Education, Policing, and the Wrong Fear

I. A Personal Irritation

I was watching a Woke Left commentator one morning, someone whose work I often find valuable even where I disagree with the underlying framework, and a comment they made briefly resonated with the subjects of my recent articles. In the course of the discussion, they referred to “National Socialists” and said that National Socialists often want to get their hands on education and policing.

What caught my attention first was the wording. Most people on the Left, and most people more generally, would usually say Nazi, fascist, or Far Right. “National Socialist” has a different charge, because the word “socialist” in the Nazi Party’s name is often used by the Right as a cheap way of smearing socialism by association. That historical point matters because the Nazi use of socialist language was not socialism in the ordinary socialist sense, but an attempt to capture worker anger and redirect it into a racist, nationalist, anti-Marxist project.

The wording also felt odd because the same commentator is, on a number of questions, fairly sympathetic to China. I do not raise that as a serious argument against them, and I am not trying to turn this into a piece about China. But it would take a hell of a lot of twisting to read my politics as less liberal than the Chinese Communist Party. In almost every ordinary liberal domain — speech, association, dissent, pluralism, cultural freedom, religious liberty, and the right not to be absorbed into the state — my position is far more liberal. Where China matters for my own thinking is almost the opposite: it shows that state power can subordinate workers to accumulation just as brutally as private capital can.

The overlap still made the question worth asking, because my last two articles happened to be about education and policing. One concerned schools and the way wider social failure is displaced onto teachers. The other concerned policing, race, class, institutional failure, and the false choice between liberal identitarianism and Far Right grievance. I do not think the podcast comment was aimed at me. The probability that anyone involved has read my recent articles is low enough that it would be absurd to think it was. But the coincidence was enough to sharpen the issue: what would actually distinguish a materialist socialist account of education and policing from a National Socialist one?

I do not think the answer is difficult, but it has to be shown rather than assumed. The point of CFMO is not to protect my self-image from an accusation I dislike; it is to test whether categories track the mechanisms they claim to identify. If “National Socialist” is to mean more than “a politics I find worrying,” then it has to refer to a specific ideological and institutional structure. The first task, therefore, is to define what National Socialism actually was.

II. What “National Socialist” Has to Mean

National Socialism was not simply a politics that cared about order, discipline, schools, policing, national institutions, or collective coordination. Every functioning state has some relationship to those things. If those features are enough to make a politics National Socialist, then the category stops discriminating and becomes useless.

National Socialism was a specific racial-authoritarian formation. It combined antisemitism, racial nationalism, anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, anti-democracy, leader worship, militarisation, political violence, and the subordination of social life to a totalising party-state project. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum describes the Nazi Party as seeking to pull German workers away from socialism and communism into an antisemitic and anti-Marxist ideology, with Hitler framing politics through racial struggle and the supposed destiny of a German “master race.” (Holocaust Encyclopedia)

That distinction matters because a movement does not become socialist by using the word socialist. The relevant question is what happens to labour, class organisation, ownership, political power, and the institutions through which workers act collectively. Nazi Germany did not emancipate workers as a class. It destroyed independent worker organisation. The Nazi government abolished trade unions and forced workers, employees, and employers into the German Labour Front under Nazi control. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)

In CFMO terms, the word “socialist” in National Socialism does not track the material structure of socialist politics. It tracks a propagandistic appropriation of worker language into a racial-nationalist, anti-Marxist, anti-liberal project. The category “National Socialist” should therefore identify a politics that subordinates institutions to racial myth, authoritarian state power, ideological conformity, anti-democratic mobilisation, and the destruction of independent social life.

Used seriously, National Socialism does not mean “a politics that talks about schools and police.” It means the capture of schools, police, labour, culture, and civil society by a racial-authoritarian state. If the phrase is applied to any politics that takes institutional order seriously, then it no longer identifies fascism. It identifies discomfort with institutions as such.

