Politics UK – Page 14 – thinking liberal

We need to talk about class

We hear a lot about racism in politics. But we don’t hear so much about another form of prejudice that is arguably just as important, and indeed adds an important dimension to the understanding of racism: social class.

What do I mean by social class? It is quite difficult to pin down exactly: it reflects combinations of social circumstances, such as education and where you live. Social class confers advantage to some and disadvantage to others, and to gaps in mutual comprehension. For example there is total exasperation in the Labour Party between middle-class metropolitan liberals and conservative working class union members. There is a lot of evidence that working-class people suffer disadvantage, for example in the job market. Middle-class people are often clueless about how to deal with this, except by creating abstract talking points such as “social mobility”, and trying to make everybody middle class like them. Middle-class privilege goes largely unrecognised.

Funnily enough, I have often heard the assertion that British society is riven by class distinctions which have barely changed over generations, in a uniquely British way, in contrast to both European neighbours and former colonies. But this goes hand in hand with outdated stereotypes of what class looks like. This divides society into upper, middle and working classes. Upper class people are thought of as landed aristocrats, middle class people as suburban professionals and working class people as blue-collar workers. All are predominantly white, and the common mental picture cleaves to old-fashioned gender stereotypes too. In fact social class has changed radically over the last few generations, and the divisions in British society are not particularly unique to Britain.

Changes to working classes have received some recognition through the work of Claire Ainsley, author of The new working class: how to win hearts, minds and votes, who is now working for Sir Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party. Much of the modern working class is from ethnic minorities or are recent immigrants, many are in insecure job contracts, and the women are as likely to be working as the men. This analysis has to be taken seriously, but it may distract from more important dynamics that affect working classes as a whole.

The new upper class is perhaps better understood. This is the elite of the super-rich. The new aristocracy is no longer so closely tied to the ownership of land, but instead to big business. It has deep political influence in nearly all political systems, from the United States to China, and is doubtless behind the erosion of capitalist competition. But we should not exaggerate its influence either: western democracies (and the Chinese Communist Party, come to that) retain powers to hold it in check.

It is the new middle classes that seem to be the least understood. They are as heterogeneous as the new working classes, but I know of no work comparable to Ms Ainsley’s trying to get to grips with its complexity. The artist Grayson Perry observed two very different middle classes in a television series exploring class. On the one hand he talked to the anxious inhabitants of a suburban housing development, keeping up with appearances and ever-changing fashions. On the other there were self-confident liberals who didn’t care what others thought of them. And what about those young metropolitan Momentum activists creating Labour’s collision with the party’s working class roots? They clearly feel that society is stacked against them, for example for property ownership, and yet they are university educated and have access to professional careers.

Two forces in particular are shaping the new class landscape. The first is economic. Working class livelihoods have always been vulnerable to advances in technology. Advances in manufacturing and office technology has shrunk the number of traditional working class blue- and white-collar jobs, replacing them something more rootless. This has militated against traditional working class solidarity and union organisation, and reduced both pay and job security. The second is the massive expansion of education. Educational standards have risen across the board, and the availability of university education has increased dramatically. This has opened up access to middle class work, both expanding its extent, and making it more precarious. Meanwhile immigration has served to backfill working class roles from families that have transitioned to middle class. The interaction of these forces is complex and their effects are not well understood. In my opinion (I am getting a bit ahead of the evidence here) it has created a big problem of what might be called middle-class privilege (though my mother would have objected to that use of the word “privilege”, which to her was loaded with a sense of responsibility). If you are born into a working-class family it is much harder to make your way into a good middle-class life than it should be, based on ability. And in particular if you make a poor start in your educational career it is much harder to make progress than it used to be. Meanwhile the living conditions of working class people don’t get enough attention from the political class, making life harder than it should be.

Let me illustrate the new class dynamics a few examples. The first is about language. Grammar and, to a lesser extent, spelling serve a linguistic function to reduce ambiguity. But the opprobrium attracted by bad usage is totally disproportionate to this usefulness – it is surely used as a means of maintaining a class filter. If your grammar and spelling is a bit weak, you are liable to be dismissed as not being up to standard, even if you communicate quite clearly. I speak as somebody that enjoys linguistic pedantry – but I have to be careful it doesn’t get in the way.

A further example is the use of educational qualifications to pre-select job applicants for interview. This doubtless makes sense in some cases, but it is applied much more widely than it needs to be. When recruiting myself I tried to disregard qualifications, especially if the individual had a significant work track record. That track record, and understanding how the individual goes about their work, was to me much more important. Indeed overcoming a poor educational start is a sign of ability. And yet sifting by educational qualifications is deeply embedded into our job market without regard to how appropriate it might be.

A revealing linguistic tic is the habit of middle-class people calling working-class jobs as “low-skilled”. This has rightly been called-out during the Coronavirus crisis in the case of care workers, but it remains pervasive. It demeans working-class people, who work often requires a lot of skill, but not of the sort you get through a university degree.

Class cuts through racial politics. The most egregious racism comes from white working class people – who think that non-white people (or immigrants) are being given an unfair advantage. This may be well-known, but few seem interested in finding out what drives these feelings – it is easier to put it down to working class ignorance. A different class dimension affects the Conservative government’s narrative on racism. Led by middle-class people from ethnic minorities (like the Home Secretary Priti Patel, or the Downing Street adviser Munira Mirza), the message is that a lot of the fuss about racism comes from a victim mentality in many non-white people, which can be overcome if they engage more constructively with society at large. This has led to a spectacular parliamentary spat between Ms Patel and Labour minority MPs with a more working-class background, who complained about being “gaslighted”. The truth is that the experience of racism for ethnic minority working-class people is very different from those from middle classes. The current fuss is driven mainly by a cry of pain from working-class non-whites.

And then we have the case of university tuition fees. These are an attempt to move the cost of university tuition to those that benefit most from it – a push back against middle-class privilege. But those middle classes are often enraged by them – hence Labour’s promise to abolish them at the last election. Their argument is that state-funded university tuition improves access to it and hence social mobility. But this is a bit like the Conservatives’ attempts to address the high cost of housing by subsidising first-time buyers. The substantive way to improve lives of working class people is through making their work better-paid and more secure, and to reduce the cost of life’s essentials, such as housing. There is at last some sign that both Conservative and Labour politicians are starting to recognise it (I wish I could say the same for my own Liberal Democrats, who have become something of a middle-class ghetto – though not irretrievably).

That is welcome. But politicians need to address two further aspects of the class system. The first is fairness – ensuring that people from working class backgrounds are not disadvantaged by prejudice. The second is empowerment – to give all communities, working-class or middle-class, more say over their lives. One big cause of working class dissatisfaction is that they feel sick that things are done to them without their consent. This was ably picked up by the Leave campaign in the Brexit referendum. But politicians are better at exploiting anger than dealing with its causes.

Deadly and contagious, this virus is reshaping our society

When the pandemic started to seriously intrude into our daily lives, in March, my view was the it might accelerate some changes, but it was being overplayed by some commentators as a society-changing event. My view is changing. And it is changing because the virus is proving so hard either to beat or to live with. It just won’t go away. In this week’s statement the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, made some steps towards acknowledging this. But many people are still in denial.

