The Battle for Britain with John Clarke (part 4)

Thanks, Jeremy.

And thanks to everybody for turning up.

How impressive.

So I'm going to do what we did times before.

I'm going to do a sort of brief overview of the two last chapters of the book, and then we'll see what happens.

So chapter nine, it's called Unstable Equilibria, a Crisis of the State? And it starts from my favourite, much loved phrase of Antonio Gramsci, in which he reflects on the possibility that the life of the state may be conceived of as a series of unstable equilibria.

And I keep coming back to it because I like that paradox of unstable equilibria.

And I find it a useful way of thinking about the strange trajectories of states.

So the argument for the chapter is that everything that has gone before now comes together and is condensed in the unsettled life and trajectory of the British state and generates three different sorts of crises in that state.

First is a crisis of capacity.

That crisis of capacity to actually do state-like things has been coming for a long time.

It derives its impetus from the neoliberal reconstruction of the state around cost reduction, around the introduction of what's in social policy were called quasi markets.

and managerialization, a combination that delivered what Ian Harden, a long time ago, called a contracting state.

That's in both the sense of contracting, it's both shrinking and shrinking by the means of subcontracting.

It produced what Clark and Newman, an equally long time ago, called a dispersed state, devolving power and authority for state services to different sorts of agencies, recruited through combining what economists delight in calling principal-agent relationships – the rest of us might think of as the process of contracting out through audit and later in the new labour years through treating users of state services as consumers.

The combination of those dynamic changes has over a long period of time generated a variety of failures to deliver on things that people, well, maybe it used to be expected, it's probably now hoped for from their state.

The

second type of crisis for the state is a crisis of legitimacy.

Those failures to deliver across a range of fields.

I mean, best, worst exemplified possibly in the chaos of the asylum system in the UK.

But the failures, multiple failures to deliver, have led to a growing public scepticism about both capacity, the ability to actually do it, and competence, the ability to organise to do things.

Combined with, I think, I mean, I don't know that they were ever trusted very much, but a deepening mistrust of politicians and of politics in general, that politics is viewed as corrupt, dirty, ineffectual, which I think in passing is a... is a challenge for those of us who have spent a lot of time trying to tell people that subject X, topic, relationship Y, is indeed political.

But if political is a suspect category, there's a question about how that works for progressive politics.

Anyway, not here, not now.

Thirdly, and finally, there's a crisis of authority.