When Sorrows Come...

... they come not single spies, but in battalions.

There’s a pretty solid consensus that the western political class today is totally incapable, and that it presides over fragile state systems, that it has itself hollowed out and de-skilled progressively for the last forty years. Conversely, it is agreed that the West faces an array of existential problems never seen before, some already with us, others yet to arrive. Yet there’s been a surprising lack of reflection on the implications of these two truths together. Let’s peel away a few scabs, and try to see what’s likely to be hiding underneath.

Almost everyone who’s not a member of the western political class, or a parasite upon it, views it with a kind of numb despair. Increasingly professional in the blinkered and isolated sense, it is increasingly amateurish in every other. This would matter less if the class were supported by competent and properly staffed state structures, but that is seldom the case. Most state services in western countries have been reduced to shadows of what they once were.

That much is generally agreed, but there has been little attempt to think about what exactly the practical consequences are, and how they might complicate, or even prevent, an effective response to problems caused by climate change, disease, war, mass population movements, and all the rest. The conclusion of this essay will be a bit like an Aristotelian syllogism: western states are increasingly being confronted with massive, interlinked  problems, requiring competent and far-sighted management. But there is no competent and far-sighted management. Therefore we are stuffed. I’m now going to try to put a little flesh on these unattractive-sounding bones.

Let’s start with the biggest weaknesses of the system. The first is the incestuous and exclusive nature the political class, Now of course this is not new. The House of Lords in eighteenth-century England, or the aristocracy at Versailles, were at least as ingrown and far removed from the concerns of ordinary people then, as their descendants are today. But in the eighteenth century there was no question of a notionally representative political class, theoretically owing a duty to the people: now there is. It’s a familiar story: the end of mass political parties, the dominance of politicians without experience of anything outside politics, the capture of the main western parties by a well-off, culturally homogeneous professional and managerial class, the triumph of image and discourse over reality, and the increasing contempt of the political class for the people who elect them. Beyond valid concerns about corruption and nepotism, there are two entirely technical consequences of all this, that bode ill for the political management of even relatively simple problems, and which will make facing up to the kind of complex crises that are starting to arise now difficult, if not impossible.

The first is that fundamental traditional political skills are no longer needed for career success. Once upon a time, politicians would try to get elected, and to develop personal and organisational skills that made that possible. They would rely on large numbers of volunteers for canvasing and to get the vote out, and on convincing as many people as possible to vote for them by personal contact and giving speeches. Few politicians are capable of that today. Rather, success comes from appealing to an in-group, to positioning yourself well with party militants, and to getting favourable coverage from certain media sources. “The electorate” is those who read your Twitter posts. Why does this matter? Well, it means that when a genuine crisis arrives, such politicians are incapable of understanding, let alone communicating with, and certainly not motivating, ordinary people. The epitome of this type of politician must be Emmanuel Macron, whose attempts to talk directly to the French people during height of the Covid crisis were so awful, and so embarrassing, that people hid under the table to get away from him. Here was a man clearly hopelessly out of his depth, in a situation where McKinsey was not the solution.

The second is that genuine ideas are no longer needed either. True, governments are still elected with notional programmes, but that’s a polite fiction. Politics is about winning the media battle, looking good on TV, massaging genuine political issues so that they go away, internal warfare within the party, and winning the next election. Government “initiatives” are generally sterile technocratic exercises which take money from those who have too little already, or give even more to those who already have too much. When a genuine political crisis arises (Covid, Brexit, Ukraine) the system finds that it cannot be managed or Twittered away, and has no idea what to do, other than to try to look good on TV. So it inevitably panics. With Covid, western governments have effectively surrendered, and allowed the disease to propagate freely, because they don’t have the moral or intellectual capability to fight it effectively. And Ukraine is being dealt with, so far as I can tell, on the basis that winter isn’t coming this year after all. The result is a kind of paralysis at the heart of government, where nothing is ever done except in haste and for immediate effect on one hand, or out of sheer panic on the other.

Even without forty years of the hollowing out of state capacity, this would still cause problems. Contrary to myth, public servants prefer to work for a government that knows what it wants, and sets objectives (and no, not those sort of objectives). Most senior figures in western public services have now spent their careers working in a political culture which is obsessed with image and with instant effects. There are no rewards any more for being prudent, for thinking long-term, or for telling the political class that they are storing up trouble for the future. All this produces a kind of corruption: the prizes go to those ready to tell the political class what it wants to hear, and to help them do whatever it takes to get good media coverage. Good people leave, or just never join.

