A Failure to Plan

Brexit proved that the UK doesn't do planning. A popular theory is that David Cameron believed he would not have to honour his EU referendum commitment to his own party after 2015, assuming that the widely-predicted hung parliament would allow him to sacrifice it in coalition negotiations, as he had done with inheritance tax reform in 2010. This suggests that the Tories didn't plan for all eventualities last year, despite the limited number of possible outcomes (win, lose, draw). Part of me is incredulous that any politician would be so careless, but there is ample evidence that the electoral throw of the dice is rarely accompanied by much cunning. For example, there are competing theories as to why Labour was unable to secure LibDem support for a coalition in 2010, but the claim by David Laws that they were "too disorganised or divided even to table clear positions" probably has some truth to it, even if arithmetic, personal distaste and intellectual exhaustion were ultimately more decisive. The last month suggests the PLP hasn't improved much since.

The judgement of the Chilcot Inquiry was that the Iraq war was a failure of planning from beginning to end. The US had a plan well in advance of the conflict, i.e. regime change, but the UK lacked similarly clear goals ("I will be with you, whatever") and never settled on a coherent plan for decision-making domestically. This lack of planning and the consequent reliance on Tony Blair's "belief" system allowed the UK to be manoeuvred into an open-ended commitment without adequate scrutiny of the objectives, the means or the risks. There was, catastrophically, a failure to plan for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall, while the operational planning of the occupying British troops in the south of the country has already become a textbook example of how not to do it. The parallel deployment in Afghanistan was little better, suggesting that trying to "punch above your weight" will usually lead to a bloodied nose at best and being pummelled senseless at worst.

Afghanistan and Iraq were not exceptions. The UK's current military preparedness suggests a persistent lack of adequate planning, from the macro-farce of aircraft carriers without aircraft to the micro-farce of the wrong sort of boots. To show that this isn't a recent development, we only have to recall that 2016 is the centenary of the Battle of the Somme and the culmination of the Dardanelles Campaign. The replacement of Trident is another example of poor planning, not so much in terms of the well-known limitations of a continuous at sea deterrent (CASD), that can only guarantee one boat in the water at any time, but in that we are wholly dependent on the willingness of the US to allow us to pay for and man a small part of their nuclear fleet. Britain's future "independent nuclear deterrent" is whatever the US government decides it is going to be, which means we have abdicated planning authority.

At this point it is worth noting that the particular aspects of planning I'm focusing on are plan design (working out the best course of action to achieve a goal) and adaptation (dealing with contingencies - i.e. "events, dear boy, events"). Planning is actually about how we handle uncertainty, hence the importance of deterministic and probabilistic analysis (what are the relationships, what are the odds). However, the modern understanding of planning is increasingly biased towards the concept of control, i.e. imposing certainty. The obvious example is the pre-2008 belief that risk in financial markets could be managed away, that the unknown (the "Black Swan event") did not need to be considered. At the level of the personal, planning has evolved from the pragmatic and contingent (shopping lists, booking a holiday) to the performative and permanent (wishlists, timelines, activity trackers). The aim is less to reduce uncertainty through foresight (what shall I buy, where shall we go?) than to reduce chance and loss (no surprises, never forget anything, full visibility). Against this, the lack of foresight and casual risk-taking of politicians is remarkable.

The great ideological battle of the twentieth century was between central planning (one big plan) and the use of the price mechanism to distribute planning (lots of plans of varying sizes). In this simplistic history, central planning peaked in the middle decades of the century before the sclerosis of the 70s led to the triumph of the market. In practice, central planning has never been in ruder health. The growth of multinational corporations, amplified by the winner-takes-all dynamics of the digital economy, has created large companies run on a command and control basis whose planning scope and expertise exceeds that of many countries. Stories of businesses that have grown "too big" (Sports Direct), or been ruined by inexpert managers (BHS), are usually evidence of exploitation, not the shortcomings of planning. While government is derided, and publicly-funded academic experts are denigrated, businesses that exhibit the secrecy and dictatorial certainty of the USSR under Stalin receive a market premium.

For all the talk of deregulation and the reality of privatisation, the scope of state planning has continued to expand in areas such as health, education, utilities and transport. This shouldn't come as a surprise. We live in a more interdependent world, which is the product of deliberate and growing specialisation by function as much as technological determinism or ecological consciousness. The state plays a central role in enabling that specialisation by creating markets through legislation, providing complex human resources and physical infrastructure, and coordinating finance capital through guarantees and underwriting. While this is not as overt or formalised as it was in the 1960s, and the suggestion that the state is directing the market remains anathema, the reality is central planning in all but name. As we have recently seen with the new government's embrace of the phrase "industrial strategy", even the language can be changed when circumstances demand.

