The success of the New Right in the 1980s partially depended on its programme being hitched to a bourgeois modernization project to overcome the suffocating stagnation in the core capitalist countries. It was characterised by an appeal to radical individualism, and the entrepreneurial spirit - no wonder its social base was disproportionately located in the petit-bourgeoisie. Third Way social theory embraced this modernization doctrine, so that those forms of social democracy that gravitated to the Third Way, principally in the Anglophone countries, began to conflate 'progress' with global capitalism and its celerity.

The "forces of conservatism", in Blair's infamous coinage, were just those who resisted this force of racing and relentless change. In this, he was probably borrowing from Giddens, who in turn was borrowing directly from John Gray on the apparent incompatibility between conservatism and neoliberalism. Giddens argues: "Conservatism always meant a cautious, pragmatic approach to social and economic change—an attitude adopted by Burke in the face of the messianic claims of the French Revolution. The continuity of tradition is central to the idea of conservatism. Tradition contains the accumulated wisdom of the past and therefore supplies a guide to the future. Free market philosophy takes quite a different attitude, pinning its hopes for the future on unending economic growth produced by the liberation of market forces".

This misrepresents Burke, who was a devotee of market forces, and an individualist of the sort that inspired Hayek's approbation. Burke was indeed 'pragmatic' about social change* but one is, after all, pragmatic to an end; one conserves some state of affairs. It happens that the tradition which Burke wished to conserve, to which end he was pragmatic, was not in the first instance a way of doing things, but property rights and the incentive structure that was produced by a particular property relation. Take his appeal to William Pitt not to supply food to the poor during famine, for example. It was not the traditional way of living of agrarian proletarians that vexed him, but the risk posed by government intervention to enterprise, and to the further development of productive forces. I've written more about Burke's market fundamentalism and the cosmic order into which it is integrated elsewhere, so won't elaborate here. The point is that what defines modern conservatism is precisely its commitment to the capitalist property system, which is itself held to be rooted in certain enduring principles of human nature.

Still, capital itself had appropriated the language and icons of radicalism as part of its raid on the counterculture. Conservatism has always imitated the left, and the New Right's references consistently mined the representational strategies of the radical left. Neoliberal capital represented itself, in its cultural product, as a great, levelling, liberatory force. Think, or example, of Mike Nichols' Working Girl. Nichols, a liberal, produced something stunningly Reaganite. The heroine is a smart New York woman who has a degree but is stuck in a relationship with a deadbeat, in a friendship with an unaspiring secretary, and in a job working as an assistant for a cold, snobbish woman who doesn't respect her. This female boss is her glass ceiling - she frustrates her ambitions and steals her ideas. Her liberation is accomplished by usurping her boss' identity while he's on holiday. In this way, she establishes a sexual relationship with an established executive, with whom she contrives a business plan and woos a comely old chief executive who, she gushes, made his fortune by imitating Japanese management practises and not kowtowing to the unions. She proves her mettle, and also demonstrates that her female boss was pinching her ideas. So, the female boss is given the boot, and she is given her own office. She treats her own assistant in a respectful, open, meritocratic way. She calls her old friend, the unaspiring secretary, and tells her of the promotion. Her friend squeals with delight, apparently satisfied with the vicarious pleasure in someone else's promotion. The final shots of the gleaming silver towers of New York fade out with Carly Simons' academy award winning song 'Let the River Run', which promises a "New Jerusalem". You get the gist. As a story about female liberation, the message appears to be that emancipation is found through an alliance with patriarchs and union-busting Reaganite capitalists, in enmity with envious self-serving women, and consists of rising above your inferiors. Neoliberal capitalism thus positions itself as the revolutionary force driving women's liberation, in the form of a vibrant, dynamic meritocracy.

Given this successful cultural appropriation, it was logical for a timid and conformist social democracy, embracing neoliberalism, to try to assume a radical deportment by mimicking the conservatives. The austerity project can't even pretend to offer something like this. An 'age of austerity' is by definition an age of stagnation and adversity. The cultural cues of the emerging capitalism are rather different. Instead of luxuriating in the libidinal intensities of the market place, thrilling to the adventure of risk, and fantasising about endless protean self-invention, we are instead guided toward the unpromising waters of austerity nostalgia. No bourgeois modernism for now. Think rationing. Think neglect and decay. Think ricketts, TB, and polio.

*In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke makes a distinction between reform and change. Whereas change "alters the substance of the objects themselves, and gets rid of all their essential good as well as the accidental evil annexed to them", reform "is not a change in the substance or in the primary modification of the objects, but a direct application of a remedy to the grievance complained of". As imprecise as his terms are, a permanent problem in Burke's polemics, it is fair to say that he favoured any reform of the political economic system of late 18th Century England which would help to preserve it, and opposed any change that he regarded as fundamental. This distinction is important for modern conservatism. It can embrace wrenching social transformations if these serve to conserve the kernel of existing social relations.

