Rethinking Labour's statecraft.
| Author | Denham, John |
Failure without crisis
Territorial inequality now dominates UK politics. (1) Regional and national imbalances within the UK and a concentration of economic power outside its borders have fuelled place-based expressions of grievance. As the pandemic demonstrated, the central union state lacks the capacity to govern a dispersed and imbalanced polity effectively. It is ill-equipped to meet the challenges the UK faces, including the transition to net zero, building an economy in the aftermath of Brexit that 'levels up' places lacking economic and political power, providing effective public services, and the cost of living crisis. Each of these challenges requires the effective formulation and delivery of policy at nation and locality level with coordination and coherence UK-wide. Governance and politics in the UK are beset by a multi-layered dysfunctionality, essentially concerning the central state's inability to deal with the diverse and unequal economic, social, and cultural geography of the UK. (2)
The situation has often been described as a crisis. But it is not yet a crisis that has precipitated a moment of decision or response. It is all too possible that our current unhappy state of affairs may stumble on for years, at the expense of the people, communities and nations of the United Kingdom.
Our argument is that dysfunctionality occurs because UK political leaders and those who dominate the union state in Westminster fail to recognise the plural character of political power and authority in the UK. Our current form of government has its roots in the central unitary British state forged after the Second World War. As empire collapsed and the state focused on the productivity and welfare of domestic society, government briefly seemed to represent a homogenous and unified 'British' people bound together by national collective institutions, whether trade unions, businesses or cultural and religious organisations. Prior to the 1930s Britain's complex state was a plural polity in which power and authority were dispersed through multiple institutions within the British Isles and across the territories of empire. It was not, as many imagine today, a centralised unitary state. (3)
The semblance of a unitary British state was gradually fractured as national identities assumed new importance in Scotland, Wales and within Northern Ireland, and as the central state struggled to deliver economic growth across the UK. Some on the left argued that the state needed to be rebuilt to reflect the plurality of British society, but during the 1980s, right-of-centre governments used the powers of the state to meet economic and social purposes prioritised by elites: financialisation, privatisation and the global opening of the economy. While abandoning the effort to shape economic life in the national interest or to address conditions in different parts of the country, they used the state to assert a conservative vision of cultural uniformity and order.
Between 1997 and 2010, Labour certainly used the proceeds of growth to invest in public services, tackle inequality and attempt to address uneven economic growth and tell a more liberal national story. However, it left key elements of the economic model and the union state unchanged. The introduction of devolution was driven more by attempts to assuage nationalism and to underpin the Peace Process in Northern Ireland than to refashion the British state. A further decade of governments of the right has actively facilitated the development of a 'rentier economy' in which economic market activity is focused on the extraction of wealth, often taxpayer-provided, through the organisation of public services and utilities, land and property. Assets have often flowed to overseas financial interests, domestic inequalities have widened, and place-based forms of identity and grievance have intensified. The recent Conservative discussion of 'levelling up' is a recognition of the growth of geographical inequality and grievance, but it has not fundamentally questioned the modes of political and economic power responsible for these phenomena.
The centralised union state we have today is ill-equipped to undertake the radical challenges that are required to create an economy that can meet the needs of people in every part of the United Kingdom. The problem is much more fundamental than the design or delivery of central UK government policy. Effective government requires the empowerment and coordination of centres of power and authority that are dispersed throughout the country, and which have their own local forms of legitimacy and accountability. The consequences of this failure to recognise the plural character of the UK polity are multiple and serious. Devolved national governments have a fractious relationship with the centre. Local government lacks the power and capacity to shape places and create local inclusive growth.
The incomplete process of devolution initiated by Labour has been characterised as 'devolve and forget', in which coordination and collaboration between the UK government and the devolved nations has been patchy and inconsistent. The devolved nations have no clear rights to be consulted on, let alone shape, union policy. These inherent weaknesses in the central union state have been cruelly exacerbated by the formation of a UK Conservative government that rests entirely on its English majority. The consequence is that any meaningful 'British politics' in which elections across Britain are contested on largely the same issues, and won by the same two major parties, is in possibly terminal decline. The political landscape of the UK's nations (and of different regions within England) is demonstrating deep electoral pluralism. (4)
Boris Johnson and Liz Truss's Anglo-centric British nationalism prioritises a Conservative English view of the union's interest over the interests of Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. (5) (There is no reason to suspect a shift under Rishi Sunak.) The implementation of Brexit has revealed an administrative state that is all too willing to ignore the interests of the devolved nations while rejecting any recognition that England itself should be regarded as a nation, with its own democratic accountability of government.
In trying to assert a strong, unitary union state, the Conservative government has undermined alternative centres of national authority. The lack of willingness to work with the devolved nations is remarkable, and the government has increasingly signalled its intention to intervene in the devolved nations, rejecting the national autonomy established by devolution. As the level of support for independence in Scotland and Wales shows, this approach is undermining consent for the union itself. The government's assertive unionism mobilises the rhetoric of parliamentary sovereignty to empower an unchecked Anglo-British executive. (6)
For England, incomplete devolution and the absence of a holistic UK-wide perspective has resulted in UK departments having responsibility for...
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