It is too early to develop a clear view of how this pandemic is evolving. But I can see at least three phases. The first phase is over. This saw the initial emergence of the disease, and immediate hard lockdowns to try and contain its spread, alongside the mobilisation of the health systems. In East Asia and Europe, and in some parts of America (such as New York) this strategy has succeeded in preventing or stemming a rapid advance. Elsewhere weak health systems or perverse political leadership means that the disease is still spreading rapidly. But that aside we are now in an awkward second phase. The lockdowns are being eased, but alongside this the disease is making local breakouts. It is becoming clearer that restrictions on our daily lives cannot be relaxed fully. Even if the disease can be stamped out in some areas, it remains prevalent in neighbouring ones, and the threat of it returning ever-present.

We still don’t know enough about the virus that is causing all the trouble, how it spreads, and its effects on the human body. But some aspects are becoming clearer. The first is that it is deadly. It does not seem to affect many of the people it infects, and some people seem to think that it merely hastens the demise of people already at death’s door. And yet 20-30% of the population appears to be vulnerable in most places, and it has the capacity to double the death-rate, or more. Hospitals become overwhelmed and unable to deal with other health conditions. The second aspect is that it is highly contagious, much more so than other viruses that are deadlier to the infected (such as ebola). Just how contagious is unknown, but we do know that super spreading events occur, where dozens of people are infected by a single individual at once. Being indoors seems dangerous, as does being in proximity to people who are exhaling heavily, such as people singing, shouting or exercising. Wearing masks seems to be a significant help in reducing infection risk. What makes the virus so much of a problem is this combination of lethality and contagiousness. We are conditioned to deal with diseases that are highly contagious but not so deadly (like most flu) or deadlier but much less contagious. To these two known aspects there is an important unknown. Does catching the disease confer immunity to it? There is a widespread assumption that it does, meaning that we can expect herd immunity to arise at some point, when most people can’t catch or spread the virus. But the emerging evidence is troubling. Antibody tests show low rates of prevalence even in places where the disease has been widespread. And there are reports of people being infected multiple times. A second unknown is how quickly we can get an effective vaccine. There has been impressive progress, but plenty of reason to be cautious.

So where does that leave us? Developed societies have no choice but to try and contain the disease. This means changing behaviours to reduce the risk of catching it. This arises partly through public policy and partly through private choice. As I said in my previous post this means that many people are going to avoid social gatherings indoors, including going out to pubs and restaurants. The more prevalent the disease at any time and place, the more such measures have to be taken. The best we can hope for is containing the disease to low prevalence, allowing quite high levels if freedom, but stamping on local outbreaks as they occur. This is being done most successfully in East Asia; in Europe Germany is the main large exemplar. But even this is far from normal. The big problem is that we are going to have to live with this disease for a year at least and probably a lot longer. This has profound consequences.

The main consequence is in the world of work, and in the economy generally. There are two main aspects to this. First is that sectors that rely on close social contact and free movement are going to shrink, perhaps drastically. This includes hospitality and travel. The second is that productivity in most sectors is going to be dented as health precautions take effect. This will inevitably reduce the standard of living. Prices will rise faster than pay; taxes will probably have to rise to curb excess demand and inflation. All this is too much for most people to take on all at once. Many are still trying to negotiate with the virus. I hear owners of indoor gyms complaining about not being allowed to open, like other businesses are. And yet an indoor gym must be one of the best spreading environments conceivable, after a mass indoor choir.

So how did Mr Sunak face up to this huge challenge in his budget statement this week? Pretty well in the circumstances. The most important thing is that he is pivoting from trying to keep old jobs alive (e.g. through the furlough scheme) to creating new ones, in particular focusing efforts on younger people, whose livelihoods are most at risk. His generosity towards the hospitality sector with his VAT scheme and meal discounts may look hopeless against the tide of events – but it does demonstrate some empathy towards one of the sectors most under pressure, which could reduce the short-term trauma somewhat. His £1,000 bonus for firms that retain furloughed staff until January looks harder to justify. It is hard to believe that it will make much difference to job retention, and yet it is estimated to cost huge sums. Surely it would have been better to top up benefits for the out-of-work. His reduction of stamp duty on property purchases looks like an expensive sop to party donors – though I personally stand to benefit.

But, as most people see, this is only a start. In the pipeline are more job losses and business failures, which will bring more problems in their wake. There is also an upcoming crisis in local government finance, as central government support to meet the extra costs of the crisis is woefully inadequate, and the role local government needs to play in combatting the virus is becoming ever larger. This will be the third phase of the pandemic, as the economic crisis deepens, while the struggle to contain the virus continues. Conventional economic management tools are not going to help as much as they should be. A lot of the problem is restriction to the supply side of the economy, while demand is suppressed by fear as much as lack of funds – so boosting demand simply risks creating inflation or a currency crisis. However job creation in public services: health care, social care and education, looks like a sensible way forward. Lower productivity means more people will be needed in these sectors. A rebalancing of the economy from private to public sector will surely mean tax rises in due course, but with no shortage of liquidity in financial markets the government can probably defer some of the hard decisions.

And meanwhile the public will have to confront some hard truths. The virus shows that the free-wheeling individualism at the core of western societies has its limits. It is not sustainable to suggest that individuals can judge the health risks for themselves, since by spreading a lethal disease the consequences of their actions will mainly be felt by others. The failure of so many people in Britain and parts of America to wear masks in public shows how far we have to go. We have something to learn form the East Asians. But not China. That is another story.

The two worlds of post-lockdown Britain

On Monday the Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, happily announced a tranche of relaxations of England’s lockdown restrictions, to be timed for 4 July. The public weren’t going to wait, flocking to the country’s beaches to take advantage of a few days of sunshine. I took the first picture here in Broadstairs, Kent on 31 May, thinking it was crowded (we had become used to this beach being deserted), but look at yesterday by comparison. The country seems to be making a dash for normality. Disappointment lies ahead.

The relaxations come after some hefty lobbying by businesses, who are experiencing huge strains. They highlight a legitimate concern, as many jobs are under threat as businesses face the danger of folding. Public finances are under strain too, though by how much and why remains a matter for debate. But the problem is a deadly virus for which there is no vaccine or cure, not overzealous lockdown regulations. So if you don’t want to risk catching the disease, and the prospect of a horrible death, just how safe are you being made to feel? The country is dividing on this question.

I have heard quite a few lobbyists for the hospitality industry on the radio. For the most part they do not inspire confidence. They are anxious to abolish the two-metre social distancing rule, but are reluctant to explain how they can still be safe. Some of them even grumble about the idea that they would have to keep records of all those attending their establishments, even though this is an obvious quid quo pro to relaxing distancing requirements in the high-risk settings that most of them obviously run. One expert offered a list of potential mitigations for reduced distancing: not facing people, masks, reducing time of contact, low noise levels so that people can talk softly. Not much of this helps if you are indoors in a pub or restaurant, although if customers are seated at tables only with members of their isolation group, then at least you won’t be facing others. To be fair some hosts on television are doing a better job of explaining themselves: instead of whinging about the rules they are showing viewers all the precautions they are taking to make people feel safe.

