To some extent, then, Shabana Mahmood was correct when in her statement to the House of Commons yesterday she described the findings of the Southport Inquiry’s Phase 1 report as “not surprising”, noting that “findings like these have been heard in inquests and inquiries before”. The report certainly makes plenty of recommendations of “training” for the various “agencies” concerned — police, NHS, Lancashire County Council and its many emanations. Quite sensibly, no doubt. But there can also be heard in Sir Adrian Fulford’s report some bolder, unexpected notes, the beginnings of a tune, perhaps, that many are starting to hum, though not yet in great numbers at the heart of today’s Establishment. 

In the opening pages, Sir Adrian describes as “a fundamental failure” the fact that the relevant public-sector agencies were guilty of “an enduring focus… on the potential risk of harm to [Axel Rudakubana] as opposed to the risks that he posed to others”. More important than that, he argues that the “merry-go-round of referrals, assessments, case-closures and ‘hand-offs’” among these agencies “has to end”.

The report’s principal concern is the risk to the public, and how that risk was wrongly assessed, communicated, and responded to. But there is another risk at play here: the risk to the individual state employee who steps up to take responsibility for someone like Rudakubana. When something as terrible as the murder of innocent children occurs, no one wants to be in that position. And one way of avoiding that — of everyone avoiding it together — is precisely the referral merry-go-round the report decries: if you wanted to design a system for avoiding responsibility in these circumstances, or at least spreading it so thinly as to make no difference, you could hardly do better than the status quo. 

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But how to change this culture? “Training” isn’t going to do it. And before condemning these people too harshly, consider their powers. Faced with someone as obviously dangerous as Rudakubana — bringing knives to school and announcing his intention to kill, then returning after exclusion to attack a random pupil with a hockey stick — you too might not want to accept responsibility if all you are able to offer is the provision of “support” at a “hub”. That is especially when it is all contingent on Rudakubana actually turning up or answering your phone calls. On one view, you cannot expect someone to take responsibility for a dangerous problem unless they have the means to properly deal with it. Which is why the police are in a different, and perhaps more blameworthy, position. 

When Rudakubana went missing from home and officers found him on a bus with a knife, he said he wanted to stab someone and admitted to thoughts of using poison. But the police pondered his “neurodiverse condition” — autism — and “didn’t think custody would be appropriate”. They, in Sir Adrian’s words, “in effect treated [his autism diagnosis] as a defense to the criminal offense of possession of an offensive weapon”. If he had been arrested, as the report concludes he should have been, “his home would have been searched, leading to police and other agencies gaining critical information about the ricin seeds he had bought, and the terrorist training manual he had downloaded.” Which, in turn, would — or at least should — have led to a substantial period of incarceration: and no murders. 

The report elaborates on the point: “Far from recognizing that [he] was responsible for his own actions, and that his ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) meant (in his individual case) that he posed an increased risk of harm to others, agencies regularly used his autism as an explanation or even excuse for his conduct, including his violence. This was both unacceptable and superficial.” As with the condemnation of the public sector “merry-go-round”, this unapologetic rejection of the maximally “#bekind” position strikes me as noteworthy. At least, it is more no-nonsense than we might expect from a 21st-century inquiry chair.

And then there’s the analysis of the parents’ shortcomings. While acknowledging the significant difficulties they faced with their younger son, Sir Adrian also variously describes them as obstructive, manipulative and harmful; they failed to “set boundaries and to enforce expectations”; if they “had done what they morally ought to have done”, the attack would not have occurred. The 2016 version of this, I suggest, would have read somewhat differently. It’s subtle, but the emphasis on parents’ moral obligations, separate from the legal framework, and on the need to “enforce” their expectations, again gives a slightly more prescriptive tone than we have become used to — even in a report of this gravity.

Most startling of all — albeit of lesser significance in the chain of causation, and not in the report’s five “fundamental problems” — is the discussion of how an implied and unfounded accusation of racism led to the watering down of Rudakubana’s EHCP (Education, Health and Care Plan). This is a legally binding document that sets out a Local Authority’s obligations, and specifies the special educational provision required to safely and effectively meet a pupil’s needs. In 2021, Rudakubana’s EHCP was reviewed. Deputy headteacher Joanne Hodson — who Sir Adrian emphatically calls a “highly impressive witness” — wanted to include a section detailing the risks Rudakubana posed to others. But Samantha Steed, from Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, wished it removed. 

In Hodson’s words “[she] even went so far as to accuse me of racially stereotyping [him] as ‘a black boy with a knife’”. There had been no mention of his skin color until that point. But the implied accusation had its effect. As Hodson put it in evidence, “that effectively shut me up … that was the point at which I – that professionally just closes me down completely, doesn’t it?” As a result, the document was toned down. 

Sir Adrian describes Steed’s decision to “raise issues of racial stereotyping” as “unwise”. If that is an understatement, he no doubt had in mind his finding that nobody had acted in bad faith — so there was no need to pitch the criticism too high. But it nevertheless feels like a notable shift in the direction of the wind. How many such remarks — implied and unjustified assertions of racial prejudice — are made in professional settings each day in Britain? Hundreds? Thousands? Perhaps now there will be fewer. Perhaps the move will no longer be seen as entirely risk-free.  

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The report also, unsurprisingly, contains recommendations around online harms. And while these all relate to children, Labour will no doubt try to use them to justify their program of restriction and censorship more generally. 

Yet if this report will not please everyone, there is a new strand in there, powerfully expressed, that says we cannot carry on like this. Comforting delusions of one sort or another, and an insistence that in a society as wealthy as ours there need be no trade-offs, have been central to the state’s governing philosophy for decades. This report, in its clear-eyed analysis of cause and effect, as well as in its diction, seems to take a step back, or rather forward. 

No more public-sector evasion of responsibility; no more supine inaction around “neurodivergence” or mental health issues; no more baseless implications of racism; no more imbalance of attention and resources in favor of the potential wrongdoer over the potential innocent victim. Through it all, teenagers must be held responsible for their actions — and their parents too. This may have all come from a retired and highly respected senior judge, formerly of Michael Mansfield KC’s “radical” Tooks Chambers. But if you were to adorn it with a “sodding”, a “bloody”, and an “I don’t care” or two, it could quite easily serve as a tweet from Rupert Lowe. One way or the other, it feels like progress.

A man and his sister prepare to take matters into their own hands. Colin McInnes, who is autistic, and his sister, who is in early recovery from addiction, make their way into the city center carrying a rucksack with a flask of lentil soup, a sandwich, and some broken bourbon biscuits inside. Colin’s aim is modest: to feed one hungry homeless person.

Little did he know that this small act of compassion would change the course of his entire life and the lives of countless others. As Colin turns to walk home with the empty rucksack, one street-dweller taps him on the shoulder and asks if he will be back. “I will,” he said. “I’ll be here at this time every night.”

Six years later, homelessness is only worsening, and this winter, Glasgow is as cold as ever. Thankfully, though, Colin has been busy. Inside the headquarters of his Homeless Project Scotland (HPS) — the result of the promise made on that cold night — 40 or so people are eating hot meals in a warm café. Sustained entirely by volunteers and public donations and operating without government funding, it provides food, shelter, emergency response and advocacy seven days a week. Every meal, bed and item of clothing here is paid for through public donations, and the quiet support of nearby businesses. At the back of the building, in a glass-fronted office, a man with a 1,000-yard stare chairs a meeting. It’s Colin.

The challenge facing him is acute. Across the UK, the scale of homelessness now runs into the hundreds of thousands. Shelter’s latest analysis shows that at least 382,000 people in England were homeless on a given day in 2025 — including many families stuck in temporary accommodation. Official government statistics show 132,410 households in temporary accommodation in England alone, and Shelter has calculated that there are as many as 100,000 children in temporary accommodation in London alone. To put that another way, one out of every 21 children in London is homeless, equivalent to more than one homeless child per class.

Taken together, these figures underline how pervasive housing insecurity has become, extending far beyond rough sleeping into widespread reliance on emergency and temporary housing. These trends reflect deeper structural pressures: a chronic shortage of genuinely affordable housing, spiraling private rents, insecure tenancies, and a welfare system reformed in ways that leave little margin for error when people hit crisis.

Westminster recently set out a new plan to prevent homelessness and rough sleeping, backed by £3.5 billion in promised investment. Yet critics argue that without a major expansion of social housing and meaningful action on poverty and insecurity, little will change.

Another factor worsening the crisis is dysfunction across the system itself. Research by Shelter has repeatedly shown how stretched resources at local level create avoidable delays to vulnerable people getting the support they need. This failure is often chalked up to the chaotic lives of the homeless as opposed to services arguably unfit for purpose. People with complex needs face specific challenges. Homeless Link’s Unhealthy State of Homelessness research found that 82% of people experiencing homelessness have a mental health diagnosis, but only 9% of accommodation providers state they are capable of supporting people them. They may be judged too risky for mainstream services, while rigid thresholds, poorly integrated services, and turgid referral systems delay timelier intervention. Public misunderstanding compounds the problem, allowing homelessness to be framed as inevitable, insoluble, or the fault of feckless individuals, relieving political pressure for meaningful change.

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Homeless Project Scotland is determined to change this. The charity represents a radical communitarian response to these traditional systems, many of which have grown overly cautious to intervene in a climate of scarce resources and institutional ass-covering. Powered by working-class volunteers with little experience of, or interest in, navigating bureaucracy, the project is driven by a palpable sense of moral urgency and a clear message to homeless people: if services won’t help you, we will.

Colin describes that night in Glasgow in 2019 as “something like Armageddon”. And what followed, he tells me, was not a plan but a series of improvised and messy responses to escalating need. He acted swiftly on the impulse to help so many of us feel but resist. Rucksacks became crates. Crates became a battered trailer dragged through the snow under Central Station Bridge. Food was cooked and reheated wherever possible. “We didn’t care about any legalities,” Colin says. “Just caring about humanity. Get it done and feed people.”

Word spread. Soon, Colin’s team was feeding hundreds. Then Covid hit. As other services shut down and staff were furloughed, Homeless Project Scotland kept going. “We were the only place providing food in the city center,” Colin says. “The whole city just became empty.” Eventually the operation was paused, not because demand fell, but because gathering together in the streets became unsafe.

What followed was even more ambitious. Volunteers cooked in their own homes, met in supermarket car parks and delivered food daily to hotels across the city where the homeless had been lodged during the pandemic. “We took out thousands and thousands of meals,” Colin says.

Made up of volunteers operating off their own backs and running mainly off proceeds from collection buckets passed around local pubs, HPS lacked a formal structure. When it was time to upscale, crowdfunders were launched and more volunteers signed up. In the absence of a professional PR operation, accusations of poor governance found easy purchase — and Colin applied to become a registered charity. “I wanted to be above board,” he says. “I wanted to show everybody where the books were.”

He also needed a premises. First, he persuaded a landlord to let him take over a disused property in a collapsing rat-infested building. After a letter to Network Rail — owner of a vacant retail unit beneath Central Station bridge in the heart of the city center — an Argyle Street office came next. Then, the current base on Glassford Street on the doorstep of Glasgow’s upmarket Merchant City. “We kept thinking: ‘This is too big,’” Colin says. “And then before you know it, that TARDIS got filled.”

Today the organization runs what Colin describes as the only fully volunteer-led night shelter in Scotland, alongside a food service producing tens of thousands of meals a month and a volunteer-run national helpline operating around the clock. People call in with all kinds of problems, from loneliness to hypothermia to domestic violence.

Colin is unapologetic about the absence of professional sheen that some apparently mistake for unseriousness. “Bureaucracy can fuck right off,” he says. “You will never fund my charity for a bureaucracy.”

What guides the organization instead is a simpler principle: people before procedure. It’s a principle as risky as it is provocative. Colin traces his distrust of rigid systems back to personal experience rather than ideology. “My approach is shaped entirely by lived experience,” he explains. “I am someone who has suffered at the hands of systems that were meant to protect, support, and care and which clearly failed to do so. That experience gave me a deep understanding of how easily people fall through the cracks and how invisible they can become.”

We take a break. I step out for a cigarette and get talking to a man named Andy. When Andy first contacted Homeless Project Scotland, he wasn’t in Glasgow. He was in Blackpool; after a period of poor decisions, his marriage had broken down and he’d become estranged from his children. Desperate, he phoned the helpline. Instead of receiving advice, a referral, or a soul-destroying automated message, as he might have done if he’d rung any other hotline, Andy got talking to Colin. Colin jumped in a van and drove south through the night. “He came down and picked me up from Blackpool,” Andy says. Within days, he was in the shelter. After three months, he moved into a hotel. Now, he has a furnished flat and is being assessed for a two-bedroom home so his children can visit.

Andy had tried accessing services before and “got nowhere”. If it wasn’t for Colin and the project, he says, “I think I would have committed suicide.” Andy now volunteers seven days a week.

On this brutally cold evening, the shelter is filling quietly. People queue in a seated area, are then greeted by name and guided through a process that is firm without being intimidating. There is no performative authority, no sense of suspicion. The atmosphere is strangely serene.

The dormitories are warm and well-ordered. Each bed is numbered. The system is meticulous rather than bureaucratic. If someone in bed eight gets unwell, staff can immediately access their medical information. There are showers, toilets, laundry facilities and a kitchen area in the shelter. There is a small cinema corner and a few well-stocked bookshelves. Bedding is high quality, supplied by the same company that services the boutique hotel next door. People here are not offered platitudes about “dignity” then fobbed off until Monday morning; rather, they’re treated with care and respect.

In creating such a sanctuary, Colin has come up against many of the computer-says-no types prevalent in officialdom; the kind of people who are so inured to the dysfunction of the sector that they no longer perceive it let alone raise their voices against it. As a result, his antenna for local authority bullshit is extremely well tuned. In a video posted by the project earlier this year, Colin explained that Glasgow City Council had refused him a planning application for a shelter on the grounds that people would queue outside the building for food, a decision he contrasted with the tolerance shown for lines of rowdy revelers outside nearby nightclubs.

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The project experiences a fair amount of resistance locally, Colin tells me, much of it framed in the language of health and safety. Risks are identified, concerns are flagged, and safeguards are invoked. In theory, these mechanisms exist to protect the vulnerable. In practice, Colin argues, they are often used to obstruct help at the moment it is most urgently needed. Fire safety was repeatedly cited as a reason not to act, even as people slept outdoors in lethal conditions. At the same time, “shared-air” sleeping spaces were dismissed as undignified, despite the alternative being a doorway in sub-zero temperatures. The contradiction is not lost on him. “The lengths that the SNP-led council and SNP government have gone to in order to defend the position that night shelters are ‘a thing of the past’ are extraordinary,” he says. “This is not about policy, ideology, or box-ticking. This is about life and death. When the choice is a warm, supervised indoor space or sleeping outside in sub-zero temperatures, the moral answer should be obvious.”

To Colin, this all reveals a risk-averse system more comfortable managing hypothetical threats than confronting immediate harm. Worse, he believes that bureaucracy has become a way for institutions to distance themselves from moral responsibility. When procedures are followed but people still freeze, starve or die, process becomes a means of deflection. The absurdities don’t stop there: each time someone is forced to sleep rough, the local authority is in breach of its own statutory duties — yet faces no penalty. In effect, the biggest rule-breaker is left enforcing the rules on everyone else.

By contrast, safety in this shelter is not ignored, it is simply understood differently. “We don’t have time for sitting writing policies,” Colin says. “People are coming in here in an emergency.”

Emergency is not overselling it. The situation in Glasgow is bleak. Official Scottish Government data shows Glasgow accounted for 43% of reports of rough sleeping in Scotland in 2024-25, far higher than other local authority areas. Independent counts by agencies like Simon Community Scotland regularly find around 25-30 people sleeping rough in the city on a given night (the real number is likely higher), illustrating the visibility and persistence of the problem. On a good night, Homeless Project Scotland will still be forced to turn people away because the shelter is at full capacity. The fact it is so oversubscribed demonstrates its direct impact; if it closed, rough sleeping numbers would rise overnight.

This is clearly not a service designed around political correctness. It is a response moving at a pace the homelessness crisis demands. What distinguishes it is not just the services it provides, but how it innovates in the face of administrative gridlock. Despite being run entirely by working-class volunteers, it is a model for what support for homeless people should look like in the 21st century. And while traditional systems have a lot to learn from the project, it’s likely it will inspire more radicalism outside the sector — and continued resentment within it.

While Colin believes his presence is an irritant to leaders both local and national, he has seen interest from politicians looking to capitalize on what is regarded by many as SNP complacency. The shelter has recently drawn visits from both Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and Reform UK councillor Audrey Dempsey, no doubt on charm offensives ahead of Scottish Parliament elections in May. For now, Colin appears wary of political proximity, conscious that attention can just as easily dilute the message as strengthen it, and that keeping power at a safe distance may be essential to the project’s integrity. In truth, Colin, like many great social campaigners, thinks and talks just like a politician. It’s where his loyalty currently lies that ultimately distinguishes him.

I think again about Andy’s story as we walk back upstairs. Had his call been logged, deferred, or redirected to office hours, he might not be here at all. In a system where delay is too often presented as necessary due process, Homeless Project Scotland operates on a simpler moral principle: when someone is in crisis, you go to them. You do not ask them to wait. It’s a principle we could all learn from.

Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng took what they believed were good decisions. Their massive energy price subsidy would protect people from the cost of living crisis. They thought that cutting taxes would boost growth and prosperity for everyone. It is easy for people to sneer at the latter after the event. But the plain fact is that no-one has discovered a sure fire plan to deliver economic growth. If they had, running the economy would be easy.

As we now know, the markets took fright at the further proposed increases in government debt. Interest rates on the debt soared and the pound collapsed. The Truss government was wrecked. This had always been a risk, ever since in 2019 the government piled up massive amounts of public debt with the furlough scheme. At some point as government debt rises, confidence really drops and interest rates really do double, or even more. But this point is inherently unknowable in advance. It bears little connection with the objective facts.

For example, interest rates were in the 6-8% range in several Mediterranean Eurozone countries in the mid-2010s. But the amount of government debt relative to the size of the economy in, say, Spain, was lower than it is now in the UK. Even now, the UK’s debt position is much better than that, say, of Italy. But it was the UK which the markets attacked and not Italy.

Many commentators on the Left maintain that all this was obvious in advance, that the Truss-Kwarteng policy was bound to end in rapid and ignominious failure. But we might reasonably ask, if this is the case, why these same commentators are not now enormously rich, having used their insight to short UK government bonds.

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All this was anticipated by Keynes, a much more subtle economist than many of his followers grasp. In his magnum opus, the General Theory of Employment, he championed the idea that extra government spending could help keep an economy out of recession. But he qualified this with two key points. When government deficits rise as a result of increased spending, Keynes wrote that: “The method of financing the policy may have the effect of increasing the rate of interest and so retarding investment in other areas.” He went on to suggest that the psychological effect on “confidence” might also depress private sector spending. The psychology, he asserted, was often “confused”, by which he meant it could move in ways entirely contrary to what a rational assessment of the evidence would suggest.

The second example is much less grand, but all the more telling. Intentions and outcomes can differ even on a small scale. To great fanfare, in 2018 Nicola Sturgeon announced a policy of a minimum price on a unit of alcohol. Scotland has a serious alcohol problem, and this seemed a good idea. The policy was praised by the World Health Organisation. Yet the hard-core older drinkers who were the real targets of the policy seemed to have continued drinking. They paid for it by cutting back the amounts their families spent on food and heating — even before the cost of living became the issue which it is now.

Young people in particular do seem to have cut back on high alcohol drinks. They switched to cheap street drugs instead. These are often unreliable and dangerous products, and the drug-related death rate in Scotland is now four times higher than in England. Sturgeon and the SNP intended to do good with their policy, but the outcome seems to have worsened the situation.

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If detailed planning really worked, the Soviet Union would have been a great success and not a catastrophic failure. Of course, both governments and firms have to set a vision, a view of where they want to be. But they must never fall into the trap of thinking that the plan is reality. Most of the time, outcomes are different to the intent in the plan. The main risk is that focusing too much on the plan might lead a government or firm to reduce its flexibility, its capacity to respond to surprises, both good and bad. In the old Soviet Union, everything was planned with great precision. No individual enterprise was allowed to fail. But, eventually, the whole system collapsed in catastrophic failure. In the West, individual firms fail all the time, but the system as a whole delivers the goods.

There are worrying signs that, as a result of the furlough scheme, the same Soviet-type mentality is starting to pervade Britain. If a company is in difficulty, some scheme should be contacted so that it is kept alive by taxpayers’ money. The industrial structure should be pickled in aspic. The intention of any such policy would be to do good. The risk is that it simply leads to an economy populated by zombie, low productivity firms.

Sometimes outcomes can be much better than expected. A classic example is Windows. The first releases basically tanked. Microsoft announced that development would stop after the release of version 3.0. In the meantime, they had partnered to develop OS/2 with IBM, the “operating system of the future”. Windows 3.0 sold millions of copies in the first few months and the rest is history.

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Coca-Cola spent vast amounts of research testing how people would feel about New Coke, which they launched in the mid-Eighties. The plan said it would be a great success. But it met with a disastrous reception in the real world. Coca-Cola abandoned the product within a few weeks despite the huge sums spent on it. Their actions show the value of flexibility and willingness to discard plans in the face of new evidence. The UK government’s reaction to the emergence of Covid in early 2020 shows the danger of inflexibility. The early data from China suggested that the death rate might be of the order of 3-4%. So it was reasonable to have an initial lockdown to try and assess the situation.

But it rapidly became clear that the death rate was in fact much lower. More importantly, at least 95% of all deaths were in two groups which were small compared to the size of the overall population: the over 85s and those with chronic conditions such as heart disease caused by obesity. For the bulk of the population, there was little serious risk to health. Despite this new information emerging quickly, the government seemed to double down on its plan of lockdown and its message of fear.

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The complexity of the world does not mean that nothing can be done, that outcomes are random. But it does mean that governments and firms must be flexible. A further implication is that, as far as possible, decisions should be devolved. The closer to a problem you are, the more likely there is to be local, tacit knowledge which is hard to capture in formal documentation and rules.

In fact, successful institutions evolve organically, indicating that excessive government intervention may be both unnecessary and counterproductive. Consider Greater Manchester. The Mayor and the GM combined authority have relatively few legal powers. These in general still reside with the ten individual boroughs. But the combined authority has evolved “convening powers”. This is soft, informal power. A complex system of interconnected organisations and committees has developed and is continuing to develop. And it seems to work. A genuine, connected city-region is coming into being.

The economy and society are essentially more like a biological system than a complicated machine. No matter how complex, a machine can be programmed and controlled. The economy evolves, often in unpredictable ways. Policy-makers, including the new Prime Minister, need to shed the tick-box mentality and recognise this fundamental feature of reality.

The inquiry turned out to be much more than a simple examination of a botched refurbishment on a West London estate. Instead it has given the public a rare glimpse of the various structures whose failures contributed to the fire. None of them ought to escape with reputation intact. Not the housing sector, not the construction industry, nor the fire service or central government.

What has emerged is a profoundly depressing portrait of a private sector with a near psychopathic disregard for human life, and a public sector which exists to do little more than serve or imitate it.

Sadly, though, pandemic, unending political turmoil, and a major war have pushed the revelations about defective building regulations, cost-cutting, and missed warnings away from the public eye. Aside from an excellent BBC podcast, there has barely been a ripple in the national media about these revelations.

The first module of the inquiry focused on the refurbishment work that took place at Grenfell. Architects, sub-contractors and surveyors took to the stand. The most important information regarded the way in which the tower’s deadly cladding was selected for use. Original designs had specified a zinc product for the system, which would not have been combustible.

But the council had only set a budget of £8.5 million for the tower’s refurbishment — including cladding, new windows, a new communal heating system and the conversion of commercial units to new flats. The original contractor priced the work at closer to £12 million.

