How liberals abandoned the future - and why we must find it again

The liberal establishment came to totally dominate Britain, but it had no vision of what the future should be other than a series of procedures. Unless others begin to map out a different future, we’re stuck here - or worse.

The BBC license fee is worth paying to sustain Adam Curtis documentaries if nothing else. I have just finished the peerless Shifty, a work of art and a work of political and economic commentary which really ought to be compulsory viewing.

I learned almost nothing new, and yet that is the power that Curtis brings to his work – it made me see things in a much clearer light and with a different perspective anyway. And of the many things that are stuck in my mind, his closing metaphor is the one I'm thinking about most.

The series explains how our modern politico-economic situation came to be, following Britain from 1979 until the millennium. It mainly picks over the political and economic changes that took place but it also takes a side glance at the 'liberal creatives' and their positioning. Alienated by Thatcher, increasingly disdainful of the working class, they were becoming more and more elitist.

So when Blair and co announce their vainglorious Millennium Dome, the liberal political elite and the liberal creative elite sort of merged to design it. And between them they come up with – nothing. They billed it as a vision of Britain's future, but no matter how many meetings they have and how many consultants they bring in, no-one could work out what to put in it.

This is the metaphor; the liberal establishment now has nothing whatsoever to say about the future. The artists were turning into business people, provoking and shocking the 'plebs' with their New British Art. And the politicians really only had one idea for the future – merge the liberalisms.

That is what I want to look at, at how the two forms of liberalism, at first at odds, finally made peace and declared the end of history. It has dragged us here and it has left us with no road map. And it is leading to the demise of liberalism altogether.

The first liberalism to appear was cultural liberalism. The cultural liberals in their modern form trace their lineage to 1960s counter-culture, and in particular the Californian, hippie individualism that became dominant. They believed in free expression, the right to 'be who you are', the right to 'be different', the power of education, the value of art.

So by its nature this philosophy is a very close match to the mindset of those who come through creative disciplines – and that includes broadcast media. The right of the political spectrum are not wrong to conclude that Britain's attitudes and tastes have been shaped by a liberal cultural elite. It's just that, gradually and up to a point, most people were quite happy to be increasingly culturally liberal.

But the cultural liberals were initially very hostile to the other form of emerging liberalism – economic liberalism. If people are best left to 'be free' and express themselves as they wish, then why aren't 'business creatives' allowed to 'be free' in the same way? If self interest is so good in culture, why not in commerce?

Perhaps the primary reason the cultural liberals were so hostile to this was that the economic liberals at first presented themselves as in opposition to the cultural liberals, not economically but politically. It was Conservatives who championed neoliberal economics, welding conservative social views to liberal economic ones.

And so Thatcher's economic liberalism sounded and felt a million miles away from Melvyn Bragg's cultural liberalism. For nearly two decades they exist in a stand off – business leaders would have liked the arts to be more functional and the artists wanted economics to be less reactionary and knuckle-dragging. So they stared each other down through the power of funding elite opera (one side) and running satirical comedy on TV (the other).

And then, in the mid-1990s, we get the 'great merger'. This is led by the New Democrats in the US and enthusiastically picked up by the Blair Labour Party in Britain. By this point Britain was already broadly culturally liberal. Business leaders came to like the new personal freedoms as much as anyone else. There was very little resistance to cultural liberalism left.

Which means that when Clinton and Blair not only dropped their resistance to neoliberal economics but embraced it, there was no real remaining conflict in British politics, other than round the edges. This is the real-world manifestation of what Francis Fukuyama called 'the end of history' in a book published five years before Blair (a book which has not aged well...).

That was the logical conclusion of what was happening in politics and the economy. If everyone agrees that neither the economic nor sociocultural model that exists can be improved other than tweaks round the edges, there is nothing left to do. The only possible future is already here.

In fact, it becomes impossible to imagine the future at all. For a liberal, there was no driver or dynamic that would or could replace the one they had put in place. All Prime Ministers of Britain were basically liberals from that point onwards, with slightly different emphases on left and right.

