Should We Repair Our Sewers?

It's not obvious that we should repair our sewers and leaking water pipes, and not because of any scepticism over the impact of twenty years of neglect or disagreement over who should "pay" for the work. What is required for investment in the public fabric is not money but real resources: labour and materials. As Keynes put it, "Anything we can actually do, we can afford". If those resources are not available, the money buys nothing. This means that the key question for public investment is not "How will we pay for it?" but where will those resources come from? In practice (for tasks of significant scale) this means what else will we forgo. That foregoing might be limited to the public sector (e.g. we upgrade the sewers instead of building new hospitals), or it might be concentrated in the private sector (e.g. a moratorium on private housebuilding), so we effectively transfer resources and thereby grow the public sector's share of GDP. Framing the debate as one of money ("There is no magic money tree" etc), and implying that money is somehow a real thing that is naturally limited (reification), is a way of avoiding this choice and thus simply a way of advocating the status quo.

Feudalism recognised the categorical difference between resources allocated to specific tasks (e.g. the corvée) and resources that could be exchanged (whether via money or barter is immaterial). In a pre-market society where money was in short supply, because it wasn't generally needed as a means of exchange and specie was naturally limited, "public works" - i.e. infrastructure of general utility, such as roads or bridges - could only be effected through such an allocation of real resources. This was possible because the seasonality of agriculture meant that there were predictable periods of labour time available for non-subsistence activities. Industrialisation, or more precisely proletarianisation, did away with the corvée and other feudal remnants through the move to wage labour. This also meant that resources for public works were now part of the market system, which in turn meant competition with private interests for labour and materials. The important point here is that the expansion of the market has always been in tension with public works. The result was that industrialisation and its consequent social ills produced not the Nightwatchman State but an expansion of government with a central role in appropriating and allocating real resources.

This not only addressed real needs but it opened up a new site for exploitation in the interface between government and private contractors and would create a new class of public assets ripe for rent-seeking. There were three notable trends in public administration over the course of the twentieth century in response to this. The first was the national or regional consolidation of many public services, such as health and utlities. The second was the gradual conversion of government from a primary employer of real resources to a contracting party of private suppliers through privatisation and outsourcing, which meant both the creation of de facto monopolies in the private sector (e.g. water and rail) and increasingly the limitation of local government graft to property development, i.e. exploiting the public asset of planning approval. The third trend was the move to more regressive taxation as working class incomes grew, which was consolidated in the 1980s both nationally (the increase in VAT and cuts in top-tier income tax) and locally (the introduction first of a poll tax and subsequently a household tax that hasn't kept pace with the inflation in high-end property values).

These three trends have meant that people today feel increasingly alienated from public services and regard local government as little more than a property developer that is unresponsive to local needs and vulnerable to graft. The first development has led to both falling levels of satisfaction and increasing antagonism towards the status quo, hence the renewed popularity of nationalisation, while the latter has led to growing disillusion with local authorities and the relative flourishing of independents and maverick parties, many focused on limiting housing development. While any individual "NIMBY" might be selfish and short-sighted, NIMBYism clearly reflects the tension that now exists between local democracy and local government. Meanwhile, the water companies have become national villains not simply because they have polluted our rivers and beaches with sewage but because they have come to symbolise the regressive legacy of Thatcherism in which the poor face disproportionately higher bills while the priority of the business is to deliver dividends to shareholders.

Repairing our water pipes and sewers is attractive for a number of reasons but three are worth focusing on in the context of the above. First, it would be a national programme, which would obviously open up the question of full nationalisation. Second, it would be democratic. All households could expect to benefit from lower water and sewerage bills and most people would consider the improved utility of clean beaches and rivers to be of value. Third, it would be a less contentious use of real resources than housebuilding, and more specifically of private housebuilding in suburban and exurban areas. However, unless there is a rebalancing between the public and private sectors, it would also mean denying real resources to other public works, such as public housebuilding in urban areas. Constructing inner-city council flats would be more popular than building on the green belt and is the only way in which we'll see any movement towards addressing under-supply, which is an issue of location and tenure more than capacity, and (eventually) a reduction in house price and rent rises, which Keir Starmer is now on record (if that means anything) as saying he wants to see.

