British politics is stuck. As the country has veered from crisis to crisis, politicians of different parties have struggled to raise their thinking to match the scale of the frightening challenges we face, and to act decisively enough to change the situation. Too often, the conversation in Westminster, Whitehall and the media starts and ends with inherited restrictions: money and its unavailability, supposedly unbreakable rules, half-remembered calamities and cautionary tales, the ostensible bounds of the possible.
But this misses something which is both government’s own core function, and a threat it faces daily from external forces: the exercise of power.
Britain lacks robust thinking about how power functions in both the public and private sector, and in the relationship between the two. Political science tends to focus on defining ideologies, delineating public opinion, and examining the role of institutions. Journalists show too little curiosity about how power functions beyond Whitehall. Few economists factor the idea into their thinking; on the question of the responsibilities of business, for example, ‘power has more or less disappeared from the discussion altogether’.1
For those leading relatively empowered lives, this makes intuitive sense – interrogating power risks stirring up needless conflict. But in the face of warnings that ‘the sense of disempowerment people feel over their everyday lives’ is feeding ‘widespread discontent with the political status quo’2, ignoring the issue has become an unaffordable self-indulgence. Whether the Cities of London and Westminster like it or not, large swathes of the public have developed a rough-and-ready theory of power of their own – a theory that is corroding trust in mainstream politics, more profoundly than at any time in the century-long life of British mass democracy.
To counter it, we first need to explore why the public sees power this way, and then develop an alternative theory – which can form the basis of a more focused and effective governing programme.
This will involve identifying the problematic concentrations and dispersals of power that leave too many people feeling disempowered, and thwart the government in its attempts to make their lives better. It will mean locating and interrogating the ideas that entrench the current distribution of power, tracing how they began as heresies and became common sense – then sketching out how, in turn, they now need to be challenged and replaced. This is what Clement Attlee achieved in the 1940s and Margaret Thatcher achieved in the 1980s, throwing off the democratic crises of the 1930s and 1970s. In the 2020s, it has come time to do this once again. And so to convince people afresh, before it’s too late, that mainstream liberal democracy can deliver.
