A few weeks after Keir Starmer’s landslide, it may not seem like Britain is a conservative country. The left has won an enormous victory and started to push forward on its agenda. Policies are being announced: today Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, says the government will start building offshore wind turbines. But, as Labour settles into government, there are signs it may be already be getting bogged down by an institutional and cultural conservatism that has long held Britain back from doing things.
Threats to Starmer’s ‘change’ are starting to emerge. The arsenal deployed against Tory plans over the years – from endless consultations to judicial reviews and human rights challenges – now threatens Labour plans. ECHR-driven lawfare could apparently be waged against proposed planning reform and adding VAT to private school fees. Even if these reviews and legal obstacle fail, they would add delay and costs to the decisions Labour promised in its manifesto. It points to a cross-governmental, cross-party problem. Britain, fundamentally, has become bad at dealing with change.
There is a culture of risk aversion
Among think tanks and policy wonks, it has become an almost constant lament. Britain cannot get anything done. Infrastructure and our inability to build is the most obvious example. Projects like HS2 are announced, consulted on, scaled back, and overrun on costs, eventually becoming an expensive shadow of what was first envisaged. Across the country, there are dozens of projects – road, rail, power generation – that have been kicked around for decades without a shovel hitting the ground. It seems a uniquely British problem, with other countries having half the hassle and costs.
In the mid-2000s, Tony Blair’s government announced plans to expand Heathrow. At almost the same time, the Polish government started to explore plans to build a new airport for Warsaw. With a new government, the Heathrow discussions are back under consideration – meanwhile, the Poles have just started digging, with the first flights hoped for in 2028. By then, we might have concluded our next set of consultations.
With building, the immediate causes are apparent. We’ve created a planning system driven by local vetoes and a political culture that incentivises objection. Where the costs are obvious and localised, they seem to outweigh the incremental national benefits of these things happening. This then flows into local government, as councillors and MPs are incentivised to join the side of the blockers. The problem is that it is a broader cultural issue pushing against change. Britain is becoming almost allergic to getting things done.
Our state capacity is bogged down in the idea that things must move slowly. Reviewing and consulting are more important than deciding. Processes are preferred over outcomes. Governments of every political persuasion say they’ll fix it, but can’t. Much of the Covid enquiry highlighted how slow even emergency decision-making was, and how much institutional resistance had to be overcome.
Part of this is the instinct to add regulation to fix a problem, rather than to remove it. For decades, Britain liked to blame our overbearing state on the EU, but post-Brexit, we have seen how much of it is homegrown. There are very few people in politics who are instinctively pro-regulation. Instead, there are many who get persuaded by the good of individual measures – banning scary-looking knives that are already illegal, pushing small venues into having anti-terror plans – without thinking of the cumulative effect. This flows into the government’s decision-making, with each action loaded with extra consultations and rules in support of some tangential aim.
Beyond that, there is a culture of risk aversion in Whitehall and beyond. While Silicon Valley start-ups might have an ethos of ‘move fast and break stuff’, our state has the opposite view. Wasting effort or having a negative impact is seen as detrimental, both to government and individual careers, so it is better to advise inaction. The consequences of that are harder to identify and pin on individuals.
This only persists, however, because it aligns with what a lot of voters want, too. A strong streak of individualism now runs through British politics and our interactions with the state. Not only do we not want our views spoiled or building work in our backyard, but we also expect to be listened to when we object. Consultations and court cases only happen because people bring them and interact with them, and they hope to win. It is not even about being compensated. Priti Patel dismissed the plan to pay her constituents for allowing pylons nearby as ‘bribes’. The only solution? The project could not go ahead!
Wherever there is change or development, the British seem reticent. Where once we were the country of industrialisation, urbanisation and building, from canals to Concorde, there is now little desire to get stuff done. The country has become reluctant to take a calculated risk, too scared of adverse consequences and less interested in the upsides. Whitehall’s infrastructure and attitudes have not come from nowhere, but are the result of a public desire to regulate, consult, proceed with caution, and, if possible, block.
Britain is dominated by a kind of conservatism, not in the political sense but in its character. It has made us sclerotic and process-driven, more focused on satisfying ‘various stakeholders’ than getting a decision made and implemented. To succeed, governments must be able to change things. Sometimes this will create losers. Sometimes things will fail. Cumulatively, however, the cost of caution is worse. Governments need to do things, and we as a population need to be more comfortable, maybe happy, with that.
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