It's worth noting that the UK public fabric in other respects is quite healthy. Contrary to the "private affluence and public squalor" trope of old, we have built a lot of new public works over the last forty years, from hospitals to the Elizabeth Line. But while governments since Thatcher can take credit for this, the legacy they have burdened society with is the regressive Thatcherite model of financing in forms such as PFI and privatisation, while some of the greatest successes have come when that model has failed so badly that renationalisation (or takeover by regional authorities) has proved unavoidable. The problems of the NHS, social care and poverty aren't due to a lack of buildings or infrastructure but to low wages restricting spending power and leaving vacancies unfilled. These really are areas where a magic money tree (i.e. money creation in the manner of QE but directed to social rather than financial assets) would work wonders. That said, there are obvious opportunities beyond sewers and council flats for public infrastructure investment, notably improvements to rail transport in the North of England and an accelerated transition to renewable energy. In sum, there's a lot that could be done but we need to recognise that this would entail a change in the relationship of public and private activity.

In other words, we need a comprehensive programme of investment in public works that would significantly expand the public sector. This can be done without shrinking the private sector by a comparable amount, but only if we expand the key resource of labour, which doesn't mean getting disability benefits claimants to harvest potatoes but encouraging migrant labour. Otherwise, we must transfer resources from the private to the public sector, which is not only anathema to anti-state Tories but also conflicts with Labour's somewhat incoherent commitment to growth through business expansion and raised productivity. Were we to increase migration, the demand for non-labour resources would also increase, however that ought to be an opportunity for import substitution in many areas. That in turn highlights how such a programme of public works would necessitate a formal industrial policy by which the state could intervene to direct capacity planning and even private investment. Is this politically feasible? The short answer is no. 

Not only has Labour made clear that it will be "fiscally responsible" (and if you think they'll change their tune in government you obviously don't understand who they are), but it has already indicated that its priority is to make Thatcherite taxation less obviously regressive, but not to otherwise change the model. Nationalisation has been ruled out while the suggestion that shareholders who have reaped decades of dividends should be expropriated without compensation is simply not up for discussion (at best you'll hear demands for "equity injections"). Labour and the Liberal Democrats have both talked of making the water companies foot the bill for repairs rather than the taxpayer, despite taxpayer funding being more progressive than additions to water bills. If recent history is any guide, the most likely outcome is an increase in charges to consumers obscured by new, more stringent targets for repairs by the water companies and larger fines for spillages (though in practice with Ofwat being ever more reluctant to impose them).

This is not to say that a big plan won't be mooted, but that without a firm ideological underpinning (let's call it "socialism") a public works programme and industrial policy are both likely to be captured by capitalist interests, much as the previous attempts to repair the UK's fabric during the New Labour years were captured by the financial sector and business consultancies, and much as the Labour Party institutionally has been recaptured by business since 2019. The suggestion that the Labour leadership's priority is to revive social democracy, rather than restore the authority of the state and the credibility of the establishment, is laughable. The ultimate choice for Labour is not what gets done (Bevan's "The language of priorities is the religion of socialism" is not a statement that bears much scrutiny) but who gets to do it: the public sector or the private. So long as Labour prefer the latter, which is clear in everything from their burbling about "choice" in the NHS to the lack of substance in the proposed Great British Energy company, then the outcome will continue to fall short of popular demands. 

The sewage crisis is simply an appetiser (if you'll excuse the metaphor) for the main course of the housing crisis. The government-mandated moratorium on council housebuilding from the early-80s onwards represented the largest privatisation of the last half-century. It is often forgotten that privatisation means shifting provision from the public to the private sector, and not just the sale of public assets such as state-owned businesses or individual council houses. Insofar as the Conservative Party has ever managed to shrink the state, it is in this movement of housebuilding activity from a mix of public and private (almost 50/50 in the late-60s and early-70s) to exclusively private. Fixing the housing crisis requires a reversal of this, moving real resources from the inefficient building of car-oriented starter homes in the exurbs to building energy-efficient flats for social renting in cities. But it won't happen. There will be no moratorium on private building and what limited social housing is funded by the state will be parasitised by private developers. Stopping sewage leaks and spreading the cost of doing so over a decade of water bills is the limit of our ambition.

