The Alternative Year: Behind the facade, the reality of Conservative government is finally laid bare with smoke and mirrors dismissed

It seems each year in recent times seems keen to outdo the last for crises and calamity. It is a long few years now that progressives have been looking for the tide to change, for a chance to get Britain moving forward again.

Looking back over 2018, our focus was on laying bare the reality of a living under a Conservative government - and how the realities of that are finally becoming visible, released by time, escaping from behind excuses and scapegoats.

Here is our rundown of 2018 in British politics as we saw it and wrote it - and as we see it informing us for the new year ahead.

Ten Years of Conservative Government

The year 2018 marked ten years of Conservatives in government and what that really means is becoming all too clear. Hiding behind the fallout of the Financial Crisis of 2008 that happened on Labour's watch, the Tories always had a handy excuse to deflect criticism.

But it has been a full decade now - and for many, it will be marked as a lost decade. Child poverty and working poverty have risen, hand in hand. Homelessness and indebtedness have risen. Padding out employment statistics has been prioritised over wellbeing, as pay stagnates and precarity rises.

Furthermore, the privatisation and outsourcing drive is being exposed. Plush contracts handed out to private sector profiteers have done little for services, while greedy executives extract public wealth - even as the companies themselves fall apart in a poorly run shambles.

The structure of our services, both public and private, has been allowed to crumble to enrich some few well-connected individuals. The few who profit from hastily assembled companies acting as little more than a front to funnel profit - even as the work is done by largely the same people who have always done the work - before being left to crumble.

Smoke and Mirrors

What the crumbling reality of Britain under the Tories is showing us - beyond the poor state of things under their method and ideology - is how much effort is dedicated to surface phenomena. To keeping up a veneer, rather than dealing with the real, underlying issues.

The 'Northern Powerhouse' is one such issue. Funding shortfalls, cancelled upgrades, rail timetable chaos, entire rail franchises in chaos. The Conservatives time and again put their faith in an empty branding exercise - brands like the 'Northern Powerhouse', and the 'Midlands Engine'.

Empty words. Housing had faced the same trouble. Slogans like 'Right-To-Buy' and 'Help-to-Buy' are a temporary fix, meant to rally someone else to invest so the Tory government doesn't have to - temporary measures that often make things worse in the long run. Look at local government.

From the devolution to regional mayors, to housing policies, to social care, local government has been cut out of the loop and ended up with less funding, even as it has felt greater weight dropped on to it's shoulders - more burdens, more less power and money with which to act.

Too Much Fiction, Not Enough Fact

The Conservatives have hidden so much of this beyond a wall fact-less, and often tactless, political debates. Being well informed is crucial to making good decisions, but the media make that so much harder every day - itself embattled and feeling political and competitive pressures.

So we took to debunking a few of the best laid myths.

We looked at the far right, it's rise and how it has been pinned to the working class - of claimed to be some great movement of the people. The reality is exposed as the far right being a nearly exclusive middle class ideology - one rooted in the fear of the loss of privilege.

This was as true for Brexit as it was for Trump.

Whether those voting for Brexit could see what the future outside the EU would hold or not, you can see this privilege in what a hard Brexit would mean. We laid out the reality of 'WTO terms' as accelerating, not ending, the decline of UK sovereignty at the hands of globalism - for which the WTO was founded to be the point of the spear.

The poorest haven't been given share-enough of the spoils of globalisation and Brexit isn't going to change that. Nor, really will Remaining - not by itself. Without a radical will to reform, all we have in either scenario stagnation and inequality. But while Europe provides framework to try and build something better, Brexit strands us.

Looking forwards

There were hopeful sparks too, in 2018. As hard as that is to believe. The #MeToo movement, the Women's March, and other events, occuring so close to together have the makings of a pivotal historical moment - an expression of women's power, both resistence and progress.

Wars, cold and hot, that have been fought for decades also saw an interruption for peace. Historic cooperation in Korea, a peace agreement between Ethiopia and Eritrea, the Basque paramilitary group ETA finally dissolved, Greece and North Macedonia settled a naming dispute.

These events represent a cropped image of 2018. But what they also represent are slow burning, long negotiated, discussions finally bearing fruit. Hate produces only a brief flash. Rash action, the product of rash thought, puts down no roots. Hate only lasts if we embrace it.

The fight for justice and peace puts down deep roots. Even in a world on fire, there comes a fresh flowering. The New Year will bring opportunities to get back to looking after the common good. The first step towards that isn't a big one. All you need to do is care and get informed.

The Northern Powerhouse is a smoke-and-mirrors sales pitch to sell the North and it's assets. The North needs something real.

Photograph: Northern Rail train at Manchester Oxford Road by Mikey. (License) (Cropped)

The chaos caused by the mess Northern Rail has made of it's timetables, has led to commentators calling into question how committed the government really is to the vaunted Northern Powerhouse - it's plan to rejuvenate the North.

