https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2024/09/30/the-long-and-the-short-of-it-five-devolution/
In the first part of this essay, we looked at the response of incoming UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer to the brief – and likely lager-inspired – pulse of violence on one of the few hot evenings of an otherwise dismal summer. While Starmer had set out to appear tough on the spectre of a mythical “far right,” his response was actually brittle and fragile… revealing to a great extent, a state machine already close to breaking point. This was most obvious in the decree to release prisoners from jails which were already full to bursting point, with the inevitable bureaucratic ineptitude resulting in violent and dangerous men being released alongside those non-violent criminals nearing the end of their sentence.

This was quickly jumped upon as “two-tier justice” – which, of course, and despite government denials, it was… don’t imagine for one minute that if you get assaulted, mugged, or burgled, police will be on overtime to catch the perpetrator. And don’t expect any midnight court sittings to ensure swift punishment in the unlikely event the perpetrator is caught. But for the longer-term, this was less important than the callous dismissal of the genuine concerns of the families of the murdered girls which were the trigger for the later riots. Starmer himself dismissed these concerns as unimportant (in the context of the rioting) thereby demonstrating that he is simply not a politician, and likely ill-equipped to manage the raft of economic and social crises that are set to engulf the UK during Labour’s (probably brief) period in government.

In the second part of the essay, I contrasted Starmer’s response with that of the British monarchy. This highlighted the way, throughout modern history, the monarchy has positioned itself as the people’s champion in the face of government policy, action, or inaction that is known to be unpopular among the wider public. It is, as I noted, an approach which allowed the British monarchs to keep their heads attached to their shoulders where other monarchs were less successful. Whether the current monarch or his successors know it, this might yet prove to be the beginning of a power struggle aimed at retaining the monarchy at the head of an emerging national state which will inevitably replace the current neoliberal supranational corporatist forms of governance.

In the third part of the essay, we examined the key role of communication and transport in the development of the modern state, noting, for example, the near absence of a national state in Britain prior to the nineteenth century – day to day governance falling to “a union of partially independent county states, each with its own ethos and loyalty.” Only with the development of railways and telegraphy was a nation state made possible… and once created – because power brooks no rival – it quickly embarked upon the disempowering of those disparate county states. We then noted that in the late oil age, air transport and digital communications had laid the foundation for the supranational organs of government of the twenty-first century – and for the same reason, how those supranational bodies had begun to disempower individual national governments.

So removed have we become from the material basis of our way of life, that it is hard to imagine anything other than progress… although for the growing western precariat class, decline is more obvious with each passing day. To those at the height of power, not only is progress expected, but the mythical “singularity,” in which all human decision-making is taken over by a salient AI, is surely just around the corner. In part four though, we saw how the communications and transport systems that enabled this form of supranational government are dependent upon a critical mass of paying users to maintain and expand. But since the rising energy cost of energy has driven up the cost of essentials for the mass of the population, these systems are in the early stages of a death spiral in which rising costs necessarily fall on an ever-smaller pool of paying users… until such time as the system becomes impossible to maintain.

Not that death spirals are limited to communications and air travel. For many years, I have been warning about the gathering “energy death spiral,” in which the rising cost of energy has to be borne by an increasingly squeezed middle… driving us toward the day when the energy system itself must collapse. Often overlooked in these discussions, however, is the possibility of a “government death spiral.” And yet, we are all aware of just how over-indebted our governments have become; and of how the only “solution” on the table is somehow generating a rate of economic growth which is no more than a dim memory of the oldest of us.

Government may, of course, default on its debt or simply “print” (i.e., devalue) the currency it needs to repay it. But here we must remember that one person’s debt is another person’s asset. Your pension pot, for example, will include a big chunk of government debt. So too will your insurance fund. And many private banks use government debt as an asset against which they make loans… so no mortgage for you if government defaults or devalues. In a growing economy – which, albeit punctuated with periodic slumps, is what we enjoyed for the best part of three centuries – this isn’t a problem because the economy will have grown sufficiently next year to repay this year’s debt with interest. But what happens when three centuries of growth comes to a shuddering halt?

