All good things come to an end – and every blog must too, as personal sites become scarcer and scarcer and professional or hosted blogs jostle them aside. So this is the last of hundreds of posts on this site. We hope they’ve been illuminating, enlightening – and sometimes infuriating.
It’s exactly ten years today since ‘Public Policy and the Past’ started up, and this is as good a time as any to bring down the curtain – because of a suitable anniversary if nothing else, but also because the practice of readable, historical, data-heavy and self-critical reflection is even more common these days.
You can read that in lots of places: you don’t need some amateur on Blogger filling up your day. That said, it’s been a real ride, we’ve learned a lot, and we hope you have too. Today, ten years after the words started to flow (or chafe), hopefully it’s a suitable summing up to look back on what we said, what was right, what was wrong – and more importantly, why. Let’s not waste your time too much – let’s keep it to four headings.
Getting it wrong. First of all, the number one thing any analyst must do is highlight misses rather than bullseyes. These tell you loads more than the successes, because they allow you to pinpoint where each bit of machinery is doing under the bonnet – and where. Exactly why did your prognostication fail to stick? Isolate those precise points in the chain, and you’ve made progress.
Here’s a couple of examples: we thought that Greece would probably be forced to default and abandon the Euro, suffering mightily as it was under its ‘structural adjustment’ programmes, to the extent where neither the European ideal nor economics itself made any sense any more. That didn’t happen. Its elites and people were too committed to Europe; the leap in the dark (and the nightmare of organising) embodied in a new Drachma was just too much. So far, so much learning.
Another example is university tuition fees. We thought that very high fees (of which more later) would put students off, particularly those from low-income or non-traditional backgrounds. This just wasn’t right, and that tells us something again: the social revolution from below that is swelling student numbers is perhaps unstoppable. Put that together with the coming demographic bulge in the number of 18-year olds, and as you read people moaning about how big universities have got you should know this: they are likely to get much, much bigger in the years to come.
Elections. Here we built up a fairly creditable record, with one major blemish. As you’ll all know by now as you refresh Nate Silver’s 538 again and again, if you aggregate polls and then apply them on a curve in probabilistic manner, you’ll get quite close to the final answer – if there isn’t a shock applied to that system from ‘outside’, and if the collection and compilation of those numbers are right in the first place. Big ifs, but them’s the breaks.
So again and again and again we said that Ed Miliband’s Labour Party was just not doing well enough on any historical metric – by-elections, polling, leadership ratings – to win the next General Election. We were vindicated in 2015, though that didn’t exactly take Nostradamus, did it? We struck a good balance about the 2012 Presidential election in the US. We treated Trump seriously from the outset, which was an important win, and we spotted the potential for a Hung Parliament in the UK General Election of 2017. All very pleasing. It’s a B+ rather than an A-, because between late 2017 and late 2019 we also thought Labour could win any new election. But more of that below.
Universities. This is where we started, really, all those years ago, so it’s pleasing to loop back and look at what we said. What was that? Analysis that now sounds wearyingly familiar: that the university funding system set up by the Coalition in 2010 was a Doomsday machine that could eventually blow up the whole sector. Not particularly because of high fees themselves, but because the Government was itself meeting the upfront cost of a big-ticket item that now had all its wires exposed, and would become more and more unpopular (as well as unsustainable) over time.
As the cost of university education rose and rose – necessarily, as technology improved, resources got pricier and pricier, and a generation of worn-out buildings had to be replaced – politicians began to realise that they couldn’t let the fee go on ballooning outwards (it became especially onerous once the Office for Budget Responsibility insisted the cost be added to the Government’s debt).
So Theresa May froze the fee in 2017, and set the scene for an ongoing crisis which will eventually see British Higher Education implode like a bad soufflé. If more money doesn’t appear soon, an increasingly toxic and unhappy sector will slide into mediocrity and worse via the medium of open industrial warfare, a brain drain and widespread redundancies even as student numbers rise. Slow handclap, everybody.
Corbynism. We got the impression everyone enjoyed our writing about this benighted topic. We didn’t. It was horrible. A load of screaming and shouting in a room that had never exactly been calm, but had not for decades been full of such angry and exclusionary adulation either. ‘Behold the man of peace!’ they shouted as they hustled and jostled and lied and failed. Anyway, it’s all over now, as predicted here, and as analysed here. Exactly what we’d warned and warned and warned about – an electoral asteroid hitting the planet – did in the end make Earthfall. It wasn’t pretty.
Except, for a while, we did believe that Corbyn-Labour could make it into government – for two reasons. Firstly, the Conservatives were very divided, and for a time in 2019 looked like they might split altogether. They didn’t, as we should have known from a long history of their lack-of-principled success in hanging onto power. The Tories do split – and they did in 1846 and to a lesser extent 1904 – but usually they don’t. This time, they splintered less than Labour, with inevitable consequences.
Secondly, we probably went far, far too easy on the Corbyn experiment. This was not a matter of electoral expediency: of the fact that it was rather less than likely to win Labour an election. This was a moral question. Even as we raised the red flags (or perhaps the pink banners of social democracy), we excused Corbyn for his past associations, his narrow-minded prejudices, his self-indulgence. We held back from passing a judgement of institutional racism, and probably we still would – cautious, and maybe too tentative. As usual, the electorate knew better. The lesson, as so often, was this: believe everyone when they show you, not tell you, who they really are.
So that’s the end – but an end long prepared for. Perhaps the thing to leave you with is the long view. You scroll through Twitter, you look at people’s shock (and awe) on Facebook, it looks like a doomy world is falling to bits. Right now, in the time of Covid, it really, really feels like that – and perhaps nothing will ever be the same again.
But in the macroscope beyond the individual pain and tragedy of Covid or welfare ‘reform’ or endemic structural racism, things probably will chunter on – and probably go on getting a little bit better. We’ve been here before, many times, in the influenza pandemic of 1918-19, or the polio terrors of the 1940s and 1950s, or the fascist attack on democracy that lasted from the 1920s to 1945, or under the shadow of the bomb during the Cold War. We made it through then, and we can make it through now – bolstered in tiny part by greater reflection, more self-criticism, better statistics, cooler heads, and most of all the exposure of the charlatans among us.
On that note, and those recommendations? Thank you so much for reading, good luck, and goodbye.