That is not analysis. It is moral classification.

III. Education: Indoctrination or Provision

Education mattered deeply to National Socialism because children were not treated primarily as developing persons, future citizens, or members of a plural society. They were treated as material for ideological formation. The Nazi project was not simply to educate children but to Nazify them, and that meant reorganising schools, youth organisations, culture, and civic life around racial ideology and obedience to the regime. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum describes Nazification as the process by which Nazi ideology was introduced into all aspects of German life, including education, politics, clubs, the arts, and government policy. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)

This is why the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls mattered. They were not ordinary youth organisations with a patriotic flavour. They were party structures designed to impose conformity, dismantle existing social traditions, and indoctrinate children and young people into Nazi ideology and policy. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)

A National Socialist politics of education therefore treats the school as an ideological apparatus of the party-state. It does not merely ask whether children can learn, whether teachers can teach, or whether classrooms can function. It asks how children can be formed into subjects of the racial-national order. Education becomes a means of producing obedience, conformity, racial consciousness, militarised masculinity, reproductive femininity, and loyalty to the regime.

My argument about education moves in the opposite direction. I do not want schools to become engines of ideological discipline. I want schools to stop being forced to absorb every failure produced elsewhere in the social order.

The problem I was identifying is that schools are increasingly asked to perform functions that properly belong to other institutions. When SEND assessment is weak, when alternative provision is inadequate, when youth services have collapsed, when mental health support is inaccessible, when family support is thin, when housing insecurity and poverty shape pupil behaviour, the classroom becomes the place where all of that arrives. The teacher is then expected to solve, in real time and under impossible conditions, problems that were produced by the wider collapse of social infrastructure.

That is where some forms of liberal identitarianism become institutionally damaging. They can correctly identify patterns of disadvantage, but because the material institutions needed to address those patterns are missing, the burden is shifted downward onto the teacher. The teacher is expected to make individualised accommodations, manage competing harms, interpret structural inequality live in the classroom, and maintain the appearance of inclusion while still teaching everyone else. The analysis names a real problem, but the solution becomes a demand on the nearest frontline worker.

That is not socialism. It is moral management under conditions of institutional retreat.

A socialist approach would not pretend that a vulnerable child becomes less vulnerable by being kept inside a classroom that cannot meet their needs. Nor would it pretend that the teacher is oppressive simply because the teacher cannot absorb every social contradiction into ordinary classroom practice. A child who cannot currently cope in a mainstream classroom still deserves education, structure, safety, development, and a route back where possible. But those things require institutions, not slogans.

This is why the answer has to be collective provision: proper SEND assessment, high-quality alternative provision, smaller ratios where needed, therapeutic support where appropriate, youth centres, sports clubs, mentoring, family support, internal support units with genuine educational purpose, and behaviour systems that are clear, consistent, audited, and backed by leadership. The point is not to remove difficult children so that the respectable can be protected from them. The point is to build the institutions that make education possible for all children, including those whose needs cannot be met by pretending the ordinary classroom is infinitely elastic.

That is not the National Socialist capture of education. It is the reconstruction of the social ecology around education so that schools do not become the dumping ground for every failure the rest of society refuses to carry.

IV. Policing: Public Order or Police-State Politics

The same distinction applies to policing.

National Socialism did not merely “care about policing.” It transformed policing into a mechanism of political domination, terror, surveillance, racial persecution, and regime security. Britannica describes the period after 1934 as the steady elaboration of a totalitarian police state, with police, security, and SS organisations unified under Himmler and Heydrich, while schools, universities, the press, theatre, and the arts were forced into Nazi regimentation. (Encyclopedia Britannica) The US Holocaust Memorial Museum similarly describes the combination of the SS and police as an important step in transforming the Nazi regime into a powerful dictatorship, giving ideological radicalism executive authority. (Holocaust Encyclopedia)

A National Socialist approach to policing therefore collapses the boundary between law, ideology, violence, surveillance, and regime protection. The police become an arm of the racial-party state. Enemies are not merely people who commit crimes; they are political, racial, social, and ideological categories to be monitored, neutralised, removed, imprisoned, or destroyed.