This is in addition to the attack on both the concept and the reality of public service which has been going on for two generations now. Nobody doubts the decline in capability and competence: the only debate is whether it’s a good idea or not. For decades now, all forms of public service have been simply cast as employers of people and spenders of money.  The fewer people employed and the less money spent, therefore, the better. The actual connection of the public service with the functioning of society and the quality of life was never very obvious to the PMC, who had their own education, health, transport and many other things provided privately, and hired their cleaning-ladies and gardeners from the latest wave of impoverished immigrants. It’s only now that they are discovering, for example,  that it’s impossible to find enough people to stack shelves in supermarkets, because even to do that, you have to be able to read properly, and in many countries a lot of working class young people can’t. Wonder why that is.

And so, governments no longer have the organisational capability to make things happen or stop them happening. During the worst of the Covid crisis, all that most western governments could manage to do, out of desperation, was to claim that, well, their performance wasn’t as bad as that of some other comparable country over there. But to cope with large-scale problems, you need actual organisations, staffed by properly trained, paid and equipped people, with the right resources. You can fiddle numbers, you can hide inconvenient facts, but you can’t ultimately change reality when it wallops you in the face.

Against that cheerful background then, are there any large-scale challenges coming our way, where it would be helpful to have a well-organised and properly funded state capability? Well, just a few, and, as we shall see, they are mostly inter-related, in the sense that each multiplies the effects of the others. You’re familiar with all of them, I’m sure, so this is just a quick reminder. Let’s start with the weather, and I say “weather” because it’s not just about high temperatures. In recent years, here in Europe, we’ve had tropical style Monsoon rain, violent thunderstorms and hurricanes, harvests destroyed and rivers overflowing their banks. The centres of major cities on or near rivers can expect to be threatened with flooding regularly from now on. Few cities in Europe are prepared for that, not least because civil defence capabilities have been cut back to almost nothing. This means the flooding of underground railways, shopping centres and apartment blocks, among many other things. (As this is being written, reports are coming in of Paris Métro stations being flooded after heavy rain.) On the other hand, temperatures of the kind we have been experiencing recently cause devastating forest fires, destroy crops, produce droughts, disrupt transport systems and dry up rivers. Oh, and they kill people: it’s estimated that the death-toll in the European heatwave of 2003 was some 70,000. Heaven knows what this year’s will be.

Or what about diseases? The current attitude is to pretend that Covid has gone away, on the basis that a death hasn’t occurred if no-one records it. Most experts believe that it’s simply the first in a wave of diseases, helped along by, guess what, higher temperatures both in Europe and elsewhere. During Covid, many national health systems came close to collapse (some, like that of the US, weren’t really trying anyway). How will hospitals and health services cope if there’s a peak in infections in the middle of a heatwave?

Partly prompted by the foregoing, but also caused by wars, political insecurity and the fundamental weaknesses of globalisation, there’s the disruption of the supply of some basic needs, including pharmaceuticals. We think first of goods from China, but the same is true even within Europe. (In France, believe it or not, mustard is in short supply because of the drought.) The conflict in Ukraine, directly and indirectly, is having all sorts of consequences for food crops and raw materials. And maybe after the fighting, the Russians will decide to sell gas and aluminium, say, to other markets than Europe and the US. How will hospitals and health services cope if there’s a peak in infections in the middle of a heatwave, at the same time as a shortage of drugs and a shortage of fuel for air-conditioning, ventilation and cold storage in hospitals?

Final example from a very long list: the movement of populations, which of course directly contributed to the dissemination of Covid in the first place. (Ah, the free movement of diseases!) The accession of new countries to the European Union has led to the effective emptying out of parts of Eastern Europe as a desperate population of working age moves westward. How many extra millions will flee a disintegrating Ukraine and unstable countries on the periphery, we have no idea. This is great news if you need a cleaner or a gardener and want to pay them almost nothing, but it’s not actually fun for the cleaner or the gardener, nor their families, stranded in countries whose language they don’t speak, with nothing to sell except their unskilled labour at starvation wages, and putting even more strain on social and educational services that are already close to collapse. And in turn, the absence of borders in Europe is spreading around immigrants from very far away, some of whom bring with them diseases which have not been seen in Europe for half a century as more. So imagine hospitals, heatwaves, shortages etc. at the same time as  a major epidemic of an illness we don’t know how to treat.

