters of Babylon, who art to be destroyed; happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”[7] Hard to believe that any book purporting to holiness could recommend smashing babies against rocks.

Such splendid examples of divine spleen engendered many imitations. Protestant Henry VIII of England tore down Catholic monasteries whose ruins still litter the English landscape like a collage of public follies; the Moghul emperor Aurengzebe (1618-1707) razed as many Hindu temples as he could lay hands on - thereby dismantling the tolerance that had prevailed under Akbar The Great (Jalal ud-Din Muhammad Akbar 1542-1605) and embedding a hostility between Hindus and Moslems that not even Gandhi could placate; Spanish conquistadors smashed the temples and idols of the Aztecs; Germans burned 200 synagogues on kristellnacht[8] as a prelude to the Holocaust; Afghanistan’s Taliban shelled the Buddhist sculptures of Bamiyan after the latter had gazed serenely on humanity for 1400 years; etc.

All these acts of destruction took place in God’s name or with His unqualified approval. For, as one of Christianity’s noblest thinkers makes clear, He cares only for those with correct opinions: “Pagans have no one to redeem them, nor do they expect one. Jews have no one to redeem them either; they await one in vain. Only Christians have a redeemer.” [9] And even then you have to be the right kind of Christian: “The Jesuits have tried to join God to the world and for their pains have earned the contempt of both.”[10]

The Abrahamic God demands subservience and often a deal of bowing and scraping. Christians - sinners by definition - spend much time on their knees begging forgiveness. Muslims bow in the direction of Mecca five times a day.[11] Jews don’t kneel but, as readers of the Torah must know, their Lord - Yahweh - all too often loses His cool, threatening - and sometimes visiting - catastrophe on the world and on His chosen people as punishment for their misdeeds.

Of the three great monotheisms, only Islam formally tolerates “alien” versions of the faith.[12] Hence why the Jews were able to live peacefully for 800 years in Muslim Spain. Judaism, by contrast, is exclusive: its adherents defined by race as well as by God.[13] Other faiths are relevant to Jews solely because - after millennia of persecution, pogroms and the Holocaust - they understandably inspire fear. Christianity’s God, notably in its Western version, has been steadfastly intolerant, with a memorable record of burning heretics, torturing infidels, persecuting Semites and forcing people to convert on pain of death.

Christian taste for repression and vindictiveness towards errant humanity has rested on a conviction that we are by nature irremediably wicked. Saint Augustine sums up the situation with exemplary rigour:

“Banished (from Paradise) after his sin. Adam bound his offspring also with the penalty of death and damnation, that offspring which by sinning he had corrupted in himself, as in a root; so that whatever progeny was born.....from himself and his spouse ...would drag through the ages the burden of original sin, by which it would itself be dragged through manifold errors and sorrows, down to that final and never-ending torment with the rebel angels....the damned lump of humanity was lying prostrate, no, was wallowing in evil, it was falling headlong from one wickedness to another...”[14]

Insisting that we are vile creatures and disgraceful in God’s eyes provides plenty of excuse for His holy representatives on Earth to punish whoever fails to submit and repent. Victims of divine wrath are too numerous to count. Among the most celebrated are the Oxford martyrs, Bishops Latimer and Ridley, and the Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer, - all three burned alive in 1555-6 for not being Roman Catholics. And lest we are tempted to think only Catholics indulged in such practices, it is worth recalling that John Calvin one of the leaders of the Reformation and the virtual ruler of Geneva was happy to arrange for Michael Servetus , a brilliant physician and theologian, to die at the stake in 1553 for no other reason than that Calvin didn’t like his ideas.

For hundreds of years, the Catholic Church dominated Europe as much by terror as by compassion. Obedience to God meant obedience to the Pope - God’s mouthpiece on Earth. And while it is no longer acceptable for Popes to condemn free inquiry - as they once condemned speculation about the Trinity[15] - they still like to lay down the law, as Pope John-Paul II did when he publicly humiliated members of the Latin-American clergy who held political views that differed from his own (a moral auto-da-fé that in earlier times would likely have ended in the stench of burning flesh).

Despite the pacifist tone of the New Testament, Christians became aggressive as soon as their ranks had swollen sufficiently to furnish armies. During the Middle Ages, Christian Europe happily sent troops to the Holy Land, convinced that God approved of slaughtering Muslims. When the Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099, they massacred the inhabitants ”…butchering everyone in sight, Jews and Moslems alike.”[16] On the fourth Crusade, they turned aside from Palestine - their intended destination - and instead sacked Constantinople - then the centre of Eastern Christianity.[17] No doubt that was also God’s will. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, North and South Americans were similarly slaughtered or enslaved and their lands expropriated with God's approval. Then it was Africa’s turn. And India’s. And South-East Asia’s. The slave trade was a speciality of monotheism: a demonstration of superiority over the heathen.