The council was advised by its consultants to either increase its budget or abandon the project, warning that it would “fail” if it continued. That advice was ignored. Instead, the council’s management company (the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (KCTMO)) procured a new contractor, Rydon, which agreed to take it on at the knock-down price of £9.2m. This was still above the council’s budget — so KCTMO and Rydon held a secret “offline” meeting without minutes to discuss making further cost savings, going outside the normal procurement rules. A big money saver which appears to have been agreed at this meeting was the cladding — switching to a product called “aluminium composite material (ACM)” would save around £300,000.

It would emerge that the savings were actually more substantial than this, but Rydon disguised the true value from KCTMO in order to maximise its own profits. “We will be quids in,” wrote one manager in an email.

ACM was widely used in the UK at the time, but its fire risks were no secret: it had been linked to several huge fires globally. The team who refurbished Grenfell all claimed to have no knowledge of this — although one did email internally to note that “the ACM will be gone very quickly in a fire” during a debate about the necessary strength of fire breaks.

Next, the inquiry turned to how the organisations which sold highly combustible cladding and insulation had tested and marketed them in the years before the fire.

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We heard that the French arm of the multinational giant Arconic had tested its ACM cladding panels in 2004. These tests revealed that when bent into a “cassette” shape they burned 10 times as quickly and released seven times as much heat, and could not even obtain the minimum European fire classification.

Rather than removing this particular product from the market, they branded the test a “rogue result”. They kept on selling it. Internal emails warned of the risks, with technical staff warning “we are in the know” and that the true nature of the panels needed to be kept “very confidential”. One senior member of the team even speculated about a tower block fire clad in its panels killing “60 to 70” people.

Changes in fire regulations did start to limit the use of ACM in much of Europe. But due to a defunct fire standard which was never removed from UK guidance, it was able to keep selling the product here. It would be sold for use on Grenfell in the particularly dangerous cassette form. The manufacturers of the insulation boards which sat behind the external cladding — Kingspan and Celotex — also had testing which revealed a potential risk in systems involving their products.

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Kingspan drastically failed a large-scale test in 2005, with a system containing its foam insulation described as a “raging inferno” in an internal document. Yet it was able to obtain certification to continue targeting high rise jobs for the next 12 years, without disclosing this test. A small amount of the insulation ended up on Grenfell.

A larger amount was provided by Celotex, which also failed a test in early 2014, before passing a repeat. This second test featured additional fire resisting boards placed around key temperature monitors, which were never disclosed in its marketing. One of its former employees accepted that this behaviour amounted to a “fraud on the market” when questioned.

One of the most shocking moments of the inquiry was within the third area of its investigation. This looked broadly at the many failures in the tower’s management. Grenfell housed 37 residents who had disabilities that hindered their ability to escape in an emergency. On the night of the fire, 15 of them died, several alongside friends and relatives who would not leave them in the burning building.

The inquiry heard that the management company had done nothing to identify these residents, or plan for their escape. In fact, when the London Fire Brigade asked if there were any disabled residents in their housing stock, the building’s risk assessor advised that KCTMO should “say you have nobody”, otherwise “questions like why were they not included in the building’s [risk assessment] spring to mind”.

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KCTMO staff defended not producing plans for the evacuation on the basis that they were following government guidance from 2011 which said doing so was “usually unrealistic”. This went against other legal provisions, but does appear to have become standard practice in the housing sector — with thousands of disabled people living in high rises with a similar lack of protection.

Startlingly, the Home Office recently announced it would not implement the inquiry’s recommendation that housing providers should be legally obliged to provide such plans.

Westminster has been consistently found out during the inquiry. The UK government department responsible for building regulations knew from cladding tests conducted in 2001 that ACM systems — like the one on Grenfell tower  — were flammable. The result of this testing was delivered to ministers in September 2002, along with a warning that the highly combustible cladding was, perversely, acceptable under standards included in official guidance.

But amid industry resistance to higher standards — which were said to “limit market choice” — the guidance was never altered. The testing which revealed the horrendous fire performance of the cladding was “deliberately covered up” to “avoid triggering a cladding crisis”. A former senior civil servant said he could “see why people might think that” but insisted it is not what happened.

Other warnings were missed. Eight years before Grenfell, an extraordinarily similar tragedy killed six people at the Lakanal House block in south London. The ensuing coroner’s inquest concluded in spring 2013 and recommended changes to building regulations. But the Government had strict rules preventing the introduction of new regulations (or “burdens on industry” as they were termed) and chose not to tighten the rules.

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By Henry Wismayer

In July 2014, civil servant Brian Martin — who was responsible for the building regulations guidance — attended an industry seminar which specifically warned the guidance needed to be tightened to rule out the use of ACM on tall buildings. Nothing was done.

And in February 2016, a cladding contractor emailed him to express concern that “there are many such buildings [with ACM] and their numbers are growing”. But Martin did not pass this “red alert” warning on to his seniors, despite having personally assured them that an ACM fire could not happen in the UK. He was well aware of the risk of this product writing in one email: “It’s very rigid and makes nice shiny buildings. Sadly when it gets exposed to a fire the aluminium melts away and exposes the polyethylene core. Whoosh!” He never checked if the cladding was being used in the UK, or acted to remove the standard from the guidance which permitted its use.

The inquiry was full of bitter of lessons and terrible news. The evidence comes together to weave a tapestry of staggering failure across the public and private sectors. Sitting behind these errors is a story of decay that can be traced back to an absence of state intervention. Inadequate funding, hands-off regulation, and privatisation — all contributed to the deterioration of these sectors. At times, it is difficult to know how the inquiry can even approach making recommendations without telling us to rip up our entire political model and start again.

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At the very least, degrees of change are needed. Testing and certification should be removed from the hands of private bodies. Deregulation should always be moderated by the need to protect life. Residents need more power to challenge their landlords (whether social or private), in order to hold them to account. Progress in all of these areas is slow and partial. Hearing ministers boast about the prospect of cutting red tape after Brexit suggests it may be short-lived.

The inquiry itself is still running: final expert evidence is being heard and it will move to what will doubtless be a painful examination of the circumstances of each death, in order to fulfil obligations under the Coroner’s Act. Then there will be a pause while we await the final report, and then, finally, the police investigation will take over.

Should anyone be taken to trial, the process will stretch out for years. The inquiry may have given us something approaching the ugly truth about what happened, but five years after the fire, the road to the justice and change that bereaved and survivors are desperate to see is fraught.

But as the pandemic inches towards its two-year anniversary, any warm feelings are but a distant memory. Today might be Australia Day, but the mood isn’t one of celebration. Australia is having a bad summer, and Australians are angry with their governments, especially the federal government led by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.

A few months ago, the Morrison government looked as though it would cruise back to power in the upcoming federal election, which must be held by May this year. This month, however, the Opposition Labor Party’s primary vote climbed past the Coalition’s for the first time ever. Morrison may still be leading Opposition leader Anthony Albanese as preferred Prime Minister by 7%, but he had a 23% lead in August. The trend is clear.

The immediate cause for the government’s political woes is the acute shortage of rapid antigen tests (RATs) across Australia. Although the federal and most state governments were right to shift to a ‘living with Covid’ approach late last year, they failed to anticipate the entirely predictable surge in demand for testing as society opened up and the highly transmissible Omicron variant took hold.

To manage mounting pressure on testing and supply chains, the National Cabinet, with the notable exception of Western Australia, agreed to redefine ‘close contact’ more narrowly, reduce the required period of isolation for positive cases, and permit the use of RATs instead of only relying on PCR tests. However, having failed to stock up on RATs, test kits rapidly ran out and could not be found for love or money. Actually, that’s not quite right. The small number of RATs that could be found cost a lot of money — in one case $500 for two tests.

What followed was immense public confusion and consternation, as well as crippling staff absences, since negative test results are necessary for ending mandatory isolation and international arrivals. The federal government responded by washing its hands of the problem, only providing free kits to six million low-income earners, and blaming state and territory governments since testing is their purview. In return, the states blame the federal government for failing to ensure a reliable supply of RATs to the country.

Yet behind these problems lies a more profound political failure: the Government’s inability to explain Australia’s almost overnight decision to drop its ‘Zero Covid’ approach. For almost two years, Australians were told that they should avoid Covid at all costs; today, they are accommodating very high daily case numbers with minimal restrictions.

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Given Australia’s very high rates of vaccination and Omicron’s milder symptoms, this is arguably the right approach. Nonetheless, Australian leaders and public health officials, with few notable exceptions such as Queensland’s Chief Health Officer John Gerrard, have failed to make a sustained case for the new strategy publicly. And that has left many Australians concerned and confused, wondering if the Government is just winging it.

So rattled is the Prime Minister by his rapidly declining popularity that he attempted to distract from these problems by using the oldest trick in the Australian political playbook — looking tough on borders. Yet even the detention and subsequent deportation of Novak Djokovic has failed to revive his political fortunes, instead turning into a prolonged farce that made the federal government look even more useless.

So far, Australia’s anger has mainly been directed at Prime Minister Scott Morrison. And most of it is justified: Morrison’s incompetence, preference for soundbites over substance, and propensity to shirk responsibility have meant that Australia suffered from a leadership vacuum in the middle of one of the worst crises in its history.

But the dysfunction runs much deeper. Indeed, the problems exposed during Australia’s summer of discontent are symptomatic of the country’s entire pandemic response — but they can no longer be papered over by lockdowns. At the root of the problem are changes to the Australian state that began decades ago and whose negative impacts have finally come home to roost. Having set out to create a state that is less responsive to popular demands, Australia’s political elites have ended up creating a state that is incapable of addressing serious crises.

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Australia went through a deep political and economic crisis in the Seventies, which, at the time, political elites attributed to unrealistic popular expectations from an overburdened state. In response, from the Eighties, both centre-Left and Right-wing governments sought to dismantle the Keynesian compromise that underpinned a relatively equitable distribution of income. Although justified in terms of efficiency, rationalisation and competitiveness, the main purpose of Australia’s neoliberal transition over subsequent decades has been to reduce the state’s responsiveness to society.

Policymaking and implementation processes increasingly transformed the Weberian ‘command-and-control’ structures of the post-World War II state into a diffuse array of quasi-independent agencies, both public and private, loosely coordinated by the central government. State capacity was hollowed out, while fragmentation impeded central agencies’ capacity for direct action, and blurred lines of control and accountability. This was a design feature, not a bug of the emerging Australian regulatory state. Having shed direct control, political leaders could claim plausible deniability over policy decisions and their outcomes in many areas.

Federalism has only made these problems worse, routinely hampering Australia’s response to the pandemic and generating an endless blame game between the federal and state governments. Just like the federal government, state and territory governments’ capacity has also been hollowed out. They have also struggled with federally imposed budget austerity, weakening their capacity to deliver important public functions, such as health.

All of which made it impossible to coordinate a national response to the pandemic. States and territories have often acted as independent countries, paying little attention to the federal government and to each other. They have exercised unilateral discretion over state borders and even over the international border via their hotel quarantine systems. Even now, Western Australia alone remains committed to a Covid elimination strategy and is yet to reopen its borders to other states.

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In this context, Morrison’s incompetence is far from unusual — it is inherent to the kind of state Australia has. But even a leader keen to take control during the crisis would have struggled to get things done because of the very significant constraints on top-down direction in the Australian state.

And so Australia’s reckoning with its real pandemic record must extend beyond dissatisfaction with the performance of its current political leaders. Unless state structures change to become more responsive to elected leaders, and through them to the wider public, the same pathologies will continue to reappear. Australia has paid a high price for its dysfunctional state during this crisis, but it could be much higher in the next.

Today, little has changed. The NHS’s looming vaccine mandate — requiring that employees are vaccinated against Covid before April — has inspired grim warnings about the debilitating impact of an exodus of staff: the effect on waiting times, on overworked doctors and on vulnerable patients. But what’s been ignored is the disproportionate number of women it could affect.

At its heart, of course, this is simply business as usual: women are no strangers to coercion in healthcare, and the NHS’s relationship with its predominantly female workforce has long been problematic. While women make up 76.7% of the NHS’s 1.3 million employees, only 45% of doctors are female; despite recruitment drives, fewer than 30% of surgeons are women, while two-thirds of consultants are male. No doubt that goes some way to explaining why male doctors earn 20% more than their female counterparts. Figures show that, out of 212 NHS trusts, 198 have a gender pay gap and in 125 the gap is worsening.

But this isn’t simply a money issue: the NHS also has a dismal record on employment rights, discrimination and abuse of its staff. In just one year, nearly 1 in 10 of Unison’s NHS members reported rape, sexual abuse or harassment at work, with 1 in 3 describing such incidents as a “frequent” or “regular” occurrence. Only 15% felt their case was dealt with adequately.

Nor is it just female employees who are affected by the sexism of the NHS. Female patients regularly face discrimination, with their concerns often dismissed as “women’s problems”. For instance, studies have shown how healthcare staff routinely underestimate and undertreat the pain reported by female patients, largely thanks to institutionalised stereotypes about women being oversensitive or over dramatic. Only last year, a Health Minister was forced to admit that “women are not listened to” by the NHS.

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Yet in light of multiple reports of systematic failings in maternity care, including harrowing descriptions of how thousands of women have been subjected to “birth rape” — doctors performing vaginal examinations on women without their consent — it’s hard not to conclude that the problem runs deeper than women simply not “being listened to”. In fact, as we’ve seen during lockdown, the medical establishment seems to have all but forgotten that women exist. At the start of the pandemic, a UN report warned that Covid lockdowns could have “serious consequences to women’s health”, including disruption to reproductive and sexual health services, as well as services to combat gender-based violence. But even its authors couldn’t have foreseen the horror of women being forced to miscarry and give birth on their own, while their partners waited in car parks.

Similarly cruel scenarios played out in the realm of contraceptive rights. For the past two years, many providers of contraception have refused to meet women face to face, even if it meant a woman was unable to remove her interuterine devices (IUDs). As with all battles over reproductive choice, this only pushed the problem underground: this time in the form of grim TikTok videos teaching women how to pull IUDs from their uterus at home.

But such sexism was present in almost every aspect of Covid response, up to and including the manufacturing of vaccines. Male bodies are assumed to be the “default” during clinical trials; even on the rare occasions, such as the Covid vaccine trials, when women are included, questions tend not to be asked about specifically female concerns, such as changes in menstruation.

It was hardly surprising, then, that reports of menstrual irregularities following the jabs were downplayed for months, despite tens of thousands of women reporting changes. Rather than being listed as a side effect or investigated promptly, such concerns were often belittled and diminished. For many women, the only available information they had on the menstrual side effects was via social media — hardly a comforting (or reliable) source of information.

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It is only now, more than a year after the vaccine rollout began, that researchers have begun looking at the extent and cause of the link. It is likely that the changes to menstrual cycles are benign; a number of possible causes have been suggested, with some also occurring with other vaccinations.

But this comes as scant consolation for the women who’ve experienced unexpected side effects and have, yet again, had to fight to be heard. Distrust can be infectious, and many women have been left feeling understandably uncertain about the ability and willingness of healthcare providers to listen to their concerns and to research the effects of the vaccine on their bodies. Is it any wonder that young women remain one of the cohorts most likely to refuse the jab?

So it seems natural that the NHS vaccine mandate would strike a particular chord with female staff. The policy might not be intrinsically misogynistic — after all, it will affect male staff too — but it’s not inconceivable that female staff will feel particularly alienated. Women possess an already precarious grip on their own bodily autonomy, and for many, their relationship with the NHS, both as patients and as employees, is beset with mistrust and coercion. The constant battle to try and retain control of their own healthcare decisions and the encroaching powerlessness they feel has now begun to even seep into their career.

And yet, it seems peculiar that the same people who pride themselves on supporting a woman’s right to choose in other settings — such as abortion — find no issue in coercively demanding retrospective changes to contracts that further strip the rights of its predominantly female workforce. The progressive emphasis on the right to choose, it seems, only applies if you decide to make the right choice.

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Whether or not the NHS vaccine mandate goes ahead — and it seems increasingly doubtful that an overstretched NHS can afford to sack 70,000 employees — for many women who feel deeply resentful of the mandate, the damage has already been done. To them it must seem galling that, after demanding so much from staff, including expecting them to work in Covid-ridden hospitals with minimal protection, the NHS now feels entitled to discard them for the sin of attempting to cling on to their bodily autonomy.

Even if the threat is removed, the continuing willingness of the NHS to disregard women, now with the encouragement of those who were once allies, will be the final straw for many. As its female staff are now discovering, the NHS remains institutionally sexist — and it will take more than a few rainbows and ‘claps for carers’ to cure it.

If you think we live in dramatic political times, this Act was the product of a much more febrile and rambunctious period. There was no single cause of the Lords crisis; it was a combination of inevitable changes in democratic politics, high cunning, and silly plots. If there was a single event that set things in motion, it was this: in December 1905, Arthur Balfour became the last Prime Minister to cede power to the leader of the opposition without having first been defeated in a general election. He thought the Liberals would disagree about Ireland and be unable to form a cabinet. Instead, they did the obvious thing: got themselves in order and called an election against a long-serving, increasingly out-of-touch government.

In early 1906, the Liberal Party won a whopping victory, increasing their seat count by 214. Balfour became another last: the last Prime Minister to lose his seat in an election. Defeat didn’t dent his belief that his party ought to be the ultimate arbiters, though. Balfour announced: “The great Unionist Party should still control, whether in power or in opposition, the destinies of this great Empire.” These Liberals weren’t the sort of chaps you want handling questions of empire and social reform. The Tories must remain in charge, one way or another.

Balfour’s statement might seem like the usual press release bluster. But the leader had a scheme. The Tories had a stonking majority of hereditary peers in the House of Lords. And so, having lost an election in the lower house, Balfour started running the country from the upper. He and Lord Lansdowne, Conservative leader in the Lords, thought they could take an approach of “caution and tact” to voting down government legislation in the Lords. It didn’t work. In 1907, the Liberal government passed nine measures in the Commons. The Lords rejected five of them. Lloyd George jibed that the peerage was Mr Balfour’s poodle.

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Tory brass knew Lords reform was necessary. Balfour agreed in principle. But he ended up rejecting the idea, claiming that Lords reforming would weaken the Commons (this from the man using Earls and Marquesses to vote down government legislation!) Not that Balfour felt the need to demean himself with explanations; he was still Tory leader largely because no-one else could take over. He was too posh to push: “I am certainly not going to condescend to go about the country explaining that I am ‘honest and industrious’ like a second coachman out of place!”

Meanwhile Balfour saw opportunity in the threat of the growing German navy. He pushed the Liberals to accept that British ships had to be built. This neat distraction unified his grouchy party. New ships meant new taxes. The Tories preferred the indirect taxation of putting tariffs on imports — making food more expensive. The justification was that age-old Tory favourite: the alternative was the confiscation of private property, the thin end of the socialistic wedge. The Liberals, led by H. H. Asquith, stood for Free Trade and Cheap Bread — and had to accommodate themselves to the new class of Labour voters who had made themselves known in the 1906 election. In the 1909 budget, the Chancellor David Lloyd George proposed raising money via a “super-tax” on the wealthy, as well as other taxes designed to hit landowners.

Balfour and Lansdowne wanted to let the budget pass the Lords, although some peers threatened to sack their staff in protest at the new taxes. Then Lloyd George gave his Limehouse speech, throwing shade on the recalcitrant toffs: “What is the labour they are going to choose for dismissal? Are they going to threaten to devastate rural England by feeding and dressing themselves?” Tory peers frothed. Balfour schemed again. If the Lords voted down the budget, there would be a general election, and the Tories could promise tariffs that would protect British jobs. The peers rejected the budget. The first election of 1910 was held (with 92% turnout). The Liberals lost 123 seats.

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The brouhaha really got going at this point. The Liberals stayed in government with the support of Irish Nationalists and Labour, giving them a majority of over a hundred. The alliance complicated the game. Passing the budget was no longer sufficient. The Irish Nationalists insisted that the Lords must lose their veto, something Liberals had been talking about since the 1880s, so that a bill could be passed giving Home Rule to Ireland. To the Tory party, this was intensely unacceptable.

There followed months of protracted and frankly useless negotiations. As always with Lords reform, a slew of clever but unpopular proposals came and went like the tide. There were Tories who would have accepted a form of federal Home Rule, but Lansdowne was stubborn. This, you see, was the thin end of the imperial wedge. There was even a plan to mix life peerages and a select number of hereditaries. Ultimately, there was no compromise. The crisis was crystallising dividing lines in British politics that would continue for years.

A second 1910 election was held. Only this time, Asquith had a scheme worthy of Balfour. There was a new king, George V, and the Prime Minister had secretly got him to agree to create a mass of new peers that would vote for the legislation, if necessary. Edward VII had refused him this promise without a second election, but George, having been on the throne for less than seven months, was bounced into rather flustered agreement by the duplicitous Asquith. The game was up. Balfour had schemed his way into a ridiculous position. The King had been duped. The Tory peers had gained nothing by holding out for everything.

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The Parliament Act 1911 passed the Commons five months after the second 1910 election. While Asquith drew up his list of potential new peers to swamp the Lords, Balfour was labouring under the strange idea that the king might take the Tory side. It was quite a shock when Asquith present the list in July. He spent half an hour at the dispatch box, his voice hardly audible as Tory MPs howled “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!” Balfour caved and announced his shadow cabinet’s policy: to pass the bill. By November, he had resigned. Many Tory peers became “last ditchers,” opposing Asquith to the bitter end. Most, of course, flaked out.

The peers’ great fear, besides Irish Home Rule, was that the hereditary principle would be toppled. Life peerages, which would allow commoners to sit in the Lords, were mooted in this crisis. They weren’t introduced until the 1950s, though. And the hereditary peers weren’t removed from the House of Lords until 1999. Those negotiations ran much more smoothly thanks to the under rated Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury. A master of High Politics who makes Peter Mandelson look like a playground gossip, Salisbury negotiated for 92 hereditary peers to retain their place in the Lords. Unlike Balfour, Salisbury knew the value of compromise. Those hereditary peers don’t seem to be going anywhere, anytime soon.

Still, every time a government is elected, more life peers are added to make sure the numbers even out. There are now nearly 800 members. Charles Moore described it as “an ermine slum.” It is the only upper chamber in the world that is bigger than the lower chamber. Many peers are useless. The Lords lingers on, but calls for reform and complaints of its wastefulness are frequent. As with the negotiations of 1910, there is a plethora of proposals about what to do with them. Most are convoluted, impractical, or simply haphazard (remember Nick Clegg’s Senate?). Robert Salisbury has proposed the simplest answer of anyone: “a directly elected federal parliament. It would sit in the chamber of the House of Lords. The House of Lords would be abolished… The chamber of the Commons would become the seat of the English parliament.”

It is hard to imagine an idea less favourable to the “last ditchers” who so passionately objected to the Parliament Act 1911 — which can only be another reason to implement it. If only someone with sufficient vision could persuade him back into politics: Lord Salisbury retired from the House of Lords in 2017, on the day of Theresa May’s snap general election. Her Brexit nightmare and Boris’s ineptitude have revived many of the conditions of the 1910 crisis. And the House of Lords is the unsolved problem of British democracy we always return to at such times. Many of the semi-redundant life peers are now just as keen to keep their place as the hereditaries used to be. They should worry about a new Balfour coming to defend them. Then their time really would be up.

For many foreign observers, meanwhile, the most fascinating thing was seeing British politicians and civil servants doing the very reverse of keeping calm and carrying on. As Cummings made clear, the decision-making process during the early months of Covid was not only frenzied but highly emotional and laden with expletives.

In particular, his account of one “crazy” day in March last year — when Number Ten discussed bombing the Middle East, whether to introduce a national lockdown and a newspaper story about the Prime Minister’s girlfriend’s dog — seemed more reminiscent of Fawlty Towers than Yes, Minister.

Yet the true significance of what we learned from Cummings’s remarks is the light they shed on how the modern state copes — or fails to cope — with a crisis. This is not the stuff of tabloids or sitcoms. It is not entertaining. But it is important. For Britain, whether it realises it or not, is facing its 9/11 moment.

