Author: abuaro01

Post-Brexit Devolution: What Should it Look Like?

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brexitIn this post Paul O’Brien argues that after Brexit devolution should  empower local government to deliver a localised industrial strategy.

Councils could be forgiven for wondering if Government remains as committed to devolution and decentralisation of power, post Brexit, as it appeared to be before June’s vote.

What started well and seemed to have support at the highest level of Government, with George Osborne’s zealot like enthusiasm, doesn’t appear to have the same prominence with new cabinet figures, indeed some fear that the agenda could simply fizzle out.

It would be a major policy U-turn to cancel next year’s mayoral elections for the big three combined authority areas of Greater Manchester, Liverpool City Region and the West Midlands, however it doesn’t appear that many other deals are close to completion with almost daily stories of negotiations collapsing.

Whilst some find the idea of having an elected mayor forced upon them objectionable, others have concerns over whether you are really going to get what you signed up for in terms of funding for projects or powers, given the economic uncertainty that exists post Brexit.

Given the financial crisis local services face, decentralisation is exactly what is needed. It’s clear the public feel that they are not getting their fair share of resources. APSE’s recent opinion poll, with Survation, found 77% of the public want more of their taxes spent locally, rather than elsewhere.

There now appears to be a consensus amongst Government that the UK needs a new industrial strategy with national infrastructure projects at the heart of it. However, what is really needed is for local government to be recognised as the key to driving a localised industrial strategy, and given the powers and funding to deliver it. One that can draw in investment and stimulate local growth, which will have an immediate impact now, rather than in fifteen years time.

Devolution to date has been about individual authorities combining and going to Government asking for funding to undertake initiatives that are ‘unique’ to their area but in reality when you examine many of the Combined Authority Orders there are common themes running throughout. So is it really necessary to painstakingly go through the process of putting these together and then spend months negotiating back and forth with civil servants on the detail? Is it not time for the sector to get together, as a whole, and ask Government for a devolution package around local industrial strategies, including borrowing powers for housing, transport and roads infrastructure, employability and skills development?

In the current climate of uncertainty we may just find a Government that is willing to listen to creative solutions to problems, which they are struggling to find answers for.

Paul O’Brien is Chief Executive of APSE (the Association for Public Service Excellence) and a member of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity

International Seminar on Social Movements

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In this post, Mercè Cortina-Oriol reports back the seminar on Social Movements organised by the University of Girona and Fundación Betiko.

The past 24tisrael_social_justice_protests_rabin_square_tel_aviv_29_october_2011h and 25th of November took place in Girona (Catalonia) the 1st International Seminar on Social Movements co-organized by the Area of Political Science of the University of Girona and the Betiko Foundation.

The aim of the seminar was to address the fields of social movements and collective action in the current political, social and economic context. More specifically, the framing question of the seminar was to what extent the economic and political changes of recent times, mainly -but not only- in Europe, are giving rise to new forms of collective action and social movements whose contents, identities, and resources differ from those the previous, conventional ones.

The seminar was an outstanding opportunity to congregate academics such as Bob Jessop, Jonathan Davies, Donatella Della Porta, Salvador Martí and Joan Subirats among others; political and institutional actors coming from the background of the social movements such as Miguel Urbán (Member of the European Parliament for Podemos), Xulio Ferreiro (City Mayor of A Coruña), Nacho Murgui (Deputy Mayor of Madrid City Council), Jordi Bonet (responsible for communication at Barcelona City Council), and Ricard Vilaregut (Chief Executive from Badalona City Council) among others; and activist from different European countries. The event was structured through four different sessions, each of them aiming to reflect on a particular topic: the challenges of social movements in a new era; mobilisation in the global world; from protest to institutions; and, the activist in power: has anything changed?

The seminar posited relevant questions and inspiring answers and examples around the new processes of mobilisation and the challenges for both the social movements and the new political organisations that emerged from them. Along two days, the debates brought up consistent questions with the research agenda of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity (CURA) such as the processes of emergence of new expressions of resistance, the conditions for their emergence or for their absence, the forms that these new expressions adopt, the limits or capabilities of local governments to face the political and economic order and the imposed austerity policies, the possibilities for the development of alternatives to crisis and austerity from the local sphere, and the challenges for democracy in a context of crisis. The organisers we will soon compile and publish the interventions of the seminar. Nevertheless, and despite the relevance of all the debates, in this post I will summarise briefly those more connected with CURA’s research interests.

One of the central sessions in the seminar focused on the structural conditions for social movements and other forms of response and resistance in the new era. Professor Bob Jessop, from Lancaster University, opened the debate. In his intervention, he contemplated the threats to democracy that the current crisis brought along and contextualised the challenges of current social movements. Throughout his presentation, he stressed the need for a better understanding of the relation between the State and the capital, and the analytical opportunity that the comprehension of the State as a social relation opens for it.

In the discussion, Mercè Cortina-Oriol, from the University of the Basque Country and CURA fellow, stressed the need for examining the implication of the social in the processes of neoliberalisation and the risks of assuming the disruptive character of the social. After Cortina-Oriol, Professor Jonathan Davies, from the De Montfort University and Director of CURA, focused on the role and the capacities of both the local government and the social to respond to the challenges that austerity policies bring along. He underlined the disjuncture between normality and crisis, and the problem of assuming austerity as part of the normality. From a more theoretical approach, Carlos Prieto, from the MNCARS, defended the need for the emergence of a new political subject. Throughout his intervention, he questioned the class compromise as a transformative articulating element. For his part, Marco Aparicio, from the University of Girona, talked about the complexity of the power structures and the progressive hollowing out of the traditional spaces of decision-making. He also stressed the relevance of the discursive dimension in the processes of mobilisation, and the importance of defending social, political and economic rights.

A second debate focused on the new forms of resistance and their challenges. Donatella Della Porta, from the Scuola Normale Superiore of Firenze, opened the debate. The discussion revolved around the new processes of mobilisation since the economic crash in 2008. Della Porta presented the results of her recent research on the new cycle of mobilisation in the context of austerity, expressing the need for rethinking the social movements in times of crisis. In a context of diminished confidence in the institutions and an increased sense of grievances, she identifies new processes of identity formation and new forms of mobilisation. Comparing these with previous cycles, she observes forms of collective action that are more open and plural, where individual citizens have more space and chances to participate, and where consensus gains prominence over the logic of the delegation.

Some of the points highlighted in this regard were the tragedy that supposes the fact that critical networks often go behind those that defend the status quo, and the performative dimension of the responses to the austerity as a way of generating alternatives. This last question, addressed by Leandro Minuchin, from the University of Manchester, posit the potentialities of self-managed initiatives and solidarity networks in action for the provision of services in a context of austerity and social emergency from a communitarian basis.

