The inexorable rise of the equality agenda, and how it might get me a pint

Yesterday I got personal notice of a very good post by Clifford at The Other Taxpayer Alliance. 

Which is nice.

It’s about the reaction to John Denham’s speech about the equality agenda in general, as partially and not very well reported in The Guardian, and better reported by Sunder. 

Clifford goes on to reference a number of writers who are pushing that agenda from different percpectives.  I won’t repeat all the references here, as that’s what Clifford’s post is for (and anyway false modesty forbids, as he was kind enough to mention this post of mine).

What it did make me realise though is that, even though John Denham may not quite have got the hang of the need for a ‘compelling narrative’ in favour of equality just yet (indeed Clifford suggests his speech militates against such with his negatively loaded use of terms like ‘1960 egalitarianism), there does really appear to be the start of a groundswell of opinion in favour of the kind of narrative of income-equality-as-the-new- common-sense, which I sought to promote in this post.

When I cross-posted it at Liberal Conspiracy, for example, I assumed it would be lambasted by many of the rightwing ideologues who lurk around, intent on taking the piss out of anyone who dares to set forth a view that differs from the mainstream notion that ‘ZanuLiebour have saddled us with insurmountable debt recklessy and our greatgrandchildren will pay for it’, and ‘anyway it’s all the fault of the unions and teenage mothers’.

But that didn’t happen.  

I accept that in part  this was because the article wasn’t sufficiently well-written to engage people who didn’t start out from a left perspective (it was written as a piece for this blog, where to date generally only lefties come). 

And certainly there was some scepticism about my suggestion that creating demand through raising income at the ‘lower’ end was founded on anything other than a vague socialist wish, rather than accepted economics.

But that notwithstanding, I’m encouraged enough by that experience, and even more so by seeing my principal (and intelligent) critic Tim Worstall now engage in civilised and even half-though-reluctant agreement with My Post-Keynesian Economics Guru Duncan Weldon, to think that the equality-as-economic-sense argument is ’saleable’ to a wider public – first to those with an understanding of the complex relationship between savings, investment and demand, certainly, but then onwards to a wider readership/listenership. 

There is much to be done to ‘market’ this new post-neoliberal approach as the sensible way to go, not least as it is inextricably  tied up with the need to spend our way out of recession, and the popular media-fed heebie jeebies that that creates, but I think we may be starting to get somewhere. 

Certainly, when I break with personal tradition and attend a conference on Saturday, in the company of Dan and Duncan (anyone else?), the key thing I’ll be looking for as an outcome, to make me happy on the train home,  is a sense of how the left can continue to push the post-Keynesian (neo-Hobsonian?*) agenda in words and images the public can start to support, and how we can make the Labour government listen to the electoral advantages of jumping on that bandwagon. 

Well that and Dan said he’d buy me a pint.  Which is nice.

* On the neo-Hobsonian underconsumption theory stuff, I’m indebted to Reuben at The Third Estate for jigging some half-memories of what I might have read, and have instructed Duncan to provide a full analysis of his continued relevance, or otherwise.  I’m happy to read and learn.