Press the 'grow' button

On the mindset of the tyrannical class

Little else is requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of opulence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.

-Adam Smith

I sometimes think that everything that is wrong with the way that Britain is governed today can be boiled down to a single issue: we are ruled by people who think that ‘to grow’ is a transitive verb. They actually think that government has it in its power to create wealth. In their worldview, economic policy is really just a series of levers and buttons that politicians fiddle about with in order to ‘grow’ the economy as such. And policy can therefore be assessed as being good or bad depending on whether it can be plausibly be said to be ‘delivering’ growth, or words along those lines.

We got an interesting insight into the underlying psychology of this daft notion in a face-saving, rally-the-troops style interview which the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, gave to The Guardian in the run-up to Christmas. Things are going extremely badly for Reeves. She has been embroiled in a rumbling scandal concerning alleged falsification of her CV, and her Autumn Budget is widely considered to have been a disaster that is fuelling a ‘hiring recession’, leading to higher inflation, and bringing growth to a shuddering halt. So this underarm throw of an interview with The Guardian, the mainstream news outlet guaranteed to be most naturally sympathetic to Labour politicians experiencing a downturn in fortune, was an opportunity for her to portray herself as still possessing something like initiative.

Instructively, she came out swinging for one figure in particular - Nigel Farage - who she castigated for his purported inability to come up with ‘answers’:

What’s Nigel Farage’s answer on the economy? How is he going to make working people better off? He hasn’t got a clue. How’s he going to grow the economy? He’s not got the faintest.

‘He has no idea on the biggest issue that matters to voters’, she continued, ‘which is tackling the cost of living crisis’.

Reeves, like the entire Cabinet, is obviously worried about Nigel Farage and the momentum that has accrued to Reform UK since the election earlier this year. That she should be training her guns on him is no surprise. It is the angle of attack that is intriguing. Reform’s ideas for the economy are basically Thatcherite - in the previous election, they promised that if they were elected they would cut taxes (mostly by raising thresholds on, for example, income tax and inheritance tax) and also shrink spending. So it isn’t, as Reeves alleges, that Farage, or Reform, has no ‘answers’. It is rather that those ‘answers’ are not designed to make people better off, grow the economy, or tackle the cost of living crisis. They are, rather, designed to get the State out of the way so that those problems can be resolved by society itself.

Reeves, I am sure, can wrap her head around this concept in principle - doubtless she has read a bit of Hayek, if only to try to understand why he was wrong - but she cannot, to use a Heinlein-ism, ‘grok’ it. Her intuitions flow in precisely the opposite direction: society is passive, government active; society is naturally in crisis, government is the solution; society’s wealth is small, government will ‘grow’ it; society is badly off, government will make it ‘better’. So when she is faced with the idea that economies tend to grow for themselves when the State shrinks, she goes through a kind of biological, immune-system response - she rejects the notion as though it were an invasive foreign organism. And this manifests itself as unthinking, blind dismissal: you don’t have a clue. You haven’t the faintest.

In this, of course, Reeves is entirely emblematic of her colleagues. This is a government which thinks it can ‘rebuild Britain’ by ‘deliver[ing] growth’ through a literal Soviet-style 10-year plan, ‘ensur[ing] every nation and region realises its full potential’, ‘driv[ing] innovation, investment and the adoption of technology to seize the opportunities of a future economy’, and ‘help[ing] people get a job, stay in work, and progress in their careers’. It is a government that in short thinks that all it needs to do is try to ‘grow’ the economy and that growth will then follow, and which thinks things like innovation, investment, technological evolution and employment (even career development!) are in its gift to bestow. And it is therefore a government that is constitutionally incapable of conceiving of the attempt to ‘grow’ the economy itself as being at the heart of the problem.

But Reeves is also emblematic of the great bias towards tyranny that may be political modernity’s defining feature. At first blush it might seem absurd to label somebody so patently evidently out of her depth as Rachel Reeves a ‘tyrant’. But as I have previously argued, there is nonetheless something tyrannical in the phenomenological sense about the way in which people like her operate; for all that those who govern us are fundamentally tin-pot and silly, the way in which we experience their governance is in conceptual terms little different to how ancient Greek thinkers would have described what tyrannical rule looked like.

And this is because, ultimately, it rests on the same conceptual grounds. The tyrant is to be understood as a ruler who quintessentially governs not because he has emerged within a pre-existing normative or constitutional framework, but because he has taken or usurped power through his own personal qualities - his own skill, talent, wisdom, nous, and ruthlessness. This means that tyranny is above all a personal mode of rule, which inheres in the person of the tyrant and reflects his own interests, but which also rests on his personal qualities - the tyrant rules because he is capable of doing so. He alone should be in charge, he tells the world, because he is the most able; and he also of course maintains his position not through pleas to a pre-existing order but through his own personal cunning and decisiveness.

