It is hard to imagine a more timely book in the light of Ed Milliband’s election as the new Labour leader. “Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today,” begins Tony Judt, who was Erich Maria Remarque Professor in European Studies at New York University until he died in August at the age of 62. We are obsessed with money and have lost any sense of community.
In the 30 years following the Second World War, there was a widespread belief that the state could do a better job than the unregulated market. A benign welfare state would keep us from the poverty of the 1930s and protect us from the cradle to the grave. These assumptions underpinned Butskellism in Britain, the great society in the United States and social democracy in Europe. But social democrats today are defensive and apologetic. Critics who claim the European model is too expensive or economically inefficient have been allowed to pass unchallenged.
And yet the welfare state is as popular as ever with its beneficiaries: nowhere in Europe is there a constituency for abolishing public health services, ending free or subsidised education, or reducing the public provision of transport and other essential services. Judt pulls no punches. This new obsession with wealth, privatisation and the private sector is disastrous. Unregulated capitalism, he argues, destroys itself and then begs for a bailout.
For Ed Miliband, important choices lie ahead. The direction he chooses will define the prospects for the party for years to come. He should read Ill Fares the Land and plot a path for the party based on socialist principles such as economic prosperity and social justice, not limit himself to finding policies for winning the next election. This would enable him to strike the right balance between the long term interest of this nation and what compromises are palatable to voters.
Ed, who has said he wants to bury the orthodoxies of New Labour, would benefit from the sound advice of Judt as he sets about finding policies for narrowing the gap between rich and poor, adding value to and protecting civil liberties, and imposing limits on how the market is allowed to gets its way. The market economy has proved to be cyclically unstable – the mantra that “public is bad, private is good” needs discarding – and we need to find another way to deliver economic prosperity and social justice.
