Mammon's Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now by David Marquand – review

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/21/mammons-kingdom-britain-david-marquand

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"Don't be evil": 16 years ago, that was the founding slogan of Google, which only goes to show that 16 years can be a very long time in business. Having started out determined to be different from every other soulless bunch of suits – to be not just smarter and cooler, but somehow that bit nicer – Google now finds itself as mired as any other corporate giant in controversy over everything from its tax affairs to its customers' privacy. However ethical the intention, not being evil is apparently harder than it looks, as the Co-operative Bank seems hellbent on demonstrating.

Which leaves us with a problem. Ever since the great crash of 2007-8, when the price paid for turning a blind eye to corporate evils became painfully clear, most radical responses to this profound crisis of capitalism have struggled with the question: if not this, then what? If we don't want bad, predatory, unstable capitalism then what would the good – or responsible, as Ed Miliband puts it – kind look like? David Marquand's new book, however, suggests that we're coming at this from the wrong angle.

The contemporary argument about whether austerity or Keynesian stimulus will get us back to growth quicker is, he argues, missing the point: we shouldn't be aiming to go back anywhere. (Indeed perhaps we can't, since he believes the era of steadily rising living standards may be over, giving way to a new norm of thinner pickings but a more environmentally sustainable life.) But more than that, he doesn't think either untrammelled capitalism or a "good capitalism" that relies on tighter regulation is the answer. After all, regulators develop agendas and blind spots of their own, and can grow too close to their targets: it's unlikely they alone are strong enough to contain a City of London that Marquand describes as a state within a state, a law unto itself, a "swelling boil on the nether parts of the global financial system". Rather like Thomas Piketty, Marquand thinks capitalism simply isn't working. But somewhat wistfully he concludes that overthrowing it isn't the answer either, even though apparently Marx was right a lot of the time. So it's back to the old question: if not this then what?

His answer turns out to be that we should dig deeper, remaking not just the economy but the society it sprang from. It's all very well talking about "good capitalism" but, he argues, that's impossible "without good people, living good lives" in a culture that preferably doesn't revolve around what he sees as an unholy trinity of individualism, freedom and choice.

To the lay reader who doesn't know their Hayek from their Hobbes, the opening sections of this book will be hard going. Even for those with a working knowledge of political philosophy, reading it can feel at times like being on a train that passes through some pretty long stretches of tunnel before emerging into daylight.

Once there, however, there are some brilliantly illuminated patches, including his definition of the concept of a "decent society" (borrowed from the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit) as being one that does not humiliate its members. That doesn't just mean respecting their human rights but not allowing individuals to be exploited at work, or homeless, or degradingly poor, or demonised for being poor and thus for demonstrating rather inconveniently that markets don't actually cure all ills. What the current argument lacks, in Marquand's view, is a moral dimension, an understanding that first you need a decent society run according to ethical beliefs and practices, where money ceases to be worshipped quite so fawningly and people have more regard for one another. Only from such a healthy society can a healthier economy grow.

After all, as he points out, the prophets of the free market go to great lengths to create a moral structure for it: to separate deserving from undeserving, to "tell the ultra-rich that they are entitled to their riches, and assure the aspirant middle and working classes that if they obey its precepts they too will be rich, or at least richer". Their opponents too should be unafraid of saying that some individual decisions are intrinsically better than others, rather than clinging to the liberal principle that there's no such thing as a bad choice.

This Blue Labour-ish emphasis on personal morality and the crumbling institutions that once held society together – the family, the trade union movement, the church – can easily sound nostalgic for a golden age that, assuming it ever really existed, is never coming back. But Marquand argues that it isn't actually impossible to reverse the tide, or we could never have got from the 1950s to here. We got ourselves into this mess, he says sternly, by buying into the idea of hedonistic individualism in the first place: "We and not just the bankers were the authors of the wildly over-leveraged economy that crashed." So surely we can get ourselves out of it, too. All we need to do is "revisit the connection between economic and moral life that preoccupied the clerisy of the 19th and early 20th centuries, not to mention the authors of the Book of Deuteronomy, St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther". Which sounds terrific: but ask what that might mean in practice, and before long sadly you're struggling to nail the proverbial jelly to the wall.

It would be unfair to expect a detailed manifesto, even though as a former Labour MP and adviser to the European Commission Marquand isn't just another ivory-tower academic. But we are pretty familiar now with an analysis of what is wrong with Britain that links together appalling levels of income inequality, overpaid bankers, tax-dodging corporates, Tony Blair, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars (which make a guest appearance here as an example of why one should never forget history), a shallow and materialist celebrity-fixated culture and Rupert Murdoch. The tale doesn't get much less shocking with each retelling, but there comes a point where you can't just keep retelling it, where calling, as Marquand does in his final chapter, for a "national conversation" sounds dangerously like a cop-out after six years in which it sometimes feels as if we've talked about little else.

If we should be unafraid to condemn bad choices, which choices are to be deemed bad? After all, no mainstream party in Britain and few individuals are liberal enough to say that anything goes: debate tends to rage instead over which specific choices – lone motherhood, for example, or not paying corporate tax – are wrong. Yet Marquand doesn't spell things out.

It seems likely, too, that if we are to recreate a sense of social solidarity now it won't be by the same means as half a century ago: we're probably not going back to an era of mass union membership, lifelong marriage and religious guilt, which means we will need new institutions and causes that do a similar job of bringing us together. Among the beacons of hope Marquand sees for a more decent future are the emergence of the Occupy movement, UK Uncut, the living wage campaign, the environmental barrister Polly Higgins calling for a new offence of ecocide (damaging ecosystems on an epic enough scale to jeopardise populations) and rather more surprisingly, the Women's Institute campaign to save honeybees. All show, he argues, that the idea of a common good is alive and well and that some people are already trying to reinvent it, even if none of these ideas amounts to a coherent political vision.

But that doesn't answer the question that floored Occupy, which is how you persuade a critical mass of other people – many of whom doubtless quite enjoy having choices, and freedom to pursue their own pleasures – to sign up. To put it in the words of Milton, as Marquand does, how do you get people to choose "strenuous liberty" – the huge effort and risk involved in remaking society along radically different lines, and weaning ourselves off the rewards of economic growth – instead of "bondage with ease", or the devil we know? And in a globalised economy, even if Britain could somehow learn not to be evil, how would we deal with discovering that not everybody's quite so enlightened?

Marquand must be right that bad corporate behaviour didn't just spring from nowhere; that on some level it reflects the values of our age. It's almost impossible to argue with the ideal of a decent society; hard to disagree that some aspects of the one in which we live are frankly obscene. But then "don't be evil" was always a great idea. It's just that putting it into practice seems to be so much harder than anyone thought.

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