When I went to university in the Netherlands, the most boring classes were on public administration. The coursework was filled with abbreviations of unpronounceable names of various government agencies with opaque missions and overlapping remits. There were bewildering “org charts” — diagrams that always seemed to swim before my eyes, precisely because they bore no conceivable relationship to political reality.

The exception to the tedium was the rare occasions we were able to analyse how advanced governments handled crises. The quality of senior leadership; budgets or lack thereof; the decision-making process; external factors — all were examined with the aim of determining what lessons could be drawn to prevent, or at least better handle, future emergencies.

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In this context, Cummings’s testimony deserves to become an instant classic in the textbooks of public administration over the Western world.

Many of the facts were already clear before Cummings spoke: the emergence of Covid-19 in Wuhan; the Chinese government’s lack of transparency; the inadequacy of the World Health Organisation.

But amid all the entertaining titbits about whether Dilyn the Dog would “make it through the next reshuffle“, Cummings revealed one thing in particular that, despite being widely ignored, was more important than anything else: that Britain’s plans in place to deal with a major pandemic were either useless or non-existent.

This raises a disturbing question: how reliable are the plans for other kinds of emergency that the government may one day face? If Britain’s response to the pandemic is any guide, the answer is not encouraging.

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Take the NHS, an organisation which even in the most normal of winters can still easily be overwhelmed. It is, to give it some credit, a system that has to cater to an ageing population. Still, almost as soon as the pandemic struck, the Government was forced to acknowledge that the NHS lacked the capacity to deal with Covid. So often a source of pride in Britain, it suddenly became symbolic of institutional malaise: a system that struggles during normality, and has no capacity to handle a national emergency.

There are lessons here not only for the UK but for all Western governments. Not a single country in the West, after all, can be said to have handled the pandemic well. The key question now is how well they will learn its lessons.

And this is where an analogy can be drawn with the way the US Government responded to the 9/11 catastrophe. In the wake of the devastating terror attack, a 9/11 Commission was set up — and, although there was controversy surrounding its makeup and the lengthy nature of its hearings, it ultimately produced an accurate and useful report on what had gone wrong.

It uncovered bureaucratic agencies with no shared goals; rivalries, distrust and turf-wars; a chronic failure to share information — in short, a dysfunctional and bloated bureaucracy. Sound familiar?

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Yet the administration of George W. Bush decided to add to the bureaucratic tangle by creating a brand-new institution, the Department of Homeland Security. It is far from clear whether this innovation has been a success. The subsequent lack of terrorist attacks on the same scale as 9/11 may testify to its effectiveness — although one might think that’s a low bar.

Perhaps the bigger mistake the Bush administration made after 9/11 was to think that occupying Afghanistan and Iraq would be effective counter-terrorism measures. These moves formed part of a broader “War on Terror”; a clear threat was identified and a solution, regardless of whether it was the right one, was settled on. But was it proof that the lessons of 9/11 were heeded? The rise of Isis, just thirteen years later, sadly suggests not.

Similarly, another parallel can be drawn with current debate over the origins of Covid-19. Following 9/11, the US and its allies in the West failed to thoroughly understand and develop a plan for countering radical Islam. There was never an urge of to tackle the root cause of Islamism: dawa — the propagation of radical Islamist ideology.

Just as efforts to determine the origins of Covid-19 have been stymied, to this day Homeland Security is still not paying enough attention to dawa, which, to me, has taken the form of a dormant virus. No doubt it will rear its ugly head in the near future, and while we have no excuse not to be prepared, I fear we will be surprised yet again.

Will we continue down a similar path following the pandemic? Will Britain succeed where America failed? It depends, of course, on what comes next. Cummings, to his credit, has said that “there is absolutely no excuse for delaying” a full-scale inquiry into the Covid debacle. Whether or not Boris Johnson takes notice remains unclear.

But what we do know is this: if, twenty years from now, we can look back on two decades without a comparable public health disaster, it will be because we bothered to treat the British response to Covid not as political soap opera but as a case study in public administration. Crafting a dependable plan may not sound like a vote-winner, but it is the only way that Britain, as well as the West, can expect to survive its 9/11 moment.

Britain being a northwest European kingdom with a very different demographic and historical context to that of the US, the political effects of this were not what our local imitators of American fashions intended, a fact alluded to by the Labour frontbencher Khalid Mahmood when he deplored the loss of Hartlepool with the observation that “the loudest voices in the Labour movement over the past year in particular have focused more on pulling down Churchill’s statue than they have on helping people pull themselves up in the world”. 

No wonder, then, that Sadiq Khan, like an arsonist complaining about the growing prevalence of fires in public life, pleaded after his unexpectedly slender victory in London’s mayoral race for an end to the culture war. By making history a political battleground in a fundamentally conservative country more obsessed with its past than any other nation in Western Europe, our America-aping intelligentsia have unwittingly handed the government a ready and easy source of endless political victories. 

Like other divided polities — think of Northern Ireland — we have entered the realm of symbolic politics, where historical memory looms large and where the state possesses a clear advantage. Observe how our newly-Gramscian Conservative government seems set on replacing museum staff to defend one narrative of the nation’s story from assault by another: this is more than an online  “culture war”. Instead, the British state, perceiving a threat to its legitimacy at a time of existential political disorder, is acting as any state would act: by culling challengers to its authority and reasserting the moral validity of its existence.

Yet underlying this war over historical memory, on both sides, is a simplistic understanding of what history actually is. On the one hand, the statue-topplers argue that they are uncovering the dark objective realities of Britain’s colonial or slave-trading past from within an obscuring shroud of national myth-making. On the other, the Government and its supporters assert that they are defending the truth of our island story from the nihilistic and destructive myth-making of race-obsessed radicals. 

Both are right, and both are wrong. All history has a mythic quality, as observed by Foucault in his 1976 lectures at the Collège de France when he noted that “we can understand the discourse of the historian to be a sort of ceremony, oral or written, that must in reality produce both a justification of power and a reinforcement of power… Like rituals, coronations, funerals, ceremonies and legendary stories, history is an operator of power, an intensifier of power.” What we are observing then, though still only dimly appreciated, is a battle over political power, in which Britain’s history is both the weapon and the field of contest.

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To understand this interpretation of the historian’s art — for art is what it is — we should turn to the work of the recently-deceased American historian Hayden White. In his 1973 work Metahistory, and later in the essays collected in the 1978 Tropics of Discourse, White took aim at the folk understanding of history as a simple record of events that happened in the past. Using his specialisation in medieval literature, White drew a contrast between the chronicle — a simple, chronological record of events more or less devoid of interpretation — with the historical narrative, encompassing history as we understand it, which is precisely how it sounds: a narrative, a literary construction which assembles an inherently moralising story or myth from the raw data of historical events, a process he termed emplotment.

As White observes: “The historian arranges the events in the chronicle into a hierarchy of significance by assigning events different functions as story elements in such a way as to disclose the formal coherence of a whole set of events considered as a comprehensible process with a discernible beginning, middle, and end.”

As a literary construct — a product of the personal aesthetic judgment and moral worldview of the subset of writers we term historians —and through the conscious or unconscious selection of raw events into an overarching narrative, “history” is  revealed as a literary genre analogous to fiction, which is not to say it is not “true.” As White suggests, historical narratives “succeed in endowing sets of past events with meanings,” as the tropes of fiction unconsciously shape the historian’s art when he sets down to write. The historical narratives he produces follow the form of these fictional narratives — indeed, they depend on them to work.

How does this apply, in practice, to our national culture war? White, deconstructing 19th century historiographies of the French Revolution, distinguishes between a politically “radical” understanding of history as analogous to the Romance, and a more or less conservative one drawing on the tropes of Tragedy. In the first understanding, which characterises the “woke” narrative of Britain’s urgent need to transcend a dark and morally disfigured past, history-as-Romance is “the sort of drama associated with the Grail legend or the story of the resurrection of Christ in Christian mythology. It is a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall.”

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By Aris Roussinos

In the conservative, tragic reading of history, by contrast, the historian is concerned with “the resignations of men to the conditions under which they must labor in the world… man cannot change them but must work within them. They set the limits on what may be aspired to and what may be legitimately aimed at” in an imperfect world of frail and fallible human beings.

In the former worldview, the past is a world of torment and oppression which must be erased in the construction of an imminent Utopia; in the latter, the past, though perhaps morally imperfect, simply reflects the bounds of human nature. Man is what he is, and the construction of Utopias is as dangerous as it is fruitless: all we can do is build upon our shared inheritance from the past. We can see this dynamic play out in the United States with the New York Times’s construction of the mythic “1619” narrative centred on America’s essential, founding sin of slavery in opposition to the previously dominant “1776” narrative of America as a promised land of liberty and moral renewal. Neither is true, exactly, just as neither is false: they are merely opposing narratives constructed from the same raw data in pursuit of opposing political projects, differing in emphasis, narrative style and moral worldview. All history is, in this reading, a moral fable about the present.

Viewed in this way, there is a liberating quality to this understanding of history. White claims in The Historical Text as Literary Artefact (1976) that “if historians were to recognise the fic­tive element in their narratives, this would not mean the degradation of historiography to the status of ideology or propaganda” but instead “would serve as a potent antidote to the tendency of historians to become captive of ideological preconceptions which they do not recognise as such but honour as the “correct” perception of “the way things really are.” Through this self-awareness, “we should be able to identify the ideological, because it is the fictive, element in our own discourse” just as “we are always able to see the fictive element in those historians with whose interpretations of a given set of events we disagree; we seldom perceive that element in our own prose.” Thus armed with self-awareness, he argues, the contentious work of History can proceed with a greater, more productive detachment. 

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It's the Queen or tyranny

By Mary Harrington

Let’s consider this point further: “we are always able to see the fictive element in those historians with whose interpretations of a given set of events we disagree.” When we apply this insight, as conservatives of one kind or another, to such masterpieces of the modern historian’s craft as “52 Times Britain Was A Bellend,” or to the crop of Twitter academics who pronounce to the world with the now-customary appeal to authority of “Hi, Historian Here!” that actually St George was Turkish or that one or other government pronouncement is just like fascism in the 1930s or that actually Anglo-Saxon England was a multiracial utopia, we are freed from the need to engage these fantasies as historical truths but instead as political statements, new narratives or myths constructed as part of a political project centred on the present. 

It is not worthwhile to state that these claims are not true in a meaningful sense, because they are not meant to be. These are not “truthful” claims about what Britain was but modest literary fictions, political demands about what Britain should be now or in the future citing a mythicised past as a claim to authority.

The purest essence of this trend is the backwards projection of the tropes of late-stage liberalism through all time and space; though it sees itself as an urgent defence against nationalism , through constructing a mythicised past in pursuit of a present day, contested political project, such a worldview is nationalism’s child, not its negation. Indeed, anyone who has studied the starring role of history in the construction of nationalist projects will recognise the ironic parallels: like the classic nationalism of Europe’s 19th century, the anti-national cosmopolitanism of the modern Historian Here is a construct of liberal journalists, academics and schoolteachers, aiming to transcend what they see as a restrictive and oppressive near-past in pursuit of a glorious future, itself prefigured and justified by an idealised distant past. 

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Is it the Tories who are doomed?

By Ed West

For any modern European, ultimately, there is therefore no escaping the tropes of nationalism and the nation-state, even if the aim is to overthrow them: they shape our worldview just as the world of throne and altar shaped that of the medieval mind. Aiming to surpass nationalism, the 21st century cosmopolitan liberal, like the FBPE activist turned-EU nationalist, finds himself reproducing its tropes, entirely unconsciously: whether furiously hunting through ancient bones to find continuity with modern migrant populations like the Ahnenerbe hunting for Germanic ancestors in the steppes of Eastern Europe, or constructing modern political mythologies on the slender records of the dim and distant past.

Returning to the culture war over statues, the adoption of America’s new racialised mythic narrative came at a politically infelicitous time for its partisans, as Labour is now discovering. The British state is threatened by rival peripheral nationalisms, in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and it is not hard to discern the first glimmerings of a British nationalism in a manner that has never yet quite existed. Sturdily independent of foreign rule then distracted by imperial concerns, Britain never experienced the nationalist wave that swept the rest of our home continent in the 19th century — even the high jingoism of the Victorian era spent itself on preventing Russia’s conquest of the Ottoman Empire, rather than focusing on domestic rivals. 

In the nascent British nationalism being forged as a reaction to both separatism and the still-contested relationship with the European Union, many parallels with the classic nationalisms of 19th century Europe can be discerned. Instead of dismissing devolution as merely a failed constitutional experiment, we can perceive an almost irredentist quality, aiming to reunite a unitary people divided by artificial borders. The nationalisms of the periphery have thus birthed a new nationalism of the centre, and the consequent construction of a single British people defined against internal and external rivals in a way that we have never yet quite experienced.

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Why nationalism matters

By Ed West

If this is the case, then as in other nations experiencing a nationalist wave we can expect symbolism and history to become the central matter of politics, in a way that hands great advantage to our current Conservative government. The new politicisation of history is just a taste of what is coming our way. The British state, in Tory hands, will find itself engaged in a war of historical narratives to ensure its own survival. All the affective tools of nationalism and nationhood — the symbolic politics that is the very stuff of nationalism — will be employed to this purpose. The funeral of Prince Philip, a sombre festival of Britishness, was merely an early glimpse of this symbolic realm: we can expect the Queen’s funeral, whenever it comes, and the coronation that follows it, to be profoundly political and fundamentally nationalist spectacles aimed at shoring up the state and the self-identification with it of the British people. 

In this, ironically, we can argue that the government will be more postmodernist than the alleged postmodernist deconstructors of British history: where our soi-disant radicals see themselves as uncovering an objective reality from within the myths of British nationhood, the government will have the need and capacity to construct new-old national myths with all the resources of the state behind it. As others have noted, a postmodernist worldview, whether adopted cynically, or playfully, could be productive territory for a Right-wing political project. We are all postmodernists now, the government as much as its critics: each has the power and will to consciously create mythic narratives for nakedly political ends, yet only one controls the levers of the central state.

Dismissing this dynamic as mere “flag-shagging” is a dangerous trap for Labour — nationalism remains the most powerful political force in Europe, as it has been since the dawn of modernity — still powerful enough, indeed, to break up our country from around us. Once historical narratives, and the emotional bonds of nationhood and solidarity they conjure up, become the central ground of politics, the realm of myth and symbol conquers all. If Labour wants to win power again, it will need to think up better stories for the country to gather around.

Of course, such candour has its advantages. But not in frontline politics — where, for good or ill, a different set of skills is needed to make allies and get things done.

And so it was hardly surprising that Mercer was unceremoniously sacked this week, after expressing anger at the Government’s failure to keep its promise to protect veterans of the British Armed Forces from facing prosecution for historic offences. Next week, two unnamed veterans will go on trial in Belfast for the 1972 murder of an IRA commander — the first time that British soldiers will be prosecuted for the alleged killing of an IRA terrorist.

Mercer was understandably frustrated; the Government had previously pledged that such a prosecution would never occur. Few sacked politicians can say they were dismissed for taking a stand on an important issue. Mercer, in that respect, is the exception.

For ultimately, it would have been far easier for Mercer to have taken the easy way out and turn a blind eye to the trial. The issue of historic prosecutions is an ethical and political nightmare, one which is very easy to put off — as successive governments have demonstrated.

Even when such investigations do take place, they tend to be far from fruitful. Take, for example, the probe into the killings in Londonderry in 1972 that became known as Bloody Sunday, when 13 people were killed. It gave rise to the longest and costliest inquiry in British legal history.

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The Saville Inquiry published its findings in 2010 — a full 12 years after it was established — and found that a number of the soldiers present on the day fired in a way that was “unjustified and unjustifiable”. And yet, for the soldiers who took part, the Saville inquiry was of little utility. They were granted legal immunity from future prosecution so long as they told the truth. But a number of the soldiers — most notably the man known as Soldier F — perjured themselves in their attempts to whitewash their actions, thus leaving themselves open for future prosecution.

Not that anyone was in any hurry to do so. After Lord Saville’s report was published, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) announced that it would begin a murder investigation into the killings. And there was a distinct sense of foot-dragging around the matter.

The PSNI announced that it would have to begin its investigations as though they were starting from scratch, implying that the incomparably detailed Saville report had no worth. It took almost a decade for them to decide to only prosecute one of the soldiers — Soldier F — for his actions on the day. Even now Soldier F only faces prosecution for two of the deaths he was most likely responsible for — much to the horror of the families of other victims, who are believed to have been killed by Soldier F.

Today, discussion surrounding Soldier F’s prosecution tends to be strikingly reductive: either wholeheartedly in support of the prosecution or in defence of the veteran.

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By Charles Townshend

And on the face of it, it seems like a straightforward decision to make. Having watched Soldier F testify in 2003 — and written a book on the matter — I can say with certainty that he is a liar. He pretends to have no memory of what happened on that day because he knows that what he did was indefensible; he disgraced not just his regiment but his country. In any normal situation, it would be impossible to justify not prosecuting him.

But the situation in Northern Ireland is not normal — not least because prosecutions there have become a very one-sided affair. In order to secure the current peace arrangements, it was necessary to take decisions that would ordinarily be unconscionable. Most notably, the British government, led by Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell, carried out secret side-deals with the IRA and its political wing Sinn Fein as part of the Good Friday Agreement. These included the assurance to unconvicted terrorists who were “on the run” that they would not be prosecuted for their historic crimes.

Blair and Campbell kept the existence of these letters classified, knowing full well that the British public would not be able to stomach them. Indeed, these “get out of jail free” letters remained such a secret that when John Downey was prosecuted in 2014 for his participation in the IRA’s 1982 Hyde Park Bombing, the trial collapsed when the defence produced the assurances secretly given to Downey by the British government.

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By Angela Nagle

Downey was as responsible for the Hyde Park Bombing as Soldier F was for Bloody Sunday — yet it is only one of these men who faces prosecution. And as a result, many believe there is a double-standard at play here: why should Soldier F face the possibility of being charged one day when a number of the terrorists Britain was fighting are able to walk free?

Certainly it’s a legitimate concern. But is this double-standard not defensible? After all, Downey was a member of a proscribed terrorist organisation, while Soldier F was a serving representative of the state. Surely a soldier must be held to a higher standard than a terrorist?

For the most part, that claim has a certain appeal, and if it were the case that the army still has lessons to learn from Bloody Sunday and its aftermath, then it might be more applicable. But it is almost fifty years since Bloody Sunday happened, and the inquiries into it — in particular the Saville Inquiry — have already established the many lessons that should have been learned. There has even been a Prime Ministerial apology for the actions of British soldiers on the day. What more is there to achieve?

Mercer, then, was right to condemn the Government for failing on its promise not to allow former servicemen to appear in court. But now that he is on the backbenches, perhaps he can put forward a more subtle argument that needs making.

For ultimately, even in the case of Soldier F, there is little need to condone or defend the historical actions of the few rogue British troops in Northern Ireland. That doesn’t mean whitewashing Soldier F for his crimes, any more than it means whitewashing Downey for his.

But either both men are in court or neither is. Make that case, and it’s up to Sinn Fein and their supporters to make the next move.

But if you’re a scout, you’re trying to find out what’s really there. You might hope that there is a conveniently placed bridge across a river, or that your enemy’s supply lines are vulnerable; but your job is to establish whether that’s true or not. When you look at purported facts, you want to determine how true they are, not simply how useful. 

I was thinking about this when I read a story in the Guardian last week saying that British schools are “institutionally racist”, based on their own examination of the data around exclusions. The story said that the fixed-term exclusion rate for black Caribbean pupils — that is, the rate at which they are kept off school for a given period — was five times higher than that of white children in some areas. Roma Gypsy and Irish Traveller pupils were excluded at an even higher rate.

An accompanying analysis linked this to “racial micro-aggressions” and “racial micro-invalidation”, such as young black people being censured for wearing “inappropriate” haircuts; the implication being that the problem was that teachers were racist, intentionally or otherwise, towards their pupils.

This is a fraught topic. It is obviously deeply worrying if black Caribbean pupils are being excluded at high rates. But I am extremely hesitant about assuming this is an uncomplicated story of racist teachers (or institutionally racist schools), because I think there has to be a lot more going on here. I think this is a case of looking for arguments that support your position, not one of going out and trying to find out the actual facts as objectively as possible. I can understand why the Guardian might do this, because racism really is terrible, and calling attention to it feels sensible. But they’ve flattened a complex problem into a simplistic narrative.

Here’s what I mean. First: the Guardian has been really shoddy in its reporting of the data. 

For instance, they say that the exclusion rates for black Caribbean boys “are up to six times higher than those of their white peers in some local authorities”. Which is true. But there are 343 local authorities in England. They will have very different ethnic breakdowns and will vary in all sorts of ways just by chance. The Guardian story sort of acknowledges this – Cambridgeshire, the worst-affected area, has “a relatively small number” of Caribbean students, they say, so the data isn’t trustworthy. 

But even if black and white children were excluded at exactly the same rate nationally, you might expect to see some quite large differentials at local level, just by chance. Cherry-picking the worst areas, unless you have some underlying reason to think that they really do have a worse-than-average problem with racism, is bad practice.

If you look at England as a whole (the data is here), the problem doesn’t go away, but it does become  much smaller – there are about 10 exclusions per 100 black Caribbean children per year, as opposed to about six for white British children. (Note that that’s not quite the same as saying “About 10% of black Caribbean children are excluded”, because some children are excluded more than once.) Still, you might say, that’s hardly a negligible problem, if black Caribbean kids are excluded 60% more often than white ones. But the data is not the only issue with the reporting. 

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The story makes, as far as I can see, absolutely no effort to check whether there might be any confounding variables. It sees that black Caribbean children are excluded at higher rates, and assumes that the one causes the other directly. By analogy: famously, ice-cream sales and drownings tend to go up and down on the same days. Do ice creams make you drown? Probably not — more likely, it’s that hot weather makes people buy ice creams, and also makes them go swimming (and then drown). The weather is a confounding variable which influences both ice-cream sales and drownings, and makes them look as though they are connected. But when you control for the weather, they’re not.

Is there any possible factor that might be connected to both school exclusions and ethnicity, and which might make them look as though they are more correlated than they are? An obvious one might be poverty: it could easily be that poorer children are more likely to be excluded, for any number of reasons, and that black and ethnic minority children are more likely to be poor.

You could, for instance, look at how many children in each ethnic group are eligible for free school meals (FSMs), and see whether, when you control for that, you still see the link between ethnicity and exclusions. 

Annoyingly, the Department for Education’s website doesn’t let you break the data down by ethnic group and FSM eligibility[1.  I’ve emailed them asking for it broken down like that, and they say they can provide it, but only if I submit an FOI request and wait for four weeks! Which is really very annoying. I’ll do it anyway and then update this piece if it changes anything.]. But the sainted Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of statistics at the Open University, helped me find a rough-and-ready workaround. We found an FOI release of data showing free school meals by ethnicity at each educational key stage — from 2017, which isn’t ideal since the DfE data is 2018/19, but hopefully it’s close enough. We took a crude average across the stages for each ethnic group.

Then we looked at exclusions by FSM eligibility for English pupils as a whole. The exclusion rate for children on FSMs is a little under 14%, and for those not on FSMs it’s a little under 4%. 

This is a non-trivial piece of work which we shouldn’t have had to do. The Guardian should have. It is the most basic and obvious piece of data-checking imaginable, and the fact that they didn’t do it makes me think that they settled on their chosen explanation long before the facts came in.

As it happens when you control for FSMs, it doesn’t make all that much difference. But they were only right by accident.

On this chart, the rate of fixed-term exclusions is on the X (horizontal) axis, and the rate of exclusions after controlling for FSM eligibility is on the Y (vertical) axis. If a point falls below the diagonal line, it means that poverty is “causing” some of the link between that ethnicity and exclusions, and controlling for it makes it go away somewhat. If a point falls above the line, then that suggests that the ethnic group is actually doing worse, by comparison to its poverty level, than its headline numbers.

