Compared to Suu Kyi’s impassioned plea for assistance in rebuilding a sector ‘destroyed’ by military rule and in helping to foster ‘vibrant’ and ‘robust’ citizens, I found the first half of the day lamentably abstract and of very little relevance to the Myanmar context. To watch two UK vice-chancellors spouting the usual technobabble about partnerships, transparency, reciprocity, the knowledge economy and so on – always excruciatingly painful – felt like being on another planet. It was particularly galling to listen to them say that university autonomy was always a bit of a myth; it was a ‘privilege’ that had to be ‘earned’; and because we were ‘accountable’ to ‘stakeholders’, the best we could hope for was ‘responsible autonomy’. The message this sends out to a semi-authoritarian state that is deeply afraid of conceding freedoms to any institution not directly under its control is an appalling one: our institutions aren’t free either, and that’s a good thing, so don’t worry that you have to actually liberate your universities.

The other-worldly atmosphere persisted with a panel on how universities could contribute to economic growth – an incredibly UK-centric agenda, with universities being pressed to convert themselves into handmaidens of business in the context of a busted economy. I really felt – as did the other Myanmar experts there – that the discussion had to be brought down to earth in the Myanmar context. The question, I pointed out from the floor (when, after 2hrs of talking from the platform, we were finally allowed to contribute), is not what universities can do for the Myanmar economy but rather how the economy can be harnessed to revive the universities. Although education spending has risen in absolute terms, because the overall size of the government budget has grown, it is still the case that the military gets in excess of 20% of government spending whilst education gets just 4.4% – one of the very lowest in Asia. Until these figures are reversed, we cannot hope for significant improvements in HE.

I was invited to speak on a panel on ‘university leadership – what will this involve?’ I was later asked if a copy of my remarks was available, so I thought it might be worth writing the bullet-points up here. I say all this with the caveat that most UK vice-chancellors often fail to live up to these standards.

• Leadership has a strong political dimension and is about intervening within a very specific political economy context – so attention to that context is critical instead of general abstractions and fast policy transfer. Leadership has both an internal dimension – leading groups and individuals within your institution – and an external one – trying to unify people beyond your institution behind you.
• Fundamentally, university leadership in Myanmar must be inverted. Currently, university rectors are arms of the state used to penetrate, regulate and police university staff and students in the name of security and public order. In future, they must carve out autonomous spaces for teaching, learning and research in which academic freedom is cherished and defended from external attack, i.e. rectors must defend universities against the state (and others hostile to these values and activities). If you do not have such an autonomous space, you do not have a university.
• What does this mean concretely?
  • freeing staff from ‘policing’ duties to perform teaching and research. Much staff time is wasted because lecturers are made to patrol campuses, check who is entering and exiting, and essentially spy on their students (or each other). This is totally inappropriate.
  • re-establishing and then defending academic freedom as an absolute value in both research and teaching. This must be promoted both as an internal culture and defended from external attack.
  • advocating externally for policy changes necessary to make these things possible, e.g.:
    • de-regulation of academic travel. Currently, if a scholar wants to go abroad to study, research or teach, they require permission not only from the higher education department but a cabinet meeting; thereafter they must have a passport approved by the ministry of foreign affairs, clearance from the ministry of home affairs, and so on, and are often required to leave financial bonds and/or family members behind. Lecturers must not be treated as potential enemies of the state.
    • students must be empowered to select their own courses of study. Currently they are simply assigned to degree programmes based on their school exam results (e.g. if you come in the top X%, you are assigned to medical school, whether or not you want to be a doctor). Students need autonomy and academic freedom, too.
    • Above all else, rectors will need to lobby for additional funding to enable them to rebuild their dilapidated institutions. This is particularly critical to resolve the chronic underpayment of lecturers. Currently, no one can survive on a lecturer’s salary. You must either be supported by your spouse (which is why 85-90% of lecturers are women), have your own family business or work one or two other jobs, or find other sources of income, e.g. private tuition or even taking bribes from students to assign them particular grades. The suggestion made in an earlier session – to use academics to help tackle corruption in other areas of life – is all well and good, but corruption within universities is itself rife and needs tackling first.
• University leaders also need to help foster and work in partnership with other autonomous groupings within university communities. They must assist and support staff in organising unions, and cease the reported practice of union-busting by dispersing organisers (which is linked to the equally terrible practice of rotating lecturers around posts arbitrarily every few years). As the constitution of the recently-formed University Teachers’ Association at Yangon University shows, staff unions are interested in helping to rebuild the capacity of staff and should be treated as partners, not enemies. Similarly, they should be conceded collective bargaining rights. Student unions – forcibly crushed and even physically destroyed in the 1970s – should also be restored.
• Advocating a positive, dynamic and progressive mission for the university will help mobilise staff, students and local communities behind university leaders, attract funding from government, international donors, and possibly alumni – who could be a useful set of allies, particularly for institutions like Yangon. Such a vision will be critical in building the socio-political coalitions necessary to effect the political and economic changes required to create a bedrock for university reform.
• Finally, university leaders must engage in collaboration with each other, and with local communities. They must not – despite what the VCs had said earlier in the day – seek to ‘compete’ in the misguided sense that this will drive up standards. This typically only duplicates efforts, wastes resources, and destroys collegiality.

