In the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, the Buddha tells a bodhisattva named Mahāmati that “Things are not what they seem… Deeds exist, but no doer can be found”.
A key sutra in both Zen and East Asian Buddhism, set in Laṅkā, ruled by the legendary Rakshasa king Ravana; but it is just an aphorism as relevant to our own capital as the mythical island fortress. Britain increasingly feels like a nation in which nobody does anything. Everywhere is there decline, and nowhere can there be found responsibility to reverse it.
Rising in horror from the stinking, fetid swamp of decay, a new movement is emerging; one less interested in the ideological bickering which has increasingly come to define Britain’s small politics, and more in enacting material progress.
Many of these people are, as Andrew Orlowski has written in these most august pages, policy wonks trying to reshape Britain; neorationalists, he argues, the products of vast piles of Silicon Valley cash and an evangelical belief in “solutionist” interventions.
But their ambitions to build the Nu-Jerusalem are no longer just contained within the pages of policy papers; they have now extended their ambitions to the public realm. Fed up with the state of the Tube trains, prominent members of the movement — including Tom Harwood, GB Newsman — took to cleaning the Bakerloo Line of graffiti themselves, wearing hi-vis vests that promised they were doing “what Sadiq’ Khan’t”.
The idea behind the clean up, simply put, is that “We can no longer expect the state to fulfil its basic function. We need to think about how we can personally step in and do their job for them.” A noble endeavour, taken in the finest traditions of civic spirit. Perhaps. But there is a problem with this noble act — and it’s that there is a thin line between dignity and degradation. But if a state can’t fulfil its basic function, by what right can it claim to be a state?
The problem of Tube graffiti is eminently fixable. In fact, TFL spends £775 million every year on it. That is £775 million taken from the pockets of precisely the sort of people who make up this emerging movement: commuters who ride the Tube every day, taxpayers whose money is funnelled into the swollen and increasingly incompetent state machine. These are not passive citizens; they are already paying for the system they are now forced to supplement their financial contributions with the gross reality of hard labour. It is like hearing the pleasing sound of a stream trickling over your face as you’re being waterboarded.
This, in fact, is true of most of Britain’s problems. For all the talk of state capacity, the state has never had so much. We have the highest tax burden since World War Two, and the highest levels of public spending too. The Civil Service workforce is at a 20-year high. Yet for all its vast resources, the machinery of Government seems to show little interest in directing them towards the delivery of basic services, or in upholding its side of the social contract.
The problem is not capacity but priority. The state has been left to drift by politicians who, until the Jenrick Effect was discovered, thought there were no headlines in maintenance, and therefore spent no time on it. The Leviathan rots from the head down.
When I spoke to Tom Harwood, he told me that this public-spirited behaviour was a way to shame the government into doing something — a prelude to action, rather than a substitute. This is an entirely fair rationale, but it takes us to some dark places. While shame may prompt action, it is not a solution. That is because the problem is not simply that the government fails to perform these basic functions, but why it fails to perform basic functions. Restoring basic state competence means addressing and reversing the process of institutional entropy. You do not cure a disease by only treating the symptoms; the disease that has taken hold of patient Britain is that our government is consuming exponentially more energy and money, yet producing ever less useful output.
The systemic solutions to Britain’s woes go far, far beyond mere minor improvements
It is unclear whether such treatment can be administered by neorationalists. As Orlowski writes, they are impatient for results, and so they favour what Evgeny Morozov called solutionism — usually a round of quick technocratic fixes and a heavy reliance on supply-side reforms. That might work for the simple problem of ensuring Tube carriages are cleaned, but the systemic solutions to Britain’s woes go far, far beyond mere minor improvements. As innocuous and well-spirited as it may be, this activism — by mistaking absence of action for the problem itself, rather than confronting why state action has ceased — normalises the withdrawal of state responsibility and replacing it with ad hoc, individual interventions. One might call it civic-minded vigilantism. In doing so, it inadvertently accelerates the process by which public institutions lose their legitimacy; every act of personal substitution is an erosion of the state’s capacity to command confidence, and with it, authority.
Who is to say where this process ends? We contemplate, darkly — recent YouGov polling that says for the first time since the question was asked, a majority of Britons express little or no confidence in the judicial system. Deeds exist. How long before doers can be found?
