Mick Hartley

Yesterday's Sunday Times carried a review by Robert Cooper of John Kampfner's latest book, Freedom for Sale: How We Made Our Money and Lost Our Liberty. The review, under the heading "Bread and Circuses", was unashamedly positive:

Marx was wrong, according to John Kampfner. It is not religion that is the opium of the people, but capitalism. Give them good shopping opportunities and they will forget about liberty, equality and fraternity, and cease to care about who governs them and how. And while they worship at the shopping malls, the governing class gets on with managing the state according to its own ideas. But this is with the consent of the people, who value prosperity more than they fear for their freedom. […]

Kampfner’s book is original, persuasive and disquieting, and fills a gap in our understanding of the post-cold-war world.

Nothing in the review provides any reason to believe this conclusion. The kind of critique of consumer capitalism described here, whereby idiot shoppers patrol the malls like zombies, in thrall to the blandishments of the advertising industry, far from being original, is so well-worn as to be threadbare. So why the undiluted praise?

Well, as a possible clue we have now, in today's Times, an article by John Kampfner himself, providing a taster for the book. It looks to be a cosy little arrangement. 

He gets straight to the point:

Why is it that so many people are willing to give up their freedoms in return for an easy life? The question goes to the heart of the political and economic crisis that is afflicting countries around the world, whether they are considered authoritarian or democratic.

Does it? He's assuming that there's a conflict between the two; between freedom and having an easy life. Historically that was no doubt the case: freedom had to be fought for. But once freedom of the liberal democratic kind had been achieved, and the structures were put in place  - the rule of law, free speech, elections, the rights of workers to organise in unions, and so forth – then it's not clear to me why people should then not be able to go out and enjoy themselves as they see fit. Which may well involve taking it easy, going shopping, and other such pursuits which don't necessarily meet with the approval of former editors of the New Statesman like Kampfner, who make a living writing important and provocative books.

This is what I call the pact. In each country it varies; citizens hand over different liberties in accordance with their own customs and priorities. In some it is press freedom; in some it is the right to vote out their government; in some it is an impartial judiciary; in others it is the ability to get on with their lives without being spied upon. The model for this new world order is Singapore, the state in which I was born, and which has long intrigued me. I am constantly struck by the number of well-educated people there who defend a system that requires an almost complete abrogation of freedom of expression in return for a good material life.

Well yes, Singapore is no doubt an interesting case: wealthy, but not exactly home to a vigorous culture of argument and debate. No doubt he's got a point there – but it's hardly controversial or insightful. Most people know that much about Singapore if they know nothing else about the place. But the point he wants to make, what he's leading up to, concerns Britain…which is why he sticks that last freedom in there, after press freedom, the right to vote out the government; and an impartial judiciary, all of which we have: that rather odd one about "the ability to get on with their lives without being spied upon":

Nowhere, however, has left me as depressed as Britain. From ID cards and CCTV, to a national DNA database, to long periods of detention without charge, to restrictions on protest, to the most stifling libel laws of any equivalent nation, the UK Government has rewritten the relationship between State and the individual. In doing so, it has met little popular resistance.