It’s in its infancy, but it’s hard to imagine how the emergent mood of seriousness about the interlinked threats to our economy, society and democracy cannot but grow stronger.
Yes, there was relief at last week’s news that the economy was still growing in the first three months of this year, even if at a minuscule rate. But that was dispelled by the realisation that it is still smaller than before the pandemic three years ago, the worst performance in the G7. Another interest rate increase seems sure to follow after last week’s hike – yet more stress for those having to remortgage their homes, and a further economic dampener. Business and consumer optimism are in short supply.
The baleful impact of the cost of living crisis spreads. The new “multibanks”, providing not just food but clothes and furniture to the very needy, are testimony to the extent that hardship is penetrating far up the income scale. This is changing attitudes. On Thursday, the Fairness Foundation, whose editorial advisory committee I chair, releases polling suggesting that Tory voters are as enthusiastic as Labour voters about an imagined society in which most wealth is held in the middle rather than by an elite, as now.
Unease about trends in our society are widely manifested. Even the clumsy efforts by the police to maintain law and order at the coronation, summarily arresting not only peaceful republican protesters but unconnected bystanders, brought a surprising degree of condemnation: the embarrassed police were forced into an apology. Suddenly, there is concern that a traditional right to protest is being menaced. Defending civil liberty is becoming a popular cause.
The results from the local elections in England speak to this new mood. The populist right was eviscerated: Ukip was eliminated and the Reform party picked up just two seats. Amid all the extrapolations of what the vote meant for a general election, what went too little remarked was how the progressive opposition parties collected 60% of the vote, compared with the Tories’ 29%. Voters are newly serious, with tactical voting now habitual. The vast majority want serious government, and evidence that our obvious ills are being confronted.
This is all grist to the mill of MIT professors Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson who, in one of the most important books of the year, Power and Progress, released next Thursday, argue there should be no surprise at how the new seriousness is making votes count. Surveying the last thousand years, they argue that the political struggle has consistently aimed to contain excessive inequality of wealth, and act collectively to share prosperity. It is successive waves of transformative technologies above all that bring the productivity gains that create great wealth, only for it to be captured by the incumbent elite. The amazing thing is that it has taken so long this time for the countervailing forces to manifest themselves – the new rightwing populists managing to capture the unhappiness and express it via Brexit and Trump. But ultimately the nature of the real challenge breaks through.
The Industrial Revolution certainly threw up unimaginable wealth via the locomotive, the spinning jenny and the steam engine, but also unimaginable human suffering – in the 1830s, one part of Manchester had 33 toilets for 7,000 people and only half the children survived beyond age five. But the next half of the century saw a fightback, they argue, led by trade unions, friendly societies, co-operatives and the newly formed Liberal party giving organised labour a voice. There were parallel movements in the US – the progressives who broke up the great railway and oil monopolies at the beginning of the 20th century and then Roosevelt’s New Dealers. Wealth has to be shared.
In our time, the next challenge is artificial intelligence. The threat may not be tuberculosis or mass unemployment but surrendering control over every dimension of our lives to machines. Either AI can be deployed usefully to serve humanity or become, as it is in China, a super-Orwellian Big Brother and author of a stream of fake but credible news. Technologies are not immutable: they must be shaped to serve us. The authors explain how vital it is to develop a counter-narrative for how technology – ultimately the source of 85% of new wealth – can be used for human betterment. They cite global concern about climate change as one example, with civil society and government pressure advancing technologies like cheap wind or solar power. From breaking up big tech companies to proposing a reinvigoration of industry-wide trade unions to push up wages, they marshal a range of initiatives to fight back, including a wealth tax. AI could be shaped to benefit society at large rather than the bosses of tech giants by creating “data unions” that collectively hold our data to be used only on our behalf.
Voters may not know the specifics, but they know that on issue after issue, the Tory discourse of culture wars, shrinking the state and tax cuts is out of time – distractions from the profundity of the multiple crises that confront us. Whether tackling obesity, gambling addiction, online safety or child poverty, the government resiles from any serious duty of care, beating a retreat from decisive action.
The country doesn’t even have an industrial strategy to further our embrace of new technologies, as Make UK warned last week, let alone one that would allow those technologies to serve us. For example, it would be good to shape car manufacturing technology for human betterment, but as Adrian Hallmark, CEO of luxury car company Bentley, said last week, no one has chosen to locate an electrical vehicle or battery factory in the UK. As matters stand, Britain won’t have a car industry in 2035, a calamity aided and abetted by Brexit curbing access to EU markets.
There is huge concern, and quiet anger, across the country. People are rightly worried about their livelihoods, standard of living and future; the gulf between the gothic pomp of the coronation and their daily experience is yawning. The mood is reflected in the spate of deeply critical books – the FT’s Martin Wolf’s trenchant call for the common good to be urgently reasserted to counter elite greed in The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, or IFS director Paul Johnson’s powerful dissection of the stupidities of how we organise taxing and spending in Follow the Money.
Their arguments need to be put into the mainstream as part of the fightback. Don’t vote for a coalition of chaos, respond the Tories. It’s a slogan that no longer has purchase. They are the chaos.
• Will Hutton is an Observer columnist