On the VAT reversal: "We were trying to score a point against the Conservatives, if you like. Okay, well that was in the election. We have now moved past the election."

I don't find myself refreshed by the Sage of Twickenham's honesty about his dishonesty, any more than I'm charmed by any of his fatuous nicknames - aside from the 'Sage' tag, he is garlanded with 'Dr Doom' and 'the Prophet Elijah', the harbinger of judgment. For all his lamentations about the moral cesspit of the City, he consistently shows himself to have the mindset not of a prophet, but of a spiv, an opportunistic trader for whom any lie is good enough. Lacking talent or charisma, he makes a small electoral killing by misrepresenting his wares, banks the votes and splits.

Two of the last, pathetic, arguments mounted in the Liberals' defence is that they are if nothing else humanising Tory policy, and are, at any rate, honest brokers. Cable and Clegg are thankfully determined, in their exultant glee at finally being among the big boys, to trash those illusions. The only sense in which the Liberals have helped to humanise Tory policy is by lending their weak saffron brand of 'social justice' to the sales literature, and that is losing traction rapidly. And honest brokers? They've made their bona fides clear: they are at their most direct and brazen with us when admitting they've been lying to us.

A former boss of British Petroleum, Lord Browne, is the man whom first New Labour then the Tories selected to reform higher education. Lord Browne has no experience in higher education, or indeed in any aspect of education. He has forty one years of experience in BP, but that is an oil company whose primary motive is to accumulate handsome profits. He is popular with the capitalist press, and the FT once dubbed him - in a luridly grovelling interview - the Sun King of BP. He is currently a Lord who runs a private equity firm, and chairs the Tate. One thing he does have experience of, however, is of ruthless cost-cutting, which contributed to several high-profile disasters while he was in charge of BP. I presume it was upon this basis that he was chosen by a New Labour government to slash higher education funding.

Today, Lord Browne's review has been published. As has been anticipated for a while, it's devastating. Essentially, it recommends the following: raise tuition fees, further the market in education, axe arts and humanities funding, close the less prestigious universities, cut support for living costs, abolish loans for students with 'low grades', raise the interest rate at which loans are repaid, and abolish minimum bursaries. Of course, the business press loves it. The FT is drooling over the potential "free market revolution". And the coalition government is united behind it. Anyone who expected the Liberals to oppose this attack are going to hit the earth with a crash. Both Clegg and Cable have welcomed this report - 'fairness', 'on the right lines', and so on. It's exactly what they expected, they signed up to it when they joined the Tory government, and any left-of-centre pledges they made in opposition to gain support from disappointed Labour voters are now dead in the water.

Universities UK, the organisation of vice chancellors, has produced a sycophantic response to the cuts. But their own research has previously shown that they know full well that raising tuition fees will drive the poor out of higher education. So, they know what this is. I understand that the press release from David Latchman of my alma mater, Birkbeck, is equally blasé. So, the university bosses are largely satisfied - but they've no reason to be, even if they are as selfish and greedy as they are overpaid. They were warned by Cable a while back that even if students had to pay more, it wouldn't plug the gap created by the cuts. Students pay money in the long run, but the Treasury forks out in the immediate term. This, they've made clear, will still leave a gap, and there will still be deep cuts that will even affect their eminences.

Education activists are calling this a declaration of war. The NUS rightly argues that the removal of the tuition fees cap simply passes the costs of the bankers' crisis onto students. They would do well to acknowledge right away that their strategy of batting their eyelashes at successive governments hasn't really borne fruit. Students are likely to get very very uppity. I've spoken at a few Unis this year, and noticeably there's a left growing in some formerly untouched territories, largely because of the dread of what the Tories are about to do to us. The wave of occupations that greeted the invasion of Gaza will, I suspect, look like a tea party in comparison to what now follows. But that's not enough. We also need the unions to step up to the plate. And the UCU, to its credit, is uncompromising in its attack on the Brown review:

If enacted England will have the most expensive public degrees in the world, with families having to shell out between £76,000 and 136,000 to put two children through university.*

According to UCU calculations, a three-year degree with annual tuition fees of £6,000 would cost a total of £38,286, including maintenance loans and interest payments. A three-year degree with annual tuition fees of £12,000 would cost a total of £68,329, including maintenance loans and interest payments (see notes below for full calculations).

The report also proposes to create a market in student places which it suggests will facilitate a large reduction in public funding which 'may be equivalent to removing all funding from anything other than priority subjects'.

The union said that, if implemented, the proposals would be the final nail in the coffin for an affordable university degree for the vast majority of ordinary families. It forecast that as a result of the creation of a market for student places, some universities would close, and only so-called priority courses would survive, making innovative new courses unviable and so weakening the UK's position as a global knowledge centre.