This makes tyranny, perversely, the most meritocratic mode of rule, in the sense that it rests on the sheer personal ‘merit’ (real or imagined) of the tyrant and nothing else. And this observation of course helps us to get at something important about modern governments too, in that - while their claims on authority do not rest, except perhaps in North Korea, on the sheer merit of a single man or woman - they also insist on a meritocratic, and hence also personal, justification for their own rule as well. Lacking a grounding in the spiritual or theological realm, and also these days increasingly lacking a grounding in a national order either, the only reason they can give for why they should exist, and why they should go about governing the rest of us, is because those within them personally merit their positions.

This is writ large across the governing classes, broadly conceived, throughout the Western world. They make up a caste of highly educated technocrats who, though often very petty, mundane, and mid-witted people, have a very well-developed understanding of their own personal merits and why it is that they should therefore be in charge. They are simply cleverer, more virtuous, and more knowledgeable than the common people, and this is how their status is explained and maintained. And while it would not exactly be accurate to describe them as usurpers or extra-constitutional rulers, it would be accurate to describe them, like tyrants, as having no extrinsic justification for their status, and no inherent one beyond these personal qualities they purport to possess.

It is more apt to describe these people as a ‘tyrannical class’ than a tyrant, of course, but in all other respects it is therefore useful to analyse their rule within the rubric of tyranny, and through the lens of its central features. One of those is particularly important when it comes to Rachel Reeves, and this is the tyrant’s obsession with ensuring that independent wealth is eliminated among his subjects - the possession of property in particular being something that is problematised under a tyranny. This is because, for the tyrant, remembering always that he must demonstrate his merit, it is crucial that his subjects should be made to feel that they benefit economically from his rule rather than because of their own creativity, hard work, intelligence and dedication.

For if the latter is true, then a large part of the claim the tyrant makes to possess merit breaks down; if it turns out that the people can be prosperous in their own right, then the reason why the tyrant should be in charge at all evaporates like early morning mist exposed to the sun. Ideally the tyrant wishes for the precise opposite to be the case - that he should presumptively own all of the property in society, and should disburse it as he sees fit so as to be seen to be both benevolent and wise. But, failing that, a half-way house will do, within which the tyrant portrays himself as possessing the ability at a turn to click his fingers and dispense wealth (or, of course, take it away).

There is no surprise at all then that the modern Labour Party, representing as it does the interests of the tyrannical class above all else, should make the outlandish claim that it possesses the wherewithal to ‘grow’ the economy. That is entirely in keeping with the self-description of itself as meritorious that one would expect. And it is no surprise that Rachel Reeves should see the relationship between government and society in the terms which she does, with the former conceptualised as the driver of innovation, realiser of potential, and developer of careers, and the latter conceptualised as a kind of inert mass that needs to be carefully manipulated and controlled at all times in order that it can function properly at all.

It is also no surprise that she should have such a tin ear when it comes to arguments about the size of the State, and no surprise that she should have such a visceral, vomit-like response whenever anybody suggests that the people in charge might have less collective merit than those they purport to govern. She is about as deeply ensconced in the mindset of the tyrannical class as it is possible to be. And she is therefore thoroughly wrapped up in a conceptualisation of herself and those around her as imbued with special wisdom and expertise that elevates them above the ordinary citizen and puts a kind of sorcery into their fingertips - able to conjure ‘growth’ if only they are left to their own devices for long enough.

The truth, as anybody with eyes to see can behold for themselves, could not be more different. And in closing it is worth, as a brief coda, returning to an interview Reeves gave with the self-same Guardian back in June 2024 in the run-up to the July election. At that time Reeves was Shadow Chancellor, fully expecting to take over the reins from Jeremy Hunt when Labour (inevitably) won, and she was in a gung-ho mood. Describing herself as wanting to usher in a ‘Big Bang’ moment within 100 days of taking office, she was bullish about her project of ‘stability, investment and reform’. ‘Reform is something we can crack on with straight away,’ she declared. ‘Much of [it] won’t take as long as people think.’ She went on, in a fashion that with the benefit of hindsight seems almost drunkenly ill-advised, that it would not ‘take ages’ to re-establish stability, and that what was chiefly needed was ‘the kind of seriousness of leadership we haven’t had for a number of years now’.

To find her now having to insist that there is ‘no single silver bullet’ and that ‘you can’t turn round 14 years of poor economic performance in six months’ is, in light of these pre-election remarks, wryly amusing. But of course it also serves to prove the overarching point, which is that those whose justifications for authority rest on their own intrinsic merit almost always find themselves being exposed as possessing anything but that. This, to return us to the philosophical point, is tyranny’s ultimate problem and inevitable Achilles’ heel: the personal qualities of the ruler, or ruling class, are never enough to sustain a governing framework across time, for the simple reason that the claim to have greater personal merit than that aggregated in the population is always and inevitably shown, sooner or later, to be false. The only really interesting thing about our current government is that this is being exposed more rapidly than I think it perhaps has in modern history - and that the exposure is likely to be so thorough, in the end, that it may eventually call into question the premise upon which the authority of the entire tyrannical class rests.