Few things imperil our political order like widespread perception of state incompetence

As I have written previously, there are few arguments more superficially appealing but substantially useless than that the Conservatives lost the last election on ‘competence’. This is because it is usually employed by people who wish to avoid an ideological battle they suspect, probably rightly, that they will lose.

But whilst it is meaningless to set up a binary between competence and ideology in that way, there is a real and very dangerous sense in which incompetence can become electoral liability – not that a particular government was simply executing its good ideas in a bad and thus unpopular way, but that the State itself is incapable of executing its core functions.

This morning’s papers have a toxic combination of interrelated stories on this theme. First we have the eventual re-arrest of Hadush Kebatu, the Ethiopian sex offender at the centre of this summer’s disorder over migrant hotels, after he was farcically released from prison by accident.

David Lammy, the Justice Secretary, has not only promised an independent inquiry (upon which this Government has such a good record) but also imposed a raft of new procedures on prisons for triple-checking the status of inmates – including, per the Daily Telegraph, “identifying “high-profile” prisoners, about whom governors will consult a new special support unit in the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) before they are freed or deported”, which is quite revealing about his priorities.

Fair enough, you might think. Yet it is just another example of something-must-be-done governing: prison governors are not wrong to point out that these new procedures, which don’t seem to be accompanied by any extra resourcing, will not only impose new burdens on overstretched staff (potentially up to 45 minutes per prisoner) but are also based on nothing, as it has not yet been established what mistakes led to Kebatu getting out.

(Not that the Conservatives can really talk on this front, fond as they were of passing knee-jerk legislation such as Martyn’s Law, or the post-Grenfell building regulations, which also imposed onerous and costly measures which had nothing to do with the problem they purported to address.)

Next, a new report has revealed that the Home Office has squandered tens of billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money through gross mismanagement of the whole migrant hotel scheme:

“The home affairs committee found that a series of failures by the Home Office allowed the estimated cost of the ten-year asylum accommodation contracts to soar from £4.5 billion to £15.3 billion. The report also revealed that, despite the rising cost of asylum hotels, the Home Office had failed to collect £46 million it was owed from two companies providing accommodation.”

Blame for this is naturally shared between officials and ministers, although it probably shouldn’t be divvied up equally; as I noted in a paper from breaking up the Home Office a few years ago, one of that departments structural problems is that the political element (ministers and advisors) is not scaled to its vast Civil Service headcount and sprawling responsibilities.

Nor should we automatically assume that the Government’s stated intention to end the use of migrant hotels will necessarily ‘solve’ this problem. Just as the headline savings of so doing are almost certainly illusory (as the State is not changing its obligation to house these people, only how it does it), so too could such incompetence manifest in the new arrangement. If a department can’t track a relatively small number of contracts with big providers, how will it be more effective monitoring lots of small ones?

Rounding out the issue, we’ve got claims that Sadiq Khan has been ‘covering up’ grooming gangs in the capital after the Metropolitan Police decided to re-examine thousands of cases.

All of this is deeply, dangerously corrosive to our political order. If the State cannot seem to discharge its basic responsibilities, and if politicians appear more interested in making excuses – be that by denying there’s a problem or elevating our current legal rights regime over the public’s perception of justice – then it will come to be held in contempt.

That in turn can set off a vicious cycle. A state commands obedience in two ways: voluntarily, from habitually law-abiding citizens, and through enforcement. It is already the case that Britain is to some extent an ever-more regulated and restrictive society, but only for the law-abiding; if the State does not command respect, and is widely perceived as being incapable of consistently enforcing the rules, then respect for its institutions, and norms of obedience to them, will decay in turn.