The trouble with “failing”

This week: the true meaning, and lack thereof, of “failing organisation”; a new, old way of looking at history; and one of the most baffling maps of Britain I have ever seen.

So I’ve been thinking about the word “failing”. No, not for the obvious reason: I meant with respect to how it’s used to describe parts of the British state.

In 2017, a report by the 1922 Committee of Tory backbenchers described their party as a “failing organisation”. Six years of political dominance and a Tory landslide later, this diagnosis feels faintly misplaced, but the report in question was a post-mortem on the 2017 election, which you might remember had not gone all that well. That summer, with occasional opinion polls showing Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party up to eight points ahead, the party was in open panic.

In some ways the last six years have seen everything change and then change again for the Tories, as they’ve gone from underperforming to worldbeating to catastrophic. In other ways, though, nothing’s changed at all, and many of the institutional problems the 1922 Committee report describes remain. And yet, no Conservative backbencher has described their party as a failing organisation for quite some time. The last time it faced the voters, it won; so those other things ceased to matter. 

What failure means for a political party seems, at first glance, easy to define, but that’s only really true when talking about a party of government. What does it mean for the Green party to be failing? Or the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland? The metrics showing progress are harder to define; the degree of progress that’s sufficient more debatable. Is an improvement on the last election enough? Should context be taken into account? How?

In politics and public policy, failure is ill-defined, and the way we use the word vague and domain-specific. Schools are quite often described as “failing”, but the term has no official definition, and seems to just be a word reporters use for an inadequate rating from Ofsted when they’re trying not to repeat themselves. With hospitals, it’s even vaguer. Sometimes, as with the Stafford Hospital scandal of the late 2000s, it means “shit shit shit way more people are dying than they should”; more often, though, because these types of problems are thankfully more common, it means something much closer to “insolvent”. 

All of which means you can show up with your broken leg, receive perfectly decent treatment, and have no sense whatsoever that the place you’ve been is a failing hospital. Those who regulate a system in which demand is potentially infinite but resources are not, however, disagree. The thing at which a hospital is failing is not necessarily the thing we imagine the primary function of a hospital to be. 

And then there’s local government, whose performance, best I can tell, is measured entirely on those terms. A quick web search for “failing councils” finds endless references to those, like Croydon and Slough, that got into big enough financial masses for the government to roll out the F-word and then send the commissioners in.¹ But there are many other ways that a council can fail, which somehow don’t qualify for the term. 

The City of Westminster has blocked the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street and wound down Soho’s flirtation, during the pandemic, with blocking traffic to create a sort of pavement cafe culture: this may be doing what the locals want, but both acts seem to me to be failing the city as a whole. (The council changed hands last year, going Labour for the first time. Whether this will lead to an improvement in these policies – it’s continued to oppose pedestrianising Oxford Street – remains to be seen.) Then there’s the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, which ripped out its new cycle lanes the moment it could. It’s also home to Grenfell.

Central London’s new cycle map. Mind the gaps caused by terrible councils. Image: TfL.

Nobody, so far as I know, has referred to them as failing councils because, occupying the richest bit of the UK as they do, their finances are pretty healthy. But they are failing – in their responsibilities to improve the business and tourist heart of London; in protecting their residents – all the same. It doesn’t seem to matter to me that they have full bank accounts while they do this. If anything, that makes it worse. 

So, perhaps we should start describing them as in the way we describe those hospitals. And if the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is a failing organisation, well, surely that raises questions about whether it should be allowed to continue. 

Link me baby one more time

A heading that’s even more apt now, as my editor notes, I’ve definitely used it before. Anyway:

1. To kick us off, please enjoy these canaries that look like the Beatles, c1963.