End of Empire

Empires never achieve statis: they are either advancing or in retreat. This has been the case ever since Alexander the Great sat down on the banks of the Indus river and wept because there were no more worlds for him to conquer. Of course the Macedonian never did any such thing. The origin of this story is probably a comment by Plutarch on the Atomistic multiverse: "Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, 'Is it not worthy of tears,' he said, 'that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?'". The modern variant seems to arrive in William Congreve's Way of the World of 1700: "Nothing remains when that day comes, but to sit down and weep like Alexander, when he wanted other worlds to conquer". In other words, a lament at how much had yet to be achieved becomes a cry of despair at completion. Congreve's play appears at a time when the British Empire was still in its infancy, just before the War of the Spanish Succession, whose spoils included Gibraltar and an expansion of the slave trade. If there was a contemporary geopolitical gloss, it was in the emulation of Alexander's ambition.

The idea of "grow or die" would remain central to the ideology of empire throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1914, following the final scramble for Africa and the first stirrings of non-white colonial independence movements (the ANC was founded in 1912), the evident limits of British rule were already producing a pessimism that sought parallels with the decline of ancient empires, such as Rudyard Kipling's poem Recessional of 1897, with its famous lines: "Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!". Perhaps more pertinently, in his 1906 fantasy Puck of Pook's Hill Kipling imagined the defenders of Hadrian's Wall in the late 4th century just before the legions left Britannia for good. For Edwardians, the Roman Empire was the obvious historical antecedent to the British Empire, both in its self-appointed civilising role and its defence against the encroaching barbarians, though the latter were as much to be found in the metropole among the industrial working class as beyond the limites. 

Despite the colonial gains arising from the First World War, the mood in Britain continued to be sombre and elegiac, when not overtly declinist. The narrative of empire's inevitable decay due to the moral laxity and self-indulgence of the people goes back to early Christian propaganda, but it also has a political resonance in the twentieth century with the arrival of universal suffrage, socialist parties and the welfare state. This continued beyond decolonisation. It has been amusing this week to see Philip Larkin's reactionary 1969 poem Homage to a Government being given an airing in the context of our exit from Kabul. That most British troops had already been withdrawn from Afghanistan by 2014, after a complete failure to "keep order" in Helmand province, doesn't invalidate the parallel because this is very much about the mood. But whereas the form of the classical elegy and the subject of imperial decline could inspire notable poems in the twentieth century, such as Auden's The Fall of Rome and Cavafy's Waiting for the Barbarians, Larkin's piece is a resentful and spiteful diatribe that reads more like a letter to the Daily Telegraph.

As last week's Commons "debate" on Afghanistan proved in its emotional posturing (a handful of mainly leftwing MPs excepted), there is clearly an appetite for expressions of regret, but less over the follies of empire than for its supposedly ignoble retreat. Behind this lies the assumption that the state still has a higher purpose, a raison d'etat, that should not be constrained by democracy. Tony Blair came close to making this explicit in his latest widely-reported and intemperate intervention. After a swipe at what he termed the "imbecilic" phrase of "the forever wars", he explained the withdrawal from Afghanistan in terms of a lack of political determination to reject the less heroic life that Larkin also bemoaned: "We did it because our politics seemed to demand it. And that’s the worry of our allies and the source of rejoicing in those who wish us ill." This is such a perfect example of the form, with its hint of a stab in the back, that you could imagine it being written in Latin. Beyond his demonisation of "Radical Islam", what appears to concern the former Prime Minister most is the "risk of relegation to the second division of global powers", and that clearly goes for many current MPs on both sides of the house. The UK has actually been in the second division since Suez in 1956, which was really what Larkin was complaining about.

The problem with this British frame of reference is that it leads to a misunderstanding of American empire. Despite mimicing the UK's imperial expansion in the 1898 Spanish-American War, the US quickly decided that the better model for its own aspirations to global dominance was not Britain's conquest of India but its economic domination of South America in the nineteenth century: dependency through free trade and direct investment, the cultural hegemonising of the middle and upper classes (i.e. anglophilia), and covert interference to ensure a congenial political environment. This led to a century of American military incursions in support of economic interests, the cultural success of Hollywood, and the routine promotion of coups. The challenge of communism in the Soviet Union and China would trigger major wars, notably in Korea and Vietnam, but far from producing a score-draw in the one and a defeat in the other, what they actually enabled was the wider global hegemony of what would eventually become known as the Washington Consensus. Today, the US military has about 750 bases in 80 countries and its defence expenditure dwarfs that of everyone else. The idea that it is in retreat generally is absurd.

