Britain’s dysfunctional state: Energy, Droughts and Lockdowns
Britain’s dysfunctional state: Energy, Droughts and Lockdowns
And what Brexit has to do with all this
In today’s newsletter, I want to draw together a few things which people are always asking me. Both in the House of Lords and on the street, the same questions keep cropping up:
- Do you still defend your role in Brexit? Do you think it’s been a success, or are you disappointed in how things turned out?
- Why has there been no great public reckoning about the harms of lockdown? How did they get away with it?
- How scared should we be about the cost of energy? What can we do as a society to get to grips with higher energy bills?
- Why on earth are they talking about droughts? Haven’t they seen this country?!
The last one might be a bit of a joke, but I do think all these questions have a common answer: Britain’s system of government is increasingly dysfunctional. As regular Battle of Ideas festival speaker Ashley Frawley noted recently in a brilliant TV segment, from the NHS to the civil service, the people who run important institutions in society seem to be such busy bees creating rules, plans, regulations and frameworks while failing to actually deliver the services and infrastructure we need.
What does this have to do with droughts? Well, you’ll have noticed that every water company seems to have extremely detailed ‘drought plans’ or ‘rain monitoring systems’, but seems to be much less interested in the apparently too mundane business of actually supplying water, building reservoirs and fixing leaks.
Similarly, the enormous increases in energy prices have exposed decades of ‘planning’ about energy that have left us unprepared for an energy crisis. Many of you will have seen the viral clip of Nick Clegg explaining that it was pointless to build a new nuclear power station because it wouldn’t be ready until 2022 – this sums up a deeply short-termist, managerial approach to government. As another Battle of Ideas festival regular, James Woudhuysen, put it, ‘instead of putting all our energies into securing more supply, the UK authorities would prefer us to start rationing our gas and electricity use … the UK government has presided over the managed decline of our energy supplies.’
Without overdoing the point, you can also see how this kind of government approach figured in our lockdown polices. The lockdowns really exposed the UK – which was supposedly the ‘best prepared’ for a pandemic, according to quango league tables. As one study has it, ‘this reflects the inherent pathologies of the shift from “government to governance” and of the “regulatory state” it had spawned. This has resulted in the hollowing-out of effective state capacities, the dangerous diffusion of responsibility, and reliance on emergency measures to contain crises.’
Finally, then, what does any of this have to do with Brexit, and my support for it? One thing that united many Brexiteers was the concern that the EU had intensified this ‘hollowing out’ of state capability, resulting in UK politicians conveniently failing to take responsibility for major challenges the country faced. To put it crudely, hobnobbing with Brussels technocrats and copy-pasting EU regulatory schemes seemed much easier than looking deeply at the problems facing the UK in areas like energy, food, water supply or industrial strategy.
Brexit has certainly not changed this responsibility-lite mode of government overnight. But I think that leaving the EU has forced open the door for us to have proper debates and discussions about what kind of government – and what kind of leaders – we want to have. There is now nowhere for our politicians to run and hide.
We at the Academy of Ideas will be hoping to provide a space for these discussions to happen at our annual Battle of Ideas festival. As you can imagine, energy will feature prominently, but we’ll also be looking at the crisis of institutions like the Civil Service, as well as reflecting on the legacy of populism. Go and get a ticket now!
Stay up to date
Select events and media appearances from the Academy of Ideas and our friends
In the news:
Ella Whelan reviewed the papers with Alexis Conran and Jack Blackburn on Sunday 28 August. Listen again from 00:25.
Recommended reads from Academy of Ideas:
The New Puritans by Andrew Doyle: skewering the culture wars Tomiwa Owolade, The Sunday Times, 28 August 2022
Time to fight for a better future Tom Slater, Spiked, 26 August 2022
The fundamentally important principle behind this dysfunction is that the more power that a government has, the less accountable that it is, even in a democracy.
The imperative is a radical and irreversible dissipation of state power. Concentration of coercive power is inherently unsafe. Constitutional reform is a real urgent necessity that will have a serious practical effect on the lives of millions.