As the Guardian reports this morning
Once vanishingly rare, the prospect English local authorities might go bust now offers no surprise: four councils have in effect gone bankrupt in the past year; others have declared a state of “financial emergency”; a further one in five believe it is “fairly or very likely” they will become insolvent in the next 18 months.
Those that are not going bankrupt know that they face the prospect of closing almost all their services bar social care, emergency housing and (maybe) refuse collection.
This is a desperately sorry situation, created entirely by Cameron and Osborne and their utterly unnecessary policy of austerity, for which Cameron has now been rewarded with a peerage and high office, whilst Osborne produces a podcast with his best friend, Ed Balls, who happens to be married to the person who aspires to be Labour Home Secretary.
A century ago, local councils were at the heart of transformational change in the UK. They were the primary providers of:
- Schools
- Electricity
- Local transport
- Social housing
- Gas, in some places
- Clean water and sewers
- Public health
In other words, they were at the forefront of the transformation of society, often using locally subscribed capital to fund local development via bond issues that turned the savings of local people into the future that they desired for themselves and others.
And now? They have been reduced to rumps of service that live under perpetual threat of further cuts, utterly dependent for funding on central government that is intent on denying it to them.
The neoliberal attack on the power of government to transform lives can be seen in the collapse of local government in the UK.
Do we need more evidence of how dangerous it is?
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Many years ago I worked with an electrician who had been trained by the Bristol Corporation Electricity Department and the Corporation proudly announced in advertising that it’s power station at Portishead was the base load station for the South West
Sadly all now long gone
The dark hand of Neoliberalism seems too to be behind the coming BofE’s CBDCs. Here in their Digital Pound Response, as commentator Rich Turrin observes, they try and fail to reassure that they won’t be used for behaviour modification or for spying, honest, you can trust us etc; https://richturrin.substack.com/p/bank-of-england-digital-pound-privacy
Personally I remain unconvinced.
Also of concern; this must-watch from Lord Prem and former Police Commissioner Anthony Stansfield which leaves one in no doubt of the ongoing corruption in high office in this country which must somehow be rooted out before any social progress can be made https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJNJ4EElXiw&t=67s
Sadly selective amnesia isn’t confined to Neoliberals many voters are clueless about macro-monetary matters and therefore fall prey to the ideologically rabid and moral free Neoliberals. Perhaps under FPTP the small number of swing seats that determine election outcomes need to be strategically targetted by a macro-monetary literate non-Neoliberal political party.
Schofield, do you think that making snide remarks about the voters helps, either on here or in any other place?
What are you doing to help people understand?
Jen W it’s really important that you understand what I’m trying to point out and right now you’re just not getting it. In the first instance the idea of many people in the UK having “selective amnesia” is not mine although the phrase is. The idea is that of Abby Innes and comes from her book “Late Soviet Britain” where she says that the ideology of Neoliberalism dominants the thinking of many people in the UK and it does so in large part because it concentrates on fostering “organised forgetting.” In plain terms it does its level best to stop people facing the negative effects of Neoliberal ideology and examining the causes of those negative effects. An obvious example of this, which Richard’s blog focuses on, is the lying about how the country’s monetary system works. The other big theme in her book is that Market Fundamentalism which Neoliberalism has as a core mantra is no different than the State Capitalism of Communism in that it’s a utopian materialistic dream that is flawed in practice. To avoid people recognising this both utopian ideologies have to put a great deal of effort into encouraging people to have selective amnesia. For you to deny this is taking place is not constructive!
Schofield, you obviously do not understand me any more than I understand you.
I am saying that many voters don’t have selective amnesia because they can’t forget what they never learnt in the first place.
I am obviously not intelligent enough for this blog.
I disagree JenW
There is a misunderstanding here
That’s normal
I probably should not have allowed the comment aimed at you on. My mistake.
It seems to me that the social contract, whereby Governments worked in the interests of its citizens has broken down and Governments now work in the interests of big business as evidenced by the ever widening gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. We are witnessing conditions identical to those described in ‘The Spirit Level’ by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (2009), which describes the “pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption”.
Agreed
Thank you, Richard.