Now, it’s true that, taken individually and at some distance from each other, most of these problems have solutions of a kind. As the temperature hits 40 degrees, a well-dressed Minister in an air-conditioned TV studio can tell people not to go to work unless they have to, to keep cool and drink plenty of water. Which is fine unless you happen to be a bus driver, a paramedic or a supermarket checkout operator, and as long as air conditioning continues to function and fresh water is available in unlimited quantities. The problems start when, for example, such temperatures occur every week, when drought hits, and when the railway tracks that buckled in the 40 degree heat last week haven’t yet been repaired, and look, it’s 41 degrees today.

Much emergency planning, especially today, is very incident specific: one emergency in one place at one time. You can deal with a major forest fire by sending all of your available resources to deal with it. But what if  another one breaks out elsewhere, because it’s yet another “unusually hot” summer? What we have these days are “just in time” state systems, where governments gamble that multiple crises will not happen at the same time, or close together. No more, unfortunately. Now in some ways, the most significant consequence of that is not technical, but political. Suppose a country starts to close down by degrees because of severe weather and an epidemic of a new disease (or any other two factors you choose). Could most western governments actually manage such a situation, in the proper sense of the word: could they communicate what they had decided to the people, and would the people actually do what they were asked? Nearly everything depends on the detail, perhaps, but it's hard to be believe so. Governments themselves for forty years have undermined their own capabilities, and proclaimed their marginal status. This was why Covid was a shock: suddenly, small-government governments were acting like the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. No wonder people didn’t believe them.

One reason why managing such problems is difficult is that we live today in fragile, tightly-coupled societies, where the continuity of everyday life depends on complex systems working all the time. Yet few of us stop to think about this, or the potential consequences if things go wrong. Consider: when I was a small child we lived in an essentially cash economy. My father was paid in cash, my mother did the shopping in cash, the rent was paid in cash. The house was heated by an open coal-fire, though gas fires were just starting to become popular. Cooking was with gas, and water was heated in a boiler the kitchen. There were a few vegetables in the back garden, a legacy of WW2. Newspapers, milk, cheese and butter were delivered to the door, and the postman called three times a day. Some families had televisions and telephone landlines, nearly all had old-fashioned valve radios. Every house had candles for the inevitable power-cuts.

Now, this was not a better world, necessarily, but it was a much simpler one, with a high degree of redundancy, and a tolerance for inevitable, intermittent failure. Twelve-hour power-cuts in winter were no fun, but they could be lived through with a paraffin stove. There was no fridge (my mother did the shopping almost daily) so there was no food to spoil, and only the main room in the house was ever heated anyway. The vast majority of the men and women of my parents’ generation had been mobilised during the War, and were used to roughing it and making do.

Let’s try to imagine a simple and uncontroversial scenario in today’s very different world, and you can ask yourself whether your own government would be able to cope with it technically, and what the public reaction would be.

Take a medium-sized provincial town, not even a big city. Assume that days of exceptionally high temperatures followed by torrential rain have brought the power generation system down, and it will take at least 48 hours to repair it. This kind of scenario has been much studied and the likely practical consequences are well known. They include no light, heat or power, for any system with an electrical component. Lifts in apartment buildings won’t work, there will be no running water in the higher floors. Any building with electronic locks will become either a prison or impossible to secure. There will be no air-conditioning. Shops won’t be able to open if they have electric shutters, and even if they could their cash register system would be useless. Even the bar-codes would be unreadable. Bank cards of all kinds will stop working, and you won’t be able to get money out of cash machines. There will, of course, be no communication of any kind, apart from such emergency networks as are still operating. Traffic lights won’t function, and petrol pumps will stop working. Hospitals, already overloaded and stressed because of the effects of high temperatures, will have to close most of their facilities. Anything requiring cold or cool storage will rapidly become unusable. Facebook and Twitter will not be available. There’s plenty more like that that you can read about, and in general the larger the area affected the worse it will be. Large cities may well become uninhabitable after 3-4 days of such conditions.

