Dismantling Britain’s despotism

The fictional town of Dunchester is the scene for a right-wing science-fiction novel by nineteenth century author H. Rider Haggard. It is also the site for a fantasy game used to recruit and train British civil servants. The Tory novel is about radicals trying to block experts and professionals from saving Dunchester from an epidemic of plague. The civil service game allows players to spend £20 million in regenerating a fake town with the same name. Players take the role of any number of key stakeholders – Ministers, MPs, pressure groups, council officers. But there’s one group missing. It is as if the pestilence of Rider Haggard’s novel has entirely killed the people of the city. In the civil service game, the citizens of Dunchester have no say in how money spent on them is allocated. Our bureaucrats are, it seems, trained to govern a country which has no people.

I learnt about Dunchester from my friend Julie Grimble, one-time Hackney councillor and manager of the LGA’s Labour group office. Julie is, like me, one of the growing number of Labour people seething with anger about the arrogance and incompetence with which a small group of ministers, wanna-be ministers and civil servants govern – or try to govern – the British state.

We’re beginning to see that Alex Salmond was right. There is a ‘Westminster elite’. It dislikes most of the people of Britain. It imagines it is cleverer than the rest of us. It thinks it has the right to rule. It believes government can do things for the people, like deciding where Dunchester’s millions are spent without talking to those who ‘benefit’, not with or by them. Not everyone who works in Westminster is a paid up member. There are plenty of MPs critical in public (even more in private) about its pretensions. But, most of those who aspire to be ministers conform to its rules.

What Salmond missed, of course, was that this elite’s effort to dominate damages Lambeth as much as Leith or Lanarckshire.

It is an elite whose abiding emotions are distrust and fear. It doesn’t trust anyone with authority who it can’t directly control – teachers, social workers, but also charities and businesses large and small. It doesn’t imagine people can hold public instititions to account. Most importantly, in an age when information travels instantly, it is frightened about being held to account for failure. To defend itself it wraps our public sector, and much of private business, in red tape. It has an ever-expanding desire for ‘powers’ to tackle potential crises, the latest being the ridiculous restrictions proposed by Theresa May on supporters of terrorism. Its most important characteristic are its tin ears. It exists in a world where its whims and reflexes are always true, its crazy schemes always work, and other points of view simply not heard.

There’s long been a word in English politics to describe this state of affairs – ‘despotism’. Despotism denotes a concentration of power in people or institutions that rule without dialogue or challenge. Despotisms are political system where administration is centralized, where responsibility and energy is sucked out of local communities so much that people lose any sense of their independence and initiative. I can’t think of a better word to describe the corruption of our public institutions happening in places like Rotherham, for example. There, authority is so badly centralised that ticking boxes created by national guidelines mattered more than stopping children from being raped. As Alexis de Tocqueville long ago pointed out, it doesn’t matter that the system is overseen by elected representatives. Electing its managers might change the direction the machine travels, but they don’t alter the despotic way it works.

Opposition to despotism (here at least) has long been a theme in English politics. As E.P. Thompson once noted, there were always ‘limits beyond which the Englishman [sic] was not prepared to be ‘pushed around”. The combination of English patriotism and local liberty resonates deeply, still. As ever, it is picked up by politicians from different sides. In the 1800s, this language was used by conservatives opposed to the French Revolution, and radicals defending the right of Trades Unions to organise alike. Thatcher mobilised it against a left she describes as anti-individual and pro-soviet. Its now a theme UKIP has seized as their own, defending the freeborn Englishman against the tyranny of Europe’s bureaucrat. In fact, though, like the Conservatives, Nigel Farage seeks simply to repatriate authoritarian power, and give a distant, despotic UK state the powers Europe has now.

I’m angry that Labour has conceded the anti-authoritarian traditions of English politics to the right. This should be our turf. Labour was established to defend the independence of working people, to organise and defend against the despotic power of both the central state and big business. Too often we were seduced by the idea that the despotic machinery of the centralised state could ‘deliver’ better living standards. We’re learning now it can’t. Jobs can only be created if our economies are governed by people who understand local conditions face-to-face, not as massive statistical aggregations. Health services can only work together if they are answerable to local politicians not central managers. Life and energy will only return if our country’s towns and cities have power.

We need to dismember Britain’s despotism. Scotland will do it their own way, as they work out their devolution settlement. But here in England, we have two hundred years of radical argument about the need to challenge despotism and disperse power to draw from. Its time Dunchester’s citizens got their voice back.