Читать книгу Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics - Philip Collins, Philip Collins - Страница 18

It will take a long time for Britain to recover from its latest argument about the location of sovereign power. The animus of the European referendum and its echo during the departure negotiations will reverberate for at least a generation. Whether or not the economic damage is severe and lasting, the quality of public debate was impaired by a raucous, uncivil and, at times, stupid standard of argument. The deceptively simple injunction to ‘take back control’ is a demand for a form of sovereignty that no longer exists. The question Britain actually faces is not, as it was posed in the referendum debate, independence or slavery. It is instead, given how much power exists in multinational enterprises and how much has been traded in treaties, how we best pool our sovereignty so that we maintain maximum power for the best effect.

The referendum campaign may have provided a poor answer but it posed a very good question. The impulse for popular control is a noble one and if political life has not been satisfying it, then that needs to be corrected. The implication of the demand for more control is that power has trickled from the hands of the people. There is, indeed, no more centralised developed democracy than Britain. There is no nation in which its provincial towns and cities live deeper in the penumbra of such a shadow cast by its capital. Britain is an unbalanced economy and a concentrated state.

A polity with all its power at the centre no longer works. In 1872 Benjamin Disraeli gave a now celebrated speech in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester in which he set out the public health problems to which government would, and did, supply the answer. When the task is to prevent the spread of contagious disease by the construction of the sewers, then a singular state, with all its purchasing power and command of space, is the ideal means. The public health questions of today involve millions of elderly people treating their own symptoms every day. We have passed from the era of the condition of Britain to the era of the long-term conditions of Britain. The remote state has little relevance to problems like these, and it is little wonder that there has been a sense of lost control.

The decline of deference and an abundance of available information have also changed the relationship of the individual to the state. In all aspects of our lives we are confronted by choices and options, deliberation and decision, but the default setting of the state is still to provide services in bulk order, like it or lump it. The British state runs on an old model of power in which a distant centre does things to people. It is a generation out of date and the consequence is that the services it offers suffer in comparison with the quality of what is available elsewhere. This matters, and not just because public services provide public goods. They also serve to enact a drama of who we are, and this is the penultimate condition of Britain question.