From the climate to water and energy, our country is facing multiple crises that are a product of total political failure, says Guardian columnist John Harris
, the lowest in the G7. Now, business investment in the UK remains more than 9% below its pre-pandemic level. Crucial parts of our national infrastructure have been failed twice over: first when they were state-owned and let down by the stinginess of the man from the ministry – and then when they became privatised victims of modern capitalism’s increasing fondness for stripping out, squeezing down, and chasing dividends.
The fate of England’s water is a particularly vivid example. Pipes, reservoirs and treatment works were once owned and run by local councils, butof a mind-boggling mess of interests that includes a Malaysian conglomerate called the YTL corporation, Norway’s state-owned bank and JP Morgan Asset Management.
Executive bonuses based on annual results are part of the same problem. In the consumer economy, the results are bad enough . But once that logic dictates decisions that affect our most basic infrastructure, you get a mixture of tragedy and disaster: national resilience coming a distant second to the kind of greed that finds a home in offshore tax havens.
Our systems of politics and power hardly help. With elections seemingly arriving every couple of years, and with our fourth prime minister since 2016 imminent, it is hardly surprising that planning – and spending – for the future so rarely intrude on the national conversation.
Perhaps the biggest issue of all is that the British state is so centralised: overloaded Whitehall departments cannot possibly deal with demands for investment from wildly different parts of the country, and are usually beholden to the penny-pinching mindset of the Treasury.
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