THE LOCAL STATE and the new municiaplism

I have been trying to interest an academic journal in publishing an article about the development and management of a local political strategy in the mid 1970s – namely Social Strategy for the Eighties (SRC 1982) This was a very rare thing to attempt - the Greater London Council, Liverpool, Sheffield and some London boroughs may have been flaunting their left-wing credentials at the same time but the Strathclyde strategy was rather different - a serious and considered response to the "Born to Fail" report of 1973 which had exposed the scale of multiple deprivation in the West of Scotland and demanded some sort of official recognition. 

The English local authorities had pursued a deliberate strategy of confrontation 

with central government - but Strathclyde Region was at pains to seek (and 

gain) the support of the delegated central government in our country – namely 

the Scottish Office. A draft of the article can be read here 
It’s hardly surprising that the last few years have seen a revival of interest in 

the 1980s experience of local government. The Thatcherite stifling of local 

government had started shortly after her first election victory in 1979 and 

was full in swing – first with budgetary limits and then increasingly savage cuts.

But local government still had some autonomy in those days – whereas they have 

since undergone more than a halving of their income.  
What has been developing in recent years is a new “municipalism” which is 

receiving extensive coverage – some of which I list below

Stuart Hall has one of the best things I have ever read about THE STATE in 

a chapter of The Hard Road to Renewal – Thatcherism and the crisis of the Left ( 1988)

Instead of progressively withering away, the state has become a gigantic, swollen, bureaucratic and directive force, swallowing up almost the whole of civil society, and imposing itself (sometimes with tanks), in the name of the people, on the backs of the people. Who, now, can swallow without a gigantic gulp the so-called temporary, passing nature of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’? On the other hand, the very same period, since the end of the Second World War, has witnessed a parallel, gigantic expansion of the state complex within modern capitalism, especially in Western Europe, with the state playing an increasingly interventionist or regulative role in more and more areas of social life. It has become far and away the largest single employer of labour and acquired a dominant presence in every sector of daily existence. What are we to make of that unexpected development, never adequately predicted in the classical Marxist literature?

Even more difficult to work out is our attitude towards this development. On the one hand, we not only defend the welfare side of the state, we believe it should be massively expanded. And yet, on the other hand, we feel there is something deeply anti-socialist about how this welfare state functions. We know, indeed, that it is experienced by masses of ordinary people, in the very moment that they are benefiting from it, as an intrusive, managerial and bureaucratic force in their lives.

However, if we go too far down that particular road, whom do we discover keeping us company but – of course – the Thatcherites, the new right, the free market ‘hot gospellers’, who seem (whisper it not too loud) to be saying rather similar things about the state. Only they are busy making capital against us on this very point, treating widespread popular dissatisfactions with the modes in which the beneficiary parts of the state function as fuel for an anti-left, ‘roll back the state’ crusade.

And where, to be honest, do we stand on the issue? Are we for ‘rolling back the state’ – including the welfare state? Are we for or against the management of the whole of society by the state? Not for the first time, Thatcherism here catches the left on the hop –hopping from one uncertain position to the next, unsure of our ground. Perhaps it might help if we knew how we got into this dilemma. This is a vast topic in its own right, and I propose to look at only four aspects here.

• First, how did the British left become so wedded to a particular conception of socialism through state management, the essence of what I want to call ‘statism’ or a ‘statist’ conception of socialism?

• Second, I want to sketch some of the reasons why the very expansion of the state, for which so many on the left worked so hard, turned out in practice to be a very contradictory experience.

• Third, I want to confront head on the confusion caused on the left by the ‘libertarianism’ of the right – the way Thatcherism has exploited the experience of welfare statism and turned it to the advantage of the new right.

• Finally, I want to consider some aspects of the changing social and economic relationships today which have influenced spontaneous attitudes on the left – what I call the growth of a left libertarianism. In conclusion, I can only roughly indicate some directions in which our thinking needs to be developed.

The chapter then goes on to track the history of the british understanding of 

the role of the state – with a collectivism coming into view in the the 1920s – 

particularly on the right.

