Richard, again a fascinating and wideranging contribution and one has to admire the sheer breadth of historical reference you bring into these discussions, from Ford in the 1970s to local government reform and even the old GLC structures (bring it back?). Whether one agrees with all of it or not, it certainly provokes thought.
I think there is some truth in your broader point that both major parties increasingly lost the habit of listening properly to large sections of the electorate and became tied to institutional assumptions that hardened over time. I also agree that immigration policy under both parties often proceedead despite considerable public unease and that neither side ever properly levelled with the public about the longerm social and economic consequences, positive or negative.
That said, I would gently push back on one or two points.
I am not entirely persuaded that council housing itself was primarily a mechanism of “social control”. Much of the post-war municipal housing drive emerged from genuinely dreadful housing conditions, overcrowding and slum clearance and gosh what slums they were. The tragedy perhaps is that too much later planning became overly ideological and disconnected from human-scale communities. Some estates worked reasonably well initially, others became planning disasters. End of the day it has to be built cheap ... but that didn't have to mean some of the stuff they did.
Similarly, while immigration undoubtedly affected labour markets in some sectors, the relationship between wages, productivity, housing supply and living standards is probably more complicated than a simple supplyanddemand model alone can explain. Britain also experienced deindustrialisation, technological change and the weakening of organised labour across several decades, often simultaneously.
I would also gently correct one historical point. Elephant and Castle itself was not named after Catherine of Aragon or the Infanta of Castile, however attractive the story sounds. Historians generally trace the name either to an old coaching inn or possibly a corruption of “Infanta de Castilla”, though the latter remains disputed rather than established fact. My family is from East Ham - part of it.
On Birmingham, I still resist the idea that decline was inevitable or that the city has been in continuous collapse since the 1960s. Not so. Birmingham for long periods remained a remarkably productive, inventive and civically confident place. My own feeling remains that the deeper rot set in later, when managerial politics increasingly replaced civic imagination and when internal party democracy weakened substantially.
And finally, I would probably avoid reading too much into the “year ending in 8” theory before the crystal ball overheats completely! Economic crises have tended to arise from long global cycles and structural weaknesses rather than numerology, though I concede 2008 was certainly spectacular enough to tempt fate. Allthough the Bible does give a simular number.
In any event, thought-provoking as always and I look forward to the next instalment once the iPad has recovered sufficiently to permit further constitutional reflection.
Again, an interesting analysis and thank you for taking the time to write it all out.
Yes, I am a Labour man, though at times recently Labour and I appear to have agreed to a temporary separation…!!
I do not accept that Labour “caused” the 2008 crash. By any reasonable measure that was an internationaly financial crisis driven by increasingly reckless behaviour within global capital markets and the packaging of risky financial products that many people barrely understood. I do however accept that Labour became caught up in the hype and the rather absurd notion that boom and bust had somehow been defeated. I remember thinking at the time that this was a very dangerous assumption.
As for the bank bailouts, I still think intervention was essential. Allowing major banks simply to collapse would have been catastrophic. I also never thought taking controlling interests in the banks was necessarily a bad thing. If anything, we perhaps failed to use that moment to reshape banking more fundamentally, separating safer consumer banking from the more speculative casino-style activities that caused so much damage in the first place. In many ways some of those excesses are quietly creeping back. Captain Mainwaring may have been a silly arse but I guess as a banker he was trustworthy...
Others than that, I actually find myself leaning towards agreement with quite a lot of what you say, particularly about political parties losing the habit of listening properly to the public and becoming too tied to institutional interests and internal orthodoxies.
In any event, thank you again. Thought-provoking as always and I look forward to your next offering, even if my iPad may require medical attention by the end of it!!
Again an interesting analysis but the question remains where do we go from here. You rightly say that both the main parties have failed. You place the blame on both the many many years of Labour rule in the city and on the Tories 14 years. But, as a Labour man, you fail to acknowledge that austerity was a consequence of the economic crash of 2008 under Labour; the result of which was bound to be austerity whoever was in power. The bailing out of the banks by Brown was, in hindsight, a great mistake and cost us dear. But the Treasury was never going down the route of letting them go bust. It never thinks out of the box. And then there was COVID and the cost of paying people not to work. The Tories were culpable but Labour more so, as reflected by the voters. The Labour vote decline by 40% on average; the Tory vote by 9% on average. But the bigger criticism and the biggest reason for decline is the failure of these parties to listen to the people. In so many ways the policies of both parties have been based on sectional interests rather than on what the vast majority of the population wanted. The desire to please public service workers, the biggest voter base for Labour, and big business for the Tories. Both these groups had views completely opposite of what the majority wanted. The rot set in under the Wilson government in the 1960s but was already developing during the 13 years of Tory rule. Let me give a few examples which following in the next entry… because my iPad begins to have a fit when I write too much in one go here!!!