That is not my argument about policing.

My policing argument is that policing has become one of the places where wider institutional failure is most visible. Race matters. Class matters. Geography matters. Institutional contact matters. Public trust matters. Reputational management matters. The mistake is to reduce all of that to a single identitarian explanation, whether liberal or reactionary.

Police forces can be institutionally racist in their ordinary operations while also mishandling particular race-coded incidents in a way that disadvantages white individuals. Those claims do not contradict each other because they refer to different mechanisms. Routine policing may disproportionately expose black and minority ethnic communities to suspicion, stop and search, escalation, surveillance, and disbelief. At the same time, specific high-visibility cases may be mishandled because officers or managers are more concerned with the appearance of racism than with even judgement.

That does not prove the Far Right account of “two-tier policing.” But nor does the crudeness of the Far Right account mean there is nothing to examine. Institutions can fail in more than one direction at once. They can be coercive towards minority communities in routine practice while becoming defensive, hesitant, or reputationally self-protective in particular public-facing cases. That is not equality. It is institutional incoherence.

The Far Right exploits this incoherence by giving people a target instead of an explanation. It redirects anger away from housing, wages, insecure work, public-service collapse, overloaded schools, hollowed-out towns, capital, property, and labour-market discipline, and towards minorities, migrants, Muslims, black communities, asylum seekers, liberal activists, or cultural outsiders. It takes real anger and turns it into ethnic resentment.

But liberal managerialism also fails when it refuses to speak plainly about institutional contradictions. If a white working-class person is mistreated because an institution is managing the appearance of racism, that does not abolish institutional racism against BAME communities. It reveals something about the institution itself: that it has learnt to manage optics more effectively than justice. A serious materialist politics should be able to hold both claims together.

The point is not to glorify policing or to expand police power. It is to ask why policing has become the place where so many social contradictions arrive. If addiction, mental health crisis, youth disorder, domestic breakdown, public disorder, housing stress, and community fragmentation are all displaced onto the police, then the police become a crisis-management institution for a society that has failed to build the institutions that should have acted earlier.

That is not a police-state argument. It is an argument for making police power less central by rebuilding the social conditions that reduce the need for coercive intervention.

V. Why Education and Policing Keep Appearing

Education and policing keep appearing in my work for a reason, but not because I think they should become the central instruments of social transformation. They appear because they are the two places where the collapse of wider social infrastructure becomes most visible.

Schools see social failure early. If children are hungry, traumatised, unsupported, undiagnosed, badly housed, socially isolated, exposed to violence, or left without youth structure, teachers encounter the consequences before most of the political system knows what to do with them. The classroom becomes the point at which society discovers what it failed to build around the child.

Policing sees social failure later. Where youth services have disappeared, where mental health services are inaccessible, where addiction is untreated, where public space has deteriorated, where families are under pressure, where neighbourhoods lose informal forms of order, where work is insecure and housing is unstable, the police are called when things break down. The police do not usually create those underlying failures, but they become the institution that faces them once they become disorder.

This is the structural link between education and policing. One institution encounters the early consequences of social breakdown, while the other is called when that breakdown becomes public crisis. A politics that focuses only on schools and police will therefore become distorted, because it mistakes the point of visibility for the point of production.

That is also why managerial liberalism so often misfires. It identifies a real disparity or harm, but instead of rebuilding the institutions required to change the conditions generating that harm, it asks the nearest worker to compensate through language, recognition, discretionary adjustment, training, reporting, or reputational caution. The teacher, police officer, nurse, social worker, housing officer, or frontline administrator is made responsible for an outcome they do not control.

The worker carries the risk while the system keeps the cause.