In principle, a modern western state ought to be able to deal with a single isolated case like this. In practice, maybe not. In the heat of an “unusually hot” summer, most of the country’s emergency resources may be elsewhere. Most public utilities are now in the hands of private companies who run them as cheaply as possible, and whose competence and good intentions simply can’t be relied upon. Infrastructure is often in the hands of a bewildering and opaque collection of private owners from around the world. Many countries have to buy electricity across borders. Emergency services may already be at the point of collapse. The government itself may be paralysed by an entirely different crisis elsewhere. And of course this is only one town.

What’s really important though is the political reaction. Now this is often trivialised into a question about which party, or which leader, might benefit from such a situation. But the answer may well be, none of the above. Especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, we tend to forget that political systems do not last forever. Consider: the current French system dates from 1958, the Portuguese from 1974, the Spanish from 1975, the German and most of the systems of Eastern Europe from 1991. The current form of Yugoslavia dates from the independence of Kosovo in 2008. Nothing is stable, nothing is fixed. No political system is immortal.

Even at a lower level, long-established political parties can simply disappear. In 2012, the French Socialist Party won the Presidential election, and controlled the National Assembly and every level of French politics. A decade later, after the disastrous Presidency of Francois Hollande, and five years of Macron,  its Presidential candidate polled less than 2%, and the party of Jaurès and Blum is now effectively dead. The modern tendency is rather for the growth of short-lived celebrity-based parties with vague ideologies, channeling grievances of different sorts. This is not an ideal political configuration for a time when the very survival of the state may be in question, and serious political capabilities are required.

It’s common to talk up the surveillance and repressive capabilities of states today, and it’s true that the potential, at least, for surveillance, has never been higher. But it’s also true that the actual coercive capacity of western state apparatuses has never been lower. Modern western states are extremely fragile, for the reasons discussed above, and relatively small groups of angry and determined citizens could do them a great deal of damage. We saw this in France at the end of 2018, when thousands of Gilets jaunes protesters descended on Paris, and a few hundred tried to find the Elysée Palace with the intention of forcing their way in. Had they made a serious attempt, the gendarmes could not have stopped them: there was a helicopter standing by to evacuate the President. A couple of years later, demonstrators in Washington actually managed to enter the Capitol Building.

The other possibility is that, in the face of state incapacity, the population will deal with combinations of crises, and government inaction, by itself withdrawing from any social contract, and falling back on its own resources. This is already happening in the poorer areas of major western cities where the state is seldom visible, and the inhabitants manage their own existences, not always in strict compliance with the law.  But this requires the people to have resources, and neoliberalism has spent forty years carefully destroying informal and community networks that have sustained societies in the past.

This does not mean that a major crisis would produce a Hobbesian state of anarchy. Actual experience suggests that people tend to come together in emergencies, and help each other. But the fact that social and community bonds have been largely destroyed, and that intermediary organisations like churches, trades unions and social clubs have massively declined, makes popular attempts to organise responses to a major crisis much more difficult. In many major western cities, the poorest and most deprived areas also have heavy concentrations of immigrants from different and sometimes mutually hostile communities, often not speaking the language of the host country, let alone each others’.

The most likely reaction, in fact, is a kind of sour, angry resignation. Governments will not be able to manage problems of this scale, nor will they be able to communicate effectively to their populations, who simply won’t believe them anyway. These populations may not openly rebel, but they are unlikely to passively obey either. Communities will be forced back on themselves where they exist. Where they don’t exist, the strongest groups, such as organised crime, will move in to fill the gaps. This will be an entirely unprecedented situation: a highly complex social and economic system that has to work perfectly all the time, starting to come apart in unpredictable ways.

It’s astonishing how unwilling people are to think of even quite basic everyday problems that might arise as a result. When there are widespread shortages of petrol, you can’t drive to work and the shelves of your local supermarket are empty, what are you actually going to do? When you are trapped on the fifth floor of an apartment building with no running water, what are you going to do? When you are ill, and afraid you have an infectious disease but the government says it’s OK to go to work and you need the money, what are you going to do? When groups of young men come to your house to steal all the food at knife-point and sell it in the street for five times the ordinary price, what are you going to do?  Don’t you think we should be talking about such things now, even very softly?