In response to questions and comments from the floor, I made a few other suggestions.

1. Q: How can university leaders achieve these goals? What can the government do? A: The current generation of rectors will find this very hard to do, because they have been selected for compliance with the government’s security goals, not their skill in dynamic leadership. Leadership can be made more collective through the use of external councils and powerful senates. Importantly, the mistake the UK has made in handing over control of councils to majorities of externals – largely meaning businessmen – should not be repeated. Instead, local community leaders with more experience of enthusing and leading bodies of people should be drawn upon, whilst powerful senates enable the wider academic body to exercise leadership. The best thing the government can do is to step back, identify clear and inviolable rights for universities and then uphold them rigidly. People are afraid to use their autonomy if the space to do so is vague and flexible according to political whims.
2. Q: Is there a danger that the rural population (70% in Myanmar) will be neglected, particularly in the focus on elite, urban institutions like Yangon? Q: what about ethnic minorities, whose experience of Myanmar education systems is often oppressive and marginalising? A: Both of these areas are major problems. Rural access to universities can only be enhanced by fixing the basic education system. It was asserted throughout the day by Myanmar delegates that the language of university instruction is English and it must stay that way. In reality, although some slim and outdated course texts may be in English, even in ‘elite’ institutions, the students’ English language skills are so appalling that courses are actually taught in Burmese, or some mangled form of Burmglish. If Myanmar insists on English – which may be sound for business reasons and may even be less oppressive for minorities who do not wish to/ cannot speak Burmese – then it must radically improve English instruction in schools. As for ethnic minorities, leadership would involve designating one university in each minority state as a national flagship institution and building it up as rapidly as possible to a truly excellent standard. This would show that the state was serious about providing avenues of advancement for all Myanmar’s people.
3. Q: Is there a risk that the pace of change is too fast? Can we just give out academic freedom and free speech when people are not used to using these freedoms? Is there not a risk of paralysing the education system if we allow party politics onto campus? A: This last point, ironically, was made by a very senior British attendee, and thus echoed the authoritarian sentiments of the Myanmar delegate on my panel, who warned against creating ‘violent’ youths and keeping party politics off campus. Personally I do not fear freedom of speech, academic freedom, or politics. I am often asked about the violence against Muslims in Myanmar and whether it is a byproduct of the new freedoms people enjoy. In reality, anti-Muslim sentiment runs very deep in Myanmar and anti-Muslim agitation was occurring even under military rule: Wirathu, the monk who leads the hyper-nationalist, anti-Muslim ’969′ campaign, was imprisoned by the military precisely for whipping up religious hatred. But what we have seen recently is Buddhist leaders who do not subscribe to his perverse reading of Buddhism speaking out against the violence. What is required is more free speech, to allow these alternative voices of reason to be heard, not less free speech. Similarly, what passes for academic research in Myanmar universities is lamentable and leads to dodgy assumptions about, e.g. the Rohingya, to go unchallenged. Wouldn’t it be better if scholars could research and publish on such controversial topics, to enable a more enlightened debate? As for politicisation, the problem in Myanmar is not too much politics but far too little. Myanmar society has been totally depoliticised and atomised by decades of one-party and military rule, leaving it virtually bereft of organisational structures and sophisticated political thinkers – and this in a country that was once at the forefront of anti-colonial liberation struggles in Asia. It desperately needs time, resources and freedom to explore and rediscover political ideas.