America's is an informal empire but no less powerful for that. What Afghanistan has proved is that the US is ultimately pragmatic about maintaining its imperial reach and influence, as it was in Vietnam, and as indeed were the Romans (Hadrian's Wall was actually a line of withdrawal from Scotland). This includes not only strategic incursions and retreats but also selective blindness to the behaviour of allies (e.g. Israel and Saudi Arabia) and a willingness to make examples of the weak, from Iraq to Sudan. For all the talk of a Taliban victory, the story of Afghanistan is essentially a two decades-long punishment beating. The retreat from Kabul may be difficult for those who associate blood with soil to understand, but that simply shows the persistence of the older imperial paradigm in which the loss of any territory is shameful, which is why the UK has been most vocal in its dismay at President Biden's decision (which, lets not forget, is impeccably bipartisan in following the deal negotiated by the Trump administration), even to the point of voicing unusually direct criticism and questioning whether the "special relationship" exists any more. 

In reality, the US is merely making the nature of the relationship explicit. When Obama said that the UK would be "at the back of the queue" for a trade deal if it left the European Union, this was interpreted by many as a partisan point rather than a simple statement of American interests. Even liberal commentators who were sympathetic to Obama have struggled to explain Biden's attitude towards the UK in anything other than terms of decline (a "nose-dive in relations"). Some conservatives have even characterised the withdrawal as evidence of isolationism and thus an improbable victory for leftwing anti-Americanism. The reality is that at both the political and military levels the US has a generally low opinion of the UK and is not minded to consult it except for the sake of politeness. There is no special relationship. It can usually rely on the UK to be the first ally to volunteer for any coalition of the willing (Wilson's demurral over Vietnam was very much the exception to the rule), but this merely reflects the British obsession with being primus inter pares among the auxiliaries of empire. It's an asymmetric infatuation that will inevitably weaken with the evaporation of the UK's influence in Europe.

If the retreat from Afghanistan symbolises anything it is not the weakening of America's geopolitical resolve, or a turning-in on itself to focus on domestic repairs, but another step towards the dissolution of the remnants of the British Empire. For all the posturing in the press and at Westminster, if push came to shove the UK would probably lack the resolve, not to mention the military capability, to mount another Falklands campaign (which in reality was "a damn close run thing"). In recent years there has been a renewed focus on the dismantling of the United Kingdom, with the possibility of Scottish independence and Irish unification, but this remains a more distant prospect than the loss of the British Overseas Territories, such as Gibraltar, the various Caribbean tax havens and the sovereign bases in Cyprus. This wouldn't necessarily be the result of a hostile takeover by another power. It might simply be the result of a change in the economic and regulatory environment prompting formal independence. Though it was the US that did the heavy lifting and suffered the greater casualties in Afghanistan, it is the British empire that lies in the graveyard.

The Cunning of History

The dominant theme of the Afghanistan saga is poor planning, and has been since the US and UK backed the Mujahideen in the 1980s and so sowed the seeds of al-Qaeda. Indeed, you could argue it has been the theme since 1839 and the First Afghan War. The consensus on display in the recent House of Commons debate is that we were right to invade in 2001 but lessons must be learnt about the poor operational foresight that has been characteristic of the endeavour since, right up to the chaotic scenes at Kabul Airport this week. Despite the evidence of history that poor operational planning by the military and the Foreign Office can usually be traced to strategic misjudgements in Number 10, our politicians have insisted on a firewall between the original decision to join the US posse and all the disappointments and calamities that came in its train. Instead, MPs have turned their focus to the traditional laments of incompetence (insufficient resources and inadequate military equipment), the politicians' lack of honour (leaving interpreters to their fate), and even the dereliction of duty of the Foreign Secretary (not making a phone-call). My aim here is not to offer a detailed explanation as to why this outcome was inevitable, nor to revisit the folly of Tony Blair, but to ask what this means for planning itself.