National Conservatism

It's now becoming clear that the term "Cultural Marxism" is being gradually normalised on the political right, despite its history as a conspiracy theory and its well-known antisemitic connotations. According to the Guardian's coverage of the National Conservatism conference in London this week, the term is now "controversial", which contrasts with its more robust interpretation a few years ago. Presumably it will shortly be described as "contentious" and finally as evidence of a legitimate concern. While the paper's Peter Walker rowed back on that earlier choice of word later in the week with an analysis expressing "concern", he also included the suggestion that speakers might be using the term "naively". In other words, the right are being extended the sort of benefit of the doubt that was conspicuously absent in the coverage of the left during the Corbyn years when entirely legitimate criticism of Isreal was routinely branded as antisemitic. One other notable difference is that the media considered the possibility of the left winning the Labour leadership to be simply impossible until it happened while they appear almost resigned to the far-right taking over the Conservative Party.

It was notable that in Walker's report the term "globalists" was described as "a populist repurposing of leftwing criticism about economic globalisation and the increased power of corporations". The hints of horseshoe theory in that framing ignore that the term is common among historians of neoliberalism, and not just "leftwing" ones. Obviously globalists, in the sense of proponents of economic globalisation, is not the same as globalists as a proxy for "rootless cosmpolitans". But in framing it as the language of the extremes, liberals are able to dismiss the term altogether, much as many of them have taken to dismissing the historical reality of neoliberalism itself. Likewise, the readiness of commentators at the Jewish Chronicle to excuse the Tories' increasing use of the term Cultural Marxism with what amounts to an "It's complicated" defence is notable for the emphasis it places on the possibility of a non-antisemitic use, going so far as to suggest there's a legitimate concern by reviving the hoary old trope of Herbert Marcuse warping the minds of American youth in the 1960s.

This indulgence of the far-right is partly down to the way that antisemitism has been increasingly cast as primarily a problem on the left. This is not just a result of Corbyn derangement syndrome, and the media campaign it produced in the UK with the Jewish Chronicle a notable contributor, but of the longer running evolution of the antagonism between Israeli ethno-nationalism and progressive solidarity with Palestinians. This has seen the chief threat to Jews in the West reframed as the largely powerless political left at the same time as the actual existential threat to Israel has declined in the face of a nationalist cohabitation in the Middle East, following the Camp David Accords in 1978. With the delicate development of a three-way modus vivendi between Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran now underway, we can expect the focus on the leftist bogey to increase, which in turn means greater leeway for the political right in the West to exploit antisemitic tropes so long as they steer clear of overt Jew-hatred, or at least make it plausibly deniable.

Ironically, this growing tolerance (if not full acceptance) of the term Cultural Marxism reflects the way that its antisemitic animus is being pushed into the background in favour of a more generalised conspiracy theory that encompasses other minorities and their activism, from Black Lives Matter to trans rights. This was fully on display at the National Conservatism conference which was little more than a series of rants about people that the right hate, such as immigrants, graduates and women who decline to be brood mares. But as is always the case when the reactionary id is given free rein, that antisemitic element continues to lurk in the shadows. It will remain as the occult meta-narrative behind the interlinked conspiracy theories. For example, the claim that the "Great Replacement" of European Christians by Muslims is being organised behind the scenes by Jews like George Soros. It's a basic tenet of reactionary thought that if you dig deep enough into any topic considered malign or corrosive of society you will eventually find the Jews at work.