As to what the Myanmar delegation will take away from their visit to the UK, we can only speculate. The delegates’ closing remarks did not give me too much optimism. In the final session, one delegate observed that rectors lacked the experience of running their universities autonomously and so could only be granted semi-autonomy (because, presumably, the current leadership from the 12 ministries involved in running universities is so fantastic); he also supported the reintroduction of student unions, but only if they could receive training on how to conduct themselves responsibly, e.g. from our own NUS; and by this he seemed to mean they should focus on organising student societies rather than being involved in politics. Finally, the deputy minister showed that he was absorbing the British technobabble by agreeing that universities needed to engage with ‘stakeholders’ and more public-private partnerships would be necessary. The main requests for assistance were around capacity-building for administrators and English teachers; provision of research facilities and equipment; assistance to update teaching and research methods; HE partnerships; and advice on student union formation. That is, unsurprisingly, the technocrats want to focus on technical assistance. But if they neglect the broader political economy context and, crucially, the values that universities are meant to embody, they will not get very far.

You can hear the show here; the segment starts about 42 minutes in.

• Weibo alters China’s environmental debate – FT
• [Myanmar] Govt Sends Controversial Press Law to Parliament – Irrawaddy
• Cambodia Khmer Rouge tribunal staff go on strike – AP
• N Korea builds mysterious “panorama museum” in Cambodia – Kyodo

You can listen to the show here; my segment starts about 42 minutes in.

Since holding elections in 2010, Myanmar has transitioned from a direct military dictatorship to a formally democratic system and has embarked on a period of rapid economic reform. After two decades of military rule, the pace of change has startled almost everyone and led to a great deal of cautious optimism. To make sense of the transition and assess the case for optimism, this article explores the political economy of Myanmar’s dual transition from state socialism to capitalism and from dictatorship to democracy. It analyses changes within Myanmar society from a critical political economy perspective in order to both situate these developments within broader regional trends and to evaluate the country’s current trajectory. In particular, the emergence of state-mediated capitalism and politico-business complexes in Myanmar’s borderlands are emphasised. These dynamics, which have empowered a narrow oligarchy, are less likely to be undone by the reform process than to fundamentally shape the contours of reform. Consequently, Myanmar’s future may not be unlike those of other Southeast Asian states that have experienced similar developmental trajectories.

• Japan protests over China ship’s radar pointed at vessel – South China Morning Post
• Beijing Court Takes Rare Swipe at ‘Black Jail’ System – Wall St Journal
• Gerald Giam: no increase in foreign workers if resident workforce grows at 1 per cent – Straits Times
• Chinese comedy aims to make Americans laugh – FT

You can listen to the show here; my segment starts about 35 minutes in.

• Markets cheer Japan conservatives’ return to power- Shinzo Abe is back as Japan’s PM, but while markets have reacted favourably, Japan’s neighbours are cool.
• China rounds up members of doomsday cult – this has been linked to the school stabbings in Chenpeng, which have gained unusual international attention because they happened alongside the school shootings in Connecticut
• Congress OKs RH bill – the Philippines passes a controversial reproductive health act which instructs the state to provide contraception devices.

You can listen to the segment here; I come in about 46 minutes in.

Theorists from a number of different traditions, notably Gramscian Marxism and Regulation Theory, point out that capitalist states need to pursue two distinct strategies of rule. One is a political strategy designed to cement the domination of the ruling classes. Since this cannot be achieved through coercion alone, it typically involves trying to win the consent of subordinated social groups through various ideological devices and concessions. The second is an economic strategy, which seeks to provide the conditions for capital accumulation. An accumulation strategy is important because, despite what various free-market theorists may suggest, capitalism does not expand smoothly on its own. Historically, capitalist have needed the state to provide the conditions under which they can realise profit. In early capitalism, the state was required to break up earlier, communal forms of property holding to allow it to be seized and aglomerated and put to productive, profitable use, e.g., the enclosure of scattered, patchwork communal lands to form large-scale agricultural estates. States have also been required to lay the legal foundations for private property and defend it, by force if necessary, from efforts to redistribute it – and so on. In an ideal world (from the elites’ perspective), the accumulation strategy supports the political strategy by providing a flow of material benefits to subordinated groups; and, vice versa, by successfully legitimising the economic system.

A crisis of the sort we have experienced in the last few years requires a fundamental rethinking of both these strategies, because the previous ones have clearly been seen to fail quite dramatically. The failure of the economic strategy is most apparent, but this failure has also plunged the state into a crisis of political strategy, as have a number of related and unrelated developments such as the scandals over MPs’ expenses and the phone hacking scandal. The fact that no party was able to command an overall majority in the 2010 elections illustrates the collective failure of the political class to articulate a compelling strategy, and the continued infighting since is indicative of their continued failure.

So far a lot of the commentary on the Tory-Lib Dem coalition’s economic policy has focused on their programme of public sector cuts, which is designed to cut the massive budget deficit acquired following the nationalisation of private-sector debts incurred in the global financial crisis. Many critics have highlighted how the poor are essentially being made to pay for a crisis which originated in the banking sector and has simply been shifted around. This is of course true, though it is principally a moral criticism. Another critique is that ‘you cannot cut your way out of a recession’. This line reflects the faint ghost of Keynesianism that has been floating around since 2008, the claim being that, since recessions are caused by depressed demand for goods and services, it is irrational to try to climb out of recession by further suppressing demand. Even the IMF and the ratings agencies have recently come around to this rather obvious way of thinking. Some commentators have now begun to ask a more fundamental question: where is future economic growth meant to come from? Which sector(s) is meant to lead the economy out of recession?

It is quite obvious that the government has no real answer to this question. There has been some talk of the need to ‘rebalance’ the economy away from the domination of finance back towards manufacturing. This actually began prior to the 2010 election when Lord Mandelson, a previously fervent admirer of neoliberal deregulation, suddenly announced the need for an ‘industrial policy’ to help support British manufacturing. Since then, the Lib Dems (particularly in the form of Business Secretary Vince Cable) have probably been the most outspoken on this issue, but virtually no real policy initiatives have followed from this rhetoric.

The reason for this is plain enough. Decades of anti-industrial policy have profoundly eroded the basis for profitable manufacturing in Britain. The Thatcher government was content to sacrifice vast amounts of British industry as the price for defeating the trade unions. Manufacturing continued to decline under New Labour as a further million jobs were lost.The Blair administration in particular was seized of the ridiculous notion that it was now possible to ‘live on thin air’, in the words of New Labour guru Charles Leadbetter. The so-called ‘creative industries’ were supposed to be our new leading sector, the view being that we could create wealth by creating and monetising ideas, independently of material production. Consequently, investment in research and development and national infrastructure has been among the worst in Europe. The closure of technical colleges and polytechnics, or their conversion into second-rate universities, has produced a generation of young people without the requisite skills – with degrees in media studies instead of mechanical engineering. Through deregulation, capital has been allowed to avoid the risky business of investing in actually producing things, flowing instead into arcane speculative vehicles. The reality is that the material basis for high-end, high-growth manufacturing does not exist in this country.

Thus, for example, while some on the ‘left’ fanatasise about ‘green industry’ and ‘green jobs’, and the government has put some money towards this goal, the truth is that the vast majority of wind turbines are built abroad (e.g. in Portugal) and would need to be imported. Even if politicians had the balls to push for the construction of a new generation of nuclear power plants, it could not be achieved by British industry because the education system is not producing any graduates in nuclear engineering, and all the important components would need to be manufactured abroad.

