Political Hedonism in the Yookay

To welfare-dispensing drudgery and beyond

The final cause, end, or design of men…is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby…

-Thomas Hobbes

British viewers of Prime Minister’s Questions yesterday were treated to the spectacle of the Chancellor of the Exchequer visibly weeping as she glared, like a wronged spouse, at her boss, Sir Keir Starmer, from the front bench of the House of Commons.

We’ll come to the bigger story behind this image in due course, but the ‘optics’ of the moment, as the SpAds would put it, were too precious and too apposite not to memorialise. This is the nakedly visible representation not just of an individual in a spot of bother, but of an entire political order coming to an end. While all developed states are heading for economic, political, moral and spiritual crises, Britain is the leader of the pack. Its governing regime, the structure by which the ‘some’ have ruled the ‘many’ since 1997, is clapped out and beyond rescue. It has no ideas and it has, to use that old Match of the Day-ism, lost the dressing room. And one can almost see this realisation in Reeves’ expression - even while recognising that she may have had more personal reasons for her tears.

The reason why it is Britain that is at the cutting edge of global decline is that it is Britain that has most thoroughly embraced what Leo Strauss called ‘political hedonism’, meaning, essentially, the politicisation of the idea that the good is synonymous with the absence of displeasure.

Strauss called Thomas Hobbes the first political hedonist, because Hobbes was the first to declare the State to be founded not on natural right but on authority. It was not that there was no such thing as morality; Hobbes was clear about that. But moral principle did not provide adequate grounding for rule, because opinions about how to apply it differed. Rule was rather simply the expression of the authority of the sovereign, created by human ‘imaginations’. It existed to serve an end: the creation of a social order without which life would be, famously, nasty, poor, brutish and short. In other words, it derived from an understanding that the political good and the avoidance of displeasure were identical.

This conceptualisation of the role of the state as being to minimise displeasure, having begun in the 1600s, has now reached fruition in truly exotic and extraordinary forms. And it explains a great deal about our current predicament. It explains Reeves’ (surely now inevitable) downfall. But it also explains much else about the manner in which things are deteriorating.

Let’s begin with the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill. The basic problem here is easily stated: the British State spends way beyond its means. And the big culprit is social security. Total welfare spending in 2023-24, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) was £296.3 billion; by 2029-30, it will be £377.7 billion, and heading further north. £81.4 billion here, £81.4 billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money: this situation is not sustainable. One way or another, it will have to stop.

In response, the government had decided to make what are referred to widely as ‘cuts’, chiefly to what are called Personal Independence Payments or ‘PIPs’. These are a wheeze wherein people can claim around £100 a week (the exact amount varies) for help with ‘extra living costs’ if they have ‘a long-term physical or mental health condition or disability’ and experience ‘difficulty doing certain everyday tasks or getting around’. These payments are no doubt important for some people but are clearly handed out too easily, and are projected to ballon in cost from £17 billion today to somewhere around £35 billion by 2026-27. They will be responsible for the lion’s share of a projected increase in outlay on disability benefits from about £30 billion to £50 billion in the same timeframe - which is to say two years.

Up with this is something which we cannot put - if we want to remain solvent, anyway - and Labour duly decided to make the aforementioned ‘cuts’ through the new Bill. These ‘cuts’ in fact translated into a reduction in the rate of increase, in the order of about £5 billion. This would mostly be achieved by changing the way that eligibility for PIPs was to be assessed - making the exercise a bit more stringent, in other words.

Shaving £5 billion off a £20 billion increase, which is itself only part of an £81.4 billion increase, would in itself have been small beer. But even this modest speed bump lying across the road to insolvency has proved politically impossible to keep in place. First, a successful rebellion by Labour MPs forced an amendment which protected existing PIP recipients from any changes. And then, just the other day, a panicked Keir Starmer sought to buy off the rebels with a further concession: there will be no change made to the PIP assessment at all until a ministerial review is concluded in the autumn of 2025 - and since this review, the so-called ‘Timms review’, will be ‘co-produced’ with disability campaign groups, it seems safe to say it will recommend no changes are made in perpetuity.