While the liberal wing of the Conservative Party has sat glumly by and worried about the direction of travel, many in the political centre have greeted the conference with ridicule, as if this development could be satirically dismissed as Fascist cosplay or laughed off as the raving of eccentric loons. But it's actually evidence that right-of-centre opinion-formers, including MPs such as Miriam Cates and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and the sort of people who get columns in The Times, like Katherine Birbalsingh, have bought into a paranoid worldview in which the nation is under threat from nefarious forces. The appearance of Michael Gove as the responsible adult, suggesting that the Tories need to turn down the dial on the "culture war", is significant not because it suggests the party may be more resilient but because it suggests that the door was long ago flung open to instrumental paranoia. Given his own history of indulging Islamophobic conspiracy claims, such as in the Trojan Horse affair, this should be obvious.

Some in the political centre have decided that the shift to the right spells electoral doom for the Tories. But this is to ignore that the direction of the party is usually a reliable guide as to where Labour will drift next, not simply in the tactical sense of opportunistically seizing the ground vacated but in the more instinctual sense of being unable to imagine a politics that isn't defined in conservative terms. The misjudgement of allowing Corbyn to contest the leadership in 2015 arose from the belief that giving the left's ideas an "airing" would lead to their rejection. The purge of the left since 2019 is intended to prevent that same mistake ever being made again, which means that the only permissible direction in which the party can now ideologically develop is towards the right. That Keir Starmer has adopted the language of performative patriotism, and now even goes so far as to describe Labour as the real conservative party, is not unrelated to the national conservative turn. 

The Foreign Secretary

Simon McDonald, the former Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Head of the Diplomatic Service, to give him his full title, has made a downbeat assessment of the UK's place in the world and its geopolitical prospects in the New Statesman. Given that venue, he was happy to personalise the narrative of decline and pronounce on the calibre of Conservative politicians: "When I started [in 1981], your typical minister had served quite a long apprenticeship, coming into cabinet with a lot of miles on the clock. ... Now you can be foreign secretary within a few years of entering parliament. Boris Johnson’s first job in government was foreign secretary." And just to emphasise the point, "Liz Truss spent a massive amount of time on her image. Her social media feeds were something that she curated all the time. She was nurturing the audience that eventually voted her to the leadership of the Conservative Party." There were 15 years between Johnson first being elected an MP and his becoming Foreign Secretary, which included a stint out of Parliament as Mayor of London, while Truss held 6 ministerial roles in the 11 years she spent in Parliament before gettting the same job.

According to the interviewer, Harry Lambert, "The UK’s fading position in the world has deeper causes than its recent foreign secretaries", but while true this is to confuse cause and effect. The decline in the standing of the role, and the consequent use of it to park the troublesome or provide a launchpad for a domestic leadership bid, is a reflection of the UK's dwindling importance in foreign relations and thus the maginalisation of this once great office of state. Consider that the current Foreign Secretary is James Cleverly and his shadow David Lammy, neither of whom would be considered among the brightest and best of their generation. The point at which the importance of the role, and the calibre of incumbents, started to decline probably can't be fixed precisely but the handover from Robin Cook to Jack Straw in 2001 is a pretty good candidate. While the former would prove his credentials as an independent thinker and devastating speaker in his opposition to the Iraq War, the latter would prove himself an energetic factotum for the security state.

But in no sense can the UK's relative decline in standing be attributed to a lack of virtue on the part of successive foreign secretaries. The unimpressive roster between Straw and Cleverly - Margart Beckett, David Miliband, William Hague, Philip Hammond, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Hunt, Dominc Raab and Liz Truss -  is certainly a testament to the paucity of talent in the senior reaches of the two main parties, but it also reflects the way the role has come to be seen as a stepping stone, either on the way out of frontline politics or towards a bid for Number 10. And yet virtue remains the dominant motif in political debate, even if it is employed in a wholly partisan fashion, hence the continuing free-pass afforded Keir Starmer for his duplicity in outlets such as the Observer and New Statesman and their continuing appetite for stories of Tory viciousness. When vice must be excused, as in the case of the Labour leadership, pragmatism is the order of the day: "circumstances have changed", "we can't afford it" etc. 