But a lot of people don’t really care. They are fed up with confinement, and note the reduced prevalence of the disease, and therefore the reduced risk of catching it. Many are younger and fitter people who feel less at risk of suffering badly. Many also draw confidence from other countries where restrictions have been relaxed. They miss two aspects of these overseas examples. First is that in the more successful countries they applied relaxation after they had beaten back the disease further than England has, and that even then they have had to identify and manage local outbreaks. And England’s track and trace infrastructure inspires little confidence that it is up to this task. The second is that in other countries that have relaxed (notably in some states of the USA), they are moving headlong into a relapse. Two things about the epidemic strain our intuitive way of understanding the world. First is the time lag between picking up the disease and diagnosing it, then between diagnosis and hospitalisation, and finally between hospitalisation and death. The second is the exponential nature of the spread, and the way a small number moves very rapidly to a big one and so the need to intervene when it feels too early. This is what led to some countries failing to take the disease seriously enough until too late. It is clear that the US President Donald Trump, ever the intuitive leader, struggles with both these things.

But while one, very conspicuous, group are making a headlong dash for normality, another, usually older and more vulnerable, group remain very frightened. They are staying indoors, so remain nearly invisible. But this applies to my household and many others that I know. This is both good and bad news. The good news is that if this group stays out of trouble, then the most vulnerable people will be protected, keeping hospitalisations and death rates down. The bad news is that this large number of often quite high-spending people will not be the free-spending agents needed for a full economic recovery. And if infection rates start to rise, they will become even more scared.

All of which gives an impressive of a government that doesn’t think things through. If it wanted to tempt older people back into shops and other facilities it needed to work a bit harder to reassure them. The words are there but the body-language isn’t. For example the government says that the 2-metre rule is replaced by “one-metre plus”. The plus is meant to suggest alternative mitigation, and yet this has been totally drowned out in the messaging. If it had been combined with a clear directive for people to wear face coverings in virtually all indoor settings, then it might have been easier to convey this. Instead they promote the idea that the risks are reduced so you don’t need precautions like masks; of course they don’t say that, but observing people around me that seems to be what is happening. And the problem about masks is that everybody needs to wear them for it to work. It is no use if just the worried people do.

Still, the government has probably bought itself a month or two before any obvious problems emerge. And then it looks likely to face a twin threat. A faltering economy as the worried sit on their savings while government support schemes, like furlough funding, run their course. And rising infection rates working their way slowly but surely through the system, beyond the country’s capacity to contain it on a local level. I really hope I’m wrong.

Henry Ford’s shadow: from France 1944 to Covid-19

A Sherman tank of the US Third Army in WW2

In September 1944 the US Third Army under General George Patton approached the Eastern French city of Nancy. Its vehicles, notably Sherman tanks, had driven there under their own power after landing in Normandy in July. And not by the most direct route: the army pushed south from Normandy before turning east. This journey of hundreds of miles, with rail networks unavailable, had taken a very low toll on the army’s vehicles, including the Shermans. The Germans were organising a counterattack. But their Panther tanks had to make the trip mostly by rail, subject to Allied air attacks, and a third of their strength broke down while driving the 30 or so miles from the railhead to the jump-off point.

This was a triumph of US engineering and industrial organisation. The Panthers had a much better gun and thicker armour than the Sherman, but that was no use if they couldn’t make it to where they were needed. American industrial superiority was repeated everywhere: air, land and sea. Robust, well-designed weapons were put into combat in overwhelming numbers. The Germans produced clever designs in all these fields, but their artisanal industrial organisation led to unreliability, limited production capacity, and often, as in the case of the Panther, designs that were hard to fix when they went wrong. The Americans outshone their German and Japanese enemies and their British allies. Only the Soviet Union could compare. The Russians could not match the Americans’ production quality or sophistication, but their designs were robust and factory output reached the battlefields in vast numbers. They didn’t need to last long when they got there. Only for lorries did the Soviets crave those vehicles made in Detroit.

It is often assumed that the way the Americans and Russians outproduced their enemies was just a matter of scale and resources. But that is not so: superior industrial organisation was necessary for those nations to respond with the speed that they did to the German and Japanese onslaughts. They also needed strong military organisation and tactics: and both nations also had these, though the German methods continued to outshine both until mid-1944. But the lessons of military organisation were quickly forgotten when the war ended, whereas industrial organisation was needed to win the peace. It is no wonder that the way their industry won the war so dominated public policy in America and the Soviet Union, and in Britain too, as it tried unsuccessfully to emulate American prowess.

And what was the American method, successfully used also by the Russians? It was the production-line, developed in the motor industry by Henry Ford. Its key features were the use of standardised designs (“Any color as long as it is black”), simplified as far as possible, high technical specialism in the workforce, segregating human tasks so that minimal skill was needed, and a highly centralised, hierarchical command and control structure. And above all it celebrated economies of scale, the expectation of which became the standard for business and political elites Small was regarded as necessarily inefficient. It is an approach suited to those with an imperial frame of mind, so it is not hard to see why it was popular with Russia’s Communist leaders, and even in post-imperial but backward-looking Britain. It is interesting that it took such hold in democratic America, but the scale of that country invited imperial thinking too amongst it is business leaders.

But the Henry Ford method has weaknesses. It is slow to respond to change, and becomes very inefficient where a feedback loop is needed between user and supplier, or any area where complexity is built-in. Bottlenecks, delays and queues become routine. Furthermore organisations built around the production-line mindset, especially outside the urgencies of wartime, become ossified, divided into fiefdoms that fail to cooperate. But leaders remain locked into its thinking. When things go wrong, the management response is to tinker, by adding bureaucratic controls that slow things down and promises that lessons have been learned that always disappoint in their results. That the Henry Ford method was failing first became apparent when Japanese manufacturing started to outcompete American and British firms in the 1960s and 70s. At first this was put down to “cheating”: underpaid workers doing excessive hours, and so on. But then managers started to realise that the Japanese had been adapting their manufacturing techniques using an idea referred to as “Total Quality Management” (TQM), which involved much more delegated decision-making, and organisation-undermining cross-departmental teams. This realisation came too late for most of British manufacturing industry, with the motor industry weighed down by mediocre management and bad industrial relations, often driven by demarcation disputes, a common outgrowth of Fordism. The new ideas were beyond the imagination of management and union leaders alike. America embraced the new ideas more successfully, notably by Jac Welch’s General Electric in the early 1990s.

But the world was moving on, as Baumol’s law started to diminish manufacturing industry’s economic importance, just as it had done to agriculture a century before. Service industry became critical, and services are less easy to fit into a standardised mould. At first management thinkers adapted their manufacturing techniques, arguing that services were just another product. But by the mid 1990s thinking had moved on to an idea that was centred on a service mindset, where manufacturing products were seen as just another service. This was Business Process Reengineering (BPR). The user experience became central to business organisation, delegated decision-making critical, and layers of hierarchical management were dismantled. This was catching on just as I was taking responsibility for a mediocrely performing organisation administering savings plans. I used it to reorganise everything, doubling productivity and improving quality of output too (actually, that was linked). This was a heady time in management thinking, with optimistic “both and”, and “win-win” ideas taking hold. In Britain the most eye-catching business using BPR was Virgin Atlantic, offering a superior travelling experience at a reasonable cost. It even infected Tony Blair’s New Labour, who took on the heady optimism of leading business people, with the idea of “Stakeholder Capitalism”. Mr Blair’s subsequent period in office showed that he had no idea about what all this actually meant, however.

