The stupidest thing Tony Blair ever said was that the twentieth century was the conservative century. In contrast, while the Conservatives often held office, rarely were they in power.
If you told the progressives at the end of the Victorian era that the dawn of the new century would bring the end of Empire, full legal equality for women, the extension of suffrage to all adults regardless of property – they would probably be quite impressed. Today, you could tell them that the British state guarantees not just a minimum wage, but a living wage. That the same state guarantees all its subjects not just “cradle to grave” universal healthcare, but welfare too.
You could tell them that the House of Lords has almost entirely lost its hereditary peers, and been stripped of its role as the final court of appeal. That the monarchy has become little more than the nation’s finest celebrity export, and that membership of the Church of England is more likely to be used as a punchline than a status symbol. This, I suspect, would be beyond the scope of their imagination.
Foremost among them were Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Graham Wallas and their fellow comrades of the Fabian Society. In 1895, they were to decide, over breakfast, to establish a school to further the “betterment of society” through “gradualist” or reformist democratic socialism.
Over the coming decades, its location would shift from Adelphi Terrace over to Houghton Street, where it still resides to this day. The London School of Economics has served as a sort of microcosm for British political, social and economic history in the last one hundred years or so. Whilst ideologies have ebbed and flowed in their influence, this has been reflected in the constitution and character of the university.
The structural shifts in society at large have occurred in almost natural symbiosis with the school itself – while Churchill won the war, it was Attlee (Lecturer), and his Chancellor Dalton (Student and Lecturer) that won the peace. They would implement the Beveridge Report, named after the LSE’s long-time Director, promising to rid British society of the five Great Evils: squalor, ignorance, want, idleness, and disease.
Another significant element of Lord Beveridge’s legacy, given the benefit of the long scope of history, was the decision to hire an Austrian economist called Friedrich Hayek whose Constitution of Liberty Margaret Thatcher would later slam on a table in the Conservative Central Office and proclaim: “This is what we believe”.
In the next era of British politics, it was Anthony Giddens (Professor and later Director) who was widely celebrated for providing the intellectual basis of the “Third Way” – “beyond left and right” – most famously adapted in the form of Blair’s “New Labour” reforms.
My point is that the contribution of the LSE to British political, economic and social life is very considerable indeed. This is all the more ironic given that it isn’t really a British university at all.
The LSE has educated two Canadian Prime Ministers, two Colombian Presidents, three Presidents of Ghana, three Prime Ministers of Japan… the list goes on. Oxford and Cambridge boast similarly eminent alumni, but few would doubt they are as quintessentially British as Shakespeare, Scotch or The Beatles.
The same could not be said of Houghton Street. This is partly a consequence of geography – central London is far more culturally and linguistically diverse than the Cotswolds. Oxbridge is steeped in tradition and with it, class, heritage and ancestry. The London School of Economics has no such pretence and claims the second highest proportion of international students for any university in the world. In contrast to other universities, the school epitomises cosmopolitanism and globalisation.
The school’s internationalism has some obvious benefits – and not just the capital inflows from the largely overseas student body. Academic training is one of the great hallmarks of British “soft power” – the idea that the experience of foreign elites in London would shape them towards the British way of life characterised by the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, and limited government based on separated powers and divided authority. The theory suggests that when these future leaders, most importantly of the developing world, find themselves with greater and greater economic, military and diplomatic muscle they might be more favourable to defending the Anglo-American liberal “rules-based” international order in return.
Alongside globalisation, the school stands as the flag-bearer for distant and unaccountable political and economic elites. George Soros, who spent seven years at the university, rewarded his hosts by becoming the hedge-fund billionaire famed for almost bankrupting the Bank of England and forcing the country to crash out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. It’s this distance that creates the impression that there exists such an “Establishment” with a separate set of values and experiences entirely remote from, in the words of the LSE’s founders, the society to which they seek to better.
While the progressive founders of the turn of the twentieth century sought to better society through emancipation – universal suffrage, investment in education, rights for trade unions inter alia – the Philosopher-Kings of contemporary academia seek to better society through technocratic paternalism.
The five “Great Evils” identified by Beveridge would now be a relatively modest set of goals – today they would include reference to the environment, sugary drinks, gambling, alcohol consumption, too perfect body-types to be featured on the London underground and potentially “dangerous” speech.
The growth of schools of government and bespoke courses on “Public Policy” – of which the LSE is one of the most acclaimed – promising lessons in the “craft of government”, is all part of this trend. The recent jargon of “Big Data” serves this idea- that if only politicians, civil servants and other policy-makers had access to an ever greater database then they would finally have enough information to cure the ills of society by planning it for us.
It’s difficult to ascertain the exact root cause of this movement, but it’s highly relevant that the Beveridge report did not live up to it’s grandiose rhetoric. Its flagship, the National Health Service, famed as unique in the developed world actually offers some of the worst outcomes in the West.
The apparatus of state taking on the commanding heights of the economy as part of the post-war consensus in the name of eliminating “want” and “idleness” slowly withered in the succeeding decades, culminating with IMF bailouts and the Winter of Discontent. Council housing, designed to eradicate squalor, was decimated by the mass desire of the working class to actually own their homes, rather than being permanently reliant on the Government.
The humbling experience of these policy failures has meant the more recent work of public policy enthusiasts have focused on these other “evils” – as a result, they’ve become less hubristic and more moderate in their expectations. That is to say, central government may not be able to regulate unemployment but it may still be able to “nudge” citizens into behavioural changes. A bit like if George had given up on slaying the Dragon, but tried to win over the townsfolk by tracking down the odd rodent instead.
The LSE could and should, like the alumni that bucked the trend such as Hayek and Robbins, defend the fundamental structure and constitution of liberal democracies instead of focusing on improving the administration and general governance of state.
Scholars of old like Hume, Madison and others recognised that the system of laws and checks and balances defend individual freedom and in turn protect the public good – this is the true prism by which society can be bettered. As the LSE doubles down on its reputation for wiring the house of British and international bureaucracies, it loses its focus on the central principle of its establishment.