And further:

UCU believes big business should be taxed for the substantial benefits it gains from a plentiful supply of graduates and has proposed a modest Business Education Tax for the top 4% of companies – those who make profits of over £1.5m a year. Increasing Business Education Tax to the G7 average of 32.87p and hypothecating the extra revenue to higher education would generate enough annually to abolish tuition fees.

Well, of course, I'm sure the government will be most attentive to what "UCU believes", and will be only to happy to tax their business allies to keep the public sector afloat. I'm not sure why no one has suggested it. Sarcasm aside, these words only mean anything if the UCU is prepared to back this up with action, and that has to include industrial action. It isn't only students who will be affected after all. We're talking about the closure of universities and departments, and the rapid shedding of staff. We're talking about a profession which is about to be savagely downsized.

Some will argue from a strictly capitalist viewpoint that these cuts are short-sighted, that they will undermine the skill-based labour market that is needed to make Britain competitive in the global economy. This is true in a broad sense, and it's roughly the case that the vice chancellors made to the government ahead of the Browne review. However, business isn't stupid. The capitalist class has been prepared for a massively pared down infrastructure on all fronts for a while now. They knew that this would come with some disadvantages, but they prefer that to them being forced to bear the costs of higher public investment. And this is an impeccably pro-business set of reforms, which preserves some basic funding for a core set of courses outside the arts and humanities that is most directly useful for capitalist enterprise. Anything else will be delivered informally, through philanthropy and patronage. So that, having pushing through the destruction of our education system, the ruling class can pose as its unofficial saviours.

Ideologically speaking, the cuts will almost certainly come with a new spiel about 'excellence'. The ideology of 'excellence' has been integral to the neoconservative assault on education in the United States, the deliberate engineering of a system to create narrow, educated elites with implicit property bars to exclude the vast majority of people from the system. In the UK, we've heard the Tories promise to introduce a "brazen elitism" in education supposedly on the basis that this would serve talented students best. It's a commonplace of right-wing axe-grinding in papers like the Daily Mail that the rise in the number of students doing well at exams is actually a sign of a collapsing education system. They argue that this can only happen because the tests are being made easier. This chimes with the complaints of employers that more people getting A, B and C grades makes it harder for them to recruit effectively, and to distinguish between the genuinely talented and those who have benefited from falling testing standards. Underlying this position is the standard elitist assumption that only a few can excel, that there is a fundamental conflict between quality and equality, and that anything else is political correctness. But though such arguments are part and parcel of the revival of elitist thought, the Tories will try to use the discourse of 'meritocracy' to bind the new 'streamlined' education system to some vaguely progressive goals. They will do this by claiming that one of the sources of high inequality is that egalitarian education fails talented students from poor backgrounds, and that a more selective education system is a vital means for the talented few to escape the drudgery of being stuck with their inferior peers in a static, rigid, know-your-place class system. For years, the mainstream of social democracy has embraced the founding assumptions of this drivel. This may be a good time to break with that habit.

What is the 'Big Society' for? Is there any evidence that it is a response to popular sentiments, that it actually resonates with any underlying political feeling, for example? The polling would suggest not. Most people have not heard of it, and most don't know what it means. There is little enthusiasm for the idea when it's explained to them. Certainly, the majority aren't anxious to volunteer for any 'Big Society' programmes - why should they perform for free what public servants can perform for a wage? I would hypothesise that the 'Big Society' idea isn't really supposed to resonate, and people aren't supposed to know what it's about. It is a deodorant, precisely intended to "decontaminate the Tory brand", surrounding it in a fragrant pot-pourri of sweet nothings. It does not explain the main policies advanced under its rubric, nor does it provide a coherent policy mix. At most it places a new inflection on old policies. We'll come back to this.

There is, of course, an intellectual penumbra surrounding the 'Big Society'. Nathan Coombs' dissection of Philip Blond [pdf] would suggest that at least one of its major advocates is an occult medievalist. As far as the Conservative Party apparatus goes, it would appear to derive from the 'compassionate conservatism' of Marvin Olasky, and its exemplars drawn from a whole range of corporate philanthropists, latterly including Geoffrey Canada of the Harlem Childrens' Project, who bashed the teaching unions at Tory conference this year. More on this in a moment. But is the 'Big Society' a Thatcherite idea?

