As expected, Andy Burnham is now the Prime Minister and has already started with eye-catching policies that don’t particularly help the UK. VAT cuts for pubs are mostly irrelevant next to the cost of energy and labour due to the NI hike Labour implemented. The £2 bus policy is surprising from a devolution perspective – let regions set the appropriate rate for themselves, particularly given £2 won’t cover the cost, and it appears to be unfunded anyway.
There are some rumblings about trying to sort out adult social care, which would be an important change, but until we get further details I’ll be sceptical that there’s a plan for this.
Anyway, onto today’s links. We have the impact of Blair on Britain’s constitution, the need for deportations in a liberal democracy, and an interesting diversion into Roman concrete.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/207194579
- Dan Lewis (who runs an excellent Substack, in particular on the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act) examines the legacy of Blair’s changes on Britain’s constitution.
- What’s interesting about Blair’s changes is the thinking behind them. In Lewis’s view:
- Inside the Labour Party, the election result prompted a different conversation. If one Prime Minister, elected by 42% of voters, could reshape so much of Britain in less than a decade, perhaps the issue extended beyond Margaret Thatcher herself.
- So, some interesting thinking here. Normally we see parties in power implement policies or expand their powers in ways that would terrify them if the opposition had done it. But given Labour’s history, this dispersed power approach makes some sense, but as we will see later, wasn’t really thought through.
- The first way power was dispersed was to the European Union – notably the Amsterdam Treaty in 1997, which, as Lewis notes, meant that Britain would still be bound by EU actions, even if it had voted against these.
- Between 1997 and 2009, around 6.8% of UK primary legislation and 14.1% of secondary legislation played some role in implementing European obligations. The government’s own estimate placed the EU origin of legislation carrying a significant economic impact at around 50%. Both measures omit much directly applicable European regulation and vary enormously according to what counts as a law. Their combined message remains clear: ministers worked across broad areas where many of the governing rules had already been settled above the national level.
- This ties back into what we’ve explored previously, in particular in Between the Waves by Tom McTague – Britain’s relationship with the EU was misunderstood by Remainers (it doesn’t have that much of an impact) and Brexiteers (it’s not that powerful). It is what it is – a powerful regulatory body, with significant economic gravity, that has significant influence on our legislation.
- The next area is devolution, which I want to emphasise. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland got significant new powers, but without much revenue accountability. As a result:
- Under Blair’s model, Holyrood could announce more generous services and attribute fiscal pressure to Westminster. Westminster could increase the block grant and attribute poor outcomes to Holyrood. Voters now had a blurred answer to the most basic democratic question: who paid for it?
- That design fits devolution’s political origins. Blair regarded it as a means of accommodating Scottish national identity, preserving the Union and completing the Northern Irish peace settlement. The settlement delivered autonomy over services while retaining the Treasury as the financial centre of the state.
- If Burnham or whoever comes after is serious about devolution, this will have to be seriously reconsidered. It makes no sense that regions can drastically diverge from the centre, but receive no benefits from doing so, and, critically, no significant consequences for poor policy decisions.
- So far I have yet to see Burnham reckon with this, particularly with his comments about wanting good growth in all postcodes. This doesn’t accept the inherent nature of devolution – you are accepting unequal outcomes, which reduces fairness overall, in the hope that in aggregate we all benefit through faster regional growth.
- The next area that Blair changed was the rise of quangos, and the reduction in central government power. This consistently comes into conflict with the UK government’s own stated objectives, such as housebuilding being blocked by Natural England. Starmer never grappled with this, despite bemoaning his seeming inability to achieve his goals. Burnham will have to reckon with this too if he is serious about prosperity. Again, these devolved bodies have zero consequences for stopping the government or growth – they are following the law and their own regulations.
- Finally, Lewis examines the legal changes implemented by Blair. The Human Rights Act requires compliance with Convention rights wherever possible, and requires domestic courts to take Strasbourg judgements into account.
- The system reaches beyond legislation. Every public authority – government departments, councils, police forces, prisons, regulators and much of the NHS – must exercise its powers compatibly with Convention rights. A broad statutory discretion can therefore become a narrower operational power once officials account for the HRA and subsequent judgments.
- So, devolved bodies that are already unaccountable have another legal layer on top. Hence the frustration that nothing seems to work well, and yet nothing is reformed.
- Lewis then goes into Blair’s instincts behind this, and examines what he got right and wrong, which is absolutely worth a read. I’ll just emphasise the devolution point here again. Blair and the Labour Party were terrified of another Thatcher transforming the country, and hence put checks and balances into our constitution. But they then didn’t do the logical next step – give local regions and municipalities, etc the powers they once held before Thatcher and even before World War II. And as I keep emphasising, doing this while ensuring the costs were also recognised by the relevant authority too.
