Why Britain no longer functions

By Pete North - October 19, 2020

The majority of us want something done about immigration. It’s not reasonable to expect the country to absorb hundreds of thousands of people every year. It brings constant and disruptive change we are not equipped to deal with.

To deal with it we need more than border enforcement. It requires policing to tackle the back street sweatshops and illegal accommodation. That, though, doesn’t happen because local authorities lack the resources and institutional architecture to cope with it. If you find a HMO full of illegals, you still have to re-house them if you close it down. It’s cheaper and easier to do nothing.

We could easily close down the illegal places of employment such as the garment factories in Leicester but we’d have to go out and find them. We’re not doing this. Since October, there have been fewer than 60 health and safety inspections in an area with over 1,000 factories. We have all the laws we need but nothing like effective enforcement. Nothing has been done and nobody in government has been held accountable.

We ought to prioritise this kind of work, particularly in areas like Bradford and Leicester because where you have Pakistani communities you find exactly this kind of exploitation, but more crucially, a network of law firms involving visa scams and shell companies set up for money laundering.

For that, there is enough work to keep courts in operation seven days a week. But we no longer have local police stations or local local magistrates courts. They’ve all been streamlined into nonexistence. The court system is now on the brink of collapse.

The left would blame austerity but this is more to do with a managerial mindset and it would have happened with or without austerity. You just have to listen to the way town hall bosses talk. They believe to their core than amalgamating things makes them more efficient. It makes governing more convenient for the governors but they do not record the cost to society of gutting effective local government.

This is especially visible now when after eight months of a lockdowns and restrictions, we still don’t have a functioning test and trace system. Local authorities used to have that kind of capability but now central government believes it can all be done with gadgets and technology. We’ve saved a few quid at the local level but to cost to the UK economy is running into tens of billions.

It will get worse too. We are already in the process of “devolution”, essentially creating super-authorities, which will no doubt mean further closures of local government offices until nobody working in “local” government knows or even lives on their own patch. We’re all just numbers on an accountant’s spreadsheet.

Good national governance stands on a foundation of good local government. Having chipped away at its own foundations we now find that whenever there is a crisis councils don’t have the capacity to act so it then falls upon central government which lacks the capability. All it knows how to do is throw money at the problem – or rather its preferred bidder service contractors and party donors.

Instead of local government we then get regional fiefdoms headed up by hasbeen politicians, leading to the same kind of grubby and tiresome politics we see from the London mayor and the Welsh assembly. Another layer of politics we don’t need and can’t afford, and suffers from the same bureaucratic inertia as central government.

The destination of all this, assuming we are not there already, is high taxes to sustain a a massive government apparatus keeping middle class university educated functionaries and busybodies in secure non- jobs, but one where nothing ever gets done, wastes vast sums of money, nothing works, nobody is ever held accountable and the rich get richer off it.

We’ve had this for some time now, resulting in political cynicism and disaffection. The state then further retreats into its defensive corporate bubble further isolated from any democratic inputs, seeing the public as a nuisance to be managed at a distance. Governance then becomes a system of issuing fines with its operations primarily geared to revenue collection. Government is no longer integral to society. It becomes wholly parasitic and incapable of doing what we want it to do regardless of who we elect.

This is how our democracy became meaningless. Local councillors have little authority and local authorities are now essentially regional development quangos implementing top-down agendas. One hopes that Brexit provides some remedy for this but without further democratic reform we have simply exchanged Brussels for London at the top of the pyramid. Without a fundamental change of mindset we can’t expect things to improve – and the longer this decay festers the more dangerous politics becomes.