***

You may argue that in acknowledging that "there is such a thing as society" it constitutes a break with Thatcherism, but that is to buy into an Aunt Sally version of Thatcher. Her famous quote, including the phrase "there is no such thing as society", is wildly misread if it is taken to imply that there can be no mutualism, cooperation and charity, that is if it is taken to be simply a hardnosed declaration that everyone is out for themselves. In fact, Thatcher was being an orthodox Hayekian here in that, for this kind of liberal, all corporate entities beyond the individual are fictitious. In this sense, there is no 'company', 'class', 'school', etc. These are reducible to the individuals who make them up. But the context of the quote made it clear that for Thatcher, charity and mutualism were entirely appropriate forms of social solidarity, at times worthy replacements for state intervention.

But Thatcher was also a statist. She used the state not only to discipline labour, but to ringfence the national space and keep out immigrants, to wage war, to discriminate against gays and bolster patriarchy, to draw power away from local democratic institutions and centralise it (or disperse it among quangos), and so on. Is there a contradiction here? Is there something basically incompatible between a strong state and a free economy? Was Thatcher parting with her Hayekian premises here? In one sense, yes. Hayek was a liberal whose overriding concern was not with state sovereignty. Indeed, in some of his writing he confesses to hostility to the very principle of sovereignty. On the other hand, Hayek was far more profoundly influenced by Carl Schmitt than he found it convenient to acknowledge, and it was above all Schmitt's authoritarian liberalism that shaped his views on the liberal state. The role of the strong state in Schmitt's ideology is to protect the autonomy of civil society, as a zone where the rule of law alone restricts an individual's freedom - obviously, this freedom includes first and foremost the freedom of capitalist managers to operate outwith excessive regulation, and of capitalist owners to invest without excessive appropriations. So it was for Hayek, who saw a strong state as an at times essential bulwark against the encroachments of democracy. Thatcher's bolstering of the state in its disciplinary, coercive capacity is entirely consistent with her downsizing of the state in its welfare capacity.

Hayek insisted that he was not a conservative, and in a very antiquated sense this is true. He preferred to position himself in the 'old Whiggish' tradition of Edmund Burke. This would seem odd at first glance. Hayek's market-based modernism and rationalism would seem to be incompatible with Burkean empiricism and traditionalism. Hayek was a Kantian, while Burke was a Humean. Hayek was a methodological individualist, while Burke believed in an organic social totality. But their understanding of spontaneous social order was derived from the same classical political economy, and the political order that both defended was identical - 'free market' capitalism with a parliamentary system founded on some conception of natural law, and characterised by an amalgamation of political forms including monarchy, aristocracy and an elite democracy. There is thus enough shared territory for Hayek to claim some affinity with Burke, though the latter's conservatism was of a piece with his defence of the post-1688 Whig tradition - just as Schmitt's counter-revolutionary conservatism in Political Theology was continuous in fundamental ways with the authoritarian liberalism of The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. Today, conservatism has long since adapted to and incorporated liberal ideas, so that Hayek's insistence that he was not a conservative was anachronistic. The point I wish to underline with these observations is that a powerful sovereign state is not merely a central component of the conservative tradition, but is perfectly compatible with a certain kind of right-wing market-based liberalism. There is no reason why a 'Big Society' could not also have a strong state.

***

Back to the 'Big Society', then. Coming from a coalition government with a Liberal component and a 'freedom bill' in gestation, you might suppose that it will have a strong libertarian inflection. So let's look at the areas where the Conservatives have appeared to take a libertarian position relative to New Labour. The Tories in opposition sensibly positioned themselves against ID cards and the database state, having initially been supportive of the measures. They also took the side of publicans over the smoking ban, preferring 'voluntary' bans to be introduced by individual companies, though there's little sign that this ban will be reversed or even significantly modified.

Under David Cameron's leadership, the Tories expressed some scepticism about control orders on the grounds that they were both an affront to due process and wasteful. However, they did nevertheless vote for the renewal of the orders in 2007 (the legislation has to be renewed each year) before abstaining in 2008 and 2009. Since forming a government, the Tories have issued new control orders and have been engaged in a protracted conflict with the courts over the issue. The signs are that control orders will be retained in some form on the implausible grounds that the Tories were unaware of the security situation while in opposition. On asylum seekers, the Tories promised that they would move to end child detention, arguably a slight humanisation of a system that has resulted in systematic abuse - but since the detention system will remain in place, it will also involve breaking up more families.

The liberalisation that the Tories have reluctantly embraced has often involved endorsing New Labour reforms - on section 28 and gay adoption, for example. On the other hand, the Tories have firmly backed the government's anti-immigration legislation, just as they have backed the government on most 'anti-terror' legislation. The Tories have often wanted to go farther than the last government, demanding a tougher policy on crime (there are now noises that prisoners will have to work a 40 hour week in jail), and imposing a cap on non-EU immigration. Much of the legislation they have opposed, meanwhile, has been that which abridged sovereign power. For example, the Human Rights Act has been a Conservative bete noir since it was introduced. It has allowed the judiciary to inflict defeats on the government over issues such as immigration, deportation and rendition. Cameron argued for the repeal of this act precisely to prevent that from happening. Indeed, the Law Lords ruled last year that the use of control orders was in breach of the European Convention of Human Rights. All signals are that such libertarianism as does manifest itself with this government will be low key and relative - ie, relative to the last government, which set a high benchmark for authoritarianism. And it is not only in the area of civil liberties, crime and immigration that one expects the 'strong state' to persist.

