Martin Wolf, the long-standing chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, had a meltdown of sorts in his latest column, which as shown above is titled We must fund oppositions properly to save democracy. Because Wolf has been at this game for decades, he is able to maintain a veneer of reasonableness in presenting yet another “save democracy” scheme. Those pretty much without exception are anti-democratic. This piece is true to form. Their purpose is to prevent a populist presumed rabble from taking over, or as a fallback, to domesticate them sufficiently so that they don’t represent too much of a threat to elites, particularly of the professional-managerial class sort. Wolf’s notions are so obviously self-contradictory, and his distaste for what was once called the masses so evident that his piece is a train wreck, the written analogue to a decoration horrorshow that interior designers would label “tragic”.
We’ve both cited and criticized Wolf over the years. He has penned many fine and informative columns. But too often, he has advocated wrong-headed orthodoxies, sometime a bit too obviously to curry favor, such as backing Bernanke’s bogus “savings glut” theory of the crisis, which conveniently exculpates the Fed.
Before we turn to Wolf’s seizure-in-the-form-of-an-article at the prospect of the knuckle-draggers getting even more power, note how he omits how we got here. The ultimate cause is neoliberalism’s success in shifting from an economic model that tried to achieve rising real wages as its measure of success, and one that shifted to rising asset prices as the priority, and used easier access to debt, particularly consumer debt, to bolster consumption so as to avoid pressure to share the benefits of productivity gains with workers. That has produced an explosion in concentration of wealth at the top and the shift towards more open oligarchy.
The part that Wolf and his ilk did not anticipate was that the best defense of the old technical-managerial elite was having sufficient concern for the welfare and pay levels of the lower orders and making sure a socially-stabilizing level of policies were put in place. Remember, this is not just for long-term survival but also competitiveness. Stronger social safety nets and government support allow for higher levels of real prosperity. Think for instance of how much employees pay is wasted on US health industry grifting. That cost savings could be shared between industry and workers, resulting in more competitiveness.
Again this is a crude generalization, but many in the professional-managerial class were happy with the way skyrocketing pay at the very top lifted their boats. They ignored that rising inequality created precarity for all but heavyweight capitalists (as we are seeing now with the collateral damage from the DOGE slash-and-burn operation).
Consider one episode of this history: the savage and successful establishment campaigns against Sanders and Corbyn. As we chronicled at the time, virtually all US polls showed that Sanders would beat Trump, polling 10 to 20 points better than Hillary in 1:1 matches. And importantly for the Wolf and Co. hysteria about populists, Sanders and social democrats generally are not hostile to having elite experts inform policy. Their priority is a fairer sharing of the economic pie, and the people they threatened most were the top wealthy, as opposed to top technocrats. I cannot speak with the same confidence about whether a Corbyn win would have checked the UK far right (the question about Corbyn was that he had only been a backbencher and might have faceplanted as party leader) but it seems highly improbable that he could have been worse than Starmer.
Now let’s turn to the bizarre Wolf offering. Its opener:
Boris Johnson won the Brexit campaign and a general election not because he knew how to govern, but because he knew how to entertain. If the present government fails, will the successor be a better government or a populist entertainment? My bet is on the latter, with possibly devastating long-term results, as is now the case in the US…
The Starmer administration has good intentions. But it was woefully unprepared for government. Part of the explanation has been such a lengthy period in opposition. The government is inevitably very inexperienced, as was also true in 1997 and 2010. But there is a further constraint: oppositions are chronically underfunded. They are supported not as governments in waiting, but as small private organisations trying to win elections.
Huh? UK readers can correct me, but the Government historically had a remedy to this problem, which was a highly professional civil service. My impression is that its quality has eroded seriously over time. The first blow was the deregulation of UK financial market in the 1980s, which led to both a big rise in pay levels along with employment. That led to a brain drain , not just from government service, but also science and research. I am not anywhere as clear on the second component, and hope British readers will fill in the gaps, but I have the impression that there was also deliberate hollowing-out of the civil service, starting in the 1990s. I don’t have the older history, but comments to the article described recent purges. For instance:
Emalyom
Martin, the role of public servants is to guide a new ruling party. The problem is that the last bout of conservatives tore the rulebook; first through the unelected cummings et al, then through Truss’ farcical stint, firing many career public servants.
