Ill Fares the Land (12 page)

What does it mean to those on the receiving end when everything from the local bus service to the regional parole officer are now part of some private company which measures their performance with exclusive reference to short-term profitability? In the first place, there is a negative welfare impact (to use the term of art). The chief shortcoming of the old public services was the restrictive regulations and facilities—one-size-fits-all—with which they were notoriously associated: Swedish alcohol outlets, British Railways cafes, unionized French welfare offices and so forth. But at least their provision was universal, and for good and ill they were regarded as a public responsibility.

The rise of enterprise culture has destroyed all that. It may suit a privatized telephone company to provide polite, automated call centers to attend to complaints (whereas under the old nationalized arrangements, complainants were under no illusions that anyone was listening); but nothing substantive improves. Moreover, a social service provided by a private company does not present itself as a collective good to which all citizens have a right. Unsurprisingly, there has been a sharp falling off in the number of people claiming benefits and services to which they are legally entitled.

The result is an eviscerated society. From the point of view of the person at the bottom—seeking unemployment pay, medical attention, social benefits or other officially mandated services—it is no longer to the state, the administration or the government that he or she instinctively turns. The service or benefit in question is now often ‘delivered’ by a private intermediary. As a consequence, the thick mesh of social interactions and public goods has been reduced to a minimum, with nothing except authority and obedience binding the citizen to the state.

This reduction of ‘society’ to a thin membrane of interactions between private individuals is presented today as the ambition of libertarians and free marketeers. But we should never forget that it was first and above all the dream of Jacobins, Bolsheviks and Nazis: if there is nothing that binds us together as a community or society, then we are utterly dependent upon the state. Governments that are too weak or discredited to act through their citizens are more likely to seek their ends by other means: by exhorting, cajoling, threatening and ultimately coercing people to obey them. The loss of social purpose articulated through public services actually
increases
the unrestrained powers of the over-mighty state.

There is nothing mysterious about this process: it was well described by Edmund Burke in his critique of the French Revolution. Any society, he wrote in
Reflections on the Revolution in France
, which destroys the fabric of its state, must soon be “disconnected into the dust and powder of individuality”. By eviscerating public services and reducing them to a network of farmed-out private providers, we have begun to dismantle the fabric of the state. As for the dust and powder of individuality: it resembles nothing so much as Hobbes’s war of all against all, in which life for many people has once again become solitary, poor and more than a little nasty.

—PERICLES

 

 

 

 

O
ne striking consequence of the disintegration of the public sector has been an increased difficulty in comprehending what we have in common with others. We are familiar with complaints about the ‘atomizing’ impact of the internet: if everyone selects gobbets of knowledge and information that interest them, but avoids exposure to anything else, we do indeed form global communities of elective affinity—while losing touch with the affinities of our neighbors.

In that case, what is it that binds us together? Students frequently tell me that they only know and care about a highly specialized subset of news items and public events. Some may read of environmental catastrophes and climate change. Others are taken up by national political debates but quite ignorant of foreign developments. In the past, thanks to the newspaper they browsed or the television reports they took in over dinner, they would at least have been ‘exposed’ to other matters. Today, such extraneous concerns are kept at bay.

This problem highlights a misleading aspect of globalization. Young people are indeed in touch with likeminded persons many thousands of miles away. But even if the students of Berkeley, Berlin and Bangalore share a common set of interests, these do not translate into
community
. Space matters. And politics is a function of space—we vote where we live and our leaders are restricted in their legitimacy and authority to the place where they were elected. Real-time access to likeminded fellows half a world away is no substitute.

Think for a minute about the importance of something as commonplace as an insurance card or pension book. Back in the early days of the welfare states, these had to be regularly stamped or renewed in order for their possessor to collect her pension, food stamps or child allowance. These rituals of exchange between the benevolent state and its citizens took place at fixed locations: a post office, typically. Over time, the shared experience of relating to public authority and public policy—incarnated in these services and benefits—contributed mightily to a tauter sense of shared citizenship.

This sentiment was crucial to the formation of modern states and the peaceful societies they governed. Until the late 19th century, government was simply the apparatus by which an inherited ruling class exercised power. But little by little, the state took upon itself a multitude of tasks and responsibilities hitherto in the hands of individuals or private agencies.

Examples abound. Private security agencies were replaced (and disbanded) in favor of national or municipal police forces. Private mail services were made redundant by the development of national post offices. Mercenaries were forced out of business, replaced by national conscript armies. Private transportation services did not disappear—retreating instead into luxury provisions for the very wealthy—but were displaced as the primary means of communication by publicly-owned or regulated buses, trams, trolleys and trains. The patronage system of artistic support—well adapted to private operas for independent princelings and isolated courts—was steadily displaced (though never entirely) by publicly-funded arts, supported by national and local taxation and administered by state agencies.

The point can be extended indefinitely. The emergence of national football (soccer) leagues across Europe served simultaneously to channel popular energies, forge local identities and establish a nation-wide sense of space and shared enthusiasms. Much like France’s famous turn-of-the-century geography text,
Le Tour de la France par deux enfants
, which socialized a generation of French schoolchildren into an appreciation of the map of France, so the formation of the Football Leagues in England and Scotland introduced young fans to the geography of their country through the competition of teams from its various regions.

From its early years through the 1970s, the Football League was always a single entity: ‘meritocratic’ in the sense that teams could rise or fall through its various divisions according to their performance. Footballers, recruited locally, wore the colors of their team. Such advertising as there was confined itself to placards mounted around the pitch; the idea of attaching commercial announcements to the players themselves would simply never have occurred to anyone—the resulting cacophony of colour and text would have detracted from the visual unity of the team.