Having first sanctioned despoliation, rape, pillage and murder, the Christian Church reserves the right subsequently to repent and to insist that such acts could never have been committed in God’s name nor be acceptable in His eyes. Eight hundred years after the sack of Constantinople, for example, Pope John-Paul II issued an apology, having apparently decided God had changed his mind about that particular atrocity.

Doubtless the world is much relieved to know God’s revised opinions on such issues. But armies still go to war with clerics in tow; and the leaders who send them assure whoever may be listening that He is ever on their side.

Violence is not, of course, absent from the story of Islam. The Prophet was a military as well as a spiritual leader and in bringing the Word to Arabia he also conquered it by the sword - though the slaughter appears to have been slight. God is merciful, the Quran tells us, to those who believe and to those who repent of their sins. On the other hand “God will render of none effect the works of those who believe not…” and thus “When ye encounter the unbelievers, strike off their heads until ye have made a great slaughter among them…”[18]

After Muhammad’s death, militant Islam went on to conquer vast territories in Asia, North Africa and southern Europe and by 1530, under the leadership of Suleiman the Magnificent, had reached the gates of Vienna.[19] When Islam later receded from Europe, it left behind bodies of the faithful who would clash repeatedly with their Christian neighbours: Kosovans against Serbs, Chechens against Russians, Turks against Greeks. The Moghul conquest of 1527 embedded Islam firmly into the Indian sub-continent’s religious and political life. Millions have since died in localized conflicts between Muslims and Hindus.

What we learn from the history of the Abrahamic tradition is that its symbols and doctrines can be used to justify pretty well any kind of behaviour. Gottfried of Strasbourg, the great medieval poet, spotted the problem: “…the most virtuous Christ swings to every wind like a weathercock and takes any fold like a mere cloth....He lends himself and can be adapted to anything, according to the heart of each, on behalf of sincerity as on behalf of cheating...He is ever what it is wanted he should be.”[20]

For the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim world, the struggle for theological supremacy embraces a parallel and even more ancient struggle for freedom of speech. Since the beginning of recorded history, and even deep into our mythological past, authorities have sought to control what we may say or depict. Mostly, they have succeeded through command of the means of repression: weapons, armies, instruments of torture, the threat of execution and the fires of hell.

Socrates was an early victim, but readers of the Torah (or the Old Testament) will know that the first creature to make free use of their tongue appears to have been a serpent. If God - the first recorded censor - had put a few angels on patrol in the Garden of Eden before knocking off for the night, the serpent would have slithered away and we’d have been left in stupefied but contented ignorance. By the time of Deuteronomy, God had understood His mistake and set about correcting it. He saw that if His children were allowed to express themselves freely, sooner or later they might come up with something unpalatable - maybe even a call to worship some other deity. Best to forestall them:

“If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or they son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is thine own soul, entice thee, saying “Let us go and serve other gods…”...Thou shalt surely kill him…”[21]

Evidently, in matters of blasphemy, apostasy, and irreligion, the Scriptures grant a licence to put offenders away. Fortunately, most people seem disinclined to visit injury or death on fellow human beings regardless of their religious persuasion, or the occasional bellicose diktat of a spiritual leader. Were it not so, we would be living the nasty, brutish and short existence that Hobbes described.[22] Fundamentally, there is no reason to deny respect to the vast majority of believers whose intentions are peaceful and whose God is benign. If Freud was correct in stating that individuals are natural enemies of civilization[23], then the discipline of religious observance can arguably be a force for peace, although a humanistic education can doubtless work just as well. In the end, the quality of our behaviour does not appear to depend on whether or not God occupies a place in our world view.

Regardless of what we believe, respecting each other as human beings would seem to be a no-brainer. Respect for institutionalized religion is a different matter as I have tried to suggest, since all-too-often it has functioned as an intellectual, moral and even a political tyranny. In place of the doctrinal rectitude of monotheism with all the savagery to which it has given rise historically, perhaps it would be better to embrace the uncertainty of the Vedas: “….Whence has this creation arisen? Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not. The one who looks down on it from the highest heaven, only he knows; or perhaps he does not know.”[24]

Pope Francis possesses the charisma of a superstar. He is charming, eloquent, and a moving defender of the poor and the dispossessed. Nevertheless, his public advocacy of belligerence in matters of faith, even if he was joking, exposes him to conclusions of the kind we might expect from certain terrorists. Rather than pay attention to the opinions of spiritual leaders - no matter how elevated - perhaps we would do better as sentient beings to consider the evidence and judge for ourselves.