The current system works just fine, as long as public servants are never fired for ideological reasons (this should be somehow codified)
Other readers made similar points, that better pay levels in civil service would be a simpler solution:
M from Milan
Make civil service a more attractive career, with prestige and better money. There is plenty of interesting and significant work that calls for intelligent young people to do, especially if they want to influence policy and make positive contributions.
Instead, they are misled into thinking—and tempted by the bounty—of “effective altruism”.
Better paid MPs (and more/better staffers) would help:
Psi
This misses one of the most important point, lack of policy development is one thing but the quality of politicians is significantly worse than they were historically. What we should also be concerned with is fixing the incentives about entering politics. Properly functioning (and funded) MPs offices, MPs paid properly, proper exit support. Many of these things have deteriorated over the years and the quality of MPs has dropped along with it.
But let’s turn now to Wolf’s desperate measures:
This is not a critique of democracy per se. Yes, it has many failings. But none of them is as great as those of despotism. Yet we have to recognise that oppositions need a great deal of help if they are to prepare themselves for the tasks they may face….
What is needed then is large-scale public support in keeping with the reality that a political party is a core institution of government. Its vitality is a public good. Even parties one does not agree with are part of that good, because healthy competition is what democracy is about.
There are two risks with relying on private money: insufficient resources and corruption. The former would be smaller if British think-tanks had the resources of US ones. But they do not and never will. Moreover, the priorities of the think-tanks depend on those of wealthy and powerful donors. These may be in line with the true priorities. But that cannot be guaranteed.
So, we should create funding for the opposition on a scale sufficient to invent and create policy, and work out many of the problems of implementation, prior to coming into power. This would improve the quality of public debate and governance, thereby making our democracy more effective. Today, support is just too limited. Thus, financial assistance to opposition parties “to carry out their parliamentary business” in the House of Commons (so-called “Short Money”) was set at only £11.1mn for all opposition parties for 2024-25, with Labour getting just £6.8mn. Opposition parties may also have access to civil servants in the run-up to an election. But that, too, is not enough.
I can see three possible improvements. One is to create a department of the opposition staffed by civil servants and outside experts, designed to help the opposition formulate its proposals. An objection is that this would undermine civil service impartiality. It is also unclear what to do with multiple opposition parties. A second possibility would be publicly funded party think-tanks, as in Germany, with the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and others. The third would be to fund parties to commission research and policy development on a large scale.
Hopefully German readers will sanity-check as to whether these “publicly funded party think-tanks” seem to generate better policy proposals and are seen as meaningful forces. And how does one prevent the likes of McKinsey muscling its way into this research by being willing to do it on a pro-bono or severely discounted basis? I saw shortly McKinsey proudly discussing the work it had done pro-bono for the US Treasury after the crisis,. It was not hard to see that they were keen to promote the idea that they now had an inside track and could thus better advise financial services industry clients (even before getting to the fact that they would be advocating for industry interests rather than the benefit of the broader public).
Wolf reminded readers that he had previously advocated for citizens’ assemblies to provide input. Some pink paper readers saluted that idea, while one reader said his experience with them in California was dreadful (the caliber of the discussions was poor and there was a lack of convergence on what to do). One also might recall this this sort of channeled populism can lead to unexpected outcomes; one of the steps on the road to the French Revolution was when the King asked representatives of each of the three Estates to list their grievances via cahiers de doléances. In other word, having voters crystalize their views on what is wrong may not be stabilizing, as Wolf seems to believe.
Needless to say, a preponderance of Financial Times readers comments derided the anti-populist tone as well as the patently weird idea that government employees should be helping parties currently in opposition formulate policies. A few reactions:
Daniel 21
Is this an April Fool’s piece? Incorporate the “opposition” into the state? JD Vance’s Munich speech seems to provoked an allergic reaction to democracy.