Indeed, visual representations of collective identity used to matter a lot. Think of the black London taxi, its distinctive monotone emerging by consensus between the wars and serving thereafter to distinguish not only the taxis themselves but something about the austere unity of the city they served. Buses and trains followed suit, their uniformity of color and design emphasizing the role they played as common transporters of a single people.

The same purpose may be ascribed in retrospect to the distinctively British enthusiasm for school uniforms (not unknown elsewhere, but usually associated with religious or communitarian identity—parochial schools, for example). Looking back across the chasm which opened up with the ‘individualist’ enthusiasms of the ’60s, it is hard for us today to appreciate their virtues. Surely, we now suppose, such dress codes stifle the identity and personality of the young?

Rigid dress codes can indeed enforce authority and suppress individuality—an army uniform is intended to do just that. But in their time, uniforms—whether worn by schoolchildren, mailmen, train conductors or street-crossing wardens—bespoke a certain egalitarianism. A child in regulation clothing is under no pressure to compete sartorially with his better-off contemporaries. A uniform makes identification with others, across social or ethnic boundaries, involuntary and thus—in the end—natural.

Today, to the extent that we even acknowledge shared social obligations and claims, these are characteristically met in private. The mails are increasingly beleaguered by the private delivery services which cream off profitable business, leaving the Post Office to subsidize costly delivery and collection services for the poor and in remote areas. Buses and trains are in private hands, festooned with advertisements and garishly decorated in loud colours that announce the identity of their owners rather than the service they provide. The arts—in Britain or Spain, for example—are funded by the proceeds of privately administered lotteries, raising money from the poorer members of the community through the encouragement of legalized gambling.

Football Leagues across Europe have devolved into ultra-wealthy Super Leagues for a handful of privileged clubs, with the remainder mired in their poverty and irrelevance. The idea of a ‘national’ space has been replaced by international competition underwritten by ephemeral foreign funders, their coffers recouped from commercial exploitation of players recruited from afar and unlikely to remain in place very long.

London’s taxis, once famous for their efficient design and the astonishing local knowledge of their drivers, now come in myriad colors. In the latest retreat from functional uniformity, non-conventional makes and models are permitted to advertise themselves as official taxis—even though they can neither perform the hitherto mandatory turning circles nor meet long-established load capacities. Within a predictable future, we may expect the famous ‘knowledge’—the intimate familiarity with London’s maze of streets and squares required of every licensed taxi driver since 1865—to be abandoned or diluted in the name of free enterprise.

Armies, especially the American army, are increasingly dependent for logistical support, material provision and transportation security upon private services—the latter furnished at great expense by companies hiring mercenaries on short-term contract: at the last count, 190,000 ‘auxiliary’ private employees were ‘assisting’ the US armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The police once incarnated the modern state’s ambition to regulate social intercourse and monopolize authority and violence. Less than two centuries after their first appearance, they are being displaced by private security companies whose function it is to serve and secure the ‘gated communities’ that have sprung up in our cities and suburbs over the past three decades.

What exactly is a ‘gated community’ and why does it matter? In its initial American usage—now enthusiastically applied in parts of London and elsewhere across Europe, as well as throughout Latin America and in wealthy Asian entrepots from Singapore to Shanghai—the term denotes people who have gathered together into affluent subdivisions of suburbs and cities and fondly suppose themselves functionally independent of the rest of society.

Before the rise of the modern state, such communities were commonplace. If they were not actually fortified in practice, they certainly represented a distinct private space, its boundaries well-marked and secured against outsiders. As modern cities and nation states grew up, so these fortified enclaves—often owned by a single aristocrat or limited private company -blended into the urban surroundings. Their inhabitants, confident in the security now offered to them by the public authorities, abandoned their private police forces, dismantled their fences and confined their exclusivity to distinctions of wealth and status. As recently as the 1960s, their reappearance in our midst would have seemed quite bizarre.

But today, they are everywhere: a token of ‘standing’, a shameless acknowledgment of the desire to separate oneself from other members of society, and a formal recognition of the state’s (or the city’s) inability or unwillingness to impose its authority across a uniform public space. In America one typically finds gated communities in far-flung suburbs. But in England as elsewhere, they have sprung up at the heart of the city.

‘Stratford City’, in east London, covers some 170 acres and claims the power to control all activity in the (public) streets under its jurisdiction. ‘Cabot Circus’ in Bristol, ‘Highcross’ in Leicester, ‘Liverpool One’ (which spans 34 streets and is owned by Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster’s property company) are all privately-owned and privately-controlled spaces at the heart of what were once public municipalities. They reserve the right to impose a range of restrictions and regulations according to taste: no skateboarding, no rollerblading, no eating in certain locations, no begging, no vagrancy, no photographs and of course a myriad of private security and closed circuit cameras to enforce the above.

A moment’s reflection reveals the contradiction of such parasitic communities-within-the-community. The private security firms they hire are not entitled by law to act in the name of the state and must thus call upon the police to assist them in the event of serious crime. The streets they purport to own and maintain were initially surveyed, built, paved and lit at public expense: so today’s privatized citizens are the undeserving beneficiaries of yesterday’s taxpayers. The public highways that allow members of a gated community to travel freely between home and work were also provided—and are still maintained—by society at large, as are the public services (schools, hospitals, post offices, fire engines and the like) on which ‘gated citizens’ may call with the same rights and expectations as their un-privileged neighbors.