It was precisely in this critical period, between the 1880s and the 1920s, when the parameters of British politics for the following fifty years were set for the first time – that statism took root in British political culture. In those days, what we now call ‘statism’ went under the title of ‘collectivism’. What is crucial for our analysis is the fact that there were many collectivisms. ‘Collectivism’ was a highly contradictory formation, composed of different strands supported in different ways by the right, the centre and the left – if, for convenience, we can use those somewhat anachronistic labels. Collectivism was regarded by many sections on the right, and by some influential sectors of the leading classes, as the answer to Britain’s declining fortunes. The country – the new collectivists believed – required a programme of ‘national regeneration’. This could only be undertaken if the old shibboleths of laissez faire were finally abandoned and the state came to assume a far greater role of organic leadership in society.

They believed a ‘populist’ bloc of support could be won amongst the

dominated classes for such a project, provided the latter were ‘squared’ by

state pensions and other Bismarck-type benefits. This was the programme

of both the ‘social imperialist’ and the ‘national efficiency’ schools, and of

the highly authoritarian populist politics associated with them. And though

they did not carry their programme in detail, they were extremely influential in pioneering the shift in the allegiance of British capital from its former commitment to laissez faire, to its newer link with a certain type of capitalist state interventionism.

Recommended ARTICLES on the new municipalism
Exploring the Potential of the Local State - Sheffield and the local state  

Beveridge and Cochrane (Antipode 2023)
The Uses and Abuses of municipalism by the british left (Minim 2022)
Prefiguring the local state D Cooper 2017
Whatever happened to local government? Symposium on 1993 Cochrane book 

by Ward, Newman et al (2015)

Whether the Local State? Neil Barnett 2013
 
Book

Reclaiming Local Democracy – a progressive future for local government  Ines Newman 

(2014) A very clearly written celebration of the ethical importance of this body which 

contains a useful glossary

BLOGPOST DESTROYS MY POSTS YET AGAIN

 My apologies for the text interfering with the right-hand column of the last post. THere's nothing I can do to deal with this!!

THE DECLINE OF STATE CAPACITY

Recent posts from Aurelien and Dominic Cummings on this coincided with 
this more positive post from Paul Cairney about a new vision for UK 
government. Cairney’s post references a 2021 article of his which has, 
at the end, a link to “a contemporary story of policy” which links in turn 
to a fantastic article on  “Ostrom and the bright side of public service” 
which superbly summarises the entire literature on government failures and suggests 
a way forward.
It’s hardly surprising that some 50 years of neoliberalism have seriously 
dented the capacity of the State. But it’s taken some time for us to 
notice the combined effects of privatisation and Austerity on the British 
State. I’m loathe to credit Cummings with anything since he was the brains behind 
Brexit and also the key political adviser not only to Michael Grove (when he 
was Education Minister) but also to Boris Johnson (before becoming one of 
his bitterest critics). But the man blogs interestingly (if belatedly) eg

almost all large organisations incentivise (largely implicitly/unconsciously)
preserving existing power structures and budgets, preventing system
adaptation, fighting against the eternal lessons of high performance
excluding most talent, and maintaining exactly the thing that in retrospect 
will be seen as the cause of the disaster. Large organisations naturally train 
everyone who gets promoted to align themselves with this dynamic: dissent 
is weeded out. Anybody pointing out ‘we’re heading for an iceberg’ is ‘mad’, 
‘psychopath’, ‘weirdo’ — and is quickly removed.
And even the very occasional odd characters who a) see, b) are able to act 
and c) have the moral courage to act are highly constrained in what they can 
do given the nature of large institutions and the power of the forces they 
confront. (Even Bismarck in 1871-5 or Stalin in the 1930s, more powerful 
than anybody else in their country, were highly constrained in their ability to 
shape forces like automation, though they could help or hinder their particular 
country’s adaptation
Even Boris Johnson was forced to put his pen to an admission of failure 
when he allowed this Declaration on Government Reform to be published 
in 2021, before is ignominious resignation.
One of the signatories to the note on a New Vision for the UK government
was Matt Flinders who has written this response to the 2013 book on
 “Blunders of Government”  

