I have been a Labour voter for most of my adult life and a Labour critic for approximately the same period, which is not a contradiction but a description of the specific relationship that…
Alan Nafzger on the Autumn Statement, the Political Economy of Modest Ambition, and Why the Left Wins When It Governs and Loses When It Performs
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Alan Nafzger | govna.uk
I have been a Labour voter for most of my adult life and a Labour critic for approximately the same period, which is not a contradiction but a description of the specific relationship that politically engaged people develop with the parties whose broad direction they support and whose specific choices they find maddening. This week’s maddening choice was the decision to frame a genuinely progressive housing policy as a “pragmatic infrastructure investment” rather than as what it actually is: a commitment to the principle that the state has a role in ensuring that people can afford to live in the places where they work. The policy is good. The framing is cowardly. This is Labour’s current operating mode, and I understand why they have chosen it and I wish they had chosen differently.
The Things They Did That I Agreed With
The NHS staffing announcement – the funded training places for 10,000 additional nurses and the above-inflation pay offer that has been accepted by the major unions – is the kind of tangible, delivery-focused governance that the party promised and that public services require after fifteen years of real-terms funding cuts. I have been critical of Labour’s caution on structural reform, but the staffing announcement is not caution; it is the unglamorous work of rebuilding public service capacity, and it deserves acknowledgment. The planning reform proposals, which have moved further toward allowing local authority housing development than most observers expected, also deserve acknowledgment. More from UK politics at Bohiney Magazine and from The London Prat’s political coverage, where the tone is sharper than mine and the patience with framing decisions is lower.
The Thing I Am Still Processing
The foreign policy vote this week, in which a significant number of Labour MPs voted against the government on the specific question of arms export criteria, is the thing I am still processing. Not because the rebels were wrong – the arguments for tighter arms export standards in the current geopolitical context are serious and the government’s response to them has been inadequate – but because the specific parliamentary dynamics of a government majority large enough to absorb significant rebellions while still passing legislation creates an incentive structure that makes dissent cheaper than it should be and accountability lower than it needs to be. The rebels are right on the policy. The government’s management of its own majority is the structural problem that the right policy position does not solve. I will continue processing this. The NHS staffing announcement remains good. The framing decision remains cowardly. The week was, on balance, fine.
More laughs: NewsThump | The Daily Mash.
On the Political Week’s Residue
The thing that remains after a week of covering politics from the sideline – writing about it, thinking about it, arguing with myself about specific decisions and their implications – is not primarily an opinion about any specific policy. It is an ongoing assessment of the quality of the political process: whether the decisions being made are being made for stated reasons, whether the stated reasons are the actual reasons, and whether the gap between them is larger or smaller than in comparable periods. My honest assessment of the current Labour government, measured against these criteria, is: the gap between stated and actual reasoning is smaller than in the previous government, and larger than I would like, and the second half of that assessment is what keeps me writing. The things I agreed with this week are real improvements. The thing I am processing is a real concern about the structural dynamics of majority government. Both are part of the record. The diary continues. Govna.uk continues. The Labour Party continues, doing several things I agree with and one thing I am processing. This is the accurate description of a functioning democracy operating imperfectly. It is better than the alternatives I can identify. I will note this and continue to complain.
The diary continues next week. The city, the country, the nature, the history, the politics – all of it continues. The writing is the record of continuing to pay attention to it. More from across the network at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
What sustains the writing across weeks like this one is not the certainty that it matters – journalism about the diary form never comes with that certainty – but the working hypothesis that paying close attention to specific things, in specific places, over specific periods of time, produces a kind of knowledge that no other method produces, and that this knowledge is worth having and worth sharing. The diary is not the place for conclusions; it is the place for the observations from which conclusions, eventually and tentatively, can be drawn. The week is over. The observations are made. The notebook is open for the next one. Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat. The specific pleasure of this kind of writing – close to the ground, attentive to the week’s texture rather than to the week’s conclusions – is that it keeps the practitioner honest about what is actually known versus what is assumed, and what is observed versus what is interpreted. The observation is the foundation. Everything else rests on it. The notebook is open.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/alan-nafzger-labour-politics-diary/