So what, then, is going to lead the country out of recession? The truth is probably that the government is still groping for a solution. As Bob Jessop points out, political and accumulation strategies don’t emerge whole and intact in some kind of ‘eureka!’ moment – they are assembled piecemeal through trial and error, and are shaped by reactions to them from other social groups.

However, it is increasingly obvious that the government is groping towards the further privatisation of state assets as a means of providing a channel of capital accumulation. This strategy was first used in a serious way in the 1980s when vast swathes of state-owned industry and infrastructure – coal mines, steel mills, the railways, power generation and distribution, telecommunications, etc – was sold to private companies. Typically, they were let go at rates well below their market value and massive subsisidies continued to be paid to many of their buyers, since this was required to deliver the rates of profit required by private investors. This was legitimised by the political strategy of neoliberalism which claimed that private firms would run these services more efficiently, a claim which now looks totally absurd, particularly in relation to the railways. A further significant privatisation was the sale of council houses to their tenants, again at knock-down prices; this was again legitimised by the claim that private owners would invest more in their homes, but it was largely a (stupendously successful) political bid to gain support from the working class for the Tory programme of privitisation. For the same reason, people were offered the opportunity to purchase shares in the newly-privatised public assets, and thus participate in Thatcher’s dream of a ‘shareholder democracy’, where people participated not as political agents in a common society which might make big decisions about the form political, economic and social life ought to take, but as shareholders voting at annual general meetings on how companies should be governed and how profit should be maximised. Thatcher’s strategy was thus both to open up new avenues for capital accumulation in areas previously barred to it (because of public ownership), and to broaden the social basis for further capital accumulation by creating fringe benefits for a greater segment of the population. By 2010, a sixth of the UK population had investments in the London stock market, directly tying their personal wellbeing into the fate of finance capital, the principal beneficiaries of 1980s deregulation.

Early signs are that David Cameron is groping towards a similar solution to today’s crisis. In a recent speech, he laid the most comprehensive ideological statement yet on the economy, which involved a full-throated defence of free markets and indicated a determination to ‘use this crisis of capitalism to improve markets, not undermine them’. Echoing Thatcher, he laid out his vision for a ‘genuinely popular capitalism, which allows everyone to share in the success of the market… building a nation of shareholders, savers and home-owners’. The speech was long on rhetoric and short on substance, but it outlined a range of concrete measures: tax cuts for entrepreneurs; the ‘reinvigorat[ion] of the right to buy’ (council houses, presumably); and ‘providing new rights for public sector workers to create mutuals and own a stake in their success… opening up new forms of enterprise’.

This last line in particular suggests that there has been greater coherent to the government’s public sector ‘reform’ platform than is often appreciated. One of the first things the government did on taking office was to introduce radical plans for the accelerated privatisation of the National Health Service, where private providers – already given an enforced market share by New Labour reforms – were to be allowed virtually unfettered market access, with the ethos being that it simply did not matter who provided services. The goal of ‘improving markets’ was to be met through new commissioning arrangements via GPs (acting as de facto ‘customers’ on the demand side) and through a new healthcare regulator. Some of the more extreme aspects of this plan have been beaten back through sustained resistance from the public and healthcare professionals, so the market is no longer being opened up quite so radically, but nonetheless, it is being opened up.

Similarly, an early priority was the ‘reform’ of universities. Fees were hiked to a maximum of £9,000 and the Browne Report, which kick-started the reforms, explicitly articulated students as consumers and university education as a service they purchase. The Browne commission was initiated by New Labour, illustrating how such moves are both an extension of earlier part-commercialisation of public services, and how this emerging response to the global financial crisis is broadly shared across the political class, rather than being driven by ‘Tory ideology’ as some deluded individuals on the ‘left’ seem to believe. Government plans essentially established an internal market in British HE in which departments and universities would compete with one another for students and their fees; the ‘winners’ would be allowed to expand while the ‘losers’ would be allowed to go bankrupt. New business opportunities would be opened up by allowing Further Education colleges (many of which are already run entirely along business lines) to provide degree-level courses, and by allowing private providers, such as those existing in the US, to establish for-profit institutions with degree-awarding powers. Again there has been sustained opposition from students, lecturers and much of the general public, which has reportedly led to the white paper containing the more radical aspects of this plan to be shelved. Nonetheless, new market opportunities have been created.