In foreign relations, the desire for virtue continues to lead liberal commentators to fulminate against the evils of the world even as they cannot help themselves from succumbing to a more realist, even materialist, analysis. For example, Simon Tisdall in the Observer bemoans the UK's decline - "post-imperial Britain, reduced to has-been hanger-on" - but his patronising review of the Middle East centres on anxiety over the position of the United States, not the United Kingdom, which suggests a degree of projection in his language. The rapprochement between Iran and Saudia Arabia is couched in terms of America's "sidelining", which seems questionable given its continuing, dominant military presence in the region and unquestionable geopolitical clout. More plausibly, he notes that neither Tehran nor Riyadh trust Washington these days, though you'd have to ask when either really did, at least since the 1970s. Just as with Israel, US policy towards Saudi Arabia has been to maintain the status quo, with the periodic deploring of acts that offend international opinion designed for domestic consumption, but there has been little genuine enthusiasm in either direction. It is a marriage of convenience in which trust plays little part.

Last week in the Guardian Patrick Wintour explained the cooling of relations between the US and Saudi Arabia as the result of the fracking boom: "Once US dependence on Saudi oil ended, the former’s role as provider of the latter’s security was inevitably questioned and their paths slowly diverged". This materialist explanation ignores that America was never itself dependent on Saudi oil, but that many US clients - notably Japan and South Korea - were. In other words, the US supported Saudi Arabia in order to maintain the global economic order: a more strategic self-interest than low prices at Midwest gas stations. What this highlights is that America's foreign policy has always been imperial, in the sense of maintaining a planet-wide regime, and consequently its practical application has always been instrumental rather than a series of responses to disparate moral outrages, as liberal commentators have preferred to frame the challenges to the hegemon. This instrumentality in turn explains why America frequently disappoints those commentators.

For example, major military interventions by the US since 1945 have rarely produced a clear victory, if you exclude small-scale policing operations such as Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. Korea was a score-draw, Vietnam a heavy loss and Iraq saw the match abandoned and the pitch ripped up. But the purpose of such interventions was not to effect regime change, in the sense of replacing autocracy with democracy, and nor was it, other than incidentally, to halt the march of communism (the so-called Domino Theory). The purpose was to create US client states in strategically important areas of the globe. In Vietnam, the US wasn't defending the French colonial regime but seeking to replace it with a nationalist one on the South Korean model - then a military dictatorship. In these terms, Korea was a great success, Vietnam was initially frustrating but has been veering towards the US since the 1979-91 border war with China, while Iraq has been written-off and neutralised as a buffer - one reason why Saudi Arabia and Iran are now seeking a modus vivendi in the Middle East.

Though they are loath to admit it, most liberal commentators recognise that the UK has been a US client state since the Polaris Agreement of 1963, coincidentally the year of its first formal request for accession to the EEC. For many, the great (if unspoken) tragedy of Brexit was not the decoupling of the UK from the European Union but the loss of its role as America's reliable proxy within the European Council of Ministers. One explanation for the Labour Party's reluctance to "reopen" the Brexit debate is that it remains far more of an Atlanticist party than a Europhile one, its conversion to the latter being in no small part a pragmatic response to its electoral failures in the 1980s and an opportunistic hope that Jacques Delor's "social Europe" was more than just rhetoric. Likewise the attempt by Alastair Campbell to recast the history of the People's Vote campaign as a talented young team undermined by its conservative chair and betrayed by the selfishness of the Liberal Democrats and SNP ignores that his legacy will be as the flack for a Labour Prime Minister who took the country into an illegal war simply to please the Americans.

