Politicians need to stop being 'mid'

There is a perceived political orthodoxy about the role of government - don’t waste time in small things, don’t bite off more than you can chew. Except life is mostly small things and very big things…

There's this bump in the road... Not a metaphor, it's an actual bump. It's a menace and has caused so much strife to so many people it became famous. But no-one did anything about it. This is happening in the richest city in the world, a city where everyone seems to struggle to make the necessary investments in people's lives. No-one did anything about that either.

Here's why – one is too small and the other is too big. It really does come down to that alone. The solution to problems like this is supposed to be 'politics', but politics is now a very specific size. It's far too big to fit in your life but it's far too small to fight any serious fights. So it fails.

This has a name in physics – it is called the scaling problem. What works at one scale doesn't work at another, or small changes in one number can cause giant changes in other numbers. The Big Friendly Giant was four times taller than a human so they gave him four times as much food. He was starving – because he's four times wider and four times deeper too so he's really 64 times bigger.

Back to the bump for a second; it is known as the Williamsburg Bump because it is at the start of the Williamsburg Bridge in New York. It was just a construction error – a gap was a little too big so they had to put a little ramp in to connect two bits of road, and the ramp is far too steep. It has been a danger to cyclists for years and years.

Everyone knew this and it was famous, but no-one did anything about it. Because politics doesn't work on that scale. Imagine this was a bump in Scotland – if government did anything about it at all they'd ask KPMG to assess the number of such bumps (that just cost us £100k) and then the Scottish Futures Trust would have a dozen well-paid staff writing a tender for it (costing us another few tens of thousands).

They would eventually produce a contract proposal for 'all the bumps'. The contract would be lucrative and wasteful and expensive. So they tell the Scottish Government this who reply 'nah, too much money'. Which means £120k has been spent and the bump remains unfixed.

This in turn needs to be scaled in two other directions. First, upwards. If you take every small problem and turn it into a slightly different big problem because you don't do small problems, this rampant inefficiency grows like the Big Friendly Giant's stomach. Waste in government isn't so much 'regulation' as gigantism.

And then downwards – because at the human scale this just looks incompetent. Seriously, how much effort does it really take to fix one bump? Cyclists have been angry about this for ages. If you're not a giant, this just looks like something where there is no reasonable excuse for inaction.

Well to make a point, new Mayor of New York Zohran Mamdani just fixed the bump. In person. Yes it was a stunt, but it was a stunt that achieved something contemporary politics is dreadful at – making politics relevant at a human scale.

As I have been pointing out for years, the only people on the planet who care about 'a thousand new jobs' are politicians. A thousand jobs mean nothing to us; all that matters is the one we have, the one we could get and the one we want. A thousand shit jobs is, for us, just a shit job.

Politicians never get this because they think the world is made up of performance indicators. In a performance indicator, small things disappear. Approximately 99.99999997 per cent of Americans have not been killed by ICE. Statistically it's a non-issue.

So let's look at the other end of the size spectrum. To maintain a Mamdani link, you could read this or let me summarise it. It argues (approvingly) that Mamdani isn't a socialist but a social democrat because he is doing smaller, pragmatic things that can be done to improve lives rather than trying to alter the ownership structure of the economy.

It is a common argument this one – best not to deal with all that 'means of production' stuff, just do some stuff with expanded childcare and some subsidised housing. But it makes me laugh. First of all, the only real successes of social democracy were really socialism, like mass council house building, nationalising public utilities and the NHS.

The role of social democracy has really been little more than 'now don't fuck it up'. But creating new things that last? Social democracy has been woeful. I can tell you what FDR, Attlee and Mitterrand did because it was socialist in nature and changed the world and we still live with it today. Clinton, Obama, Merkel, Blair, Hollande – what did they leave behind? Only decline.

Here's why; social democracy, as defined by contemporary social democrats, is the definition of 'never small, definitely not too big'. For the social democrat, above them is the market and below them is the citizen. Messing around with the former is above their pay grade and worrying too much about the individual experience of the latter is just stressful.

