Graeme Archer: The rise of the machines

Gordon Brown and Labour. Close your eyes for a moment. What did you see?

Sunshine? Happy faces? Did you feel bathed in joy?

I saw: blackness. Ugly faces contorted in hate (to coin a phrase). Metal boxes, the height of skyscrapers, set out in a row and stretching far into the distance. If I listen carefully I can hear a frantic scrabbling and scratching at the walls from within.

You remember I told you once of my obsession with Iris Murdoch. Her novels talk endlessly about machines, indeed one of them is called The Sacred and Profane Love Machine. I think that by machine she meant the almost-cosmic algebra that binds us all together, and can tug hard between proximate humans. (This is the atheist’s surrogate for God.) If you’re in love, there’s a sort of machine binding you to the Other, almost independent of your two selves. Machines like that are good, though I find it important to understand their intent (even if it is only a literary device designed to mask the essential biological imperative we all obey). Work is another machine, one in which it is very important to feel in control. Lose that control at work, and you will lose your self-respect, your self-esteem and ultimately your integrity.

New Labour is a machine which is not sacred, but profane, in every sense of the word. It is a machine which has learned the art of self-replication. It has set in motion an entire sequence of mechanical devices which now dominate our country and hold us tight in their pincers. Some of them are obviously machines: for example, the tax credit system, a machine designed to force humans to live separately, rather than to live together, acting against the pair-bonding instinct of men and women since the dawn of civilisation. The Tax Credit Machine is further capable of grotesque errors which leave its victims gasping in despair; emotional responses to which the machine itself, and its robotic spawn in parliament, are quite, quite indifferent. Famously, the Brown Leader has never answered a single parliamentary question on the shambolic and immoral system he set in motion a decade or so prior to Year Zero. (Do we call 1997 Year Pre-Zero now? The Blair decade already feels like one of almost prelapsarian innocence. All those useful idiots smothering the media with spew about what a fresh start it all was).

The worst devices Labour have unleashed, however, are much more sinister, masked as they are in a near-impregnable cloud of good intentions. The Human Rights Act is one of these. It is the perfect machine: how do you attack the rights of humans? It’s important to be clear that doublethink imbues every Labour device: thus an Act which is said to protect the rights of humans actually turns out to be a machine for ensuring that natural justice for humans takes place as rarely as possible. The only beneficiaries of these ghastly devices are those with the warped desire to force the rest of us to think the way that they do: those Great and the Good who populate the committees that lecture us severely and constantly about the importance of, ooh, for example, diversity, who take it as axiomatic that one arbitrary metric they come up with (e.g. “diversity”) is in and of itself not just a Good Thing, it is the Best Thing, it is the Only Thing. Think about it! We have allowed a single, arbitrary, unidimensional measurement about our collectives – diversity – to become one of the key ways we sum up the totality of our humanity, the multifarious nature of our lives and our connections with others. And the only outcome of all this hectoring, for reasonable people, is to make us more aware of what divides us, rather than what we’ve got in common. I don’t know whether to laugh or weep.

Forgive the repetition of a truism. Lecture people endlessly on the rights of their social grouping (which they were born into completely at random); measure and punish them if they do not measure up to the machine’s notion of humanity – and they will end up assisting the machine, balkanising themselves in that sequence of boxes, fighting one another, instead of listening to one another. Instead of loving one another for their similarity and their differences.

When I’m feeling good-natured, I cannot believe that the Labour party intended this to happen. I tell myself that I know loads of good socialists, and that these outcomes are unintended consequences (albeit consequences which were perhaps somewhat predictable to people who grew up reacting against the pseudo-science of Marxism). Sometimes, though, I ponder the faces of Alistair Campbell and Peter Mandelson and Ed Balls and Gordon Brown. I think a lot about Dr David Kelly. I don’t know mate. Look upon my works and despair.

Centrally determined algorithms for determining the best outcome for most people will end up causing misery. Think about the nursery in Hackney which was starved of the two hundred quid it needed to do up its lavatories, required for its expansion, expansion on the estate where it was actually needed, on the estate where it would have helped a handful of poor women get back into work. It was starved of the two hundred quid it needed because the Central Algorithm had determined that the best Childcare Machine was Sure Start. A Sure Start which would more accurately be named Marginally Better Start for Middle-Class Children Who Would Anyway Have Had A Good Start And Who Cares About The People We Said We’d Help They Probably Don’t Vote Anyway Machine.

OK so what is to be done (ha ha). We need lots and lots of small and messy systems. I’m not anti-machine; they must just be under the control of real people. That means trusting people with the money they need (from us, through taxation, through philanthropy) to help their neighbours in the way that their instinct and their experience lead them to think most likely to work. They’ll get it wrong sometimes but by God the Centre for Social Justice showed us plenty of examples at conference where they get it right. I’d rather pay to fail with love than watch yet more algorithms march out from Whitehall in yet another doomed attempt to perfect humanity (i.e. render it powerless and dependent on a faceless machine i.e. dehumanise it: remember doublethink). To be a wee bit more prosaic: my definition of Social Justice is to trust local groups, neighbours, residents associations, groups of parents, churches, companies, third sector organisations (and nearly always the state but under the control of the other groups) to work together to offer diverse solutions for poverty, drugs dependency, education, worklessness.

Iris Murdoch once wrote: in the end, all our failures are failures of love. She could have been writing about Brown Labour.

Comments

[Malcolm Dunn]

Absolutely right. Labour's failing do not generally come from bad intentions but an overiding belief in an ideology that doesn't work.That, and of course common or garden incompetence. It's a message we should be driving home at every opportunity.

[Tony Makara]

Some machines can be quite beautiful. I'd love to own one of those old cathedral radios that were popular in the 1920s, they are five foot tall, look like a huge gravestone and are heavy enough to kill a man. I'd love to play my old Broadway shows through a machine like that.

Some machines however are ugly. Particularly the political machine known as Labour. The Labour party lost its heart and sold its soul after the death of John Smith. Now it runs like an automated robot. Lead by an overseer and run by unthinking functionaries. They exist for themselves and no-one else. Neil Kinnock is the living example of Labours transistion from man to machine. A conviction politician turned career-politican.

[Henry Mayhew - Ukipper]

You need 100,000 words for the range of this argument. Good effort in 1,100.

The concept of the uncaring public sector machine is an excellent one. Where are the local checks and balances in today's systems? Where is the sense of community involvement in social welfare? What impact is depersonalisation having on mental health?

Stick it all in a book. Follow up with a Michael Moore-style docu-drama.

[kingbongo]

Graeme - this is a brilliantly written article and one of the best expositions of the Conservative case for a just people focussed society I have ever read.

Henry Mayhew is right - this would make a cracking polemical documentary.

[David Sergeant]

What a super way to put it. But. If Greame Archer's ideas were put into practice you can bet that, in short order, the first time it is got wrong Labour and the BBC will be around in no time going on about the missuse of tax payers money etc.

This problem was demonstrated time and again during the 18 Tory years. Big media screams of rage with the local perpetrators making noises about how it's not their fault but Whitehall/Tories.

Graeme's and IDS's ideas will only have a chance if, right at the beging, politically aware trouble shooters are available to investigate and explain when things go wrong - as they frequently will.

[Peter Franklin]

Superb article, Graeme