There are two lessons to take from this. The first (and very obvious one) is that the US will not intervene in Ukraine and will not tolerate any escalation by its allies there. It has been scrupulous in avoiding direct conflict with either the USSR/Russia or China since 1945, just as they have been equally avoidant in return, and it clearly sees more geopolitical advantage in allowing Russia to bleed itself out. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is clearly offering the country as a client to both the US (via NATO) and the EU, though with limited success so far. America can afford to wait, as its strategic patience towards Vietnam shows. The second lesson is that British politics under a Starmer government is likely to shift even further into the US's orbit, even though the utility of the UK as a client will continue to diminish. Britain's role will be to act as a promoter of American interests in global forums, rather than providing logistical support (though a lone aircraft carrier will no doubt pootle about the South China Sea), which ironically means the role of Foreign Secretary will once more assume an importance in American eyes it hasn't had since the heady days of David Miliband, a man who was elevated to the job only six years after being elected as an MP.

The Capability of the State

The coronation has inevitably led to many state-of-the-nation essays and none has captured the essentially sombre and fearful mood more than Ian MacIlhagga's claim, in the relatively obscure US magazine Palladium, that "Britain is dead". This comes from a technocratic and centrist political space concerned with effective governance (the non-profit American Governance Foundation), so it is impeccably liberal in its reasoning, but being a foreign perspective means it avoids the usual self-congratulation and personalism that mars domestic liberal analyses. Boris Johnson is mentioned only in passing while Dominic Cummings is cited as an ultimately defeated reformer of the Civil Service whose intentions were laudable. In a useful corrective to the dominance of the popular narrative by historically and sociologically illiterate controversialists like Matthew Goodwin, the author is under no illusions about who composes the governing elite, even if his routine declinism is questionable.

MacIlhagga's charge is essentially a rehash of Martin Wiener's thesis, in the 1981 book English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980, that the UK's steady fall from economic and geopolitical dominance can be traced to the continued social pre-eminence of aristocratic values (anti-industrial and anti-mercantile), which first seduced the industrial bourgeosie in the nineteenth century, persuading them to buy landed estates and chase honours, and then infected the emerging middle class in the twentieth, as seen in the persistence of private schooling and a general flippancy towards governance ("a culture of amateurism"). Despite this liberal lineage, there are also odd bits of the Anderson-Nairn thesis in the essay - the "premature death" of the "modernizing class" after the Glorious Revolution - though the paradox of an anti-industrial aristocracy that embraced capitalism isn't really addressed, suggesting MacIlhagga's reading didn't extend to Ellen Meiksens Wood.

But while there is little novelty in this thumbnail history, what is of the moment is the focus on the state's capability, which McIlhagga defines negatively as "the British elite’s profound inability to prevent national decline". In a litany of failed reform, that amusingly links Cecil Rhodes to Cummings, MacIlhagga acknowledges that this wasn't a tale of steady and comprehensive decline - "The pressures of the following two world wars forced the British state to retain a high level of capacity and an ability to mobilize effectively" - but he insists that the established habits led to an under-performing economy and poor scientific productivity from the late-1940s onwards. Again, he appears not to have read the scholarship on the subject, notably David Edgerton's The Rise and Fall of the British Nation. The result is an inescapable pessimism: "In the end, every technocratic policy fix has been recuperated into managed decline. Buoyed up by soft power and high-paying financial services, even the UK’s would-be reformers drastically underestimate the human capital problem that affects every layer of society".

Where MacIlhagga most obviously shows the influence of Wiener is in his belief that the British malaise is essentially cultural, and by that he means the culture of the elite: "After a multi-generational failure by the British state to assess its hard constraints and build up a materially productive social order, its elites appear to have fundamentally lost interest in governance". This is supported by predictable criticisms of the utility of elite education, notably the Oxford PPE course, and the generalist bent of the upper reaches of the Civil Service. What it fails to do is acknowledge that there are plenty of people in the UK who have not lost interest in governance but that they are effectively denied access to power by a politico-media establishment in which the purpose of elite education is to preserve that elite, not to equip recruits with appropriate technocratic skills (James Schneider is the one interviewee to correctly note that education is a red herring). This leads MacIlhagga to frame "an absolute decline in state capacity" and "a breakdown among colleagues of the basic trust in each other to get things done" as essentially a HR problem.