That is the wrong way round. If a child cannot function in a classroom, the question is not only how the teacher should adapt. It is what provision, diagnosis, support, family intervention, youth structure, and community environment would make classroom participation possible. If a neighbourhood becomes disorderly, the question is not only how the police should respond. It is what housing, labour security, mental health care, addiction treatment, youth provision, public space, and local institutional life would reduce the need for coercive response in the first place.

Education and policing are not the solution to every social problem. They are the places where we notice the problems we have refused to solve elsewhere.

VI. My Political Outlook

My position is not National Socialist, fascist, conservative, or communist. It is a materialist socialist position grounded in CFMO.

That means it begins from constraints, institutions, labour, production, social reproduction, and the material conditions under which people can live together. It does not begin from racial destiny, national myth, inherited hierarchy, subjective recognition, or state worship. Categories matter only insofar as they track real constraints, stable patterns, institutional functions, and consequences that can be specified.

In economic terms, my position is socialist because it begins from labour and social reproduction. The central question is not whether the state or the market wins as an abstract matter. The central question is what forms of ownership, labour organisation, public infrastructure, and institutional design are required to prevent capital from degrading the conditions of social life.

That does not require the abolition of every market, price, contract, firm, or private initiative. I have argued elsewhere that money and prices solve real coordination problems in complex economies. A serious socialism cannot abolish those mechanisms by moral declaration. It has to ask what they do, where they work, where they fail, and how they should be constrained.

The socialist task, as I understand it, is to socialise the reproduction of labour. Training, skill formation, worker security, public infrastructure, housing, health, education, care, and institutional continuity cannot be left to the convenience of capital. If employers can compete by degrading wages, casualising work, weakening safety, externalising training costs, and dumping social reproduction onto families and the state, then the market becomes destructive.

This is also why I am not a communist in the ordinary sense. I do not think a modern economy can simply abolish money, prices, markets, and decentralised production without creating severe coordination problems. But I am also not a capitalist liberal, because I do not treat the freedom of capital to command labour as social freedom.

Nor am I socially reactionary. I am small-l liberal in coexistence: people should be free from persecution, arbitrary coercion, unnecessary moral policing, and exclusion from ordinary social life. People do not have to share one metaphysics of identity, sex, nation, religion, gender, sexuality, or culture in order to participate in the same institutions. A socialist society cannot require everyone to think correctly before they are allowed to live together.

But that does not mean liberal recognition should become the basis of social ontology. The state should not turn every subjective identity claim into institutional structure, and nor should it allow prejudice to become institutional licence. The materialist rule is stricter than both: where a distinction tracks a real institutional constraint, specify it; where it does not, it cannot justify unequal treatment.

That is a very different politics from National Socialism. National Socialism subordinated the individual to racial destiny, the worker to the racial state, the school to ideological indoctrination, the police to political terror, and society to the leader-party. My position subordinates institutions to the reproduction of social life, democratic constraint, labour protection, material explanation, and common public standards.

These are not the same direction of travel.

VII. Common Standards Are Not Authoritarian Capture

One reason the misunderstanding can arise is that I sometimes defend common standards. In the present climate, that is easily misread as authoritarianism, especially by people whose politics has become centred on recognition, accommodation, and subjective harm. But common standards are not inherently authoritarian. In many institutions they are the condition under which weaker people are protected.

A classroom without predictable rules does not become liberatory. It often becomes dominated by the loudest, strongest, most disruptive, most socially confident, or least inhibited pupils. The quiet child loses. The anxious child loses. The SEND child who needs calm loses. The lower-attaining child who needs teacher attention loses. The teacher loses authority while remaining responsible for the outcome.

The same is true in public space. A street without predictable law does not become free. It becomes more dangerous for those with the least private protection: the poor, the elderly, women, children, disabled people, minority communities, and anyone who cannot buy their way out of disorder.