Denial is, inevitably, the first response. In the 1970s, plenty of villains – militant unions, profligate politicians, unruly Arabs, greedy capitalists, etc. – were found to allow us to pretend that a return to the growth rates of the early oil age were just around the corner. But something more profound had occurred. Something unfortunately obscured by our medieval economics, which completely ignores what we might call “Earth limits.” Put simply, at the time the British classical liberals were writing the first economics texts – which are revered in many quarters to this day – it was inconceivable to imagine that the energy and resources needed for any economic activity might not be available. But in those days, there were less than a billion people on the planet, and almost all of the fuel and resources were still beneath the ground. Today there are more than eight billion of us, and most of the fuel and resources – particularly the cheap and easily accessible ones – were consumed decades ago.

The chosen response – most likely as the least bad option – was the corporatist version of neoliberalism which took hold in the 1980s and formed the post-Cold War consensus of the 1990s. Its main feature, allowing capital to migrate to parts of the world with the lowest wages and the least regulation, provided us with one final spurt of real economic growth. But it came with three huge downsides. Most obviously, the old western working class was forced to become an indebted precariat – since none of the necessary consumption could occur otherwise – with various asset benefits and state handouts partially maintaining the system as a whole. Second, and inevitably, as the economy internationalised, so too did government itself. This is most obvious in the form of the mostly dictatorial European Union, which until recently seemed to be winning the power struggle between national and supranational government bodies. However, we see a similar trend behind the NAFTA trade treaty which, as sure as night follows day, would have followed the European trajectory of ever greater harmonisation and regulation, dictating, in turn, ever greater pan-North American governance bodies. And since power can brook no rivals, such bodies would inevitably usurp the power of national governments (even one as huge as the US federal government). Third, and most politically damaging, the neoliberals surrendered to the classical liberals’ greatest enemy. While espousing the virtues of “free markets” – by which classical liberals like Adam Smith meant markets free from cartels and monopolies (since the eighteenth-century national state was almost non-existent) – the neoliberals supped from the corporate trough and gave multinational monopolies and cartels a free pass even as they undermined the remaining regulatory powers of democratically elected national governments.

Internally, neoliberalism dissolved the class conflict of an earlier period. The old, massed ranks of industrial workers were rapidly and painfully replaced with a new, debt-bound precariat… forced to eke out an insecure living from part-time, zero-hours and temporary employment in non-productive sectors like retail and hospitality. Only slightly above these in the new pecking order came the new army of debt-based university graduates working in what David Graeber referred to as “Bullshit Jobs” – white collar, but mind-numbing, purposeless, and barely better paid. Only in a few tiny enclaves – almost historical nature reserves – do we find remnants of the old industrial working class… the handful of car workers at the Nissan plant in Sunderland or the soon to be extinct steel workers in Port Talbot. And just as the old working class has been dissolved, so too have its institutions – the community associations, trade union branches, and mutual societies which once formed the backbone of industrial Britain.

Something similar – though a lot less painful – occurred at the top too. The so-called captains of industry were dispensed with. The old British capitalist class disappeared along with the dying embers of the Empire. In their wake, Britain – or rather London – became just another global city where global corporate interests came to do their British business. And as British capitalism dissolved into the bigger global blob, so the institutions and traditions which once propped up and legitimised its rule also became extinct.

This dissolution of all which once appeared immovable helps to explain why the established political parties are also crumbling to dust. In the 1980s, the destruction of Britain’s industrial landscape had given rise to a rearguard, and increasingly militant trade union backlash… most bitterly seen in the 1984-85 miners’ strike. Throughout the early-1980s, anti-systemic revolts arose in local government, campaigning protest movements, and industrial action, all of which fed into the divisive politics of the Labour Party of the period. Under Michael Foot’s leadership, an attempt at compromise was attempted. But how does one compromise with a neoliberal revolution which is bent on destroying your way of life? Under the leadership of Neil Kinnock – mirroring the direction of the Democrat Party in the USA – the decision to ditch the working class in favour of a mythical new progressive educated class was followed. Although it would take the Kinnock leadership nearly a decade to break the internal opposition within the Labour Party. Blair, of course, became the inheritor of the new, sanitised Labour Party, whose corporate funders obviated the need for trade union and constituency association funding. But while Blair claimed to have discovered the magical “third way” – neither capitalism nor socialism – in reality, it was just the further surrender of national interests to the supranational corporate system.