Another point in this regard was the need for stressing the links among social movements, social initiatives, citizens and new alternative governments. This idea was closely related to a third central debate: the challenges for the new local governments for building alternatives to austerity. Joan Subirats framed this discussion focusing his analysis on the impact achieved by emerging parties, evaluating the case of the Barcelona City Council. He underlined the challenges of new formations such as Barcelona en Comú, a formation that, coming from a process of mobilisation, managed to win the municipal elections in 2015. Subirats highlighted the need to strengthen the sovereignties of proximity and the ability to promote popular construction from the commons, without falling into processes of systematic re-municipalisation. Instead, he advocated for searching different possible options that range from the traditional public service to the idea of co-production to ensure the universal delivery of quality services.

Adding to the third debate, the interventions by new institutional representatives bringing out the contradictions when passing from the street to the Mayor’s Office, the limitations of the institutional strategy, and the difficulties that entail the relationship with other levels of the State Administration. Other questions were related to the need to settle the political decision processes with what we could call a new type of civil servants and the need to train new officers while coexisting with the previous ones. For his part, Ricard Vilaregut brought up the limits that these new governments have at the time of breaking with the inherit clientelistic relationship that the previous governments had with some social organisations and private entities. Finally, Ismael Blanco, from the Autonomous University of Barcelona, insisted on the need for these new formations to carry out flagship policies in order to give direction and symbolic power to these new local governments.

The seminar provided an open space for actors from different background to share their experiences and perspectives, and proved the need for a common space of reflexion to move forward in the field of the alternative ways of governance under austerity.

Dr Mercè Cortina-Oriol is postdoctoral researcher of the Basque Government and CURA fellow. Form January 2017 she will be an Early Career Academic Fellow in the Department of Politics and Public Policy at the DMU.

Austerity in time and space: the case of Germany

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germany-96590_960_720In today’s post Felix Wiegand, Tino Petzold and Prof. Bernd Belina argue that while austerity policies have often been implemented as part of a short-term, often authoritarian political offensive (a “shock strategy” as Naomi Kline put it) in (West) Germany this was carried out “piecemeal” over a thirty- to forty-year-time frame, which also included the subsequent adaptive and normalising effects. The authors discuss several important historic markers and dynamics to illustrate this process while emphasising the multi-scalar and spatially unequal nature of implementing austerity.

The history of austerity in (West) Germany, following the Allied victory over Nazi Germany, began during the first half of the 1970s as the Fordist development model started to come apart not just politically, socially and culturally, but in particular economically. Two decades of relative stability of German society and the “brief dream of never-ending prosperity” were followed by a cycle of economic crises that had reached its temporary high point in 1974/75. During the first years, the (West) German state reacted to the effects of the crisis with counter-cyclical fiscal and economic policies based on Keynesian ideas. However, a turn to austerity policies was soon after carried out – at a time when power relations in German society shifted and a “national state characterized by market competition” was created.

This was started by the social democratic-liberal government coalition led by Helmut Schmidt, German Chancellor from 1974 to 1982. During his first government policy statement on May 17, 1974, Schmidt announced a change to how government debt will be managed. He said that “[t]he Federal Government will use all constitutional and political measures at its disposal to their fullest extent in order to commit federal, state and local authorities to cost-cutting budgetary policies starting in 1975.” The following year’s Budgetary Structure Law substantively implemented this announcement by putting the Federal government on a restrictive fiscal path.

The budget situation of states and municipalities worsened during the subsequent years of deindustrialisation processes as a consequence of the crisis and because of tax law changes such as the elimination of the payroll tax in 1979. As the local state experienced a fiscal crisis, local political projects were established that combined cost-cutting measures with early types of entrepreneurial urban policies – events that put in motion the long-term transformation of urban politics.

Also on the federal level, the focus shifted to austerity and neo-liberal supply-side politics towards the end of the social democratic-liberal coalition government (“Budget Operation 82”) and in particular during the conservative-liberal governments under the leadership of Chancellor Helmut Kohl (1982-1998). In his first government policy statement, Kohl put fiscal policy at the center of the attack on the Keynesian welfare state consensus by announcing his vision of a “well-managed country through well-managed budgets.” During the 1980s, the German government consolidated the federal budget and lowered public spending – similarly to developments in the UK under Thatcher’s leadership, albeit without the same intensity of conflict with organised labor.

The unification of the two German states in 1990 opened a window of opportunity for continuing the policies of the 1980s.  On the one hand, the policies of the German transitional privatisation agency supported an enormous privatisation project for making formerly publicly owned East German companies competitive for the global market. On the other hand, expectations for a speedy global market integration of these now privatised companies led to the (neoliberal) decision to forego tax hikes for financing German unification. Instead, the government opted for not interfering in the market in hopes of covering the cost of unification by an economic upswing.

After it became obvious early on that these hopes would not materialise, the German government responded with a classic “failing forward”, in Peck’s terms, of neoliberal policies. The growing public debt increased the pressure on the government for limiting new borrowing. As a result, municipal “budget consolidation plans” became popular during this time. The Maastricht Treaty (1992) and the Stability and Growth Pact (1997) implemented similar policies on the European Union scale. The federal Savings, Consolidation and Growth Program (1993) aimed at cutbacks of around 35 billion Deutsche mark by slashing unemployment and social welfare payments by 1996. This policy was, however, only the beginning of a comprehensive reduction of welfare state services under the banner of budget consolidation characterized by a roll-back of the welfare state, cuts of public sector jobs and reduction of public investments.

There are similar connections between attempts at shrinking the welfare state and the policies of Chancellors Gerhard Schröder (1998-2005) and Angela Merkel (since 2005). Massive tax cuts during the social democratic-green coalition governments under Schröder’s leadership, adopted with the intention of improving the competitiveness of German companies, exacerbated the structural underfunding of the state. Under Merkel’s leadership, public debt continued to increase during the peak of the 2008-2009 financial and economic crisis, as bailout packages for failing and troubled financial institutions worth billions of euros and further tax cuts were adopted. At the same time, Germany introduced several constitutional regulations and mechanisms such as the balanced-budget amendment (2009), the European Fiscal Compact (2012) and municipal “budget consolidation programs.” The constitutional changes institutionalised the neoliberal ideal of a balanced budget on various scales and further limited the financial scope of public expenditures. In recent years, this politics of constitutional austerity has been reflected, for example, in the German government’s 2010 austerity package, in public service staff reductions and inadequate compensation levels for state and municipal employees and – despite some concessions regarding social spending – in a new round of municipal cost-cutting measures.

The diverse nature of the individual measures enacted on the various scales of the state shows the significance of the spatial dimension in the process of implementing austerity in the Federal Republic of Germany. On the one hand, financial burdens that mainly arise from the delivery of welfare and public services, which have been funded through Germany’s federal system, have increasingly been shifted to lower levels of government – a classic scalar dumping. German states such as Bremen and the Saarland as well as many municipalities in the former industrial heartland have experienced the full brunt of de-industrialisation processes – in addition to the limited opportunities of income generation and the negative repercussions of tax cuts on government revenues. This has left many levels of government exposed to a form of structural underfunding and has established austerity as the norm even in the absence of cyclical crises. It becomes apparent that the spatial hierarchy within Germany’s government system has been used on a regular basis for imposing specific budgetary consolidation requirements and austerity policies onto subordinate levels of government – often against their will and beyond their capabilities. This practice has taken on a new quality with the institutionalised balanced-budget regulations that have been introduced at all levels of government since the 1990s and in particular after the 2008-2009 financial crisis. The scalar linking and reinforcing of the individual mechanisms and policies across various government levels has created a tightly laced corset of austerity in Germany.