Now a similar picture is also emerging in secondary education. Initially, so-called ‘free schools’ were criticised largely because they would allow middle-class ‘pushy parents’ to establish schools where they could segregate their own kids, drawing them out of and further impoverishing mainstream state education in their local areas. No doubt this was a fair criticism, but in light of today’s news it now looks as if ‘free schools’ were also created to provide an avenue for private companies to establish for-profit schools. Viewed in the light of wider public sector ‘reform’ this looks less like the exploitation of a technicality and more like part of that plan to ‘open up new forms of enterprise’.

Moves like these have been wrapped up with the ideological tropes of the ‘big society’, which is posed as an alternative to the ‘big state’, the idea being that community initiative can flourish if people are allowed to take over and run their own local services. Simplistic criticism has branded the ‘big society’ a mere cover for cuts. Certainly that is part of it: it is easier to say that local community groups will now run local libraries rather than simply closing them all down. But arguably it is more than that. It is part of the wider agenda to open up public services to ‘entrepreneurship’ of various kinds. As Cameron mentioned in his speech, employee-led ‘mutuals’ are already delivering £1bn-worth of healthcare services. His vision is for public servants to convert themselves into ‘social entrepreneurs’, essentially ‘buying’ the bit of the public service they currently staff, and then running it as a business selling services. Gradually the state’s role will be stripped back from being a provider of services, leaving it as a mere commissioner of services from these various ‘providers’.

As the £1bn figure suggests, this trend is not at all new but is an intensification of trends that are already in train. One of the most notorious examples is the Commonwealth Development Corporation. Formerly an arm of the British government’s overseas development agency, the CDC’s investment components were spun out into a private company, Actis, which was then sold at rock-bottom rates to its own employees in 2008. Its value subsequently skyrocketed and its new senior executives were soon paying themselves million-pound salaries; meanwhile its investment priorities shifted from those with maximum benefit for poor people in the third world but which often struggle to raise private capital through the banking system (e.g. agriculture) to projects with the highest profit margins, which have no trouble attracting private investors.

The accumulation strategy the government seems to be groping towards – albeit one beset by some popular (though very uneven) resistance – is attractive because it fits with prevailing ideological currents and economic imperatives. Despite the crisis of capitalism, the notion that markets (albeit presented in the guise of ‘local communities’, ‘medical professionals’, ‘student consumers’, ‘parental choice’, etc) are the most efficient providers of goods and services has essentially gone unchallenged, largely because no systematic alternative has been articulated by any social group, including movements like Occupy Wall Street. Vague blandishments for a ‘moral capitalism’ (a contradiction in terms) are easily wrapped into the government’s programme. The continued privitisation of state assets and public services also meets the overriding imperative of cutting the budget deficit in order to maintain ‘credibility’ in the international bond markets. Dismantling public services is also an easier route to capital accumulation than trying to rebuild the basis for manufacturing. At the same time, it tries to respond to the political crisis of the state by again widening the social basis of support for an intensification of capital accumulation by enlisting more people in market dynamics. Doctors are offered more respect and autonomy if they agree to serve as health commissioners. Students are promised more ‘voice’, enhanced ‘student experience’ and earning power if they choose to spend their fees wisely on the best degree courses. Local communities are offered maintained or even improved public services if they exercise ‘choice’ and organise themselves to become new providers. State employees are offered the opportunity for self-enrichment by ‘mutualising’ their bit of the state. Council tenants are again offered the ‘right to buy’ while low-income families are given a helping hand onto the property ladder. We are all offered shares in the recently-nationalised banks when they are (eventually) re-privatised.