Mum is a civil servant and has an oversight role for local authorities.
The corruption and reliance on private sector providers, including City investment firms for adoption and fostering, is breathtaking.
Care for children and even adults that have some disability may cost of up to £3000 a month. However, the person doing the work may get a quarter of that. The City intermediary snaps up the lion’s share.
Programmes to support Ukrainian, but not other refugees, are also exploited. For example, one home county has 1800 Ukrainian children of school age, mainly boys soon to be of fighting age, but being kept out of harm’s way. 600 are in private school, a hidden subsidy for struggling private schools, minor ones.
The Tories are the worst, but the other parties are at it, too. Mum says this corruption has been there ever since she joined the civil service.
Thank you
Good article Richard. Local government and with it local democracy needs a complete revival. I fully believe much of what central government does but not all could be performed by local councils/communities providing the Funding goes with it. This probably means a complete change for the way taxes are raised/assessed etc. Central govt hold on the way we thrive locally needs to be dismantled. However I can’t see Labour or Conservative parties doing it. They are too consumed with the pursuit of power and wealth.
…………..and all Labour can do is suspend an MP for rightly pointing out the ongoing overreaction of the the Israeli government to the HAMAS attack of last year.
If only it was that quick and effective in its proposed response to the crisis in local government and much else.
BTW, I do not believe in the ‘collective amnesia’ theory at all.
To forget something is to have at one time truly understood it.
Did this society of ours truly know how things worked? I can’t remember any lessons at school telling me how and why the ‘welfare’ state worked – do any of you?
My whole life has been about tax cuts, cuts to employment conditions, pay and more hardship.
I don’t believe the principal purpose of what we undergo in our formative years is educational at all; rather, it’s conditioning designed to make us think that having rich people be in charge is somehow the natural order. Think of Tacitus, Life of Agricola (not for first time I’ve pointed this out either) “§ 17. The following winter passed without disturbance, and was employed in productive matters. For, in order to familiarize a population scattered and barbarous and therefore inclined to war with rest and repose through the charms of luxury, Agricola gave private encouragement and public aid to the building of temples, courts of justice and dwelling-houses, praising the energetic, and reproving the lazy. Thus an honourable rivalry took the place of force. He likewise provided a liberal education for the sons of the chiefs, and showed such a preference for the natural powers of the Britons over the industry of the Gauls that they who lately disdained the tongue of Rome now coveted its eloquence. Hence, too, a liking sprang up for our style of dress, and the “toga” became fashionable. Step by step they were taught in things which led to vice, the lounge, the bath, the elegant banquet. All this in their ignorance, they called civilization, when it was but a part of their servitude.”
Think too (for example) of Disney movies about medieval times where the son of the wealthy landowner (who happens to be useless at it) gets to ride the horse in the local jousting tournament while the local guy who is actually far and away the best at it has to attend as a squire because of his lowly social status. This state of affairs is presented as normal – why? Why is it normal that the rich kids get preference in life over the able kids? Why would we put up with this nonsense if we weren’t conditioned into accepting it as normal from an early age? Perhaps more importantly given our present circumstances, isn’t such a society bound to some day self-discover as moribund?
Back in the days of “O” levels my history O level syllabus covered social history from 1830 – 1946ish. It covered the rise and necessity of trade unions and the welfare state. Gove has of course done his best to eliminate history from the curriculum. As far as I can tell the only history that kids get now is the Tudors when we were GREAT, and the First World War.
Nothing about how Hitler came to power which seems so very pertinent now.
