A Failure of Nerve

The widely-reported death of "levelling up" may reflect the government's changed tenor, from the activism of Johnson to the pragmatism of Sunak, but as Johnson was never that active, and Sunak has proven to be anything but pragmatic (e.g. failing to buy off the nurses and split the strike movement), it might simply reflect the political eclipse of Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities and Minister for Intergovernmental Relations, to give him his full title. Gove's policy paper, published less than 12 months ago, talked of levelling up as "a moral, social and economic programme for the whole of government" that would "spread opportunity more equally across the UK". Such lofty ambition has always been Gove's rhetorical signature, whether in pushing a nostalgic schools curriculum or promising us the sunny uplands of Brexit. Whatever else can be deduced from the current administration's behaviour over the last three months, it's clear there will be no single unifying theme beyond hanging on for dear life, which isn't that much different to the opposition's approach as they sit atop a poll lead that clearly has little to do with their policy pledges.

In trying to distract from Sunak and Starmer's underwhelming presentations, Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer defined the difference between the parties as less state versus more state. This isn't altogether wrong, though given Rawnsley's undiluted Blairism, it merely prompts the question as to what sort of state he has in mind. For example, when he writes "his one thought about addressing the crisis in the NHS is that more health care should be provided by the private sector", it isn't immediately clear which party leader he is talking about, though the clue is that Starmer's comments on the NHS came some days later so it's actually Sunak. Not only did the Labour leader back Wes Streeting's suggestions about private sector involvement, he also took the time to take a swipe at the vested interests of doctors and NHS "bureaucracy", while advocating a nebulous devolution of power that encompassed self-referrals to medical specialists and communities "taking back control", none of which would have been out of place in Gove's policy paper, or indeed a speech by Maragaret Thatcher.

This modesty of ambition is the opposite of what many hoped for (or feared) following Brexit. There has been a striking consensus between remainers and leavers in recent months, the former concluding that the facts of geography and the asymmetries of power in a world still highly-integrated by trade mean that our hands remain (fortunately) tied, the latter that the Brexit project has been fatally damaged by the Tories' incompetence and is now "unsalvageable". This shared pessimism about the capability of the UK state might seem odd given that it co-exists with a continuing belief in the power of the EU project on the one hand (the activist state in excelsis), and a belief that a dynamic (even "swashbuckling") Britain still exists somewhere just out of reach on the other. But viewed through the lens of history, it highlights that a failure of nerve at the crucial moment has been typical of the UK for more than a century, and we appear to be living though another one now.

Though the People's Budget of 1909 marked a significant step towards a Bismarckian welfare state, it also marked the limits of the UK's fundamentally Georgian constitution. The crisis of the Liberal Party between 1906 and 1918 was famously attributed to a combination of Lords reform, Irish home rule, female suffrage and trade union power, but what this omits is that the chief problem was not external pressure, either in the form of conservative resistance or progressive demands, but internal weakness, specifically that the Liberals were temperamently unsuited to overseeing the growth of the sort of state necessary to meet the challenges of the twentieth century, either in wartime or peace. They became irrelevant and that is why they were supplanted by the Labour Party, though ironically this marked the point at which liberalism became hegemonic. It is grimly amusing that Lords reform, Scottish independence, gender rights and mass strikes are all on today's agenda, but this is less a case of history rhyming than continuities from a century ago due to the weak development of the state. 

There were two pivotal moments over the last 100 years: the late-1940s and the mid-1960s. The first of these was in some respects the return of the Liberal Party to government. Not only was the welfare state cast in the image of William Beveridge, but consititutional reform was ducked and empire preserved where possible (partly to generate export dollars to pay for US war loans but also partly because of a genuine belief that Britain still "deserved" its imperial reach, just like its seat at the UN and nuclear bombs). Meanwhile, social policy was given a distinctly pre-war cast (e.g. the 1944 Education Act, the 1948 Nationality Act). At a time when the UK could have become the de facto leader of Europe, it mentally retreated behind the English Channel. What Labour was temperamentally more suited to was the nationalisation of strategic industries, albeit on a Fabian model that assumed a continuity of management (and thus poor labour relations) with "public ownership" a substitute for more radical industrial democracy. 

