England seems not to have undergone the epiphany that transformed Europe after the war, in the initial stages of reconstruction, when the various governments, all faced with the same task, of clothing, housing, and employing populations devastated by conflict, mobilised the bureaucracies that had previously directed wartime operations, to campaign for affluence at home.
The successful re-establishment of the state as a welfare provider, prompted the revelation that state employees — at state hospitals, state schools, post offices, banks, local councils, and train stations — had a face, and a reputation for decency and application, which went a long way towards restoring popular faith in government.
In France, according to The Economist, “public spending now accounts for a greater share of GDP than it does in Sweden.” (“Fractured France – An unprecedented election, with unprecedented risks” – Mar 4th 2017). The same issue reports that, “its vast state, which absorbs 57% of GDP, has sapped the country’s vitality.” (“France’s next revolution – The vote that could wreck the European Union” – Mar 4th 2017.)
In the same issue, The Economist refers to “France’s splendid social sector,” whilst noting that, despite its splendour:
Since the end of the trente glorieuses, the three decades of strong growth that followed the second world war, it has been debt, rather than growth, that has financed the high-speed trains, the blooming municipal flower beds and the generous provisions for child care, ill health, job loss and old age. (“Fractured France – An unprecedented election, with unprecedented risks” – Mar 4th 2017).
On the continent, in many countries, between the people who consume state services — that is, all of us — and the people who provide them, there is this bond, something akin to what the American philosopher John Rawls termed “the veil of ignorance,” the notion that, in a fair society, one would be happy to trade places with one’s interlocutor, without caveat.
Both of you are party to the same virtuous cycle, like two parties to a trade that might cement a relationship with a good client, if you were a stockbroker. You all profit from the exchange. The state is an honest broker. This enhances accountability and transparency in governance. This is progressive socialism, in which the state is held accountable for deliverables, by its consumers, who are taxpayers.
In England, the reverse is true: the welfare state has entrenched a division that can only harken back to the class system, between people consuming state services, and people providing them, as if state employees were servants in a grand house, that incongruously, never has sufficient funds available, to provide hot meals, patch the roof, or clean the grounds. This relationship is almost universally adversarial.
The problem is that the state has systematically starved its own subsidiary arms of funding, to the extent that those employed by them, are compelled to play the role of gatekeepers, whose mission is to limit, rather than dispense, care to which people paying taxes are doubtless entitled.
To this terminal dynamic, add the wrinkle that local councils are still highly politicised venues, like lab experiments in a school of community mobilisation that has failed to evolve since the 1970s, that levy a hefty tax of their own, and you have a truly surreal experience trying to navigate the terrain. To quote my favourite Spectator columnist, Melissa Kite, whose travails resemble my own:
“My flat was a few hundred yards from the boundary between Lambeth and Wandsworth [where I lived from 2012-2015], so I have spent the past 16 years within touching distance of a flagship Tory council while being dictated to by the loony left and their amusing ideas of how to best spend my money, for example on toilets for heroin users.
…[and] the wheelie bins… They had assigned me four by the time I exchanged contracts on the cottage. Two black, two green. And endless rolls of plastic sacks which they insisted the recycling was put into before it was placed in the green bins. Plastic wrapped in plastic placed in plastic. That was the lefties’ preferred way of saving the planet.
The separate garden sack was the stuff of Orwell’s wildest dreams. I didn’t dare use it after they labelled it with a red ‘Contamination!’ sticker, making it look as if I had been disposing of nuclear waste. In fact, when I peered inside, there was a tiny piece of cellophane, no more than an inch square, from the cigarette packet of a passerby, which had blown into the sack and lay on top of my neatly chopped branches and leaves.” (Real life, 22 April, 2017)
Compounding the general state of dismay and disillusionment, is the fact that state services are far superior in affluent areas. This is to invoke that dread phenomenon that one cannot ignore in England, the Post Code Lottery. If you happen to live in the catchment zone for a good GP or a good state primary school, you may expect a decent – even an excellent – standard of service. If you don’t, you are quite literally taking your life in your hands.
This disparity in quality of life, based purely on income, and amplified by the very institutions that are supposed to provide access to standard care, regardless of rank, social standing, or relative affluence, has had a corrosive effect on faith in government as such.
The irony of the situation is that England was the first country to elect a socialist government after the war; the Labour party under Clement Attlee was far to the left of any viable opposition party in Europe, save the Communist parties of the time.
The other European countries were much slower to embrace socialism as a political creed, which gave them the chance to focus immediately on postwar reconstruction as a government mandate, beyond the scope of politics.
Many of the programs that an American would call socialist, on the continent, were simply sold to voters as coping tactics, to get them over the worst years of postwar austerity. They still occupy a principled dimension of national identity, in which people take pride, much as Americans take pride in our Army.