Hitler is taught
Both my sons did at GCSE and we went to Munich to see were it started – which was well worthwhile
GCSE History offers a choice of eras:
Section A: Period studies (Choose one of the following options):
— AA America, 1840–1895: Expansion and consolidation
— AB Germany, 1890–1945: Democracy and dictatorship
— AC Russia, 1894–1945: Tsardom and communism
— AD America, 1920–1973: Opportunity and inequality
Section B: Wider world depth studies (Choose one of the following options):
— BA Conflict and tension: The First World War, 1894–1918
— BB Conflict and tension: The inter-war years, 1918–1939
— BC Conflict and tension between East and West, 1945–1972
— BD Conflict and tension in Asia, 1950–1975
— BE Conflict and tension in the Gulf and Afghanistan, 1990–2009
More detail on the AQA website at https://www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/history/gcse/history-8145/specification-at-a-glance
There is a peculiar disconnect between the exposure of the transparently blatant fact that the Conservative Government has been wholly, unrecoverably discredited by the electorate; for total, across the board irresponsible failure; with the wholesale packaging of Labour as a neo-conservative, neoliberal government-in-waiting. The monumental level of spin by the media being applied is intended to be surreptitiously enabling of a Labour victory. We see that strikingly in Scotland where the media, across the board, has already awarded election victory to Labour, and is determined, collusively with Unionist Parties to do everything in its consensus power to make it happen.
What is not noticed the the efforts hastily being implemented to redraw constituency boundaries to cement the gross bias of the FPTP system in favour of the Conservative Party to ensure that only neoliberal conservative parties sharing the same dogmatic, narrow, religiously rigid ideology can win power. Empirical evidence is officially dead. This scandalous manipulation of power to consolidate it with even greater security is quite obvious. Allow me to offer just one example of this misuse of political power; the impact on Scotland and Wales, consolidating the already over-mighty power of England; and the consolidation of power in England in London and the South East, and the deprivation of influence of the North of England; the areas already grotesquely deprived of the resources they require, to thrive.
The constituency changes proposed in ‘Constituency boundary reviews and the number of MPs’ (house of commons Library, November, 2023), here: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN05929/SN05929.pdf
This significant boundary change will increase England’s seats by 10 (+2%); Scotland and Wales lose 10 seats (-10%; note the small increase for increase masks a huge fall in influence in Parliament for Scotland and Wales; a huge change to position in which England already has dominant power (see p.30 for the Table of ‘allocation of Seats across the UK’). This is a long game, and it seals the political fate of Scotland and Wales; because do not believe this is the end-game, this is merely one step in the long term, slow-burn destruction of both nations.
Within England, London and South East are +9 seats; North East, North West and West Midlands all lose (-6): together a swing to London/South East over North of 15 seats (3% of total seats in England). Neoliberalism having invested all Britain’s resources for the South East especially, it is now exacting the political price. The claim will be that all this represents population trends; but it is the consequence of politcally driving people south for forty years; depriving half the geography of Britain with resource, and then talking about ‘levelling up’; while further depriving the North of the political leverage ever to make it ahppen beyond spin, and the trifles of trickle down. This kind of politics is far beyond cynical; it is corrupt.
Thanks
Much to agree with
More bloopers. This should read: “This significant boundary change will increase England’s seats by 10 (+2%); Scotland and Wales lose 10 seats (-10%); note the small increase for England is turned into a large net increase, adjusting for the much bigger relative losses in Scotland and Wales; which masks a huge fall in influence in Parliament for Scotland and Wales”.
This the way our politics are being grossly manipulated by the vested interests of neoliberalism; without anyone even noticing. It is just so easy for neoliberalism to win, no matter the election result.
In the north east both my seat, North West Durham, and my son’s constituency, Wansbeck, disappear. Mine is a redwall, and my son’s is a labour controlled.
Mine is shared by four surrounding seats. Wansbeck is mainly subsumed by Berwick, which makes it one heck of a size for one person to look after.
Fortunately we have a vote for a north east mayor, with Jamie Driscoll hopefully going to be in charge. This is what he stands for, and he is getting more and more support over the weeks.
https://jamiedriscoll.co.uk/manifesto/
At the weekend he had 65 people leafleting for him in Sunderland.
He’s got a big presence on facebook, despite those who say they don’t know what he stands for. They are the ones who have never bothered reading anything by him, or been to one of his meetings.
We need more people like Jamie in local government.
Everything you say is bang on, as usual, Richard. But sadly, it wasn’t just the Cameron/Osborne ‘coalition’ government that endlessly attacked and undermined local government, albeit that they are responsible for the catastrophic situation we now find ourselves in. We tend to forget that New Labour didn’t have much time for local government either as they also pursued a centralising agenda.