The dominant motif in British politics is the idea that there are major areas of public policy that the state cannot effect. This is not simply the neoliberal idea that the provision of the means of social reproduction, such as health and housing, should be left to the market, but a more profound belief in the incapability of the UK state in the context of historic decline. In other words, declinism is a interpretative choice that excuses inaction. The idea that areas of national life, from the monarchy to "rural England", should be preserved - that we shouldn't risk change and should "prefer the tried to the untried", as Michael Oakeshott put it - is obviously central to conservative thinking, but this has to be allied with the progressive impetus of modernity - the ceaseless appetite for novelty, the relentless exploitation of resources etc. In Britain this has produced a schizophrenic political culture in which the rhetoric of modernisation and growth coexists with a profound aversion to meaningful change.

An outside observer might wonder at the tactical nous of the Tories banging on about the "small boats" of asylum-seekers in the Channel, given that this is an intractable problem for which the only outcomes are relative degrees of failure in the eyes of the rightwing press. But this would be to misunderstand the spectacle. The outsourcing of asylum processing to Rwanda isn't simply an "out of sight, out of mind" manoeuvre. It serves to highlight the limited capability of the UK state, which is the governance analog of the claim that "We're full up" and that public services lack the capacity to accommodate immigration. Likewise, the same observer might be nonplussed by the lack of ambition on display from the Labour Party when there are so many obvious areas for improvement. While Starmer and his front bench have emphasised reform, this is very much in the sense of a continuation of the work of the New Labour years. There will be no nationalisation of the water companies, private providers will be further entrenched in the NHS and the state will limit itself to producing targets and metrics.

This cross-party consensus on the limited role of government is perhaps most obvious in housing. The state's role in the provision of accommodation was the emblematic social policy of the twentieth century, from the "Homes fit for heroes" demand after World War One to the priority of housing starts in the Labour and Conservative parties' electoral offers after World War Two. The roots of the current "crisis" go back beyond the Thatcher government's introduction of Right-to-Buy to a cross-party consensus on the need to reduce the state's role in housebuilding that began to emerge in the mid-1970s as part of the neoliberal shift. It was the Callaghan government that first considered a national policy of allowing tenants to purchase their council homes but shelved it due to concerns over its "indiscriminate" nature, the management of which would have required significant state intervention. Thatcher cut the Gordian Knot by the simple expedient of adopting a free-for-all policy that privileged occupiers and forcibly removing local government from supply.

The problem today is not that we haven't built enough homes but that property is unequally distributed, both in the sense of who owns or occupies what and in the sense that too much capital is tied up in it and thus unavailable for more productive investment. The long inflation in house prices cannot be divorced from the accelerated decline of British industry in the early-80s any more than deregulation of mortgage financing in that decade. It was the combination that diverted (initially domestic) capital and savings into property. The demand for a more holistic view of housing than simply how to get more first-time buyers onto the ladder is correct, but it doesn't go far enough if you don't perceive the housing problem to be one of the allocation of real economic resources, and that in turn raises questions about the role of the state in economic management. The narrative of relative decline ignores the absolute progress of society: despite the inadequate housing conditions of the poor, we have fewer slums today, fewer people sharing beds or bedrooms, and tenants have far more rights than they did a century ago. 

As David Edgerton noted more broadly, "declinism took to explaining what never happened with explanations that didn't work." The retreat of the state in the 1970s was not the product of either intrinsic weaknesses in British elite culture or of structural forces such as imperialism's neglect of domestic industry (the left critique) or the democratic indulgence of the welfare state (the right critique). Rather it came about because of a conscious decision to limit the agency of the state, a decision that had its roots in the liberal struggles over the expansion of the state in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Samuel MacIlhagga is right to trace the paralysis of the British elite back to the little-known Coefficients dining club formed by Sidney and Beatrice Webb in 1902, but he misses the point that the attempt to unite the "progressive" Webbs with liberal and conservative politicians such as Richard Haldane and Alfred Milner highlighted the exclusive nature of the British political elite: the club. It is this exclusivity that remains the fundamental problem in British governance and everything that has occurred in politics since 2015 suggests its defence remains paramount.