1. Immigration… from 1950 onwards up to now the indigenous population has voted in opinion polls that they did not like it and did not want it. But it happened anyway in increasingly larger numbers, under both parties for different reasons. The liberal largely public sector Labour voters saw its usefulness in that bastion of the Left the NHS… and they were wedded to a concept of internationalism, a product of Kantian philosophy and later Socialism. The Tories too because big business increasingly saw the need for cheap foreign labour and the need to destroy union power by undercutting the wages of the indigenous white working class semi skilled workers. And the Trade Unions, who should have defended these workers from immigrant labour, did the exact opposite. The example of the Ford plant strikes in the 1970s illustrates this dramatically. So rather than stopping immigration and thereby increasing the wages of ordinary people, by the law of supply and demand, both parties did the opposite, whether it was the Blair wave of 1 million from Eastern Europe or the post COVID so-called Boris wave, the majority of which actually came under Sunak.
2. Housing… unlike continental Europe the vast majority of English (the same does not apply throughout UK) want to own their own home. But Labour has for decades been wedded to social usually council houses as a weapon of social control to be frank. Let me illustrate this phenomenon by Peckham in South London, an area that includes the famous Elephant and Castle area, named after the Infanta of Castile, Henry VIII first wife who had a home there. In 1965 under the GLC Act the Tory Borough of Camberwell, in which Peckham lay, was joined to the Labour borough of Southwark to form the new LB of Southwark. Almost immediately the. Labour council began pulling down the old privately owned back to back houses replacing them with a huge concrete jungle of council flats known as the Aylesbury park estate… notorious as the place where the young black boy D Taylor was stabbed to death. The people of the area were now dependent on the council for their homes and until 2026 voted Labour accordingly. The bizarre thing about this is that some of these Victorian houses survived and are lived in often by Labour politicians and are valued at over 2 million £s each! On the other hand Thatcher introduced the right to buy and with it support for the Tories in places like Oscott and Kingstanding. But this inevitable created a problem for those unable to buy their homes, especially when 10 million immigrants have been added to the population since 1960. Yet people want to live in their own home but both government parties have failed to achieve this. And so there is created an underclass of 35% of the population who live in social or more likely privately rented housing with no chance of ever living in their own home.
I could go onto the issue of social pride. Various governments as I wrote yesterday have “reformed” local government… getting rid of the link between where a person lives and the local council. A person aged 50 today might have lived in the same house all his or her life, and I jest not, and have lived in five different council areas in that time as these changes have occurred. Yet that house was before that fifty years in the same political area for the previous one thousand years. When your roots are being dug up every few years civic pride and the feeling that you have for your home area dwindles. I would like to know how many people feel proud that they live in their own county of the West Midlands? I doubt more than a few. And with a lack of civic pride comes “I can’t be bothered” who is elected, whether litter fills the streets, whether kids run a mock etc.
In a sense both parties have failed in so many areas that is why both parties have lost out. It is not simple a question of managed decline but a question of inevitability that, having been ignored for decades, the voters until 2026 had given up. Why 2026 matters so much is that the offering of two new parties and the independents gave a sense of hope. Whether that hope can ever be realised is not important for now. These next four years are crucial both for the nation and for Birmingham. At the local level, as I said yesterday, Birmingham is in the last chance saloon. If a coalition of the Left succeeds Birmingham will last. If it does not, and the signs are not good, it will be broken up. The latter is more likely. At national level Reform will win in 2028 or 2029… Labour have an incredible record to follow. Every time they have been in power and the year ends in 8 there has been an economic crash. 1948, 1968, 1978, 2008… the only exception was 1998, when they had just got into office and Britain was in surplus. Perhaps this time they will buck the trend and give us the crash in 2027 instead? In the light of present public borrowing that looks increasingly certain. But who knows… I need a crystal ball!
