For the better part of a century and a half, the infrastructure crafted by Victorian engineering giants kept this country moving.
It was well-built, beautifully-designed, and laid the foundations for the huge leaps forward in economic progress and social change that built modern Britain.
But even the grandest of designs aren’t built to last forever. They require sequential updates and upgrades, not because they were designed poorly (we can’t fault Isambard Kingdom Brunel for not anticipating the advent of the motorcar, or even High Speed Rail and preparing accordingly) but because times, and demands, change. I saw this firsthand working in the aviation industry.
Aircraft types changed, and got bigger, requiring expanded parking aprons with boarding gates spaced further apart. Airport security needed to become more advanced and complex, requiring expanded terminals, and baggage systems were automated - necessitating huge underground screening and sorting areas to replace the old systems whereby bags were placed directly on trolleys to be taken to the ramp for loading.
The cause of failure of most infrastructure is that we fail to maintain, upgrade or develop them to changing demand. Not just because of short-termism, but because of several, more unusual human failures.
Chief among these is the remarkable ease custodians of a bit of infrastructure tend to have with becoming captive to the logic of a system as it is currently configured, sapped of the enthusiasm and energy the system originally inspired, and being in denial about its gradual decline.
This all too common problem, which I call “Thisisfineism”, involves a hefty amount of lying to yourself about just how well the system is actually working. It incentivises sweating the asset, surrendering to the predictability of the known (however diminishing) parameters of the thing as it is currently constituted, and putting off vital gradual renewal.
This inspiration, of course, for my name for this urgency to put the blinkers on is the meme of surprisingly strong longevity most people call the “This is Fine” dog, which has summed up denialism amidst growing flames since it first went viral in 2013, and has flashed in my mind more times in the House of Commons than I care to admit.
LONDON BRIDGES FALLING DOWN
Hammersmith Bridge - beautiful and broken
Hammersmith Bridge as it stands today was was designed by Sir Joseph Bazalgette and replaced the previous bridge that was damaged after being hit by a boat in 1882. Such was the energy of the time that the replacement was approved in 1883, a temporary bridge was opened in 1884, and the bridge we know today opened in 1887. From damage to closure (with a temporary solution in the meantime) in five years.
Since then the bridge has been carefully maintained, repaired after three bomb attacks by Irish Republicans, and its glorious ironwork still delicately spans the Thames. However, it was shuttered to vehicles in 2019 and has been a monument to political failure ever since.
Years of warnings about the integrity of the bridge and demands to strengthen and improve the structure to keep up with increasing vehicle sizes and weights were ignored. The ensuing argument over what to do and how to pay for it is still unresolved today, the better part of a decade later. It has nearly now been shut for twice as long as it took the original bridge to be built.
It’s not even the only bridge in London that is at risk of failure: Albert Bridge is closed for urgent repairs, supposedly for about a year, and Vauxhall Bridge has had sequentially lower weight limits imposed in 2023 and 2026 respectively as the condition of that bridge deteriorates.
The failings of three key pieces of physical infrastructure are now having huge impacts on London, because of the failure to keep up with changing demands, to maintain sufficiently well, and to keep fit for the modern day.
Thisisfineism got us into this hole.
In 1986 when Greater London Council was abolished, many of London’s bridges were transferred to borough councils to manage and maintain. Inevitably that meant that for decades the money needed to pay for upgrades and repairs for these bridges was not allocated, and Councils allowed the infrastructure to slip behind the demands of the day.
The political leadership needed to do the sensible but difficult task of taking responsibility away from local councils and into the hands of a properly resourced, expert organisation was not present, because while the bridges continue to not fall into the Thames, “this is fine” is an accurate statement… right?
ANTIEVERYTHINGISM IS JUST THISISFINEISM (sorry)
Andy Burnham speaks at Number Ten North (Getty Images)
Something we haven’t done well enough in the last few decades is remember that infrastructure isn’t just bridges and roads.
Vital but intangible things like our laws, our societal norms, and even organisations like community groups and volunteer networks are infrastructure too, and they need constant refinement and reinvention to ensure they suit the evolving world we live in. This is no new or radical idea - the notion of “soft infrastructure” has been around for decades.
The nebulous web of processes and norms that make up our political system, are probably the most critical example of soft infrastructure, and right now the cracks are more obvious than ever before.
Government, and local Government, is infrastructure - and what we do or don’t do to modernise it and update it is probably the most important infrastructure question of this century - because it is the system that underpins every other system. If we want to answer it properly, we have to tackle the Thisisfineism that has defined us for far too long.
I think Britain is plagued by it. Because it has gripped Westminster for so long, it has infected the systems that depend on Westminster, like a mist over the various branches of the public sector, and even seeps into the more ossified, undynamic parts of the private sector too.
Where Burnham and his team rail against “Everythingism” (defined by its framers as “the belief that every proposal, project or policy is a means for promoting every national objective, all at the same time”), they are just lowering expectations as to what the system can achieve rather than trying to renew it properly. They may talk a good game, but until wholesale constitutional reform comes forward, when it comes to the political system, Burnham’s team are in effect practising Thisisfineism.