A bloke at work
I find this argument out of date and naive. If we have learned anything from Brexit, Trump or any other populist argument it is that “facts” hardly seem to matter any more, and the more they appear to come from “experts” the less they are listened to. Sure we could invest in the ‘machinery’ to maintain the balance…but who will listen to it. Both sides of Brexit “knew what they wanted to believe”. Same in the US. What we are living through now is a fundamental issue of democracy meeting polarised social media. I have no idea how you solve for that. Politicians live for votes. Popular ideas (vs. Economically or ecologically sensible ones) get votes.
YourNextAIBot
OMG, what have I just read?
Who are we to fund, Mr. Wolf?
Tories which just caused damages to the tune of £100bn+ GDP yearly (regardless of being well-funded), or
Reform which CEO (yes, CEO!) has been eating d**** on national TV because they paid him to do that?
Seriously, I like reading your articles, but this is daily-mail-worthy.
In other words, this Martin Wolf column is part of the accumulating evidence of desperation among the current ruling classes in the UK and Europe. And these reactions don’t seem simply to reflect fear of a loss of power, but the loss of legitimacy.
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During my MSc in mid 1990s, marking the entry to my “original career” in health economics, Citizens’ Assemblies were being piloted. In health economics we called them Citizens’ Juries (CJs) and one important feature that distinguished them from some versions of CAs is that the members would vote at the start, receive important contextual information and experience from “experts”, then vote again afterwards.
The proof-of-concept one we were all lectured on (and as such, am not sure whether it got a proper publication with peer review) was on treatment priorities for smokers. A handful of the 30ish attendees were initially of the view that smokers should be de-prioritised for conditions “they brought on themselves”. After the socio-economics of situations that cause people to engage in diseases of despair etc were explained, everyone voted to give all patients equal priority.
These days, with the degradation of so many fields and the public suspicion of “experts”, I’m not sure the original CJ would work. Which is a shame because I always liked it in principle.
Against Elections: The Case for Democracy by David Van Reybrouck discusses examples such as this. I liked the book, though there is something uncomfortably technocratic about trying to rescue democracy by fiddling with institutions and technical fixes, even if they’re on the radical side.
In the UK there has been Short Money since 1975 (named after Ted Short, then deputy to Wilson) covering opposition costs in the Commons, and Cranborne Money since 1996 (named after the then courtesy title of the present Lord Salisbury under a writ of acceleration) covering similar costs in the Lords. The leader of the opposition has received a quasi-ministerial salary over and above the salary of an MP since 1937, and this boon was extended to the opposition chief whip from 1965.
So, in the UK at least, there is quite generous funding. However, what Mr Wolf is presumably saying is that election expenses need to be underwritten by the taxpayer lest the oligarchs have a free hand. In my view it is necessary to break the monopoly which political parties have over the parliamentary process in order to improve the quality of British governance, whereas Wolf’s proposals would likely reinforce partisan control. However, I stopped reading Mr Wolf’s columns when the scales fell from my eyes in the mid-2000s.
FYI – the link to “cahiers de doléances” is messed up.
Fixed, thanks!
So his solution is to have taxpayers publicly fund their own political and economic destruction? Just another day at the office for Mr. Wolf.
I couldn’t get through the FT paywall, so I am dependent on the extracts quoted, but I don’t see much emphasis on anti-populism as such, unless the argument is that strengthening political parties is anti-democratic insofar as they may not represent the interests of the people. There’s anyway very little new in what he suggests.
There are several different issues here. You are right that in Britain traditionally the Civil Service was ready and waiting for a new government with policy options, costs of proposals and so forth This is still theoretically the case today, but has been undermined by two developments. One is the hollowing-out in numbers and capacity of the Civil Service since the 1990s, which is now simply unable to cope with the burden. But the other, less noticed, is the army of “advisers” and “assistants” who have flooded Whitehall in recent decades, often young, always inexperienced, and seldom professional, with their interests tied to the interests of the person for whom they work. In this, as in many other ways, the British system has been Americanised. The process really got going under Blair, who was notorious for taking decisions after talking to a few “mates,” and for encouraging communication by email and text message. It’s got a lot worse since: fifty years ago someone like Cummings simply could not have existed, but by the time of Johnson, it was accepted that the most powerful individual in the country was some bloke who had not been elected, had no professional standards, and just happened to be in favour with the current incumbent of Downing Street. Thomas Cromwell would have been proud.
