It's yet another few weeks and the government has received criticism over a report over historic structural issues with schools, namely the structural defects found in Reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC). Now an international concern, with the German public broadcaster DW identifying it as a 'global issue', it is clear that this has moved beyond the U.K., and beyond the control of the government that the critics so hate.
However, we should see it in a different light. The signs of the postwar brutalism that so defined that age of decline and despondency is finally waning - a genuinely dangerous building product that presents harm to children and is a key signal of the government's inability to grasp infrastructure. Of all the cries for more immigration, more people, more open borders - it is in fact the cry for more infrastructure that is given the least attention, the least care. Most importantly, the cry for good infrastructure that goes unheeded. HS2 incomplete and contested, talk of a problem nation, a declining nation abound.
A recent FT article on a declining Britain seemed to relish Britain's position as a nation in decline, as an insignificant nation. The reality, of course, is more complex. Britain's infrastructure issues, as shown by the RAAC debacle, are less about the substance of the serious issue at hand, than they are about the form. Policymaking is paralysed by the twitterfication of national issues. An article by Nicholas Boys Smith in UnHerd also underlines the broader societal point behind the RAAC crisis - that the very use of RAAC in the first place was driven by a need to brutally detonate one's way to modernity. Newer, modern materials could override the sturdy buildings of the past. Things could be done cheaper and more easily. More importantly, successive governments have failed to find workable solutions to the crisis.
There is no end in sight until the short termist approach to key infrastructure across the United Kingdom ends and infrastructure is seen differently. Less as a short term design trend, or a building to merely fill one roll - but as versatile building blocks for the future. RAAC is a key sign that the chickens have come to roost: when poor policy - or, at best - ignorance is rooted in both the ideology of the blob, and in the very nature of governance, long term decay merely bubbles up to create long term political headaches.