In a sense, all levels of government are impacted by austerity. A geographic perspective, however, shows that austerity’s tangible effects and the remaining room for action are unequally distributed across Germany. The local scale suffers the most from austerity. Within the federal government structure, municipalities are the lowest level of the spatial hierarchy and possess, despite their constitutional right to home rule, particularly little room for action. Especially (larger) cities are the focal points where public service agencies and poorer as well as marginalised populations are spatially concentrated. Cost-cutting measures are directly experienced by urban residents on a day-to-day basis and, more often than not, lead to an extensive crisis of social reproduction. As a result, austerity is hurting municipalities and, in particular, cities the most – although the extent differs from city to city and from municipality to municipality. The politics of austerity has affected first and foremost economically disadvantaged municipalities during the last decades and has even further reduced the already few resources that are locally available for addressing economic and social needs. On the other hand, prosperous cities and municipalities have been in the position to further improve their locational qualities through low taxes or exciting social and cultural attractions. This is one of the main reasons for why spatial disparities as well as the level of socio-spatial inequality between (and also within) municipalities has further increased in Germany during the last decades.

The case of the Federal Republic of Germany illustrates that scholarly research on austerity must draw its attention to the big picture of multi-scalar and spatially unequal processes whenever possible. This insight should prompt not only researchers in academia, but also all those who envision and organise an emancipatory politics, to meet this challenge. The everyday politics of austerity  and the associated incremental implementation of normalisation and adjustment processes force us to develop emancipatory strategies based on everyday experiences. At the same time, however, the spatially unequal nature of austerity impedes the development of political projects that would be comprehensive and far-reaching enough for confronting the multi-scalar linkages of institutionalised austerity. But that’s another blog post.

Felix Wiegand is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Human Geography (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) and works on (urban) austerity, crises and the transformation of statehood; Tino Petzold is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of Human Geography (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) and works on multiscalar austerity in Germany; and Bernd Belina is professor at the Department of Human Geography (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) and works on critical geography, austerity and criminology.

Austerity, security and conflict

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policia-bogotaIn today’s post Alke Jenss reflects on the synergies between austerity, security and conflict in the Latin American context.

In the Americas austerity programmes are nothing new. Neither is the loss of sovereignty concerning economic and social policies. Think of Mexico’s debt crisis in 1982 which set off a range of structural adjustment plans focusing on spending cuts and privatization in the region, or think of Argentina in 2001, and the similarities to European crises and “crisis management” will jump to your eye. Or think of Chile, where the Pinochet dictatorship was representative of a liberalization laboratory deeply dependent on austerity measures and its repressive framing. Its imagery of necessities has carried on until today.

Now, there is talk of “intelligent austerity” supposedly needed to confront the structural reduction of growth in the region, based on the “end of the super cycle of raw commodities” (CEPAL). “Intelligent austerity” is supposed to avoid excessive cuts that would affect growth and thus taxes. The UN Economic Commission on Latin America (CEPAL) has warned that the cuts in (public) investment could lead to exactly that. So, austerity is once again on the table in Latin America.

One interesting example for renewed budgetary restraints on the national and the municipal level, considering the fall of commodity prices, is Colombia where one must ask what implications austerity politics has for the current peace process between the government and guerrillas. Three points can be made:

Firstly, the peace process hasn’t affected austerity measures even though original causes of the conflict have likely been exacerbated by cuts to public spending (extreme inequality, rural isolation, violent appropriation of land, missing life perspectives). Because of the fall of commodity prices of raw materials so central to Colombian the export structure, the cabinet has agreed to reduce the investment side of the national budget by 10 %. To combat the fiscal deficit is its central concern, especially since a fiscal balance-regulation was introduced in 2011; the Banco de la República’s high interest rates focus on inflation control. In 2016, the Santos government also tried to cut running costs by introducing an “Austerity Plan” for its own public administration personnel.

Secondly, austerity measures have not seriously undermined the exorbitant security budget. The armed conflict, interestingly enough, has never been presented as the costly undertaking it is, even though the expansion of the military budget between 2002 and 2015 in absolute terms is diametrically opposed to austerity – if you took the latter literally. The internal defence budget alone has revolved around 9 billion Euros since 2012 which are fed into the military fighting of guerrillas annually. Additionally one might consider costs of infrastructure damage. This makes it far more costly to maintain the war than to end it, even though the allegedly high payments to demobilized guerrillas were one point used by those opposing the peace deal subjected to referendum in October 2016. With this and other arguments focusing on the threats that FARC fighters represent to parts of society, the campaign for a ‘no’ vote succeeded . However the campaign leader, Álvaro Uribe, never mentioned that during his government term demobilized paramilitaries formerly involved in illegal economy were awarded ample support for setting up legal businesses.

Third, the politics of austerity deeply embedded in Colombian politics affect the chances for what we might call “sustainable” peace entwined with social justice. A transformative idea of peace which by definition encompasses social justice is hardly possible with an economic austerity policies, with so many people earning only minimum wage or being in long-term displacement with no realistic perspective to return to their villages. It is remarkable enough that the FARC guerrilla agreed to the peace process on the terms that the economic model as such would not be put under scrutiny. The agreements on agrarian reform might be far reaching but in a context favouring large-scale export focussed agrarian industries, where smaller producers under pressure and public investment is cut, reality will rather cement the extreme rural inequality co-produced by decades of forced displacement and violence directed at grassroots campesino movements.

The fourth point is relevant beyond the context of the Colombian conflict. It’s the punitive take on poverty that represents austerity policies’ flip side in Latin America. It will likely persist even if the peace deal is realized with some modifications due to the referendum: prison populations have grown excessively in the Americas (see the World Prison Brief), i.e. from 126/100.000 inhabitants in 2003 to 231 in 2014 in Colombia or from 156/100.000 inhabitants in 2003 to 214/100.000 inhabitants in 2014 in Mexico. Mexico is another fundamental example where the narratives of security and austerity feed into each other in simbiosis, yet affect only parts of the highly stratified society, while some, close enough to transnational capital flows and political, boast their cars and mansions on social media. It seems quite ironic that often, the latter have been union leaders on the one hand and sons and daughters of those entrepreneurs at least bordering on illegal economy with their negocios.

As UNDP reports for the region confirm, most inmates however, complemented meagre income with what is now called narcomenudeo (small scale selling of drugs) or committed crimes such as theft or robbery. They, as the clients consuming the by-products of the drug economy, seem to sit on the lowest steps of the social classification ladder. What role do these segments of population play for society in countries such as Colombia or Mexico? They fill in the large segment of low-skilled, informal and badly paid jobs whose access to social policies is worse than ever after historical structural adjustment has conflated already selective social security programs. The gruesome numbers of police killings and disappearances underline that these social sectors are denied the most basic rights based on class and racial classifications. Austerity and punitive measures are closely linked and reinforce each other. Arguments against a raise in minimum wage are usually based on austerity and the competitive advantages narrative. But as increases in minimum wage would mostly go into consumption this might even have positive effects on domestic demand. It would break the assumed linkage between reduced spending and more growth. As things stand, they provide a growing social base for illegal economy.