But the real problem is what happens between elections, and it’s accepted in most countries that the gulf between the resources of government and those of opposition parties is so enormous, that it is a problem for democracy. My own experience suggests that this is true. In Britain, certainly, opposition politicians struggled to develop any real expertise in any area of government, with little time for research and maybe one part-time assistant. The result was that government simply walked all over the opposition. I can think of many examples during my time. One was in 1997 when Robin Cook, widely expected to be the incoming Foreign Secretary in an election that Labour would win, wrote an article on how he would strengthen controls on the export of defence equipment (a topical subject at the time.) On examination, it turned out that, with minor exceptions, everything that he was advocating was already being done. But Cook had no source of advice and research (all the material he needed was in the public domain) and was dependent on campaigning NGOs with their own agendas.
Most countries have decided that it’s not a good idea if the government’s resources massively outweigh those of opposition parties, and that some level of public funding is needed to correct this. The very limited funding in the UK leaves the door open for various NGOs, consultancies and think-tanks, some more respectable than others, to influence oppositions, hoping to reap the fruits when their clients enter government. The decay of the old Civil Service and the proliferation of “advisers” makes this very easy. In Germany, the Stiftung, each linked to a political party, have historically carried out the function, and there are also non-political but publicly-funded institutions. My observation is that, as a result, German parliamentarians are much better informed, on the issues than the UK. Elections are another question: in France, political parties are eligible for public funding for their election campaigns, but their overall expenditure is very limited and independently audited, thus placing the major parties on a more equal footing.
As I say, little of this is new and it’s been debated at least since the 1960s. Britain is a particularly flagrant case, but of course the normal rules of politics apply: every opposition wants more funding for opposition parties … until it is in government.
Thank you, Aurelien.
In addition to Whitehall, I would add local government. Decades ago, the likes of county education officers and engineers were skilled and experience individuals and able to engage Whitehall and local stakeholders.
Aurelien is right to highlight advisers and assistants and their Americanised job titles such as chief of staff. The likes of Cameron, Osborne and the Miliband brothers started working, if that is what one can call it, life as such. Under Blair, the number rose to the 40s, a couple per ministry. Under Johnson, the numbers rose to nearly a hundred, largely to “get Brexit done” and make up for Johnson’s lack of diligence. Let’s not forget the ones at party HQs and assistants to parliamentarians, including then in Brussels, and desperate to get into a ministry.
Aurelien is also right to highlight “mates”. This included his tennis partner and music industry mogul, Lord Levy, who became adviser on the middle east. This extended to career civil servants who became unhealthily close, including drinking buddies, to Blair and Alistair Campbell. The officials included the trio who co-wrote the “dodgy” or “sexed up dossier” to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Cummings is the most famous of the lot. Please keep an eye out for names like Morgan McSweeney and Matt Pound, no less toxic and just as ignorant.
In a word, “crapification”. I could also say, toxification.
Just as Yes, (Prime) Minister held a mirror up to part of the 70s/80s political establishment, The Thick of it did the same to the Blair/post-Blair years. Malcolm Tucker is often derided as a caricature, but I’m not so sure…
There was a TV Mini series called “The very British coup” (1988) based on a novel (1982) which I never got round to reading. An old style labour government gets into power. It wants to leave NATO, get rid of nuclear weapons and adopt alternative energy. Obviously all the tricks in the book are thrown at it by the establishment (MI5 IMF unions etc). I will say no more because of spoilers.
But is the real issue lack of expertise? If Stamer’s main idea is wanting to balance budget and as close second to leave any industrial development to the whims of private capitalists, then that sets hard constraints on what could be done. And better estimates on how much one percent rise in VAT will bring in doesn’t change anything.
What is anti-democratic here is Wolf’s repeated rubbishing of populism.
The post links to an archived version so you can read it in full there.
With Safari at least I still got the unarchived version, and even my no-paywall extension on Firefox didn’t work. I must be doing something wrong ….
Don’t click the first link to it, but scroll down to the second (‘Its opener’).
