Mick Hartley

An interesting article in today's Sunday Times from Dominic Lawson, who comes to his late father Nigel's defence after the man's record as chancellor was trashed by Labour shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves in her recent Mais lecture (here).

Reeves, though, extolled one figure above all, who was associated with that period: the Cambridge economist Joan Robinson (1903-83). This undoubtedly brilliant woman was praised by Reeves for understanding — allegedly in contrast to Nigel Lawson — that economics “is about values, rooted in political, philosophical and moral questions, about human nature and the good society”.

My father was of a generation that knew something of where Robinson’s “philosophical and moral” outlook had led, and perhaps it is because of that age difference that no one commenting on the shadow chancellor’s lecture has made the points he almost certainly would have done. So I will.

Ms Reeves’s idol was this country’s most influential advocate of the economic policies and practice of Mao Zedong, not just the Great Leap Forward — the forced collectivisation of agriculture, which caused a famine that killed an estimated 50 million Chinese people — but also the Cultural Revolution. Robinson declared of the former period that “the rationing system worked”. She was — as Evan Osborne sets out in his essay “Captive of One’s Own Theory: Joan Robinson and Maoist China” — even dismissive of official toleration of desperate individual efforts to grow food during the Great Leap Forward. Robinson had written of the “many concessions [that] had to be made to individualistic sentiment among the peasants; some communes actually disintegrated into private household cultivation”. Tut-tut.

As for the barbarous Cultural Revolution, Robinson praised it at the time as “the first example of a new kind of class war” and condoned the violence by the Red Guards against the “rightists”, observing: “Perhaps they are still wondering what hit them.” She even enthused about the North Korean model, describing it as a “nation without poverty … all the economic miracles of the postwar world are put in the shade by these achievements”.

Leave aside that Robinson had fallen abjectly for the propaganda of her hosts (she went to North Korea and was a frequent guest of Mao’s regime): it was her very “philosophical and moral approach”, eulogised by Reeves, that led her into such blindness.

From Robinson's Wiki entry:

In October 1964, Robinson also visited North Korea, which was effectively a single-party Communist state, and wrote in her report "Korean Miracle" that the country's success was due to "the intense concentration of the Koreans on national pride" under Kim Il Sung, "a messiah rather than a dictator." She also stated in reference to the division of Korea that "[o]bviously, sooner or later the country must be reunited by absorbing the South into socialism."

Hmm.