***

The 'Big Society' has been pitched as a remedy for the 'broken society'. It involves a radical re-structuring of the welfare state and the public sector. Its intellectual basis has been in preparation since the Tories' devastating election defeat in 2001. In addition to the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS), which had informed Tory social thought since Keith Joseph founded it in 1974, there has been the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), set up by former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith in 2004 to provide conservative answers to the problems of poverty and 'social exclusion'. Iain Duncan Smith comes from the Thatcherite wing of the Conservative Party, a 'strong state and free economy' conservative whose campaign for the leadership was briefly set back when it transpired that one of his advisers was the father of BNP leader, Nick Griffin. The base and the parliamentary party had endorsed him precisely because of this vintage. But he couldn't restore the Tories to a decent standing in the polls, and lasted less than two years as leader.

Theresa May understood the problem: "Our base is too narrow," she told the party as its chairperson in May 2002, "and so, occasionally, are our sympathies". The Tories were seen, she warned, as "the nasty party". The politics of the free market and the strong nation were not enough to win elections any more. The Tories had lost votes among the professional middle class, the lower middle class and the 'skilled working class', which could not be mobilised on such a basis. Duncan Smith had tried to take this lesson on board and implement it, and David Willetts started to try to float a distinctly Tory response to poverty and social exclusion. But it wasn't enough to detoxify the Tory brand. However, the CSJ took this strategy forward and, after another failed interregnum, David Cameron took the Tory leadership. Acknowledging the advice of Lord Ashcroft and advisor Steve Smith, Cameron "smelled the coffee", staking out an ostensibly 'moderate' policy stance in order to "decontaminate the Tory brand".

Cameron's leadership succeeded to some extent, where Duncan Smith failed. Cameron, like his predecessors, comes from the Thatcherite right-wing, but he has persuaded many commentators that he belongs to the 'One Nation' tradition of Benjamin Disraeli - though he has never been a member of the 'One Nation' parliamentary group. He speaks the language of progress and social reform, and articulates concerns about inequality and poverty. It sounds a great deal more like the 'left-wing' Toryism of Macmillan and Butler than the hard-nosed Poujadism of Thatcher and Tebbitt. Yet, specific policies on welfare and the public sector are notable for being continuous with the legacy of Thatcherism. Indeed, many of the policies associated with the 'Big Society' are recycled from past Conservative manifestos, as well as camping on territory recently staked out by New Labour. 'Free schools' and 'GP-led' trusts advance the logic of partial privatization, academies and foundation hospitals. They are profoundly anti-democratic in thrust, just as the earlier transfer of public assets to quangos was an attack on democracy. The attempts to reduce 'wasteful bureaucracy' continues previous manifesto commitments, and follows from New Labour's battles with the civil service and public sector employment. 'Freeing' public sector workers from central oversight, and 'liberating' them to focus on targets is an old Thatcherite idea that was enthusiastically taken up by New Labour.

And for all that the Tories would pose as friends of liberty, when it comes to welfare reform the moral panic of the "broken society" authorises not less but more surveillance and bullying. It has been argued that the "broken society" will reduce the statist "chivvying" that has left "shards" of "vanished civilities" littering the political terrain. This is highly unlikely. A centrepiece of Cameron's election campaign in 2010 was that the government should cut off benefits for those who refuse jobs. The Tories under Cameron continued its policy of seeking to force claimants to work for their benefits, ending the "something for nothing culture" and "helping" people back into work. The morality behind this policy, implying that unemployment is the result of an individual moral failure and that those who claim benefits are parasites, is the same as that which drove the first tentative moves toward workfare under Thatcher, finally bearing fruit with 'Project Work' in 1996 and continuing under New Labour.

Indeed, the whole thrust of Cameron and Osborne's attack on the undeserving poor - because, as Cameron and 'fairness' means giving people what they deserve - is that the state should have more of a say in the lives of those claim benefits. It reflects the dominant values of a ruling class that is, pace Digby Jones, demanding ever more disciplinarian and intrusive policies for the poor, while claiming greater liberty for itself, principally from taxation and regulation. That the recipients of benefits are citizens claiming an entitlement, and not beggars, is conveniently bypassed in a discursive regime that criminalises the unemployed and disabled, just as the Tories and New Labour have successfully criminalised asylum seekers.