The chance of all this succeeding seems rather slim. In contrast to the 1980s, when many people looked to the Thatcher government as a saviour, resolving the social and economic crisis of the late 1970s, today the overwhelming reaction to any government initiative is profound cynicism. With the experience of previous privatisations people are able to see that – as shown in the Southern Cross scandal, for example, where a company running privatised care homes went bankrupt following real estate speculation to finance its expansion – the provision of public services and the extraction of profit are often contradictory goals. Far from being more efficient, privatised services often still rely on subsidies to deliver profit rates, while simultaneously gouging customers through increased ticket prices or service charges. They can also see that, despite the goal of a ‘shareholding democracy’, the vast majority of gains from earlier privatisations accrued to a very narrow elite who had access to the skills and capital required to exploit the new avenues being opened up; that would be even truer today given the dramatic widening in income inequality since then. All this makes it unlikely that the government can restore a long-lost hegemony.

However, this doesn’t mean that the strategy will be turned aside. The very cynicism that undermines the government applies equally to most efforts to oppose it. Most people do not believe they possess the power, individually or collectively, to resist. More importantly, perhaps, there is no programme of resistance behind which they could throw their weight. The parliamentary opposition is falling over itself to restore its ‘credibility’ in the eyes of the financial class by committing itself to austerity, and its bland, ‘Blue Labour’ calls for ‘moral capitalism’ are easily wrapped into the government’s own agenda. The extra-parliamentary opposition is extraordinarily weak and reactive. The most well-organised force, the trade unions, are concentrated on minimising redundancies and fighting cuts to their pensions – laudable goals but certainly not ones articulated as part of a wider alternative strategy for the economy, politics or society as a whole. Other groups emerging to contest political terrain are marginal. The British Occupy movement is even vaguer in its demand and programme than its American counterpart (which is itself backwards-looking, appearing to long for the restoration of the ‘golden age’ from the 1950s-1970s when the ‘American dream’ could still be realised by the so-called ‘middle class’); in any case, it has certainly failed to inspire or mobilise the broader population, even if they sympathise with its basic impetus.

Until some sort of strategy offering a systematic alternative to the current one is articulated, the likelihood is that the government’s current strategy will stagger onwards, moulded here and there to fit a path of least resistance as popular anger flares, but not substantially deviating from its course. The result is unlikely to be ‘popular capitalism’ but more widespread cynicism and disengagement. Within 10-20 years the welfare state could be so denuded that it offers only skeletal provision for those unable to provide for themselves, while those who do have the ability to pay will lose any incentive to support public services, retreating instead into private provision. Since the welfare state is one of the last, feeble, remaining forms of social solidarity, social cohesion will continue to degrade and, as atomisation proceeds apace, our capacity to affect meaningful change will decline even further.

As a very junior scholar, it was a real privilege to be asked to contribute to this volume, which assembled a really stellar cast of authors, some of them reflecting on or summing up decades of brilliant scholarly work. Although the price tag is certainly prohibitive for anything but university libraries, I think it is a genuinely fascinating and wide-ranging collection that will be great to read for anyone interested in the region. We are hoping that Routledge will agree to a paperback edition if sales of the hardback proceed swiftly enough.

In the era of mass democracy, say from the late nineteenth century to the 1980s, government policy reflected the social forces underpinning the ruling party. Crudely speaking, many European democracies were dominated by parties which represented, alternatively, the interests of organised labour and of the interests of capital. Government policies reflected the broad ideological platforms these parties constructed in order to appeal to their social bases.

Since then, however, politics in advanced democracies has undergone a profound transformation. With the crushing defeat of the organised left in the 1980s across most of the industrialised world, the social cleavages and ideological struggles which characterised politics during the Cold War dissipated. Traditional workers’ parties shed their socialist commitments, shifting rightwards, courting big business and swing voters in marginal constituencies. This dramatic narrowing of the political spectrum has generated a far more technocratic form of politics, where parties compete not on the basis of ideology, but on their respective managerialist merits. Elections are now a contest over who can keep society and the economy ticking over most efficiently.

