The Forest

In 2001 Tony Blair gave a speech to the newly formed Welsh assembly. In it he said that devolution is ‘just one part of a much wider programme of constitutional reform designed to move us away from a centralised Britain to a more democratic, decentralised, plural state.’ That was 2001 and by that point Blair’s government had already presided over the creation of devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. 

Skip ahead nine years and the coalition government, channelling a similar spirit, was ushered to power in part on the strength of David Cameron’s talk about a ‘Big Society’. This was a prospectus that set out to give people and communities a greater stake in public affairs, granting them the powers to run local services (for example, setting up and running schools), and devolving power and a degree of fiscal management to regional government. The same initiative led to the first wave of city mayors. All of which was undertaken to ‘deliver the reform, renewal, fairness and change Britain needs.’

Fast-forward another nine years and lurking behind the Johnson government’s pledge to Get Brexit Done was a goal of ‘levelling up’. More economic in character, it set about trying to cement the government’s newly formed alliance with former redoubts of Labour support by targeting the social, economic, and cultural disparities between the dynamic centres of metropolitan success and parts of the country they had left behind. 

So entrenched is this consensus about the need to overcome an unbalanced distribution of success and power that the opposition Labour Party has staked out its own ‘radical’ programme. Here similar ideas aim to crystallise the national potential overlooked by a top-heavy system of government. Through a new constitutional settlement decisions will begin not from Westminster but at the local level, and metro mayors will receive new powers to foster ‘dynamic new clusters’ of regional economic activity as part of a bid for broader economic growth. 

It would seem that all the major political parties have been committed to renewing British democracy by way of local empowerment for the last twenty five years. Through the disciplining lens of winning power, they are more or less falling over themselves to win the hearts and minds of constituencies otherwise disillusioned with the way money and government works.

Bolstering the Labour Party’s latest pitch for democratic renewal, the IPPR think tank released a paper in June on ‘Building support for democratic reform’. British democracy, it reports, is in a ‘doom loop’. A majority are dissatisfied, and this forms a general trend over the last twenty years that contrasts with a lively faith in the democratic creed that animated the twilight years of the twentieth century.  Commensurate with the decline in satisfaction is an increase in cynicism. Perceptions prevail that an elite has captured the institutions of power, that they don’t represent the country, behave with integrity or deliver for their citizens. 

Underlying the pivot between ‘doom’ or ‘democratic renewal’ is a kind of Burkean argument; to conserve institutions with value it is necessary to reform them. If the trends towards disaffection and disillusionment are as pronounced as the evidence suggests, then the case for renewal should be urgent; and perhaps it is this sort of moderate conservatism that has prevailed since the 1990s.

Even so, the ‘doom loop’ has tracked each cycle of reform. Does this mean the reforms haven’t worked? Were they undertaken in bad faith? Or is the consensus just wrong? Certainly, in the eyes of some the ‘Big Society’ was a cynical, rebranding exercise that polished the tarnished reputation of Thatcherite conservatism, just as ‘levelling up’ was a populist manipulation of legitimate democratic grievance for purely opportunistic ends. Even the Labour Party’s current position could be seen as a desperate attempt to win back the voters they lost in 2019, and the rhetoric of renewal a public overture that masks stealthy and tactical tiptoeing towards power. 

So is all this talk of renewal an empty piece of sophistry that dissimulates but serves the hard-nosed realpolitik of liberal politics? How many people know anything about their metro mayor? What sort of real power do they have? How far have people felt the impact of the myriad funding projects injected into the marginalised parts of the country? Did anyone care when a small cabal furtively ran a campaign to remove the office of Bristol’s city mayor?

The wide-angled impression has to be that these reforms are only tinkering with an industrial-sized tanker forged from a different era but that continues to define the status quo. This is a vessel with its roots in the politics and economy of the nineteenth century, a ‘big’ world of machine politics and smart, systemic finance. The paradox is that it creates a country divided against itself: an economic system on which wider society ultimately depends but by which it feels alienated, a class of internationalist professionals that the ‘secret people’ of provincial Britain quietly resent. The picture is visible in the architecture of Cotswolds villages: outside the charming centres of postcard country retreats now inhabited by moneyed media magnates and city financiers are new-build estates for the struggling underclass.  

Those who have stopped to observe democracy have often noted that it requires more than a simple transaction between the enfranchised and their representatives. It is never just a naked calculation. Communities, associations, the many expressions of civic society – these form the fertile soil from which it flourishes and on which its rude health ultimately depends. Tocqueville saw this clearly in the democratic culture of nineteenth century America, a country at that time shaped by a patchwork of disparate religious communities. Where such an earthy culture is untilled and left to itself, weeds may choke off any good-growing thing.   

The situation, as the IPPR report implies, creates different political opportunities. One way is clearly exploitative. The perception of a corrupt elite against a picture of widely divergent economic interests creates a space for short-term demagoguery to press its advantage. Except this doesn’t really solve anything. The only meaningful answer is to deliver a real solution. Which tees up Labour nicely. It allows them to say that the nasty Tories were just using the agenda to mainline their craving for power, but we actually care and will do what it takes to make democratic renewal happen. 

Personally, I’m not so sure. Politics, for all its noisy theatrics, rests on deeper structural trends. Behind the potted history of democratic reforms in the last twenty years, is a more fundamental utilitarian and neoliberal consensus. This has conditioned so much in modern Britain, especially since the 1980s but with roots in the 1960s, that it has become something like a reflex movement. It is no longer clear that the civic life of the country exists in the same way as it did in the post-war years. It has been hollowed out. 

The recent attempts at democratic reform may just show that we lack the imagination for the sort of renewal that is needed, because our imagination is shaped by an entrenched and altogether different political reality – one that is, at its core, technocratic and indifferent to the peccadilloes of community and human association. Such a reality was always at odds with irreducible characteristics of human nature but the problem has become more pronounced as our machine civilisation has become more advanced.     

Which could mean that only by stumbling blindly through a period of pain will any sort of alternative become possible. Some version of doom may have to precede a glimpse of renewal.