By the early-60s it was clear that the UK needed to change course. The empire was gone, British industry continued to suffer from under-investment, and people were still living in Victorian slums while watching American TV shows (or watching the same slums on Coronation Street). Again, there was a failure of nerve, with politicians dithering like Macmillan or retreating into nostalgia like Gaitskell. The Wilson governments of 1964-70 made important advances in education, housing and social security, as well as pushing through many liberal legal reforms, but this was arguably just the overdue work that should have commenced in 1945. Where the state failed was in taking the lead to retool industry or advance beyond the industrial relations of the 1950s. This would be played out through the 1970s in strikes, the persistence of a class antagonism and snobbery that reeked of the prewar era (see 'Til Death Us Do Part or The Good Life for examples), and strife over the European Common Market. In all, the slow death of Labourism.

In many ways the 1980s marked the apogee of state activism. This was seen in the induced recession that decimated manufacturing, the privatisation and asset-stripping of nationalised industries, and the centralisation of power. The systematic selling-off of council housing was arguably the most consequential social policy of the century. What this showed was that the state had enormous leverage, which in turn highlighted the timidity of those earlier periods. You could extend this argument to the creation of the EU Single Market and even the Poll Tax, which proved a major miscalculation but could not be faulted in terms of ambition. Though the shadow of Margaret Thatcher looms large over contemporary politics, one important difference is the reluctance to lever the state for such radical economic and social change. The Blair governments were busy and intrusive, but many of their achievements were shallow, with the result that few of their mighty works survived even five years of the coalition government. Conservative administrations from Cameron onwards have been marked by venality, indolence and incompetence.

Against this backdrop, I return to the question I rhetorically asked of Andrew Rawnsley above: what will the state look like under Starmer? His answer is: "At heart, Sir Keir believes in a large and activist government, with the levels of taxation implied by that, though he prefers to talk about an “agile state” to make it sound more attractive to the wary." This isn't much help. The first part sounds like Blair while the second, borrowing an anodyne term from neoliberal business-speak, could equally apply to Wilson. But there is clearly not going to be a return to 1960s levels of taxation, so the scale of social investments seen in that era are unlikely to be repeated, while the few commitments made to date have either been carefully hypothecated (e.g. using increased tax receipts from a "reformed" non-dom status to fund more doctors and nurses) or are so ambiguous as to be impossible to price (Great British Energy). There's also little likelihood of someone like Roy Jenkins pushing the envelope of legal reform (say around trans rights) beyond Sir Keir Starmer KC's comfort zone.

The UK state has tried to be genuinely activist on three occasions. It gave up after 1911 because the Liberal party (and Asquith in particular) didn't have the stomach for it. It was supremely activist in the early-40s under the exigencies of war, though it was no coincidence this was led by a former Liberal minister of an activist bent in Churchill. It was activist again in the 1980s, under the influence of monetarism and neoliberalism, leading to the paradox of an anti-state government that significantly expanded the state's power. The Attlee governments of 1945-51 were less radical than supposed, with much of their effort geared to the continuation of the warfare state as much as the extension of the welfare state, and their economic policy focused on repair and preservation rather than reinvention. The Wilson governments of 1964-70 were an attempt to address the social policy omissions of the Attlee years and the subsequent stagnation under the Conservatives, but without the nerve to address economic power beyond the rhetoric of modernity and In Place of Strife. The result was the 1970s combination of improved living standards and industrial conflict. 

In this context, there is little reason to believe a Labour government under Starmer will be particularly activist, and certainly no reason to believe it will seek a radical departure comparable to the early-1940s or 1980s. It clearly won't even live up to the qualified activism of the Attlee or Wilson governments. Though there is similarity in the rhetoric - the wasted years of Tory rule - there is also much talk of continuity: fiscal responsibility, leveraging the private sector, and not frightening voters (the social democractic manifesto of the Corbyn years now having been anathematised). Above all there is waffle, notably in the insistence that devolution can be a silver bullet: "We will succeed where successive governments have failed, in various ways, to varying degrees for a century, and we will do so for one simple reason – ending a century of centralisation and unleashing the power of all people in all parts of Britain". This is not only unconvincing from a party that is notably authoritarian and centralised, it suggests a refusal to acknowledge that the failure of successive governments has been down to a failure of nerve, not an excess of state power. Like the Liberal Party before it, Labour appears ready to give up before it has started.