Britain is drifting into failed state territory

By Pete North - August 2, 2020

If politics was functioning, by far the largest expenditure for any political party, after advertising, would be on policy research. At one time parties in opposition would invest a great deal of intellectual energy on alternative policy aimed at resolving problems of the day. They would then be compiled into a manifesto. A prospectus for government.

A manifesto used to be a serious business. These days, however, they are cobbled together at the last minute, usually following fads and fashions and amount to little more than a list of vague political aspirations while the parties themselves have no idea how to translate such aspirations into policy.

One might aspire, for instance, to get immigration under control. Most parties, if they are serious about winning, will say this. Achieving the objective, however, is a little more involved. You need a whole spectrum of policies starting in local authorities all the way up to the border and beyond. The objective must inform foreign, trade and aid policy. The stuff of real statecraft.

This, though, is a lost art. Government has been reduced to two basic functions. Firefighting and media management. When a problem comes along it is simply a matter of throwing money vaguely in the direction of the problem and hoping for the best while using a media management operation to deflect the worst headlines and keep the media occupied with the trivia it lives for.

This in my view is failed state territory. Politics is unable to usefully shape or direct the apparatus of government toward any particular end. Here it is no exaggeration to use term failed state. Certain arms of government can continue to function on autopilot for a long time with minimal interference from politics, and in some cases the less meddling the better, but other arms of the state tend to go feral when not directed.

What you then have is a country functioning purely on muscle memory but in a state of almost imperceptibly slow but terminal decline. Eventually things start to break down and simply don’t get fixed. The public simply adapts without realising.

Housing is one such example. Today we see plans for a “radical shake-up of the complex and outdated planning system”. Of course, nobody will argue that it isn’t outdated but it’s complex for a multitude of reasons. There are a number of overlapping and often conflicting priorities. The Tories, though, are going with the laissez faire deregulatory “permission in principle” approach.

In other words, a considered policy taking into account the many conflicting demands of housing policy was simply beyond their abilities so they’ve decided to abandon actual policy and let the chips fall where they may, resulting in low quality cramped homes and increased congestion. We’ll hate it, but we’ll simply have to get used to it because we have no democracy to speak of. The decision is made.

Here the opposition can wail all it likes but when it comes to their turn in office they’ll have no more idea of what to do instead, and will simply resume the role of firefighting, throwing money at the various problems this “shake-up” creates. We get nowhere near the kind of joined up policy making we need and subsequently elections become meaningless.

This mode of government has been in effect for some time now. As a system of managed decline it works well enough when the fundamental governance systems are fixed in place. But that ends this coming January.

The real test will be the Brexit trade deal. If there’s no deal things will rapidly fall apart. Managing the consequences is beyond their ability. The fact we have a government that would even consider a no deal Brexit is a sign of the intellectual atrophy at the heart of government. They have no idea what damage it will do or how to even prepare for it. They haven’t the first idea how complex systems work.

Fisheries will rapidly fall apart. Foreign boats will ignore the new boundaries because the UK simply won’t have the resources to enforce them. We have no idea how to design a fisheries policy let alone run one. We’ll end up spending more on enforcement than the fish are worth. Without a deal it won’t even be worth catching the fish since we can neither land or sell fish in the EU. UK seas then become ripe for plunder unless we task the Royal Navy and RAF with fisheries protection (as if they haven’t got better things to do).

As to exports by road, we should be getting ready to run tests on the customs system but we’re nowhere close to that. The Dover clearance centre isn’t going to be operational on time nor will we have customs officials capable of running it. We don’t have that kind of competence.

Instead of implementing policy government will be in full whack-a-mole mode in much the same way it has handled Covid. They should have had a full spectrum of policies ready for day one of Brexit but that which does exist is not so much policy as propaganda to convince themselves. When it collapses at first contact with reality and the policy cupboard is bare, they’ll be in a state of permanent damage control.

Then, as with any failed state, the government will seek to deflect the blame for its own refusal to plan and anticipate, and its failure to do all those things commensurate with being an independent state. The media should be on top of this in holding the Tories to account, but in all probability they won’t. They’ll much prefer the biff-bam war of words between Johnson and the EU as relations deteriorate. Another key ingredient of a failed state is a dysfunctional media.

As it happens, things do not look much better even if there is a deal. Many of the problems play out as though there were no deal by way of having only a limited trade relationship, which will see a number of regulatory systems in need of urgent attention at a level beyond the comprehension of your average MP.

Everything from waste exports to space policy is in some way touched by Brexit, for which there are no credible policies ready to run. Elimination of tariffs is barely scratching the surface, and without a serious trade policy and a contingency plan, we’re going to make a giant mess of it. Perhaps irretrievably.

As to trade, nobody close to this government has a functioning concept of what modern trade is about or how the global rules based system works. Johnson is surrounded by cronies, cranks and imbeciles. They’ve got no handle on it and they’re not even close.

At that point it won’t take very much to push us into failed state territory for real. Covid won’t finish Britain off, but the next pandemic (or pandemic scare) probably will.

There was never any chance of handling Covid well. Lockdowns have their uses but only in conjunction with properly equipped, localised face to face track and trace systems conducted by local authorities who know their patch. We have long since dismantled that capability by way of merging local authority functions as far back as 1995. We have long since abandoned any concept of local government. That which remains is simply a network of implementing agencies and welfare dispensaries.

Instead of learning the lessons from Covid we are now doubling down on that historic mistake, with further amalgamations of councils, creating super-authorities around the country, laughably in the name of “devolution”. We are, in effect, abolishing local democracy. This amounts to unilateral disarmament for any future outbreaks.

With a feral government, incapable of bringing anything under control, having already squandered its credibility, and with a useless and inert parliament, things will simply coast along until they start breaking down, held together only by the goodwill of government departments and the much maligned civil service.

What we’re looking at here is the consequences of decades of political and institutional atrophy. Meaningful party politics has died a death, we no longer even know the meaning of the word democracy, and all of our policy competence has been outsourced to Brussels. We spend more on PR gurus than we do policy experts.

In that regard political parties have had no need of policy backed manifestos. Transport policy, agricultural policy, fisheries policy, trade policy, consumer protection policy, labour rights policy all became a function of the EU leaving national politicians to shuffle the deck chairs and decide which cohort to buy off at elections. Even if our political parties were capable fo devising an alternative approach based on a different philosophy they wouldn’t be allowed to implement it.

So what we are left with is political parties which are little more than brand names that various extreme factions battle to control just to get their hands on the purse strings. None of them are actually interested in political outcomes, just so long as they stay in power. We therefore revert to the kind of winner takes all tribal politics no different in substance to any African tinpot dicatorship.

It won’t take much for the UK to become a failed state. We are halfway there already. We risk becoming like Greece – a poor country populated by wealthy people with a dysfunctional state where nothing happens without a bribe, and public provisions are so bad that anyone who can chooses private provision. Everyone else is left to rot.

We then gradually get used to unsustainable immigration, poor housing, permanent congestion, feudal landlordism crime and disorder while a decadent political class destroys everything it touches.

I once argued that Brexit would at least arrest the decline but the last few years has persuaded me that we missed the window and we are far too gone for Brexit to mean anything. It seems, in fact, to be an accelerant of all the worst trends in politics meaning we will reach the depressing conclusion far sooner. Whether that’s a good thing or not is really contingent on what we decide to do about it as a country. If we continue to tolerate it as we have with little or no protest, then we shall surely deserve what’s coming to us.