Most of the dots are pretty close to the line, suggesting that the overall picture is not all that different from the one painted by the Guardian’s data:

But this is important. I read that Guardian story and thought “hang on: they haven’t controlled for poverty. Might that be what’s going on here?” And then I checked, and it doesn’t look like it is, so I’ve included it. I tested my own theory and showed the results. If you’re actually trying to work out why something is happening, that’s what you need to do, not just say “Look, A and B are correlated! Therefore A causes B, no further questions. Ice cream definitely causes drownings.”

It’s also worth having a closer look at that graph. As the Guardian said, black Caribbean children are excluded at a higher rate than white children, and Roma and Irish Traveller children at an even higher one. (In the case of Irish Travellers, that seems to be related to poverty, but the numbers of Traveller children are tiny, so we can’t have much confidence in it.)

There’s something worth noting, though. The hard blue lines are the national average. Black Caribbean children are well above it. But black African children are somewhat below, and Indian, Chinese, Bangladeshi, Pakistani children are hugely below. If British schools are institutionally racist, then it’s a really laser-targeted racism, which discriminates against the kids of Trinidadian descent but actively encourages the ones of Ghanaian heritage. 

Also, white children are excluded at above the national average – a white child is about 50% more likely to be excluded than a child of black African heritage, and about three times as likely as one of Indian heritage – and they do worse than their poverty levels would predict. When you look at overall educational performance, you see a similar pattern: white and black Caribbean children do badly, when you control for FSM eligibility. Black African children, and Asian children, consistently do better than average.

No doubt there are many problems with racism in British schools. But I don’t buy the idea that the differences in exclusion are driven by it; either that racism is bizarrely specific, or whatever is behind this problem is upstream of schooling. 

You could easily come up with some alternative hypotheses. For instance, someone pointed out to me by email that Roma and Irish Traveller children have by far the highest rate of absenteeism, more than double the next highest group, perhaps because their tight-knit communities do not place very high value on school-learning provided by the state. You could also tell a plausible story about black Caribbeans feeling that the British state has not traditionally been on their side, and that making them place less value on state institutions such as schools.

I don’t know how it fits with the problem with white British children, or why Asians and black Africans have such a different response, but each group has very different histories and therefore different cultures and attitudes.

But if you want to say that schools are institutionally racist – that there is something, whether explicit racial attitudes among teachers or some structural problem with the education system that harms black Caribbean children – then you have to do a better job than simply pointing to some data that on the surface tells a convenient story, not interrogating it at all, and moving on. It’s not as if there aren’t much more clear-cut examples of racism in the world; you shouldn’t need to point to ambiguous-at-best situations like this and call them racism to bolster your argument.

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How racist is Britain?

By Tom Chivers

This isn’t the only example in recent days. Another Guardian story found that 60,000 “racist incidents” were recorded in UK schools in the last five years, but made no effort to help us understand if that was a big number or not; how many schools are there? How many pupils? (There are about 24,000 schools in the UK, teaching about nine million pupils; that doesn’t make the numbers OK, but it’s vital context.) The New Statesman ran a piece about excess deaths going up in the UK even before the pandemic, blaming it on austerity; but forgot to control for the growing and ageing population, which muddied the story somewhat.

This all makes sense if you see the public sphere as a battleground, if you see debate as war and arguments as soldiers: and perhaps that is a sensible attitude to have. Perhaps if you want to get things done, to defeat racism or win elections or any such goal, perhaps you need to have the mindset that sees inconvenient complexity as something to be destroyed.

But I would rather people tried to think a bit more like scouts, to ask where data comes from and whether it means what you think it means. And if you do find out what’s really true — where that bridge is, how the enemy’s troops are arrayed — you can fight against it all the more effectively.

Over the past year, his unabashed criticism of lockdown policies has turned him into something of a renegade. It is a development that mystifies him; as he sees it, his views have always been mainstream liberal, and it is the world around that has changed.

In the course of our conversation, the retired judge doesn’t hold back. He asserts that it is becoming morally acceptable to ignore Covid regulations, and even warns that a campaign of “civil disobedience” has already begun.

You can read what he really thinks below. And watch our interaction on Lockdown TV — it was a fascinating conversation.

Podcast version:

On civil disobedience:

“Sometimes the most public spirited thing that you can do with despotic laws like these is to ignore them. I think that if the government persists long enough with locking people down, depending on the severity of the lockdown, civil disobedience is likely to be the result. It will be discrete civil disobedience in the classic English way — I don’t think that we are likely to go onto the streets waving banners. I think we will just calmly decide that we are not going to pay any attention to this. There are some things you have to pay attention to: you can’t go to a shop if it’s closed. On the other hand, you can invite friends round for a drink, whatever Mr Hancock says. People are doing that to some extent already.

“Everyone will have their own different threshold. But I think that in the eyes of many people who disapprove of the lockdown, and some people who approve of it, we’ve reached that point quite a long time ago.”

On the ethics of law-breaking:

“I feel sad that we have the kind of laws which public-spirited people may need to break. I have always taken a line on this, which is probably different from that of most of my former colleagues. I do not believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law… You have to have a high degree of respect, both for the object that the law is trying to achieve, and for the way that it’s been achieved. Some laws invite breach. I think this is one of them.”

On sacrificing civil liberties:

“[Thomas] Hobbes believed in the absolute state — it didn’t have to be a monarchy, but it had to be absolute. He said that there was nothing short of the state actually killing people that the state should not be entitled to do. He was not, let us say, a believer in liberty. This is because of his experience of the anarchy which flowed from the civil war in England. Hobbes believed that we resign our freedoms unconditionally and permanently into the hands of the state, in return for security. Now, this is a model which ever since the rise of a recognisable form of modern Liberalism in the middle of the 19th century, has been almost universally rejected. But we have tended to revert to it during the current crisis. And I think that that is a very striking and very sinister development.

On the dangers of public fear:

“John Stuart Mill regarded public sentiment and public fear as the principal threat to a liberal democracy. The tendency would be for it to influence policies in a way that whittles away the island within which we are entitled to control our lives to next to nothing. That’s what he regarded as the big danger. It didn’t happen in his own lifetime; it has happened in many countries in the 20th century, and it’s happening in Britain now.”

On the fragility of democracy:

“Democracy is inherently fragile. We have an idea that it’s a very robust system. But democracies have existed for about 150 years. In this country, I think you could say that they existed from the second half of the of the 19th century — they are not the norm. Democracies were regarded in ancient times as inherently self-destructive ways of government. Because, said Aristotle, democracies naturally turn themselves into tyranny. Because the populace will always be a sucker for a demagogue who will turn himself into an absolute ruler…

“Now, it is quite remarkable that Aristotle’s gloomy predictions about the fate of democracies have been falsified by the experience of the West ever since the beginning of democracy. And I think one needs to ask why that is. In my view, the reason is this: Aristotle was basically right about the tendencies, but we have managed to avoid it by a shared political culture of restraint. And this culture of restraint, which because it depends on the collective mentality of our societies, is extremely fragile, quite easy to destroy and extremely difficult to recreate.”

On being a liberal:

“I regard myself as a liberal with a small L. Until the Covid outbreak, that was a very middle of the road position to be in. Since the outbreak, it’s become controversial, even in some people’s minds extreme. This is, I think, some indication of how far our national conversation has moved.”

On what the Government should learn:

“My first proposal is that governments should not treat information as a tool for manipulating public behaviour. They should be calmer than the majority of their citizens; they should be completely objective. My second lesson would be that governments dealing with scientific issues should not allow themselves to be influenced by a single caucus of scientists. They should always test what they are being told in a way that, for instance, judges test expert opinion by producing a counter expert, and working out which set of views stacks up best.”

On his critics:

“I would very much have preferred the kind of points that I have been consistently making for the last year to have been made by just about anybody else. Those colleagues or former colleagues who disapprove of what I’ve been doing have got a perfectly good point. But there are some issues which are so central to the dilemmas of our time, which are so important, where I think that you have to be prepared to stand up and be counted.

Hence the drama of the post-election reshuffle, back in February. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, was told to sack his advisors and make room for a team of Downing Street heavies. Honourably, he refused — and so he was forced out too.

The message was unambiguous: the whole Cabinet, from the Chancellor down, would have to submit to central control — or else. Henceforth, the relationship between Number 10 and every minister, no matter how senior, would be modelled on that between Matthew Corbett and Sooty.

And yet the puppet show has not gone to plan.

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Why Boris needs an heir apparent

By Peter Franklin

Last month, the chief puppeteer — Dominic Cummings — lost the battle for Downing Street. While he’d eliminated all resistance in the Cabinet room, he hadn’t accounted for the upstairs flat. Big mistake.

And then there’s the Prime Minister himself — who these days looks like a ghost at his own feast. All leaders fade away eventually, but the pace of events has accelerated his career trajectory. To sink from conquering hero to yesterday’s man in a space of a year is going some.

Finally, and most tellingly, there are the puppets. The supposedly synchronised Cabinet is all over the place. Their individual performances range from stellar to abysmal. So, as it turns out, who you appoint to the top jobs still matters, no matter how centralised your style of government. Eight examples prove the point:

1. Rishi Sunak

Two years ago, Rishi Sunak was the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Local Government — just about the most junior of junior ministers. Now, he’s Chancellor of the Exchequer and the favourite to succeed his boss. There was never any doubting his potential, but he owes his meteoric rise to Boris Johnson’s model of government.

It’s an age-old trick: ensure loyalty by promoting those who haven’t earned it. Appointees are indebted to their patrons; and the principle of ‘easy come, easy go’ means it’s straightforward to dispense with them. Look down the list of Secretaries of State and you’ll find one example after another.

With Sunak, however, the cipher turned out to be a star. Which is just as well, given events. As a competent manager and reassuring communicator, he’s implemented crisis socialism without freaking out the markets, the public or his own party.

We’ve also seen some hints of creativity. He’ll need more, though, because you can’t recover from an unprecedented crisis without new ideas. His proposal for a National Infrastructure Bank is a key test. If it can raise and lend money like a real bank (instead of just being glorified government fund), we might just be able to ‘build back better’.

2. Dominic Raab

The idea of a politician ‘rising without trace’ has become a cliché, but it’s a fitting description of Raab’s CV. As Foreign Secretary (and, before that, Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union), Brexit should have been the making or breaking of him. But Brexit policy consists of two kinds of decision — the really big ones made by the Prime Minister and the excruciatingly fine detail handled by the negotiating team. There’s nothing much in between for the Cabinet minister.

The fact is that Raab is in the wrong job — appointed to the FCO not for what he can do, but for what he represents (i.e. the Eurosceptic Right of his party). For the Cabinet’s tough guy it’s a mismatch — like putting Chuck Norris in charge of a Swiss finishing school. Raab needs a big spending department to run; and though that would technically be a demotion, it would be the best thing that could happen to him.

3. Priti Patel

The Home Secretary was also appointed to make a point. A hardliner on both Brexit and immigration, her elevation from the backbenches to one of the great offices of state was a clear signal of the government’s intention to get Brexit done and control our borders.

Of course, she was only on the backbenches because she’d resigned from the Cabinet in 2017 after unauthorised meetings with the Israeli government came to light. Few people expected her to return to office so soon, or indeed at all; but salvaging a capsized career is another way in which Downing Street can ensure the loyalty of its appointees.

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Every Home Secretary must fight the Home Office

By Stephen Pollard

Since her return, Patel has again fallen foul of the ministerial code — this time in regard to bullying allegations. Despite the official enquiry into the matter, she escaped unscathed. Two things protected her: first, the self-defeating nastiness of the Left — which loves to target women and people of colour who dare to have the ‘wrong’ opinions; and, second, the fact that Patel, despite her obvious limitations, is stubbornly pushing forward on the immigration reforms that were promised in the Conservative manifesto.

Of course, it’s one thing to tighten border control in theory, another to maintain it in practice. As with all Home Secretaries, Patel’s fate ultimately depends on upholding the law as it stands.

4. Matt Hancock

The Secretary of State for Health gives every impression of being another rapid riser. In fact, he had five years in junior ministerial roles before making it to Cabinet — which is an eternity these days. This year, he’s had to draw on every scrap of his experience.

It’s unclear how Hancock will be judged by history (and the inevitable public enquiries) — because the record is so mixed. Will he be remembered for the various test-and-trace fiascos or the triumphs of vaccine policy? How does one balance the failure to protect our care homes from Covid with the fact that the NHS has not been overwhelmed by the greatest challenge in its history?

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Matt Hancock is wrong about herd immunity

By Sunetra Gupta

Secretary of State for Health and Social Care is a big job at the best of times. But in 2020 it grew too big for any one incumbent. A Government that understood the importance of ministers would have carved out special Covid-related roles at Cabinet level (a test-and-trace minister, for instance) — leaving the Health Secretary to focus exclusively on the core issues.

Churchill’s wartime Cabinet was reshaped around the demands of the war effort — and something similar should have happened in this war too.

5. Michael Gove

Michael Gove is by far the most experienced member of the Cabinet. Apart from a brief period of exile following the Brexit referendum, he’s been a senior figure since 2010 — serving three Prime Ministers.

Paradoxically, he’s survived for so long by embracing unpopularity. He’s the political equivalent of a sin-eater: the outcasts who were once paid to take on the sins of others through the consumption of a ritual meal. Of late, these meals have been substantial — with Gove sent out to defend the Government through its imperfect improvisations of lockdown policy.

Allied to his knowledge of the inner workings of the Whitehall machine, Gove has become indispensable. And yet his talents could be better deployed. He is, at heart, a radical — willing to pursue reform in the face of entrenched opposition. As soon as the Covid crisis is over, he should be put in charge of solving another problem that’s been left unsolved for the last decade or more: housing.

6. Robert Jenrick

This would be a good point at which to examine the record of the latest Secretary of State who hasn’t solved the housing crisis. Robert Jenrick is the sixth Cabinet minister in this role since 2010. Some have been real talents, others not so much, and none has been left in post long enough to sort out Britain’s single greatest structural problem.

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How to rescue Generation Rent

By Peter Franklin

Indeed, none has been allowed to state the obvious, which is that rampant house price inflation is a bad thing. If the Conservatives want to rescue Generation Rent and revive their vision of a property-owning democracy, then house prices must fall relative to wages.

A generic placeman such as Jenrick is incapable of true reform. His atrocious planning white paper maintains the fiction that the planning system is to blame for the housing crisis — instead of the land bankers. If Boris is serious about building back better then he needs to set Gove loose on the vested interests standing in the way.

7. Gavin Williamson

Oh dear, what can one say? Any politician capable of a media performance like this one has no business being a minister, let alone a Cabinet minister.

In any case, Williamson is unlikely to survive the next reshuffle — not after the results debacle earlier this year. He wasn’t to blame for the closure of schools during lockdown and the cancellation of exams. However, he did oversee the grade allocation algorithm that caused such upset and fury.

His department made the classic mistake of targeting one objective — i.e. the prevention of grade inflation — without considering the wider ramifications. In particular, the downward adjustment of grades based on the past performance not only of the pupil but also the school could not have been more contrary to the principle of levelling up. If you want to succeed as a government’s minister, then best not to drive a coach-and-horses through its domestic agenda.

Robert Jenrick’s housing target algorithm is a similar fiasco — and a further lesson in the foolishness of entrusting policy to mindless robots.

8. Liz Truss

Liz Truss isn’t exactly my kind of conservative. Her infamous tribute to a generation of “#Uber-riding #Airbnb-ing #Deliveroo-eating #freedomfighters” didn’t just make me cringe, but evoked a soul-crushing void.

But, fair’s fair, she’s done a decent job as Secretary of State for International Trade. It’s still early days, but to rebuild a long-abandoned function of sovereign government (i.e. trade diplomacy) is a painstaking task that she’s diligently got on with.

It remains to be seen what purpose this new capacity will be put to — especially when it comes to the looming trade deal with America. The fate of the British countryside hangs in the balance and I hope that Truss makes a stand for the things that matter more than the bottom line. You wouldn’t want to feed chlorine chicken to those Deliveroo-eating freedom fighters, would you Liz?

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By James Rebanks

Nevertheless, she’s had a good year. While she bombed at DEFRA and as Lord Chancellor, she’s undoubtedly found her niche. Which goes to show that getting the right people into Cabinet is only half the struggle. The other half is getting them into the right positions.

Perhaps Downing Street should stop appointing people to roles that they haven’t actually asked for. Instead they should invite applications from candidates who actually want to do each job. They’d thus be able to prepare for the position, think about what they want to do with it and then present their case to the appropriate decision-makers.

I know, it’s a crazy idea — but it seems to work for well-run organisations.

I understand that when you’re doing the most important job of your life, feelings run high. You can have more impact in a day in Number 10 than in decades in most jobs. So much is at stake that sometimes you have to go to the mattresses to get what you need. So there will be arguments. There will be anger. There will be rivalries. In a high-functioning organisation, those tensions are the grit in the oyster that helps to get the job done. But today’s Downing Street is all grit and no oyster.

This matters, as if we needed reminding, because there is work to be done. We are in the midst of a global pandemic and staring recession and large scale unemployment in the face. We are on the brink of Brexit, the biggest structural disruption to our trading relationships in generations. The longest political union in the world’s history, between England and Scotland, is fracturing before our eyes. And those are just the small problems.

Climate change. Our ageing population. Building solidarity between increasingly diverse citizens. Technology firms that stretch our understanding of the relationship between state and corporation. Global power shifting eastward… Every moment spent bitching about colleagues is a moment wasted.

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Will Covid kill our toxic work addiction?

By Polly Mackenzie

Downing Street should be a serious place. It should attract and retain serious people. I don’t care if the Prime Minister’s chief of staff once had a job as a chicken: everyone has to start their career somewhere. I care if he — or she — has a theory of change, an understanding of how they might make a difference in that job to the wall of policy problems we face. I expect them to be wise enough to understand what has been tried before, confident enough to try something new, but humble enough to learn from what others figured out first. All we get from the current crop is the arrogant assumption that their personal brilliance is enough to conquer all difficulties, an assumption made even more laughable by the fact that they can’t even get the person sitting at the next desk to like them.

Almost everyone in Number 10 at the moment is a campaigner at heart. There should always be campaigners in the Prime Minister’s office. People who are good at the game of politics. They are the people who keep the ship afloat. But they are not the people who choose the destination or the route. You also need a cadre of thinkers and deliverers, who will make the difference to what the government does, not just what the government says. Without them, politics is just a parlour game — and it is no wonder it descends into briefings, counter-briefings and subterfuge.

In her book, Why We Get The Wrong Politicians, Isabel Hardman argues there are systemic problems with candidate selection, and the way people get promoted to high office. The system is set up to choose and elevate people with a set of skills that isn’t actually what a modern democracy needs. I agree with every word she says. And there are similar systemic problems that mean we get the Wrong Political Advisers too. Fiona Hill, who served as Theresa May’s joint chief of staff, gave evidence this week to Parliament’s Public Administration Committee in which she admitted it was nearly impossible to persuade anyone good to go and work for the Prime Minister’s office when she was there.

We assume that Boris is just too tribal to offer a job to anyone outside the Vote Leave camp. But it’s also possible that no one else would take the job, given the conditions on which it would be offered. As a friend who considered a senior cabinet office role put it to me: “They’ve made it clear they don’t want to be helped, so what’s the point in expending any personal political capital on them?”

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Has Boris had a sickbed conversion?

By Tom Holland

We live in challenging times. We are told that millennials are queuing up to find jobs with purpose. So public service ought to be an attractive option for talented people who want to make a difference. But what do you get for giving up a few years of your life to the Downing Street machine? Mediocre pay. Terrible working conditions. The knowledge your boss — the PM — might quit or be ousted any moment. The constant fear that colleagues will be briefing the press about your mistakes, or leaking secrets of your personal life to undermine you.

One of my colleagues in Number 10 put his name to a briefing which happened to note that the age of consent was lower in some other countries. It explicitly ruled out lowering the age of consent in the UK. Nevertheless, a Conservative colleague leaked the briefing and my friend was named in the Daily Mail as little better than an advocate for paedophilia. Who would want to work in a toxic environment like that, where you can trust no one?

The very virtuous might put up with it out of duty and purpose. You ought to get a positive feedback loop: as the government demonstrates its impact, more and more people want to be part of it. Boris’ majority government could have switched us into this mode. Unfortunately, we are still stuck in the negative feedback loop that started under Mrs May. The worse the government is, the fewer good people want to get involved. Sacrifice my comfortable life to end homelessness? Maybe. Sacrifice it to spanner about, accomplishing nothing? No thanks.

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Are special advisers just gossiping grifters?

By Polly Mackenzie

So we end up with the Wrong Political Advisers — the ones with few options, less experience, and limited social skills — working for the Wrong Politicians. It’s hardly a surprise that government has been such a basket case for so long.

The news that Dominic Cummings is off does give Boris Johnson the chance to press the reset button. A Prime Minister with an agenda, and a commitment to delivering on it, ought to be able to attract talented people who want to keep their heads below the parapet and do the job. He simply needs to make Downing Street a healthy place to work. Recruit doers, not ranters. Build a culture of trust and compassion between colleagues. Make sure people go home on time, and see their family. Give them confidence their jobs will last for years, not weeks. Stop fighting and start getting things done.

My son was born with a rare chromosome disorder which renders him severely disabled and needing round-the-clock care. Our mundane everyday comprises uncontrolled life-threatening epilepsy, severe learning difficulties, autism, communication challenges (at 12 he remains entirely non-verbal), excessive hyperactivity, and complete dependency on the adults around him to keep him safe.

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve grown used to the cultural narrative surrounding disability in 2020 Britain. My son is frequently the subject of questions which leave me aghast: When are you going to put him in care? Does he go to school? What’s his life expectancy? Will he ever talk? Frustrating? Yes. Exhausting? Absolutely. But these questions represent something bigger than people’s one-off awkward foot-in-mouth moments. They’re reflective of a carefully constructed, economically-driven system in which people’s worth is reduced to what they are able to contribute on a purely fiscal level.

For almost a decade now the government has focused its efforts on reducing welfare; scrutinising the most vulnerable among us, it has systematically stripped back the support, and ultimately the dignity of those most in need of humanity. The mainstream media presence does nothing to challenge this, with disabled people portrayed through a lens of pity, at best, and demonisation, at worst.

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How my daughter disrupted my politics

By Ian Birrell

I have a son who teaches me humanity every day. He’s shown me how to love beyond what I knew was possible. He’s expanded my empathy and compassion. He’s given me skills in advocacy, and a fighting spirit to speak up for those who have no voice. Because of him, I am a better human. And yet the message from all sides is very clear. My boy is a drain on the system who, due to circumstances entirely beyond anyone’s control, is unable to contribute anything of any worth to society. He needs costly round the clock care, expensive daily medications to keep him alive, and let’s face it, he’s really rather lucky to be here at all.

Back to lockdown. Once the initial cacophony had settled into an urgent background buzz, a key theme emerged in the national conversation — education. Essentially paraphrased by Children must continue to learn, global apocalypse notwithstanding. Schools reacted quickly to the questions surrounding exams. Parents were sent timetables and expectations were communicated. Discussions ensued about getting work online, and ensuring young people were still able to make educational progress in spite of the national situation.

Great, right? Wrong. This response all pivoted around typical kids and mainstream provision, filtered through the blinding middle-class privilege that assumed average ability, regular curriculum, laptop access, supportive furloughed business parents, and stockpiles of basic necessities.

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Is the lockdown doing more harm than good?

