Could there be a 'fourth way'?
Tony Blair's 'Third Way' turned out to be suspiciously close to Margaret Thatcher's blend of expanding freedoms to business and markets while restricting those of the individual. In this, both hues of Government fixed their agendas with a lot of help from our so-called 'special relationship' with the United States. In my blog last week I argued that the Northern Rock episode exposes the fallibility of blind belief in free markets.
On the eve of Alistair Darling's Pre-Budget Report, I'd like to state my belief that we must stop looking across the Atlantic for our economic and social inspiration. We've been doing that for 30 years and we've got Kentucky Fried Chicken, 50 Cent and a transport system that's the laughing stock of the developed world. I think we've learned all we can from that direction.
It's about time we started to try and learn more from our social democratic neighbours on the Continent. OK, I admit it, I'm an unrepentant Europhile – not in the sense of a strong European Union. Au contraire, I'm all in favour of localism: I think more policy should be determined at a level closer to where people live. And while many of its inefficiencies and extravagances are doubtless exaggerated in certain sections of the media, the EU nevertheless tends to the opposite direction: where laws are made at a great distance from citizens and uniformities are imposed across nations.
This latter prospect is one that depresses me, although it is globalisation and tourism, not the EU, that are the major protagonists behind it. I returned last week from a massively enjoyable and fascinating 16-day rail trip around the continent, taking several sleeper trains between some of its greatest cities. This diverse collection of societies and cultures within such a small area on our doorstep: we take it for granted at our peril.
In the middle of the trip I read this news piece about fears for the survival of Paris neighbourhoods expressed by the deputy mayor Lyne Cohen-Solal: 'All the cities all over Europe are starting to look the same. London, Berlin, they're going to have the same streets with the same shops,' he said. 'If we don't intervene ... we are going to have only textile shops and fast food. We don't want this kind of future for our city. Culture is a very important thing to create integration [and] a higher quality of life.'
He's spot on. Soon, Europe's monuments and treasures will be reduced to totems of expired national identities, dotted around a homogenous morass of cultural and aesthetic mediocrity. (You might surmise from this that I don't rate shopping very highly in the pursuit of happiness. And you'd be right.)
Just as unfettering markets doesn't seem to stop them working inefficiently and heading in catastrophic directions, zealous lawmaking and regulation in the social arena rarely meets its objectives (take 'the war on drugs'). I believe there are arenas in which socio-economic intervention is justified and could be effective: supporting traditional local industries, proper town-planning and regeneration programmes, and transport policy, both local and national. But these are the very areas that have been abandoned by successive governments to the selfish vagaries of private enterprise and the market.
Which brings me to the trains. My experience of rail travel and urban transport across the continent was that it was superior to and cheaper than ours – by far. Even in those nations supposedly blighted so badly by decades of communism. Polish trains might be a bit shabbier and slower than Virgin's much-touted Pendolinos – but they are affordable to everyone, not overcrowded and their vestibules don't smell of excrement.
I don't pretend to know much about the transport policy of each nation on the continent or have detailed ideas on how we can learn from them. That is the job we pay politicians and civil servants for: to study complex problems and come up with solutions that are of most benefit to the widest possible section of society.
The free market is just one of the more effective means civilisation has found to organise business so that it provides for society's needs. That's all – it's a means, not an end in itself. That's why, when it has manifestly failed to provided a decent solution (as in the case of our rail network), it should be shown no clemency and no respect.
Comments