It is difficult, when considering how the pandemic has revealed the total incapacity of the British state, not to think of the parasitic tropical fungus Cordyceps. When an ant is infected by its spores, the insect is compelled to engage in behaviour disastrously fatal to itself, but essential to the fungus’ reproduction. Driven by a suicidal urge it cannot control, the ant climbs to the highest branches of a nearby tree, clamps down hard with its mandibles on a leaf and dies.
Its brain eventually erupts into a cylindrical fruit, which pushes its way, like an exploring finger, from the ant’s head to release its spores on the breeze and infect nearby colonies. The ant’s survival is not an evolutionary concern of the fungus; all that matters is its ability to totally manipulate the ant’s functions, and to spread its spores as far as possible, at whatever cost to its host.
Such is the British state after forty years of exposure to neoliberal ideology. After four decades of privatisation and outsourcing, it hesitates to close the borders to a lethal pandemic because feeding a few thousand travellers in airport hotels is beyond its capacity; it can’t produce a functioning track and trace system; when the pandemic began, it had no stock of PPE and wasted millions trying to procure essential supplies from private profiteers. Even supplying free school meals to quarantined children transpired to be beyond the capacity of the fifth-largest economy on earth, leaving the government hostage to the ineptitude of the profiteers to whom it outsourced the role, and humiliated by a Premier League footballer’s PR advisor. Even as the British state is brought to the edge of destruction, it cannot shake itself free of the ideological parasite of outsourcing, deregulation, and privatisation which controls its every action.
All because the British state has been hollowed out to the point that it can barely be said to exist. Its survival, even within the short term, is doubtful: but then the host’s survival, and that of the colony to which it belongs, was always secondary to the parasite’s desire to reproduce itself and unleash the free-floating spores of capital.
A recent academic paper by the political scientists Lee Jones and Shahar Hameiri lays out, in forensic detail, how Britain’s record-setting death rate from Covid derives from the failures of what they term the “neoliberal regulatory state”, whereby both Conservative and Labour governments have retreated from active “government” in favour of hands-off, vaguely-directed “governance”. This has, they explain, resulted in “the deliberate reduction of popular expectations of public authority; the outsourcing of responsibility to technocratic, private and quasi-autonomous actors, weakening lines of control and accountability; and the hollowing-out of state capacities and authority to the benefit of frequently inept large-scale corporations.”
Over the course of decades, “state apparatuses were… reconfigured to reduce their responsiveness to popular demands.” State-owned industries were privatised and “authority and control over resources were extensively transferred to unelected technocrats, independent regulators, quangos (quasi-autonomous nongovernmental organisations) and public-private partnerships.”
The results, once this mutilated state was faced with a deadly virus, are clear to see: 100,000 dead and counting, and a devastating economic collapse. Yet there was nothing inevitable about this outcome. The destruction of the British state was a conscious, willed decision by successive governments, who adopted a naive and idealistic faith that deregulation and privatisation would make us richer, happier, and above all freer. The state, they declared, was unwieldy, bureaucratic and wasteful: shifting governance to market forces would be more cost-effective, responsive and, above all, efficient.
As we now see, this was pure fantasy, a construct of radical ideology marketing itself as “common sense”. Marketisation, however, has not led to the eradication of waste and inefficient bureaucracy, but to the vast growth of both, taken out of democratic control and oversight. As Jones and Hameiri observe, and as any of us can see every day, “the neoliberal regulatory state is actually characterised by greater bureaucracy and considerably higher governmental spending (including on welfare) than its predecessor”.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe