The real ‘new politics’ of post-crisis Britain: Part I

As I argue in my forthcoming book Austerity Politics and UK Economic Policy, if austerity were simply an argument about the merits of deficit reduction, its critics on the left would have won hands down.  Indeed, the regularity with which George Osborne now delays the deficit reduction end-date clearly shows that he agrees.  Alas, austerity is more than simply a laboratory experiment for macroeconomic theory.  It builds upon instincts among the electorate around security and fairness that have sharpened since the financial crisis, which I believe have given life to a new politics of ‘place’.

In Part II of this post (to be published next week), I argue that Labour has been too slow to grasp the centrality of place to post-crisis political discourse in Britain. This first part outlines the character of the politics of place and shows how the right have used it to justify and embody their austerity agenda.

Crises destroy complacency about the basic building blocks of our lifestyles, of which physical space is probably the most fundamental; accordingly, people are now more concerned about the spatial organisation of their lives. Place – and associated concerns around identity and belonging – has therefore become a key dimension of numerous political and policy dilemmas.  The most obvious examples are heightened anxiety about immigration and membership of the European Union, which both reflect concerns about individuals’ and communities’ ability to exercise control over their own social environment, even if they manifest politically as rather spurious claims about economic impacts.

More generally, however, the crisis appears to have unleashed or unearthed a wider set of anxieties about the security of forms of spatial organisation – from our homes, to our towns and cities – which were once taken for granted, or more precisely, which we once assumed were immune to the ebbs and flows of the wider economy.

The genius of austerity is that it quietly builds these anxieties into the case for the smaller state. In terms of our homes, or so the argument goes, the Conservative Party will naturally support our desire for home-ownership so that we can secure our own financial well-being – at the same time, however, the state’s ultimate responsibility to provide decent homes is further diluted.

In terms of our towns or cities, the Conservative Party promises to empower local communities to take control of their own economic destiny, as exemplified by the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ agenda. There are two key ruses at the heart of this agenda.  The first is that it is designed to correct the North/South divide.  In fact, inequality between Northern and Southern regions has grown significantly under the Coalition and Conservative governments, not least due to their decisions on how and where to cut public spending.

The second ruse is that the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ represents some kind of empowerment for the North vis-à-vis central government.  The tacit Conservative argument in this regard – inspired by the ‘new urban economics’, which claims to have identified market-led forces of ‘agglomeration’ as the key to local prosperity – is that successive governments have effectively held back Northern cities and regions precisely because they have sought to manage Britain’s geographical inequalities. By having to support depressed regions, more resilient regions have suffered.  Of course, when the political elite is telling us to ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’, even if the neighbours in question are just a short trip down the M62, most of us want to believe that our town or city belongs in the latter camp, while that down the road is in the former.