By Tom Chivers

Priorities and policies reflect underpinning values. Those values form the building blocks of our human expression. Insipid bias and implicit ableist attitudes pervade the very pores of a society, seeping like water into the cracks we’d much prefer to pretend weren’t there. Except here’s the thing. Winter will inevitably come. And when it does, those cracks will be blown wide open, exposing the crumbling foundation of a culture premised on nothing more than the intangible promise of capitalist success. The coronavirus pandemic may well be our wintry reckoning. People talk about it being indiscriminate, that everyone is at equal risk and that we’re all in the same boat. I disagree. While we’re all undoubtedly weathering the same storm, some of us are cruising by in relative comfort on our superyachts, and others of us are frantically bailing water from last year’s perished dingy we found buried at the back of the shed.

For relative sanity and treading-water-level survival, our family is reliant on hands-on support from no less than 10 additional people every week, not to mention the background team of professionals waiting in the wings to address the constant scene changes of behaviour, epilepsy management, educational support… etc etc.

When lockdown struck, we lost all our support overnight. We were suddenly thrust into trying to manage a child with 24/7 constant care needs, homeschooling three girls in key year groups, and enabling the keyworker of the house to continue his job as part of the social care response to the pandemic. Let me reiterate. With all the support we were receiving prior to the coronavirus chaos, we were at treading-water-level survival. It was already hard. We were already exhausted. It was never enough anyway. But to have it all ripped from under us in an instant? Hellish.

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Who cares about carers?

By Mary Harrington

Let’s be clear on this. Children with disabilities and special educational needs are categorically some of the most vulnerable humans in the UK right now. My son is fully reliant on adults to meet all his needs, educational and otherwise. He attends a specialist provision and his curriculum is highly individualised to support basic life skill development. Reading and writing will likely never happen, but that in no way renders his education null and void.

The Government’s initial announcement that children with Education, Health and Care plans would continue to attend school proved nothing more than lip service. We have just entered the seventh week of no school provision: my son could not be safely managed in the school environment on a skeleton staff. It was made crystal clear from the start of lockdown that the school would not be open to him, regardless of the glaring irony that those needs and challenging behaviours constitute the very reason he should be prioritised for support, not pushed away.

All children with EHCPs have a significant level of need which in and of itself renders them more vulnerable than their typical peers. And yet, again, the children most in need are the children first sidelined in a crisis. The most recent move to nullify the very same documents that legally protect our children just stacks insult onto injury. The government have relaxed the legal mandates to provide the support outlined in EHCPs — local authorities have, in essence, been told to ‘just do your best’. Reasonable endeavours.

Now, I’m a pragmatic person. I understand providing the exact support to every child in the current socially-distanced dystopia is nigh-on impossible. But when you start reducing the solid legality to vague ambiguity, it only serves to pull at the seams of an already unravelling society.

Humanity matters. Our children matter. The richness and complexity of humanity cannot be reduced to a figure per capita. We see our true selves in those times where the world is momentarily shaken up and broken; where the contrived order evaporates and we are stripped back to bare souls. Resist the idea that economy and financial viability have to come first. Value people for people and the inherent intrinsic worth that comes with being human. Our children matter. Humanity matters.

The assumptions behind the epidemiology. The timing of the lockdown. Test and trace. The question of masks. The medical preparations. The economic rescue plan. You name it, the policy is probably way off.

But in what direction, I couldn’t tell you. Nor can anyone else — yet. It’s called the novel coronavirus for a reason. We’ve never faced a disease quite like it before. We’ve never shut down the economy before. This is uncharted territory and every government in the world is blundering about trying to find a way through.

So how much blame does our government deserve for the mistakes that it has made, is making and will make?

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Which epidemiologist do you believe?

By Freddie Sayers

I hope that one day we’ll have the luxury of looking back on all of this as a historical event, not an evolving crisis. We’ll then have the time and space for royal commissions, public inquiries and all the rest of it. No doubt the 20:20 hindsight brigade will be out in force. So will the vulture press, picking over the bones — and looking for fresh meat too. Heads will be called for and, I fear, sacrifices offered up. My hope, however, is that we’ll be less interested in the what, when and who of the mistakes, and more interested in the why.

Where the explanation is one of incomplete information and limited options we need to be forgiving — always asking ourselves if we would have done any better in the same circumstances. I also suspect that the worst errors are rooted in a culture of government for which there can be no scapegoats because it’s goats all the way down.

These are the errors that come not from too little information, but from too few sources of advice, not enough experimentation, insufficient verification, and an unwillingness to admit to mistakes or to change course. In his interview with UnHerd, the epidemiologist Neil Ferguson said that “there’s a tendency to become wedded to a position you’ve taken and find it difficult to revise views in terms of new evidence coming forward”.

This applies as much to politics as it does to science. And perhaps especially to political decisions made on the basis of scientific advice (given the gravity of what’s being decided).

With great power comes great responsibility — and I’ve no doubt that our leaders do feel responsible. You can see the weight of it etched on their faces. But it is not the only thing they need to feel. Power must also be tempered by humility. And that’s what I sense is missing here — if not from the soul of each and every minister, then from the culture of government (and politics and journalism) in which they operate.

True humility is not cowering passivity, but a recognition of the radical uncertainties that we have to live with. It is only once we’ve understood that reality that we begin to act appropriately — by accepting that most of what we do will be wrong to some extent, and therefore actively seeking out evidence of that wrongness. It’s only on such a basis that we can put a stop to what doesn’t work and learn from what does (no matter whose idea it was in the first place). Above all, we must keep our options open. The worst thing we can do, especially when faced with huge but unknowable risks, is to make one big bet on being right.

And yet that’s exactly what our system of government encourages our politicians to do.

*

Systems, of course, can be reformed — but there’s one thing that never changes and that’s the corrupting effect of power itself.

In Nineteen-Eighty-Four, George Orwell showed us what power at its most corrupt looks like. These are the chilling words of O’Brien, the secret policeman who breaks poor Winston Smith:

“Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

The context of the novel is the totalitarian state of Oceania. Our own situation, despite the lockdown, is a far cry from that grim parallel universe. Power, as exercised in a democracy, is thankfully not absolute — and thus neither is the corruption that follows in its wake.

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By Peter Franklin

Indeed, power is often illusory — our leaders are more Wizard of Oz than Big Brother. Nevertheless, the Orwellian idea of power for its own sake is still relevant to the smoke and mirrors of post-modern politics.

Let’s imagine O’Brien not as a member of the thought police, but as a comms consultant in our world. This is how he might describe our system of government:

“One doesn’t use whatever power one has to do something; one does something to show that one has power.”

What that something is — be it an ‘eye-catching initiative’, a full-blown government strategy or even something genuinely important like a single currency or a foreign war — doesn’t really matter. What counts is not so much the destination as that the wheels have been set in motion: the civil servants have something to implement; the press officers have something to press release; the journalists have something to report; the parliamentarians something to debate. Everyone, if not happy, is at least occupied — and none more so that the minister, standing over the machinery of government, lever proudly in hand.

Policy-makers do love their ‘levers’. And politicians love to pull them. In fact, they’re always on the pull — looking for some simple way to make something happen and therefore look like they’re in control.

In the UK, no department is keener on its levers than the Treasury. And no wonder — in no part of government is there a more reliably mechanistic correspondence between a ministerial decision and some meaningful result. If the Chancellor of the Exchequer raises or lowers this or that tax, then up or down it goes. If he decides to borrow more money, it gets borrowed. If he wants to cut expenditure, it gets cut.

But much, if not most, of what government does or tries to do is not like that. There’s no direct relationship between a decision made in Whitehall and an outcome in the real world. An education minister may try to boost literacy, a Home Office minister try to crack down on knife crime; but though money might be allocated to the chosen objective and new powers legislated for, there’s no guarantee that an actual difference will be made. The government machinery doesn’t always connect with the facts on the ground. Indeed, forget the real world: bureaucratic inertia can disconnect the machine itself from its levers — leaving ministers pulling away to no effect.

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By Tom Chivers

In recent decades, governments have become obsessed with ‘delivery’ — with making sure that the machine does respond. As part of this we’ve seen the Treasury taking an increasingly assertive role in the work of the spending departments — as if the lever-pulling magic of fiscal and monetary policy can somehow rub off on those parts of government whose writ runs beyond spreadsheets. Under Boris Johnson, we’ve seen the Downing Street operation take effective control of the Treasury — as if to ensure that control over the state is ultimately exerted from Number 10 not Number 11.

*

The great problem with this focus on levers and delivery is that it shrinks perspectives to internal workings of the machine — instead of looking at it from the outside and asking questions about the system as a whole.

Obviously, there’s the question of centralisation versus localisation. If you want to make changes across the country, can you really do it via a machine that is remotely controlled from Whitehall? But there’s an even more important question than that. And what it asks is not ‘where?’ but ‘how?’. Fundamentally, the machinery of government can be configured to operate in one of two basic ways: the first is to implement what works (as reckoned by those in charge); the second is to find out what doesn’t work. Decision versus discovery.

There’s no doubt which approach our political culture prefers. As Nigel Lawson once put it, “to govern is to decide”. But on what basis should one decide? Historical precedent? Political expediency? Ideological prejudice?

How about experimentation instead? Why not redesign the machinery of government to systematically test many solutions to a problem, as opposed to the current configuration, which is about imposing just one. It is surely easier to see what doesn’t work in practice, than to guess what does in theory — and thus, by a process of elimination, get closer to the answer.

Why isn’t government massively more experimental? Is it a question of expense — a lack of time or the money? No — because as long as we fail fast and fail small (through lots of local experiments), we can minimise the downside (and subsequently maximise the upside by making the most of what was found to work). Rather, the real reason why we stick to the one-shot, top-down style of policymaking is a political culture in which you can’t be the ‘big man’ unless you take big decisions.

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And thus the machinery of government is engineered around the amplification of ego. Each part of the mechanism is valued and incentivised according to how well it serves this ultimate purpose. The flow of information back up the chain of command, which should be about revealing reality, instead responds to what the top of the chain wants to hear: confirmation that the right lever was pulled in the first place.

*

A prime example of this institutionalised confirmation bias was the original Troubled Families programme. This was launched by David Cameron in the wake of the riots of August 2011. At the time, there was enormous pressure on the Government to ‘do something’ — and the programme was the main response. Its purpose was to reduce truancy, anti-social behaviour, worklessness and other social problems thought to be concentrated among a targeted group of 120,000 households. It was rolled-out across the country, with hundreds of millions of pounds of funding.

By 2015, the Programme was reporting a remarkable level of success — with 98.9% of the troubled families supposedly having had their lives “turned around”. But, then, in 2016, an independent evaluation by the National Institute for Economic and Social Research surfaced, which was “unable to find consistent evidence that the programme had any significant or systematic impact.”

Payment by results was meant to provide the right incentives for providers (in this case, local government). But thanks to vague criteria, success could be declared (and payment collected) in most circumstances. In its very design, the programme was self-confirming.

It was also a huge wasted opportunity. Local delivery could have facilitated local experimentation with a variety of different approaches, involving a variety of different public, private and voluntary sector providers. But that would have made the Government — the Prime Minister in particular — look less decisive. The results would have been mixed, with some experiments failing completely. No doubt, the media would have portrayed each negative or mediocre result as a fiasco or even a scandal rather than as knowledge gained. As for any successes, those would have been seized upon as evidence of a postcode lottery — patchy provision privileging some communities over others.

Politically, it’s less risky for government to roll out one big approach across the nation, especially if its eventual failure doesn’t become apparent until long after the media has lost interest. Indeed nothing could be more risky than the fail fast approach of effective policy experimentation, because that generates news while the media is still paying attention.

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Housing is another example of a policy area where localisation could allow a wide range of different approaches — and where outcomes are readily measured and compared (houses are big and thus easily counted). But, astonishingly, this most place-based of political issues is still driven by demonstrably useless central government policies like the wretched Help to Buy scheme. Imagine if those resources had been made available to local authorities, housing associations and other potential innovators with a brief to try out literally groundbreaking ideas.

In some areas of policy we do see government taking forward a number of different approaches to a particular challenge. For instance, with energy policy, government has thrown its weight behind the development and deployment of a broad spectrum of power generating technologies. That’s good, but what’s less good is that policy doesn’t proceed to the next stage, which would be a robust evaluation of the different options, so that we can weed out the ones that don’t perform as well as the others. Instead, we see government stubbornly persist with projects like new nuclear power stations, despite the eye-watering costs and the availability of cheaper alternatives.

Because pulling the plug on a project looks like failure — and therefore an admission of weakness — expensive mistakes have a tendency to get more expensive and thus even harder to admit to. This is why evidence of failure is less likely to be sought out and may even be suppressed. At the very least, we can expect the chain of command — configured as it to the delivery of the big man’s big decisions, not to ask awkward questions.

*

How much this all applies to the Government’s handling of the corona-crisis remains to be seen.

When we eventually look back on the decisions that have been made, the most important question we can ask is not whether they turned out to be right or wrong — but whether, in Professor Ferguson’s words, the decision-makers “revised their views in terms of new evidence coming forward”.

It’s on this basis that our leaders and their advisors should be judged. Of course, so far, it is too early to tell. But if the verdict of history is a good one, it will be despite, not because of, our culture of government.

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Test article

By Mary Harrington

Those travelling into the area from more densely populated cities do carry a greater risk of bringing the coronavirus with them. But I suspect there is a degree of parochialism and xenophobia to placards like this, as demonstrated by the worrying number of people carrying on as normal: the virus is something they get “down there in London”, as I was told of various phenomena as a child. To paraphrase George Orwell, the pandemic still feels far away, a smudge of misery hidden by the curve of the earth’s surface.

There are of course some who are out and about for the daily supermarket run. Others are no doubt ‘key workers’; while some perform their one piece of exercise a day. It scarcely matters. What matters is that we don’t gather to socialise in public places. Yet through my dusty window I can still see a continual trickle of people — overwhelmingly older people — who appear reluctant to take even basic precautions in the face of this threat.

These are extraordinary times and writing this I feel like a member of the Stasi. According to Anna Funder’s excellent book Stasiland, there was one Stasi officer or informant for every 63 people in the former German Democratic Republic. Including part-time informers, that ratio was high as one informer for every 6.5 East German citizens. I view everyone walking past the window of my study with suspicion. Yet I was rather more disconcerted by the glee with which some police forces appeared to be enforcing the lockdown.

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The dark side of rural England

By James Bloodworth

Despite the protestations of professional contrarians and rent-a-gobs — the types who must continually batter themselves against the mainstream in order to define themselves — we are not yet East Germany. Indeed, this is not really a ‘lockdown’ as such: we are still permitted to leave the house and, unlike in much of mainland Europe, we do not have to show papers to anyone in order to do so.

The real test will be in the coming weeks as the death toll rises more rapidly. Just before the lockdown was announced the pubs in the small Somerset town where I’m staying were bristling with life. Drinkers fanned out onto the pavements like a swarm of ants, despite the macabre scenes broadcast from Italy and elsewhere. It wasn’t much-maligned millennials whom I saw expressing such frivolous abandon, but rather many who would be characterised as the so-called ‘war generation’.

I don’t know if this is a conscious expression of selfishness so much as an absorption of the idea that nothing ever changes. Through our obsessive nostalgia for the ‘Blitz spirit’ and its accompanying sentimentality, we forget that the generations born during and shortly after the war have experienced an unparalleled degree of peace and prosperity. There has been very little in the past 75 years that the provincial middle class have not been able to safely ignore behind net curtains and an irrepressible asset bubble.

For its part, the Government has understandably been reluctant to introduce the sorts of draconian measures that have been enacted in mainland Europe. This has been widely lamented yet it is a sound instinct. The Labour Party has been strangely silent, though we can assume its ruling clique of boutique Stalinists are lamenting the fact that it is not they who have finally been able to put the entire population under house arrest.

Suggested reading

How coronavirus exposes our fragility

By James Kirkup

More importantly, one wonders what kind of society we will have when we emerge from this crisis. It is striking how quickly even conservatives have grasped the ineffectiveness of the laissez-faire economic system now that the situation has required people to think about things beyond their own wallet. Human beings are largely emotional creatures who respond to seismic events in an emotionally charged way. The cool rationalism espoused by various economic theorists went out the window as soon as people started to stuff their bathroom cabinets with toilet rolls.

It isn’t only ordinary people who are carrying on as if nothing has changed. Even now, 10 days after Johnson announced the official lockdown and weeks after the crisis started, we are still hearing stories of employers forcing staff to turn up to work, and low-paid workers cram into Tube carriages — hotbeds of viral transmission — because the Government has been slow to close down all non-essential workplaces. Boris Johnson and co are not evil or intent on sacrificing millions of the elderly in the name of ‘herd immunity’, as some of the more deranged fringes of the Left are suggesting. However they are temperamentally incapable of grasping the realities of living the sort of existence where one is willing to risk fatal illness in order to earn a wage.

As the crisis has progressed, it has become clear that there are far too many opportunities for disreputable organisations and individuals to take advantage of the situation. This in turn is undermining the collective effort to protect the old and the vulnerable. There may be little we can do beyond better public information to keep the compulsive socialisers indoors, but we can reprimand the landlords ripping off their tenants and the bosses forcing immigrant workers — desperate to put food on the table — to pile into petri-dish Tube carriages

The Government had the power to pay self-employed workers to stay at home and it has finally done so. It also has the power to close things such as building sites, which remain open. In the words of a local friend who manages a couple of sites, they are “not the most hygienic of places and most people there aren’t too concerned by it all”. He will close this week regardless of government advice.

Suggested reading

All eyes on the Swedish coronavirus experiment

By Freddie Sayers

On a personal note, last week I informed my landlord in London that I would have to end the tenancy early because I had to self-isolate with my 90-year-old grandmother. It was something of an emergency. The response was immediate: I had to cough up the outstanding rent covering the six-week notice period or she would trouser my deposit. When I mentioned the three-month mortgage holiday my landlord would soon enjoy I received no response let alone any offer of compromise. I’ve heard nothing at all since. The landlord in question owns at least eight properties, each with at least three occupants paying £800 a month or more in rent.

I suspect there have been many similar occurrences of landlords taking advantage of the situation and employers flouting the spirit of the emergency measures. While the majority of people in Britain have made huge sacrifices over recent weeks, they’ve seen some of the country’s biggest companies — Virgin, Wetherspoons, Sports Direct — behave with only profit in mind. This may yet be a lasting lesson for those who have been brought up on the notion of benevolent capitalism, just as the relative success of collectivism during the Second World War shifted public opinion to the Left for a generation following the defeat of Nazi Germany.

Capitalism will endure because the alternative remains too temperamentally wedded to the failed doctrines of the past but the state has taken on a more significant role in the economy during the crisis than people will have imagined when they voted Conservative at the December General Election. Yet nationalisation for the sake of nationalisation leaves most people manifestly cold. I suspect the consensus view resembles the well-known quote from John Kenneth Galbraith: “I’m deeply suspicious of somebody who says, ‘I’m in favour of privatisation’, or, ‘I’m deeply in favour of public ownership.’ I’m in favour of whatever works in the particular case.”

What’s more, the outpouring of misplaced online sentimentality for Cuba’s international medical brigades is further evidence that the Left is too busy cosplaying the Cold War to formulate a serious alternative to the status quo. Whether the liberal model we have grown used to endures beyond the current pandemic may be another question altogether, as James Kirkup has touched on elsewhere for UnHerd. But Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party have all but disappeared from the national conversation since the crisis began.

Suggested reading

Will the pandemic kill off libertarianism?

By James Kirkup

Invariably one expects support to rally behind the Government during a time of crisis. Something similar has occurred in the United States under Donald Trump, despite his clumsy (to put it mildly) handling of the pandemic. Yet Corbyn’s decision to stay in office and preside over a lengthy leadership contest has lent the Labour Party an air of irrelevance during a period when the public needs an opposition that is volubly challenging the government on every decision it is taking. Corbyn’s decision to continue working from Parliament despite police advice to work from home is indicative of the man’s titanic ego — an ego he has always cloaked in a affected air of modesty and asceticism.

We are waiting then, all of us. For the pandemic to end — or at least to subside — but also to see what sort of society emerges by the end of it. It has not yet hit us in Somerset with the force it has in Europe or, indeed, in London, but every thinking person knows it is coming.

The mood among those who have shown indifference up to now will change as the local obituary pages expand and the numbers struck down crowd out the usual fare of petty crime and squabbles over planning permission. Theirs is the deep, deep sleep of England — and they are about to be jolted rudely awake.

Then it will be more waiting, mainly to see whether the resulting acidity and resentment is directed at the Government, or toward those fellow citizens who up to now have so egregiously flouted the emergency measures.

But of course, that’s a general principle, not an absolute rule. There are some things that should be prohibited, because the overwhelming evidence shows that even with all the information and the freedom to choose, we end up with results bad enough to justify intervention that limits the actions of individuals or groups.

That is the basis for my conclusion that it’s time to ban men.

Suggested reading

The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

To be clear, I’m not advocating the elimination of my sex, nor that we be proscribed by law. My proposal is a modest one. I think men should be barred from holding elected office. Not forever, mind. This would just be a temporary measure, lasting perhaps 10 years — enough to cover three general elections under the infamous Fixed Term Parliaments Act.

At those elections — as well as those for devolved assemblies, local councils and mayoralties — only female candidates would be eligible to stand. The electorate would be unchanged: I have no desire to see men disenfranchised, not least because female politicians would need to compete for their votes. But for that decade, politics would be for women only. Men would be left to spectate, comment and criticise — and perhaps argue for faster progress towards the day when they too could wield power.

That’s the policy. What on earth is my justification for it? Why would anyone, let alone a man, propose such a thing?

Well, to go back to my initial premise: look at the evidence. We men have had an awful long time to get this right, to use our freedom and power to run things in the interests of the whole country. Have we taken that opportunity? Of course not. We’ve messed things up, and unless something radical happens, we’ll keep on doing so.

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How the Lib Dems could seize power

By James Kirkup

I barely have room to list all the ways in which we’re screwing up. Maybe I should start with the most visceral — and talk about how we abuse and kill women. Even the official statistics, which inevitably exclude abuse that isn’t reported, show that 1.3 million women experienced domestic abuse last year. That’s 8% of the adult female population. Those figures include 139 women killed by men, who are generally partners and relatives.

This should be a scandal, a matter of outrage. Likewise the horrible, insidious trend towards men killing women then claiming in court that it was “a sex game gone wrong” — and sometimes getting away with it. Perhaps in some cases that’s true, but if so it’s the poisonous fruit of a rancid online culture of pornography that depicts choking women during sex as normal.

Surely though, not all men do this stuff? Surely we’re talking about a minority? Yes indeed. But where’s the male outrage, the anger from the majority? Why is it that the only politicians and journalists who regularly yell from the rooftops about these horrors are women? The fact that domestic violence and abuse are still often confined to the subdivision of “women’s issues” is proof that men have failed to use centuries of accrued power and authority wisely.

Another exhibit: the women’s prison estate, a collection of women most of whom are victims of abuse and who pose a greater threat to themselves than society. It should shame us to lock them up and worsen their lives, but again: how many men say so?

Suggested reading

Caroline Lucas's crackpot proposal

By Paul Embery

More evidence for the prosecution can be found across the economy. Girls beat boys at school, but start to fall behind at university. Even when male and female careers begin on equal wages, the man will, on average, out-earn the woman within 10 years. The burdens of childcare and elderly parents fall on women, who don’t just suffer lower wages but smaller pensions and often worse health.

(This stuff is bad for men as well as women. I know several psychiatrists who think that male suicide — the biggest killer of men under 45 — is tied up with rigid ideas of male responsibilties to earn and succeed at work. If it were easier for more women to balance family and career, more men might do the same — and fewer men might die.)

Again, the failure to act — the collective male failure to resolve problems that are well-known and soluble but which happen to fall most heavily on women — is a sign of the failure of male leadership.

Put simply, if it were men being intimidated, beaten and murdered; men being demeaned and abused as entertainment; men whose careers were being routinely stunted — would successive parliaments mostly composed of men have done so little in response?