There can be no doubting that King and Crewe provide 12 “horror stories”
to support their argument, but without any meaningful reference
points against which to evaluate the frequency or nature of these
cases the reader is left with little more than an entertaining list
of policy failures. (“the politics of pessimism”) without offering a greater 
sense of balance or governing perspective. Even the briefest discussion of
Bernard Crick’s classic In Defense of Politics (1962 and recently
republished by Bloomsbury) with his warnings about the innate messiness and 
fragility of democratic politics would have broughtwarmth to an otherwise 
cold book. The insights and arguments offered by scholars including Andrew 
Gamble (Politics and Fate, 2000), Gerry Stoker (Why Politics Matters, 2006),
and Colin Hay (WhyWeHate Politics, 2007) would all have added tone and texture 
and balance in way that intensified the social relevance and reach of the book. 
Others who would have challenged the general narrative offered by King and 
Crewe—Natan Sharansky (The Case for Democracy, 2007), Peter Riddell 
(In Defence of Politicians, 2011), Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards 
(Democracy Despite Itself, 2012), Stephen Medvic (In Defense of Politicians, 
2012), and Cobb (Unbroken Government, 2013) to mention just a few—are 
equally absent and sorely missed. 
It is also true that many of the “blunders”—but not all—will be well known to 
many readers, as will many of the explanations that King and Crewe offer to 
explain the frequency of such failings. Failure in British Government (David 
Butler, Tony Travers, and AndrewAdonis) and Groupthink in Government 
(Paul ‘t Hart)—books that deal with specific failures or explanations were 
both written two decades ago, whereas Gerald Kaufman’s How to Be a Minister
(first published over three decades ago) provides a magisterial insight into the dangers of departmentalism, reshuffles, and
ministerial hyperactivism that King and Crewe offer as explanatory variables. 
More recent books like Christopher Hood’s The Blame Game (2013) or the 
content of specialist journals like Contingencies and Crisis Management might 
also have added a clearer sense of the complexities of modern governance. 
The theories, the concepts, the analytical depth, and comparative analysis are 
absent to a great extent because this is a book that is written for a broad public
audience and not a narrow band of political scientists. Such endeavors are to 
be applauded if they contribute to the public understanding of politics, but 
the risk is that without some sense of balance, they contribute to rather than 
address public cynicism about politics. In many ways and like all good books, 
The Blunders of Our Governments raises as many, if not more, questions than 
it answers. In many ways, it provides a rich seam of empirical material that has 
been expertly prepared and now demands careful mining from a range of perspectives and 
positions in order to tease out exactly what, if anything, the 12 cases of 
failure provided by King and Crewe tell us about the changing nature of 
British government. One provocative step along this intellectual journey 
might attempt to turn King and Crewe’s thesis inside-out and upside-down by
daring to suggest that the changing nature of political rule (i.e.,the sociopolitical 
context within which political decisions are now taken) actually undermines their 
argument about blunder frequency and blunder avoidance. Could it be that a 
careful analysis of the changing nature of political rule in the twenty-first
century leads to the conclusion that blunders are actually far rarer—actually 
far more infrequent—than analysts might expect from the scale of challenges 
faced by those in the business of government? The hook, twist, or barb in this 
argument is the manner in which it draws upon Anthony King’s own work on the 
concept of “political overload” in the mid-1970s. 
“Once upon a time, then, man looked to God to give order to the world,”
King argued in Political Studies (1975, Vol. 23, p. 288). “Then he
looked to the market. Now he looks to government. The differences are
important. . . .One blames not ‘him’ or ‘it,’ but ‘them,’” and in the decades since 
King’s article was first published, a massive literature on “disaffected democrats,” “the crisis of democracy,”
 and “why we hate politics”  underlines the simple fact that large sections 
of the public increasingly blame “them” (i.e., politicians and governments) 
for a range of social ills. 
The important element about King’s analysis, however, was his focus on
expectations and intractability (or what we might relabel capacity
and demand). The former simply highlights that the range of tasks,
issues, and functions for which governments are now held responsible
increased greatly during the quarter of a century following the
Second World War; the latter adds a qualitative dimension to this
fact by noting that not only had the responsibilities of governments
increased but also the nature of the challenges being faced by
governments was becoming more intractable.
The business of government was becoming far more difficult, and there
were no simple solutions to complex problems. The crux of the issue
for King in the mid-1970s was therefore that “the reach of British
government exceeds its grasp; and its grasp, according to our second
proposition, is being enfeebled just at the moment when its reach is
being extended (288). Feed that logic through the three decades
covered by The Blunders of Our Governments and then set it against
even the most cursory appreciation of the social, technological,
economic, and political trends that are so beautifully captured in
Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid modernity,” and “the blunders of our 
governments” arguably appear far less damming and our systems possibly 
even slightly more resilient that at first might appear.
The challenges faced by governments are more complex (the “wicked
issues” of the twentieth century replaced by the “super wicked
issues” of the twenty-first that demand complex and inevitably
risky “megaprojects”) and the public’s expectations more immediate and 
unrealistic than ever before. (No government can fulfill a world of ever-greater 
public expectations.) If the resources of governments (physical, financial, 
intellectual, etc.) have declined relative to the rate of demands (quantity and
intractability), then is it any wonder it is possible to identify a series of blunders? 
Although counterintuitive, an increase in the number and visibility of government 
blunders is theoretically consistent with a less  blunder-prone, more resilient, and 
ever more transparent governmental structure. 
Could it be that blunders are to some extent woven into the very fabric of
modern governance in a way that defies political science’s way of interpreting 
the world? Could it be that blundersare, to some extent and echoing Bernard 
Crick, little more than the price we pay for living in a democracy? Can something 
really be a blunder if it is a failed response to a unique problem? Could it be that 
this book is not really about the politics of failure but the value of hindsight?
These are the questions that The Blunders of Our Governments points to but 
arguably does not answer.

