The demise of HS2 should teach us to give up the false idol of consensus
Consensus is not the political ideal that we’ve been taught to believe it is and the HS2 debacle proves its shortcomings, writes Eliot Wilson
It was Victorian Conservative hero Benjamin Disraeli who famously told the House of Commons, “England does not love coalitions”. He had a point; our whole political apparatus is organised to support an oppositional system in which control of the executive alternates between two major parties, left and right. Voters go to the polls with a binary choice: to endorse the government and reject its potential replacement, or vice-versa.
Something changed, perhaps in the 1990s when Tony Blair tried to seal the tomb of ideology and described New Labour as “the political wing of the British people”. This was the “big tent” idea, but the implication was obvious: if New Labour was so inclusive, their policies must be hugely popular, sensible and logical. To oppose them must, therefore, mean not only you took a different view, but you were, by process of elimination, malign.
This idea now has a powerful influence. Many voters think that any political problem will ultimately submit to a single, correct solution which is waiting to be discovered, like some ancient artefact. All that is required is to gather together enough people, force them to put aside their “partisan approach” and sit around a table to be sensible and moderate. If they do this, the one solution to any challenge will be found.
It is a lie. It is a corrosive one, an exclusionary one and a pious one which seeks to monopolise the moral high ground. We have seen the limitations of it, the glimpses behind the veil, during the past week or so. Take HS2: as widely anticipated, the prime minister announced that the leg of HS2 from Birmingham to Manchester would not now be built, saving, Sunak hopes, £36bn.
Supporters of HS2 were outraged, and cloaked their political opposition in a kind of moralising disappointment. David Cameron took to Twitter to lament that Sunak was throwing away “15 years of cross-party consensus”, shocking enough, but also imperilling any future attempts to create consensus for other projects.
It is a charge the prime minister took on the chin, in one of the better parts of a patchy and unconvincing speech. HS2 was the “ultimate example of the old consensus” which he was now rejecting.
I would go further. There is no need for a consensus on the idea of a high-speed rail network, and, indeed, it may be damaging. Because, and this is the central point, it does not address the only challenge to the British economy, nor is it proven to be the only solution to that challenge. Sunak’s underlying objective may be saving money, but there is a respectable argument against HS2: it was devised 15 years ago, before the explosion in hybrid and remote working; the case that it would encourage a modal shift from air travel to rail is unproven; and the environmental case is weak.
The prime minister’s opposition to the “war on motorists” shows that there can be valid positions on either side. Cars provide huge mobility and independence, they are emotionally important to people and their environmental impact will decline. However, they are inefficient as a way of transporting a large number of people, they require infrastructure which is expensive and has a huge impact on the environment and they generally make towns and cities less pleasant for everyone else. Both cases contain truth, and both should be articulated.
We saw this strange imperative during the pandemic. There were widespread calls for creating a coalition or “national” government in response to the crisis, as if consensus and coalition were some magic bullet. Why would assembling politicians with utterly different world views and beliefs on a range of issues make for a better response? The only plausible, and still unconvincing, answer is that it would create some fuzzy feeling of collective effort and “being in it together”.
Consensus is presented as the epitome of reasoned consideration. In political terms, it has become a mode of exclusion, of uniformity, of a desire to stifle energetic and hard-edged debate. It is stripping away all but that which is universally agreed, a race to the lowest common denominator, and encourages an intellectual mush. It dodges tough questions and enforces false rationality. Margaret Thatcher knew this instinctively, and made no bones about it. “What great cause would have been fought and won under the banner: ‘I stand for consensus?’”
Eliot Wilson is co-founder of Pivot Point and a former House of Commons official