REFERENCES

[1] Exodus 20:4-5
[2] Deuteronomy 7:5
[3] 2 Chronicles 34.
[4] Joshua 8:26
[5] Joshua 11:10-11
[6] Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique, H: Histoire des Rois Juifs et Parlipomènes, Geneva 1764.
[7] Psalm 137:8-9
[8] 9th November, 1938
[9] Pascal, Pensées and Fragments Divers XXXV (Pléiade Ed.)
[10]Ibid. Pascal was a Jansenist - hence his distaste for the rival Jesuits.
[11]“If I were God, I wouldn’t let people kneel before me. I’d ask them to stand, look me in the eye, treat me as an equal, speak to me as a brother. Why should they humiliate themselves in my presence since I’m the one who made them what they are? Am I responsible for their obsequiousness? Could it be that I’ve fashioned a bunch of slaves? If so, the fault and the shame are mine alone.” - Maurice Maeterlinck, Devant Dieu, Paris 1937.
[12]“We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples.” Yuqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi (d. ca. 870) quoted in Karen Armstrong, A History of God, London 1993.
[13]Conversion to Judaism is possible but Jews have shown little interest in spreading the faith.
[14]Augustine, Enchyridion 46:47
[15]Father, Son and Holy Ghost: a concept embedded in Christianity though unmentioned in the Bible.
[16]Robert Payne, History of Islam, p.221
[17]In 1204.
[18]Quran: Chapter 47.
[19]Despite the setback of 1256 when Mongols sacked Bhagdad.
[20]Tristan und Isolde, circa 1200, lines 15733-15747.
[21]Deuteronomy 13:6-9
[22]Hobbes: Leviathan, 1651
[23]See Freud: The Future of an Illusion, 1927
[24]Rig Veda, 10.129 Nasadiya, circa 1200-900 BCE.

Art as Politics

Anyone who has visited the Royal Academy’s Daumier exhibition Visions of Paris expecting to see views of fine buildings and picturesque plazas will have been sorely disappointed. The title is misleading because the focus of Daumier’s penetrating gaze was not urban landscape but people, and the social and political milieu of his time. Paris barely appears at all. Instead, what arrests the attention from the very first works on display is the force of the artist’s political commitment: on one hand his mockery of the rich and powerful, at its best in the caricature of King Louis-Philippe as Gargantua and his grotesque maquettes of monarchist politicians; and on the other his sensitive depictions of the poor and working classes. Daumier was an uncompromising republican, a quiet but acerbic revolutionary conscious at once of the extremes of inequality prevalent in nineteenth century France, and of the humanity of the common people. He belonged to and in many ways exemplified the Romantic revolution, one of whose characteristics was a recognition that “ordinary” individuals were as worthy of study and respect as the aristocrats and idealised religious figures that had largely dominated pictorial art of previous periods.

What struck me at the Daumier exhibition as forcefully as the creative and intellectual vigour of this remarkable artist was the applicability of much of his social and political satire to the UK’s present circumstances. Just as in the France of Louis-Philippe, we too have:
• an upper class with a heredity monarch at its head support by obsequious politicians and a servile, gossip-driven media; • extremes of inequality that have not ceased to grow since Thatcher and her successors enthusiastically chose to deliver the country to the international market.

Daumier was not alone, of course, in using his art for social and political purposes. Artists and thinkers at the barricades were a familiar sight in the nineteenth century: Shelley’s writings were considered seditious; Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables evoked the life of the underprivileged as did Zola’s L’Assommoir and Germinal; Marx gave his name to revolution with pamphlets and newspaper articles as well his longer works; Proudhon in What is Property? answered his own question by concluding that “property is theft”; Dickens honed in on numerous contemporary ills including England’s sclerotic legal system, widespread social deprivation, capitalist corruption and so on; a little later Kropotkin was working on an anarchist proposal for the administration of economic life. Daumier himself earned a spell in jail for pillorying the monarchy. All these were or became opinion shapers who, by their very choice of subject matter, succeeded in engaging their contemporaries and steering them into an uncomfortable contemplation of injustice and poverty.