So instead they exist in between, doing social policy to handle the worst outcomes of this unequal citizen-versus-market battle they have walked away from. Sure, they made asbestos illegal, but they didn't demand that housing corporations properly insulate the new houses they build. Medium-sized.

“In a democracy what matters is small things and big things - if you get those right, medium-sized things take care of themselves”

The reason social democracy leads to decline is how easy it is to undo. That is the point. Social democracy exists inside a more powerful superstructure of 'the market' so the things it does are portable, not permanent. Then the right comes along, dumps the social democracy stuff and structurally increases the power of the market.

Then the social democrat returns, leaves the market as is and gets back on with some more temporary, portable social policy initiatives that no-one objects to too much. But that snarling, empowered market is now more destructive than before. And at the citizen scale they don't believe in the politicians any more because that's what they've been conditioned to believe through experience.

Politics has a scale problem because it came to see itself as small. The lords of the market call this 'agile'. But it's really a failure to govern. Look at the polling; people hate this stuff, precisely because they feel this split; they get neglect and performance indicators, the powerful get deference and law change – and we're supposed to be chuffed at Swift Bricks.

Don't get me wrong; Swift Bricks are good things, but if they are making the newspaper then government is skew-whiff. It's a perfect medium-sized problem you can play politics with and no-one much really cares.

Meanwhile last week I was in Cumnock with the wonderful 9CC Group (a group of nine community councils who took over the wind farm community payments locally and distributes them without interference from government or the local authority). I saw precisely what you never see in Scotland – a £3,000 grant to fix a roof and another few hundred on some new chairs and tables for a tiny clubhouse.

These sums are transformative – a £150,000 building is saved from decline, a community organisation can attract new members now it's facilities aren't dreadfully dated. But where else in Scotland do you get that kind of money? Can you imagine a civil servant in Edinburgh saying 'we can solve this by giving them a few hundred pounds'? Can you imagine a local authority?

Here is the reality, one politics cannot come to terms with. In a democracy what matters is small things and big things. If you get those right, medium-sized things take care of themselves. Literally no-one in government says that ever and it is why they are so useless.

But if people live in a world where bumps are fixed, roofs are mended and broken chairs are replaced, they see their democracy delivering for them. They feel their tax to be worth paying. They get that this is a system that is working for them.

Meanwhile throughout history the biggest consistent truth is that ordinary people's lives are shaped by the whims of the powerful – medieval feudal lords, AI data centres, doesn't matter. They do it, you pay the price.

Right now the Scottish Government is running around trying to manage medium-sized performance indicators such that the NHS looks like it is working. But its food policy is weak as dishwater because despite an enormous amount of the strain on the NHS being diet-related, you don't muck around with the profit margin on multinational food corporations.

A 'top and bottom, not middle' approach would focus on the 'journey' of patients as they move through the system, would realise it needs a better data structure and proper signposting, more information, a sense that this is patient-centred. It would begin to streamline our experience and feeling.

And then they should be cracking down hard on Industrially Produced Edible Substances (or Ultra-Processed Food if you must), abusive social media, poor housing quality – because obesity, a mental health crisis and poverty remain at the heart of demand for health services. It fixes the NHS without so much as a performance indicator in sight.

This reality requires two things that don't exist in Scotland – real decentralisation and brave politicians. It's not just that politicians don't do small things, they can't. People mocked Mamdani by sending pictures of other potholes and bumps to fix. If he responds to all of them he'll get nothing else done. You need to give budget and power to people near to the problem.

That is the opposite of Scotland's local authorities, a definition of 'wrong size' – too giant to be local, too small to be strategically regional. It was a market ultra-purist who created that system...

And brave is the opposite of our politicians. The outcome? A hard right government might get elected and make this all worse because people in England are sick of declining high streets which is becoming a totemic issue for communities that feel ignored. You try and get a politician to take town centres seriously – they're busy boosting AI data centres. Who has time for the small stuff?

There is this bump in the road, and this time it's a metaphor. The bump is politicians who have curled up in a position of power above the rest of us but underneath where real power lies, preening themselves like cats on a sofa in a burning house. Unless they can overcome there scaling problem, they won't fix anything.