Anti-Politics by Eliane Glaser

Author:Eliane Glaser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Anti-Politics: On the Demonization of Ideology, Authority and the State
ISBN: 9781912248124
Publisher: Watkins Media
Published: 2018-01-20T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

What Should the State Do?

If politics has recently fallen out of favour, so too has the state: it’s disparaged as an anachronistic, topdown relic of the twentieth century. The field of the state is not the same as the field of politics, but the antipathy to the state on both Right and Left is an aspect of post-politics, because the state is public in the same way that politics is public – an officially common forum. The aim of this chapter is not to offer a fully worked-out vision of what the twenty-first-century state should look like, but rather to call attention to the troubling similarities between Right and Left attitudes towards the state, and the strange absence of thinking about the state on the Left.

There was once a clear split between Left and Right about the optimal size and role of the state. The Left was in favour of a big, or big-enough state; for publicly owned resources and centrally distributed services. The Right argued for individuals and communities to be more self-sufficient. That has now changed. The ‘condescending’ state, taking upon itself the power to determine what’s good for ordinary people, is one of the targets of the Right in their assault on authority. Yet a critique of the mid-twentieth-century state is also common to both the soft and radical Left. One of the few recent exceptions to this trend is Polly Toynbee and David Walker in their 2017 book Dismembered: How the Attack on the State Harms Us All. Prominent voices on both the mainstream and activist Left now advocate localism and autonomy. We must ‘think differently about the state’, argues a recent report by Blairite Labour MPs Liz Kendall and Steve Reed entitled ‘Let It Go: Power to the People in Public Services’: services are inappropriately predicated, they claim, on a kind of parent–child relationship.22 The state is almost absent from discussion in the most cutting-edge Left groups. The motivation might be different on Right and Left – the devolvement of risk and responsibility rather than the genuine distribution of power – but the effect can be hard to distinguish: very few now seem to be making a case for the state.

While it’s good to be forward-looking and think outside the box, the repudiation of the state has a number of problematic consequences. First, it means that people are not being looked after. The Left denounces cuts to the NHS and to schools, but fails to make the structural case for the state as an organisational entity. In the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire, an under-discussed response by many of the residents was a complaint at the absence of central co-ordination, top-down administration of support and help by those in authority. Grenfell revealed that jurisdictional authority in the UK is a mess. Nobody knows who is supposed to take responsibility for anything – for disaster relief, for safety inspections, for paying for renovations. It benefits the Right that everyone is attacking the state, because they can hand even more power to Serco and Capita.

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