Inclusion without capacity isn’t compassion — it’s abandonment. When the state hollows out, communities are left to carry tensions they never chose. Here, I have written about how Britain’s outsourced systems are turning welcome into erosion.
I take my cue from Anoosh Chakelian’s 'How Britain Lost Control' New
Statesman cover story this week. The article offers a vivid, unsettling portrait of a
country where the state has hollowed itself out, outsourcing its
responsibilities to private contractors and leaving communities to absorb the
consequences. Her reporting from Wigan — of overcrowded HMOs, fraying neighbourhoods,
and a government that has lost the capacity to enact its own ideals —
illuminates the very dynamics I was trying to name.
This revision is an attempt to place my earlier reflections within that wider, more concrete frame. The erosion I wrote about in the abstract is visible in the streets, houses, and lives Chakelian describes. To speak of inclusion today is to reckon with the structures that make it possible — or impossible. And so I have rewritten this piece to acknowledge the lived realities that now press upon it. Realities about which many folk living comfortable privileged lives for example, continue to parrot abstract banalities.
There are moments when a society’s virtues begin to fray not because they were wrong, but because the institutions meant to hold them have grown too weak to bear their weight. We speak easily of inclusion, hospitality, openness. These are good words, necessary words. But they depend on a moral architecture and when that architecture weakens, even our best intentions can become sources of strain.
In recent years I have found myself returning to this
question: What happens when a society tries to welcome more people than it
can meaningfully care for? Not because the newcomers are unwelcome, nor
because the locals are unkind, but because the state that once mediated between
them has abandoned the business of leadership and lost the ability to understand a nation which daily witnesses a tolerance of injustice and unfairness and which shows a lack of empathy for justified concerns.
Anoosh Chakelian’s recent reporting from Wigan offers hard detail. She describes Darlington Street — a long terrace of redbrick houses, once
home to mill workers and miners — now transformed into a symbol of Britain’s
political and moral drift. “Every other house has been taken up as an HMO,” one
MP tells her, as private contractors pack asylum seekers, ex‑offenders, and the
homeless into the cheapest streets they can find. The result is not hostility
so much as exhaustion: neighbours who no longer know who lives next door,
communities that feel transient, and a quiet sense that something once solid
has begun to dissolve.
This is not the fault of those who arrive, nor of those
already there. It is the consequence of a state that has outsourced its
responsibilities to companies whose duty is not to the common good but to the
contract and it's financial drivers. Serco, Mears, Clearsprings — names that hover at the edges of public
consciousness — now run vast tracts of what used to be the work of government.
They house asylum seekers, manage detention centres, operate speed cameras, run
NHS catering, and even maintain the radar stations that watch the skies. They
are, as Chakelian puts it, the “shadow state”: indispensable, unaccountable,
and largely unseen.
In such a landscape, inclusion becomes a slogan rather than
a practice. The state disperses vulnerable people into the cheapest corners of
the country, leaving local councils to absorb the consequences without the
means to respond. Residents feel policies are being done to them, not with
them. Asylum seekers live in houses where toilets go unfixed for a year, where
four mattresses are pushed into a single room, where the weekly support payment
sometimes fails to arrive and where easy money is to be made by property speculating go-betweens who can buy up properties and sell them on as risk-free investments as a Serco- managed packages. And all the while, the political class speaks of
compassion and control as though either were still within its grasp.
This is the erosion which should concern us all: not the erosion of
values, but the erosion of the structures that make values possible. A society
cannot meaningfully include newcomers if it cannot house its own citizens. It
cannot preach neighbourliness while leaving neighbours to negotiate overcrowded
streets, rising rents, and the slow unravelling of local trust. It cannot ask
communities to carry burdens that the state itself has deliberately laid aside.
The tragedy is that everyone suffers. The asylum seeker who fled war only to find him/herself in a broken house and hostile, suspicious neighbours. The lifelong resident who watches her street change overnight and feels she has no voice in the matter. The council officer who knows what needs to be done but lacks the budget to do it. The politician who promises reform but inherits a system too entangled to unwind.
Inclusion, in such a context, becomes a fragile thing. It requires more than sentiment. It requires capacity — the ability to build homes, to plan coherently for education and employment, to mediate between competing needs, to hold communities together rather than leaving them to fray.
Without that capacity, inclusion becomes erosion: not because we welcomed too many - though as an island nation losing vast tracts of productive land for food security or for breathing space away from crowded cityscapes this also can be debated - but because we built too little, planned too little, cared too little at the level where care must be organised.
We need a recognition that compassion
without competence is a brittle virtue.
In the end, the question is not whether we should be an open or a closed country, generous or guarded, welcoming or wary. The deeper question is whether we still possess the civic and moral power to hold the tensions that any real society must carry: the tension between neighbourliness and change, between compassion and capacity, between the needs of those who arrive and the needs of those already here.
A state that has
hollowed itself out cannot hold these tensions; it leaves communities to absorb
them alone, and then wonders why resentment grows. If we are to rebuild
anything worth calling a common life, we will need a politics that can bear
disagreement without panic, and a public realm strong enough to mediate between
competing goods.
Our country needs to be governed — not managed, not
outsourced, not placated — by a government that understands inclusivity and
understands that dissent needs to be part of that inclusivity, not judged by any arbitrary virtue‑signalling standard.