The Hairdryer is All We've Got

How do we 'change how we try to change the country'?

Some rule is indispensable to human society, and rulers try to make their rule indispensable to this society by forming the society so that it respects and needs them.

-Harvey Mansfield

The new Labour government, elected five months ago, is floundering. Everybody knows this - the government knows it, we know it, they know we know it, and we know that they know we know it. The jig is already up. Future historians will have a field day dissecting this bizarre episode in British political history, when a government recently elected off the back of a vast majority in Parliament squandered the entirety of its political capital in the space of a season. To actually have to live through what is going to follow will be the epitome of that old Chinese proverb about ‘interesting times’; there are going to have to be a lot of tough decisions made, week by week, as to whether to laugh or cry.

But, naturally, face must be saved and pretences must be kept up; we’ve got four and half more years, potentially, to get through. And so everybody has to continue going through the motions - the government has to gamely pretend to still have authority, and we have to accept that there is some annoying sanctimonious bloke who is going to appear periodically on the telly and behave as though he is the ‘Prime Minister’. This is already a toe-curling experience whenever it happens. As things further deteriorate it will gradually become excruciating.

This absurd man made one of these appearances yesterday, to tell us all how terrible everything is, as if we didn’t know already, and to set out a ‘plan for change’. (You can read the full text minus some redactions here; overseas readers may wish to watch it, complete with ill-judged intro music and some well-meaning warm-up acts, to get a flavour of how truly dreadful the experience is of having to hear Starmer speak.) This ‘plan’, if it can be called that, consists of the setting of six ‘milestones’ to ‘fix the foundations’ of the country (and which go alongside Starmer’s ‘five missions for a better Britain’, ‘six first steps’, ‘seven pillars of growth’, and so on), namely:

• Higher living standards in every region of the country

• Building 1.5 million homes

• Safer streets

• The best start in life for every child

• Clean power by 2030

• Cutting NHS waiting lists for operations

Let’s leave aside for a moment that it is always a bad sign when politicians resort to setting out ‘milestones’, ‘targets’, ‘goals’, ‘pledges’ and ‘deliverables’ (one thinks immediately of Rishi Sunak’s five pledges and Ed Miliband’s EdStone). Let’s also leave aside for a moment that at least two of the so-called milestones are not measurable in any meaningful sense (how could any society, let alone government, realise ‘the best start in life for every child’, and how does one define and measure ‘safer streets’?). Rather, I want to focus on a strange analogy that Sir Keir appears particularly fond of, concerning the experience of ‘finding damp on a wall’. He’s used it before, and in this speech we heard it deployed early on. The relevant section ran as follows (with emphases added):

Fixing the foundations it’s like finding damp on a wall…

You can paint over it…

Get the hairdryer out…

Hope it goes away.

Or you can strip it out, rip out the plaster, and deal with the problem once and for all.

But unless we fundamentally reform the way government goes about its business…

Unless we first change how we try to change the country…

Then the hairdryer is all we’ve got.

Got that? Unless we first change how we try to change the country then the hairdryer is all we’ve got.

It’s not a perfect analogy by any means - finding damp in a wall in your home would not in itself be a cause for ‘fixing its foundations’ - but we all know what he’s gesturing towards. What he means is that the problems the country faces are structural, and therefore require structural changes to be made; it’s no good tinkering around the edges. And we therefore have to do nothing less than ‘change how we try to change’ things - we need, as it were, a new approach to the very concept of ‘change’ and how it is to be achieved. It’s only then that those pesky foundations can be fixed.

There are two problems with this, one that is relatively minor, and one that is fatal. The one follows on from the other, however, and is closely linked to it.