There’s an old joke about a traveler lost in the countryside who asks a local directions. After a long pause, the local replies “well, I wouldn’t start from here”. Looking at the UK at the moment, I feel that we’re in a similar place. Except for one thing. It isn’t clear that we know where we want to go to even be able to ask the way beyond hearing that this isn’t a good starting place for any destination we might want.
In the last couple of months both the Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, and the Leader of the Opposition, Keir Starmer have made big speeches setting out five point plans for the future. But, regardless of the merits of either, neither really sets out a destination.
Sunak’s proposals were:
- We will halve inflation this year to ease the cost of living and give people financial security.
- We will grow the economy, creating better-paid jobs and opportunity right across the country.
- We will make sure our national debt is falling so that we can secure the future of public services.
- NHS waiting lists will fall and people will get the care they need more quickly.
- We will pass new laws to stop small boats, making sure that if you come to this country illegally, you are detained and swiftly removed.
Starmer’s “missions” were:
- Secure the highest sustained growth in the G7, with good jobs and productivity growth in every part of the country making everyone, not just a few, better off.
- Make Britain a clean energy superpower to create jobs, cut bills and boost energy security with zero-carbon electricity by 2030, accelerating to net zero.
- Build an NHS fit for the future by reforming health and care services to speed up treatment, harnessing life sciences and technology to reduce preventable illness, and cutting health inequalities.
- Make Britain’s streets safe by reforming the police and justice system, to prevent crime, tackle violence against women, and stop criminals getting away without punishment.
- Break down the barriers to opportunity at every stage, for every child, by reforming the childcare and education systems, raising standards everywhere, and preparing young people for work and life.
There’s obviously quite a lot of overlap between both sets of proposals and a difference between them in that Sunak as PM was setting out what he was actually attempting to do right now whereas Starmer was saying what he would want to be doing were he to become PM at the next election to be held some time before January 2025. Starmer’s missions are at least to some extent reliant on Sunak succeeding in his first four immediate priorities. But neither really said very much about where they were going whether framing their proposals as missions or priorities.
If in fact we’re already in a good place, it doesn’t matter too much if our leaders and their challengers were just talking about how to better administer things as they are. But part of the “I wouldn’t start from here” is that it doesn’t take a lot of time, whatever your aspirations, to conclude that there are a lot of bad things about the here and now beyond improving the economy, the effectiveness of public services like the NHS, criminal justice, immigration, the environment and education, important though all of those are. For me, underlying both men’s speeches is an avoidance of thought about whether the structure of the economy or the nature of how those important public services are provided is the best it could be. Without that, both are just offering better ways of doing the same thing. That may be enough in itself to make one or the other be PM after the next election but I think it misses an opportunity in the current adversities to do more than be a manager rather than a leader of the country. And, as the systems we have are showing the country being in decline relative to the world, such as the possibility that Poland, with its legacy of Communist rule and as recently as 2004-16 being a place from which large numbers of the most educated and motivated came to the UK to improve their lives, may in a few years overtake the UK in wealth and living standards. Something more than merely managing that decline is surely needed.
It would here be tempting to pin blame on things like Brexit, Liz Truss’s catastrophic few weeks as PM, Russia’s war on Ukraine, the legacy of Tony Blair, the global financial crisis of 2008 or whatever for decline. But I think in the end those things are like the companion of the traveler in the joke at the beginning of this piece complaining that they shouldn’t have taken that turning some miles back. Some fun and interest can be had in running alternative histories of where we might be had we not done those things but they don’t tell us very much about how to deal with where we actually are now. Even just retracing our steps to the point of error is not easy or necessarily an improvement in the journey. We might do that and find that the turning we “ought” to have taken is now no longer open.
So, at risk of hubris, here are five features of the destination I think we should be aiming for as a country:
- Homes for all
- Work that pays well for all and rewards fairly for its value, demand and difficulty
- Public services of a high standard at a reasonable cost
- An end to factional fighting over ever-smaller categories of identity
- A culture of doing rather than opposing and criticising
The roads to this destination are not easy or short. Some might involve a bit of doubling back. There are alternative routes which might shorten the journey but make it more uncomfortable along the way or lengthen the journey but make it less arduous. I’ll sketch out a few suggested roads to my utopia.
Homes for all
The cost and availability of housing, whether to buy or rent in most places people want to live is now shocking. There simply isn’t enough and at a reasonably affordable level. So we need to address this by making it much, much easier to build new housing where it is needed and wanted, and to bring costs down. Costs will to an extent be addressed just by having more supply, but the major component of cost in most places where housing is needed is the cost of the land to build on. The way to reduce the cost of land is to remove factors which restrict the supply of land. So end the Green Belt, make it much easier to gain planning permission to build and let it happen. The ideal for most people is houses, with a decent sized garden, with good facilities nearby so that they can form an identity and community. In the interwar period and in the 50s and 60s we built a lot of these and called them suburbs. They’re so well liked that today they tend to be very expensive to buy in and the people living there fight hard to keep them as they are. Dramatically increasing the availability and affordability of family homes in communities people would like to live in would also help to reverse the decline in birth rates and postponing having families until later in life. Instead of arbitrary constraints like the Green Belt and planning, why not remove those and just have requirements for building standards, environmental performance and maybe aesthetics? It may also be worth introducing measures to provide forms of tenure which recognise the reality that for many, life is not static and that they need something in between the flexibility of short term lets for 6-12 months and a forever home.