Richard, again a fascinating and wideranging contribution and one has to admire the sheer breadth of historical reference you bring into these discussions, from Ford in the 1970s to local government reform and even the old GLC structures (bring it back?). Whether one agrees with all of it or not, it certainly provokes thought.
I think there is some truth in your broader point that both major parties increasingly lost the habit of listening properly to large sections of the electorate and became tied to institutional assumptions that hardened over time. I also agree that immigration policy under both parties often proceedead despite considerable public unease and that neither side ever properly levelled with the public about the longerm social and economic consequences, positive or negative.
That said, I would gently push back on one or two points.
I am not entirely persuaded that council housing itself was primarily a mechanism of “social control”. Much of the post-war municipal housing drive emerged from genuinely dreadful housing conditions, overcrowding and slum clearance and gosh what slums they were. The tragedy perhaps is that too much later planning became overly ideological and disconnected from human-scale communities. Some estates worked reasonably well initially, others became planning disasters. End of the day it has to be built cheap ... but that didn't have to mean some of the stuff they did.
Similarly, while immigration undoubtedly affected labour markets in some sectors, the relationship between wages, productivity, housing supply and living standards is probably more complicated than a simple supplyanddemand model alone can explain. Britain also experienced deindustrialisation, technological change and the weakening of organised labour across several decades, often simultaneously.
I would also gently correct one historical point. Elephant and Castle itself was not named after Catherine of Aragon or the Infanta of Castile, however attractive the story sounds. Historians generally trace the name either to an old coaching inn or possibly a corruption of “Infanta de Castilla”, though the latter remains disputed rather than established fact. My family is from East Ham - part of it.
On Birmingham, I still resist the idea that decline was inevitable or that the city has been in continuous collapse since the 1960s. Not so. Birmingham for long periods remained a remarkably productive, inventive and civically confident place. My own feeling remains that the deeper rot set in later, when managerial politics increasingly replaced civic imagination and when internal party democracy weakened substantially.
And finally, I would probably avoid reading too much into the “year ending in 8” theory before the crystal ball overheats completely! Economic crises have tended to arise from long global cycles and structural weaknesses rather than numerology, though I concede 2008 was certainly spectacular enough to tempt fate. Allthough the Bible does give a simular number.
In any event, thought-provoking as always and I look forward to the next instalment once the iPad has recovered sufficiently to permit further constitutional reflection.
Again, an interesting analysis and thank you for taking the time to write it all out.
Yes, I am a Labour man, though at times recently Labour and I appear to have agreed to a temporary separation…!!
I do not accept that Labour “caused” the 2008 crash. By any reasonable measure that was an internationaly financial crisis driven by increasingly reckless behaviour within global capital markets and the packaging of risky financial products that many people barrely understood. I do however accept that Labour became caught up in the hype and the rather absurd notion that boom and bust had somehow been defeated. I remember thinking at the time that this was a very dangerous assumption.
As for the bank bailouts, I still think intervention was essential. Allowing major banks simply to collapse would have been catastrophic. I also never thought taking controlling interests in the banks was necessarily a bad thing. If anything, we perhaps failed to use that moment to reshape banking more fundamentally, separating safer consumer banking from the more speculative casino-style activities that caused so much damage in the first place. In many ways some of those excesses are quietly creeping back. Captain Mainwaring may have been a silly arse but I guess as a banker he was trustworthy...
Others than that, I actually find myself leaning towards agreement with quite a lot of what you say, particularly about political parties losing the habit of listening properly to the public and becoming too tied to institutional interests and internal orthodoxies.
In any event, thank you again. Thought-provoking as always and I look forward to your next offering, even if my iPad may require medical attention by the end of it!!
Again an interesting analysis but the question remains where do we go from here. You rightly say that both the main parties have failed. You place the blame on both the many many years of Labour rule in the city and on the Tories 14 years. But, as a Labour man, you fail to acknowledge that austerity was a consequence of the economic crash of 2008 under Labour; the result of which was bound to be austerity whoever was in power. The bailing out of the banks by Brown was, in hindsight, a great mistake and cost us dear. But the Treasury was never going down the route of letting them go bust. It never thinks out of the box. And then there was COVID and the cost of paying people not to work. The Tories were culpable but Labour more so, as reflected by the voters. The Labour vote decline by 40% on average; the Tory vote by 9% on average. But the bigger criticism and the biggest reason for decline is the failure of these parties to listen to the people. In so many ways the policies of both parties have been based on sectional interests rather than on what the vast majority of the population wanted. The desire to please public service workers, the biggest voter base for Labour, and big business for the Tories. Both these groups had views completely opposite of what the majority wanted. The rot set in under the Wilson government in the 1960s but was already developing during the 13 years of Tory rule. Let me give a few examples which following in the next entry… because my iPad begins to have a fit when I write too much in one go here!!!