The question is not whether rules exist. The question is what they track, who they protect, how they are enforced, whether they are open to challenge, and whether the institution has the material capacity to apply them fairly.

This is where the distinction between authoritarian order and socialist institutional order matters. Authoritarian order demands obedience for the sake of the state, the leader, the nation, the race, the party, or the hierarchy. Socialist institutional order asks what forms of coordination are required for people to live, learn, work, move, speak, organise, and reproduce their lives without being dominated by the powerful.

One protects power from society. The other protects society from domination.

Common classroom rules are not authoritarian when they create the conditions under which all children can learn. Behaviour policies are not authoritarian when they are clear, proportionate, audited, and supported by real provision. Policing is not inherently authoritarian when it is lawful, accountable, constrained, non-political, and limited to behaviour that actually undermines shared public life.

But all of these things become dangerous when they are used to hide social failure. If common rules are imposed without SEND provision, youth services, family support, mental health care, alternative provision, and poverty reduction, they become punitive. If policing is expanded without housing, health, labour security, local institutions, and community trust, it becomes the coercive management of decline.

That is why the answer cannot be “more discipline” or “more police.” The answer is to rebuild the institutions that make discipline and policing less necessary.

VIII. Institutional Overload

The central concept is institutional overload.

An institution becomes overloaded when it is forced to perform functions that properly belong to other parts of the social system. Schools are overloaded when they must act simultaneously as educators, mental health services, social workers, family support systems, youth centres, SEND providers, behaviour stabilisers, safeguarding agencies, community anchors, and moral repair workshops.

Police are overloaded when they must act as emergency responders, mental health crisis workers, anti-social behaviour managers, missing youth services, addiction responders, neighbourhood stabilisers, domestic conflict mediators, public order units, symbolic representatives of state authority, and reputational managers for political failure.

Once this happens, the institution becomes incoherent. It cannot perform its core function well because it is carrying too many displaced functions, and when it fails, the failure appears to belong wholly to the institution itself. Schools appear unable to maintain behaviour. Police appear either too coercive or too absent. Teachers appear inconsistent. Officers appear cowardly, prejudiced, defensive, or heavy-handed. Managers then respond with more procedures, more training, more language, more reporting, more audits, and more reputational control.

But the missing institutions remain missing.

This is the managerial trap. When social infrastructure collapses, management compensates at the point of visibility. It does not rebuild the youth centre; it gives the teacher another framework. It does not restore mental health provision; it gives the police another protocol. It does not rebuild housing, labour security, family support, local clubs, public space, and social trust; it trains frontline workers to handle the consequences more sensitively.

That is not structural politics. It is the administration of decline.

A materialist approach has to reverse the movement. Instead of pushing every problem downward to the nearest visible institution, it has to ask where the problem is actually produced. If the pressure begins in housing, rebuild housing. If it begins in labour insecurity, discipline capital and stabilise work. If it begins in youth isolation, rebuild youth institutions. If it begins in unmet SEND, fund assessment and provision. If it begins in mental health collapse, build the capacity to intervene before the police callout or the classroom crisis.

The point is not to excuse schools or police from criticism. It is to stop pretending that criticism alone can compensate for missing social structure.

IX. What Would Follow Politically

In education, this means rebuilding the social and institutional ecology around the school. Serious SEND assessment and provision should prevent children with unmet needs being treated either as ordinary discipline problems or as informal exceptions whose support consists mainly of teacher improvisation. High-quality alternative provision should exist as a real educational route, not as a dumping ground, and it should have skilled staff, smaller ratios, therapeutic capacity, academic continuity, vocational options, and reintegration pathways. Youth centres, sports clubs, mentoring, family support, mental health services, and community institutions should give children structure outside school rather than leaving the classroom to carry the whole burden.