Security discourses in turn legitimize policies which leave out social questions or subsume them under a theme of threat. How this relation of austerity and the production of insecurity for parts of society plays out can be observed in contemporary Latin American.

Alke Jenss is a researcher and lecturer at Bielefeld University, Germany and has worked on insecurity and the state in Latin America.

Heathrow expansion: Six reasons why it should be seen as a failure of government

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2000px-heathrow_airport_map_with_third_runway-svgIn today’s post Steven Griggs and David Howarth outline six reasons why the decision to build a third runway at Heathrow airport represents a failure of government, that will be hotly contested and continue to generate controversy well into the future.

In his statement announcing the UK government’s decision to support a third runway at Heathrow, the transport secretary Chris Grayling said that the decision was ‘good for Britain’ and that the new proposals were ‘best for our future, and best for the whole country and its regions.’ The ‘truly momentous’ decision to expand Heathrow, it is claimed, will improve the UK’s connections with the rest of the world, while increasing international trade and creating jobs.

Most business leaders and unions welcomed the long-anticipated decision, stressing its vital role in stimulating economic growth, especially in a post-Brexit world. Politicians across the divide, apart from the Greens and Liberal Democrats, rallied to support the government. Ominously though, Zac Goldsmith resigned his Richmond Park seat and collective cabinet responsibility has been loosened to accommodate dissenting voices, most notably Boris Johnson and Justine Greening. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell remain firmly opposed to expansion, though once again they stand opposed to most of their parliamentary party.

There is no question that more airport capacity at Heathrow and Gatwick is demanded by powerful forces and vested interests. The airports are running at 98% of their capacity, and the demand for more flights shows little sign of waning. For many commentators, economic growth and global connectivity will no doubt be fuelled by the expansion of the UK’s only hub airport, though precise levels are disputed.

But once the dust has settled, and the flag-waving and trumpeting ended, what are we to make of the decision? Is this truly a triumph of strong leadership, an end to ‘dithering’ and the confident action of a government of ‘builders’ committed to ensuring Britain’s future? Perhaps a little less spin and a little more caution would not go amiss. In reality, the May government’s support for Heathrow expansion is the outcome of a series of government failures and policy reversals, which is likely to end in tears. Here are six reasons why.

First, the belated decision to expand Heathrow is a failure of political leadership. It represents the inability of the Coalition government to keep to the line agreed in May 2010, when it declared a moratorium on Heathrow expansion. But the Conservative government has chosen not to stick with David Cameron’s ‘No ifs, no buts’ promise that there would be no new runway at Heathrow. Instead, appearing to buckle against an intense pro-expansion campaign led by business, supporters of Heathrow and London First, the Coalition agreed in 2012 to set up the Airports Commission and thus to reopen the case for more expansion. Indeed, the terms of reference of the Commission directed Sir Howard Davies to examine where the new expansion should be – Gatwick, Heathrow or even “Boris Island” – and not whether there should be expansion in the South-East of England at all. Finally, the aviation industry’s demand for hub capacity made it difficult to advance any serious consideration of spreading expansion across all London airports; not just Heathrow, but Gatwick and Stansted, as well as regional airports.

But, secondly, the Davies Commission failed to deliver ‘an evidence-based consensus’, which it was hoped would take the politics out of this controversial decision. If anything, the conflicts between different airports, between airports and their surrounding communities, amongst politicians (within and across parties, and between tiers of government), and between many environmental groups and business representatives, has intensified and looks certain to continue.

And, thirdly, seen in a longer historical perspective, it is the failure to recognise that the wrong decision was made to build Heathrow in the 1940s. Because it’s in the wrong geographical location, causing untold misery and suffering of noise pollution for all those residents and households languishing under its flightpaths, further expansion can only exacerbate such detrimental effects. In fact, the decision might be seen as a failure of path dependency and institutional inertia, which goes to the heart of the British state and system of government.

Here one only has to think of the Roskill Commission inquiry into the third airport at London in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the delays surrounding the inquiry into Heathrow’s planned fifth terminal. Roskill’s findings were ignored by government in favour of a new airport at Maplin, only for government to abandon this plan, when the 1973 oil crisis hit the aviation industry and local MPs threatened to rebel. The upshot has been a reliance on the production and dissemination of a ‘fantasmatic’, have-your-cake-and-eat-it narrative – we can have airport expansion and environmental protection – in which the horrific threat of not acting, and thus falling behind our foreign competitors, is bolstered by the beatific prospect of adding billions to the British economy, if and when the new runway is actually built.

A fourth failure of the new scheme relates to the problem of air quality, which is the cause of major respiratory problems and premature deaths. The problem of meeting legally binding air quality targets in London (and surrounding areas) was not properly addressed by the Davies Commission and government plans to meet its 2030 air quality targets are highly contested, as the recent court case by legal campaigners, Client-Earth, goes to show. The idea that a reduction of car emissions in and around the airport, for example, will enable the expansion plans to meet the required air pollution targets looks wildly optimistic.

Fifthly, and crucially, the plans constitute a failure to tackle the problem of climate change. The anti-expansion coalition that successfully challenged New Labour’s 2003 Air Transport White Paper, which promised major airport expansion, put the problem of aircraft emissions and our international commitments to curb climate change at the centre of their campaign. Indeed, in setting out a broad consultation exercise about airport capacity in March 2011, the then Secretary of State for Transport, Philip Hammond, dismissed the previous thinking as ‘out of date because it fails to give sufficient weight to the challenge of climate change’. The previous Labour government had ‘got the balance [between environmental protection and expansion] wrong.’ Yet once again environmental considerations have been shoved into the background, both by the Airports commission and the wider public debate that has ensued.

A final and equally telling problem is that in all likelihood the plans will end in another disappointing failure to deliver a mega infrastructure project on time and within costs. Legal challenges by councils and other affected parties, the precise financing of the airport proposals – who, for example, will pay for the required surface infrastructures needed to ensure its feasibility? – coupled, of course, with the inevitable political challenges will invariably delay the implementation of plans – if it happens at all.

Already local councils are preparing to review the decisions and planning procedures in the courts, while local resident groups and direct action campaigners such as Plane Stupid are sharpening their preferred tools of protest. Indeed, we can expect the third runway at Heathrow to become a symbolic battle for environmental campaigners. Heathrow could well up being the next Notre-Dame-des-Landes, the proposed new international airport outside Nantes which continues to attract widespread criticism and protest across the whole of France and Europe.