Oh, sorry, I thought I put the link to the archived version in both spots. Fixing….
What a strange idea. I really can’t add to your take down of it.
Bravo! for the wonderfully concise and dispassionate description of the neoliberal economic and class-political transition. I want to keep that in my pocket for explaining to others when the opportunity arises.
I had an uncle and a cousin who were career and fairly senior UK civil servants. They were proud of their work and talked about it I guess they were good at it. I think they were attracted to the career for a few reasons: job security (which may have eroded later), the sense of doing an important and useful public service, and the social prestige.
I expect many factors combined to erode the competence and skill in CS, some of which have already been mentioned above. Thinking about my uncle and cousin I guess the sense of being useful and doing something important must have declined as the government itself became less useful to the nation. It all comes back to the cancellation of the unwritten social contract established in the post-war reconstruction period that you mentioned in the intro: that the people will allow the ruling elite their privileges if the tide of real wages rises. My patrician CS relatives could believe in the ultimate value of what they do since it was administration of government that’s arguably doing the right thing, or trying to. Maybe in this sense the dissatisfaction in the CS reflects the popular dissatisfaction: the other side of the coin.
Problem with the idea of non-partisan civil service is that (aside from the things pictured in Yes, Minister) nobody is non-ideological and after forty years of neoliberalism & war these things are heavily entrenched in state apparatus, which will oppose any change. See Trump vs. The Blob in his first term, and no doubt the same thing would happen to anyone trying to do similar things with economy as Trump tried to do with foreign policy dogmas.
Funding “opposition” think-tanks or whatever he calls it is of course nothing else than attempt to extend this capture and keep opposition in check lest they come up with crazy ideas. Like that the whole thing about balanced budgets is nonsense. I can see the entirely non-ideological and professional policy proposals produced by such institutes if they were asked to draft budget based on material resources constraints and not some imagined accounting ones, or what would happen if they were asked to asses how to reign in bankers and financiers.
Thank you, Yves.
“In other words, this Martin Wolf column is part of the accumulating evidence of desperation among the current ruling classes in the UK and Europe. And these reactions don’t seem simply to reflect fear of a loss of power, but the loss of legitimacy.”
This is spot on. The PMC, especially the European arm’s, alarm at the perceived sell out of Ukraine, just the latest development, and the possibilities that may arise is making heads like Wolf’s explode.
A dozen plus years ago, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria regularly featured Wolf and Singapore’s Kishore Mahbubani. Mahbubani has not been on for years, but Wolf, Tom Friedmann, Paul Krugman, Bernard Henri Levy and the Economist’s Zanny Minton-Beddoes are regular. That’s common throughout the western MSM.
The german fraction of the professional-managerial caste is by no means better than their british or american counterparts. On the contrary their religious zeal to ridicule the feared “Plebeians” is not as subtle as Wolfs anti-populism but more of the unrestrained sort. A shining example is a new book written by Mark Schieritz with the unequivocal title “Too dumb for democracy. How we protect the liberal order, when the will of the people becomes dangerous”.
Schieritz is editor at “Die Zeit”, in former times a renowned weekly newspaper (with the late Helmut Schmidt as co-publisher) but now a cesspool of the lunatic red-green “salon-bourgeoisie”.
The UK has always been a cautionary tale for the US: militarism and financialization result in a short-term buzz and a long-term decline. The US decline will not be as steep because of our more abundant natural resources, immigration, and entrepreneurship, but we will no longer be able to afford waging stupid wars in pursuit of world domination.
Funding for political parties and entrenching them into the civil service isn’t the issue in the U.S. — it is quite the opposite. The legal entrenchment of the “two-party system” is at the core of our political malaise. Insider reaction to the insurgencies of Dean, Obama, and Sanders caused the “Democrats” to become a tiny club easily controlled by a handful of oligarchs. Their failure to engage in even a performative primary process in 2024 conclusively proved this.
Steve Bannon understood this dynamic well in 2016 when he promoted a self-funded outsider game-show host and lifelong Democrat against the party establishment to the GOP nomination and presidency. Bannon pulled an Icarus and found himself replaced by oligarchs in actual government — but his anti-party electoral model remains sound.