It is important to put planning into a historical and social context. Though the history of the twentieth century has been presented as the failure of central planning and the triumph of decentralised planning, via the price mechanism and markets, in reality there was a steady increase in the planning and coordination functions of the state. The dirty secret of neoliberalism is that it assumes an assertive central authority that can plan the creation and maintenance of artificial markets that advance capital accumulation. Perhaps the most famous example was the conjuring of a market in British council house sales in the 1980s that drove both the secular rise in property prices and the expansion of landlordism. Even in the private sector we have seen the adoption of the techniques of central planning, from global supply chains and vertical integration to the winner-takes-all dominance of online platforms.

The advance of central planning has also been visible in the social sphere. Though it is excused as providing the skills necessary for a modern economy, and therefore ultimately subject to the market, the education system is an example of how social reproduction has become more centrally planned since the 1970s, with the focus on national standards and league tables. Despite the rhetoric of personal responsibility and the often punitive nature of its operation, the welfare state has expanded over the last 70 years with not only more benefits (however inadequate) but a greater responsibility for the state to intervene in "troubled families" or track "radicalised" individuals. Parallel to this, we have internalised planning into our daily behaviour in the form of neoliberal performativity: setting targets, measuring progress, ticking-off our achievements. In this environment, the government's failure to plan - Blair's evangelism, Cameron's insouciance, May's blunders, Johnson's buffoonery - looks like a performance intended to distract us from the reality that our lives are heavily planned by central authorities in both public and private spheres.

The reason why state intervention and planning has come to prominence in political discourse in recent years is less to do with the dawning realisation after 2008 that the private sector was incapable of the heavy lifting needed in a modern economy and more to do with the growing anxiety over climate change. This is a collective action problem of unprecedented scale, both at the national and global level. Despite attempts to introduce market mechanisms and "green finance", it is clear that the steps necessary to comprehensively cut emissions will require the nakedly coercive powers of the state. Contrary to the libertarian myth of the right, this is actually an attractive prospect for the parties of capital, whether conservative, authoritarian or neoliberal. For conservatives, it presents an opportunity to reinforce the defence of existing privileges in the face of an existential threat more credible than communism or the woke conspiracy. For authoritarians, it presents an opportunity to coordinate society more thoroughly and extend the state's invigilation into ever more corners of life. While for neoliberals it promises new state-maintained markets that route public funds to private capital and dynamically discipline individual behaviour.

Much of the political debate around climate change has been dominated by these rightwing frames. For all the talk of socialism or barbarism we remain trapped in the paradigm of classical economics where only incentives matter - e.g. how are we to encourage the transition away from fossil fuels? In defence of this approach, we are told to consider the salutary lesson of the gilets jaune, as if petrol price rises were the sole explanation of that uprising rather than merely its trigger. We're also suffering from a faux radicalism that presents social democratic goals, such as boosting productivity and improving working wages, as a justification for watering-down climate commitments. Meanwhile, the much-touted vision of a "Green New Deal" remains a shopping list of pious hopes when not diverted by more tangible infrastructure programmes that turn out to be exercises in corporate largesse or rhetorical "levelling-up" that is just more hot air. What's lacking is any discernible plan to actually change society and the economy (because you can't radically reform the latter without impacting on the former). But this isn't because such radical change is beyond the rightwing imagination.

Margaret Thatcher's administration in the UK, like that of Ronald Reagan in the US, was interventionist in its methods and radical in its goals - it simply used interest rates rather than sectoral planning and the state allocation of resources to reconfigure industry. It was indirect rather than direct, but no less an interference in the economy. But she was also no slouch when it came to direct intervention. The winding down of the coal industry was long planned. It wasn't inevitable or opportunistic, and both the ends and means of policy after 1979 marked a radical departure from the state's postwar strategy of modernisation and cooperation with organised labour. Starting with the Ridley Plan in 1977, it was a calculated programme intended to end the direct dependence of the economy on coal and society's indirect dependence on the goodwill of the NUM. The point is not that she should be lauded for getting the UK to abandon coal earlier than many other countries, as many of her present-day fans insist, not least because this simply resulted in greater CO2 emissions from gas, but that she showed just how radical a government could be in changing the fundamentals of industry. She also showed how effective a government could be in privileging favoured groups, from landowners to the self-employed.