Perhaps this mess would have been containable for the government, if it wasn't for the fact that the collapse of the rail network in the North comes not in isolation, but on the back of big promises that been ever further downgraded until they have been all but scrapped.

Tory ministers had pledged major upgrades and major new links. But the big pledges were watered down. Last summer, the transport minister announced that Electrification for the North were cancelled, even as he confirmed more investment in London.

And the ambitions of the TransPennine railway upgrades have been severely contracted - originally pitched as work from Liverpool to Newcastle, the latest focus is just on speeding up links between Bradford, Leeds and Manchester.

Even in the face of the current crisis, the Transport Secretary has been reluctant to talk punitively of how the rail services are being run - even as they are effectively curtailed, cut down to something approximate to an emergency schedule.

It isn't hard to see why the Northern Powerhouse now looks to have been all smoke and mirrors.

Part of the problem is that it was. In essence, the government plan for devolution was constructed around a branding exercise - the "Northern Powerhouse", the "Midland's Engine" - the semantics of which give away the broader aim of gearing the regions towards serving the corporate interests of UK PLC.

In practice, devolution reflected Conservative interests. It cut money from local services, only to return it, in part, through the Metro Mayors - executive figures, alienated from local government and accountability - whose role seems mostly intended to spend the funds on easing the way for business.

The focus was on building a framework, an infrastructure, that will encourage inward investment into a transport hub that would have most Northerners at most an hour away from most major Northern cities and their employment opportunities.

But the plan has also effectively cut local people out of the loop - developing plans for them, to impose on them. And the focus is still on the cities, and not post-industrial towns, where people have been left feeling abandoned.

Recently speaking at a Manchester Business School event on the Northern Powerhouse, Vince Cable delved into how the Powerhouse plans that he and George Osborne developed unfolded.

Cable said that the Northern Powerhouse was supposed to achieve two things: balance out the lure of London and address previous failures to get people and jobs in the same place - which he referred to as the "work to the workers, or workers to the work" dilemma. Transport would be key to Powerhouse's "workers to the work" approach.

Cable argued that efforts were however undermined by budget cuts - the Liberal Democrat said that he protested cuts to capital spending, and that the local government minister failed to protect local government budgets.

The result was a collection of cities, still poorly connected, that have become more vibrant and dynamic, but are still surrounded by impoverished suburbs - already stripped of opportunities, now cut off and drowning amid cuts.

In these conditions, of course, any investment for the North is welcome. And needed. But is tailoring the whole region purely for business the right way to go about it?

The Conservatives have sought to rebrand the North and prepare it's assets - including Northerners themselves, presented as a pool of workers and customers within easy reach and ready to scramble - for sale. Regional devolution becomes a sales pitch, all show and no substance.

But where are Northerners themselves fitting into this? People in the North are struggling to make ordinary journey's to work, that they really can't afford to lose. With competition for jobs so overwhelming, expensive journeys and cancellations are a direct threat to the ability of the lowest earners to get by.

There's only so much that an influx of business investors and new jobs could fix - even job security would unlikely be improved if the amount of work available better matched the demand for employment, such is the direction working conditions are headed in.

The North need more that is rooted there. Affordable housing. Affordable and reliable public transport. Career opportunities for the least well off, and least skilled, with the longevity and security around which to build a life.

Was any of this ever on the cards with the Northern Powerhouse?

The North needs public investment in public infrastructure and work deeply rooted in it's own communities - the means to make use of it's own resources. Achieving that from the outside, from distant Westminster, would be hard.

But from well organised and funded local government, taking seriously civic engagement, giving people a real voice and involvement? In that there is hope.

Transport Funding: The government created it's own problems and now they're getting in the way of the real debate

Photograph: 43207 Departs Leeds by Joshua Brown (License)

The government's homemade problems on transport rumbled on this weekend, with blowback from their cancellation of funding for infrastructure in the North. This can at best be described as falling at first hurdle.

Having a debate about funding at all ignores the guarantee of huge benefits that any investment produces and obscures the real, and much deeper, debate that comes after: how that funding is structured to best serve communities.

The current distraction began when the government cancelled the full electrification of the Manchester to Leeds rail links, which had been at the heart of plans for George Osborne's so-called 'Northern Powerhouse'.

In response Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester, gathered the political and business leaders of the North to a summit. It's purpose was to call for long overdue investment in the transport infrastructure of the North.

Only together, argued Burnham, could Northern leaders achieve greater parity of funding and overturn a situation that has London receiving eight times more in investment than the North - recently expressed in the cancellation of Northern electrification plans prior to the approval of further investment in London.

Chris Grayling, the government transport secretary, responded to the anger at the government by following the Tories' longstanding approach: shifting responsibility. Grayling and transport ministers announced that it is on the North to develop plans for the government to fund - as if Burnham's summit was what it wanted all along.