***

Now, I raise this because there is a debate between Anthony Barnett and David Marquand, old colleagues in Charter 88. It is a debate whose assumptions about the nature of Thatcherism, the Cameroons and the 'Big Society' I find deeply questionable. There is an assumption that the 'Big Society', however vague and inconsistent its concrete recommendations, is a genuine attempt to move beyond New Labour authoritarianism. There is an assumption that the attempt at finding mutualist, cooperative answers to social problems is real and meaningful, despite the incoherent mishmash of medievalist distributism, philanthropy, meritocratic dogmas and 'progressive' social thought that underpins it. There is even an assumption that the 'Big Society' answers to some popular demand for freedom from overbearing statist interventionism. But the evidence behind these assumptions is scarcely to be seen. The Tory instinct will always be to strengthen the state's repressive capabilities, because it is in this capacity that the sovereign state most effectively wards off popular democracy and upholds the interests of those class fractions that are most closely integrated into the Conservative Party leadership. To imagine otherwise is to leave oneself vulnerable to a sickening let down.

Lord Hutton of Furness has produced his interim report on public sector pensions. This is the important thing you need to grasp: the main reforms are proposed with a specific aim of squeezing revenue out of public sector workers so that the Treasury can pay off the bankers. This is not about fairness, much less about "gold-plated" public sector pensions. It is a simple raid on the future wages of the lowest paid workers for the benefit of the rich. Secondly: this transfer of wealth to the rich is part of an ideologically-driven class-motivated attack on the welfare state. We know the background. There is no urgent need to pay off the deficit. Most of the debt doesn't mature in less than three years, and the cost fo borrowing is still low for the UK. There is also no particular need to pay off the deficit by attacking the public sector. Higher taxes on those who bear most direct responsibility for this crisis could easily pay off the deficit. Alternatively, a redistribution and stimulus-based growth strategy would produce the revenues needed to pay it off. So, these are elective measures reflecting the class interests and the ideological priorities of those driving the policies. And Cameron has made it clear that he intends to make these cuts permanent.

Some context. One of the most shameful things about the last government was the way they proceeded to attack the fundamentals of the pension system without ever consulting the public. In their last term especially, they planned a wide-ranging series of neoliberal reforms as the Blairites became impatient to make their mark in a lasting way. At bottom was New Labour's determination that the burden of pensions should shift from state provision through taxation to private sector provision, based on financialised packages. Peter Mandelson had been very impressed on a 1996 visit to Chile with the privatised pension system set up under Generel Pinochet. He in turn impressed the incoming Blair government with his findings. This aspect of New Labour thinking arose as private sector employers were attacking their own defined benefits and final salary pension schemes, as part of their drive to raise shareholder value and reduce the cost of employment. So, just as the private sector pensions system was falling to pieces, the government saw fit to attack state provision, and a tripartite consensus evolved on this issue. One of the few things restraining the government's blows was that pensioner poverty was a hot political issue. The government found this out to its cost when a political backlash engulfed it over a miserly 90p rise in state pensions in one budget. This was at a time when public sector spending was being deliberately slashed by the government, and the spending as a proportion of GDP sank well below the levels of the Major administration. They could get away with deep, though temporary, cuts in spending on health and education, but on pensions they were forced to retreat. So, the conundrum for the government was how to reduce the amount of state provision in a politically acceptable way. In its last term, with Blairites like James Purnell and John Hutton itching to make their mark, New Labour contracted the services of the princes of capital, such as Lord Turner and David Freud to fundamentally reform the whole benefits and pensions system, with the aim of qualitatively reducing state provision. This involved, among other things, raising the retirement age to levels over and above the age to which many working class people can expect to live.

Now, amid a uniquely devastating global crisis, the government has sought to shift the burden of the crisis from the banks to the Treasury, and ultimately onto the working class. A gold-plated government of millionaires has appointed a gold-plated New Labour Lord, John Hutton, to draft a report justifying attacks on what the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg calls "gold-plated public sector pensions". The result so far is this, Hutton's interim report pending a final report in two years' time. In a nutshell, Lord Hutton - former work and pensions secretary under New Labour - advises the government to increase employee contributions to the pensions, as the most effective short-term way of raising funds for the Treasury. This is specifically cast in terms of raising revenue in the short-term. The government is also urged to increase the retirement age in the public sector, though this is more of a long-term measure as it is considered an unlikely candidate for the immediate fiscal gains the Treasury seeks, and reflects the wider commitment to reducing the scope of the welfare state. Bear in mind that new entrants to most public sector occupations already retire at the age of 65, with the only exceptions being the police, the fire service and the armed forces, who retire at 60 due to the physical demanding nature of their jobs. Hutton also advises the government to look for ways to end the final salary pension system, which he judges is "inherently unfair". Instead, he urges shifting to a pension scheme based on some sort of "career average".