The postwar era in the UK was marked by planning that was ambitious in scale but sometimes ill-thought out in detail (e.g. social housing), and grandiose projects that betrayed post-imperial over-reach (e.g. Blue Streak). The root problem wasn't a technical failing of planning so much as political delusion, a problem that has got progressively worse since the magical thinking of the 1980s. The two characteristics of a white elephant are uncertainty in the plan design (e.g. the London terminus of HS2) and a lack of contingency planning (e.g. if France pulls out of the Hinkley C project). The Northern Powerhouse is a postmodern example of this planning delusion in which the heroic predictions and sunny visualisations float freely above the tangible but modest reality of enterprise zones and local authority pump-priming. Politicians can associate themselves with the good bits - the vision thing and cutting ribbons - while blaming others for the failure to meet expectations. In such a dishonest environment, even George Osborne's serial failure to meet the targets of his own "long-term economic plan" couldn't prove fatal.

Perhaps the finest recent exponent of postmodern planning has been Boris Johnson, a man who as Mayor of London largely abdicated planning authority when it came to greenlighting office blocks and luxury flats, who claimed the credit for the schemes of others (bikes), and indulged poorly-designed projects solely for their PR value (pointless bridges, an estuarine airport, the rubbish Routemaster revival). The failure to properly plan his way to Number 10 was predictable. His elevation to Foreign Secretary is being treated as a rueful joke by most people, which means we are once more indulging the comic character rather than the really existing shit. Brexit has downgraded the relationship between the UK and the US (always instrumental rather than sentimental), and the corollary of that is a devaluation in the standing of the Foreign Office, which has become little more than a ceremonial adjunct to trade. Despite being a walking insult, Johnson is perhaps well-suited to the role.

Just as Iraq surely ended the UK's delusions of being a military "playa" on the world stage (and has probably set the clock ticking on our membership of the UN Security Council), so Brexit has recalibrated our diplomatic status to better match our future as a medium-sized nation without any major strategic significance (we're much less important to the US now than Japan). What stands out when we look back over the last 15 years, from Blair's zeal to Cameron's insouciance, is the dereliction of strategic planning in the political sphere at a time when tactical planning has been at a premium, from the daily grid of news management through multinational supply chains to the advance of globalisation by regulation and treaty. It's almost as if we've collectively decided to reward politicians who appear to be making it up as they go along because we value spontaneity. While a "man with a plan" can be dangerous, a failure to plan usually means failure.

This is Not a Popular Drama

Whether through half-remembered Shakespeare, or TV series such as House of Cards and Game of Thrones, the tendency to explain politics by dramatic analogy is both an admission of ignorance about people's true motivations and an unwillingness to address the social forces at work. A focus on the players, rather than the groundlings, is one way of reasserting Parliamentary sovereignty. Casting Boris Johnson as a clueless Caesar, the Goves as incompetent MacBeths, or Corbyn as a half-mad Lear exposed on Highbury Fields is wryly amusing, but it serves to diminish politics to the level of entertainment, which is what gave us the Johnson phenomenon in the first place. When politicians discuss themselves in analogous terms, such as Gove expressing sympathy for a clever but unloved dwarf or rooting for the Spartans at Thermopylae, you know that schoolboy fantasy has triumphed over schoolboy wit.

Crafting a life-story congenial to an intended audience is routine in the era of the personal brand, and this means delving into the dressing-up box of the collective mind. For example, Theresa May's pitch, that as the daughter of a vicar and the granddaughter of a regimental sergeant major she has public service written in her DNA, is clearly intended to reassure Conservative Party members that she is straight outta' Middle England, rather than the Old Etonian establishment or the too-clever-by-half metropolis, but it also serves to conjure an image not a million miles away from the exclusively white milieu of Midsomer Murders, which will placate those worried that there might be backsliding on the party's commitment to halting or even reversing immigration. This isn't just an appeal to Tories, but to Kippers as well.

