Beware the New, Techno-Nationalist Right

Since being elected Prime Minister of India in May, Narendra Modi’s big idea has been to link every river in India into a massive system of irrigation channels and dams. It’s a deluded project of statist hubris, first dreamt up in the days of the British empire by a government desperate to look like it was doing something to develop India. It won’t make India any richer. India needs to learn to live with less water, not shove the limited supply of H20 it does have around more quickly. But Modi’s plan sits alongside efforts to cut social security and hand more power to India’s big corporate giants in a right-wing political package. We on the left need to beware the rise of the statist, techno-nationalist right.

A new kind of right-wing politics is sprouting throughout the world. It is here in the arguments of anti-European modernists who David Cameron promoted in his reshuffle, like Liz Truss . It’s there in the argument the Economist journalists John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge make for aFourth Revolution. Its most senior political advocate is probably George Osborne, with his twin belief in the importance of cutting wages and building HS2.

These all, like Narendra Modi, want to reduce public spending, cut regulation and drive wages down. But they are not anti-statist. They want government to be mean and lean, handing out hard sanctions for people who are lazy and investing in tough-minded things they think will fuel growth, roads, railways, maths education. The key themes are efficiency and technology.

This is nationalism of a deeply anxious kind. It’s obsessed by the idea we’ll be left behind in ‘the global race’. Its stock-in-trade is the one hundred year old cliché that Britain is run by Classicists while Germany and China are educating inventors and engineers. This new right speaks a free-market version of the ideology my King’s College London colleague David Edgerton calls ‘techno-nationalism’, the wrong-headed view that our well-being depends on our capacity to compete in technological innovation with other countries.

Too often, this kind of nationalist delusion leads to investment in macho projects  that provide little benefit to the people whose lives they’re supposed to improve. Massive aircraft carriers which need the rest of the British fleet to protect them. Government IT projects that don’t work. Pointless damming projects, and a High Speed rail network which, as even Peter Mandelson admits, will as easily suck people out of the North of England as pull money in. Most of them, to quote an Indian headline, are just ‘bad science on a big scale’.

But for politicians, t’s about being seen to do something. As Narendra Modi’s landslide victory in India shows, the techno-nationalists tell a good story. They are modern. They seem to be about the future. They offer clear political leadership, offering tough, bold actions that get things done. As the Tories have abandoned the softer, more collaborative kind of politics that got them elected in 2010, the new politics of Tory techno-nationalism will dominate the language of the right in Britain for a decade.

To defeat it, Labour needs to relentlessly expose techno-nationalism’s greatest flaw: it doesn’t care about people. It is more concerned in an abstract idea of power or progress than the lives or livelihood of real human beings. And, it isn’t interested in nurturing the kind of human relationships that wealth and well-being need.

In fact, real productivity comes from the connections people have with each other in the economy, not techno-gadgetry. The most prosperous places are those where workers are skilled, motivated and have their say, where a factory has a strong local supply chain to back it up, and where there are banks run by people who know an economic sector or community.

These are things that can only be supported if the power we have over the economy is exercised locally. The problem isn’t that there are too many classicists in Whitehall, but that too much power is hoarded there or in the City. In fact, Britain has exactly the same weakness as India: institutions of government which aren’t close enough to where people live and work, which don’t give cities in particular the chance to shape their own destiny. The new Tory techno-nationalists won’t change that. If we sharpen our story, Labour, with our new emphasis on devolving power to cities and regions just might.

The Labour Party needs to get back to what it was founded to do: organise people in the places we live and work to challenge the power of money and machines.