- Right now we have a highly centralised country, but the most powerful actors are often quangos, courts, and other actors, rather than the government.
- What gives me hope is that for most of these areas identified by Lewis, the progenitor was Parliament itself. Parliament agreed to limited devolution, the creation of quangos, and much more powerful legal Acts. These can be undone, or significantly reformed to give accountability and power back to the government of the day, or the relevant local authority. It just needs a party with an awareness of what Blair did, with its own theory of power to act again.
https://substack.com/inbox/post/207294936
- Alexander Kustov examines the squeamishness that liberals have over deportation and the need for it in a liberal democracy. While this article focuses on the USA, I think it’s increasingly applicable to the UK as well.
- That sentence sounds harsher than it is because immigration debates have trained us to hear “deportation” as either unnecessary cruelty or restrictionist toughness. But the better way to think about deportation is to consider it, just like incarceration or even capital punishment, as one of the legitimate policy instruments our democratic governments have to enforce its laws and to maintain order. If our asylum procedures are meaningful, some claims will fail. And, if court review matters, some appeals will be exhausted. In the end, if we want to ask citizens to trust a generous immigration system, their government must be able to carry out the system’s own decisions.
- This is so incredibly important, in particular the final sentence, that it should be read again. When we look at opinion polls, there are broadly three types. Firstly, absolutely zero immigration whatsoever, and naturally their opposite – any immigration is fine. But critically, there is a middle ground: some immigration is acceptable, but it must be controlled. The failure to control immigration has caused immense damage to faith in democracy in the last two decades in the UK.
- What I appreciate is that Kustov makes a real attempt to examine it from the other angle properly.
- When government agents deport migrants, they commit coercive state violence against people who are, in the vast majority of cases, guilty of nothing beyond wanting a better life…
- It can violate international law when it deports people to persecution, while migration adjudication decisions are made under genuine uncertainty, with trauma, bad translation, missing documents, and uneven access to lawyers, all raising the odds of error. On top of all that, sometimes there is no functioning state to deport anyone to, or no willing state to accept anyone.
- I can’t help but feel that in the British context, and this feels incredibly daft to write this, but deportation is not nice. And therefore for far too many people, it cannot be an option that a liberal democracy can accomplish. Which I think is acceptable, but only if you maintain acceptance through the following:
- Very strict immigration controls, so you only have immigrants that the wider population has accepted
- For immigrants that do not meet the requirements of the UK, there have to be enough detention/holding centres so that they don’t enter the UK. There also need to be significant deterrents to other illegal immigrants in this context.
- The problem is that those who recoil from deportations also shy away from the above as well. As a result, the pro-immigration group has enraged the other two-thirds of the population. The wider immigration system is completely undermined, and support for even legal immigration is lower than it would otherwise have been.
- If I were a political party in the UK or the Western world, I would be laser-focused on controlling this, to avoid losing popular legitimacy for my government and also for the immigration system. The revealed preference is that this isn’t happening, and therefore voters are turning to the radical (usually rightwing) parties as a consequence.
- enforcement predictable enough that the rules feel real in everyday life for regular citizens and noncitizens alike. The goal of this all should be a deportation system that is credible, bounded, and boring.
- This is the end goal that a liberal democracy has to reach in order to restore legitimacy to this wider system. Until we get here, the UK will continue to see support for Reform and other parties who promise to bring immigration under control.
- And for something completely different, Sara Hashemi examines how Roman concrete has been so durable.
- Modern concrete usually has a lifespan of about 100 years, according to the article, which I didn’t realise. This makes the Roman legacy even more impressive.
- Something I didn’t expect:
- The sprawling estate is an architectural marvel, but one of its scientific gems are the communal toilets. They offer an unprecedented opportunity to study Roman concrete in its original state, unaltered by modern hands.
- But it makes sense, as they note later, nobody is keen to restore a communal toilet, and so we get a look at the original materials.
- However, a closer look at the concrete’s pores and fractures revealed that calcite, a mineral with calcium, carbon and oxygen, was the primary binding agent.
- When atmospheric carbon dioxide reacts with the calcium compounds in the concrete, it forms the hard mineral calcite, which contains a lot of the compound calcium carbonate. The mineral fills small cracks and pores in the concrete, allowing ancient structures to strengthen and heal over time.
- An amazing find, and I look forward to seeing how this is incorporated into modern concrete going forward.