I say that as someone who in the mid to late 1990s taught a course on British Local Government to second year undergrads and also conducted a good deal of research on the subject, both here and on the continent as part of an EU funded research (e.g. Horrocks, I and Webb, J. (1994) Electronic Democracy: a policy issue for UK local government. Horrocks, I. and Hambley, N. (1998) The “Webbing” of British Local Government). One of the things we noted over and over at the time was that UK central government – was constantly worried that left to their own devices, and with suitably flexible budgets, local authorities would come up with innovative policy solutions to the issues and problems they faced (as you rightly point out they had done during the first 60 years of the 20th).
For a central government with strong centralising tendencies, allied with ideological concerns and a dogmatic approach to policy making, this was a risk that could not be taken. As we might imagine, this began in earnest under Thatcher, continued under Major, and sadly, then became part of New Labour’s approach to, and relationship with, local government. The result was a constant stream of legislation, ‘guidance’, and centrally imposed spending ‘rules’ (e.g. and most obviously forced privatisation and outsourcing), which, over time, gradually stripped local government of its power and flexibility to act in any semi-autonomous way. We saw this over and over again through the years we were researching – as did many others who studied/taught local government studies at the time. And this was often in stark contrast to what was going on in most European countries – a situation which still applies to this day.
So here’s another thing that Starmer’s Labour party could do when (if) they get into power: have the courage to re-empower local government and fund it properly such that we can start to rebuild the degree of local innovation and service that was once a hallmark of the polity of Britain. Of course, they won’t.
I
So muchy to agree with Ivan
Mr Horrocks,
“One of the things we noted over and over at the time was that UK central government – was constantly worried that left to their own devices, and with suitably flexible budgets, local authorities would come up with innovative policy solutions to the issues and problems they faced (as you rightly point out they had done during the first 60 years of the 20th).”
This is extremely important. The industrialisation of our cities in the nineteenth century is much criticised for its serious social housing, health and welfare failures, for good reason; but the successes are now completely forgotten. I am thinking of the old Corporation of Glasgow, that wielded great power and was very effective in the provision of water, gs, transport and other services; and operating them with great efficiency without central interference. Indeed the corporation had the power and capacity to instigate legislation to further its commercial and social objectives. It was a more effective instrument of policy than central Government later proved.
What finished the Corporation (and the industrial Glasgow) was the destruction wrought by fighting two world wars; and through losing out to the wholesale centralising of power by wartime government, which discovered powers to execute policy everywhere in Britain it had never possessed; powers central government never gave up in peacetime. The results are there for all to behold: the powers of local government may be quite weak, but it has been left saddled with responsibilities it is ill-equipped to perform, and few vote in local elections. This is not a basis for authoritative or sound local government. Central government is happiest seeing local government blowing in the wind; because while it is hung up flapping in the wind, it is not a threat to the failures of central government.
“Localism” is a politically correct trope honoured exclusively in the breach by almost everyone; save for narrow nimby issues in expensively leafy corners of the country. Everywhere else in politics, it has been ditched.
Again, much to agree with
John (or Mr Warren if you prefer), as it was for Glasgow so it was for many of the cities of the industrial north and midlands in England, and indeed south Wales too. And that was despite the attitude of many rampant capitalists of the 19th and early 20th century. Even as late as the 1980s the county and district councils where I live in the east midlands still had the policy freedom and budget to able to take measures to try to combat the effects of the policies of the Thatcher governments (e.g. unemployed drop in and retraining centres; debt and money advice centres; youth clubs and leisure centres, complete with youth and community workers; toy libraries and after school clubs to name just a few). But the trend to centralisation that had been present for a while, as you note, only got worse once we had a series of governments that could not stand any challenge to their ideological agenda and the rise of neoliberalism. And you are right about localism: it’s a trope. It’s only allowed or encouraged if it advances an agenda of central government.
Our government, politics, businesses and institutions will never make any meaningful improvement all the while they are psychologically chained to a blame culture. The aviation industry, probably now the safest in the world, completely reversed it’s approach with ‘black box thinking’. Failure, mistakes and near-misses are positively embraced, without blame or recrimination, in a process of iteration and constant improvement.