The pushback against Covid-19 vaccines is not merely a perverse libertarianism. It is also an expression of the belief by relatively privileged groups that they should not be asked to make sacrifices. This is quite distinct from the weak uptake among less privileged groups, where fear of the state and low information combine to make people reluctant or merely fatalistic. This demand for privilege, both between different classes in society and between countries at different stages of development, will also inform the ongoing struggle around the measures necessary to arrest climate change. The argument between developed and developing nations as to which should shoulder the greater burden in cutting emissions is well known, as is the suspicion of the latter than the former's conversion to the cause of reduction is partly motivated by a desire to entrench its relative privilege. But we can expect to see the same dynamic within nations along class lines as justifiably discriminatory demands, such as a frequent flyer levy, clash with the self-interested insistence that the state should impose costs equally on all citizens, in the manner of a poll tax. The irony is that the latter requires far more intrusive planning yet will be advanced by those most adamant that central planning doesn't work.

It is reasonable to cavil at the hyperbolic claim, in response to the recent IPCC report, that "humanity is guilty" when it comes to climate change, particularly given the dominant role of industry and the regulatory failures of successive governments, not to mention the corrosive effect of a press-promoted climate scepticism, but we shouldn't let ourselves off the hook entirely. Electorates usually vote for modest improvement and otherwise a quiet life. The UK's repeated election of the Conservative Party, a political machine that has done little in the way of conservation in any dimension since 1911 but has proved adept at advancing social development while preserving the privileges of property, is proof of that. The party's longevity in office is often attributed to its "competence", but even the most superficial familiarity with British history should disabuse one of this myth. If the return of Labour to power looks unlikely at the moment, and regardless of whether you think the party would be up to the challenge under the current leadership, then we are inevitably banking on the Tories' attraction to central planning to effectively address climate change. Is it the cunning of history that the Conservatives should find themselves in this role, just as they have been obliged to oversee the unravelling of Tony Blair's geopolitical amibitions in Afghanistan and the final retreat of empire?

Politicised Behaviour

The IICSA report into historical child sexual abuse in Lambeth care homes has been notable less for its addition to the mountain of data on the institutional and cultural failings that enabled such crimes than for its spicy political dimension, namely that the council was under the control of the Labour left in the 1980s. Though the report notes that the operational neglect and tolerance of corruption that created the environment for systematic abuse long predated this change in political control, its interpretation of the "culture" of the council is almost wholly limited to that period and largely focused on the strategic neglect entailed by the council's antagonistic relationship with central government: "In the 1980s, politicised behaviour and turmoil dominated the culture of Lambeth Council. The desire to take on the government and to avoid setting a council tax rate resulted in 33 councillors being removed from their positions in 1986. That event and its consequences meant, amongst other things, the majority of elected members were not focussing their attention on what should have been their primary purpose of delivering quality services to the public, including children’s social care".

This suggests that if the Council had been less interested in fighting the government it would have given its full attention to delivering services, as previous administrations had presumably done. But given that the institutional sexual abuse of children in Lambeth's care started long before it became a nuclear-free zone, this in turn implies that the prevailing level of neglect might have continued. The unstated counterfactual is one in which the Council would have prioritised safeguarding the vulnerable, to the point of uncovering the abuse and rectifying the institutional failings, perhaps even triggering a wider review of institutional child sexual abuse, a topic hitherto given little attention at a national level. But that opens up a disturbing vista: that electing a reforming leftwing council might have been a progressive development. To close off that hypothetical avenue, the criticism of the left's collective behaviour then segues into a damning indictment of individual integrity: "Children in care became pawns in a toxic power game within Lambeth Council and between the Council and central government. Many councillors and staff purported to hold principled beliefs about tackling racism and promoting equality, but in reality they failed to apply these principles to children in their care". 

In other words, the root problem wasn't distraction but the hypocrisy of the left. This neatly absolves the institution - i.e. the council's permanent staff, its operating practices, its norms - from blame and so ignores the possibility that the elected members were actually sincere in their principles but thwarted in practice, and not just because of the struggle with Whitehall. It also means that the racialised nature of the institution's culture - its white privilege - is downplayed (when not simply blamed on retrograde trade unions), which stands in contrast to the salience of "Muslim privilege" in the earlier report on Rotherham written by Alexis Jay, the current IICSA Chair. While the angle of collective blame has predictably been emphasised by rightwing newspapers long attuned to the culpability of the "loony left", the focus on personal failings has also provided ammunition for the liberal press, leading to the bizarre sight of Sonia Sodha, who writes moralising editorials for the Observer, condemning the "pieties" of "those who regard themselves as being on a higher moral plane" and "who put abstract creed before material reality". The charge here is a logically inconsistent mix of hypocrisy and naivety: that the left have no grounds to accuse others of immorality, given their own corrupt behaviour, and that they have no understanding of the real world, given that they are ignorant dupes. 