But then things turned darker. The rise of the internet was the most eye-catching aspect of this: but there is no reason that this should have undermined BPR thinking. A bigger issue was the rise of cheap labour in Asia, which new technology could help tie into longer supply chains. Meanwhile managers were bewitched by the idea of “Shareholder Value”, which quickly pushed away the fuzzier and more inclusive thinking of Stakeholder Capitalism. This legitimised management and shareholder greed and corporate empire-building.. The customer experience was given lip service but not priority. Ryanair replaced Virgin as the airline success story.

And Henry Ford made a comeback, with a twist. That was that businesses embraced outsourcing (Ford wanted his organisation to do everything itself), which improved communications technology now enabled. But hierarchical management, standardisation, deskilled work (preferably done by robots) and economies of scale reestablished themselves in the way managers thought about organising work. New technology, it was thought, could make up for Fordism’s defects (more recently with high hopes being placed on artificial intelligence). Conservative ministers in Britain accepted this without question as the remade public services by reorganising and outsourcing to firms that embraced the new Fordism.

Which brings us to Covid-19. A lot of the way Britain has organised itself to meet the challenge reflects Henry Ford thinking. This particularly applies to testing, but also to PPE procurement and the contact tracing system, which has been outsourced to one of the usual large-scale suppliers. And the weaknesses of the Henry Ford approach have become evident. Queues, delays, bottlenecks; promises made by management that cannot be kept; bureaucracy being added in to try and make a broken system work better.

But some countries never fell for Henry Ford ideology. Service efficiency is legendary in Switzerland partly because they never embraced large-scale thinking, and they know instinctively how organise and delegate decisions so there are no delays and queues. Germany stuck with its artisanal, delegated approach, with much of its modern industrial prowess driven by medium-sized companies, which Forders would dismiss as being sub-scale. In German Covid contact-tracing is done by small local and professional multi-functional teams who carry out their own tests; in Britain newly recruited tracers helplessly sit by their computers waiting for referrals to come through, while their German counterparts are kept busy, using local knowledge to solve problems. British political and business elites fail to comprehend. It is probably too much to hope that Henry Ford’s ghost will be one of the casualties of Coronavirus.

The Liberal Democrats need a new vision, not a new constitution

The British Liberal Democrats suffered a poor election result last December, and it will have to bear the consequences for up to four more years. The party has commissioned a review to ask what went wrong, and to help it set a new course, which was published recently. Now it needs to take on board the report’s recommendations, and the first one above all:

Based on the lives of ordinary people in the country today, create an inspiring, over-arching and compelling vision which can guide the entire Liberal Democrats organisation for the duration of a parliament, ideally longer

The review was chaired by Dorothy Thornhill, former mayor of Watford, and the party’s most successful and effective politician, now retired, alas. Her skills were much in evidence. It is a good read, and the complete report was sent to all members, rather than a select few, with an edited version released publicly much later, as has been the case before. It does not name names, neither does it try to second guess the decision to expedite the election in the first place, where the party played a critical role. And yet it doesn’t pull its punches, describing the election as a “high speed car crash”.

The biggest problem it identifies was a lack of coherence and realism about the party’s aims, and especially muddling whether the party was trying to stop Brexit or win the maximum number of seats. Instead of resolving this, the leadership became entranced by the idea that the party could massively increase its parliamentary representation, resulting in the severe wastage of effort and resources. This was because of some encouraging polling in the summer 2019, after its spectacular performance in elections to the European Parliament. In fact the party’s strategic position became very difficult as soon as Labour came down unequivocally for a Brexit referendum in the autumn. The review is clear that there were in fact only limited opportunities for the party to advance. Fifty or more seats was never on, but increasing representation to twenty seats from twelve maybe was; instead it ended up with just eleven.

Within the “car crash” a lot of organisational dysfunction was on display, of a type seen in the two previous elections in 2015 and 2017. Nobody was sure who was in charge and different parts of the party pushed in different directions, getting in the way of each other. This dysfunction is spelt out in quite a lot of detail in the second section of the report “Summary of Findings”, after initial “Review” section which sets out a clear narrative (the narrative style did upset some people, but it adds a lot to the report’s impact).

So what next? The review after the 2017 election said a lot of the same things, but was sidelined by organisational wrangles. This time it helps a lot that there is a new President (Mark Pack) and Chief Executive (Mike Dixon – an outsider to the party), while a new Leader will be elected with the review already published. The wrangles at the party’s Federal Board, its ruling council, do not seem to be being repeated this time.

Nevertheless there is a powerful temptation for the party use the organisational dysfunction as a jumping off point for a restructure, and in particular for changing the constitution. There have already been some calls for this. There are plenty of obvious targets: the absurd size of the Federal Board, the overlapping remits the various ruling committees, the Polyfilla construction that is the English Party, and so on. But Dorothy in person is very clear that it is the organisational culture that most needs changing, not the structure. People obsess with organisation structure as a displacement activity for dealing with harder problems; I know because I have made this mistake too often myself.

And the report gives pride of place to what that much harder problem is: developing the party’s vision so that it is grounded in the way non-political people live (I dislike the term “ordinary people”; there are no ordinary people in my book). The party talks to itself too much, and has used the idea of a “core vote” strategy to provide camouflage for this. The result has been that the party has limited appeal beyond well-off professionals, at a time when all the other significant parties (Conservatives, Labour and SNP) have succeeded in broadening their appeal across social class. Alongside a core vote strategy the party must develop a powerful appeal for more sceptical voters for on an election by election basis.

One prominent finding of the report is that the party failed to develop its appeal to ethnic minorities. This is true, but the New Statesman’s Stephen Bush makes a good point that the report oversimplifies this. There is no “BAME” community; there are many communities and the other parties have made progress by recognising this and developing appeals to particular minority communities. That is true, but in the case of the Lib Dems I think the BAME issue is part of a wider problem: its neglect of working class communities. Of course the persistent problems of unconscious bias mean that all parties must keep up scrutiny of their performance among BAME communities at all times – so it is right to give it prominence.

Vision is for the party leader to set, and I hope the candidates will duly focus on this, as it is not an easy problem to solve. It needs to combine a powerful appeal to members and core voters based on what the party stands for, and a more triangulated approach that will capitalise on gaps in the political market, which will involve compromises.

I don’t think the party is in too bad a shape on the first part of this. I can be hard to articulate it sometimes, but the common ground among the party’s core support is clear. The main challenge is to make it more inclusive. There is no reason that people from ethnic minorities or working classes shouldn’t feel welcome in this group: liberal values are transcendent. But what of the compromises required to broaden the party’s appeal beyond the core?

First we must talk about Europe. The party has bet so heavily on membership of the European Union that a U-turn would destroy it. It has to say that rejoining the union is an aspiration. But not now. People in the UK want to move on; so do people in the EU. The party needs to stand for a close trading relationship, even if it means compromising on “the level playing field”, though the party might want to take a tougher line on fisheries, with conservation in mind. The case for being closer to the EU needs to be based on the idea that the world is becoming an increasingly hostile place. The United States owes Britain no favours and will always extract a very high price for free trade; China is no less easy; both have developed a tendency to bully weaker powers. Elsewhere the opportunities for trading and political alliances are no less tricky.

