Loading
In 1956Anthony CroslandGDPNHSnhsnhsprMPhsGDPYour browser does not support the element. , a thinker, called for “a brighter, more colourful country”. It was not enough, he wrote, for a Labour government merely to increase exports or old-age pensions. Britain must have “more open-air cafés, brighter and gayer streets at night…more riverside cafés…more murals and pictures in public places…statues in the centre of new housing-estates, better-designed street-lamps and telephone kiosks, and so on ad infinitum”.Rachel Reeves, the chancellor, would do well to heed that call. In on October 30th, Ms Reeves announced of £40bn ($52bn) that will leave Britain with a government that gobbles up 45% of by 2029. “We promised there would be no return to austerity,” said Ms Reeves. “Today we deliver on that promise.” Under Labour the direction of travel is clear: the state will be bigger and taxes will be higher. But another question was ignored: will it make Britain any brighter?Anger at austerity is often just anger at the state of the public realm: the roads on which people drive, the parks in which they lounge, the museums they visit and the high streets through which they stroll (while gawping at Amazon on their phones). The public realm is, after all, the only universal experience of the state. Most people are not on a National Health Service () waiting list. Few people go to prison. Most voters do not have children in school, never mind in one of those that are at risk of collapsing.The last Conservative government did think about the public realm. Its strategy of “levelling up” was one not just of economic but also of civic regeneration for Britain’s deprived areas. Jobs and infrastructure would come eventually, promised Boris Johnson, a former Tory prime minister; in the meantime, have some hanging baskets on your streets. The problem was not the strategy, it was the execution: the hanging baskets never came.Ms Reeves has bigger things to worry about than flower arrangements. The is on its uppers; schools are, often literally, falling down. But the result is that spending is focused on where it is at best incremental rather than transformational. In the , which is receiving an extra £22.6bn over the next two years for day-to-day spending, big numbers have only small effects. It is a mighty sum that few will notice. If the same amount had been invested in local government, it would have replaced the bulk of the funding lost during austerity.Elsewhere, in contrast, small numbers can have big effects. Away from the blitz of a big-spending budget, departments have mooted a series of prosaic cuts. A £15m slug of funding to do up the National Railway Museum in York is to be nixed. That was to be the centrepiece of a wider scheme to turn an area of by-hand car washes and £10-for-the-day car parks into a sprawling complex of offices and homes. No more.That Ms Reeves is a local has not spared Leeds from losing £10m-worth of funding for a northern campus of the British Library. Its home was to have been in Temple Works, a surreal part-Egyptian, part-Victorian building, in a deprived part of the city. (A mooted National Poetry Centre is also for the chop.) Another £10m-worth of funding for renovations to Liverpool’s museum on slavery is also to be cut. For a party whose hold on Merseyside is weaker than it looks (and for a government often grilled about Britain’s role in the trade), it is a peculiar decision.These sums may be slight but their consequences will reverberate locally. The regeneration of Liverpool’s docks into a thriving museum quarter—a project kicked off under Margaret Thatcher, of all people—will be hamstrung. Museums and cultural venues are what Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England economist, calls “social infrastructure”. For a government determined to invest in expensive transport infrastructure, it makes no sense to skimp on the sort that costs less and can be done by the next election (when the 2 station at Euston will still be a hole in the ground). If Thatcher could see the need for it, so can Labour.Councils do not have the capacity to improve the public realm. Whatever cash they have available is hoovered up by a small number of people—the elderly and infirm, or the young and troubled—for whom councils must care. Hampshire spends approximately 83% of its £1.1bn budget on social care for adults and children. That leaves little money for hanging baskets, never mind museums. Only the government can change that.In British politics, each main party is expected to play a role. If the Conservatives are expected to keep taxes low and the state small, Labour is designed to increase taxes and public spending. If the Conservatives are, as Theresa May, another former prime minister, once put it, the “nasty party”, then Labour is the “nice party”.On taxes and spending, Ms Reeves fulfilled expectations. But Labour seems to have forgotten how to be nice. In the 1950s Crosland took aim at his prudish and bureaucratic peers. “We do not want to enter the age of abundance, only to find that we have lost the values which might teach us how to enjoy it,” he wrote. Put it another way: if Labour is happy to stretch the government to 45% of yet still refuses to bankroll museums, what is the point?Instead, a more miserabilist vision prevails, overseen by politicians afraid of being painted as wet metropolitan types who are out of touch with the concerns of a proverbial white-van-driving, beer-drinking gambler, a figure who exists predominantly in their heads. The future Crosland outlined, of riverside cafés and murals, may seem frivolous but it is in fact fundamental. Even if Labour manages to fix the country’s public services by the next election, voters will still ask if the country is any brighter. Far better to tart it up now than wait until then.
