Austerity of the Imagination: There’s no time to think when you’re always fighting fires
Wonks are out of ideas. Is it any wonder?
A consistent feature of this blog has been moaning about the lack of imagination on show across public policy. We’ve moaned about the un-seriousness of climate policy, we’ve moaned about the lack of economic ideas on both left and right, and we’ve moaned about the lack of alternatives to universal credit.
In short, we’ve argued that in 2022, observing think-tank output is rarely as thought-provoking as it should be. The same small set of ideas are being endlessly reheated, and even when new things are suggested, they tend to be minor adjustments to the status quo, rather than transformative approaches or utopian visions. As a group, policy wonks seem, more than anything, exhausted. Clapped out. Spent.
But you know what? I think this might be fair enough. Allow me to explain by way of a self-indulgent digression.
I’m a regular listener to the Health Service Journal’s podcast, a really invaluable resource for finding our what’s going on in the NHS. Last week’s episode was incredibly depressing. In it, they unpacked the dire state of cancer services in this country and described how systematic underinvestment year on year has left us with care far inferior to what you would expect in a country as rich in Britain. This week’s episode was somehow even more depressing, detailing the issues besetting our ambulance services, the harrowing consequences of increasingly slow response times, and once again attributing this all to years of underinvestment.
This is a pattern right across the public sector – the NHS is far from the only policy area to be in crisis. Universities are having a terrible time, as are schools. Local government is running out of money and unable to deliver services. Social care is a never-ending nightmare. The list goes on and on.
There are specific factors at play in each of these situations. But there is also one clear common thread – and that thread is austerity. A project that began in 2010 to shrink state the size of the state and drastically reduce its capacity has achieved its goals. We now have fewer services, delivered by fewer people for less money. Obviously, those services are now a lot worse.
This state of affairs has shaped the mood music for policy professionals now for 12 years. For many of us in charities, think-tanks and the civil service, this means for our entire careers. And this is having a profound impact on how we see our purpose and how we approach our work.
An entire generation of policy wonks has spent their formative years doing nothing but working out how to fight fires. Working out how to do more with less, to ‘one-weird-trick’ your way out of disastrous circumstances, and to manage decline so as to achieve least-bad outcomes.
If you’ve read this blog before, you will be aware that I am anything but a Blairite. But when I speak to older colleagues who came into this line of work during the ‘things can only get better’ era, the sense that things have not always been this way is palpable. There was a time not so long ago when policy wonks could assume that the baseline level of the public sector was acceptable, and therefore they could spend their time thinking about how to push on and innovate.
That’s not to say that Blairism was itself necessarily innovative or free-thinking. But it is to say that a period of rational public sector spending created conditions in which that was possible. A lot of what came out of that period wasn’t great, but it was new. Overall, I’m not fan, for example, of the academisation of schools. But it was certainly a massively different way to deliver state education, and it has certainly brought about some benefits. Like them or loathe them, the point is, since 2010, there has not been anything close to an idea the size of academies in education policy.
Austerity has been an era of perma-crisis. And that impacts our imaginations. The best minds of a generation are trying to work out ways to keep ambulances, a public service that’s been around since the 1830s, accessible and functional. When there’s not enough money to run them, it’s a seriously hard thing to do. But every second we spend trying to reinvent the wheel to keep this country somewhat civilised, is time we’re not spending on actually moving society forward. You can’t conceive of the new when all your time is spent trying to patch up the old.
I don’t want to give David Cameron too much credit as a Machiavellian genius (because I’ve read his book and he definitely isn’t one), but if you had a classically conservative goal of maintaining status quo conditions in a society, I can think of few better ways to achieve that than his austerity programme. Not only has it reproduced social relations through entrenching inequalities, it has also, in a very real way, foreclosed the imaginations of policy makers.
Change has never been more necessary, but also never less possible. When we can’t treat the sick, we just don’t have enough time to devote to thinking outside the box.
So maybe, going forward, I won’t be so harsh on the lack of imagination that I see coming out of think-tanks. It’s not like I have all the answers, and fundamentally, I’m not sure that our jobs are set up for anyone to come up with them at the moment.
When a fire’s raging, you reach for a bucket. You don’t come up with new architectural plans to prevent fires in the future. You hope you can get to that later. But if the fires keep on springing up all over the place… you never get there.
And I’m not sure how we break out of this in the short term.