1. Immigration… from 1950 onwards up to now the indigenous population has voted in opinion polls that they did not like it and did not want it. But it happened anyway in increasingly larger numbers, under both parties for different reasons. The liberal largely public sector Labour voters saw its usefulness in that bastion of the Left the NHS… and they were wedded to a concept of internationalism, a product of Kantian philosophy and later Socialism. The Tories too because big business increasingly saw the need for cheap foreign labour and the need to destroy union power by undercutting the wages of the indigenous white working class semi skilled workers. And the Trade Unions, who should have defended these workers from immigrant labour, did the exact opposite. The example of the Ford plant strikes in the 1970s illustrates this dramatically. So rather than stopping immigration and thereby increasing the wages of ordinary people, by the law of supply and demand, both parties did the opposite, whether it was the Blair wave of 1 million from Eastern Europe or the post COVID so-called Boris wave, the majority of which actually came under Sunak.
2. Housing… unlike continental Europe the vast majority of English (the same does not apply throughout UK) want to own their own home. But Labour has for decades been wedded to social usually council houses as a weapon of social control to be frank. Let me illustrate this phenomenon by Peckham in South London, an area that includes the famous Elephant and Castle area, named after the Infanta of Castile, Henry VIII first wife who had a home there. In 1965 under the GLC Act the Tory Borough of Camberwell, in which Peckham lay, was joined to the Labour borough of Southwark to form the new LB of Southwark. Almost immediately the. Labour council began pulling down the old privately owned back to back houses replacing them with a huge concrete jungle of council flats known as the Aylesbury park estate… notorious as the place where the young black boy D Taylor was stabbed to death. The people of the area were now dependent on the council for their homes and until 2026 voted Labour accordingly. The bizarre thing about this is that some of these Victorian houses survived and are lived in often by Labour politicians and are valued at over 2 million £s each! On the other hand Thatcher introduced the right to buy and with it support for the Tories in places like Oscott and Kingstanding. But this inevitable created a problem for those unable to buy their homes, especially when 10 million immigrants have been added to the population since 1960. Yet people want to live in their own home but both government parties have failed to achieve this. And so there is created an underclass of 35% of the population who live in social or more likely privately rented housing with no chance of ever living in their own home.
I could go onto the issue of social pride. Various governments as I wrote yesterday have “reformed” local government… getting rid of the link between where a person lives and the local council. A person aged 50 today might have lived in the same house all his or her life, and I jest not, and have lived in five different council areas in that time as these changes have occurred. Yet that house was before that fifty years in the same political area for the previous one thousand years. When your roots are being dug up every few years civic pride and the feeling that you have for your home area dwindles. I would like to know how many people feel proud that they live in their own county of the West Midlands? I doubt more than a few. And with a lack of civic pride comes “I can’t be bothered” who is elected, whether litter fills the streets, whether kids run a mock etc.
In a sense both parties have failed in so many areas that is why both parties have lost out. It is not simple a question of managed decline but a question of inevitability that, having been ignored for decades, the voters until 2026 had given up. Why 2026 matters so much is that the offering of two new parties and the independents gave a sense of hope. Whether that hope can ever be realised is not important for now. These next four years are crucial both for the nation and for Birmingham. At the local level, as I said yesterday, Birmingham is in the last chance saloon. If a coalition of the Left succeeds Birmingham will last. If it does not, and the signs are not good, it will be broken up. The latter is more likely. At national level Reform will win in 2028 or 2029… Labour have an incredible record to follow. Every time they have been in power and the year ends in 8 there has been an economic crash. 1948, 1968, 1978, 2008… the only exception was 1998, when they had just got into office and Britain was in surplus. Perhaps this time they will buck the trend and give us the crash in 2027 instead? In the light of present public borrowing that looks increasingly certain. But who knows… I need a crystal ball!