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.