A spirited defence of Russell Brand comes from Suzanne Moore, deploring "the ranks of the professionally sensible" who have attacked him. It's a novelty to find oneself bracketed, however unwittingly, as professionally sensible, but there we are.
Writing in the Graun, Moore thinks that Brand "nicely highlights the narrowness of our present political discourse . . . that discourse needs busting open . . . all the retorts amount to a defence of parliamentary democracy, a political process that many are clearly alienated from (sic) . . . those who accuse Brand of naivety are themselves naive about what voting achieves . . . Brand hits home because politics as it is enacted is dull and conformist . . . This system is so dead and closed that there feels little choice . . . In reality people are falling away from political parties. Brand's idealism is in part a response to this. . . He is right on many counts and while we are far from revolution we have a younger generation with high expectations and no means to meet them.
Some points in no particular order:
Parliamentary democracy has got flaws, but, as Churchill said, the alternatives are worse. Brand, as he readily admits, doesn't have a programme; but if he did, how would he go about implementing it?
Since parliamentary democracy is apparently deplored, I could only imagine this would be by violence.
Actually such an attempt would fail, partly because the machinery of the state would be exercised to suppress it, and partly because it wouldn't command majority support; but I hope it's enough for me destroy Brand's credibility to point out that violence would be the only plausible means. After all, he doesn't intend to do it via the ballot box.
Surely Suzanne Moore, writing for the benevolent falafel-chewing gluten-free Guardian, couldn't be endorsing violence, could she?
Secondly, the Anonymous protestors, with their sweat-shop made face masks, may be right about some things, but they don't represent anyone but themselves. Brand and his new friends may rail against Parliament, but the truth is that even tired old Parliament has more democratic legitimacy than they do.
Thirdly, if there feels little choice in our parliamentary democracy it's because, essentially, the big intellectual arguments have long ago been won and lost. There is a general consensus in Britain that people want a sort of social democratic capitalism, in which the market's dynamism is harnessed and tamed to provide economic freedom but also an adequate safety net for the poor.
This sort of model has been discredited by events of the last five years, partly because the capitalism which made a few people rich by providing debt to the rest of us collapsed in a heap; and partly because its collapse revealed that the welfare system paid for with the fruits of that debt wasn't affordable. But most people believe and hope it can still be made to work, and this is where British politics is now - arguing about the details. It might change, but the views of Brand and Moore are still in a tiny minority.
Lastly, the "younger generation with high expectations and no means to meet them" is almost worth a blog in itself, but I think Moore's analysis is partly right. It's quite possible that the rising generation might be the first in a long time to end up being poorer than their parents. I say might because when I look back at my own childhood I remember wooden toys, an orange in your stocking at Christmas, holidays in rainy Scotland, and not daring to ask if I could share a room when my girlfriend came to stay; whereas even the least fortunate of my children's contemporaries have had computer games and phones that would have made us gasp, cheap holidays in the sun, endless restaurant meals and no-questions-asked room-sharing when significant others come round. Living standards have gone up dramatically in the last forty years.
Ah, say Moore and her ilk, but what about jobs? What about getting on the housing ladder?
Boring I know, but unemployment was much higher during the Thatcher years, and as for the housing ladder, most people didn't ever think they would ever own their own property anyway; ironically it was Mrs Thatcher who put the notion into the public's mind. I didn't own a house until I was thirty six. It was the first time since leaving home that I had gone upstairs to bed, because I hadn't lived anywhere with two floors.
Actually, although loan-to-value levels are high, the proportion of mortgage payments to average earnings is very low by historical standards because interest rates are so low. People can't get on the housing ladder not because prices are too high but because, post-credit crunch, mortgage companies are demanding a sizeable deposit which they don't have. None of us is used to saving, and that's because we got used to a period in the nineties and twenty-hundreds when credit was easy to get: if you wanted something, you just went to the bank and the money was handed over.
This is where I agree with Moore. The younger generation has high expectations and no means to meet them. If they had a little more curiosity about the last hundred years of British history (and there are after all quite a lot of people available to ask about it) they would see that they are in fact incredibly fortunate - they have grown up in a time of enormous personal liberty, freedom from strife, unparalelled life expectancy and material affluence. It's a crisis of expectation. But not any other kind of crisis.