It is this context that makes academic research increasingly important in modern democracies. Because, rather than appealing to ideological commitments or the interests of particular social groups, our new technocratic elites appeal to expertise. In the UK, this began in earnest under John Major, with the rapid semi-privatisation of governance to a massive range of ‘quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations’ (quangos) – groups of ‘experts’ established to regulate various areas of public life with little or no public accountability. The trend accelerated rapidly under the ideologically empty New Labour government, with the buzz-phrase ‘evidence-based policymaking’ resounding in every Whitehall department.

This transformation has been profoundly felt in health policy, for example. Campaigns on smoking cessation, obesity and alcohol consumption were all launched with appeals to scientific expertise. New initiatives were inevitably launched with the phrase ‘research shows…’, and the media happily trotted out the increasingly frightening statistics generated by academic researchers that were used as the basis for new public health interventions. The research which Philip Morris recently tried to acquire was being used to support government proposals to impose plain packaging on tobacco products.

The area in which this tendency is furthest advanced is probably the environment. Here, government policy reflects, not political engagement with the public, most of who are increasingly sceptical about the green agenda and the vast majority of which vote against the Green party in elections, but rather what ‘The Science’ tells us.

Of course, there is nothing necessarily wrong with government taking note of what academic research says. Indeed, it should be welcomed. But appeals to expertise, research and science cannot, are not, and should not be the final word in any area of public policy.

This is not least because ‘evidence-based policymaking’ often masks policy-based evidence-making. As Dr Michael Fitzpatrick points out in his book, The Tyranny of Health, many ‘evidence-based’ health policies are actually based on the flimsiest of scientific bases. For example, Fitzpatrick traces the government’s ‘five a day’ approach towards fruit and vegetables to one footnote in a government report, which leads to another government report, which itself merely references research findings that have never been made public. The Body Mass Index measurement system, which creates a scientific aura around anti-obesity campaigns, is subject to many reasonable criticisms. The number of units of alcohol we are urged to limit ourselves to weekly, despite being issued by leading physicians and the UK’s surgeon-general, was arrived at entirely arbitrarily and was recently lowered for pregnant women without any scientific rationale.

More importantly, since we inhabit a democracy, all citizens should be able to scrutinise the research which increasingly technocratic elites use to justify their policies. This is far easier than it might sound. In 2008, research by the North West Public Health Observatory generated alarming headlines by reporting that alcohol-induced deaths had leapt 80 per cent to 15,000 per year, costing the NHS £2.5bn annually. This was used to underpin a new government anti-drinking campaign. Shocked by the reports, I read the research and quickly discovered, amongst other things, that the figures had apparently been deliberately inflated by including a vast number of ‘partially’ alcohol-related conditions where the actual contribution of alcohol was subject to considerable doubt. Ideally, of course, journalists would perform this important duty, but unfortunately they often simply repeat the ‘scientific’ claims made in university and government press releases without scrutiny. This is yet another reason why, as George Monbiot has recently argued, academic publications should be fully open to the public.

The basic principle of democracy is that no one should be subject to laws that they have no control over. Technocratic politics in Western states is inimical enough to democracy without excluding the public entirely from public policy debates by creating a closed loop between politicians and experts. Rather than being defensive about their research, jealously guarding their data and blocking public and academic scrutiny, scholars at places like Stirling, the Climate Research Unit and elsewhere should welcome wider engagement with their work. Yes, opponents of their policy recommendations, like Philip Morris, can be expected to try to question their findings in ways that reflect their own, quite possibly nefarious interests – but that is the nature of policymaking in a democracy. If the research is sound and the arguments sufficiently persuasive there should be nothing to fear.

Scholars who want to help shape policies that govern us all must be prepared to engage in open debate about their work and its policy implications. Proper safeguards to protect research participants can almost always be maintained by anonymising data; privacy concerns cannot be cynically wielded to fend off scrutiny. Academics should not expect to be insulated from the democratic process, still less above it.