In this article George Monbiot nails the problem with the governments housing policy. Now housing policy is surely something that should be a priority for a Labour Government and thorough policy work would have been done in opposition, I mean they had 14 years right? Well apparently not.
I have noted in several places that the time to do your policy work is in opposition, this is because when they are in power a government spends its limited political capital managing what it decides to do and those pesky "events" that MacMillan famously complained about mean that there is little time left over for thinking. That's why governments run out of steam and find it hard to get reelected. When that doesn't happen bad policy and poor implementation can be the result. We have had huge amounts of that over that last 20 years.
We know how skimply manifestos are, so perhaps the big parties use think tanks, a centre left examle would be the IPPR. Another blank. Reliance on think tanks instead of using internal party processes for the work of policy development also has a side effect: the policy can be totally ignored because its not actualy "ours", it is not embedded in the political project that got you elected. There is another problem in the Labour Party which is that its limited internal policy committees are easliy sidelined and the leader has always had veto power over what goes into the manifesto. It is possible policy work has been done but has been ignored.
When this government was elected there was some speculation that mayors, like Andy Burnham in Greater Manchester, would extract a price for their cooperation with the government. There was specation that Andy Burnham would insist on large amouts of social housing housing at least in his patch. In fact he was optimistic and had good policies lined up. I do not see many hopeful signs that he is making this happen, if he was succeeding I think we have would have heard from him. It seems that the opposite is happening. With the continual trend to more and more centralisation (which has been going on for as long as I can remember) we now have actual proposals to move planning away from local people (district and county councils) to the much bigger regions.
We can can expect executive mayors to be used as goverment enforcers, they will be expected to do the government's bidding. This quite simply means things will be done to people, not with them. The larger regional units merely masquerade as devolution and an increase in local democracy when they are the opposite. Simon Jenkins notes this in his piece about "blockers". A thoughtful summary of local government says "Compared to Czechia, which has an average population per unit of local government of 1,710, the average figure in England is nearly 100 times larger at 165,000. Czechia is on par with Slovakia, Hungary, Austria and even France. As shown in Figure 2, local government in the UK has much less autonomy than local government elsewhere." This can be found on an article by David Jeffrey on sub-stack here.
A phrase towards the end of Monbiot's article particulary resonates “I suspect these are intelligent people posing as morons for political purposes” Yes that’s how they finessed the election and he concludes “Had it set out to destroy people’s faith in democracy and hand the next election to the far right, it could scarcely be doing a better job.”
Given the performative nature of politics and its descent from policy debate into culture war contradictions and sloganising, it’s hard not to agree