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I read Michael Gove’s big FDR speech so you don’t have to. TL;DR - I think FDR would sue. (Thread)
The speech has Gove’s customary grandiloquence and rhetorical excess. The framing device is that the crisis we face is of 1930s proportions, and this means government needs to get radical.
I guess he’s picked FDR, whose New Deal is usually seen as the high-water moment of government interventionism in US history, to show that he’s a visionary not an ideologue: these Tories will take ideas from anywhere as long as they work, etc.
Or maybe he picked it up from the efforts of Joe Biden’s team to make him out to be the new FDR. Historians of the New Deal assemble, it could be a busy summer. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/05/joe-biden-presidential-plans.html
I expect most columnists to fall for this because they don’t know much about American history, and because there’s always been a tendency to see Gove as a bright guy (for reasons which have always eluded me).
Gove offers a familiar account of what’s gone wrong under mostly-Tory government: rather than blaming the wealthy for the erosion of secure/meaningful jobs, Gove targets a liberal elite including bankers and university administrators who've succumbed to political correctness.
There’s lots of stuff here on left behind people - Gove even mentions Roosevelt’s “forgotten man”. Just as an aside, Gove seems either unaware or unconcerned that there’s a troubling racial history of this phrase. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/cp/opinion/election-night-2016/who-is-the-forgotten-man
But Gove doesn’t even seem to recognise that FDR used the term principally to indicate that most Americans were being left behind economically, and that government had to offer tangible economic help if it wanted to keep their trust.
From FDR’s 1932 speech: “Here should be an objective of Government itself, to provide at least as much assistance to the little fellow as it is now giving to the large banks and corporations.” Somehow this didn’t make it into Gove’s final draft.
Things the speech doesn’t address AT ALL: the insanity of the UK housing market, the massive generational injustice of our broken economy, the crumbling of our public services at the hands of Tory governments, the crisis of insecure work - none of it.
Gove refers on a couple of occasions to racism and “structural inequality” and does precisely nothing to explain how his government will address it.
For someone claiming to be an FDR enthusiast and a crusader against racial inequality, Gove doesn’t seem to have read Ira Katznelson’s _Fear Itself_ (prob. most important book on the New Deal in the last 20 yrs) or absorbed its sobering account of the New Deal's racial limits.
Gove might have disavowed “a radically anti-liberal white populism” (as Katznelson describes the ideology of southern white Democrats) and reassured us that his Tory New Deal would be racially inclusive; but again, this didn't make the final draft.
Beyond its silence on how we might achieve racial ‘levelling up’, the speech has virtually nothing to say about economic levelling either. Instead, it’s back to Gove’s old obsession: analytics, metrics, testing, and other modes of data gathering.
This has always been Gove’s thing; it’s what drew him close to Dominic Cummings when they worked together under David Cameron. Gove and Cummings promote a faux-technocracy intended to hide the deeply ideological nature of their political actions.
So we get the stealth-privatisation of education, including free schools run by people like Toby Young, but we’re reassured this is about “driving up standards” as measured by the constant testing of harried school kids.
Long term Gove fans: his greatest hits are in the speech, including the idea that you can only be creative when you have “mastery of deep knowledge”. Presumably this means my kids will need constant testing on fronted adverbials before they can achieve anything in life.
What is so ironic about this is that Gove himself displays no deep knowledge about ANYTHING, especially in this speech. He’s absolutely the product of a pedagogy which rewards ‘cleverness’ & superficiality, & a media which is too nervous to cry bullshit on empty grandstanding.
See, for example, his bonkers analogy to the American Revolution; deep knowledge of the Confederation-era U.S. government in this aside, yup.
Back to the radical thinking: foregrounding the 'forgotten man' and doing better analytics are two of Gove’s New Deal pillars. (I can see FDR writing this down carefully.) The third pillar is “experimentation”.
No problem with seeing that as a crucial feature of the New Deal. In FDR’s case, it actually meant massive government investment in agriculture and industry, job creation programmes, the creation of a sweeping welfare system. Some of it worked, some didn’t. And for Gove?
It’s about…being willing to grant procurement contracts to left-field suppliers?
The idea that you are going to deal with ‘forgotten’ citizens by outsourcing your contact tracing to Serco rather than funding local authorities is where the bankruptcy of this speech is most apparent. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/06/serco-wins-covid-19-test-and-trace-contract-despite-1m-fine
The core problem facing Britain is that government doesn’t innovate or experiment enough? YOU LET TOBY YOUNG RUN A SCHOOL! You let him run the universities watchdog until we complained about his eugenics-adjacency. Experimentation is not your strong suit! https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jan/09/toby-young-resigns-office-for-students
But of course the game that’s being played here is to present Britain’s problems as mostly down to the dead hand of bureaucracy, regulation and political correctness: business and capital are completely off the hook throughout Gove’s speech.
There isn’t a single critique of modern capitalism, despite Gove’s disingenuous admission that capitalism seems to be in crisis. OK, there is one: he claims that corporations are too ready to hire social responsibility officers who point out what he mocks as “micro aggressions.”
And so the radical premise of the entire speech - that capitalism is in crisis - vanishes. Instead, it’s government/the civil service that’s in crisis because it won’t let the Tories give even MORE contracts to their friends or share your private health data with companies.
I don’t work on the 1930s and my only qualification for writing this thread is that I have actually read some books on the New Deal. But I only ask that journalists who report this as some kind of masterplan for government do basic diligence: talk to a historian.
Ask them politely if they recognise this as the kind of speech FDR would have given, or if the policy prescriptions and experiments of the New Deal look ANYTHING like Gove’s calls for undermining planning regulations & yet more school ‘choice’.
I’ll leave the last word to Franklin D. Roosevelt, from his acceptance speech at the 1932 Democratic Convention. I think he sums up Toryism pretty well. And perhaps there’s a message for Keir Starmer here, too.