More from this author

Too posh to fail

By James Kirkup

This isn’t just about policies and laws. It’s about culture too, about the messages sent from those who run the country and dominate the debate to the rest of us. Imagine what the country would start to feel like if it became utterly routine, not worthy of note, to listen to a news report or political debate in which every voice was female. What message would that send to a generation of children about gender roles and aspiration? We’ve had two female prime ministers to date and those exceptions are effectively used to tell girls that if they’re truly exceptional too, they can get to the top. What if that wasn’t exceptional but normal, boring even?

Would we get better government, better politicians, if we banned men from high office? Of course not; women are no more intelligent, sensible, competent or rational than men. This isn’t some soapy attempt to argue that all-female governments would be kinder to the weak, more generous to fluffy animals and less likely to go to war than those run by men. Female politicians are as capable of vice and virtue as male ones. They’d screw up too, then answer for their failure. That accountability is the bedrock of elective politics.

Which is precisely why we men should step back and give them the chance to do so. We’ve ballsed things up, for women and ourselves. Time to give up and let someone else try to do better.

At the next election, our Parliament is facing an exodus of capable, competent women who are giving up on a career in politics long before their time. Yes, it’s normal for a cadre of MPs to step down at any election. And the number of women doing so is in proportion to the (paltry) number of women in Parliament overall. But the average number of years these women have served is about half the number of years served by the men choosing to retire from Parliamentary life. They’re bowing out early, driven out by abuse, exhaustion and the hope of a simpler life.

A political career is decades in the making, especially if your party is in opposition. So be under no illusions: if talented women are giving up after five or 10 years, they are giving up the chance to secure lasting power or impact. If you can’t hear the alarm bells ringing for the quality of our politics, you need to take a syringe to your ears.

More from this author

How I learned the Tories weren't evil

By Polly Mackenzie

Being an MP has always been a pretty awful job. You have to have the skills of a social worker to deal with the problems your constituents bring you. You need a capable legal mind to navigate through your responsibilities as a legislator. If you take your constituency seriously, you have to split your life in two: live in the constituency and spend most weeks away from your family, or live in London, and shuttle the family up and down the motorway every weekend — until the children are teenagers and refuse to leave their friends, at which point you barely see them.

Most MPs want to make a difference. They want to improve the lives of their constituents, and the citizens of our country. They will put up with all of the crap if they know it serves a higher purpose. Half the problem is that our politics is so obsessed with Brexit at the moment that it’s hard to know what difference any MP is making, even if they do slog away for 80 hours a week.

On top of that, the party system is eating itself, putting more and more power into the hands of the most extreme. Imagine going home to your beloved constituency every week and being answerable not to your voters, but to the hundred or so most unrepresentative, most rabidly engaged activists who happen to be your local party.

Yes, MPs are well paid for the work they do, earning twice the average full-time salary of someone in their forties. But their decent pay packet, and their privileged role in our democracy, have started to be seen as a reason to dehumanise them completely.

Suggested reading

Why shouting 'traitor' is a fool's game

By Giles Fraser

It’s your fault: you voted the wrong way, the haters say. You took this job: you deserve everything that’s coming to you. Abuse against our MPs has reached epidemic proportions. On all sides — Leave, Remain, Left and Right — abusers on social media and in the streets have found a louder and louder voice. Death threats. Rape threats. Threats against family members. Dog shit through the letterbox.

It shouldn’t surprise us that women are more likely to buckle under this horror. Women are more vulnerable to physical threats, most of which come from men. Much of the abuse is gendered, with pregnant MPs singled out for attacks. And, because of the imbalanced way in which most parenting still happens in our society, women are also more likely to carry the burden of balancing family life with the challenges of their career.

If we lose the women from our Parliament, we have no hope of governing our country better. In the last months, Parliament has heard powerful testimonials from women speaking about miscarriage; sexual violence; abortion; living in an abusive relationship, and more. A Parliament without these voices would be impoverished, and that’s the Parliament we’re in danger of reverting to.

But it isn’t just talented women we’re in danger of losing. You don’t have to be a woman MP to think: why am I doing this to myself? More and more brilliant people seem to be leaving politics simply because they have better options: more money, more fun, less hatred, less work. And brilliant people who ought to go into politics look at the morass and say: never in a million years.

Suggested reading

Is Boris Johnson trying to rig the election?

By Tom Chivers

This is a crisis for our politics. If the best people run for the hills at the thought of a life in politics we will end up with the worst people in charge: and we the citizens will suffer.

There’s a Netflix series, Mindhunter, which tells the story of the first psychologists to study serial killers. The lead woman is an academic who’s spent her career studying psychopathic business leaders. Someone asks her: “How do you get to be a CEO if you’re a psychopath?”. She replies: “How do you get to be a CEO if you’re not?” These are the rules now governing our politics, too: ladders of opportunity for those who least deserve them. A pathway to a country led by shits and weirdos.

If we want great people to run our country, we need to make being an MP a fantastic job again — and stamping out political abuse is only the start. Change the rules so we genuinely attract and reward the best talent. Open primaries to create real opportunity for democratic engagement, and break the stranglehold of obsessive activists. Better paid and more qualified staff, so you know you’re doing a decent job. Proper parental leave, with Parliament by video conference for half the week so you can actually see your children from time to time, and stay in touch with your constituents.

We’re not good at democratic reform, I know, here in Britain. But the case is now urgent. Unless you really do want a country led by shits and weirdos, in which case: good luck to you. view comments]]> https://stage.unherd.com/2019/11/the-abusive-inhumanity-of-our-politics/?edition=us?appcommentsnew https://stage.unherd.com/2019/11/the-abusive-inhumanity-of-our-politics/?edition=us/feed/ 23764 https://stage.unherd.com/2019/08/the-10-brains-behind-dominic-cummings/?edition=us https://stage.unherd.com/2019/08/the-10-brains-behind-dominic-cummings/?edition=us#respond https://stage.unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Cummings.jpg?w=573 https://stage.unherd.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/Peter-F.jpg?w=96 Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

Chancellor of the Exchequer? Foreign Secretary? Who cares! The big appointment of last week was Dominic Cummings as ‘senior advisor’ to the Prime Minister. The precise title isn’t important, what counts is that he’s the brains behind the Boris premiership.

But who are the brains behind Dominic Cummings? Well, you could call it a network of foreign influence – one which includes high ranking individuals in the American, Chinese and Prussian military. (Yes, that’s right, Prussia with a P.)

I should point out that most of Major Dom’s heroes are no longer with us. Indeed one of them, the Chinese guy, has been dead for more than two millennia. Also, their influence on his thinking isn’t exactly a secret – it’s all there on his blog. In a series of must-read posts and essays, including one which is more of a short book, he explains his ideas (and those of his heroes) on how government works (or ought to work).

Suggested reading

Who wants to be 'boosted' by Boris?

By Freddie Sayers

The media have already noted his fondness for John Boyd, one of the important military theorists of the 20th century. Boyd’s mantra was “people, ideas and hardware – in that order”. So, in trying work out what Dominic Cummings is all about, it seems appropriate to start with the thinkers before the thoughts.

After trawling through that infamous blog, I’ve picked out a top 10 ranked in no particular order. It’s a subjective and far from exhaustive list, but to my mind it paints a picture of what makes the man tick – and how he’d like to make the machine of government tick.

 

1. John Boyd

As we’ve already mentioned him, let’s begin with Boyd – a gifted USAF fighter pilot and a brilliant military strategist. His long career spanned active service in the Korean War through to his crucial contribution to the planning of Operation Desert Storm.

He was an archetypal maverick and thorn in the flesh of military officialdom. He earned himself a string of nicknames including “The Mad Major” and “Genghis John” — but often won his battles with the top brass. His great emphasis was on the speed, flexibility and decentralisation of decision-making as the only way of staying ahead in a competitive, ever-changing world.

Philosophically, he drew a distinction between ‘being someone’ — getting ahead in a system by conforming to its rules — and ‘doing something’, i.e. achieving change in spite of the system. Boyd chose the latter path — as has his number one fan.

 

2. Sun Tzu

Cummings describes Boyd as “a modern day Sun Tzu” — which is quite the accolade, because the legendary Chinese general was the greatest strategist of all time — a military commander of such subtlety that he may not have actually existed. How cunning is that!

However, his great work, The Art of War certainly exists and dates back to the 5th century BC. Its author believed that merely winning was not enough: “to fight and conquer in all our battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemies resistance without fighting.”

Suggested reading

China’s great global game

By Peter Franklin

But how can you win without fighting? To quote Cummings, it is by confusing and demoralising the enemy through “disorientating moves, feints, bluffs” — i.e. keep the enemy guessing and do what they least expect. Of course, that raises the possibility that the Dominic Cummings blog is an elaborate exercise in misdirection and not a guide to what he’s up to at all.

Then again, when your enemies read nothing longer or deeper than tweets and headlines, a long and thoughtful essay may be the best place to hide your secret plans.

 

3. Otto von Bismarck

This one’s a villain not a hero. Cummings calls him a “monster” and says the world would have been better off if, in 1866, an assassin‘s aim had been truer. As it was, the Prussian general lived to unite Germany, and thus create the conditions for first and second World Wars.

Continually keeping his enemies off balance, Bismarck’s “diabolical genius” enabled him to defeat the Danes, the Austrians and the French. As for the British, he achieved the ultimate Art of War objective of winning without fighting. Germany became the dominant industrial and military power on the Continent, while the British elites slumped in confusion wondering what to do about it.

Indeed, Cummings accuses the British establishment of 150 years of strategic incoherence — from the 1860s up to the present day. One might regard this as a rather sweeping view of history. Nevertheless, having won the Brexit referendum and placed himself in Downing Street, he’s in a position to act upon it.

 

4. T.S. Eliot

It’s not all old generals with DC, there’s room for poetry too. However, he deploys it like a weapon — not least in his essay The Hollow Men II: Some reflections on Whitehall and Westminster Dysfunction.

The title is taken from Eliot’s 1925 masterpiece. As poetic weapons go — it’s a bunker buster, a devastating verdict on the aftermath of the First World War.

Eliot evokes images of impotence and pointlessness, which Cummings applies to the establishment politics of our own era:

“Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass…

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion…”

It captures the aimlessness of what passes for ‘government’, the worthlessness of self-described ‘leadership’: so much activity to so little effect.

It also chimes in with Boyd’s distinction between ‘being someone’ and ‘doing something’. Democracy turns to dust when it becomes a vehicle for the former.

 

5. George Mueller

What does ‘doing something’ look like? Well, no one got things done like George Mueller – who, as head of the NASA Office of Manned Space Flight (1963-69), was the man who put a man on the Moon.

Suggested reading

A giant leap for womankind

By Dava Sobel

When one considers what happened before his leadership (the USSR’s clear lead over the USA in space) and afterwards (the troubled history of the Space Shuttle programme), Mueller’s achievement is all the more remarkable.

Cummings takes a close look at how Mueller ran the organisation (and budget) that successfully delivered the Apollo programme. He identifies the key features that made it all work and sees the inversion of these qualities in the various ways in which contemporary government bureaucracy doesn’t work.

If Major Dom gets his way, HMG in the 2020s could end up looking like NASA in the Sixties.

 

6. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger

The eagle-eyed among you will have noticed that these are two people not one. However, together, they form the leadership of Berkshire Hathaway — which they built-up from a small-ish textiles manufacturer in the Sixties to the fifth largest publicly traded company in the world.

Impressive, but Buffett and Munger aren’t the only successful investors in the world — so what does Cummings find especially interesting about them?

It revolves around something that Munger once said:

“There isn’t one novel thought in all of how Berkshire is run. It’s all about what Peter [Kaufman] calls ‘exploiting unrecognized simplicities.’ …Warren and I aren’t prodigies. We can’t play chess blindfolded or be concert pianists. But the results are prodigious, because we have a temperamental advantage that more than compensates for a lack of IQ points.”

Unrecognised simplicities. Great achievements don’t always require great advances in human knowledge, but rather the ability to spot opportunities that others miss — which they do, all the time, thanks to the natural biases of the human mind and the herd-like behaviour of dysfunctional organisations.

For instance, the Leave side in the Brexit referendum identified a large group of habitual non-voters who might be persuaded to vote if they felt it would make a difference. On 23 June 2016, they did vote and they did make a difference. In retrospect, what happened seems obvious – so obvious that many people on the other side can’t believe they missed it, which is why they prefer to believe conspiracy theories instead.

 

7. Philip Tetlock

Why did so few people see Brexit coming? Clearly the experts who advised David Cameron, Angela Merkel and other key players in the run up the referendum were wrong in their predictions. The same can be said of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which also came to grief in 2016.

Suggested reading

Could you predict Brexit?

By Tom Chivers

The work of Philip E. Tetlock sheds light on the murky business of prognostication. He’s the Canadian-American academic who made a 20-year scientific study of the accuracy of forecasting in public life.

According to Cummings, this was the key finding: “the average expert was no more accurate than the proverbial dart-throwing chimp on many questions.”

However, Tetlock also identified a minority of non-professional forecasters who do significantly better than everyone else, whether expert or non-expert. These ‘super-forecasters’ turned out to be ordinary, but numerate, people with an open-minded interest in diverse fields of knowledge. Crucially, they were willing to update their predictions in the light of new evidence.

Cummings says that Whitehall has ignored Tetlock’s research — but, that’s OK, it’s not as if ministers make decisions over billions of pounds of long-term investment or anything like that.

 

8. Robert Taylor

Bob Taylor was to the internet what George Mueller was to the moonshot. Over the same period that Mueller was running the Apollo programme, Taylor was running something called the Information Processing Techniques Office. I realise that sounds like the winner in a competition to name the world’s dullest workplace, but it changed the course of history. As part of the Advance Research Projects Agency of the US Department of Defence, Taylor direct the public investment that made the internet happen.

A less inspired set of decisions could have produced an American version of Minitel – the now defunct French version of the internet.

As if to prove Tetlock right about experts and forecasting, Taylor was not a computer scientist. Severo Ornstein (who was a computer scientist of great distinction) described him as a “concert pianist without fingers”. But that didn’t stop him from calling the right tune.

 

9. Richard Feynman

In 1962, Dean Acheson said that “Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role”. Membership of the EU was meant to be that role, but evidently it didn’t suit us. So what should our role be?

Suggested reading

Why we need to concentrate on science

By Peter Franklin

Dominic Cummings’ answer is to make Britain “the leading country for education and science”. So, let’s conclude this list with two of his scientific heroes.

Richard Feynman was a giant of theoretical physics who famously defined science as “the belief in the ignorance of experts”.

Michael Gove (a key Cummings ally) was heavily criticised when he said that “people in this country have had enough of experts”. In the fuller quote he makes it clear that by experts he means “people from organisations with acronyms saying that they know best and getting it consistently wrong”. Nevertheless, the short quote was seized upon as evidence of a turn toward an evidence-free, know-nothing style of politics.

In fact, Gove and Cummings are no more anti-knowledge that Feynman was. Rather what they’re against is the fossilisation of intellectual authority within self-serving, unaccountable bureaucracies.

No one, no matter how expert, is immune to their own BS. To quote Feynman again, “the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool”.

 

10. Murray Gell-Mann

Finally, we come to another hero of science, the discover of the quark, Murray Gell-Mann. It is from him that Cummings derives his vision of an “Odyssean education” – that is, an education that enables the decision-makers of the future to reconcile different ways of seeing the world.

Cummings is sometimes accused of taking an ‘everyone-is-an-idiot-apart-from-me’ attitude to public life. But that’s an idiot’s reading of what he actually thinks, which is that most of the people and most of the ideas we need to make a difference are already out there – they just need to be properly integrated.

His evident frustration with ‘the system’ lies in an understanding of its wasted potential – and its continued failure to look beyond itself and learn from known examples of leaders and organisations that have cracked the code of effective action.

His anger, therefore, is directed at the establishment figures who stand in the way of change — those who choose to be someone, not do something.

As Gell-Mann once put it, “if I have seen further than others it is because I am surrounded by dwarfs”.

Suggested reading

Why did we forget the father of science?

By Peter Franklin

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“The safety of England in the estimation of every reflecting person in Europe is the preservation of all that is valuable to the peace and progress of mankind. They know that the commerce of England covers every sea, and that the security of England means the security of the only moderating and tranquillizing Power that exists in Europe. […] Every man who is the friend of his species, looks upon England as the great depository of political truth, her safety as their pride, and the peril of England as their despair.”

This kind of insular (and Anglo- rather than Britanno-centric) arrogance apparently never goes out of fashion.

But can we usefully apply experience of a piece of British history to the chaos and trauma of Brexit? British history has been treated recently as a great warehouse of romantic nonsense, a delivery hub of simplified historical trivia for politicians wanting to decorate their prejudices.

Boisterous prep school myths and Blimpish delusions are not an adequate basis for mature policy-making, nor a guide to future national performance. The value of your imperial legacy may go down as well as up.

Further reading

Can lessons from the past guide us through the present?

By Various authors

And yet there are lessons – or at least illuminating contrasts – in the way that politics and policy were done historically.

When the crisis of Europe broke in the summer of 1914, Britain had been looking the other way. Unionist and nationalist gun-running exploits into Ireland had raised the alarming possibility that Britain’s oldest colonial tension was about to turn into a civil war.

Following the Curragh Mutiny earlier in the year, the government wasn’t sure what orders the Army would follow in that situation. (Almost exactly a century earlier she had been similarly blind-sided, when Napoleon’s return from Elba found British attention and the best of her troops even farther westward, in America, another imperial difficulty.)

The assassination of an Austro-Hungarian archduke seemed both a long way away and one step removed from the direct confrontations between the European great powers that had intermittently threatened trouble during the previous two decades. In 1914 Britain had more diplomatic officials in Chile than in the Balkans. When she had focused attention on south-eastern Europe – presiding over the 1913 Conference of London to tidy up after the second Balkan war – it had been as a rather grand referee, not an interested party.

“The object was to localise the war,” the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey had declared to the House of Commons; “the primary essential was to preserve agreement between the Great Powers.” Britain’s only direct interest had been the Aegean Islands.

Further reading

The outgoing German ambassador fails to understand British history

By Allan Mallinson

Grey tried to maintain the same style in responding to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia that followed. Instead of thinking immediately of Britain’s alliances, his instinct was to use her diplomatic pre-eminence to push for talks between Britain, France, Germany and Italy – the Great Powers not directly involved in the confrontation.

Once it was clear that continental war was inevitable, the question was whether Britain would be part of it. Grey squeezed limited commitments out of his Cabinet colleagues and made a series of delicately nuanced promises to France and Germany. These painstaking – perhaps self-defeating – subtleties were Britain’s last desperate attempt at impartiality. They were exploded by Germany’s declaration of war on France and invasion of Belgium. In a speech to the Commons of typical intricacy and atypical rhetorical strength, Grey shepherded the country to war.

There’s a theoretical debate about whether Britain’s more natural position in 1914 was instead to maintain the isolation that had – according to one side of the argument – served her well in previous decades, rather than sacrificing so much national resource in a continental imbroglio, accelerating her loss of influence relative to the United States and stepping onto the slippery slope of European entanglement. Regardless of that debate, in 1914 a moderate political leadership decided that it was natural and necessary, for Britain’s interest and her identity, that she should join the war.

But that’s not the lesson of 1914. The fact that Britain declared war that mad summer has little to tell us about the best means of pursuing fisheries protection or energy security a century later, regardless of whether the flickering lamps of Europe are powered by Russian gas, Middle Eastern oil or our own patriotic coal or fuel rods.

There was political interest enough in the Government’s decision to conform to patriotic enthusiasm, and the dignified thunder of Ramsay Macdonald’s reply to Grey’s speech – “There has been no crime committed by statesmen of this character without those statesmen appealing to their nation’s honour” – reminds us that there was another point of view. Rather, the lesson is in the attitude to politics and policy.

Further reading

Whose side is parliament on?

By diane purkiss

1914 feels like the last flickering of an old idea of discretion and duty in political leadership. It is Grey himself who best embodies this. The ideal Government minister, he suggested, “may well be someone who has no itch to run other people’s lives”. Perhaps his performance in the summer of 1914 seems in hindsight naive; but he struggled desperately to avoid a war that he foresaw would be devastating, and to balance party political reality, personal principle and his own clear belief about what was essential for the country.

He echoes a greater age of principled political leadership, a sense of obligation to something wider. In 1846, Peel knowingly destroyed his own government and party because he believed it essential to repeal the Corn Laws that were keeping food prices impossibly high for much of the population. Forty years later Gladstone did the same to push Home Rule for Ireland.

It would of course be wrong to romanticise Victorian politics. It had its scoundrels and its self-interested. It had herds of bovine back-benchers who are forgotten for good reason. Its politicians could literally afford to care less about party politics, because their private incomes would continue to support them whoever was in power: it was unrepresentative not only because significant swathes of the population were not voting, but also because MPs were not paid.

Peel’s principle over the Corn Laws followed decades of selfishness by a landowning political class. Gladstone’s Home Rule was never implemented. Any credit due to Grey’s sense of duty seems lost in his own sense of failure at the ruin of his work.

Further reading

What scars do we bear from the First World War?

By Robert tombs

But there is still the impression that leadership meant something more than party and personal interest. Parties evolved according to the demands of the politics – Peel changed the Tories and split them over the Corn Laws; Gladstone migrated to the Liberals, and then split them over Home Rule – instead of politics being distorted by parties. There’s a ghastly irony in the fact that the apotheosis of Grey’s professionalism and principle was his surrender to a conflict he had done everything to forestall, the submersion of his courtliness in a wave of patriotic fervour.

His extraordinary speech on the 3 August 1914 is the least resounding of rallying cries, a bleak and unhappy explanation of the inevitability of a war in which, as he put it, the country would suffer terribly.

When Sir Edward Grey first left office in 1895, he judged that it was for the last time, and noted that he and his wife were “both very glad and relieved”. His sense of duty seems impossibly quaint, from the perspective of the 21^stcentury; it certainly seems very distant. To politicians who for personal political interest deliberately promote something they know will damage the nation, leaders who, for the national interest, deliberately brought on their own political failure must seem incomprehensible.

After three decades when the issue most significant for the future identity and sustainability of the nation has been managed according to what would placate one faction in one party, a past in which parties rose and fell and split and re-formed around definitive questions of policy principle seems like another country indeed.

The institution whose members, however arrogantly, debated, like Mr Horsman, the long-term obligations and interests of the country within the European order, is unrecognisable in a bewildered herd incapable even of understanding what their votes mean. The concept of leadership itself – of articulating and advocating a principled if unpopular position, grounded in a wise and measured view of the national interest, and so trying to bring people with you – is lost.

“The great duty of a Government,” Gladstone said in 1879, “especially in foreign affairs, is […] not to set up false phantoms of glory which are to delude them into calamity, not to flatter their infirmities by leading them to believe that they are better than the rest of the world.”

Jeremy Clarkson
Nominated by James Kirkup, Director of The Social Market Foundation

The Liberal Democrats are looking for a replacement for Vince Cable. The Independent Group has made Chuka Umunna its ‘chief spokesman’ but isn’t yet a full political party. Centrism needs a leader.

That leader should be Jeremy Clarkson. Yes, Jeremy Clarkson. Bear with me.

I am a centrist. We like political compromise and policy based on evidence, not ideology: just do ‘what works’ and leave philosophy to philosophers. We haven’t had the best time of late.

One reason is that centrists tend to be like me: metropolitan wonks who focus too much on the detail of policy and not enough on how voters will see that policy.  I spent years writing clever columns about the merits of a liberal immigration policy; in 2017, I thought (and still think) the ‘dementia tax’ was a good policy, because it’s better to tax the houses of asset-rich pensioners than the incomes of asset-poor workers. Smart, eh?

Then there’s Brexit, which brings me to Clarkson.

Guess how he voted in the referendum? What he thinks about leaving? He’s a Remainer: a treacherous, bleating, Britain-hating public schoolboy millionaire liberal Remainer, who thinks Brexit is a “clusterfuck”. He’s basically David Cameron, but less fat and with slightly better jeans.