The classroom itself should then be governed by common rules. Those rules should be clear, predictable, proportionate, and backed by senior leadership. If behaviour systems produce unequal outcomes, they should be audited. If the same behaviour is punished differently across groups, that is an institutional problem. If exclusion is being used because no other provision exists, that is a system failure. But the solution cannot be to make the teacher absorb the contradiction case by case.

In policing, the same principle applies. Police should not be the default institution for every form of social breakdown. Mental health crises require mental health capacity. Addiction requires treatment capacity. Youth disorder requires youth institutions. Domestic abuse requires specialist support, housing routes, legal protection, and early intervention. Public disorder requires lawful policing, but it also requires the reconstruction of the neighbourhood institutions whose absence often allows disorder to grow.

Police forces should be accountable, legally constrained, transparent, and subject to serious institutional audit. Racial disparities should be examined. Class patterns should be examined. Stop and search should be examined. Use of force should be examined. Complaint systems should be examined. But these audits should not become perception management. The point is not to produce documents showing that the institution has learnt the right language. The point is to change the conditions under which injustice occurs.

That means resisting two opposite errors. The Far Right error is to treat policing failure as proof that minorities are favoured, migrants are the problem, or national decline is caused by cultural outsiders. The liberal-managerial error is to treat policing failure primarily as a problem of representation, language, optics, and reputational protection. The materialist alternative is to ask what the police are being made to do, which communities are most exposed to them, what social failures have been displaced onto them, how race and class shape those encounters, and how institutions can be rebuilt so that coercion becomes less central to ordinary governance.

The order matters. Rebuild the missing institutions, then audit what remains. If, after serious reconstruction, disparities remain, confront them directly. If particular groups are still treated unfairly, identify the mechanism. If rules are still applied unequally, change the rules or enforcement structure. If police still over-police particular communities, discipline the institution. If schools still exclude some pupils unfairly, redesign the behaviour system and the provision around it.

But do not pretend that a teacher can solve collapsed childhood infrastructure with sensitivity training. Do not pretend that a police officer can solve housing, mental health, addiction, poverty, and community breakdown with a body camera and a better script. Do not pretend that frontline workers can repair a broken social order through moral performance.

That is not socialism. It is the managerial displacement of politics.

X. Why This Is Not National Socialism

The contrast should now be clear. A National Socialist approach captures education in order to reproduce ideology; my approach rebuilds the institutions around education so that teachers can teach and children can learn. A National Socialist approach captures policing in order to secure the regime, persecute enemies, and enforce racial hierarchy; my approach narrows the role of policing by rebuilding the social institutions that reduce the need for coercive intervention.

A National Socialist approach subordinates labour to the racial state. My approach treats the reproduction of labour as the centre of socialist politics. A National Socialist approach destroys independent institutions and absorbs society into the party-state. My approach depends on plural institutions, unions, public services, local provision, legal constraint, democratic accountability, and limits on state power.

The overlap is therefore superficial. Both discussions involve education and policing, but categories should track mechanisms rather than surface resemblance. If “National Socialist” is applied merely because someone discusses schools, police, common standards, institutional order, or national reconstruction, then the category has ceased to identify fascism. It has become a way of pathologising any politics that takes social structure seriously.

The real question is what the politics wants those institutions to do. Does it want schools to produce ideological subjects, or does it want them to educate children inside a properly supported social ecology? Does it want police to enforce racial-political order, or does it want policing constrained by law and made less necessary by social reconstruction? Does it blame outsiders, or does it trace social breakdown to housing, labour, public services, community institutions, capital, and state capacity? Does it protect workers, or does it subordinate them? Does it expand coercion, or does it reduce the conditions that make coercion appear necessary?

Those are the discriminating questions. On those questions, my position is not adjacent to National Socialism. It is opposed to it.

XI. The Wider Lesson

The coincidence was useful because it forced a clarification. My politics does not begin from personal sympathy for teachers, police officers, white working-class grievance, minority grievance, national identity, anti-woke backlash, or any other immediate political object. Those things can matter, but they are not the foundation.