The government also took time out to complain that it wasn't invited to the Northern summit. But the summit was clearly the first step in building the solidarity necessary to construct a collective negotiating platform. Burnham himself adopted a stern stance, saying patience has run out, that London cannot continue to be developed at the expense of the North.

George Osborne, the former Chancellor and now Evening Standard editor,  couldn't help but wade in. In what was seen as an attack on his successors for not following through on his own policies, Osborne called for Theresa May to relaunch her premiership on investment in the Northern railways that could help geographically rebalance the national economy.

There are plenty of reasons for the North to be disgruntled at the government for it's failure to deliver and not least is that infrastructure spending alone is a boost to a local economy.

In the long term it is an unflinching in it's positive affect on economic growth. But in the shorter term it also creates a lot of jobs and a lot of contracts from which local businesses can benefit.

The rail links themselves reduce the time and distance between key locations. That is a boost for business, widening their customer base and giving them access to the benefits of operating at scale. It's also a boost for workers, widening opportunities while reducing the time spent on a commute.

But there is a downside - and it is this that the questions, of whether to provide funds at all, delays and distracts from. The better connections, the widening of opportunity can also encourage centralisation.

As a business pursues cheaper ways to work and greater efficiency, they have a tendency to gather in key locations, close to important suppliers, partners and customers. That raises big questions about how this will all impact the local business environment.

It cannot be taken for granted that plans for transport links will be a good in themselves. We must ask how they will serve each area. The answers we come up with must empower people, and empower them where they are.

Getting to the roots of that is tackling a microcosm of the bigger problem with globalisation, which has left behind entire communities, concentrated growing wealth and opportunity, and excluded the welfare of ordinary people from it's expansion.

Averting those outcomes means services must be tied to and benefit local people. Whether that means local cooperative or municipal rail companies, or some sort of statutory reinvestment, or some other solution, communities must profit from their local services, not be drained by them.

It is in many ways the same as for the energy sector, where action is needed to counter the impact of operating at scale and centralisation that leaves communities disinherited from the product of their own regional resources - exploited instead for private gain.

But first, we must start that debate. That means first getting passed the Conservative austere reluctance to invest in the future. Public investment is beneficial. So let's get beyond that point, and get down to how to get services working for communities, not rendering them little more than glorified or abandoned suburbs.

The State of the North: Conservative plans for devolution only make clear the need for truly accountable federalism

Sheffield, part of Conservative plans for a Northern Powerhouse. Photograph: Sheffield Town Hall by Matthew Black (License) (Cropped)

This week, IPPR (Institute for Public Policy Research) held a meeting in Sheffield to look in depth at the Conservative government's ongoing efforts to forge ahead with its 'Northern Powerhouse' project (Sheffield Telegraph, 2015; Cox, Prescott & Jarvis, 2015). Its report, 'The State of the North', lay out four tests that Conservative plans for local devolution have to pass.

The four tests came under the heading of a question, "How will we know whether the ‘northern powerhouse’ is working?" - and set out what the Conservative project must achieve (Cox & Raikes, 2015):

According to the IPPR, it must "generate a better type of economic growth", that brings jobs and higher wages; it must support skill development, particularly for the "very youngest"; it must invest in innovation and infrastructure to support "future success"; and it must "rejuvenate local democracy".

So far however, Conservative plans have been criticised as more about devolving the blame than devolving power (Bailey, 2015). It has been remarked that Conservative proposals hold onto or concentrate further power of decision-making at the centre, while shifting blame for outcomes onto the scapegoats who have to implement plans, on scarce funds, at the local level.

The criticism facing Conservative plans and some of challenges facing the North - highlighted by the substantial divide between North and South in areas like education (Bounds & Tighe, 2015; Dearden, 2015; Allen, 2015) - only make clear the need to embrace true federalism. And that will only the case if the North, the Midlands and the South, along with the nations of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, can stand on equal footing with London's Mayoralty.

But it can't just be a case of setting up assemblies. It has to involve a comprehensive reorganisation of regional, city, local, borough, county and unitary council boundaries, as well as the administrative boundaries of essential public services like the NHS or Policing, so power over decision making and funding can be properly devolved to the appropriate level - where it must be transparent and accountable to its constituents.

Such a reorganisation, clearly done, would still leave room for the highest federal level to remain the place for the broadest strategic decision making. A central government could still set the broad scope and aims, direct investment and redirect distribution of resources to where they are needed. Yet clear separation of powers between levels of government could make work at the centre a share in a partnership, rather than dictation from an ivory tower.

Democracy functions best when the decisions made at the ballot box are transparent: when voters know clearly for what it is they are voting, what powers they are handing over, what its limits are and how they can get rid of those power-holders when the need arises.