To believe that public sector pensions are "gold-plated", you'd have to be living most of your waking life in the comment pages of the Daily Telegraph. The average public sector pension is worth £7800. In local government, it's £4000, dropping to £2800 for women. For this pension, public sector workers contribute over 6% of their wages throughout their working lives. Hutton, in his report, acknowledges as much, dismissing talk of gold-plated pensions as "mistaken" since for "the most part", these pensions are "fairly modest by any standard". If they seem generous to some, he says, it is because the private sector pensions system has been so degraded over the years. But given such an acknowledgement, the standard of justification required for an attack on such "modest" provision becomes all the higher.

Hutton's approach in that regard is standard Blairite 'modernising' talk. People live to a grand old age these days, we are informed, and the buggers cost more to feed and clothe. Some people, Hutton points out, spend 40% of their lives in retirement. But this is not the case for the vast majority of public sector workers, who are among the lowest paid skilled workers in our society, and many of whom work until the physical nature of their jobs means they can no longer do it. They do not have the option to work longer. Meanwhile, some of the features of some public sector pensions go back years, and years. For example, the final salary principle has been in place in the civil service, in different ways, since 1859 - though the system has been through numerous reforms since then, the basic principle has remained intact. Which obviously means that there must be smething wrong with it. No surprises there - Hutton was once part of a government that thought it high time to abolish rights established in the Magna Carta, such was its modernising zeal.

Further, Hutton notes, provision in the state sector is increasing overall, while defined benefit pension schemes in the private sector are diminishing in value. Thus: "around 85 per cent of public sector employees have some form of employer sponsored pension provision compared to around 35 per cent in the private sector." By the standard perverse logic of 'modernising' reforms, the failure of the private sector is used as an excuse to attack the public sector. Last example: Hutton argues that there is an "imbalance" between employer and employee contributions to pension schemes. It's a vacuous claim. What "balance" is appropriate is surely a value judgment, and the implied assumption that there is an "imbalance" which favours employees is not an explanation in itself - rather it demands explanation. For the sake of context, recent reforms have already capped employer contributions to public sector pensions schemes, leaving employees to foot the bill for any shortfall.

Overall, the claim is that changing demographics mean that a system with characteristics developed in the 19th and 20th centuries is no longer suited to the task, and must be reformed in order to reduce the cost of pensions to the taxpayer. But the cost of public sector pensions is not huge. The value of the main unfunded public sector schemes is approximately 1.7% of GDP, and it is projected by the National Audit Office not to have increased at all in 50 years time. The net public sector pension cost, defined as the difference between present employee contributions and present costs, is much lower, closer to 0.3% of GDP this fiscal year. It can vary depending on the rate of inflation, but it is still eminently affordable. According to Diane Abbott, who has been an active participant in debates emerging from the Work and Pensions Committee's proposed reforms, the Treasury spends twice as much on tax relief for private pensions as it does on public sector pensions. Repeat and underline: raising employee contributions is just a way of squeezing revenue out of public sector workers to enable the government to pay off the bankers. It has nothing to do with fairness, or affordability.

The unions are warning of anger, as well they might. Unison is "adamant" that replacing final salary pension schemes with career-based schemes will sharply reduce the incomes of public sector workers in their retirement, which is in fact the purpose of such reforms. Unite points out that this attack on pensions will hit women the hardest, as 70% of public sector workers are women. The unions uniformly point out that public sector workers are already living with pay freezes and de facto pay cuts. Changes to the calculation of pensions, using the Consumer Price Index on inflation instead of the Retail Price Index, has already wiped billions of the value of public sector pensions.

Noticeably, however, the tone of the responses from Brendan Barber and Dave Prentis, and the GMB, including a cautious welcome of some of the interim report's points, suggests that the larger unions are breathing a sigh of relief that it wasn't much worse, and are themselves unlikely to mobilise over this issue. If anything they want to use Hutton's report as leverage to resist some of the more aggressive Tory plans. In truth, as anyone looking at the right-wing press coverage could detect instantly, the Tories didn't need Hutton to endorse the most slash-and-burn approach. It endorses the basic idea that public sector pensions are unaffordable, which is crap, and encourages the government to undertake both short and long-term reforms to dramatically reduce the cost to the Treasury of those pensions. That's all they needed. Unless the unions do begin to mobilise far more quickly than they have been ready to so far, the Tories will use every opportunity to cut deeper than anyone expected.

Zizek has dusted off some of his old routines - the tolerant liberal, the chocolate laxative, decaffeinated Otherness - and tenuously connected them to some current political controversies in order to visit this upon us. As amusing as these whiskered old gags may once have been, and as much as I once thought Zizek quite sharp on the limitations of multiculturalism, the more he repeats himself (or repeats on himself), the less persuasive he becomes. And that's when he's not, you know, bigging up empire, traducing Lenin, reflating Euro-supremacism in the guise of the liberal tolerance that he criticises, and generally carving out a niche as the Roy Chubby Brown of European philosophy.