In England, the same programs that were established on the continent, were implemented as part of a top-down revolution in politics, and were proof of a triumphalist ideological campaign to shift this country off its ancient tracks, out of liberal markets, into wholesale nationalisation.
These programs thus became emblematic of the new power of the state; this was not distinct from the new power of left-wing ideologues. It was the birth of the nanny state, still so sorely resented, not merely because of its tendency to meddle and hector and hamstring; but more acutely, because its intrusive attempts to micromanage people’s lives continue to fall far short of its ability to actually improve them.
The critical thing to understand, if you are not from England, is that you are stepping into an ongoing and intractable ideological conflict, as soon as you start making National Insurance contributions. It’s like marrying into a family still viciously disputing the last will and testament of a deceased relation, who left in trust the family fortune, from which all are trying to live, each beyond his means, and his entitlement. Expats and in-laws can hardly fail to come under suspicion as late arrivals to this fraught and frantic process of divvying up shares.
It is worth quoting the only response that Europe has offered to the Brexit vote, as if it were loathe to step into a violent domestic dispute. Jean Claude Juncker observed that the EU is simply not responsible for any of the economic sectors that have left British people so disgusted with their government, they were driven to take a gamble with Brexit: health care, education, infrastructure, and housing.
The article is accessible here: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/mar/24/uk-cant-blame-eu-for-problems-that-led-to-brexit-says-juncker, as is another, titled, “Decent housing a necessity for a healthy society,” which ran on 2 April 2017 in The Guardian, at: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/02/decent-housing-a-necessity-for-a-healthy-society.
This article aggregates a number of letters in response to an editorial in The Guardian. One writer observes, “For decades the U.K. has suffered from not applying lessons from European cities (which Sir Peter Hall set out in Good Cities, Better Lives). Before we leave the European Union, all political parties should understand why German cities and others have outperformed ours and created much fairer societies.”
The problem with England’s culture is that, much as Marx predicted, it reflects England’s economy. And England’s economy does not operate the same way that economies operate on the continent. As in every vicious cycle, the cause and effect of our troubles switch places in alternating mode. Work is not adequately compensated, so it is inadequately performed.
I remember an advertisement I saw in a bus one day for “The National Living Wage,” a bold initiative which aimed to “put 50p more an hour in your pocket.” I don’t know if this is pathetic, or funny. 50p more an hour represents £4 in an 8-hour day, or £20 a week. It is this kind of insulting paltry micromanagement that has hobbled every government-sponsored attempt to wrest some loaves or fishes from this economy.
Wages are inadequate; investment is inadequate; productivity is predictably low; infrastructure is crumbling; all the components of the machine that generates wealth have gotten stuck, like jammed typewriter keys. See, “Prison staff dismiss ‘demoralising’ pay rise,” by Nicola Slawson, 1 April 2017, The Guardian.
None of this was inflicted by Europe, but these trends are all set to calcify with Brexit, as the following headlines attest: “FTSE 100 suffers worst day since Brexit vote after May calls election,” by Patrick Collinson, 18 April 2017, The Guardian; “Eurozone factory growth hits six-year high but U.K. and America slow – as it happened,” by Graeme Wearden, 3 April 2017, The Guardian; “U.K. manufacturers tell May no EU deal is ‘simply unacceptable’,” by Angela Monaghan, 27 March 2017, The Guardian; “How has the Brexit vote affected the U.K. economy? March verdict,” by Katie Allen and Paul Scruton, for March 2017, The Guardian.
The sadness of this saga was brought home to me when I saw photos of a protest staged by passengers of Southern Rail, a notoriously incompetent commuter train line, at which one woman was holding up a sign that read: “I quit my job because I can’t get home to put my son to bed.” As the mother of a small boy, that image stayed with me. I chose not to work after my son was born, and I can’t imagine the anguish of parents who miss bath times and dinners in order to crowd onto trains that are running an average of two hours late, every day, because they have to work to pay their bills.
The difference between the public and the private sectors here is not the issue: Southern, for a case in point, was privatised in the hope that the prospect of profits would incentivise investment needed to modernise the line. It didn’t. Absent capital investment, the conditions in which Southern employees work have degenerated, in tandem with ongoing disputes between labour and management. Both blame the other for the astonishing series of strikes and cancelled services that have made the line a byword for the kind of terminal dysfunction that afflicts third-world countries where infrastructure has collapsed.
Commuters have agitated for re-nationalisation. But the same government that sold off the line, rather than invest in its upkeep, is unlikely to do so now. Southern employees and customers are trapped in a vicious cycle that has become overtly confrontational, and yet both are victims of a much bigger failure on the company’s part, to assume any accountability. If this were a line operating in the U.S., passengers would have launched a class-action lawsuit, and would have doubtless won. The problem is, now, much like life in a polluted ecosystem, the poison is in the water. The poison is rage, pure and simple. People are fed up.