The foundation is explanatory discipline. What is the mechanism? Which constraint is operating? Which institution is being overloaded? Which worker is being made responsible for a failure they did not create? Which group is being misrecognised by the available categories? Which pattern is real, and which explanation is being projected onto it? Which problem belongs at the level of individual conduct, and which belongs at the level of social infrastructure?

That is the CFMO move. It does not ask which moral vocabulary is approved. It asks what the category tracks, what the institution is doing, and what happens when explanation is placed at the wrong level.

That is why I criticise the Woke Left where I think it has become liberal-managerial rather than socialist. It can identify real harm, but too often it leaves the material conditions intact and asks the nearest institution to perform recognition. It can see disparity, but it can struggle to rebuild the social structures that produce it. It can name oppression, but sometimes displaces the cost of repair onto frontline workers.

That is also why I reject the Far Right. It can see anger, disorder, social breakdown, institutional distrust, and class abandonment, but it redirects those realities towards minorities, migrants, Muslims, black communities, asylum seekers, liberal activists, and cultural outsiders. It gives people a target instead of an explanation. It converts class anger into ethnic resentment.

A materialist politics has to refuse both movements. It has to tell the truth about racism without turning race into a total explanation. It has to tell the truth about class without pretending racism disappears into class. It has to tell the truth about institutional failure without blaming frontline workers for the collapse of the systems around them. It has to tell the truth about disorder without turning the police into the solution to every social problem. It has to tell the truth about schools without pretending that teachers can repair poverty, trauma, family breakdown, mental health crisis, SEND failure, and youth-service collapse through classroom technique alone.

The answer is not to capture education and policing. The answer is to stop forcing education and policing to carry the entire weight of social failure.

XII. Conclusion: The Wrong Institutions Are Being Asked to Solve the Wrong Problems

The danger in Britain is not that we are about to solve social breakdown by becoming too serious about schools and policing. The danger is that we have allowed the rest of the social order to decay, and then acted surprised when schools and police are left standing at the point of collapse.

When youth services disappear, schools inherit the consequences. When mental health services fail, police inherit the consequences. When SEND provision is inadequate, teachers inherit the consequences. When housing fails and neighbourhoods destabilise, police inherit the consequences. When labour is insecure and families absorb the stress, schools inherit the consequences. When public space, local clubs, community institutions, and stable work disappear, the informal structures that once helped regulate social life weaken, and the formal institutions are asked to compensate.

This is why the focus is in the wrong place. Schools need to be strong, but they should not be asked to substitute for a whole social ecology. Police need to be lawful, accountable, and competent, but they should not be asked to act as the default institution for untreated social breakdown. Teachers and police officers should be held responsible for what they actually do, not made symbolic containers for every failure of the state, economy, family, neighbourhood, and labour market.

The solution is not ideological schooling, police power, Far Right scapegoating, liberal perception management, or endless training sessions, language codes, reputational audits, and individualised exception regimes. The solution is reconstruction: housing, youth services, SEND, alternative provision, family support, mental health care, labour security, public infrastructure, local institutions, social clubs, sports facilities, community spaces, public health, stable work, real education, accountable policing, strong unions, socialised labour reproduction, and a state capable of building rather than merely managing decline.

Only after that reconstruction has begun can the remaining failures be properly seen. If a school still treats pupils unfairly, audit it and change it. If a police force still over-polices minority communities, audit it and discipline it. If a behaviour system still produces avoidable exclusion, redesign it. If a policing practice still generates racialised harm, constrain it. If a frontline institution is still failing, examine it.

But do not begin by asking schools and police to solve what the rest of society has abandoned.

That is the core of my position: not more coercion, not more ideological control, and not more institutional theatre, but more social infrastructure so that education can be education, policing can be limited and lawful, and ordinary people are no longer forced to encounter the state mainly through overloaded classrooms, collapsed services, and coercive crisis response.