Steven Griggs is Professor of Public Policy at De Montfort University and a core member of CURA. David Howarth is Professor in Social and Political Theory at the University of Essex

 

Why network governance won’t stop climate change

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global_climate_change

In today’s post Professor Jonathan Davies draws on Gramscian theory to argue that network governance ideology fails to engage with real power structures, and that state-society partnerships cannot stop climate change. This post was originally published on the Innovations in Climate Governance (INOGOV) website and republished with their permission

The idea of “network governance” began to grip academics and policy makers as part of the turn to the “third way” in the 1990s. Enthusiasm for networks arose from a particularly influential reading of social change.  Confronted by dramatic processes of globalisation and de-traditionalisation, often associated with the passing of modernity, many thinkers reasoned that states could no longer exercise sovereign power and instead have to involve a multitude of other actors to govern successfully.  Governing systems, in other words, have to become de-centred, or polycentric.  As INOGOV research demonstrates, climate change governance has been strongly influenced by these ideas.

At the same time, with the decline of trade unionism in many countries, the language of “working class” disappeared from mainstream political discourse, to be replaced by “civil society”.  Civil society with its networks of voluntary and community organisations is a far more palatable partner for neoliberalising states than the unions. It can be incorporated into state projects, and provide links into dispossessed and alienated communities that are abandoning the institutions of representative democracy. Working through “civil society”, state-organised networks could focus on the practical business of problem solving within the parameters of neoliberalism: trying to balance competitiveness with social cohesion, while setting aside the structural foundations of inequality and injustice. Urban living labs seeking to innovate around smart cities and sustainability are a good example of this ideology in practice.  For the most idealistic thinkers, network governance ushers in a new, cooperative and communicative form of sociability capable of replacing the crumbling hierarchical edifice of modernity.

Much of my work has been concerned with the critique of this exaggerated and normatively charged theory of change (see [1], [2], [3], [4]). I argue that the idea of network governance as an “innovation” transforming the way we are governed is hopelessly idealistic. At best it is the vague premonition of a post-capitalist society incubating within the bowels of a nasty, authoritarian neoliberal conjuncture.  There are multiple reasons for skepticism about “network governance”.  First, there is nothing new about it.  Any brief survey of early 20th century literatures show that the kinds of institutions considered “innovative” by network enthusiasts have been around for a very long time. Second, when studied close-up, “networks” look very much like the “hierarchies” they are supposed to replace.  Participatory networks, like urban living labs, tend to be cosmetic.  States and corporations are by far the biggest drivers of climate change, and they determine how it is governed through duplicitous practices like carbon trading.  Moreover, networks entrench inequalities of wealth and power – the very reason they are attractive to elites.  They leave the dispossessions and human disasters of climate change untouched and require us to think about injustice in de-politicized vernaculars of “innovation”, “adaptivity”, “inclusion” and “sustainability”.  They promise relentless “change”, but always within the parameters of the present.  Like a washing machine, we are in continuous motion but never move.

To try and put network governance in its place, and situate it in a better understanding of historical continuity and change, I turned to the work of Italian revolutionary, Antonio Gramsci (see [1], [2]).  Gramsci developed a theory of politics, in which state and civil society are deeply enmeshed.  He argued that the coercive and consensus-building tactics and strategies of government play out on the terrain of civil society.  Gramsci’s definition of civil society was much broader than the rather benign world of voluntary organisations depicted in democratic theory.  He included the media and education systems, while today’s Gramscian scholars also point to the power of charitable foundations. Much of what we call “civil society” is either closely linked to corporations and the state, or depends on them for donations, grants and contracts.  Swathes of civil society are hierarchical, predatory and conservative. Gramsci called this deep web of entanglements and inter-dependencies “the integral state”, Lo Stato Integrale.  He argued that government “educates” civil society through a myriad of coercive and consensus-building techniques.  When states are threatened with revolution, he said, a well-organised civil society turns out to be their best protection.

Studied through the lens of the integral state, what we call “network governance” looks very conventional and not at all “innovative”.  States may be shedding their postwar welfare and redistributive functions, but its coercive functions have not disappeared.  On the contrary, they are coming to the fore. When we look at the anatomy of state-organised governing networks, we find coercive managerialism everywhere.  In participatory mechanisms state managers control agendas, while those seeking to politicize an issue are often quickly marginalized.  Informal networks, on the other hand, reinforce the power of governing elites and corporate interests, which dominate climate change decisions.  Under austerity, participatory mechanisms are either set aside or tasked with advising on where the state should make its cuts. Even the much-vaunted participatory budgeting mechanisms of Latin America are widely recognized to be in decline.  And, in hindsight, they didn’t exercise that much control over the governing apparatus to start with.

The point is not that public participation is bad, or that polycentric systems do not exist in some circumstances.  It is rather that branding unremarkable practices as new, radical or innovative can be dangerous because it conceals deep continuities and asymmetries in the structures of power.  In the age of authoritarian neoliberalism, network governance is little more than a sticking plaster for the gaping wounds of late capitalism, of which climate change is among the worst.

Jonathan S. Davies is Professor of Critical Policy Studies and Director of the Centre for Urban Research on Austerity at De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

The hollowness of GDP: The case of Ireland

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In today’s post Dr Daniel Bailey and Professor John Barry argue that Ireland’s GDP statistics highlight the disconnect between ‘official’ growth and the real economy, and raise questions about the nature of growth itself. This post was originally published by SPERI Comment and republished with their permission.

In the last decade, the prominence afforded to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in political discourse has increasingly been challenged by a series of social and environmental critiques. These critiques – made by the likes of Wilkinson and Pickett, the Stiglitz Commission, theILO, and the New Economics Foundation – argued that policy-making ought to be sensitised to alternative metrics better suited to the socio-economic and ecological conditions of the present day. Recent GDP announcements in Ireland have only added to the contestations surrounding the political centrality of economic growth in political economy.

The credibility of the GDP statistic in Ireland was strained when the Central Statistics Office (CSO) announced that its growth rate for 2015 was 26.3%; far superior to any of the figures recorded during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ years of the 2000s. This figure was met with widespread ridicule, including by Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman who described it disparagingly as ‘Leprechaun Economics’.

The drivers of this growth spurt, according to official sources, were a series of ‘inversions’ whereby companies re-locate their official headquarters to Ireland, where only a minority of their business operations take place, in order to benefit from subjecting their profits to Ireland’s low corporation tax rate. This has included companies re-structuring in such a way that sees them legally transfers its assets or its intellectual property to Ireland despite the country only fleetingly hosting the economic activity of these companies. As a consequence, there was a simultaneous boost in net exports in 2015 as these multinational companies contracted non-Irish companies to carry out certain operations.  Such volatility in the GDP numbers is facilitated by the small and open nature of the Irish economy and its reliance on foreign direct investment, and by its 12.5% corporation tax rate which attracts multinational corporations looking for a foothold in the Eurozone.  The Irish Times have reported that Apple – whose exact tax arrangements with Ireland have been under some scrutiny recently – was one company responsible for the rise in Ireland’s capital stock, as well as AerCap in the aircraft-leasing sector. In addition, the robust defence of Ireland’s corporate tax arrangements by the current Irish government, and most of the opposition in the Irish Dáil (parliament), is telling and revealing in demonstrating the alliance and common interests between global corporations and nation-states such as Ireland.