The parties fear “populism” because they are undemocratic. Institutionalizing a “two-party system” through legislation is profoundly undemocratic and in the U.S. has been the road to our current rule by a totalitarian oligarchy.
Yes. People have too many mistaken notions about what “political parties” amount to, but, in practice, they almost always become bureaucratic entities that are only tangentially linked to the people.
One can’t get too hung up on how parties ought to be “more representative,” since they exist partly to make deals with various organized interests in society and to craft policy (at least the big outlines theteof) but one can’t say modern US parties are esp good at these roles either…
New Hedges interview on the pmc versus the volk has much to chew on.
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/17/the-chris-hedges-report-virtue-hoarders/
Catherine Liu theorizes that the Boomer/working class split during the late 60s and Me Decade is at the root of it all. The latter used Vietnam and Civil Rights to discard the traditional working class roots of the Dems and move into Clintonism and outsourcing and talk of “deplorables.” Virtue signaling–all about the PR–became the cloak.
I’d say these are pretty obvious assertions but not much talked about. It may be a bit facile as an explanation for current economic conditions but on target as regards current cultural and social conditions. Call it not so much blaming the victims as demonizing them.
And the generations that followed the Boomers have been victims too as they try to find employment whether college educated or no. She also talks about another side of the virtue cloak which is censor those who object to the domestic and foreign policy status quo.,
I’d like to suggest a change [ ] = deletion, while “to” = addition in “neoliberalism’s success in shifting from an economic model that tried to achieve rising real wages as its measure of success, [and] “to” one that shifted to rising asset prices as the priority, and used easier access to debt, particularly consumer debt, to bolster consumption so as to avoid pressure to share the benefits of productivity gains with workers. That has produced an explosion in concentration of wealth at the top and the shift towards more open oligarchy.”
Labeling ideas that do not confirm or affirm is wrong.
In my youth, I was in U.S. high school, Vietnam was ramping up.
I saw a poster which said: “I may not agree with what you say but I will defend your right to say it “.
Defending that liberty in part excuses my military career.
I do not recall that being a radical idea.
We need a lot more Gandhi and Rev Dr King.
Censoring is always questionable
One simple trick destroyed the competence of the civil service was that you could only get a pay increase if you moved to a different department. Any expertise has long gone.
Thank you. Yves.
I think Martin Wolf’s article needs to be read in the context of the current political situation in the UK. The Starmer government is widely perceived to have entered office with no clear plan how to proceed. They have reportedly commissioned numerous reviews from the Civil Service with a view to developing a programme for government. This has caused dismay, understandably, as many hoped that Labour would enter government with a programme already worked out. As they appear not have done so, at least in any way that is obvious, Wolf is wishing that there was some system in place to help oppositions to come into office better prepared.
You consider Wolf’s fear of a populist government to be anti-democratic. I do not read it that way and suggest that the word ‘populist’ has a different meaning in British political discourse than in my impression it does in American discourse. Please correct me if I am wrong but I think that in the US ‘populist’ has implications that the politician is concerned with the welfare of the populace and supports policies which are or would be popular. In UK parlance the term ‘populist’ has quite a different sense, which I would argue refers to a politician who is above all dishonest, who pretends to the electorate that their problems can be easily addressed by a few very simple measures when in fact the problems facing governments are usually in practice quite complex. A populist politician, in UK terminology, will very possibly demonise particular groups, such as a minority group who are ‘enemies within’ and/or foreigners. They will denigrate experts and generally in fact have no real solutions to the electorate’s problems but will seek power purely for their own selfish purposes.
Wolf almost certainly has in mind the very considerable chance that 2029 will see the advent of a government led by Nigel Farage. Time will tell, but my information, from people who have worked with him, is that although he is a very effective operator in front of the TV cameras in expressing a particular, ‘anti-establishment’ perspective (arguably he is a grievance monger but also a snake-oil salesman) , he is someone who has no interest at all in developing policies for government and does not ‘do detail’. Reports from his youth suggest that he probably entertains fascist sympathies. I think this is why Martin Wolf is worried at the prospect of a ‘populist’ government in the UK, because a Farage government would probably meet my definition.