LEVELLING UP

Paul Collier is an Establishment economist who delivered this lecture in 2022 which is well worth viewing in its entirety and nudged me to some thoughts. Briefly his presentation argued that - 

• Areas do not stabilise through the working of the market but rather 

intensify existing social, political problems

• 3 new social sciences can help us better to deal with regional disparities – 

evolutionary social psychology, moral philosophy (mutual trust) and decisions under uncertainty

• a chart on “intergenerational earnings elasticity”(!!)  shows the scale of 

what Britain and Italy are up against, with each having only 50% social mobility but Denmark 15%

• the importance of local context and of local leadership – rather than 

the “best practice” favoured by international banks

• the need to learn from others 

• and to “cross the river by touching the next stone” (as  Deng Xiaoping 

put it) that is, to learn from practical experience

Clearly I very much agree with his caustic dismissal of mainstream economics but to talk these days about local context is to engage in a similar discourse to that of “apply pie and motherhood” – it has become the everyone’s mantra. But it does need to be challenged not least because it has become, in many places, a recipe for (and rationalisation of) corruption

The December 2019 UK General Election brought Boris Johnson to power and saw many Labour seats in the North of Englsnd switch to Conservative (the famous Red Wall). And this was duly followed a couple of years later by the White Paper on Levelling Up the UK - arguably the most important spatial policy document for more than 80 years

Recommended Reading

Reframing development for “left-behind” places 2022

levelling up in the UK

According to Mazzucato and Dibb (2019), a mission-based policy should be characterized by three features: strategic orientation (direction, legitimacy), policy coordination (horizontal and vertical), and effective implementation (mix of interventions, appropriate funding and learning). There are reasons to doubt whether the mission-orientated LUWP satisfactorily meets these criteria. First, in terms of strategic orientation, each mission should be based on an inspirational aim that encourages private, voluntary and public sector groups to collaborate and innovate to resolve the problem and meet the target. Choosing the right goal is fundamental as missions depend on having legitimacy and something that all groups can ‘buy into’. Only some of the proposed missions come close to this sense of direction. The adoption of a missions approach suggests that policy should not be top-down, but instead co-created by actors at different levels, so that the eventual mix of policy instruments and schemes emerges from a process of joint working and collaboration. There is an evident contradiction here, however as most of the proposed levelling up funds are to be implemented in a primarily top-down and conditional manner.

https://www.geoffmulgan.com/post/does-levelling-up-match-up-or-why-we-should-think-of-this-as-version-1

https://research.ncl.ac.uk/beyondleftbehindplaces/blogs/Levelling%20up_AcSS%20blog_final.pdf

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781032244341/levelling-left-behind-places-ron-martin-ben-gardiner-andy-pike-peter-sunley-peter-tyler

https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/publication/levelling-up-missions-regional-inequality