In other words, although Ireland’s 2015 growth rate has some impact on governmental income and the debt-to-GDP ratio, it has only a diminishing connection to the performance of the ‘core economy’ and the reduction of unemployment. Prime Minister Enda Kenny, lost his parliamentary majority in February’s General Election not least because his appeal to the electorate on the campaign trail to ‘keep the recovery going’ was met with a response of: ‘what recovery?’.  The eroding credibility and meaning of the GDP statistic in Ireland was evident in such a debate, and the subsequent data released by the CSO will only further these perceptions.

The susceptibility of the Irish economic model to accountancy practices such as those seen in the ‘inversion’ strategies above mean that further volatility and the financial risks associated with it cannot be ruled out. Indeed, the 2016 economic data thus far forms an ironic postscript to the 2015 data as it shows that the economy has contracted so far this year. The volatility of the GDP measurement – an inherent component of the internationalised Irish economic strategy – means that it is highly problematic for either public spending or deficit reduction to be planned reliably on the basis of growth projections.  The contraction, however, tells us similarly little about economic trends such as the unemployment rate which have become increasingly disconnected from GDP levels; just as GDP has become disconnected from well-being, economic security or global poverty reduction.

Following Tom Healy, the methodological nationalism of GDP is disguising the existence of two economies operating within Ireland today. One is a very high-productivity, relatively low-labour intensive, export orientated and highly profitable economy.  The other is a low-productivity, high-labour intensive, domestically orientated and relatively less profitable economy.  Clearly this is a stylised depiction, but it does capture the misleading character of ‘single country’ and undifferentiated analyses of the ‘recovery’.

Therefore, alongside the credibility or usefulness of GDP we have to ask a connected but larger and more crucial question for modern political economy: who wants ‘jobless economic growth’? Posing the idea that GDP growth can be compatible with continuing joblessness does open up a possibility of delegitimising GDP growth.  This is based on the idea that for most people their support for ‘economic growth’ is not based on corporate profit-making or reducing government debt-to-GDP ratios, but based on strategies for growth producing jobs, and ideally high-paying, good quality jobs at that.

This is not a problem unique to Ireland. To differing extents, capital flows in many countries distorts the original premise of its ascension in political discourse.  The increasing mismatch between economic structures and the conventional statistical framework developed more than 70 years ago has recently prompted Diane Coyle to suggest that the ‘path dependency’ of the latter is now threatened more than ever by a coalition of interests seeking to develop alternative indicators more suited to the ecological, economic and societal challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.

Ireland, however, is a particularly extreme example of GDP serving an increasingly misleading and irrelevant measurement not only wellbeing, but also for the wealth of the nation. As such, the GDP growth figure has rarely been as ethereal or mythical as it is in Ireland today. But more than that, the hollowness of the statistic for the lives of the Irish people means that it is even more important for Ireland to develop a notion of national prosperity or success which goes far beyond conventional understandings of economic growth.  If ‘jobless economic growth’ is not working, can we begin to move our political economy thinking beyond GDP growth to envisage political economies of job rich non-economic growth?  If the Irish experience of ‘jobless growth’ is a discredited form of ‘Leprechaun economics’ (which should really perhaps be called ‘corporate profit shifting economics’), what do we put in its place in a ‘post-growth’ political economy?

Dr Dan Bailey is a Researcher as the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, and John Barry is Professor in Politics and International Studies at Queens University, Belfast.

Restricting immigration won’t pay for working people

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In today’s blog, guest bloggers from the New Economics Foundation (NEF) – Olivier Vardakoulias (Economist) and Marc Stears (CEO) – argue that restricting immigration  will not benefit workers in areas that voted in favour of Brexit. This post was originally published on NEF’s website – see here.

If we have learnt anything so far from party conference season, it is that free movement from the European Union has fewer and fewer supporters in mainstream politics.

When it comes to immigration, Brexit is becoming hard Brexit before our eyes.Politicians of all sides appear to believe the communities that voted to Leave the EU have legitimate concerns about immigration’s impact on their living standards.Immigration restrictions, it is suggested, will benefit working people, especially by significantly increasing their pay.

But this is not true. An increase in immigration restrictions would, in fact, do very little to benefit workers in these communities.

If you look at data from the counties of the UK, you see that there is no correlation between increases in immigration and decreases in real wages of less skilled occupations. And there’s no correlation either between increases in immigration and local unemployment rates.

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Source: CEP election analysis

In fact, we might go even further. Restrictions on free movement may actually reduce wages and workers’ standards.

Because we know from history that immigration doesn’t stop when it becomes harder. Just look at Mexico and the United States. If more EU nationals enter the UK undocumented, they will be working outside official channels, labour laws and the official minimum wage.

And workers who are granted a visa by their employer (the current process for migrants from outside the EU) will be at the mercy of that employer.

Companies will have the power to hire and fire migrants and withdraw their working permit at will, leaving migrant workers with an even weaker bargaining power over their wages and working conditions.

So ending free movement may in reality put domestic workers in a more unfavourable situation than they are in now.

Restricting immigration from the EU is a false panacea for communities who have struggled over the last decades.

Politicians of all parties would do well to avoid selling this snake oil of a solution to the working people of Britain.

Spanish Elections 26J: The Challenges for Unidos Podemos

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In this blog post Juan Carlos Monedero, co-founder of Podemos and Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, reflects on the results of the Spanish elections on the 26th June, and their significance for the development of a counter-hegemonic politics. The blog was originally written in Spanish and translated by CURA’s Dr Mercè Cortina Oriol. The original version is copied at the bottom of the article.

The regime crisis identified in Spain since 2008 and the emergence of new political parties on both the right (Ciudadanos) and the left (Unidos Podemos) are a sign of a process that affects the entire European Union. The fight against the regime of 1978 (the year of the Spanish Constitution) that Unidos Podemos represents transcends the two poles that have  epitomized Spanish (and European) politics: on the one hand, those who want to change the postwar social contract taking the neoliberal precepts and the frame of adjustment and competitiveness (the right, the extreme right and, in a shameful fashion, the socialist international) and on the other, those who want to return to the situation prior to 2008. The original space for Podemos consists, beyond these poles, in finding an answer to the crisis of civilisation that the world is facing.

The inability of the neoliberal model in aggregating citizen demands while accomplishing the mandates of capitalist accumulation turns into a growing public disaffection, and a challenge to the authorization that the governments receive from elections. This inability is added to three inherent aspects of the neoliberal model: the rise of individualist values and the criticism of “the political”; the role of corruption, which acts in this deregulated model as a kind of lubricating system; and the supranational forms of management of global capitalism (which William I. Robinson has called the emerging transnational state). Institutional corruption exacerbates the idea of inequality and the distancing between citizens and political elites. The “transnational state”, agent of the logic of adjustments in the social state -the role that Troika is representing-, leads to a claim for greater national sovereignty. Hence the “natural” way out of the neoliberal crisis is some form of populism, that is, a challenge to the system of political representation and an appeal to the people as the constituent subject that demands the recovery of the social contract or the signing of a new one, more inclusive, one. That context explains in the EU the rise of the extreme right in many EU countries, the Brexit, as well as the 15-M movement in Spain or “Reclaim the Street” in Portugal. The difference is that in Spain, 15-M posed a story that appealed to the own diagnosis of the left –pointing at the political and economic elites as responsible of the crisis and set in motion processes that chased away xenophobia. This is where Podemos was born. And its electoral fate is closely linked to the management of that past.

