Was "Kerblam!" a coincidence?

Barry Letts once said that that Doctor Who’s politics reflected “ultimately … our view and [the view of] the writer who was working with us. … If you get a collection of intelligent people together, especially creative people, they will tend to be liberal/left of centre, because that is the most intelligent position to take.” 

If this is the case then one would expect Doctor Who to track shifts in liberal/left of centre thinking. This post argues that the Doctor Who episode “Kerblam!” does exactly this. Its controversial political message is therefore no coincidence. 

 In “Kerblam!” (2018) the Doctor and her companions seemingly confront a vast intergalactic corporation called Kerblam! At the end of the episode however the enemy turns out to be not the corporation but a terrorist fighting the corporation. The Doctor finally confronts him and articulates a startlingly pro-capitalist conclusion: 

    CHARLIE: We can’t let the systems take control! 

    DOCTOR: The systems aren’t the problem. How people use and exploit the system, that’s the problem. People like you. 

 Charlie dies and Kerblam! continues in business with only minor reforms. The Doctor’s attempt to divide “the system” from “people exploiting the system” is striking. On her reasoning capitalism is not in itself an exploitative system. Instead it is a moralistic issue – of “bad people” as opposed to “good people” running capitalism. 

Yet Doctor Who had long been characterised by its highly critical stance on capitalism and corporate power, certainly since “The Invasion” in 1968. Nor, arguably, was “Kerblam!” a flash in the pan of the Chibnall era. Two magnates also feature in the episodes: Jack Robinson and Daniel Barton. Though both are defeated it is remarkable that neither really gets his come-uppance: indeed Robinson even returns to play the villain a second time. The message seemed to be that resistance to capitalism was futile. Why was the show suddenly so capitalism-tolerant? 

The shifting Left 

Let us take seriously Barry Letts’ insight that Doctor Who reflects the liberal/left of centre. During the show’s lifetime the focus of the liberal/left of centre has changed considerably. 

In the decades leading up to Doctor Who’s birth the British Left focused on economic equality and social class. Its great internal controversy - which became particularly bitter in the 1950s - was whether progress required the replacement of capitalism or merely its mild reform. “The language of priorities is the religion of socialism” declared Aneurin Bevan: “socialism in the context of modern society means the conquest of the commanding heights of the economy”. The Labour Party establishment disagreed. Having nationalised a fifth of the economy after World War Two it decided not to go much further. It sought “consolidation” rather than “advance”, a capitalist economy but with a sizeable state sector and welfare state. The Conservative Party initially accepted the new state of affairs forging Britain’s social democratic consensus of 1945-79. The important point however is the Left focused on class and economics. 

From 1979 onwards under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher the country’s ideology shifted from social democracy to neoliberalism. Under neoliberalism, government regulation and social welfare guarantees were reduced. Instead governments fostered market forces, driven by private enterprise pursuing profit marginalisation. The effect was to restore the power of economic elites (D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, OUP, 2005:19). 

Politically, neoliberalism was a great success. Thatcher and her neoliberal successors won successive general elections. The power of organised labour was subdued by a combination of mass unemployment and the defeat of a crucial miners’ strike. The government helped construct the European Single Market.  The collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc served to confirm that there was no alternative to capitalist globalisation. The Labour Party was won over, abandoning its early aim of replacing capitalism and implementing many of Thatcher’s policies (for a detailed account see S. Jenkins, Thatcher and Sons: A Revolution in Three Acts Penguin 2007). The Left having distanced itself from the hobbled working class, the working class eventually paid the Left back in kind, with the collapse of the Red Wall in the 2017 general election. 

But what was the Left to put in place of class and interventionist economics? How was it to make itself distinctive from the Right in the new century? Mary Davis argues that the Left renounced class and collectivism in favour of individual self-identity. Identities such as race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, class, sexual orientation, age, disability and the intersectionality between them were accorded fundamental importance. Crucially however this change in the “language of priorities” meant that class was relegated. It was a mere aspect of identity. It was no longer to be seen as the most significant determining force in how one experiences capitalist society. A surfeit of identity politics thereby serves as the antithesis of class politics. (Mary Davis, “Class Politics vs. Identity Politics”, Brave New Europe website, https://braveneweurope.com/mary-davis-class-politics-vs-identity-politics). 

It is therefore no coincidence that in Doctor Who the softened approach to corporations and their leaders went hand-in-hand with a vigorous pursuit of identity politics.  The over-emphasis on identity politics serves above all as window-dressing, hiding up a toleration of capitalism and ensuring that radical change does not happen at all.  As such it represents the neoliberal colonisation of the Left itself.