And guess what? It doesn’t matter. He’s still Jeremy Clarkson, the bloke’s bloke, the bloke with the cars and the crap jokes and the stupid comments about foreigners and the bad jeans.

And he’s got exactly what centrism needs: an understanding of – and a love for – the stuff that millions of ‘ordinary’ voters are interested in.

Last month, when Theresa May was pictured awkwardly trying to play pool with her Italian counterpart, Clarkson had a Twitter-rant that sums up why centrism needs him:

I’m shit at pool. But I know how to hold the cue at least. What I cannot understand is how you can be the prime minister when you don’t. Seriously, how can you get to the age of 62 without EVER playing a single game of pool? It’s impossible. 

How can you know what normal people think if you’ve never played pool?

The last thing centrists need is more smart policy and more clever people: we’ve got that covered.  We need leaders you could go down the pub and have a laugh with – and who would be down the pub having a laugh even if they didn’t want your vote, because that’s what they like doing. Because that’s what people do. #JC4PM

Howard Jacobson
Nominated by Tanya Gold

When regarding the agonies of Brexit, I dream, idly, of a clever Prime Minister. George Osborne may fantasise that I am talking about him. I am not. I am talking about Benjamin Disraeli, who wrote novels, split the Tory Party, re-established it with one nation Conservatism – still a fantasy that endures – passed reforming legislation and still made good jokes. For instance this on William Gladstone: “He has not one single redeeming defect”. Or this: “I must follow the people. Am I not their leader?”

Was the kindness, the imagination, and the wit of the novelist the key to Disraeli’s brilliance? I don’t know, but sometimes I fantasise that Howard Jacobson is prime minister. He wouldn’t do it, of course, not being a f*cking inadequate, but I cannot get the idea from my brain, especially when watching the dishonest idiots on BBC Parliament.

I dream that he would actually think, deeply, about things, and act with one eye on history, and the other on Count Tolstoy. He hates social media, which is right; I imagine he is sound on climate change, also right; he would re-open libraries, and make wonderful speeches. I wonder if the subjects of Elizabeth I felt the same way as I would under a Jacobson premiership: soothed, because their leader was that rare thing in politics – not a fool.

Tracey Emin
Nominated by Bidisha, writer, broadcaster and film-maker

Having followed her varied, beautiful and highly skilled work for decades now, I have a lot of respect for the artist Tracey Emin and would love to see what she’d do with the top job.

I interviewed her for Radio 4 about a decade ago and she was thoughtful and gentle, very cultured and with a naturally international mindset. She combines many qualities and has overcome many challenges, which I think would garner people’s respect, and also speaks to an inner strength and steady, laudable ambition.

As a former Young British Artist she has come through the New Labour era of the financial boom and Cool Britannia’s soaring cultural capital. Indeed, that period made her rich and famous. However, her early years were humble and marked by family issues (her philandering father had an entire other family secreted away), lack of opportunity and multiple instances of rape and sexual violence.

She has fought her way up from modest beginnings, gender violence, lack of opportunity and the low expectations of others to emerge as a great artist with a wide-ranging body of art, self-knowledge, maturity and self-belief. She has withstood howls of derision from many people, who believe that what she creates is not art, to emerge as a tough, experienced woman who is sure of her gifts and determined to carve her place in the world.

I respect those qualities in a leader.

Jurgen Klopp
Nominated by James Bloodworth – author and journalist

Westminster needs more people with “helping syndrome”, the epithet coined by the Liverpool FC manager Jurgen Klopp to describe himself.

As a Liverpool supporter, I’m obviously biased. But the 51-year-old German exudes a warmth and intelligence that is sorely lacking in our politics at the present time.

I haven’t chosen Klopp solely on the basis of his sporting affiliations or personal magnetism, however. His political views chime with my own: Klopps is on the Left without being a fanatic. He talks in terms of first principles rather than ideological dogma.

“I’m on the Left, of course,” Jürgen Klopp tells the journalist Raphael Honigstein in Klopp: Bring the Noise, his book on the Liverpool manager. “More Left than middle. I believe in the welfare state. I’m not privately insured. I would never vote for a party because they promised to lower the top tax rate,” Klopp adds.

Moreover, Klopp is a pro-European who emits none of the intellectual snobbery that seems to animate some of his fellow Remainers. Klopp told the Guardian in 2018 that he didn’t believe the English had become an inward-looking people post-Brexit. “I don’t see it,” Klopp told the paper.

Charisma, intelligence, as well as respect and civility towards one’s political opponents. Westminster could do with its own Jurgen Klopp.

Martina Navratilova
Nominated by Julie Bindel, journalist and feminist campaigner

Martina Navratilova, one of the finest sportspeople in the world, is brave, principled, and the antithesis of hypocrisy. In other words, nothing like a politician.

I first saw Martina on TV at Wimbledon in 1976. I was 14 years old, and crippled with self-hatred and shame for being a lesbian. Martina did not feminise her appearance, unlike other female tennis players, and was proud of her muscles. I had her clocked as a feminist, and suspected she was a lesbian long before she came out in 1981.

In 2010, I had the honour of interviewing Martina, shortly after she revealed she had breast cancer. As ever, Martina had her eye on the bigger picture, and used her diagnosis to encourage women to look out for warning signs.

More recently, Martina has spoken out about the unfairness of male-bodied trans-women competing against natal women in sport. Martina does not have a bigoted bone in her body, but even so, she was immediately accused of ‘transphobia’. But Martina did not back down, and continued to take a principled stand on this issue.

When she came out as a lesbian, Martina lost every single one of her sponsors; today, she is facing bullying and unjust criticism. But Martina takes it on the chin, because you can’t keep a good woman down. If Martina were our Prime Minister, the country would not be in the mess it is today.

Alexei Sayle
Nominated by Matthew Norman, political satirist and columnist 

The moment Alexei Sayle established himself as one of the great lost leaders came on Question Time a few years ago. An audience member raised a matter of typically inexpressable tedium, and for the only time in the borefest’s history, a panellist gave the perfect response. “I don’t care about that,” he said. “Ask someone else.”

Those who recall such national humiliations as Tony Blair’s musings on the murder trial of Deidre from Coronation Street would appreciate a PM under no compulsion to have an opinion about everything, and brazenly unconcerned about pandering.

Sayle’s claims extend beyond that. He wouldn’t remotely want the job, which should of course be a formal prerequisite for having it. If he did, he’d  acknowledge Britain’s diminished status by cancelling Trident, and use an alarmingly capacious knowledge of military hardware to remodel the armed forces in keeping with the needs of this geopolitical age rather than the one that ended in 1990.

His rage, intelligence and hilarious deployment of distinctly unparliamentary language would reignite public interest in politics to levels unseen since he was remoulding the country’s comic sensibilities in the early 1980s.

He would also be the first PM since Churchill with genuine literary talent. Alongside his fiction, he has published two glorious volumes of memoirs (Stalin Ate My Homework, and Thatcher Stole My Trousers). Who wouldn’t give one kidney at least for a  third, Bercow Kissed My Ringpiece, covering the Downing Street years?

Ronald Blythe
Nominated by Harry Mount, editor of The Oldie

At 96, Ronald Blythe remains our greatest living expert on the British countryside.

Fifty years ago, he wrote his masterpiece, Akenfield – Portrait of an English Village.

He invented the name Akenfield for his fictional Suffolk village. But his recorded interviews with locals – from teenagers to retired farmhands in their 80s – gave a crystal-clear, undeniably true picture of the brutal horrors of country life in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries.

I interviewed him this year and, half a century on, he remains a supreme listener – a quality distinctly lacking in Parliament.

Talk to an MP and they usually talk at you and avoid asking questions. I was amazed, at the Oldie Literary Lunch at the Ilkley Literary Festival last year, to see Alan Johnson, another candidate for the best Prime Minister we will never have, ask questions – and keep on asking them – of his neighbour at lunch before giving his speech.

How do you ever learn anything if you don’t ask questions and don’t listen; and don’t read books – another thing MPs aren’t much cop at?

Blythe doesn’t just read constantly; he writes, too – over 30 books so far, and he’s planning on writing more.

When I interviewed him, he modestly said, “I was a listener and a looker.”

He still is.

Claire Tomalin
Nominated by Deborah Orr, journalist

Many former journalists go into politics. That’s not surprising. The two disciplines often attract people with similar interests and passions. The journalists who used to be editors – who have experience of managing a team, juggling a mix of information and priorities, maintaining a vision of how everything fits together – are better placed than the mere writers to make the transition.

I’d never actually wish that, after she resigned as literary editor of the Sunday Times, Claire Tomalin had become a politician – her career as a biographer has been too valuable, too dazzling for that. But Tomalin would have made a superlative prime minister. Anyone familiar with her writing is aware of its remarkable intelligence – an intelligence leavened with the empathy that enables her to understand how human talents and human flaws tend to coalesce to make a unique, sometimes dark, sort of creativity or genius. No one could doubt that she has the skill with words to communicate the original thoughts and ideas that her prose writhes with.

But Tomalin’s resilience is stunning too. She has achieved so much. Becoming the preeminent biographer of your generation, having been born a woman in 1933, takes stamina. To do this while your personal life is marked by tragedy after tragedy – pain and loss that most of us don’t even experience once – well, Tomalin is a human among humans. Claire – you’re only 85. It’s not too late.

Malorie Blackman
Nominated by YA novelist, Lisa Williamson

The next generation deserves a leader who listens to and values their opinions. For the past three decades, Malorie Blackman OBE has done just that. Since publishing her first novel in 1990, she has given a voice to under-represented children and young adults in her fiction, television writing and tireless campaigning.

In a Young Adult sector dominated by white authors and publishers, Blackman’s impact has been revolutionary. Some of her books, like the wildly successful dystopian Noughts and Crosses series, tackle racism head on, while others feature black children simply getting on with their everyday lives or having the sorts of adventures previously reserved for white readers. It’s a deceptively simple yet powerful approach that has changed the landscape of children’s literature.

The 2013-15 Children’s Laureate uses her platform to promote reading for pleasure, to highlight opportunities in the creative industries for young people of all backgrounds, and encourage and empower them to write their own stories. Meanwhile her words continue to reflect issues facing young people in the UK today – just look at the emotional response her award-winning Rosa Parks episode of Dr Who spurred last year: it indicates the power of her work.

I doubt Malorie would want to touch the PM role with a bargepole, but, my gosh, wouldn’t it be fabulous if someone who put the well-being of our children first was in charge for once? They’d certainly get my vote.

Louise Casey
Nominated by LBC presenter Iain Dale

Great prime ministers have visions. They know what they want to achieve and they understand the measures necessary to achieve it. They lead from the front. They can articulate their vision to enable voters to buy into and support it. They don’t shy away from controversy or confrontation. They lead public opinion, they don’t follow it.

Step forward Dame Louise Casey. Known as the most untypical of civil servants she first came to the public’s notice as the Blair government’s Homelessness Czar. She became the driving force to combat Anti-Social Behaviour and headed the Respect Task Force before being appointed Victims Commissioner. She then took on the Troubled Families initiative and wrote a report into the Rotherham Grooming scandal. In each of those jobs she shook up the system, adopting the maxim that in order to create an omelette you have to crack a few eggs.

Louise Casey eschews party politics, but she is a natural born leader. She doesn’t stand for any nonsense, and is an original thinker. I’d say that’s just what the country needs as we look for a replacement for Theresa May. What a shame she isn’t in parliament.

Katharine Birbalsingh
Nominated by Peter Franklin

Michaela Community School is a state secondary school in the London borough of Brent. About a fifth of its pupils qualify for free school meals and almost half speak English as a second language. It has also been rated by Ofsted inspectors as outstanding in all categories. Oh, and the school opened its doors just five years ago.

Michaela’s founding Headmistress is Katharine Birbalsingh – the inspirational leader of a remarkable institution and an effective advocate for ‘traditional’ teaching methods in a modern setting. Michaela is described in the press as the ‘strictest school in Britain’, but Birbalsingh’s actual philosophy is one of no excuses for bad behaviour.

She understands what so many have forgotten, which is that the atmosphere in our schools, whether of calm or chaos, is ultimately a choice. That also goes for the scourge of screen addiction. Michaela empowers parents to take back control from the smartphone – offering discounted ‘brick’ phones so that they can call their kids without plugging their brains into the internet.

For sticking her neck out, she attracts a lot of flak – to which only one reply is necessary: you do better. We could certainly do with more doers and fewer talkers in Government (though Birbalsingh is a brilliant speaker too). No doubt she’s too busy giving children the best possible start in life to bother with the greasy pole of politics. Still, I can’t think of anyone better to deal with the delinquents of Westminster.

I’m in favour of restriction. The biggest problem with the British economy – and with Western capitalism in general – is not too little freedom, but too much. Too much, that is, for those who make it their business to increase their share of existing wealth without creating any. This is what economists call rent-seeking (which includes, but isn’t limited to, what tenants pay to their landlords).

Rent-seekers are able to extract value from others because of the monopoly rights that the state gives them over a particular resource – be it land, intellectual property, permission to pollute, political power or something else. Rent-seeking is therefore a result of government policy. Unsurprisingly, governments find themselves relentlessly lobbied by those with a vested interest in maintaining the unjust, opportunity-sapping status quo.

Further reading

What the Tories need in their next leader

By Graeme Archer

Taking on those vested interests requires courage and determination. But that’s why a government – especially one that believes in the opportunity to create rather than extract wealth – should be judged on the quality of its enemies.

Here are ten enemies that the Cameron and May governments should have made, but didn’t:

1. Land owners

Conservatives believe in the right to private property. And so they should. But that right shouldn’t include the uplift in value created when land becomes ripe for development.

The price of farmland can shoot up from less than £10,000 to more than £1,000,000 an acre just because of a planning decision. The act of merely owning the land has contributed precisely nothing to this added value – and yet landowners are able to claim the lion’s share of it.

This injustice, which Winston Churchill condemned back in 1909, lies at the heart of the housing crisis – a crisis which is destroying the Conservative ideal of a property-owning democracy and therefore popular support for conservatism among younger people.

If the Government did something about legal barriers that prevent it from acquiring land at agricultural-use value to build new housing, then a whole range of opportunities could open up. Instead, it continues to side with a few lucky farmers rather than millions of aspiring home owners.

2. The big developers

Of course, if we built more houses, the law of supply and demand would mean lower prices and reduced profits for those lucky landowners, right?

Wrong – and so is the idea that the planning system is mostly to blame for the dearth of new homes. In fact, there’s a huge backlog of unused planning permissions – leading to accusations that the big developers are “land banking”; ie, manipulating the development of the land they hold to control prices.

Of course, that can’t be possibly be true, because the Government has commissioned an investigation – the Letwin Review – which has been taken as evidence that developers don’t land bank. However, the Independent Review of Build Out Rates, Draft Analysis, June 2018, also says this:

“The fundamental driver of build out rates once detailed planning permission is granted for large sites appears to be the ‘absorption rate’ – the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price.”

Deliberately restricting supply in order to stop prices from falling? How is that not manipulating the market?

It’s plainly obvious what’s going on. The Government must stop hiding behind jargon like “absorption rates” and take land supply out of the developers’ control.

3. Nimbys and cowboys

The planning system isn’t entirely free from blame. A particular problem is the designation of green belts around urban areas. Preventing sprawl is a worthy objective, but choking the growth of prosperous cities such as Oxford and Cambridge is not. Model developments like Poundbury in Dorchester, show that we can build beautifully designed extensions to towns and cities that enhance local life instead of harming it.

However, instead of negotiating a grand bargain on sustainable urban development, the Government has failed to confront the green belt fundamentalists, while turning a blind eye to ugly, piecemeal development in unprotected areas – the worst of both worlds.

4. The bankers

In August 2011, riots erupted across urban England. But what happened next was just as remarkable: a shock-and-awe demonstration of the power of CCTV. Rioters were systematically identified by the police (with public help), shamed by the media and harshly punished by the courts. So much for the anonymity of the mob.

Now compare all that to the UK government reaction to the financial crisis. No shock-and-awe for the bankers. There have been a few prosecutions in relation to specific scams such as the Libor-rigging scandal. Oh, and someone had their knighthood cancelled. But that’s about it.

It would seem that recklessly crashing the global economy is an almost crime-free activity.

Further reading

Ten years on from the crash, the most important banking reform has still not been enacted

By Liam Halligan

5. The beneficiaries of QE

Of course, that’s not to say that the financiers weren’t targeted by the state. Indeed, they were singled out… for a massive programme of assistance.

There were the immediate bailouts of failing banks, but also a much longer period of Quantitative Easing or QE. Though presented as a general tonic for ailing economies, QE has the specific effect of inflating the value of financial assets and therefore rebuilding the bankers’ balance sheets (and boosting the investment portfolios of the wealthy).

The mechanics of the policy also generates a cascade of transactions on which fees can be charged – another nice little earner for those lucky enough to benefit.

Even if we accept the argument that governments had no choice but to resort to QE, it remains a profound injustice that the sector responsible for the original crisis has profited so handsomely from the emergency treatment.

But don’t expect any meaningful process of ‘financial truth and reconciliation’. The brain-aching complexity of QE is precisely what allows governments to get away with not having untangled it.

6. The nuclear industry

When the Conservative Government came to power in 2010 one of its first moves was to slash subsidies for renewable power. Quite right too – the leading renewable technologies were considered capable of delivering more for less, and that’s exactly what they’ve achieved. Despite self-serving predictions that the industry would shrivel without generous subsidies, it has thrived – cutting costs and expanding capacity.

No such market discipline for the nuclear sector, however. Hinkley Point C – the first new nuclear power station to begin construction since the 1980s – is to receive a guaranteed and very expensive price for its electricity over 35 years. So assuming it’s up and running by 2025, we’ll still be paying for its overpriced electricity in 2060.

By the way, the nuclear tech we’re getting for this money – the European Pressurised Reactor – is  dogged by a history of engineering problems and cost overruns.

How on earth did we end-up with this radioactive lemon? Well, it was the first – and, so far, only – opportunity to guarantee a future for Britain’s nuclear industry (even if most of the kit is imported from the French).

No industry and no technology should be owed a living – and certainly not one with nuclear’s record of failure.

7. The rail industry

Speaking of enormously expensive things that don’t turn up on time, let’s talk about our trains.

The Train Operating Companies (TOCs) aren’t best-loved by British public. But this year, with the biggest timetable changes for at least a decade, was the chance for a reset. It was really important then that the whole thing went smoothly.

It was a disaster – with services in the North and South East of England descending into chaos.

The regulator’s report into the fiasco found that the TOCs, Network Rail, the Department for Transport and indeed the regulator all made mistakes – but also that it was unclear as to who was responsible for what.

The obvious conclusion is that the structure of the industry is unsustainable. Of course, if no one has ultimate responsibility then no one can be held ultimately accountable (right up to the Secretary of State for Transport) – which suits all concerned. Except the passengers, of course.

Further reading

Can we reform our rancid political debate?

By Douglas Murray

8. Air polluters

At least most trains are electric these days, which means they don’t belch out the airborne pollutants linked to 40,000 premature deaths in the UK every year and billions of pounds’ worth of damage.

The disastrous decision to encourage the use of diesel engines in Europe can be blamed primarily on the German government and the Volkswagen emissions scandal. However, the British government has repeatedly failed to take the action necessary to clean up the air in our worst-affected cities – or say, in sufficient detail, how it plans to fulfil its legal responsibility to do so.

The long-term solution is to switch to electric vehicles, but we also need a short-term solution. The difficulty isn’t that we don’t know what to do (ie, dis-incentivise the use of polluting vehicles in vulnerable urban areas); it’s that it wouldn’t be popular with motorists.

The most powerful vested interests are the ones composed of millions of people. The trouble is that also leaves millions of people breathing polluted air – but that’s OK because a lot of those are children and they can’t vote.

9. The carpetbaggers of London

On to another kind of grubbiness. How is the Government getting on with its repeated promises to do something about the foreign money laundered through London’s property market?

Very slowly, is the answer. Almost 100,000 properties in the UK are owned by offshore companies. To its credit, the Government is forcing these publicly to register their “beneficial owners” – though not until 2021. Better late than never, but one has to wonder how so much information about so many properties is going to be verified.

Of course, this would be a much smaller problem if the ownership of high-end property in the UK weren’t so lightly taxed (and therefore ridiculously attractive). One would assume that most foreign investment in London real estate is legitimate; but one has to ask: who benefits?

Certainly not the ordinary working people and productive enterprises priced out of their own capital. And not those who pay heavy taxes on the fruits of their labour because their government won’t shift the burden on to idle wealth.

London and other British cities should be fully open to genuine entrepreneurs and innovators from around the world. But we don’t need more speculators; we’ve got quite enough of our own.

Further reading

What's killing the Conservatives?

By James Kirkup

10. Government itself

Let’s conclude with the vested interest closest to home – the machinery of government and the wider political system. The Conservatives came to power promising a revolution in the way that we’re governed. The 2010 Conservative manifesto was entitled Invitation to Join the Government of Britain and promised a “Big Society” in place of a “Big State”.

There have been some reforms – most notably a significant devolution of power to cities. But, on the whole, the status quo remains intact. Parliament, Government and the Civil Service all work in much the same way as they did in 2010. Even the most straightforward reforms, like a modest reduction in the number of MPs from 650 to 600, have yet to be delivered. 

Others have been scrapped – such as the introduction of “extended ministerial offices“. These were a tiny move to towards reducing the dependency of Cabinet ministers on the civil service – and on Downing Street. Of course, even that proved too much of a threat to the established order.

And thus a sclerotic system of government struggles on – unable and unwilling to confront its own vested interests, let alone anyone else’s.

This revelation highlighted the shamefully low priority given to people with autism and learning disabilities even in the supposed sanctuaries of specialist units run by mental health trusts. A subsequent national review found their health was being “adversely affected” by issues such as abuse, incompetence, neglect and sluggish treatment. It disclosed the depressing statistic that median life expectancy for people with learning disabilities is more than two decades less than all other British citizens.

So whom should we thank for exposure of this damning data and this long-overdue reform? Not the self-serving medical establishment, nor all those politicians shouting at each other over the despatch box at Westminster. More strangely, nor is it all those noisy big charities with senior executives on six-figure salaries, a ceaseless flow of press releases and carefully-natured brands. No, these breakthroughs are largely down to one grieving mother, whose beloved teenage son drowned in a bath following a series of mistakes.

Further reading

Why tackling slavery is such big business

By Julie Bindel

Sara Ryan was so distraught over the needless death of her son Connor, whom she nicknamed Laughing Boy for his zestful spirit, that she became a formidable campaigner. Desperate to stop other families suffering, and aided by a small group of activists and parents, the academic launched a social media campaign around the hashtag #JusticeforLB. It has had a remarkable impact. Yet ask her about those powerful charities and she tells me I have touched a sore nerve. “They are parasitic, partial and controlling in terms of the families they get behind,” she said. “They are shameful corporate entities more concerned with reputation than the impoverished lives – and deaths – of ordinary people.”

Harsh words. Sadly, however, they ring true. I know her view is shared by other traumatised parents since I have heard this again working on a recent series of articles exposing how people with autism and learning disabilities are locked up in barbaric conditions – forcibly sedated, violently restrained and fed through hatches in solitary confinement – simply due to their conditions. It is reminiscent of Bedlam. But once again, the campaign was led by families, not charities. So why is this?

I fear the answer is simple, if disturbing: many major charities have been captured by the state, becoming so reliant on government funding they have forgotten their purpose and forsaken their roots. Ryan told me a small charity called My Life My Choice fought alongside her from the start – but one household name just wanted her to sit holding a picture of her dead son behind them in a parliamentary meeting while another only jumped on the bandwagon once it took off.

Further reading

Western aid undermines African democracy

By Ian Birrell

It is easy to fire out a few tweets when someone with Aspergers appears on I’m A Celebrity… Far harder to snarl and snap at the hand that feeds you so richly, since part of the problem is how organisations are compromised by their activities. So Mencap, despite posing as the key voice for people with learning disabilities and their families, ended up attacking the bereaved parents of Danny Tozer, a man who died in their ‘care’ amid evidence of failures. You might think this famous charity is a campaign group. Yet most of its funding – £163 million out of £191.9 million income last year – comes from running services as an offshoot of the state.