Another tricky issue is law and order, human rights and privacy. The party has got up on its high horse about this in the past, but has often failed to make its case to “ordinary” people. The party needs to be more pragmatic, and focus on making sure that criminal justice institutions work effectively and fairly. “Fairness’ has a stronger appeal than “rights”. That leaves plenty of scope to critique the other parties.

But the party must also take risks. The Black Lives Matter campaign may be an example. While Labour under Keir Starmer triangulates fearing the white working class backlash, the Lib Dems can be a lot more robust. Ethnic minority working class people understand very well the need for multiculturalism, and are desperate for Britain’s institutions to be fairer; Lib Dems can be strong on both. I think the party needs to start a period of outreach to ethnic minority working class people; that will require financial incentives from the central party to local parties, who would otherwise gravitate to easier, more middle class places.

What of the conservative white working classes and rural middle classes? There is a big gap in political outlook, clearly, but the party must try avoid the gratuitous insults, which the anti-Brexit campaigning all too often led to.

Well these are some random thoughts. I haven’t offered anything coherent about what I think the new Lib Dem vision should be. Developing it will be hard, and I will keep coming back to the topic. But for now the key message for the party is that it must embrace the hard choices now, and avoid the temptation to spend too much energy on rearranging its internal affairs.

The post-growth economy has arrived. It’s time people accepted that

The idea that economic growth should be the top political priority, after keeping people safe, became established in the 1950s, and has become so imbedded in political thinking that it is now taken for granted. But it’s a bit like Wil E Coyote running over a cliff; we may not realise it yet, but the ground has disappeared from under this notion. We need to focus on different priorities, in rich countries anyway.

What is economic growth? It is the expansion of the money economy through the ever increasing consumption of volumes of paid-for goods and services. It focuses mainly on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a measure of aggregate income, adjusted for inflation. This (and the related Gross National Product: GNP, more used in the earlier days) only started to be measured consistently in the 1950s. Prior to that economic policy focused more on things like unemployment and the balance of payments, with growth only being an implicit goal. Focus on growth led first to the widespread use of Keynesian demand management within a system of managed exchange rates and capital controls in the 1950s and 60s, and then on the management of interest rates within a world of free capital movements and floating exchange rates, since the 1980s. It is the one element of continuity between these two very different worlds.

Why is there a focus on growth? I think there are two main groups of advocates. The first are public policy expansionists who wanted to secure growing amounts of tax revenues upon which to build the state system, as well as to reduce the need for welfare safety nets. It is probably fair to say that these dominated the earlier growth period.

The second are the rentiers. By rentiers I mean those seeking “economic rent”, or making money without making anything (such as renting out land). The more money there is sloshing around the more opportunities there are for rentiers. These include people with investments, workers and owners in monopolies that overcharge, many senior managers, and so on. These are much more than the top 1% of the wealthiest, and include people with a substantial stake in property (such as owning their own home) or other assets. In other words not just profiteers, but those who want and expect the value of their house to keep going up. The rentiers have been in the driving seat since the 1980s, since post-Keynesian (or Neo-Keynesian) economic policy became general. There is a bit of a paradox here: rentiers make growth harder to achieve, and in fact are one of the causes of slower growth, but they adore the policies designed to promote growth.

The first critics of growth were environmentalists. An early example was E.F. Schumacher in his book “Small is Beautiful”, which made a deep impression on the my parents in the 1970s. Environmentalists pointed out that growth implied the consumption of ever increasing amounts of natural resources, and damage to the environment, and that this was not sustainable. This was not entirely true, as economic activity became more efficient, reducing its impact on the environment. Many of Schumacher’s predictions turned out to be nonsense, and yet when I look back from now to the 1970s I am struct by how much we have destroyed; and then there is the rapidly emerging climate crisis.

A second group of critics might be called “lifestylers”. These people have rejected the need to work ever harder to consume ever larger amounts of stuff. At first these could be dismissed as eccentric hippies – but people who retire early come into this category, and that became a widespread life objective from early on. Since then the expression “work-life balance” has become popular among younger people. The interesting thing about lifestylers is that they don’t usually object to economic growth in principle (they may be rentiers after all), but their economic choices make achieving economic growth harder. They vote against economic growth with their feet.

The third important group of critics are conservatives: those that object to the changes that growth brings, such as the closure of old-fashioned businesses, outsourcing abroad or the growing use of immigrants. While some supporters of Brexit claimed to do so to improve Britain’s growth prospects, the Remainers cut little ice with their arguments that Brexit would slow growth down. Most Brexiteers simply thought that it was a price worth paying to send the immigrants home.

All three groups have been steadily gaining ground, and then into the mix has come the Coronavirus crisis. It is quite sobering to see how much economic activity people regard as “non-essential”, and how rapidly people are happy to reduce consumption when health and wellbeing are at stake. As we climb out of lockdown, we happily pile restriction upon restriction onto businesses to make them safer. There will be an inevitable cost to this, making it an impossibility to get back to the level of GPD prevailing before the crisis. Now even people who favour growth in theory will be unable to accept the price in practice. Furthermore, after the sobering experience of life being turned upside down in weeks, it is likely that people will save more and consume less to improve their financial resilience.

But abandoning growth as an objective means a profound change to the way our political class makes public policy choices. It is not surprising that so many of them are emulating Wil. E Coyote. What are the new priorities?

I put jobs first because that must be the focus of the recovery from the Coronavirus crisis, and it is urgent. It used to be argued that jobs had to follow growth. This isn’t nonsense: job creation schemes not based on sound economic principles will fail the end. But the link between jobs, and especially the sort of jobs that give people security and self-respect, and growth has become a lot weaker. Government interventions need to focus on jobs first, while still considering sustainability. The idea of a government-sponsored job-guarantee scheme is certainly worth a closer look. There are many potential pitfalls in such an idea, but for my money it is more promising than the much-touted idea of Universal Basic Income. It is important to make the point that an economy without growth is not an economy without jobs.

Second in my list is sustainability. This has both environmental and economic senses. Economic sustainability will need to be rethought, especially if people start to consume less and save more. This will mean that much higher levels of government debt will be sustainable. Environmental sustainability should be the main guide public investment. There is a lot of work to do to make our economy environmentally sustainable, but we should not delude ourselves that this will necessarily increase GDP.

Third is inequality. There is a lot of poverty in our society, and if the cake isn’t getting bigger then poverty will only be tackled by making somebody else poorer. This is a notoriously difficult problem, but some countries manage it much better than others. A job guarantee scheme could play an important role. Another important point is to tackle rentiers, through taxes and promoting competition.

And finally in my list (I could go on) is government effectiveness. In a low growth economy, the ability of governments to tax is limited, and a lot of resources will be consumed in addressing inequality. It follows that governments should use their resources more effectively. The public sector is rife with its own class of rentiers, from consultants offering to implement “world-beating” systems that don’t work, to defence contractors using national security to cover up waste, to excessive union power stopping managers from managing. We need to develop a culture of effective, delegated public sector management, accountable to a reworked political system.

Low growth has arrived, however much policymakers may dislike the notion. It is imperative that the political elites of rich countries reorient themselves to the new reality.

The Coalition at 10: keeping nationalism at bay

In hindsight the most important trend in politics over the last decade has been the rise of nationalism – and the backlash against internationalist liberals, inevitably styled an “elite”, as if all political movements were not led by elites. In Britain did the Coalition stood firmly against this trend.