The general elections in December 2015 were the verification of the breakdown of bipartisanship in Spain. The traditional transfer of votes between the rightwing (PP) and leftwing (PSOE) hegemonic parties no longer worked, and a new force, Podemos, was just 300,000 votes far from the Socialists. On the right, the emergence of Ciudadanos remained in fourth place. It failed to meet electoral expectations and was thus not able to carry out the function it was born to – to serve as a crutch to the two main parties of the regime of 1978. The novelty of the elections resulted in an institutional consternation. The inability to form a government called for new elections in June 2016. The bulk of the political discourse of all parties in the campaign focused on blaming the other formations for the need for new elections. The PP presented itself as the party of order and the recovery of a peaceful past against the current uncertainties. The PSOE returned to a leftist discourse that it had left behind when it ruled the country and reformed Article 135 of the Constitution to prioritise debt repayment over social spending. All the electoral polls were indicating that PSOE would be overtaken by Unidos Podemos, the alliance between Podemos and Izquierda Unida (the latter had won in the December election a million votes and just two seats[1], which facilitated the alliance and a replacement of its general secretariat by a younger person). The prospect of overtaking the PSOE, led to a conservative electoral campaign, amicable with the Socialist Party and aimed at retaining those votes that, supposedly, Unidos Podemos would take from the PSOE. The result, however, was not as expected. A million votes were lost between December and June, far from overtaking the PSOE who ended celebrating not having been relegated to the third place, despite achieving the worst result in their history.

Why did Unidos Podemos lose one million votes? There are several reasons. With the December elections and the failure to form a government, the “novelty factor” withered for much of the electorate. Many decided to return to abstention. Another factor was the withdrawal of the support by some Izquierda Unida voters (we could talk about more than 300,000 voters that abstained or even went to the PSOE), who were angered because of a poorly explained alliance that placed their leader in an unattractive place (the fifth in Madrid’s electoral circumscription[2]).  The withdrawal of the support by these voters might also be explained by the memory of denigrations when unity between Podemos and Izquierda Unida was not possible in the December elections, as well as the ideological moderation of the alliance in an attempt to please the social-democratic voter.

This moderation in the discourse of Unidos Podemos even led Pablo Iglesias to state that Zapatero, PSOE’s President of the Spanish Government from 2004 to 2011, had been the best President of Spain’s democratic era, despite the 15-M being born in opposition to the policies of Zapatero. Iglesias also defined himself as a social democrat. This is a moderate definition even for PSOE members, who declare themselves socialist. Finally, the six elections held during the two years that Podemos has existed, have led to exhaustion. In a context of continuous elections, the representative, media-oriented and hierarchical side of the party have prevailed, while leaving aside the more deliberative and horizontal side represented by “the circles”[3]. That is to say, the side that is more closely linked to the desire for change that the 15-M forged.

The difficulties in forming a government after the June elections re-emphasised the failure of bipartisanship, but also made it clear that the alternative needs more time than that marked by a naive belief in a “Blitzkrieg” fuelled by a regime crisis. Unidos Podemos has not yet resolved its ideological corpus, its territorial or its internal organisation. As long as Unidos Podemos leaves these problems unresolved it is not likely to be seen as potentially governing force that can deliver an alternative vision for the country. Following two years of continuous elections, it’s time to take a pause to look inward and think about how it can be a new-fangled political formation that responds to contemporary challenges such as the degradation of employment, the environmental crisis, the aging of population, the growing wars, consequent migrations, rising violence as well as social anomie in general. The old parties are not offering solutions here that are not worryingly reminiscent of the decade of the thirties of the last century.

[1] The difference between seats and votes is explained by the proportional system that defines the Electoral Law in Spain. The system is based on the D’Hondt Method in combination with a plurinominal circumscription model. (TN).

[2] The electoral system in Spain is based on a closed list model for each electoral circumscription. In Spain there are 52 circumscriptions for the case of the General Elections. (TN)

[3] “The circles” are the name that took the grassroots organizations within Podemos. These organizations take the form of local assemblies. (TN)

Juan Carlos Monedero is co-founder of Podemos and Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The blog was originally written in Spanish and translated by CURA’s Dr Mercè Cortina Oriol, with some help from Dr Adrian Bua. The original is copied in Spanish below.

La crisis de régimen que se identifica en España desde 2008, así como la irrupción de nuevas formaciones políticas tanto en la derecha -Ciudadanos- como en la izquierda -Unidos Podemos- son una señal de un proceso que afecta a toda la Unión Europea. La lucha que representa Unidos Podemos frente al régimen de 1978 (año de la Constitución) se coloca más allá de los dos polos que han resumido la política española (y europea): por un lado, los que quieren cambiar el contrato social de posguerra asumiendo los preceptos neoliberales y el marco de ajuste y competitividad (derecha, extrema derecha y, aunque de manera vergonzante, la internacional socialista) y por otro los que quieren regresar a la situación previa a 2008. El espacio original de Podemos consiste, más allá de estas impotencias, en encontrar una respuesta a la crisis de civilización que vive el mundo.

La incapacidad del modelo neoliberal de agregar demandas ciudadanas al tiempo que cumple con los mandatos de la acumulación capitalista se traduce, como es norma, en un crecimiento de la desafección ciudadana y una impugnación de la autorización para gobernar que reciben los gobiernos emanada de las elecciones. Esta incapacidad se suma a tres factores consustanciales al modelo: el auge de los valores Individualistas y la crítica a la “política”; el papel de la corrupción, que actúa en este modelo desrregulado como una suerte de lubricante del sistema; y las formas supranacionales de gestión del capitalismo global (lo que William I. Robinson ha llamado el emergente estado transnacional). La corrupción institucional exacerba la idea de desigualdad y el alejamiento de la ciudadanía respecto de las élites políticas. El “estado transnacional” agente de la lógica de los ajustes en el estado social -el papel que viene representando la Troika-, genera una reclamación de mayor soberanía nacional. De ahí que la salida “natural” a la crisis neoliberal sea alguna forma de populismo, esto es, una impugnación del sistema de representación política y una apelación al pueblo como sujeto constituyente que reclama la recuperación del contrato social o la firma de uno nuevo más inclusivo. Este marco es el que explica en la UE el auge de la extrema derecha o el Brexit, y también es el que da cuenta del movimiento 15-M en España o “Tomemos la calle” en Portugal. La diferencia estriba en que en España, el 15-M colocó un relato que apelaba al diagnóstico propio de la izquierda -culpaba a las élites políticas y económicas de la crisis- y puso en marcha procesos que ahuyentaron la xenofobia. De ahí es de donde nació Podemos. Y su suerte electoral está muy vinculada a la gestión que haga de ese pasado.

