The United Kingdom faces a series of interwoven crises simultaneously; double-digit inflation, among the highest domestic energy prices in the world, rising tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade with its major trading partner, an ineffective over-centralised bureaucracy, obsessed with contracting everything out, (which makes problem-solving and public investment very difficult to implement), and low skill levels and investment in R&D.
The result is deep-rooted, seemingly inexorable, decline. The aggregated remedies of the last two decades seem to have run out of road; QE, low interest rates, and debt-funded economic stimulae. Quality of life is noticeably on the slide. The latest country to surpass the UK in a wide range of social and economic measures, is Slovenia.
It may be that the UK political-administrative system is not capable of addressing the underlying problems. The main political parties appear to have degenerated into competition over short term populism and media manipulation, unable to overcome the layers of bureaucratic complexity and competing interests.
The country would beat a path to the door of any political movement that has a sincere and credible definition of problems, obstacles and causes, and how to overcome them.
One of the many reasons why political movements in the UK don’t get off the starting blocks here, is because their pursuit of public policy is littered with imprecise concepts. Shorthand terms for complex ideas are necessary in common parlance, but fatal for public policy. They can end up with policymakers trying to solve the wrong problem entirely.
Such terms include austerity, privatisation, sovereignty, over/under regulation, sustainability, debt, investment, infrastructure,
Does austerity refer to reductions in spending, reductions in the growth of spending, changes in aggregate spending across government, or reductions in spending only in public services ? Does it apply to spending on capital or revenue items, real terms expenditure or nominal spending ? If there is a policy to increase or decrease spending, should that follow a target ‘ultimate’ level of spending (eg 35% or 55% of GDP)? If a party’s policy is to decrease government spending but without a notional target level, is it only fully achieved when spending hits zero ?
What is sovereignty ? The UK supposedly adheres to about 1800 international treaties which it has signed, including UN, WTO and NATO membership. Do these treaties increase or decrease sovereignty ? Many of them involve political obligations and make ‘laws’ to which the UK is obliged to follow. Why do these obligations not come to the fore in debates about sovereignty ?
In a technical sense privatisation means the transfer of ownership and control of a commercial company from state to private, and theoretically the removal of special privileges eg de jure monopoly & subsidy. In problem-solving terms this is very different from a governmental organisation increasingly contracting out more of it’s operations to private companies, (eg NHS). Most UK railway companies for example are ‘subsidised’ quasi-franchises, governed by a set of labyrinthine (often quite daft) contracts. The rail track is mostly owned by the state. It is all an expensive mess, hard to unravel, and the system has made a handful of people very rich.
Is there too much or too little regulation – economic and otherwise ? What is Red Tape ? How is the ‘quantity’ of regulation measured ? Number of laws or pages, cost to the state of enforcement, or for the regulatee ? Instead, ‘quality’ is more important, but once the focus falls on regulatory quality, then the criteria for ‘high’ quality become important; implementability, enforceability, unintended consequences, cost, outcomes versus intent, and so on.
There are similar issues with how ‘debt’, ‘infrastructure’ or ‘investment’ are defined. Sustainability (eg in growth) can be environmental, fiscal, or social.
If policymakers start off with ill-defined terms, attempts to develop credible pan-governmental remedies for the longer term can end up on stony ground.
* Paul Reynolds works with multilateral organisations as an independent adviser on international relations, economics, and senior governance.
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8 Comments
Thank you for an important article!
Might part of the problem be a lack of objective, determined journalism?
A very helpful article that points to the need for a balance between policy detail and messaging to the general public. Too often in the Liberal Democrats we go for policy detail which then the public ignore. We need more messaging that sets out a vision for where we want out country to go but if we use words like regulation, sustainability etc. we need to show what we mean by them. This can be done by short explanations but sometimes the context conveys the meaning. In the Brexiteer arguments, sovereignty meant border controls which meant the end of free movement. Unfortunately a more nuanced approach is needed and that takes a few more words to explain. A similar word that needs explanation is devolution which means something different in the debate between England and Scotland from what it means within England.