The failure of Johnson and Gove might look like a defeat for newspapermen, but what it really reveals is that vain and inconsistent columnists are mere instruments for proprietors, which should hardly surprise us. Nothing has been more ridiculous than the claims that various Tory politicians (and spouses) have fallen out with each other recently, as if this were a high-toned soap opera in which everyone is shocked by enmity and personal betrayal despite it driving the plot week after week. These people are no more genuine "friends" than those who swap recommendations on LinkedIn. The relationships are cold-blooded and calculating. The claim that Michael Gove's political career is now toast because of his "back-stabbing" should be taken with a pinch of salt. This is the party of Macmillan and Heseltine, not to mention more recent wielders of the knife like Iain Duncan Smith.

Conservative politics is about the defence of status and Tories who claim to be radical reformists are usually desperate to acquire it. The "Maoist" Gove was neatly characterised by Ian Leslie last year: "The vividly drawn persona we are familiar with today emerged, fully formed, at school, in an act of audacious self-invention. The young Gove sought not merely to fit in with his socially superior peers, but to stand out from them. He rode an old-fashioned bicycle to school, wore suits, recited poetry and starred in debates ... Precocious children often grow into adults with something of the child about them, and there is something eternally schoolboyish about Gove. The reflected admiration of his parents, teachers and classmates still radiates from his smooth-cheeked face". Leslie also noted the pathological nature of Gove's alleged charm: "Politeness comes at a cost to authenticity: it is, by definition, a formal mode of expression, used to conceal what we really feel".

This lack of authenticity is not a problem for Gove or any other Tory. What matters is the tribute paid to status, even if it takes the ridiculous form of Fogeyish affectations. The reason he is unlikely to become party leader is not that he has proven duplicitous but that he has proven to be as cack-handed as Johnson in the execution of his schemes (his Queen leak may have pleased Murdoch but it upset Conservatives). For this same reason I was never convinced that the former Mayor of London was a shoo-in as Cameron's successor, even before the 23rd. His pitch to Tory MPs was that his media profile would secure enough votes to win general elections (and it may well have been material to the referendum result), but his executive incompetence (all too obvious in London where MPs spend the week) pointed to disarray in office. With the enormity of the Brexit task ahead of them, I suspect that many (and not just Gove) decided he was simply not up to the job. The ultimate betrayal here may be that City grandees dropped their erstwhile champion. Andrea Leadsom's sudden elevation is not because she was convincing in debates.

That same assessment of incompetence is at the heart of the PLP revolt against Jeremy Corbyn, but in contrast to the Tories, it is authenticity that has prevented the coup reaching a climax. With the exception perhaps of George Lansbury, Corbyn is unusual among Labour leaders in being a typical party member. He has the same concerns for fairness and justice, and the same instincts of activism and solidarity, that distinguish the footsoldiers of the CLPs, and it is these very qualities that make it unlikely he will resign. Party membership selects for people who disagree with the claim that resistance is useless. Paradoxically, that he is typical is held up as evidence of his naivety and unfitness for the job. This leads to a surreal situation in which he is charged with simultaneously having insufficient enthusiasm for Remain while being unable to connect with Northern and Midland voters who chose Leave.

Representative democracy assumes a tension between policy correctness and effectiveness, between the ideal and the electable, but this dichotomy is itself ideological, suggesting that there must always be a gap between what people want and what they can reasonably expect, and that this gap must be mediated by a political class. What the EU referendum has shown is that the people will chose the ideal, even if it is impractical or contradictory, because they value the opportunity of unmediated expression. They didn't reject expertise so much as articulate long-held prejudices developed in defensive reaction to social and economic change and fanned by unscrupulous newspapers. The idea that this could be turned round by a few facts and some stardust was foolish. Ironically, Leavers are now being berated for their credulity in believing the promises on NHS funding and immigration by the same people who have long mocked the left for its focus on false consciousness.

The "We are the 48%" demonstration yesterday was almost tailor-made to prompt sneers about self-regarding metroplitan liberals. Organising a march to Westminster was pointless in a week when the government had largely evaporated. They would have done better to march through the streets of Bexley or Stoke-on-Trent, though claiming "This is what democracy looks like" might have prompted a less than sympathetic response. The referendum result will not be reversed any time soon, if ever, and the idea that we can somehow finesse it into "staying put" with EU agreement and popular acquiescence is for the birds. The nation is divided and it will take decades to shift popular opinion far enough to guarantee re-accession, and that's assuming there is still a recognisable EU to join. Ironically, the best hope of British europhiles is that the common currency fails in the next few years, leading to a general reset that can be sold as congruent with UK preferences. Don't hold your breath.