Las elecciones generales de diciembre de 2015 fueron la constatación de que el bipartidismo se había roto. El trasvase tradicional de votos entre el partido hegemónico de la derecha (PP) y el de la izquierda (PSOE) ya no funcionó y una nueva fuerza, Podemos, quedó apenas a 300.000 votos de los socialistas. Por la derecha, el surgimiento de Ciudadanos se quedó en una cuarta posición y lejos de las expectativas, por lo que no servía para lo que había nacido: servir de muleta a algunos de los dos grandes partidos del régimen de 1978. La novedad de las elecciones se tradujo en consternación Institucional. La incapacidad para formar gobierno convocó a nuevas elecciones en junio de 2016. El grueso del discurso político de todos los partidos en la campaña se centró en echar la culpa a las demás formaciones de la convocatoria de unas nuevas elecciones. El PP se ofrecía como el partido del orden y la recuperación de un pasado tranquilo frente a las incertidumbres. El PSOE regresaba al discurso izquierdista que abandonó cuando gobernó y reformó el artículo 135 de la Constitución para dar prioridad al pago de la deuda por encima del gasto social. Todas las encuestas señalaban el adelanto al PSOE por parte de Unidos Podemos (la alianza de Podemos e Izquierda Unida. Este último partido había obtenido en diciembre un millón de votos y solamente dos escaños, lo que facilitó la unión y un relevo en su secretaría general por una persona más joven), lo que llevó a una campaña electoral conservadora y amable con los socialistas dirigida a retener esos votos que, se suponía, se arrebataban al PSOE. El resultado, sin embargo, no fue el esperado, perdiendo respecto de las elecciones de diciembre un millón de votos y alejándose el “sorpasso” a los socialistas que, pese a obtener el peor resultado de su historia, celebraron como un triunfo no haber sido relegados al tercer puesto.

¿Por qué Unidos Podemos perdió un millón de votos? Las razones son varias. En las elecciones de diciembre se agotó para una parte del electorado el “factor novedad” de Podemos, que al no traducirse en gobierno decidieron regresar a la abstención. Fue importante la retirada de apoyo de una parte de los votantes de Izquierda Unida, enfadados por una alianza mal explicada que situaba a su líder en un lugar nada atractivo (el número cinco por Madrid). También influyó en estos sectores (podríamos hablar de más de 300.000 votos que se abstuvieron o votaron incluso al PSOE) la moderación ideológica a la búsqueda de contentar al votante socialdemócrata y la memoria de las descalificaciones cuando la unidad no fue posible en las elecciones de diciembre.

Esa moderación en el discurso de Unidos Podemos -Pablo Iglesias llegó a afirmar que Zapatero, del PSOE, había sido el mejor presidente de la democracia española, cuando el 15-M nació contra las políticas de Zapatero, o se definió como “socialdemócrata”, cuando esa definición es moderada incluso para los miembros del PSOE, que se definen como socialistas). Por último, seis elecciones en dos años -los de la existencia de Podemos- llevan al agotamiento, al tiempo que primaron la parte electoral, representativa, mediática y jerárquica del partido, que dejaba de lado la parte más deliberativo y horizontal que significan los círculos. Es decir, la más vinculada al deseo de cambio que marcó el 15-M.

Las dificultades para formar gobierno después de las elecciones de junio volvían a insistir en la quiebra del bipartidismo, pero también dejaban claro que la alternativa necesita más tiempo que el que marcaba una ingenua creencia en un Blitzkrieg alentado por la crisis del régimen. Unidos Podemos aún no ha resuelto ni su corpus ideológico ni su organización territorial ni su organización interna, y mientras que no cierre estos aspectos no parece probable que pueda ser vista como una fuerza de gobierno que porte una idea diferente de país.

Tras dos años de elección tras elección, le corresponde parar el balón, mirar hacia adentro y pensar cómo debe ser una formación política de nuevo cuño en el siglo XX que dé respuesta a la quiebra del mundo del trabajo, la crisis medioambiental, el envejecimiento de la población, las crecientes guerras y las consecuentes migraciones y aumento de la violencia y la anomia social. Aspectos para los que los viejos partidos no tienen solución que no recuerde inquietantemente a los años treinta del siglo pasado.

The Vulnerabilities of Local Government Liveability Services

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In today’s post, Paul O’Brien reports on the findings of recent research that highlights the dangers posed by changes in local government for the sustainability of basic ‘liveability’ services.

The past month has been a tumultuous one for British politics. Following the referendum result in favour of Brexit, we have a new government, led by Theresa May, who has set the need to tackle the problem of inequality and to develop an inclusive economy at the forefront of her policy agenda.

A crucial aspect of this will be to tackle a looming problem that the previous government’s fiscal policy set in motion regarding neighbourhood level ‘liveability’ services. Much of the previous government’s attention was focussed upon avoiding the ‘jaws of doom’ scenario, of rising demand and underfunding of health and social care. The recent 2% health and social care precept has eased some of the pain. However less than 5% of our local population will experience social care, compared to the vast majority of local residents that rely upon on our neighbourhood level ‘liveability’ services.

On a daily basis virtually all citizens will walk in a well-lit local street. Many will drive on local roads, take their children to play in a local park, or go for a swim in a council-run pool. Local businesses benefit from public realm within local high streets. Residents will experience refuse and recycling collections provided directly to their own homes.

It is the sheer volume of these liveability services, and how they impact on the lives of our local residents, that prompted APSE with the New Policy Institute (NPI) to explore the funding vulnerabilities of these services, when compared to the priority necessarily given to social care. Our research, published in May 2016, ‘Sustainable local government finance and liveable local areas: Can we survive to 2020?’ led by Dr Peter Kenway of NPI, makes for grim reading.

Whilst the headline figures suggest cuts of 0.5% for English authorities following the budget this is skewed when financial changes are factored into the equation. Despite the 2% adult social care precept, the impact of withdrawing revenue support grant, making councils reliant upon council tax and business rates for the near totality of their funding, opens up new questions as to how liveability services can be sustained in the longer term. Some may face a further 20% of cuts on top of those already made.

Our research found that there is now a clear and compelling case for local government to campaign openly for liveability and public realm services. It also raised the issue of council tax increases and begs the question ‘is it now time for council tax reform’? We also recognised that many local councils have taken an entrepreneurial approach in supporting liveability services through better use of income generation strategies. Many sell street-scene services, for example to retail developments. Others have cultivate strategies for income in parks from rock concerts to cafes to renewable energy. Many are engaging with residents to plug the gaps left in funding – but this will only go so far.

If we allow our neighbourhood based services to decline we will force up ancillary demand on other services. There is a net contribution from good neighbourhoods. As we battle declining public health we can ill-afford to lose the services which anchor good neighbourhoods, support the wellbeing of citizens, reduce crime and make our local areas better places to do business.

Tackling this looming crisis in liveability services should take centre stage if Theresa May’s government is going to follow through on delivering a more inclusive economy that works for all.

Paul O’Brien is chief executive of the Association for Public Service Excellence, a core member of CURA and a PhD candidate at the Department of Politics and Public Policy at De Montfort University