Thank you Steve and Nigel. My other ‘appeal’ in policymaking in this context is the separation of the difficult and ‘investigatory’ task of working out how to solve problems in public policy and how to subsequently communicate planned steps to the voting public. Too often policymakers constrain themelves and shy away from the necessary invstigatory slog in defining problem and remedies, on the grounds of some assumed public perception or Overton Window. The cart should not be before the horse. Then, in working out how to communicate problem definitions and remedies to the public, too often ‘what to say’ is not separated from ‘how to say it’. ‘What to say’ is (largely) a policymakers’ job. ‘How to say it’ is a commnications specialist job.
“The country would beat a path to the door of any political movement that has a sincere and credible definition of problems, obstacles and causes, and how to overcome them.”
I don’t know about that.
It’s not that hard in the short term. It is about how to adjust both fiscal and monetary policy to run our economy close to full capacity to make full use of available resources without causing too much extra inflation. It gets a lot harder once we have to decide how the produced goods and services are shared out. That’s where the politics comes in. How much, for example, of the available resources should a typical nurse, doctor, or teacher etc be allocated compared to politicians, rentier capitalists, hedge fund managers and bankers?
We’ve all got different opinions. So it is quite unlikely the country will “beat a path” to any particular door.
“too often ‘what to say’ is not separated from ‘how to say it’
… but we generally start with ‘who to say it to’. Leaving aside our formal policy making structure which we generally ignore.
We generally look at the constituencies where we are surviving and the demographics of the swing voters there and from there we come up with a message that implies a policy.
We need to start from what we believe and generate policy from that (the formal policy structure generally does that). We then need to work out messages that can be derived from that and who would be moved by those messages. Where that is strong enough or cheap enough to target we should do it even if the audience are not in current target seats. They will be potential assets either as members or just as voices in the national conversation who don’t dismiss us as irrelevant.
Excellent post. Yes, any party with a good understanding of economic and other issues plus a politically astute plan to solve them would win big.
So, we need a new framework, aka ‘paradigm’, to explain how the economy and wider society really work. That would, inter alia, highlight the fallacies in Tory thinking plus a better politics would flow naturally from it.
More precise language for concepts can help but the real win comes with a different paradigm because that’s what shapes people’s understanding of the words and concepts they hear.
If we don’t propose a different paradigm, we are reduced to fighting on Tory turf, arguing that our team is better than their team. That’s weak and unconvincing.
The Tory paradigm of free markets, trickle down, privatisation etc. (aka Thatcherism, Neoliberalism) has ruled since 1979 but it’s failed catastrophically for ~50% and failed substantially for 90% so there is a huge hunger for a better paradigm IMO.
That opens the door to new thinking. Fortunately, much of the heavy lifting has already been done by a disparate group of liberal-minded individuals around the world although it remains to be pulled together into an outline plan tailored to UK circumstances. The party that gets this roughly right will dominate the next 40 years.
However, LibDem policymaking seems designed only to grind out detail, so we have step outside that and find a way to innovate the big picture. Any ideas?
Paul Reynolds (Comment 17th Dec)
Absolutely. A former boss of mine used to argue that people are divided into two personality types, ‘Courtiers’ whose instinct is always to make things look and/or sound better and ‘Engineers’ whose instinct is to understand, make or mend things.
There’s a lot of truth in that. I read not so long ago that this duality used to be recognised by the CIA. There were on the one hand ‘analysts’ who sought out information and worked out what it meant. They tended to be introverts. Then there were the ‘agents’, typically loud, extrovert action-orientated pushy types. This distinction has now allegedly broken down with the result that the agents, never shrinking violets, now promote their preferred plans without the benefit of adequate research.
This happened in my own experience too when a new MD at a company I once worked for stopped consulting the analysts. Result disaster – but recovered very quickly when he was fired and another new MD proved scrupulous about consulting them.
The from where I sit is that for over a decade we’ve been governed by a Party that prioritises business profits over public spending. We are still a wealthy country but that wealth is too unevenly distributed. Even Labour speaks the language of shareholder profits for fear of offending their voters. We need a fairer more compassionate country that believes in a good quality of life for everyone even if the wealthy have to cut their expenditure.