In this third article of three reviewing the Coalition, I will look at its record on the business of politics itself. In the first article I looked at the record on the economy, in the second I looked at public service reform. In my choice of three topics I am leaving quite a lot out. On the environment and energy, the Coalition made a decisive move towards renewable energy, perhaps its biggest single achievement; on civil liberties it rolled back, slightly, the heavy-handed approach of its predecessor; a notable achievement was the implementation of gay marriage; in foreign affairs there was an intervention in Libya alongside the French which met its short-term aims but left a mess; apprenticeships were given a major lift, but further education colleges (i.e. not universities) suffered neglect. There was a rather pointless reform of policing, though whether this, and austerity measures, led, eventually, to a rise in crime is a moot point. I would rather blame the dismantling of so much civic infrastructure run by local authorities, which the Coalition started, but which its successor doubled down on. A rather mixed record then, but perhaps not too bad by the standards of five-year terms.

But what of political reform? How much were we aware in 2010 of the rising tide of populism and nationalism? In 2009 the political establishment was rocked by a scandal over MPs’ expenses. This distilled a growing disillusionment with the way politics was run, after the wave of enthusiasm that greeted the “New Labour” victory in 1997. Politics seemed to be run by an out-of-touch elite of professionals, whose competence was thrown into question by the global financial crisis, which struck Britain particularly hard, and whose rotten moral compass was now exposed.

But the new kids on the block thought they could get beyond that by deposing the old Labour regime and its nannying ways. Liberal Democrats were especially hopeful that the experience of coalition politics would demonstrate a new, more transparent politics, that would help build confidence. Politics was indeed more transparent, but nobody thanked them for it. Indeed the Lib Dems’ entry into government to most people showed the unaccountable elite at work; the Lib Dems seemed to be enjoying their time at the top table too much, feeding the narrative that they were putting their careers before the country. The ambiguities in the electoral coalition that brought the Lib Dems their substantial presence in parliament were exposed cruelly. The party’s popularity was in free fall before a spectacular U-turn on student tuition fees dealt the party a blow from which it still hasn’t recovered.

The weakness of the Lib Dems did for most of the constitutional reforms that the party had hoped to push through. A referendum on adopting the Alternative Vote for parliamentary elections was lost heavily as their Conservative coalition partners mobilised against it, doing long-term damage to the whole prospect of electoral reform. Reform of the House of Lords disappeared as the political establishment cold-shouldered it. The Lib Dems extracted limited revenge by stymying a Conservative project to equalise constituencies to their advantage. This left the Fixed Term Parliament Act, implemented mainly to stabilise the coalition, in which it was mainly successful. This legislation has few friends these days, but it is still there. It’s value was shown last year when it briefly empowered parliament against a mandate-less government.

More positively the Coalition progressed the development of City regions, taking on more devolved powers, and coordinating local councils. This project was led by Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, and Conservative minister Greg Clark. This was a process started by Labour – but the government limited council’s ability to raise revenue or borrow, which are the key tests for meaningful devolution.

In broader politics Labour started its long journey down the far-left anti-austerity rabbit hole, leaving the field clear for the two most important developments: the rise of Scottish nationalism, and theBrexit movement, led by Ukip. Both would dominate politics for the rest of the decade. The Coalition found itself on the defensive on both counts, but kept both at bay.

In Scotland the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) surged to victory in the Scottish elections of 2011. The Coalition accepted this as a mandate for a referendum on Scottish independence. Was this a mistake? It did not help to heal the rift between Scotland and England. I suspect Coalition leaders accepted the SNP government’s moral case; neither party had any appetite for a prolonged battle over whether such a referendum should take place, and in the event the main victim was in fact Labour. The referendum took place in 2014, and the unionists won. But the battle energised the SNP, whose dominance of Scottish politics continues to this day. Many see Scottish independence as an inevitability. I am not so sure, but coherent opposition to the SNP seems to be a long way off.

In due course the battles over Scottish independence would be dwarfed by the Brexit movement. This movement successfully channelled dissatisfaction with the Coalition and its liberal leadership in a way Labour could not, as the previous Labour government was seen as part of the problem. The battle was fought on two fronts. First was within the Conservative Party. While its leader, the prime minister David Cameron, had a strong grip on the parliamentary party (helped by the presence of Lib Dems in coalition), the Brexit movement gathered strength at grassroots level. Second was the rise of Nigel Farage’s Ukip. This quickly replaced the Lib Dems as Britain’s third party in opinion polls, and gnawed away at the Conservatives’ local base. The only way that Mr Cameron had found to keep the movement in check was the promise of an EU referendum, knowing that he could rely on the Lib Dems to veto it. At the same time his chief electoral strategy was to destroy the Lib Dems at the next election. The 2016 referendum was where this strategy ended up.

Looked at with hindsight the Coalition’s battles with nationalism look like a moderately successful rearguard action. They succeeded in delaying their enemies but without any ideas on how to stop them. What if Mr Cameron had narrowly won that referendum in 2016? It is hard to think that British politics would be anything other than very ugly.

Liberals have now developed a much better understanding of the problem: the pressures on small towns and the countryside, of economic growth that bypasses most people. But answers? We have made little progress since Coalition days, having preferred to rally around opposing Brexit. With the nationalist takeover of the Tory party now floundering, and with the old-fashioned leftism of Jeremy Corbyn defeated, this is surely the moment to do better than that. But new liberals will not look back on the Coalition government of 2010 to 2015 as a template.

We need to escape 2m social distancing. We are going about it in the wrong way.

The UK government, in its capacity as the English government, has been easing the Coronavirus lockdown steadily over the last couple of weeks. Generally the public has been one step ahead. The picture shows the scene yesterday at one our nearby beaches yesterday; you would be pushed to find any difference from a normal day half-term week in May. The public toilets were open (big queues, no social distancing), and you could hire a windbreaker, buy ice creams and no doubt many other things too. Is this all happening too quickly?

Meanwhile, the scientific advisers seem to be behaving more and more like economists, and not always in a good way. They are very attached to their models predicting how the out break will develop. Abstract aggregated measures, especially the Reproduction or R-rate, are treated as if the are real, tangible things, rather than statistical abstractions. In one way they don’t behave like economists, though. They accuse our leaders of taking political decisions because they go against their advice. On probing them, it turns out that what the scientists mean by this is that the politicians are weighing up factors like the economy and mental health. Stuff that is somebody else’s problem for the scientists. Economists need no excuse to barge into somebody else’s field.

But even taking a broader view, the scientists have a point. The prevalence of Covid-19 is greatly reduced, though it is very hard to get a decent fix on this, given the weaknesses in the testing regime. This means that the risk of catching the disease is now quite small, depending on where in the country you are (though apparently the regional variations aren’t that great). But this low risk is precisely what led to complacency at the start of the epidemic. The countries that locked down early (i.e. before they had a visible problem) are the ones that have suffered least; Britain has one of the worst Covid-19 death rates on any country in the world.

The problem is this: living with the virus is very hard if it means maintaining 2m social distancing. So many activities become impossible: restaurants and bars for example, unless customers can stay outside. Reducing this distance to 1m, as I heard former Chancellor Norman Lamont suggest, is a bit of a nonsense. If you are indoors and with somebody for more than 15 minutes, then the risks escalate. This is what bars and restaurants are for, and you can’t mitigate them by getting everybody to wear a mask, as you can on a bus or aeroplane. 2m is probably not enough in this environment. Which is very bad news not just for those us dying to eat out again, but for the huge numbers of people employed in hospitality. At the same time shops, factories and the businesses can’t maintain their previous productivity.

