Britain increasingly feels like a terribly old country. We keep hearing its pipework hasn’t been properly overhauled since the Victorian age, so its own sewage laps at its shores and courses through its rivers. Earlier this month we crowned our oldest ever new monarch, a man who looked a picture of melancholy pretty much throughout, even if media sycophancy made it verboten to categorise the mood as anything other than joyous renewal. The country is overwhelmingly governed in the interests of older voters at the expense of the young. And this week, the latest update on the literally crumbling Houses of Parliament warned that the building is so comprehensively knackered it could be destroyed before renovation is agreed upon, let alone begun. This would be the only conceivable occasion on which this cohort of politicians could be described as bringing the house down.
Even the sewage crisis has been folded into the nostalgia myths that some find more comfortable than dealing with the present. “I remember as a child in south Wales swimming in sewage,” reminisced the Conservative MP Damian Green this week. “Jackson’s Bay in Barry used to be a sewage outlet where we all went and paddled and swam...”
But the Palace of Westminster situation is arguably the standout, for those who like their metaphors so heavy-handed as to beat them senseless. The building from which this country is governed is on the point of various collapses and existential crises, but no one can really face dealing with them. Bending reality or fleeing it altogether remain preferable. Stop me if it’s all getting too excessively symbolic for you, but the Houses of Parliament have been in grave decline for decades, with dangerous wiring and endless leaks and asbestos discoveries now resulting in 4,000 maintenance issues reported every week.
Even tentative decisions on how to properly renovate are either procrastinated over or overturned. Last-chance moments have come and gone without action. Successive generations of MPs have been paralysed by indecision and an inability to grasp the nettle. Things are now so bad that it’s almost as if the MPs who hold the building’s future in their hands have given up trying to fix its problems.
But this mismanaged decline is not cheap – as confirmed by the recent public accounts committee report, we are currently forking out a stunning £2m a week – A WEEK! - just on patching the Houses of Parliament up in the short term. All measures are only temporary. £140m has been spent on temporary fire safety. £8m has gone on temporary sewerage. (Failing to deal with effluent is one of the repeat features of our olden public realm.) There is a long-held sense that the serious multibillion-pound investment required for the building would upset the shareholders (the British public). There is no plan for what to do, so nothing gets done. Many have given up thinking a plan will ever come, so simply wait fatalistically for disaster.
Those who have faced up to the problem know that the optimal solution at this advanced stage of decay is for absolutely all MPs, peers and staff to move out and go somewhere else so that full-scale renovation can be carried out in the round and comprehensively. Various solutions have been suggested, from parliament sitting in temporary digs in London to relocating to another city for several years. Supporters of destinations outside the M25 argue that they would represent a breath of fresh air for our legislators, a chance to reconnect with the provinces they keep telling us have been neglected.
How odd, then, to find so few such supporters among those who cheerfully force other institutions to relocate all the time – namely, the “levelling up” fans of the current government. Channel 4 is now headquartered in Leeds, for instance, while the Arts Council has been ordered by the government to move more of its spending out of London, resulting in the body telling the English National Opera that it needed to leave the capital or lose all public funding. The powers-that-be seem to think that moving out of London is very good for you if you are a cultural institution – just the bracing shock to the system these London-bound elites could do with.
For the powers-that-be themselves, however, such a move is not proposed. But why? Why, when we have had to listen to all kinds of valid and not-so-valid criticism of the London metropolitan elite do an extremely significant part of that elite – the lawmakers themselves – not think a breath of fresh air may be in order for them too? In fact, why was the navel-gazing and only occasionally coherent NatCon conference this week not preoccupied with this totemic idea? Given that Suella Braverman spent quite so much of her speech railing against experts and elites, surely the queen of the NatCons might reasonably have suggested a Khmer Rouge-lite emptying of the cities of the likes of herself, perhaps establishing some rural parliament to hasten the next stage of Britain’s modern evolution. If they hate the Westminster bubble so much, why don’t they burst it?
The answer, of course, is that they don’t want to. At best, the ruling powers lack the skills and drive to do anything but keep patching up the past. At worst, they see the dysfunction as an opportunity for exploitation. Forgive me chucking this detail in again, just as a serial attempt to keep it on the boil, but at last count, almost 60 MPs were being investigated for sexual misconduct, while several already exposed still sit as MPs. That single statistic should be permanently enraging. Instead, it feels of a piece with wider decay. A rotten building houses a rotten culture that – unsurprisingly, really – is allowing the country itself to rot in all kinds of avoidable ways.