All the time people in general life are downtrodden, castigated and positively vilified for their own and systemic mistakes and failures this country is going nowhere.
(Black Box Thinking: The Surprising Truth about Success, Matthew Syed).
Centralisation of public services is profundly anti-democratic.
If principles of subsidiarity are genuinely applied then democracy is both broadened and deepened be devolving as far and as much as is possible.
Centralisation reduces the numbers of people who have experience of running and managing public services, so cutting the levels of competency in local communities, increasing democratic deficits, and reducing the levels of public engagement.
One of the paradoxes in the last 15 years of SNP rule has been the calls for devolution and independence from Westminster but increased centralised control over local government.
In Scotland there are 32 local authorities with about 30% of total public expenditure .
Finland, with a comparable population, has 310 municipalities with over 40% of total public expenditure (plus more revenue raising powers, and funding from income taxes.)
Central government politicians across almost all parties, (possibly excepting Greens and LDs) and for whatever ideology they serve, seem to distrust and despise the kind of empowerment and service delivery that a well co-ordinated network of local government can provide, let alone the enhanced democratic accountability and involvement that it promotes.
You might be sympathetic to councils having increased costs dealing with ‘homelessness’. When for example asylum is granted the now refugee status person has to leave the asylum accommodation paid for out of central government funds within a month or so and find their own place and can often present as homeless and that has to be found from local council funds.
But if any such councils have been refusing planning permissions, insisting on landlord licensing in the cheap areas adding to their costs, turning down HMO conversions, then they can’t have that excuse.
It was obvious councils should have raised Council Tax by the rate of inflation of 10.5% a year ago. They chose not to ask that question to their voters, despite polls showing that people are willing to pay more tax.
I strongly agree with all the points made about excessive centralisation of powers in this country. Councils should have real power rather than be administrators. Like all politicians won’t use power well oftentimes, but when it’s local it’s easier to vote them out.
Tax cuts = Health cuts (for the less well off)
Tax cuts = Wage cuts (for public workers)
Tax cuts = Infrastructure cuts
Tax cuts = Education cuts
Tax cuts = Eroded environment
Tax cuts = More inequality
…
Apparently Cameron and Osborne were partly persuaded to go down the austerity route, by a paper by Reinhart, et al in 2010, “Growth in a time of debt”. A few years later, a post-graduate student Thomas Herndon found errors in the paper. This is all nicely described by mathematician and self-proclaimed badass, Hannah Fry, here: https://twitter.com/CentralBylines/status/1749747229978399154
Sources
Reinhart, Carmen M, and Kenneth S Rogoff. 2010. Growth in a time of debt. American Economic
Review 100, no 2: 573-578. https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/11129154/Reinhart_Rogoff_Growth_in_a_Time_of_Debt_2010.pdf
Herndon, Thomas; Ash, Michael; Pollin, Robert (15 April 2013). “Does High Public Debt Consistently Stifle Economic Growth? A Critique of Reinhart and Rogoff” (PDF). Political Economy Research Institute – Working Paper Series (322) https://web.archive.org/web/20130701221358/http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_papers_301-350/WP322.pdf
See also
“Reinhart, Rogoff… and Herndon: The student who caught out the profs” @ BBC News, 20 April 2013, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22223190
Thomas Herndon @ Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Herndon
To understand the underlying problems with the Reinhart and Rogoff approach (which I propose is what really matters for us to extract from the episode), I would suggest reading Velichka Dimitrova, now a micro-economist, university of Warwick, who wrote this in an LSE Blog titled ‘Reinhart-Rogoff revisited: Coding errors happen – key problem was in not making the data openly available from the start’, in 2013.
Oddly I wrote about the Herndon, Ash and Pollin paper and Dimitrova’s deconstruction of Reinhart and Rogoff in the 26th January Blog by Richard, titled ‘We are being governed by economic irrationality’. Incidentally, in spite of the likelihood of being thought over-serious I do not care for the Alexander piece by the BBC; referring to a youthful looking post-grad doing research with two other academic economists; as “student homework” is cheap, show-boating, tabloid journalism; looking for an easy take on a difficult but important subject; the real nature of which is easily lost in the resort to glib populism.