UK politics: illusion of control props up defence review

This week you are invited to believe in the strategic prowess of government. Yesterday, prime minister David Cameron announced Britain's most anticipated defence review since the cold war petered out. Tomorrow, chancellor George Osborne will itemise his plans for public spending in the latest Conservative salvo against an implacable budget deficit.

Ostensibly, this is politics at its least frothy and most far- sighted: life and death, guns versus butter, quinquennial projects. It is the ultimate point of winning elections and holding office. Cameron must feel his hand on history’s lower back, guiding it suavely this way and that.

If the sensation is heady, it is also illusory. No government, least of all a democratic one in a complex society, determines the course of things. Leaders are thrown around by events, impersonal trends and political pressures, influencing them as they can on the way. By aspiring to impose systemic order on it all, their vaunted strategies and reviews only end up exposing how small is their boat and how vast is the sea.

Aged badly

The last defence plan in 2010, which did not foresee conflict in eastern

Europe

or the collapse of Arab regimes, has aged badly. The treasury sought savings, generals pressed for exemptions, public attitudes oscillated between insecurity and war fatigue.

From all this a patchwork document was stitched that quickly frayed under the tug and pull of international events. The problem was not the gormlessness of our rulers. It was, and is, the near-impossibility of strategic thought in a boisterous democracy within a changeable world. Ministers and officials say they will get it right this time, as though such a thing is in their control.

If the strategic defence review cannot be all that strategic, the spending review is not really a review. Would that it were. Britain has not balanced a budget since 2002. If there is a recession in coming years, we will go into it with net public debt of around 80 per cent of gross domestic product.

More borrowing

The state borrowed more money last month (£8.2billion) than in any October since 2009, despite five years of aggressive fiscal consolidation. The simplest savings came in the previous parliament, which leaves Cameron with incendiary reforms to foist now on the police, the medical profession and the working poor.

Britain could do with a defence plan, but it needs a zero-based spending review: an inquiry from first principles into what the state is for and how much of it taxpayers will bear. But messy reality always interjects. To win May’s general election, Osborne promised to screen healthcare, schools and pensioners from the treasury blade. Also forsworn are the most obvious tax increases and any retreat from the spending benchmarks for defence and foreign aid.

Baseline

Add this all up, and he is not “reviewing” very much tomorrow. The baseline is not zero, it is – according to the

Resolution Foundation

, a think tank that has calculated the cost of all protected outgoings – £189 billion, excluding perks for the elderly. A further £48 billion of block grants to

Scotland

,

Wales

and

Northern Ireland

cannot be directly reduced either.

The problem is not one party or one very – but not exceptionally – political chancellor. During his time as Labour's treasury spokesman and scourge of Osborne, Ed Balls promised to hold a "proper zero-based spending review", a tacit confession that none of Labour's efforts in office had been any such thing.

The problem is systemic. The tolerable price of democracy is its pesky resistance to strategic government. Every policy is an amendment upon an improvisation upon a half- forgotten contingency, agreed by quarrelling interest groups amid the blare of the electorate. Taboos and arbitrary biases get in the way.

Ideological heirs

Even

Margaret Thatcher

, toppled as prime minister 25 years ago, never had the grand design that her ideological heirs now assume she carried around in her handbag.

It is telling that we crave the simulation of strategy. This busy week is the outstanding example of our times.

The two reviews look more rational than they are, or ever can be in a system such as ours. The defence plan is a dart thrown at a board by competing departments of state, who will doubtless overcorrect for their mistakes in 2010 and prioritise the threats that happen to have manifested most recently.

The spending review does not review spending, not really. We have the elaborate, well-choreographed pretence of strategy. It is harmless, unless it fools us that we are doing all we can about our problems. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2015