Work paying for all
Unemployment is low even in the unsettled economy of recent times. But over time the balance of rewards has skewed to provide big rewards for a narrowing band of people in high finance without that distributing fairly in the middle where most are. There has been a lot of focus on those with the lowest incomes and it is right that those should be ensured of a reasonable basic standard. But, what has happened to achieve that is that in work benefits and minimum wage laws have raised the lowest while eroding the differentials further up so that it barely pays to have spent the time and effort to do hard and necessary things like study and train in medicine or other professions requiring high levels of qualifications. Instead, those in the middle income brackets, the vast majority (eg from the third to the 8th deciles) are increasingly taxed, whether directly as income tax or from the repayments they have to make on loans for the study needed to get them to that position. The higher rate of tax was meant to be for higher earners, not those towards the middle even if somewhat above average. It needs to return to that by tax being reduced in the middle range and increased in the upper ranges. In addition, at the lower end, it would be worth reducing and phasing out the level of reliance on state subsidy for lower wages, probably on a regional basis.
National insurance should be abolished and rolled in to income and corporate taxation so as to be more transparent and therefore more readily scrutinised. Employers NI is a tax on employing people so why should it exist rather than employers be taxed on profit? The student loan system was always a disguised graduate tax and should also be abolished and replaced by a graduate tax.
Public Services
It is time to have an open and honest, good faith conversation about our public services. For too long has it been considered too hard or too readily shouted down for being a surreptitious way of “turning into America” or whatever other thing is thought of as terrible.
Is the NHS really the best and most effective way to provide healthcare for all? There are other models around the world, not just America, many of which have better outcomes while remaining free at the point of need. Might it be that a hybrid model which involved higher earners paying compulsory insurance could increase the level of supply of health services without depriving those on lower incomes of care but rather giving them better access?
In education, there are large numbers of children who are for one of many reasons not able or willing to access mainstream education. For some that will be due to physical or mental health conditions or learning disabilities and at present there is a lack of resources for those to be quickly and effectively provided for within mainstream schools. For others, it will be behavioural/attitudinal without a sufficiently strong health reason to give them access to care for that condition. For probably more, the things being taught and the targets set within current mainstream education are just not relevant and lead to disengagement. Maybe, there is a case for revisiting the concept of comprehensive education in one establishment and to have much greater alternative provision, focusing on those with difficulties. That would reduce the strain in terms of workload and resource on most mainstream schools. I think it would also be worth reconsidering the value of much of the statistical data gathering and ranking of schools. The data is, as a school governor myself, largely unilluminating and comparisons between different schools fairly invidious. Why not just trust schools and teachers to do a good job?
On transport, much of the country as we know it was developed on the basis of proactive provision of transport. London’s metroland or the suburbs of Leeds had the Tube or tram network built first and the housing, businesses and shops followed. Today, we look more at putting the infrastructure in afterwards. Or, in the case of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, taking out the current use of cars before building the alternatives and the facilities 15 minute cities (SUBURBS!) need in fact to exist.
End Culture Wars
I’m possibly least optimistic about how this can happen of all my roads to the future. About a generation ago, maybe in the early part of this century I think we had got to the stage of development where the exhortation of “just stop being horrible to one another” was largely observed. It’d be nice just to be able to reverse back down that track but I don’t think it is as easy as that. What I think we can do now is “just stop inventing ways in which to think someone was horrible to you when they weren’t at all intending to or in which you might decide people might be horrible to you in the future if they don’t do what you want.” Along with “and did it really harm you?”
A Can Do Attitude
This might sound a bit silly and like invoking sunlit uplands but I think it is a major cultural issue in the UK that we have turned from self-deprecation and modesty to firmly opposing pretty much everything. I realised some years back that as a lawyer it was too easy for me to come up with criticisms and flaws in things and much harder than for friends who were entrepreneurs, to come up with and pursue ideas. So, personally I’ve tried to say yes to things more and not just to find all the downsides ALL the time. But at the same time, think how much effort is spent in all sorts of areas of public and community life saying “no, down with that sort of thing”. It is easy to find people to put in planning objections, much harder to find people to support plans. In theory, Brexit didn’t have to be about saying no to everything which had ever been near Brussels and instead actually just doing what worked best independently (which might include happening to agree with some of it) and it is arguable that the recent deal on Northern Ireland was a demonstration of what could be achieved by being a bit more positive. I remember a friend telling me about his grandmother who’d virulently opposed the building of the Manchester tram network and its stop down the end of the road who after it got built sang its praises and how she used it every day instead of the two changes of bus she’d needed. If she’d had her way she’d be grumbling about the buses taking forever to get into town. We can also take away some of the bureaucratic attempts to avoid objections by placing obligations to commission loads of reports to eg build a windfarm or a bridge which just end up costing a lot of time and money even if nobody is opposing them being built. So start saying yes a bit more.
botzarelli 