One year into a five year Parliament, then, with Sir Keir Starmer sitting on what it is fair to call a stonking majority of around 170, it has proved impossible for his government to produce even nugatory salami-slice reductions in the rate at which welfare spending is going up - let alone reducing welfare spending overall. His Work and Pensions Secretary, Liz Kendall, is one of the very few Labour politicians around who even has the faintest glimmering of the light of capability in the eyes. But she has got nowhere. She is wading in treacle. Welfare reform is kaput. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. It is a dead policy.

This is, of course, bad. It depicts the country’s political class in their worst possible light - cynical, short-termist, unintelligent, and cowardly. But above all, it is suggestive of sclerosis: a profound incapacity to take action where it is needed.

But it is interesting to set these developments in context. Because there were two episodes in recent weeks that frame what happened to the Universal Credit and Personal Independence Payment Bill in an interesting light. In the two moments in question, Parliament moved with quite startling swiftness and alacrity to legislate on matters of great significance - and without any of the dramatic rebellions and u-turns which accompanied the government’s doomed attempt at welfare reform.

In the first of these two episodes, legislation regarding so-called ‘assisted dying’, or euthanasia, found its way through the House of Commons to the House of Lords, after having had its third reading in the Commons on the 23rd of June. The Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, if it becomes law, as now seems likely, will provide a framework within which adults will be able to lawfully request assistance to end their own lives - as happens currently in places such as the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, and the US state of Oregon. This Bill may well have difficulties getting through the Lords, where it will no doubt be extensively debated, but it is hard to imagine that now ultimately it will not be passed in some form or other. This, it is important to emphasise, was not mentioned in Labour’s manifesto issued prior to the 2024 election, and came rather out of the blue - yet we now find ourselves in the position that euthanasia is relatively undramatically going to become part of our lives after a couple of fairly desultory Parliamentary debates.

Meanwhile, at the other end of life, so to speak, in the second of our two episodes, MPs voted on the 17th of June to decriminalise abortion up to the full term of 9 months, where previously it had only been decriminalised to the 24th week of pregnancy. It will still be unlawful to assist a woman in carrying out an abortion after 24 weeks of the pregnancy. But it will now be lawful, essentially, for women to abort babies themselves up to literally the point of birth.

This dramatic change in the law took place through a brief amendment to another piece of legislation, the Crime and Policing Bill, which was tabled by the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi and voted on by the Commons more or less immediately. And, as is the case with assisted dying, it will almost certainly now come into effect - although it will, for reasons of process, have to accompany the rest of the Crime and Policing Bill as it wends its way through the House of Lords.

The contrast here is stark. Parliament, it seems, is very bad at limiting the growth of welfarism. But it finds the overturning of social mores and traditional morality - which is in its own way far more consequential even than national solvency - very straightforward. What explains this?

The answer, of course, lies in modern Britain’s commitment to Strauss’s political hedonism. If the only purpose of the State is to minimise displeasure then it naturally follows that measures taken to ‘eliminate suffering’ are easily accomplished - they are things which public power finds it easy and indeed logical to do. And the minimisation of displeasure is, of course, transparently the rationale both for the legalisation of ‘assisted dying’ and the decriminalisation of abortion up to birth (the latter, for instance, being described as necessary by the British Pregnancy Advice Service to ensure that ‘there will be no more women investigated after enduring a miscarriage, no more women dragged from their hospital beds to the back of a police van, no more women separated from their children because of our archaic abortion law’).

Shrinking the welfare state is within the opposite category: it is something which it is impossible to do without causing a great deal of displeasure indeed. And it is therefore a project which modern politicians find extraordinarily difficult. It gives them the heebie-jeebies. They are not able to conceptualise that the purpose of politics may be something other than making the population feel nice. And they approach the making of the slightest reduction with vast timidity and trepidation.