The Tory Party – which has always been the closest thing politics has to a high class brothel – was much more relaxed about abandoning its grass roots in favour of the international corporate interests which paid for the Blairite clones, Cameron and Osborne – men who saw a stint in government as a mere stepping stone on the road to a profitable sinecure in finance or media once they had done messing up what remained of the UK. Indeed, with the exception of Theresa May – a last-gasp attempt by the Tory rank and file to return to a more traditional leader (as doomed as Labour’s similar attempt with Gordon Brown) – every Tory leader since has been a chancer, mainly concerned with his or her personal fortunes than with the people, or even the economy they purport to govern… the current Labour government picking up where the last one left off.

One measure of the lack of ability and talent on the parliament benches is the relatively short time that prime ministers sit as MPs before becoming Prime Minister:

The days when talented people went into politics and stayed there often long after retirement age is a distant memory. These days, even the positions of ministers and even prime minister are regarded as little more than a stepping stone on the way to a lucrative second career. And the situation is little different in the permanent state, where civil service incentives and promotion structures devalue expertise. As Ian Dunt argues, staying in one department and developing expertise is fatal to a civil servant’s career. So that the people at the top of the civil service are experts only on how to get promoted within the civil service – don’t expect them to have the first idea how the economy, agriculture, industry, or the energy system works.

This is the double-bind of the government death spiral. Not only is government bound to disintegrate along with the economy and the energy which underpins it, but in trying to maintain the system for the past half century, even as the energy cost of energy (and thus of doing everything) has risen remorselessly, we have ended up with the least competent government possible to steer us through the relatively rapid decline of industrial civilisation.

Competent government within a high-trust society with a balanced economy might just maintain control through the coming bottleneck crises. But we abandoned balanced economies and social trust decades ago. And so, the electoral swings to political parties beyond the neoliberal consensus (I am loathe to use the terms “left” and “right,” since these are largely meaningless these days) and growing protests punctuated by street violence and riots are likely to grow.

One consequence – which has already begun in the UK – is that national governments will copy the dying Roman Empire in breaking up and devolving administration in an attempt to minimise points of opposition. The government of Tony Blair more or less successfully achieved this by using the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly to see off the threat of successionist movements in both countries. And more recently, devolved regions governed by elected mayors have been established in different parts of England. The USA may well see a similar process of devolution with the Federal Government handing more administration back to individual states – controversially, for example, the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v Wade has moved access to abortion from the Federal to State level, with individual states now responsible for abortion legislation. More importantly, the EU decision (forced upon it by Germany) to “temporarily” suspend free movement, suggests that it too will be obliged to head off non-neoliberal political movements by devolving decisions back to national and local governments within the union.

The point – which the Western Roman Empire learned the hard way – is that while this may buy the elites a little more time, devolution of this kind is more expensive and so less affordable in the middle of a government death spiral. But the alternative is a revolution at the top… and not one that ushers in the libertarian wet dream of a pure free market or the Marxian withering away of the state. But most likely a (non-German) 1930s-style authoritarian revolution which forces the state to shrink, the economy to balance, and the society to suck it up (de-growth red in tooth and claw you might say).

Either way, in the absence of a new, cheap, and more energy-dense source to replace oil – and especially diesel – government will have to shrink back to something more akin to its eighteenth-century shape, in which people are once again governed by a union of independent county states almost entirely separate from a national state left concerned almost entirely with military matters. And as for the supranational bodies which currently seek to control and harmonise so much of western population’s lives, as energy costs soar and transport and communications breakdown, they will inevitably – and likely quite quickly – go the way of the dodo.