THISISFINEISM BREAKS SOFT INFRASTRUCTURE, TOO
We have held on to the particular constitutional machine that was built for us in the 19th century far beyond its useful life - not just because we have shrunk from the difficulty of fixing it, but because we have allowed those who have become trapped in its logic and trauma-bonded to its dysfunction to make the ludicrous argument that its longevity is proof of its vitality. We have failed to have the courage to make the sequential and gradual changes to our political system for successive generations, and now we are so far behind the curve, and so out of step with the modern reality that the job of rebuilding is dauntingly enormous.
There’s no excuse either in the suggestion that the cracks are because of recent, here-today gone-tomorrow trends. The advent of five (or six, seven, eight?) party politics is not some brand new explosion. Seven years ago, the Brexit Party and the Lib Dems topped the polls and won the most seats in the European Elections. The Green Party’s highest share of the vote in a national election was not in 2010 or 2024 when they made their big Parliamentary breakthroughs, but in 1989 when they took 15% of the vote in the last European Elections held under First Past the Post - and won no seats. Famously, the 1983 election saw the SDP win 25% of the votes and just 4% of the seats. Less famously, the Liberal Party won a fifth of the votes but one in fifty of the seats at both of the 1974 General Elections.
In fact, Labour and the Conservatives have only enjoyed more than 80% of the vote at UK General Elections on just two occasions since 1970: 1979 (81%) and 2017 (82%). Both times they barely crossed that threshold. Our party system has been fragmenting for a very long time, and it hasn’t really been a two-party system since at least the First World War. But our First Past the Post system continues to try to fit the square peg of multi-party politics into the round hole of a feat of soft infrastructure designed for just two parties.
Ok, yes, fine. This post was never really meant to be about infrastructure. It is yet another post by a Liberal Democrat about proportional representation (don’t worry, the extended rant about Duverger’s Law didn’t survive the final edit). But it’s not just about proportional representation. As I said, the wider political system (the system that underpins all other systems) is creaking under modern conditions, and voting reform without proper constitutional reform would be a meagre partial fix rather than a full upgrade after so many decades of decay.
We’ve had chances for sequential improvements and upgrades over the years, but other than the removal of Hereditary Peers from the House of Lords (a half job that took 27 years to complete) there has been no change to this outdated relic of a bygone era, and when AV was rejected in 2011 we missed a small step towards a system that could better handle multi-party politics.
But constitutional reform doesn’t just mean reforming the Lords or devolving more power to the regions either (sorry, Andy). It also means coming up with new rules around donations - so that the roof of politics can hold up whilst the money of opaque foreign billionaires rains down hard on it, rather than pummeling through and into the buckets of Reform UK Ltd as it does currently. It means reversing the managed decline of the roots of the system - local government - to make it impossible for the services that so many people rely on to be so threatened by inconsistent funding and the whims of Cabinet Ministers. It even means giving all children the proper civic education and media literacy they need to navigate this age where disinformation and populism shake the very foundations of truth.
All of this is to say nothing of the most important fix - creating for the first time a codified user’s manual for the system itself; a written constitution. For too long one of the comfort blankets for those afflicted with Thisisfineism has been the daft idea that the flexibility of an unwritten constitution makes it easier to make adaptations, modernisations and renewals. That patently isn’t right - or else we would have made urgent changes long ago. Instead it makes the default assumption a deference to the wisdom of history, and satisfaction with the minor repair jobs that have been achieved along the way - rather than recognising that this patchwork of half-jobs and little fixes is no substitute for real upgrading and renewal.
Andy Burnham’s early attempts at what he calls “rewiring” have so far been cosmetic or half-hearted. Number Ten North is, even by its own admission, a symbolic duplication of part of the system at another part of the system.
His willingness to hand out power to the regions risks creating an even more lop-sided geography of power, with regions further behind on their devolution journey becoming the equivalent of America’s Hawaii or Alaska fumbling around for their place in the governance system before they reached statehood, and the structural problems within regions that already have devolved powers going unresolved (like the disempowerment of London’s Councils in the wider GLA setup).
And his bizarre suggestion of reshaping the House of Lords but retaining the appointment of peers, merely making the number of appointments dependent on a quasi-party-list vote at the next General Election, is the definition of being so stuck in the logic of the system as it is that the only solutions you can come up with are bizarre patches (the same is true of his commitment to a written constitution without a truly federal United Kingdom).
LET’S BREAK THISISFINEISM
So that is why, when all is said and done, we have to break out of this Thisisfineism.
The shifting sands of the party system are not going to resettle - and they’ve been shifting for a long time.
The exposure of our systems to dark money and bad faith actors is greater now than perhaps ever before, not because the system is necessarily weaker, but because it was never designed to cope with this much bad faith.
And the imbalances in our devolution system are not going to be solved simply with Burnhamism - because local government funding is both more important than ever before and more strained than any time in living memory, and without a resolution to that funding problem, it will continue to gradually shut down.
If we snap out of it, and remember that our role as custodians of the political system carries with it an obligation to renew and update it, and therefore every other system in society that is underwritten by it, then we stand a chance of preventing some catastrophic failure.
Because political infrastructure is critical national infrastructure, and Thisisfineism has let it slide into decay for far too long.
Feels like we’ve got ourselves into a place where the process of deciding has almost become more important than actually doing anything. There’s a bigger question in there about whether Britain still has the confidence to build ambitious things at all. How can we build a new social contract when we can’t build a new train station?