Antony de Jasay, who had read and admired Strauss, gave all of this a formal explanation in his seminal book The State (1983). Here, the basic rationale is made plain. If a society loses a commitment to pre-political norms - an overarching system of law connected to social values; a sense that the future matters; a desire to maintain an association between a particular people and a particular place - then all that is left is a relationship of bargaining between State and society. Why should the State exist? The only answer is transactional: to make life more pleasurable, or less displeasurable - in other words, to embrace political hedonism and maximise utility.

This means that modernity, which above all is associated with the abandonment of pre-political commitments, is characterised by a tendency for the State to grow. It wins loyalty the only way it knows how - by cobbling together a majority and distributing to it the property of a minority. Any governing apparatus’ essential appeal is therefore always the same: it assembles a coalition of the ‘unprivileged’ and says to them, ‘Lend me your support and I will give you the resources held by the privileged.’ Support is leant through voting but also through the perhaps more important, but less widely acknowledged, implicit promise not to revolt. And the effect gets bigger and bigger over time because the natural incentive is to increase the size of the ‘unprivileged’ majority and bestow on it a larger reallocation or redistribution of resources; any governing regime is much more worried by attempts to outflank it from the ‘big State’ rather than ‘small State’ angle, and is therefore always incentivised to itself govern more, as it were, ‘bigly’.

This puts the State on a trajectory to what de Jasay called ‘welfare-dispensing drudgery’. For all that politicians may have other ideas which they wish to pursue, other values which they wish to actualise, other projects they would like to see to fruition, all that they can in the end achieve is the micromanagement of redistribution. The assemblage of conglomerations of interest groups into a workable majority and the operationalisation of the transfer of wealth to it from the minority becomes a bigger and bigger task, until in the end it is all the State can really achieve and becomes its sole occupation.

The modern British State meets the description of ‘welfare-dispensing drudge’ rather nicely: this is a governing apparatus that will be spending £108 billion a year merely paying the interest on the national debt by 2026-27, more than it spends on defence or education. And all the while it will be overseeing a growth across the same time frame, as we have seen, of £81.4 billion in social security spending. Its sole raison d’être appears to be to keep a lid on social tension by buying off particular interest groups so as to hold them together for ramshackle support. And, as we have seen in this recent debacle, it appears both unwilling and unable to revoke the trend - if anything it appears poised to grow yet further as an ever-increasing proportion of the population is encouraged to rely on it for financial support.

This can go in two directions, de Jasay tells us. The first direction leads towards a big crash. It could simply be the case that those who govern us drive us into a wall through sheer incompetence as the complexities of welfare-dispensing drudgery become too difficult to manage. Nobody should discount the likelihood of this happening: history is replete with examples of ruling classes doing profoundly stupid things, and very often in those examples the rulers who made the mistakes were considerably more capable, learned, intelligent and gifted than the likes of Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves.

The second direction leads towards totalitarianism. Welfare-dispensing drudgery, in de Jasay’s account, is inherently unstable, because sooner or later those who are in power tire of this mundane activity and seek instead to do more exciting things - whether that be the construction of a well-oiled kleptocracy or the realisation of truth and justice or anything in between. And in order to do those more exciting things, they need to create ‘surplus power’ above and beyond the oversight of redistribution. One way to achieve this is simply to do away with the messy, awkward, unpleasant process of balancing competing interests that comes with deliberative, democratic politics, and replace it with naked state control of all social resources. This has the beneficial effect of inculcating reliance by the population on the State itself, and none of the untidy drawbacks of trying to manage redistribution with an eye on the polls and the ballot box. And it thereby allows rulers to free up time and energy for other more romantic and, perhaps, personally rewarding activities.

My money is on the former of these scenarios emerging, and I think it will indeed emerge very soon. I am not sure there is a person alive in Britain today who does not feel in his or her bones that something awful is going to happen in the course of this Parliament (perhaps there are a few people down in Tunbridge Wells). It would be amazing if we make our way to 2029 unscathed. The problems are too deep-rooted and the path to a different grounding for state authority than political hedonism is too overgrown. Plan accordingly: that’s my strong advice.

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