Can governments focused on short-term objectives ever deliver long-term community action?

Last Wednesday evening I attended the Trussell carol concert and reception at Southwark Cathedral. For those unfamiliar with Trussell, it's the co-ordinator and supplier for 1,400 food banks throughout the United Kingdom, with 36,000 volunteers. A charity with a passion for ending hunger, it is an extraordinary example of how scalability and partnership can come together to produce nationwide results.

Its aim may be to end hunger but, after seventy years of state welfare built on socialist universality, the demand is as acute as ever. Research undertaken by YouGov in October showed that 9.3 million people face hunger and hardship, the highest level ever recorded in the United Kingdom. This includes 3 million children, 46% more than two decades ago. 94% of people think that poverty in the UK is a problem.

And all this fifty years after Sir Keith Joseph spoke of breaking the cycle of deprivation: fifty years throughout which the welfare state has been in full operation, together with a variety of short-term attempts to tackle inequality such as ‘The Big Society’ and ‘Levelling-up’.

This is why we ask how governments focused on short-term objectives can ever deliver long-term community action.

Some years ago, while the report ‘Resourcing Christian Community Action’ was being prepared, I came across a book by Dr. Kathleen Heasman called, ‘Christians and Social Work’. First published in 1965, it told how, before the Second World War, the Church had provided not only education and health services but also housing, mental health assistance, youth work, support for immigrants and old people's welfare, all based on the Christian principle of ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’, volunteering and philanthropy.

All that was swept away by the post-war Attlee Government, with Archbishop Temple being celebrated as the architect of the welfare state. However, as society has become steadily more secular, it has also taken on these characteristics, which Simon Duffy described in his 2016 philosophical reflection, ‘The Need for Roots’:

  • Paternalistic — it functions like a giant state-run charity
  • Negative — it defines people by their needs, not by their gifts
  • Materialistic — it expects too little from people and from life
  • Meritocratic — it centralises power and treats people with disrespect
  • Individualistic — it undermines the role of the family and community

When these are combined with the short-term cycle of democratic politics, the result is what we see today: a collection of bloated and inefficient state monopolies funded by an ever-increasing demand for, and share of, national resources — resulting in soaring taxes and national debt.

This is not, of course, just a British problem, and it's not just caused by welfare. Repeated attempts to stimulate economies also leave their burden on national debt, as the United States has experienced over the past ten years. Rachel Reeves is now embarking on similar plans for the UK economy over these next five years, with her euphemism of ‘Invest, Invest, Invest’ which really means ‘Borrow, Borrow, Borrow’.

The result is that most ‘first-world’ countries are now saddled with a scale of debt which is fast changing from a problem to a predicament, as Tim Rice explains in The Bigger Picture this week, also describing most western governments as ‘technically bankrupt’.

How can we structure democracy to enable a long-term and more sustainable perspective? It certainly needs to incorporate a long-term counterbalance to its short-term executive and legislature: in the United Kingdom, the second chamber should fulfil this role. However, as Lord True pointed out in his letter to The Times last Thursday, once the hereditary peers have been ejected, all but 26 bishops will be the products of prime ministerial patronage. I would not argue on behalf of the hereditary system. What is needed, urgently, is an elected second chamber based on voters’ long-term preferences, as we argued on 9th May last year.

But we also need to re-define state-run activities for their core purpose, and whether these should be delivered, or regulated by the State and delivered by others. For example, there is no question that defence and law and order should be delivered, and the State should provide a strong safety net for those who need it. But is it really sensible to insist on universality for health, social care and education when we have seventy years’ experience of it not working?

This also applies directly to our persistent call for inter-generational rebalancing, as its essentially long-term character gets continually swept aside by the short-term demands for government spending. On 18th November we set out a clear vision for tackling poverty amongst children and young people by introducing a new version of the Child Trust Fund and, in our final paragraph, we made the point that it was not inconceivable that this initiative might need to be delivered philanthropically.

That philanthropic vision is also clearly visible as the motivation which underpins Trussell in its work with food banks. It may be time that we stand back to take a strategic look at this seventy-year experiment with the welfare state, and whether Archbishop Temple was right to entrust the State with the responsibility for building a more compassionate society, with participation for all.

On 10th June this year, in the run-up to the UK general election, our commentary was headed, ‘Say farewell to socialism, Sir Keir’, arguing that we need to move to egalitarian capitalism as the basis for government policy going forwards. There's little sign of that happening yet, but the chronic failure of socialism to break the cycle of deprivation may yet force the change.

Gavin Oldham OBE

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