Mammon's Kingdom: An Essay on Britain, Now, by David Marquand

From page one, David Marquand makes his case clear: “There is surely something in Freud’s notion that adult fascination with money stemmed from childhood fascination with excreta.” His claim is that when it comes to geographical variations in this fascination, there is no other populous country more devoted to money worship than the UK. These are bold claims, and the author’s stated aim is to redress the balance and make Britain more normal.

When the book is at its most entertaining and enlightening, readers may find it hard to believe that they are reading the words of a man approaching his 80th birthday. The City of London is described as a “swelling boil on the nether parts of the global financial system”; Richard Branson as a man unworthy of admiration who boasts of his firm’s tax evasion; Tony Blair as a “particularly prominent fawner” to Rupert Murdoch and a man who lacked a messianic cause other than self-promotion.

Mammon’s Kingdom is a political historian’s lively account of the waxing and waning of the love of money in Britain. By concentrating on just one country, he presents a more nuanced story than that recently told by Thomas Piketty. The UK has not had just one brief experience with greater equality, and the post-Second World War era was not a single exceptional period. There has been more than one progressive age when greed was held at bay.

Marquand is also more optimistic than his nearest comparator, the late Tony Judt, about how we might treat the various ills that prevent the spread of fairness across this land, but he is fully aware of the huge magnitude of the challenge. His view is that the UK has an unusually extreme problem, is remarkably unequal in comparison with otherwise similar countries, and hence finds itself currently caught in a unique trap, one in which even the US is not so firmly stuck.

This essay on Britain is a book of many short stories which, when “read for legal”, must have raised a few eyebrows. One still-living banker is described as “ruthless, driven, domineering, ferociously ambitious and increasingly prone to megalomania”. Another is defined as emulating the first. And all this is said before the author gets on to their really bad qualities.

Almost everyone comes out looking bad in the stories in the first half of the book. New Labour’s greatest sin was getting in bed with bankers, and the rest of us were at fault for not spotting the sleaze. However, when almost everyone’s a fool then no one appears to be to blame. The one complaint I have with this argument is that precisely why Britain became so uniquely greedy is glossed over. The City of London could only be deregulated in the “Big Bang” of 1986 because the Conservatives won the election of 1983 so convincingly. That was arguably only possible when the Left split between Labour and the Social Democratic Party. Marquand was part of that split – joining the SDP – but it is never mentioned in his book.

This one complaint isn’t a personal dig that stems from having been around at the time; I was a child when those key decisions were made. But for a book that throws so much mud at so many, a little more introspection might have been in order. Marquand was part of the generation that allowed Britain to lurch to the laissez-faire. In hindsight, his contemporaries in most other countries in Europe did better when the pendulum was swinging so unpredictably. All that he says is: “The champions of the public realm succumbed to a soporific complacency.” I’d like to know more of how and why. But I get the sense that hatchets have been buried. The further back in time this author goes, the more magnanimous he is.

At many points it is suggested that some great political figure of the past was more of a moderate than we might suppose. At one point so many of the key characters in this story became masters of one Oxbridge college or another that it looks like nothing so much as a somewhat partial history of the patrician elite. At other points in the book, where in my view it is at its best, it adopts a style of narration that recalls the work of the film-maker Adam Curtis, but with wonderfully woven words standing in for Curtis’ soundtracks and grainy images.

Just as Curtis portrays the high priests of the current market orthodoxy in film, here (in words) Marquand describes Chicago School economics as a modern-day cult, one based on doctrines that are aesthetically satisfying to those with “crossword-solving minds”. The Chicagoan axiom that “rewards reflect productivity” is described as naive and quaint in the extreme, but also incredibly dangerous.

The Chicago cult to which all of our three main political parties still strongly adhere defines as “rational” any behaviour that accords with its axioms. In his call to arms Marquand proclaims that “economics is no longer a science”, that economic behaviour is not a timeless truth but a trope of rhetoric, and that the Chicagoan worldview has now collapsed. That final claim may be a little optimistic.

This is not a book written by a radical. Attempts to hold back 1980s marketisation by David Blunkett in Sheffield and Ken Livingstone in London (and their fellow democratically elected local councillors) are described as “astounding folly”. Contemporary student protests over tuition fees are labelled “hardly commensurate with opposition to unjust taxation” and yet the new fees equate to a 49 per cent tax rate for many future graduates. Half of all young women in the UK now go to university. They are set to pay tax at higher rates than many members of the far richer 1 per cent who are mostly male and just a few years older than them.

But it is precisely its author’s lack of radicalism that makes Mammon’s Kingdom so powerful. What is asked for is simply reasonable, not revolutionary. When someone so firmly based in the centre ground tells you that “the continuities between Thatcher and Blair were more salient than the contrasts”, it’s time to admit that comedian Russell Brand may have been making a fair point when he identified stultifying similarities among our political elite.

Turning to solutions, Marquand’s answer is to suggest a new national conversation based on a renewed understanding of our past, and of respecting and re-melding of a great many former viewpoints, many of which have been either largely forgotten or greatly distorted as history is retold to fit what Brand might call the hegemonic individualist discourse of our times.

Among the pantheon of heroes in the second half of Marquand’s account, R. H. Tawney stands out. Few people writing today on potential solutions to society’s ills can quote from an interview they conducted with that man, who died in 1962. Tawney lived through times more inequitable than today’s and saw greater equality dawn.

The national conversation is vital, Marquand insists, because until we can talk the talk of mutuality we have no chance of walking the path away from individualism. The greatest obstacles in our way are ourselves, and how the very way in which we think has become so corrupted. Mammon’s Kingdom makes such a claim now part of the mainstream. Which is what it has to be, if there is to be hope of escaping the trap we presently find ourselves in.