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".