The aim has to be to not have social distancing rules at all. How do you achieve this? The first step is to get infections down to a very low level. Much lower than is prevalent in any part of the UK at the moment. Then you implement a rigorous track and trace system, to identify and isolate anybody who has the disease. Extra regulations are required where people congregate in an enclosed space period of time, so that everybody can be rapidly identified if one of them turns out to be infected. People coming into the country need to be tested on arrival, with results coming back in 24 hours while they wait somewhere safe. This is all well-trodden territory for countries like South Korea, for example. This is not life returning to normal by any means, but it is much better than trying keep everybody 2m apart.

The loosening of the lockdown being implemented in England (and at a slower pace in other parts of the UK) may well not lead to a rapid escalation, as many fear. There seems to be a lot less danger associated with being outdoors, especially if it is sunny (and also, for different reasons, I suspect, if it is wet). 2m social distancing may be impossible all the time on beaches like the one in my picture (the family groups sitting and sunbathing are OK – but the problems are when you are moving around), but the risk is probably very low. Shops and schools, now opening up, are probably not very risky either, with the mitigation measures in place – though we need to be careful about people that work there. But if there is no major escalation, it seems unlikely that the opposite will happen either: that we can get infections down to the level where social distancing can be dropped. The danger is that Britain will be stuck in a no-man’s land between emergency levels of the disease and being on top of it.

Alas Britain’s problems don’t end there. The government has still not mastered the logistics of mass testing, and of large-scale track and trace operations. The press is full of things going wrong, and especially of test results taking a very long time to come through, as well as difficulties in getting the tests to people that need them. To me it smells very strongly of an over-obsession with economies of scale – which lead to problems in linking the bits together. Much can be learned from the decentralised organisation of Germany, for example. Getting this infrastructure working properly is critical to moving beyond the world of social distancing. The bad news is that the people in charge don’t show any real grasp of what is causing the problems, and assume they can be solved by working a broken system harder.

Which means that the UK’s dismal record on tackling the Coronavirus is likely to continue. Well at least we aren’t Brazil.

The Cummings Affair exposes the shallowness of the Johnson project

I have often come across the idea of the strategic manager. He (and the gender stereotype is appropriate here) thinks that it is his job to look at the big picture, and leave the detail to his underlings. Indeed, too much detail could cloud judgement, as could working too hard. More than one of my bosses in my professional career had this idea. It always ended in tears. And so it is in politics and in military affairs too. The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, turns out to be the latest victim.

Mr Johnson was a particularly prominent exponent of this idea, though, typically, he has so far as I know not expressed it himself, leaving that to his acolytes. They have described how he entrusts detailed tasks to advisers, and then makes decisions based on a solid strategic understanding. He is said to have had a successful 8-year stint as London Mayor on this basis. But only supporters judge Mr Johnson’s two terms as mayor as more than an electoral success. It is devoid of substantive achievement, while marked by ill-advised vanity projects, from the new Routemaster buses (in action but late and over budget because of the unnecessary design requirements imposed on it), water cannon for the police, the infamous Garden Bridge, and so on. The one major success of his term was the London Olympics of 2012, but his personal role was minimal; the real hard work of winning the right to hold them having been done by his predecessor. Meanwhile Mr Johnson kept as low a profile as possible as Mayor, not wanting to he held to account. The job is not nearly as big as it looks, as the government has not devolved much power to the Mayor, and it does not seem a hard job to hold down without doing serious political damage to oneself. Which cannot be said of the role of being UK Prime Minister, which is genuinely one of the toughest jobs in British politics.

The problem with the notion of strategic leadership is that events are driven by detail. Big events are the summation of of lots of small ones. Strategic decisions must be executed at tactical level, and strategic choices are best based on a firm grasp of the detail. More important still is that evidence of whether a policy is working depends on understanding of detailed evidence. You can wait for big picture evidence to emerge, but by the time it does so, it is usually too late. It follows that a strategic leader is very dependent on other members of a leadership team to both provide a tactical understanding, and to filter and feed back information from the front line. This can be done in one of two ways: “Big Beasts” or “Trusted Adviser”. Leaders usually opt for a combination of the two.

The Big Beasts approach requires an alliance with another figure who has substantial political clout in their own right: another politician. The most recent successful example of this was David Cameron’s alliance with his Chancellor George Osborne. Mr Cameron, like Mr Johnson, was a light touch leader, though not to the same extreme. His career ended in ignominy when he led the losing side of the Brexit referendum, but he lasted six years, including a notable general election victory. But Mr Osborne, by no means light-touch himself, did a lot of the work, and indeed often seemed overstretched. Mr Osborne clearly had ambitions to succeed Mr Cameron, but in the end Mr Cameron’s failure finished his political career. But that relationship stands out because it was so successful. More typically such relationships become rivalries, which in turn leads to disfunction. Such was the fate of Labour prime minster Tony Blair’s relationship with Gordon Brown, also Chancellor. Mr Blair’s leadership style alternated from strategic to getting into the detail if required, and his partnership with Mr Brown was at first highly successful. But Mr Brown became jealous, and things started to break down. Given that successful politicians are driven people, this is the normal fate of reliance on Big Beasts. The best leaders use alliances with several allied politicians and don’t become dependent – but that is very hard work, and cannot be equated to the sort of strategic leadership to which Mr Johnson aspires. Mr Johnson instead has taken the opposite tack of keeping any potential rival at a safe distance. His cabinet has nobody close to being a political rival. Only two members stand out as having any political weight. One is Matt Hancock, the health secretary, who is progressively being eaten up by the crisis and will surely be politically destroyed by it. The other is the Chancellor Rishi Sunak, who has had a good crisis, but is so new to senior politics that he cannot be seen as a serious rival yet.

Instead Mr Johnson has gone entirely for the Trusted Adviser approach. In this the leader appoints a team of advisers entirely beholden to him, and selected on ability and trustworthiness. This team keeps a low profile and carries out the detailed work, including the digestion of information coming in from the front line. Such a team usually has a leader. All British prime ministers have used some variation of this strategy. Few have had the implied power of Mr Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings. The biggest danger of the Trusted Adviser approach is sycophancy: the tendency to filter out the bad news before it reaches the centre. There is an inevitability to this, and wise leaders learn to adjust for this and try to triangulate with other sources of information. But again that is hard work. Mr Johnson has done something a bit more interesting, by appointing a maverick who is less inclined to be sycophantic.

But there is a cost. With political rivals cleared away, with Mr Johnson’s preference for a low personal profile, and with Mr Cummings’s maverick style, public attention naturally gravitates to the adviser, who becomes seen as the real power, and one that is not politically accountable. And that has now been exposed to breaking point with Mr Cummings’s rather loose interpretation of the lockdown rules so far as his family is concerned. In ordinary circumstances he would have gone, but Mr Johnson’s refusal to sack him confirms to everybody how dependent he has become on his adviser. Mr Johnson himself seems to be at sea, with only the vaguest grasp of details. His recent illness with Covid-19 seems to have taken its toll.