It's plausible to think that the political conflicts between Lambeth Council and national government in the 1980s, notably the rate-capping rebellion of 1985, did undermine oversight of council services and thereby extended the ongoing tolerance of abuse, however that institutional tolerance cannot be solely attributed to the administrations of Ted Knight and Linda Bellos. Given the lack of similar distractions in the 1960s and 1970s, it would be legitimate to ask why the problem had not been addressed before. The answer is that child sexual abuse wasn't generally recognised as an institutional problem but was seen more as a personal moral failing (Sodha is writing in a venerable tradition). For example, it was promoted by the press at the time of the 1957 Wolfenden Report as a reason to not decriminalise homosexuality, rather than as a prompt to examine the safeguarding of children. It was only in the 1980s that the issue started to come to the fore, within the context of a wider debate over institutional failure, though this was initially diverted by lurid press coverage of alleged satanic ritual abuse. It has only been in the last decade that investigations have been made systematic, in the form of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) established in 2014, and the impetus for this was in no small measure the Jimmy Savile scandal and the allegations of a Westminster paedophile ring. In other words, the state's response has been heavily conditioned by the media. 

What interests me in this sorry tale is not the routine anti-leftism of the press, nor its instrumental use of child sexual abuse, but the attitude displayed towards the role of local government. This is partly a reflection of the newspaper industry's structural imperatives, which have notably changed over time, but it also reflects the sea-change in governance since the 1970s. For its part, the press was long the champion of local government, reflecting the importance of local newspapers after the coming of mass literacy in the late-nineteenth century and the limited competition from other national media (the BBC was created in 1922). Over the course of the last one hundred years, it has focused more on the national political scene. By virtue of its conservative bias and the longevity of the Conservative Party in office, it increasingly came to view local government as a wasteful drain on ratepayers at best and a radical impertinence at worst. This became more pronounced after 1979 as the Tories sought to offload the social cost of their economic reforms onto local government while simultaneously reducing its autonomy through privatisation and centralisation.

We have now reached a stage where "politicised behaviour" is seen as inappropriate for a local authority. This is the culmination of a longer trend that began with the historic compromise between central and local government in the post-1945 expansion of the welfare state. In this context, the "antagonism" of Lambeth Council in the 1980s was actually the last gasp of the prewar municipal radicalism that had been steadily diluted since the 1950s and notably corrupted through its involvement with property development, a process that started in idealism (e.g. T Dan Smith in Newcastle) and continues today in institutional cynicsm. The trend away from politicised behaviour in local government is unlikely to be challenged by the Labour Party. Not only was it a key partner in that postwar settlement (and a participant in the subsequent corruption), it firmly committed itself to a managerialist model in the 1980s with its opposition not only to Lambeth and Liverpool but to the GLC as well. Today, uncontroversial initiatives by Labour councils tend to receive only grudging support from a national leadership uncomfortable with activism and determined that local government should be a model of "responsibility", while the left is limited to urging a distinctly modest radicalism. For example, the "Preston model" of contracting services locally is admirable but it is hardly socialist in any meaningful sense. 

This is not to suggest that local government has been wholly depoliticised during the neoliberal era, however much that "ideal" was promoted by both the political right and centre. Local politics is still alive and well, particularly in urban areas, despite the best endeavours of Whitehall to clip local government's wings and of the main parties to limit the range of acceptable politics to either a business-friendly centrism or a torpid conservatism. The continuing strength of council independents within Britain's political ecology, even when committed to a narrow-minded localism, is evidence that the appetite for democratic accountability has not yet been replaced by acceptance of an apolitical management function or tolerance for antisocial property development with all its consequent corruption. In this context, the tentative steps being taken by some Labour-controlled authorities to expand services (e.g. taking buses back under council control) or democratise oversight are encouraging. But one message delivered by the IICSA report on Lambeth is that there are limits to this repoliticisation. Go too far and you risk not only the antagonism of a Conservative government and a viciously intolerant press but a very public repudiation by a Labour party leadership keen to have its own "Kinnock moment".