Fractured (2/5)
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My parents taught me that "if you've got nothing nice to say, don't say anything at all". Most readers of this book seem to have followed this advice and the only written reviews on Amazon today give the book a perfect score of 5.
But in the spirit of the book, and with the goal of “making peace with awkward moments” (as the book suggests) I will overcome my upbringing.
The first thing I noticed when buying the book were the endorsements. David Lammy, London. Justin Welby, London. David Goodhart, London. There are a few exceptions among endorsers further down the page, but the pattern is clear and familiar within Britain. The book has been endorsed primarily by the very bubble that the author encourages us to look beyond.
The book stresses the importance of proximity and face to face encounters and shared experiences. But while doing so it pulls in studies from all over the world, especially the USA, and works to meld these vastly different societies with the UK into a single narrative. While I find the racial politics of Detroit interesting, I am not convinced by the implied argument that there is much to learn from that in Britain. We have plenty of our own problems here.
The proximity that the book advocates feels almost completely absent within it.
This proximity could have been achieved by focusing on Britain, in particular the Britain of the last dozen years which the author played a small role in governing. But it does not.
The book talks up shared rituals but I found no mention of UK government policies that have ended many of these. Cuts to my local government in Leeds recently forced it to cancel communal bonfire night celebrations for example. But this is just one example among thousands across the UK.
The book advocates proximity and face to face encounters but makes no mention of the number of venues for such meetings that the UK government has forced to close in the past decade. My local library is soon to be converted into flats having run out of money in 2016 at the height of UK government austerity. Nor does it mention the ever growing size of the UK central government and the ever-shrinking size of local government within England, dragging power further and further away from communities and the possibility of face to face encounters.
At the end of the book the author makes 32 suggestions for how we can contribute to the more cohesive society that I suspect all of us want to live in. One is to write to my local councillor, asking them what they are doing to help poorer families afford local housing and get into better schools. I don’t need to write to my local councillor since I see them quite often. But the truth is that after a dozen years of Conservative government in the UK there is very little that they can do. Housing has been largely taken out of local government’s hands where I live (we wanted to build too many homes) and most schools manage their own admissions policies after decades of academisation transferred power from my city to a distant national government in London.
Overall, this book is what I feared; Hot Dog Toryism. That phrase comes from a meme where a man dressed in a hot dog costume says “we’re all trying to find the guy who did this” with the implication being that the person responsible for the problem being complained about is the hot dog man himself.
Reading the book I often felt that the author was just reporting on the inevitable outcome of decisions and policies in which they played a part. They clearly disagree, or have never even considered this, since there is no acknowledgement, no apology, and their proposed solutions are to double down and do more of the same.
How might we bring communities back together? The book’s suggestion is a national citizen service, a national parenting service, and a national retirement service. National, national, national. After a whole book on the power of proximity and the importance of face to face engagement that suggestion is particularly jarring.
I just don’t understand how the proposed solution to a problem with a lack of proximity in our lives and in our politics is to shift yet more of our lives into the hands of people hundreds of miles away, working in political systems which we have almost no input into, to promote a national good we have not been involved with designing, and which we mostly did not vote for. But that is how the book ends. I can see how it would be good for the author’s career, and probably for the careers of his friends and colleagues. And perhaps that’s why the reviews so far are so overwhelmingly positive. But I think that the book’s suggestions would be a big mistake for most of the rest of the country.