Nothing will last forever. For all the people who have spent the last few weeks attacking Andy Burnham or quoting misleading estimates of mortality rather than discussing the intricacies of patient safety, the discussion about the NHS within Labour will continue long after Andy has moved onto other things. The ethos of ‘responsible capitalism’ took root in Ed Miliband’s famous conference speech, and since then there have been countless examples in the corporate world to underline its importance. If the Health and Social Care Act (2012) did nothing for patient safety as a statutory instrument, though perhaps providing greater clarity on NHS failure regimens in the backdrop of reconfiguration, it certainly oiled the wheels for the trolley of corporatision of the NHS. Labour’s contribution to PFI has been extensively discussed elsewhere, but it is a material fact that Coopers and Lybrand were extolling the wonders of PFI long before a Labour government, from the time of Major’s think tank in 1995. In 2011, Ed Miliband called for long-term shareholders to have greater voting rights in takeovers, backed workers on company remuneration committees and said he wanted to break up unwarranted private sector monopolies in banking, energy and the media. The problem is that, in adopting an uncritical narrative of ‘responsible capitalism’ for the NHS, one is assuming the agenda of capitalism. Is this reasonable?
For Labour, it’s easy to do this. For people who wish to support Labour, like members of the Socialist Health Association, support can be lazy. John Maynard Keynes called capitalism ‘the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone’. Mark Easton from the BBC has described that ‘responsible capitalism’ is an oxymoron, as “responsible” implies moral accountability while capitalism is driven by self-interest. A cornerstone of socialism is Marx’s philosophy of economic determinism, which identifies prevailing economic conditions as the motivating force behind all political and social activity. This materialistic worldview, is now deeply ingrained in American social, political, and religious philosophy, and attributes much human behaviour to the economic environment. This indeed paradoxically for libertarians thus frees man of personal responsibility for his own behaviour, and enslaves the individual to the free market. Neoliberalism, like socialism, in extreme can easily be argued as toxic.
Whilst Ed Miliband is doing political foreplay with the capitalist world, it could be a case of unrequited love. This takes on a Shakespearean dimension of tragedy, when you consider that Ed Miliband appears to have shunned his ‘socialist girlfriend’. While it’s Ed Miliband’s comments on Google and tax avoidance that will inevitably attract the most media attention, by far the more interesting section, perhaps, of his speech at the company’s “Big Tent” event at The Grove hotel in Hertfordshire was on capitalism and socialism. The Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt rejected the idea put forward by Labour leader Ed Miliband that the search giant should practise “responsible capitalism”, arguing the company simply follows international tax laws – which he described as “irrational”. This problem for Labour, now relevant to how much of the NHS should be re-allocated into private hands, therefore introduces the concept of “responsible socialism”. In a reference to Labour’s old clause IV, which called for “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”, Miliband added that “It wasn’t just my dad who thought it, of course. Until 1995 this view was enshrined on the membership card of the party I now lead.” However, “red baiting” — the process of referring to one’s opponents as “socialists,” and relying on that word alone to silence opposition — remains one of the oldest tricks in the Tories’ “rulebook”. Ideological opponents to socialism often use the term “socialist” to refer to any increase in government power. That is arguably, not strictly speaking, historically accurate. “Socialism” is not a direction. Historically, socialism has only one meaning: a system in which the state — or the workers directly — own the means of production.
It is said socialism may have emerged from a discontent with what remained of the feudal state after the French Revolution of 1789, and with the emergent, eminently abusive nature of pure laissez faire industry. For the peasant and working classes, there was a sense that real change had been within grasp at the turn of the 18th century. Marx developed a theory whose purpose, in part, to embrace this frustration and lessons from other jurisdictions: socialism — which Marx regarded as a means to an end — was a hybrid capitalist/Communist system, in which the means of production were publicly owned, but working and bourgeoisie classes remained separate, and therefore, to Marx, impermissibly unequal. It can be argued that some politicians, like Nixon and LaGuardia, took deliberate and permanent possession of private property, for the collective benefit of their constituents, and yet neither modern America nor New York City can fairly be called socialist. Whatever socialism might be, it is not straight-forward. However, it is perhaps time to start stop trying to scare floating voters with “the spectre of Communism” and, as a nation, finally make peace with the fact that United Kingdom, like the United States, is not, nor has it been for some time, a pure laissez faire nation, because fundamentally the public will not accept it. Socialism, like all political philosophies is a complicated and diverse ideology. It has like all ideologies its pros and cons. It has its tradeoffs. Yet, like all political philosophies, it needs to address actively its downsides to be at its best. People do not dare mention that S word. They prefer the other S word: “Social” (and “D” for Democratic).
It is therefore time to change the narrative away from ‘responsible capitalism’ and to contemplate an approach of ‘responsible socialism’ as well, perhaps? The irony of NHS England is that it is the biggest QUANGO in the land, but the possible advantage is that it could implement a coherent public health policy genuinely for the ‘health of the nation’. Responsible socialism, whilst felt as a tautology by some and an oxymoron by others, potentially can dispose of irrelevant, meaningless pseudo-choice, and eliminate the unnecessary transaction costs in waste and inefficiency injected by a free market. Critical friends of Labour can do no more better than to think about innovative ways of standing up for what they believe in. This will ultimately, I feel, earn more respect from the senior echelons in Labour. While Ed Miliband may be ‘right’ about ‘responsible capitalism’, there are so many bandwagons we can all jump on, and taking about responsible capitalism in the NHS might suggest we have given up on socialism for good.