A long article about the housing crisis by James Meek in the London Review of Books (9 January 2014) suggests why we could do with a few such figures now. Meek opens his piece by introducing the reader to a sixty-year-old retired woman who, having lived for forty years in the same two-bedroom council flat where her husband died is now being forced to contemplate self-eviction because of the government’s notorious “bedroom tax”. Scheduled to lose part of her housing benefit, she must choose between eating and moving to an affordable one-bedroom. She lives in Tower Hamlets where “ten thousand are waiting for a one-bedroom flat….five hundred of whom have been waiting for 12 years or more.” Although such a person cannot be said to own her two-bedroom in the capitalistic sense, by almost every other definition she has surely acquired possession of it. The walls will be decorated to her colours, the shelves and cupboards stocked with what is hers, the furniture and rugs and curtains, moulded to her taste and that of her late partner; from the window the view will be familiar to her; those who live nearby are her neighbours; local shopkeepers know her by name. Her emotions, her memories, her sense of self are invested in the modest apartment from which George Osborne now desires to evict her. John Ruskin - another nineteenth century free-thinker - described the process:
“Whether we force a man’s property from him by pinching his stomach, or pinching his fingers, makes some difference anatomically; - morally none whatsoever: we use a form of torture of some sort in order to make him give up his property; we use, indeed, the man’s own anxieties, instead of the rack; and his immediate peril of starvation, instead of the pistol at his head.” [1]

In the same issue of the LRB, playwright Alan Bennett finds similarities between George Osborne’s rhetoric about the poor and statements “…voiced in the 17th century and thereafter.” . Perhaps Bennett was thinking of that great enlightenment theoretician John Locke who asserted “ ‘Tis not to be expected, that a Man, who drudges on, all his life, in a Laborious Trade, should be more knowing...than a pack horse….” [2]; or maybe that icon of illiberal Tory fundamentalism Edmund Burke who thought it was at once “mad” and “blasphemous” to believe that the “competencies of government” included “supplying to the poor those necessaries which it has pleased the Divine Providence for a while to withhold from them”.[3]

During my visit to the Daumier exhibition, I remarked to a companion that at a time when we seem to me mired in the same kind of inequities of which Daumier was so obviously conscious it was a pity we did not have artists like him - true republicans prepared to challenge both the monarchy and our tired political system. To my surprise I heard around me several murmurs of agreement and none of dissent. Later, I wondered if my off-the-cuff criticism stood up to scrutiny. Certainly we have artists of the other kind - those admired (and handsomely paid) for putting tiny birds on sticks, encrusting skulls with diamonds, and exhibiting nothing - a phenomenon on which I wrote a spoof years before the none event at the Hayward Gallery in London.

But do we have political rebels amongst our artistic luminaries? Any who find in the lives of our people - of the world’s peoples - the lifeblood of their art?

Sculptor Anthony Gormley figures on the 2014 list of those receiving a high-level gong - an accolade of which he apparently approves because gongs ”now … also go to people that have opened people’s minds…” . Well perhaps some folk have had their minds opened by Sir Anthony though I find it hard to imagine to what purpose.

Of one thing we can be sure, given Daumier’s jaundiced representations of royalty, there wouldn’t have been much enthusiasm in Louis-Philippe’s palace for giving him a gong of any kind. Whoever has stood before Daumier’s piquant caricatures, his stark evocations of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, his poignant depictions of the Parisian “lower” classes might, however, conclude that the greatest artists don’t need them. Some of us might also wonder if a decoration conferred on a creative artist by an unelected head of state on the recommendation of a politician might even be considered a bit demeaning, less a mark of honour than one of failure. Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, JB Priestley - artists who one might consider to be at least as important as Gormley - figure among those who turned down their gongs. Perhaps they didn’t want to belong to a club that included people exalted for their allegiance to political parties or for their dedication to personal enrichment, or who pay a lower tax rate than their cleaners, or who have earned a spell in one of her majesty’s hostelries for criminals. Or did they simply recoil from the embrace of an establishment that many in this country learn by dint of experience to despise?

Doubtless all the names on the News Years Honours list are worthy people; but the list itself, especially at the most elevated levels, is dishonoured by those who have found their way onto it less by the nobleness of their deeds than by the size of their wallet and the quality of their address book For every of one those before whom commoners are expected to genuflect, there will be thousands - tens of thousands - whose service to others and to their nation goes unremarked: the toilers who pass under the radar of the better-off but on whose labours we and the city depend, the brick-layers and carpenters, street-cleaners, shop-assistants, bin men, plumbers, electricians, nurses, fire-fighters, social workers, small entrepreneurs... As George Eliot memorably reminds us in the concluding lines of Middlemarch: ” ... the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

[1] The Work of Iron, 1858

[2] Essay Concerning Human Understanding

[3] Quoted in Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism - A Counter-History, London 2011, p. 37