Work, it seems, has been declared a dead-end category: a dreary means to a dodgy end, not to be taken seriously, lest one be taken in. We pretend to work, they pretend to pay us. The absence of a work ethic is manifest across the range of state-run services, which have degenerated so badly, the International Red Cross issued a safety warning about NHS hospitals.
Indulging in this type of cynicism is, to quote Gianni Versace, “Like drinking poison, and waiting for someone else to die.” This is about the state of things, on the NHS.
Now, it seems, a servant is a master in disguise: some weird power struggle has come to characterise every transactional micro-aggression, every workplace encounter, and every case of crossed wires, in which people are attempting to establish dominance, in which work has become a venue for petty score-keeping, for the deeply defensive to devote their energy to arguing about who did what, instead of doing anything at all. For a point of contrast, one need only consult the inaugural episode of Grand Tour, filmed in Stuttgart.
No less an authority than John Maynard Keynes observed:
“‘If by some sad geographical slip the American Air Force (it is too late now to hope for much from the enemy) were to destroy every factory on the northeast coast and in Lancashire (at an hour when the directors were sitting there and no one else) we should have nothing to fear. How else are we to regain the exuberant inexperience which is necessary, it seems, for success, I cannot surmise.'” (Judt, Postwar, p. 358).
Social justice is largely a by-product of a sound economy. Absent GDP growth, it is wishful thinking that animates an increasingly irrelevant form of politics, as Jeremy Corbyn has demonstrated.
No amount of posturing, polished rhetoric, or morally persuasive argument, can substitute for a commercial policy. No moral victory can possibly cover the ground lost to a fall in GDP. It’s like trying to win a wrestling match by plotting moves to diagram the choreography.
There’s no point asking for things the EU cannot give, out of a sense of entitlement. This prompted Chancellor Hammond to set the record straight: “We know that we can’t have our cake and eat it.”
That’s a good start, Phil. Take that advice to your average kindergarten, repeat it once a week, and in thirty years, you may have a cohort that will understand the relationship between investment and productivity, risk and reward, ends and means, earning and spending.
This is a strange paradox: while the U.S. government may be in debt, there is no arguing with the math of personal finance. There is no third category between credit and debt. Two columns yield one answer.
Whereas in the U.K., the odd and improvised overlap between the state sector and private income, has given rise to a hybrid model of household economics, in which different liabilities are covered by different categories, nearly different ideologies.
The same families who are happy to take their children to NHS doctors, might holiday in Marbella, or own second homes in France. Whereas their neighbours might be renting their home, rather than buying one slightly more distant, because its proximity to a good state school will save them thousands in tuition fees.
In other words, some people do learn to think for themselves, but it’s in the spirit of finding an angle to leverage the system for personal gain. Whereas others, without similar choices, are sleepwalking.
Schools here encourage a competitive spirit. Try practicing more of this after graduation. Too many adults here drift through life on autopilot, marking time at jobs where showing up means you’re making a contribution. This calls for a bizarre suspension of disbelief. There is a tendency to play a role, rather than to get the job done. This can degenerate into politicking, and posing, which is actively counterproductive.
Today, the U.K. has the lowest productivity of any EU core member state that did not spend years behind the Iron Curtain. This problem is well-known to British commentators, not only in economics journals, but in the popular press.
In coverage of the first budget statement made by the government after the Brexit vote, The Guardian, a notably left-wing newspaper, observed that Chancellor Hammond’s grand design “went to the heart of a debate about the U.K.’s low productivity growth, which according to official figures, has fallen well behind Germany, the U.S., France and Italy.” According to Chancellor Hammond himself:
‘The productivity gap is well known, but shocking nonetheless,’ Hammond said on Wednesday. ‘It takes a German worker four days to produce what we make in five, which means, in turn, that too many British workers work longer hours for lower pay than their counterparts.’
The article in which the comment appears is accessible at: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2016/nov/24/why-is-uks-productivity-still-behind-that-of-other-major-economies.
A stronger economy, powered by people who can think for themselves, will give you more leverage with Europe. If you want your independence, you will have to work out what this means in terms of economic survival. Currently, you trade more with Holland – one EU state out of twenty-eight, including the U.K. – than you do with all of China.
Crashing out of the EU without a deal will not restore any of your “control.” You cannot presume to control the global economy. No one does. This is why nationalist populism of the le Pen / Farage variety is so toxic: it is a delusion. Like Canute, they cannot command the tide. Without a deal, you will simply drift, until you run aground.