Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics. Philip Collins

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      The flow of assets towards my mother’s generation has largely been an effect of size. The doubling in education spending between 1953 and 1973 occurred because of the boom in babies that needed schooling. Those babies have now grown up and, in the strange way that the end of life mimics the start, need looking after again. The growth in life expectancy, from fifty-one for men and fifty-five for women born in 1910 to seventy-nine for men and eighty-three for women today, means that more of the large generation have survived into old age and expensive infirmity. This is why NHS spending keeps increasing. This is why pensions now account for a quarter of all public spending. This is the baby boom and bust.

      My mother has gone now, but plenty of her generation are still going strong and, quite understandably, feel justified in drawing their entitlements. After a lifetime of paying in, retirement is their moment for a pay-out. However, because they are such a large generation they are taking out more than they ever put in. The generation born between 1956 and 1961 will take from the welfare state 118 per cent of their contribution. To be a pensioner was once a proxy for being poor and it is a cause for celebration that this is no longer true. The trouble is that we are struggling to pay the bill. The problem is exacerbated by the machinery of politics. Older people vote in greater numbers than younger people and, for that reason, the value of benefits to pensioners has tripled since 1979. Pensioners were deliberately protected, in a way that no other group was, from the consequences of austerity after the financial crash. Politics has become an auction house in which most of the lots appeal to the elderly.

      The consequence, unless we settle the question of generational justice, will be a spending crisis of the first order. On current trends, the share of public funds taken by the Departments of Health and Work and Pensions will create an apocalypse for the Department for Communities and Local Government. They will erect the closed sign on the door of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Transport will run slow and Business will not carry on as usual. Britain is facing conflicts that will bear out Pierre Mendès-France’s timeless maxim that to govern is to choose. The loving family would always choose to spend the marginal pound on the child in the nursery rather than the grandfather at home. The state, acting in loco parentis, chooses to do the opposite. The easiest solution would be for the young to change the political incentives by voting as a phalanx, but that requires a recovery in the esteem of politics which is the seventh question that we shall need to consider.

      7 How Do We Restore Faith in Politics?

      Politics, as Peel put it, is supposed to supply a sense of popular power and the material outline of a better life. If it has fallen in esteem that is in large part because it has ceased to be reliable in achieving either. Perhaps it is also inevitable, as democracies go through what David Runciman has characterised, in How Democracies End, as a ‘mid-life crisis’, that cynicism becomes habitual. Politicians routinely lie, it is said. Voting changes nothing; they are all in it for themselves. Episodes such as the expenses scandal, or instances of sexual harassment, do as much damage as concrete examples, which are frequent enough, of genuine incompetence.

      This is dangerous territory, for the only alternative to established politics is proving to be attractive to many electorates. The trick of the populist is to channel the prejudices, fears and intimations of a section of society. Cast as the tribune of the people, the populist has a ready-made scapegoat in the political class. This is why lazy criticism of the political process is a gift to the enemies of democracy. If the trading and negotiation of politics is not defended then the door is left ajar for unscrupulous politicians. The question has to be not how we replace broken politics with something else but how we recognisably improve it.

      There is the rub and there is the nub of the question, because underneath the clichés of cynicism lurks a critique of some merit. The question about the esteem of politics is in fact a question about its efficacy. Britain has stumbled on with an electoral system that no longer produces the executive authority it promises, with moribund political parties financed by interest groups or wealthy individuals, with an upper house of Parliament that is, remarkably for a democracy, not elected and with a civil service that has resisted reform for too long. It is, understandably, difficult to raise much popular interest in and enthusiasm for changes to the constitutional arrangements yet politics, on which we rely to prevent anything worse from rearing its head, cannot be improved without change. And that change, in turn, will not be possible unless we redraw the map of political power in Britain, which is the subject of the eighth urgent question.

      8 Where Should Power Lie?

      It will take a long time for Britain to recover from its latest argument about the location of sovereign power. The animus of the European referendum and its echo during the departure negotiations will reverberate for at least a generation. Whether or not the economic damage is severe and lasting, the quality of public debate was impaired by a raucous, uncivil and, at times, stupid standard of argument. The deceptively simple injunction to ‘take back control’ is a demand for a form of sovereignty that no longer exists. The question Britain actually faces is not, as it was posed in the referendum debate, independence or slavery. It is instead, given how much power exists in multinational enterprises and how much has been traded in treaties, how we best pool our sovereignty so that we maintain maximum power for the best effect.

      The referendum campaign may have provided a poor answer but it posed a very good question. The impulse for popular control is a noble one and if political life has not been satisfying it, then that needs to be corrected. The implication of the demand for more control is that power has trickled from the hands of the people. There is, indeed, no more centralised developed democracy than Britain. There is no nation in which its provincial towns and cities live deeper in the penumbra of such a shadow cast by its capital. Britain is an unbalanced economy and a concentrated state.

      A polity with all its power at the centre no longer works. In 1872 Benjamin Disraeli gave a now celebrated speech in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in which he set out the public health problems to which government would, and did, supply the answer. When the task is to prevent the spread of contagious disease by the construction of the sewers, then a singular state, with all its purchasing power and command of space, is the ideal means. The public health questions of today involve millions of elderly people treating their own symptoms every day. We have passed from the era of the condition of Britain to the era of the long-term conditions of Britain. The remote state has little relevance to problems like these, and it is little wonder that there has been a sense of lost control.

      The decline of deference and an abundance of available information have also changed the relationship of the individual to the state. In all aspects of our lives we are confronted by choices and options, deliberation and decision, but the default setting of the state is still to provide services in bulk order, like it or lump it. The British state runs on an old model of power in which a distant centre does things to people. It is a generation out of date and the consequence is that the services it offers suffer in comparison with the quality of what is available elsewhere. This matters, and not just because public services provide public goods. They also serve to enact a drama of who we are, and this is the penultimate condition of Britain question.

      9 How Do We Create an Open Society?

      During the tempestuous and uncivil strife of the referendum campaign, Britain did not sound like an open and tolerant nation. The nation is divided along many fissures and it can easily seem as though the chasm between those who have profited from globalisation and those who have been its victims is unbridgeable. This division of values is gradually supplanting economic self-interest as the primary index of electoral allegiance and politicians of the main parties, who have seen their traditional coalitions fracture along these lines, have shown no sign of knowing what to do.

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