At least the National Autistic Society issued a report on unacceptable in-patient care for people on the autism spectrum last year and has highlighted how families are ripped apart by these revolting policies. But it has also recently shut a residential home it ran in Somerset amid a police probe into hideous abuse and bullying of people with complex needs. Note again that more than eight in every ten pounds of its income comes from statutory bodies. Meanwhile Scope, in a landmark move, has sold off its residential and daycare services to focus on campaigning – yet still insists its voice was not muted when receiving some half its income from the public sector.

I have seen the same situation in the development sector, where ideals have been corroded by the torrent of cash flooding from Whitehall’s coffers. Now household names collude with their paymasters to fend off criticism of profligate aid policies. The most outrageous example was the IF campaign, created six years ago by charities in harness with politicians who were purported targets of their pressure.

Further reading

Why you can't rely on the news media to understand... disability

By Linnet Mcintyre

Key players included Save The Children, which receives huge sums from the government and whose chief executive Justin Forsyth, a former Labour adviser, worked hard to woo influential Tories before admitting to inappropriate behaviour towards women employees.  One source at another charity told me it was made clear “either you do this or there might be repercussions”.  I am also told of routine meetings to plot joint fightbacks against media criticisms, not to mention all those questionable junkets for MPs.

The legacy of such self-serving and supine behaviour is the sickening sight of aid charities covering up sex abuse and corruption to protect their valuable brands. This symbolises how they have become powerful corporate entities posing as cheery do-gooders while they flit around the planet preaching their patronising creed and networking with politicians. Note also recent revelations in The Times exposing how scores more charities were signing agreements not to criticise government justice and welfare policies to ensure they could carry on sucking contentedly at the state funding teat. This is contemptible behaviour on both sides.

No wonder public faith in charities has plummeted following a series of scandals from Kids Company to Oxfam, two organisations proved to have moved far from their edgy beginnings as they cuddled up to politicians. Kids Company was found to have taken £46 million in public money after it imploded and the claims of its well-connected founder turned to dust. Trust in Britain’s 168,000 charities stands at its lowest level since checks began in 2005 due to issues such as aggressive fund-raising, high pay, abuse of vulnerable people and greedy growth obsession. Many also overlap each other’s work, especially in areas where state funds flow readily.

Further reading

The charity guru who duped the world

By Ian Birrell

An important report this month by the Civil Society Futures inquiry highlighted how charities are seen by a sceptical public as disconnected from their communities and the people they claim to represent. Some are simply brand-obsessed as they chase expansion, others too dependent on their local and central government contracts. “Collectively we must transform ourselves or risk becoming irrelevant,” it concluded rightly. “Some in civil society knew of abuse at Oxfam and elsewhere, and others knew that Kids Company would fail: there is a culture of silence and this undermines shared accountability.”

This was a damning but accurate report, calling for a return to radicalism by putting power back in the hands of the people. It is the latest alarm call for the big players who have become – with a small handful of honourable exceptions – corpulent and complacent corporations with their carefully-buffed brands, shallow campaigns and clutching of celebrities. The big question is whether they will heed the message before it is too late and start standing up for those they profess to serve? Or are they so in hock to the state that activists, families and communities must simply ignore them or even fight them if they seek real change?

The book is reviewed by Howard Husock for City Journal. The reviewer is clearly more sceptical of the virtues of the state than is Lewis, but there are many points of agreement. Certainly, one doesn’t need to be a fan of big government to see the importance of competent government.

Husock expresses concern about a particular threat to administrative capability – not the immediate depredations of the Trump incumbency, but the long-term challenge of finding fresh talent:

“Why… is it proving difficult for government to recruit capable successors to retiring baby-boomer bureaucrats, many of whom are the heroes of The Fifth Risk?”

Looking at the institutions from which top civil servants are recruited, he fears that students are no longer interested in the “non-glamorous” calling to public administration:

“…I saw a shift toward graduates choosing careers with non-governmental advocacy organizations, or toward public-sector careers in which they could be ‘policy entrepreneurs.’ This is a long way from an aspiration to run Medicaid in a way to reduce fraud, or analyze how to keep Social Security solvent.”

Further reading

Global English is a force for division – not unity

By Peter Franklin

In an unrelated article for Brookings, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Laurence Steinberg address another problem with the way in which we’re educating the next generation of managers. To put it crudely, a lot of them can’t write:

“Each of us has been teaching and grading undergraduates for more than 35 years… In the past few years, however, something has seemed dramatically different. When they spoke in class, our students were just as knowledgeable as their counterparts a decade ago—perhaps even more so. But the mere thought of a written exam created palpable fear in our classrooms.”

Hirsh-Pasek and Steinberg think it’s a widespread failing:

“When we asked colleagues across the country if they too had noted that their students had trouble writing, they uniformly said, ‘yes.’”

What’s gone wrong? The authors point the finger at No Child Left Behind (NCLB) – the Bush-era back-to-basics education policy. Though they accept that teaching children facts and testing them on their knowledge is important, there are good and bad ways of going about it:

“Those adopted by the states in response to NCLB were largely fill-in-the-blank, one-right-answer tests that never asked students to defend a position or to find different pathways to come to a defensible conclusion.”

Teaching practices are important, but I suspect this goes well beyond the class room. Ours is a culture of diminishing attention spans, of soundbites, social media and immediate gratification. Young minds are formed in a sea of super-abundant, but thoroughly fragmented, information.

To write at length, at least to any useful effect, requires integration not fragmentation. Even a single sentence is a system, with parts that need to relate to one another in some sort of working order.

Further reading

What's the point of the humanities?

By Peter Franklin

From my experience of various UK work environments, including government and journalism, I have to say that the generational decline in writing ability is not limited to US universities. And I know I’m not alone in thinking this. Many graduates, with good degrees and otherwise sharp minds, struggle to compose and structure readable English. There are plenty of exceptions, of course, especially among specialists like speechwriters and journalists, but all graduates ought to be able write clearly and competently – especially those destined to run our country.

I’m not arguing that a good writer necessarily makes a good administrator. While most writers would happily participate in the proverbial brewery-based social event, only a subset could be trusted to organise one. Managing words and managing people are separate skills; someone can be brilliant at the latter and also completely illiterate.

Public administration, however, requires excellence in both. Government, indeed any large organisation, is like the nervous system of an advanced organism – highly complex, but entirely useless if the individual components can’t communicate with one another.

I’m in favour of restriction. The biggest problem with the British economy – and with Western capitalism in general – is not too little freedom, but too much. Too much, that is, for those who make it their business to increase their share of existing wealth without creating any. This is what economists call rent-seeking (which includes, but isn’t limited to, what tenants pay to their landlords).

Rent-seekers are able to extract value from others because of the monopoly rights that the state gives them over a particular resource – be it land, intellectual property, permission to pollute, political power or something else. Rent-seeking is therefore a result of government policy. Unsurprisingly, governments find themselves relentlessly lobbied by those with a vested interest in maintaining the unjust, opportunity-sapping status quo.

Further reading

What the Tories need in their next leader

By Graeme Archer

Taking on those vested interests requires courage and determination. But that’s why a government – especially one that believes in the opportunity to create rather than extract wealth – should be judged on the quality of its enemies.

Here are ten enemies that the Cameron and May governments should have made, but didn’t:

1. Land owners

Conservatives believe in the right to private property. And so they should. But that right shouldn’t include the uplift in value created when land becomes ripe for development.

The price of farmland can shoot up from less than £10,000 to more than £1,000,000 an acre just because of a planning decision. The act of merely owning the land has contributed precisely nothing to this added value – and yet landowners are able to claim the lion’s share of it.

This injustice, which Winston Churchill condemned back in 1909, lies at the heart of the housing crisis – a crisis which is destroying the Conservative ideal of a property-owning democracy and therefore popular support for conservatism among younger people.

If the Government did something about legal barriers that prevent it from acquiring land at agricultural-use value to build new housing, then a whole range of opportunities could open up. Instead, it continues to side with a few lucky farmers rather than millions of aspiring home owners.

2. The big developers

Of course, if we built more houses, the law of supply and demand would mean lower prices and reduced profits for those lucky landowners, right?

Wrong – and so is the idea that the planning system is mostly to blame for the dearth of new homes. In fact, there’s a huge backlog of unused planning permissions – leading to accusations that the big developers are “land banking”; ie, manipulating the development of the land they hold to control prices.

Of course, that can’t be possibly be true, because the Government has commissioned an investigation – the Letwin Review – which has been taken as evidence that developers don’t land bank. However, the Independent Review of Build Out Rates, Draft Analysis, June 2018, also says this:

“The fundamental driver of build out rates once detailed planning permission is granted for large sites appears to be the ‘absorption rate’ – the rate at which newly constructed homes can be sold into (or are believed by the house builder to be able to be sold successfully into) the local market without materially disturbing the market price.”

Deliberately restricting supply in order to stop prices from falling? How is that not manipulating the market?

It’s plainly obvious what’s going on. The Government must stop hiding behind jargon like “absorption rates” and take land supply out of the developers’ control.

3. Nimbys and cowboys

The planning system isn’t entirely free from blame. A particular problem is the designation of green belts around urban areas. Preventing sprawl is a worthy objective, but choking the growth of prosperous cities such as Oxford and Cambridge is not. Model developments like Poundbury in Dorchester, show that we can build beautifully designed extensions to towns and cities that enhance local life instead of harming it.

However, instead of negotiating a grand bargain on sustainable urban development, the Government has failed to confront the green belt fundamentalists, while turning a blind eye to ugly, piecemeal development in unprotected areas – the worst of both worlds.

4. The bankers

In August 2011, riots erupted across urban England. But what happened next was just as remarkable: a shock-and-awe demonstration of the power of CCTV. Rioters were systematically identified by the police (with public help), shamed by the media and harshly punished by the courts. So much for the anonymity of the mob.

Now compare all that to the UK government reaction to the financial crisis. No shock-and-awe for the bankers. There have been a few prosecutions in relation to specific scams such as the Libor-rigging scandal. Oh, and someone had their knighthood cancelled. But that’s about it.

It would seem that recklessly crashing the global economy is an almost crime-free activity.

Further reading

Ten years on from the crash, the most important banking reform has still not been enacted

By Liam Halligan

5. The beneficiaries of QE

Of course, that’s not to say that the financiers weren’t targeted by the state. Indeed, they were singled out… for a massive programme of assistance.

There were the immediate bailouts of failing banks, but also a much longer period of Quantitative Easing or QE. Though presented as a general tonic for ailing economies, QE has the specific effect of inflating the value of financial assets and therefore rebuilding the bankers’ balance sheets (and boosting the investment portfolios of the wealthy).

The mechanics of the policy also generates a cascade of transactions on which fees can be charged – another nice little earner for those lucky enough to benefit.

Even if we accept the argument that governments had no choice but to resort to QE, it remains a profound injustice that the sector responsible for the original crisis has profited so handsomely from the emergency treatment.

But don’t expect any meaningful process of ‘financial truth and reconciliation’. The brain-aching complexity of QE is precisely what allows governments to get away with not having untangled it.

6. The nuclear industry

When the Conservative Government came to power in 2010 one of its first moves was to slash subsidies for renewable power. Quite right too – the leading renewable technologies were considered capable of delivering more for less, and that’s exactly what they’ve achieved. Despite self-serving predictions that the industry would shrivel without generous subsidies, it has thrived – cutting costs and expanding capacity.

No such market discipline for the nuclear sector, however. Hinkley Point C – the first new nuclear power station to begin construction since the 1980s – is to receive a guaranteed and very expensive price for its electricity over 35 years. So assuming it’s up and running by 2025, we’ll still be paying for its overpriced electricity in 2060.

By the way, the nuclear tech we’re getting for this money – the European Pressurised Reactor – is  dogged by a history of engineering problems and cost overruns.

How on earth did we end-up with this radioactive lemon? Well, it was the first – and, so far, only – opportunity to guarantee a future for Britain’s nuclear industry (even if most of the kit is imported from the French).

No industry and no technology should be owed a living – and certainly not one with nuclear’s record of failure.

7. The rail industry

Speaking of enormously expensive things that don’t turn up on time, let’s talk about our trains.

The Train Operating Companies (TOCs) aren’t best-loved by British public. But this year, with the biggest timetable changes for at least a decade, was the chance for a reset. It was really important then that the whole thing went smoothly.

It was a disaster – with services in the North and South East of England descending into chaos.

The regulator’s report into the fiasco found that the TOCs, Network Rail, the Department for Transport and indeed the regulator all made mistakes – but also that it was unclear as to who was responsible for what.

The obvious conclusion is that the structure of the industry is unsustainable. Of course, if no one has ultimate responsibility then no one can be held ultimately accountable (right up to the Secretary of State for Transport) – which suits all concerned. Except the passengers, of course.

Further reading

Can we reform our rancid political debate?

By Douglas Murray

8. Air polluters

At least most trains are electric these days, which means they don’t belch out the airborne pollutants linked to 40,000 premature deaths in the UK every year and billions of pounds’ worth of damage.

The disastrous decision to encourage the use of diesel engines in Europe can be blamed primarily on the German government and the Volkswagen emissions scandal. However, the British government has repeatedly failed to take the action necessary to clean up the air in our worst-affected cities – or say, in sufficient detail, how it plans to fulfil its legal responsibility to do so.

The long-term solution is to switch to electric vehicles, but we also need a short-term solution. The difficulty isn’t that we don’t know what to do (ie, dis-incentivise the use of polluting vehicles in vulnerable urban areas); it’s that it wouldn’t be popular with motorists.

The most powerful vested interests are the ones composed of millions of people. The trouble is that also leaves millions of people breathing polluted air – but that’s OK because a lot of those are children and they can’t vote.

9. The carpetbaggers of London

On to another kind of grubbiness. How is the Government getting on with its repeated promises to do something about the foreign money laundered through London’s property market?

Very slowly, is the answer. Almost 100,000 properties in the UK are owned by offshore companies. To its credit, the Government is forcing these publicly to register their “beneficial owners” – though not until 2021. Better late than never, but one has to wonder how so much information about so many properties is going to be verified.

Of course, this would be a much smaller problem if the ownership of high-end property in the UK weren’t so lightly taxed (and therefore ridiculously attractive). One would assume that most foreign investment in London real estate is legitimate; but one has to ask: who benefits?

Certainly not the ordinary working people and productive enterprises priced out of their own capital. And not those who pay heavy taxes on the fruits of their labour because their government won’t shift the burden on to idle wealth.

London and other British cities should be fully open to genuine entrepreneurs and innovators from around the world. But we don’t need more speculators; we’ve got quite enough of our own.

Further reading

What's killing the Conservatives?

By James Kirkup

10. Government itself

Let’s conclude with the vested interest closest to home – the machinery of government and the wider political system. The Conservatives came to power promising a revolution in the way that we’re governed. The 2010 Conservative manifesto was entitled Invitation to Join the Government of Britain and promised a “Big Society” in place of a “Big State”.

There have been some reforms – most notably a significant devolution of power to cities. But, on the whole, the status quo remains intact. Parliament, Government and the Civil Service all work in much the same way as they did in 2010. Even the most straightforward reforms, like a modest reduction in the number of MPs from 650 to 600, have yet to be delivered. 

Others have been scrapped – such as the introduction of “extended ministerial offices“. These were a tiny move to towards reducing the dependency of Cabinet ministers on the civil service – and on Downing Street. Of course, even that proved too much of a threat to the established order.

And thus a sclerotic system of government struggles on – unable and unwilling to confront its own vested interests, let alone anyone else’s.

In the latter part of the 18th century, someone had a brainwave – it might just make more sense to have one department dealing with foreign policy and the other with domestic policy. So in 1782, the Northern Department became the Foreign Office and the Southern Department became the Home Office. In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, as governments got bigger and provided more public services and a social security system, various specialist departments for heath, education, housing etc were split off from the Home Office – meaning that most Whitehall departments today are lineal descendants of the old Southern Department.

Multiple ministries with subject-specific responsibilities are the obvious way to organise a modern national government. There is a cost, however. Separate, specialised ministries beget separate, specialised bureaucracies to administer and deliver the public services for which the most senior minister in each department is ultimately responsible.

The trouble is that public services are delivered to real people in real places, whose real needs are not separate. Rather, individuals and families have problems that can only be effectively dealt with together.

Writing for the New York Times, Dhruv Khullar provides a sombre example:

“Americans with depression, bipolar disorder or other serious mental illnesses die 15 to 30 years younger than those without mental illness — a disparity larger than for race, ethnicity, geography or socioeconomic status. It’s a gap, unlike many others, that has been growing…”

The reasons for this gap aren’t necessarily what you might expect:

“We may assume that people with mental health problems die of “unnatural causes” like suicide, overdoses and accidents, but they’re much more likely to die of the same things as everyone else: cancer, heart disease, stroke, diabetes and respiratory problems. Those with serious mental illness are more likely to struggle with homelessness, poverty and social isolation. They have higher rates of obesity, physical inactivity and tobacco use. Nearly half don’t receive treatment, and for those who do, there’s often a long delay.”

Further reading

Poor mental health is bad for the economy

By Charlotte Pickles

To differing extents, we have specialised healthcare services to administer specific treatments for specific physical and mental health conditions. These are, in most cases, more effective now than at any time in human history. But when it comes to helping the person, I wonder how much progress we’ve made:

“After decades of fragmenting medicine into specialties and subspecialties, it’s perhaps not surprising that a siloed system often fails those in need of whole-person care.”

This isn’t just about medicine, of course. Other public services – from social housing providers to the police – may end up dealing with the same individuals, but each only in respect to their immediate responsibilities.

Khullar reports on some innovative projects whose purpose is to help the whole person, not just one of their problems. But why are such schemes the exception and not the norm?

Though politicians like to talk about ‘joined-up government’ and ‘integrated public services’, they forget that public services already overlap – at the level of the person and the place. Given the opportunity to do so, frontline public service professionals from different services, who have practical experience of the people they help and the places they work, have every reason to come together to exchange information and find solutions.

The trouble though is that they are subject to separate bureaucracies, with chains of command stretching away to distant centres of power, where policy decisions and resource deployments are separately and distantly made.

Even when governments make an effort to coordinate public services – as in the case of Britain’s Troubled Families Programme – it is done from the top of the bureaucratic hierarchies, not at the frontline. No wonder such programmes fail.

It is not the centres of power that need to be joined-up, but the localities of experience.

Further reading

Wanted: a government willing to perform experiments on us

By Peter Franklin

After the country became independent from the USSR, in 1991, it decided to pursue technological innovation as a way of carving out a distinct identity. The results have been remarkable. e-Estonia, the government’s tech arm, boasts today that 99% of public services are available to citizens in digital form, with only marriages, divorces and real-estate transactions requiring you to leave the house. Online voting for parliamentary elections arrived in 2007. The country’s tax returns are done online, with most of the data pre-completed thanks to links between the tax office and local banks.

Around 97 per cent of patients have a digital health record, to which doctors have quick and easy access: in emergencies, they can use a person’s ID code to find out potentially life-saving information such as blood type, allergies, recent treatments, and on-going medication. Patients can browse through their own health records and those of their children, and see who else has looked at them. More than 95 per cent of prescriptions are issued digitally.

Cabinet meetings are paperless, with non-contentious matters agreed online in advance, and as a result have been cut from five hours to as little as half an hour. Absent ministers can take part remotely. Most parliamentary activity is also done digitally. In total, e-Estonia reckons the country’s embrace of cyber saves it 800 years of working time every year. Little wonder Wired magazine describes it as “the most advanced digital society in the world’.

There is a commercial as well as a democratic point to all this. Estonia has been able to flog its smarts to other countries, including Finland, Azerbaijan, Namibia and the Faroe Islands.

And of course, where Estonia has blazed a trail, a stampede of fellow nations has quickly followed. Govtech is proving a majorly disruptive force to the way services have traditionally been delivered across the world. In the new era there is, simply, no longer any need to do things the old, slow, frustrating way.

The Phillipines

The government’s Department of Science and Technology has worked with IBM to create an AI-driven operations centre for dealing with disaster management. This provides emergency managers with a raft of information including advance warning of extreme weather events, feedback from first responders on the number of casualties and affected families, and the condition of buildings, roads and infrastructure.

Singapore

Never far from the frontline when it comes to innovation, Singapore has created a Government Technology Agency, where more than 1,800 tech whizzes, including software developers, data scientists, user-experience experts and geospatial engineers operate like a Silicon Valley start-up, experimenting, tweaking and tackling problems brought to them by various government agencies. The Hive focused initially on establishing the Business Grants Portal, which brings the government’s various grants together in one destination so companies can more easily apply for them. It has also done work on healthcare, an app for reporting non-emergency issues to agencies, and created chatbots that answer citizens’ questions and help them to complete forms. Its leaders are now installing crack teams of around 50 people into each government department.

Denmark

The Scandinavian state is a frontrunner in the use of telehealth, which enables remote contact between patients and doctors, plus digital advice, reminders, education, intervention and monitoring. This has been adopted in areas such as home rehabilitation and physiotherapy in Copenhagen, aiming to reduce hospital readmissions; in connecting diabetes patients and those with heart conditions with healthcare staff; and in home monitoring of older Danes, including video consultations and blood pressure monitoring.

Rwanda

Previously, reliance on the road network could mean the delivery of blood supplies to hospitals took five hours by ambulance. Now hospitals simply text a request, and drones parachute the blood in within around 15 mins. This avoids the need for refrigeration and dramatically cuts emergency response times.

Holland

Amsterdam is one of the world’s leading Smart Cities. It has cut living costs for homeowners by using a smart grid to reduce their CO2 emissions, brought in smart lampposts that save €10 billion per year, and automated bridge opening and closing to reduce waiting times for cars and ships, which has dramatically cut costs. It also uses an intelligent traffic management system, which has slashed the number of hours spent in vehicles.

These advances are important. Citizens around the world see the explosion in digital capability and potential and want governments to deploy technology for the public good. As the rest of their lives become more streamlined and convenient, they expect the same from the state. Slo-mo policians and civil servants look increasingly undynamic and out-of-touch with the modern world. A firm grasp of tech is vital – with alarming forecasts being made about the impact AI and robots will have on the workplace, the public is looking for reassurance that the state is alert to and managing this shift.

There’s a lot going on behind the scenes in the British government. The DWP is using natural language processing, machine learning and intelligent automation to read and categorise incoming correspondence, which is then sent to relevant staff. This liberates workers from the more mundane aspects of the job and, in theory at least, allows them to make a difference in more essential areas. Local authorities are going down the same path: Enfield Council, in North London, uses Amelia, robot technology that deals with frontline issues such as resident queries or authenticating licenses.

There is also a conversation to be had about the vast increase in storage and use of personal data and how this threat to individual privacy is best managed. It was public unease over state snooping that saw Tony Blair’s plans to introduce ID cards in the UK come to nothing in the 2000s. However, as we live more of our lives online, and willingly share more of our data with private companies, as biometrics and other identity analytics become commonplace, it seems likely we will return to the debate, and under different terms.

For example, future generations, raised in a different, more open and connected world, are likely to be less instinctively protective of their privacy. Arguments about convenience and inevitability will hold more sway, too. Estonia’s enthusiastic embrace of the new has seen the country introduce an overarching ID card, which, because all the government’s tech innovations speak to each other, has massively simplified the interface between citizen and the state.

As Siret Schutting of e-Estonia told Wired: “When you introduce an ID card, you get a lot of people asking, ‘Why do I need that?’ But then you add all of these services, and you can purchase a car from your living room, or vote from your living room or, when it’s like minus 40 outside and you have a newborn baby, you probably don’t want to go to the family office to name her: you do that online. Very small, pragmatic things.”

When you put it like that…