And since the future has already been decided, anything that challenges or questions that future must be prevented. When the global banking system more or less collapses over 2007-2008, the only thing liberals can do is put it back together again as was using any means necessary. By this point the role of the liberals has become to prevent the future altogether, to sustain the present forever.

“The liberals only saw the present and we’ve ended up somewhere else altogether.”

Then because there is no debate over this in politics, there is no real questioning of whether any of it actually works. Every administration sticks rigidly to trickledown economics (and does so to this day) which means that every administration has to believe that poverty is a glitch to be ironed out, not evidence of a problem.

The same with the environmental crisis where the only policy considered so far is how to replicate the present with less carbon dioxide. It is true with the immigration question which can't be a globalised response to the realities of neoliberalism so must be a criminal issue. It is true with public infrastructure and services which keep declining but which are met by politicians with the steely certainty that the only solution is to do more of the only thing they know how to do.

Sustain the present. At all costs. The liberals have been agitated a total of three times in recent years and none of them was the banking crisis or austerity or climate change. One was the ripples of the one-two of the Scottish independence referendum and Brexit. One was the rise of Corbyn. One was the rise of Farage.

Why are those the concerns and not the starving kids? Because starving kids don't pose a challenge to the system that must be sustained. Liberals did nothing at all during the mass suffering caused by austerity, but they went mental when Brexit happened and again when Corbyn was elected as Labour leader.

And so we descend right down to those dregs of liberalism Starmer and Macron. Both of them are determined to use 30-year-old orthodoxies to address crises that were created by those orthodoxies. Neither of them has any form of thinking that wouldn't be instantly recognisable to all of us in 1995.

Starmer in particular is like a hollow Blair tribute – the same staff are coming up with exactly the same failed policies over and over again. Everyone knows that Labour is over as a serious proposition for our future. The public will be unlikely to frame it in the way that I have here, but they know it and they increasingly can see it.

Because while 'culture wars' are associated with the right, it has been the go-to for liberals as well ever since the banking collapse and the clear evidence they were leading us in the wrong direction. Liberals embraced more and more far-end versions of what social liberalism was meant to be, desperate to keep everyone looking at lifestyle choices and not the daylight robbery taking place in the economy.

But the real source of the crisis in which we find ourselves isn't just that liberalism ran out of steam, its that the left has spent 30 years in an accommodation with the liberals. The left has behaved like it was an internal lobbyists to make liberalism a bit more left and a bit less right. But it didn't create a coherent economic model to challenge neoliberalism and loved the new emphasis on even more social liberalism.

The left internalised the idea that challenging liberal orthodoxies too much was an unserious activity, that hinting that capitalism as we know it is failing the planet would be 'too far'. So even the left leant into a vision of the future which was basically liberalism as well.

Which means that as liberalism collapsed, only one group had a vision of the future, and that vision was simultaneously of the past. The reactionary, conservative right has taken the collapse in liberalism and done what the left didn't – steered the whole debate to its long-standing priorities of restoring social conservativism as the organising feature of our society.

I wrote about utopia and the need for new visions recently, but working through all this in my head leaves me with a different question – can anyone ever win (and successfully govern) again on the basis of 'here is the only economy you'll ever have, now away and wear some bright clothes and tell yourself you chose this'? I am becoming increasingly sceptical – and when only 54 per cent of Americans view capitalism positively now, I'm not alone.

Because you don't need to be a physicist to know that the future will happen whether we want it or not and it is already not the future that the liberals didn't see – they only saw the present and we've ended up somewhere else altogether.

So what is the future? To the Greens, it cannot be 'this with heat pumps'. To the social democrats, it cannot be 'this with more benefits'. To the nationalists, it cannot be 'this but with our own parliament'. To the left, it cannot be 'not this'. The right is winning because it has a vision for the future – even if that vision is 'more like the past', it is still a vision. AI isn't a vision...

The left is losing because it lost the belief that choosing a future is possible. It is circling endless fights over the past and the present. But choosing a future is not impossible. In my daydreams I can see it in a startling amount of clarity and it is nothing at all like the present. As I have admitted before, I am nervous to write about it because I too have been trained to believe that choosing a future out loud is not 'serious'.

Now? I suspect it is the only serious thing we can do.