On inability
"We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now all we do is put our hand in the next guy's pocket." - Frank Sobotka
A few days ago I wrote about what a disagreement about some football pitches (and whether they should be replaced with flats) tells us about our broken economic model. I think it tells us something deeper about our broken politics and our broken state, too.
Let’s differentiate broader inability from incompetence. In this context, think of incompetence as the inability to do something specific - achieve a task or perform a certain skill. Inability is more the state of being unable to do anything.
Open the news and you are confronted with the effects of what feels like a permacrisis of inability. Politically we have a government with a huge majority (bigger than even Thatcher enjoyed when she completely redrew Britain in the 80s), yet institutionally the government is unable to actually do anything. The state is either being fleeced by the private sector or finds itself unable to ‘do’ things (usually it’s both).
Take your pick from the below 5 crises:
The government is handing out billions of pounds to hotel chains because the government cannot run a functioning asylum system.
The government has to cut spending/increase taxes/both because the OBR says the ‘fiscal’ headroom has shrunk.
The government is trying to get property developers to build more homes instead of the state building coucil homes.
The government will spend between £80-100 billion on HS2 (a private company), which won’t be built on time and doesn’t even go where it is supposed to go.
We will all have to pay 26% more for our water bills - a crisis the government essentially says it can’t do anything about despite our waterways becoming open sewers.
Each of these issues make different people more or less angry depending on whether are ideologically, politically and geographically but what common thread do they all have in common? The government and the state appears unable to do anything to fix it.
Some questions follow:
What does it mean for our democracy when our democratically elected leaders are reduced to essentially trying to persuade, corral and cajole other actors (the forces of capital, investors and property developers)?
The period from 1945-79 is perhaps best understood as a period of consensus between the two main parties about what the state could and should do. In the period following 1979, the left and right argued about what the state should and should not do, whilst agreeing that the state could actually do things should it so wish. For example the Tories decided that the state shouldn’t build houses, or own and run our water system or railways - not that it actually couldn’t do things.
I would submit that what we are now witnessing and living through in real time is the erosion and rapid disappearance of the notion that the state (whether central government, local government or other arms of the state) can actually do things.
A few months after the 2017 General Election I went to see Labour of Love, the play James Graham wrote about his Nottinghamshire coalfields hometown after This House made his name. It charts the story of the Labour Party from 1990 and in its tragic, final denouement (The Guardian highlighted “strong Shakespearean echoes”) a Labour MP is desperately begs a Chinese businessman to locate a data centre in his constituency. 8 years later the Labour Prime Minister - not a backbench MP - posts fawning flattery on social media in an attempt to persuade Blackrock to invest some of their money here, whilst scrapping proposed reforms to the carried interest exemption that would have seen private equity investors actually pay taxes on their income like a nurse or a teacher.
What does it say about social democracy in this country when the only answer we have is ‘YIMBY’ism? Is Barratt Homes Britain a good thing?
Making it as easy as possible for property developers to throw up shit new-builds does not an industrial strategy, an economic strategy or a political strategy make. “Back the builders not the blockers” sounds like it was written by a public affairs consultant - probably because it was.
After WWII we built between 100,000-200,000 council houses a year, and by we I mean the actual state and local councils. To young people living in Barratt Homes Britain the notion that the British state actually built homes for its citizens to live in safely, secured and affordably now seems totally absurd. Think about how we talk about housing - it’s the ‘housing market’. Council homes are a physical, tangible embodiment of the ability and power of the state to provide for its people, not just leave it up to the market.
Walking around parts of Manchester feels like being a fever dream - am I in an actual city for people or am I a character in a CGI marketing presentation for a proposed new “community”? Often it is my less avowedly political friends who make the most lucid political points: “they’re [the government] letting them [property developers] build any old shit and they’re [the flats] all being bought up by investors to rent ‘em out”.
What does it mean for our politics when we have a Labour government in Westminster with a majority of 170, a Labour Mayor of London and Labour-led local councils who are all still seemingly unable to do anything about the most pressing issues people are facing in their lives.
For the past 15 years we have had Labour councils in London blaming the existence of a Tory government in Westminster for the failure to build affordable homes and our failing public services. What now? Not only is nothing changing, those in power are telling us that they can’t actually even change things. Apparently the job of the government is just to grease the wheels, attract the investors, “overhaul the planning system” and let the GPD growth figures bloom.
I don’t think anyone has really got to grips with what this all means. It is a profound political failure which will have profound political consequences.
There is an ideological point here, of course: the state has been so hollowed out by austerity and become so reliant on the private sector that we have not just out-sourced the delivery of public services, but in so doing have seemingly also out-sourced the actual capacity and ability of the government to do or deliver anything at all.
This is a very dangerous moment for voters to conclude the state can’t ‘do’ things, when Nigel Farage is leading the polls arguing that the ‘establishment’ (ie the Tories, Labour, the civil service, local authorities, quangos etc) are all as bad as each other and have singularly failed to deliver.
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This brings us back to the housing crisis. The first job of a government is to respond to the needs of its citizens, but on housing the state has presented itself as powerless to do anything. Faced with the vicissitudes of a broken ‘housing market’, our political leaders are reduced to Oliver Twists in a suit asking property developers to include a few more ‘affordable units’ in their development plans. The Mayor of London was priced out of City Hall by the Kuwaiti investment fund who owns it - as a demonstration of who actually runs Britain, that’s a bit on the nose. Here we have the Prime Minister on Twitter asking property developers to please build some houses - is that not in and of itself an encapsulation of the problem?
There’s a bigger point here, because the rise of Reform and corresponding decline in support for Labour (and the Tories) is predicated - at least in part - on a wider sense of anger and loss of faith not just in the current government or previous government but in the system itself. The relationship between Labour and the Tories has been a symbiotic one for most of the past 100 or so years. On the whole when voters are angry at one, they choose the other to run the system for a while and then the pendulum swings back. Not anymore.
We have a government one year into its work with a majority of 170 elected on a simple mandate of change. In other words, this is our First Past the Post system working exactly as intended - it punishes failure and rewards winners by delivering big majorities and strong mandates. In this context, it won’t take long for apathy and anger to crystallise into a total loss of faith in the state and the ‘system’ itself.
The morbid symptoms of this crisis are revealing themselves as a combination of anger and rage on the one hand, together with loss of faith and apathy on the other (see Labour’s shallow landslide and shockingly low voter turnout). Taken together, every example of the government appearing powerless and unable to demonstrate agency and competency is more grist in these mills.