Alexander Bowen: Sharing the burden requires fewer slogans, ignoring shoulders and understanding what ‘fairness’ really means

Alexander Bowen is a trainee economist based in Belgium, specialising in public policy assessment, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.

 Ernesto Laclau, the esteemed Argentine godfather of post-Marxism (post in so far as it is post class, given it is very much not done with the Marxism element), spent the best part of his career working on discourses in political power; on how words shape culture and the economy more broadly.

Chief among his concepts is the empty signifier – a phrase or symbol that to quote Wikipedia serves as “the hegemonic representative of a collection of various demands, constituting a chain of equivalence whose members are distinguished through a differential logic but combine through an equivalential one” …

…or as a normal person might term it: a ‘phrase that means whatever you want it to mean’.

“Stronger Together”, “For the Many (who?) Not the Few (who 2.0?)”, “Change.” (what?). British politics is of course littered with these slogans of nothingness, but there is one above all that I take particular issue with. It’s the one that Rachel Reeves, and seemingly every Chancellor since budgetary policy has become television entertainment, has trotted out recently. That “those with the broadest shoulders should pay their fair share”.

It is like all the other phrases that become cross party consensus – meaningless.

Yet it is meaningless in a quite specific way – it is like Laclau ‘warned’ – still shaping political power and it is shaping it in a quite specific way.

It is the motto of, what could only be termed, the Resolution Foundation Rawlsian. A person whom I shall now define as determining fairness as a min-min social welfare function where justice is redistribution and calculated on spreadsheets (or Stata depending on competence level).

They are the people who after every budget or policy measure browbeat the Chancellor based solely on whatever redistributional bar chart they have produced, and they are the people whose greatest frustration is with the godforsaken people for not understanding that the two child benefit cap is mathematically unfair. For fairness to this group is a ratio.

It is unfortunate then that the public do not see it that way.

Indeed they, if anything, agree with George Osborne. Substantive merits, or their absence, of the child benefit cap aside, some 59 per cent are in favour v just 25 per cent against. Why? Fairness.

Osborne’s rationale, and what the public clearly believe in, is a sort of base level fairness measured not in calculations but in a simple slogan – why should I pay for others to enjoy something I do not myself enjoy.

It’s an understanding of fairness you observe whenever you try to split a dinner bill – ought we each pay for what we consumed? Or will we split it equally for simplicity? Add in your colleague Mike ordering surf & turf and a top shelf scotch whilst you enjoy a salad and the principle of fairness suddenly reveals itself. The salad eater will not subsidise the steak and you certainly wouldn’t agree to calculate the bill based on incomes earned.

Empirically you observe the same sort of principle too – experts went into 640 Indonesian villages and asked them to work out who was poor and distribute money whilst observing how they did it. There was the top down centralised approach that the Indonesian state imposed on them – Proxy Means Testing calculating mathematically and observing empirically who had what. Objective and maximally efficient yet unpopular. When the people were allowed to pick what was observed was a different concept of poverty entirely – poverty was not a calculation but determined by a feeling of capacity and effort. The people, free to redistribute as they pleased, picked to support people with innate not mathematical disadvantages.

Now a state is not a household, nor is England a collection of Indonesian villages, Katie Lam’s concerns about cultural coherence aside, but at least some of that instinctive fairness must still exist for a welfare state to sustain itself.

Social democrats elsewhere appear, more or less, to understand that. Yet the entire agenda of this government, and much of the last, has consisted of spreadsheet fairness. Winter fuel payments clawed back through the tax system, the free childcare tax trap, a student loan system where the worst students get the biggest subsidies…

There is no sign of Britain’s own attempt at peine forte et dure being over any time soon yet the pressure from the system it sustains is reaching a point where it feels vaguely like an ancien régime cartoon of a peasant carrying the country with the top 0.1% of income earners paying more income tax than the entire bottom 50 per cent combined. It is a situation that if anything appears likely to escalate – with the Greens and Labour’s left proposing terribly designed wealth taxes and every other day a new leak on how to raid private pension wealth emerges.

In a certain sense then it is regrettable then that Zack Polanski’s hypnotism days are ‘in the distant past’ (2013) and appear unable to enlarge shoulder size, though bizarrely may help elsewhere, and that shoulder pads have been out of fashion for some time. At least if our collective shoulders were widening the extra burden would not feel so extreme; at the end of the day you can only stack so much on someone’s broad shoulders before you break their back.

The role of the Conservatives needs to be in articulating that – not merely repeating Rachel’s platitudes about broadest shoulders – it needs a doctrine of fairness that understands reality, instinctive fairness, and sometimes spreadsheets and it needs, should it ever make it back into government, to ensure that ‘Henry’ at least gets his back massage after carrying everyone else’s baggage.