The basis of Zizek's polemic is that while once European politics was polarised between centre-right and centre-left, it is now increasingly polarised between a large pro-globalisation centre, and a smaller but growing anti-globalisation xenophobic right. The pro-globalisation centre is the hypocritical tolerant liberal who 'respects' the Other in a certain way, but only respects a non-invasive Otherness that doesn't intrude on his/her private space, this being the political space of Europe. Thus, while the centrists attack the populist right, they celebrate diversity and Otherness in the same way that 'moderate' antisemite Robert Brasillach celebrated the achievements of Chaplin, Proust and Yehudi Menuhin, while insisting that instinctive antisemitism could only be constrained by the practise of moderate antisemitism. The populist right can only be appeased by the practise of a moderate anti-immigrant racism. The example of Brasillach does, admittedly, resonate. Bourgeois politicians whipping up racism do indeed rely on the idea that there's something instinctive and commonsensical about it, and that it can only be controlled through moderate, sensible, prudent racism.

But the rest completely fails as an index of the concrete political realities on race and globalisation in Europe. First of all, when the pro-globalisation "centre" attacks the xenophobic right, it is usually not in the name of liberal multiculturalism. Rather, it is in the name of an alternative nationalism based on cohesion, integrationism, an acceptance of "legitimate concerns", and a regretful conclusion that multiculturalism (read: multi-racial society) "didn't work" and that immigration has to be severely limited while minorities are to be disciplined and coerced into internalising some core set of national or European or Western values. It is culturally dominative, hierarchical and authoritarian, not 'tolerant', libertarian or egalitarian. Official multiculturalism has its limits, but it is not to blame for the right-wing anti-immigrant turn of mainstream politics. Indeed, the tolerant liberal, Zizek's sock puppet opponent, is entirely innocent of this bullying. He, let's suppose it's a he, is obviously white, but he's not all bad. He supports attempts to attack and undermine the material legacy of white supremacy, such as affirmative action. His worst crime is that he doesn't want to hear loud rap music in the privacy of his home. (Because, as I'm sure you already know, black people uniformly walk around white neighbourhoods with ghetto blasters playing NWA's 'Fuck The Police' at top volume. White people, by contrast, play Bach on gramophones while writhing with ecstasy over Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right. This has been confirmed by our finest evolutionary psychologists - it's hard-wired behaviour, and there's nothing we can do about it.) It seems rather unfair to blame him for those who want to destroy affirmative action and purge the country of immigrants.

Secondly, it fails because some of the most hawkishly pro-globalisation forces in European and American politics are also the most right-wing xenophobic anti-immigrant forces. If you look at the Tory Right and UKIP, or even the Law and Justice Party, they may be Eurosceptic, but they aggressively favour US-led globalisation. In the US, many the same right-wingers who favour 'free trade' and other shibboleths of globalisation are also among the most pungent anti-immigrant racists. There are, of course, nativists and fascists who fit into Zizek's characterisation of the xenophobic right as anti-globalisation, but these are still minority fringe currents, and not by and large the people who lead Law and Justice, or the Dutch Freedom Party, for example. The Tea Partiers, meanwhile, may have some nativists among them, but their texts are Austrian, and their 'Contract from America' contains a great deal about economic freedom and nothing at all about restricting globalisation or free trade. The opposition being created here between multiculturalist globalisation and xenophobic reaction is illusory. This is because globalisation is an imperialist process that is entirely compatible with restrictions to migration. It does not entail free movement for labour, except on terms amenable to Euro-American capital, since its purpose is precisely to facilitate the exploitation of labour and the extraction of surplus largely for shareholders based in the core capitalist economies.

Lastly, Poland, Zizek's "best example", is not actually typical of a European trend. The legacy of Stalinism, and the postcommunist purges, has meant that politics has been narrowed to a division between liberal-conservatism and right-wing nationalism. But there is a new left emerging there, reflecting dissatisfaction with - well - 'globalisation' among other things. The bulk of the continent is still bissected between left and right, weakly reflected at parliamentary level by parties of the centre-left and centre-right. Despite the best efforts of capital to coopt electoral processes, and despite the illusory transcendence of left and right by 'Third Way' politicians, organised labour retains the ability to uphold some basic social democracy. Indeed, the capitalist crisis is accentuating this polarisation between left and right, and bringing that struggle to a head, as the victor will determine whether labour bears the costs of crisis, or whether the bankers and the rich do. It goes without saying that if the right wins, immigrants and minorities will be among the first to suffer, and the fragile institutions of multiculturalism will be in tatters.