Personally I have some sympathy with Mr Cummings’s predicament in the episode that is at the heart of this affair: the decisions he took back in March when his wife started to show symptoms. My view about rules is that the intent is more important than the letter, and my instinct is to interpret them flexibly, or with “common sense”. That doesn’t let him off the hook entirely. He moved his family from an area of high Covid incidence to one that was at the time a low one (a situation that has since reversed); did he really not expose others to risk during his journey or while he was there?

But the problem for Mr Johnson is a much bigger one. I am in a minority when it comes to my attitude to rules. Most people prefer for rules to be set and obeyed to the letter, as then everybody knows where they are. And people have been sticking to the rules at huge personal cost. Mr Cummings’s behaviour reignites a belief that there is a ruling elite that doesn’t really care about the trials and tribulations of “ordinary people”.(an expression I dislike, but I digress). This is particularly difficult for both Mr Johnson and Mr Cummings because they have built their careers on being champions of “ordinary people” against arrogant elites. This is now exposed as being the fraud it always was.

But even if this affair hadn’t blown up, Mr Johnson would be in trouble. His model of leadership places too much pressure on too few people. It is vastly over-centralised, and it is faced by two huge challenges. The first is managing the next phase of the Coronavirus crisis, which is the loosening of the lockdown, the search for a new normal, and the alleviation of widespread hardship. Second there is Brexit. The transition period is set to end on 31 December, and the government has no intention of extending it. And yet there is an impasse with the EU as what is to replace it. This is not necessarily an impossible challenge. The government can compromise on EU demands (which are after all based on the political declaration that was part of the Brexit deal) and declare victory. But that will take brains and leadership, which are now otherwise occupied, on both sides of the Channel. The government may be successful in passing the blame on to the EU side, with Remainers still in deep depression and wary of stoking up old divisions. But it will look chaotic and add to the general impression of haplessness which is becoming the current government’s hallmark.

Take away Dominic Cummings and what is left? There is no vision of what this country is supposed to become. Successful political leadership is a “both and” business. Both strategic understanding and command of detail. Both an effective core of advisers and cooperation with other substantial political figures. And it is very hard work. With Mr Johnson at the helm Britain is drifting. Can it really last another four years/

What if we treated the science of the pandemic like economics?

Very early in the Covid crisis a wise journalist at the FT (I forget which one) said that scientists were going to learn to behave like economists. Slowly we are learning the truth of that. Almost everybody knows that economists deal with the unpredictable, and treat their advice accordingly, alongside other political arguments. So little is known about Covid-19 and the virus that causes it that we should treat scientists’ advice in much the same way, except when it comes to such important issues as vaccines and treatments.

I have long used this blog to argue that science has severe limitations and does not justify the faith that some put in it. The discipline has, or should have, rigorous processes by which it can express opinions (or hypotheses if you prefer) with increasing degrees of certainty. But only relatively simple propositions can be tested in this way. And the conclusions drawn from the evidence are usually only generalities. Many areas of knowledge are beyond the reach of such rigour. Economics is one example, management and organisational practice is another.

Science remains vital, of course. The search for a vaccine for Covid-19 is an example. It plays to science’s strengths. The proposition that a particular vaccine works a relatively simple one to test, and a general conclusion, rather than one that applies to all people all the time, is what we are looking for. It isn’t worth investing in a vaccine that hasn’t proved itself in the rigours of scientific process.

An example of something where science is of less use, look at facemasks. How effective these are in preventing the spread of the disease turns out to be a very difficult thing to test. There are so many variables. Does that mean we should recommend their general use by the public? British scientists seem be suggesting that the answer is no, though they generally try to avoid saying anything at all. Interestingly, in Asia the view seems to be that they should be worn; doubtless they would say that scientific evidence does not show them to be ineffective either. And the Asians do seem to be doing a much better job of managing the disease.

This is the null hypothesis problem. What do you believe, absent proof? Some scientists like to say “nothing”, as if that was a neutral answer. But there is no neutral answer if choices depend on it. This sort of muddle seems to have been behind Britain’s late lockdown, which has been so disastrous. The government says it was following scientific advice, and there is no reason to doubt their word. It was very early days in our understanding of the virus and the disease, so the scientific advice was not clear – though some claim it was. In Britain the null hypothesis was that a lockdown would be ineffective, so action was delayed. Elsewhere (Asia again ahead, but places like New Zealand too), the null hypothesis was that a lockdown would be helpful, until shown to be otherwise. This was a variation of the precautionary principle.

Now we are in a much trickier situation with regard to how quickly to ease the lockdown. The precautionary principle is a lot less use here, as there are harms on both sides. I have a lot more sympathy with the government this time, and I think they are right to be pushing the envelope, which in turn is opening debate. But they can’t appeal to science if they are looking for definite guidance.

So, if we start to look at the science more like economics, what might we suggest? What follows is based on evidence, but the hypotheses developed have not been tested to anything like a scientific standard. But no sensible public policy is going to be.

What we are learning about the disease is that it is not as contagious as feared at first, but that in some situations it is still highly contagious. Early in the crisis some people suggested that the overall infection rate was very high (over 50%), but that this was not showing up as most people were asymptomatic. In fact, mostly, infection rates have been pretty low (below 10%), where general populations have been tested. But there have been some pretty spectacular exceptions, where a single individual has spread the disease to many. A conference in Singapore was an early example; there was a ski resort in Austria too, and recently a nightclub in Korea; care homes have been a major trouble spot. This suggests to me that enclosed spaces with many people in them are the main danger, as well as residential environments with a lot of people mixing. Further evidence seems to show that hospitals, and perhaps care homes, can be made safe by the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). Hospital workers don’t seem to be suffering more than the population at large.

So if I’m right about that, we need to keep pubs, restaurants and nightclubs closed, except where they can serve customers outdoors. Outdoor activity generally is probably relatively safe, and the 2m social distancing advice here in Britain is probably overdoing it unless you are stopping to talk to somebody. Alas trying to change that advice is probably too much of a communication challenge. Intermediate environments, such as shops and schools, are much harder. Steps need to be taken to keep densities of people low, and my feeling is that facemasks should be mandatory (though that is probably impractical in schools). One particularly important question is air travel. On the face of it an aeroplane is a particularly dangerous environment. But if everybody wears masks? We need more evidence.

Meanwhile testing infrastructure needs to be improved so that we can test more people and get the results quicker. Something seems to be going badly wrong in Britain. Paradoxically I suspect that an obsession with ramping up scale hasn’t helped. Building large scale facilities first to gather samples and then separate facilities to complete the tests looks to me like a process flow nightmare. More testing will give us much more information and if it is combined with effective tracking we can understand better how the disease is passed from person to person.

A further idea worth exploring is that of “red” and “green” zones, with tighter restrictions in the former. The problem of course is of people moving from red to green. Perhaps you could allow restaurants to open in green zones, if all customers are made to leave name, address and phone details (with those living or working in red zones not allowed to go there). You could use a smartphone app to help enforce much of this, though that may be too Chinese for Britain.

Using such policies we can haltingly work our way to a new normal, until the scientists and technologists give us a vaccine or cure. Economics is no science, but it is not useless either. Just as politicians are used to dealing with economic problems, so too they help reduce the damage that this pandemic is doing to our society by using what evidence we have.