That is not National Socialism. It is the attempt to rebuild the social conditions under which socialism, democracy, and ordinary liberal freedom can survive.

Author’s Note

Although this article has focused on education and policing, those are not the only areas where the same argument applies. My wider interest is in the point where public health, the obesity crisis, the decline of town centres, the cost-of-living crisis, and the loss of third spaces meet. I am using the “intersection” deliberately here, because these are often treated as separate policy areas when they are better understood as connected failures in the social infrastructure of everyday life.

A capitalist system is quite capable of seeing parts of the problem. It can see obesity as a market for pharmaceutical intervention, and some of the new drugs may well be useful. It can see town-centre decline as a retail problem, the cost-of-living crisis as a problem of household income, and loneliness or social fragmentation as matters for charities, apps, lifestyle brands, or private leisure. What it struggles to see is the shared structure underneath them: people have lost affordable, ordinary, communal places in which to eat well, spend time, meet others, read, play, organise, and belong without everything passing through private consumption.

A socialist approach should begin from that shared structure. The issue is not only that people make bad individual choices, or that high streets have failed to compete with online shopping, or that families have too little disposable income, or that people lack willpower around food. Those things may appear at the surface, but the deeper problem is that the institutions which once helped organise ordinary social life have been weakened. If healthy food is expensive, social space is privatised, local libraries are reduced, youth facilities disappear, town centres lose footfall, and working people are too squeezed to participate in communal life, then poor health, isolation, and local economic decline should not be treated as unrelated outcomes.

This is where the example of community canteens is useful, including where something like this appears in China. The point is not that I want to import the politics of the Chinese Communist Party, and nothing in my argument depends on sympathy for authoritarian state power. The point is that subsidised collective provision can solve problems that private consumption handles badly. A community canteen or food hall can provide healthy, tasty, affordable meals without requiring every household to solve nutrition, cost, time, and social isolation privately.

In Britain, I would want to place that idea inside a much more liberal, plural, locally rooted institutional model. The aim would be the redevelopment of community centres and town-centre civic spaces: places with subsidised healthy food, games such as pool, darts, skittles, table tennis, or cards, small library branches connected to the wider library system, reading rooms, after-school activities, meeting spaces, advice sessions, and local cultural events. These should not be miserable welfare spaces designed only for the poor. They should be ordinary public institutions that anyone can use, precisely because universal provision avoids the stigma and fragility of services reserved only for crisis.

The physical form would vary. On estates, this might mean a single strong community building that acts as a local anchor. In town centres, the same functions could be distributed across several sites, deliberately increasing footfall and giving surrounding businesses more chance to survive. A subsidised canteen, a library point, a games room, a small performance space, and youth provision do not have to sit in one building if the better strategy is to place them through the town centre and make the centre itself more active.

This is not nostalgic localism. It is social infrastructure as economic policy, public health policy, and cultural policy at the same time. If people can eat affordably, spend time without paying commercial leisure prices, access books and services, bring children somewhere safe, meet neighbours, and use the town centre for reasons other than shopping, then several problems begin to move together. Public health improves because the food environment changes. The cost-of-living crisis eases because some basic social goods are subsidised collectively. Town centres gain footfall because ordinary life is drawn back into them. Third spaces return because people have places to be without having to justify their presence through consumption.

That is the wider pattern behind the argument in this article. Schools and police are overloaded because other institutions have disappeared or weakened. The same is true elsewhere. We ask individuals to solve diet, loneliness, family stress, leisure, local decline, and social fragmentation privately, then treat the results as personal failure when they cannot. A socialist politics should not only redistribute income after the damage has been done. It should rebuild the shared institutions that make ordinary life cheaper, healthier, more social, and less dependent on the market.

The point is not that community centres alone solve obesity, town-centre decline, the cost-of-living crisis, or social fragmentation. They do not. But they show the kind of answer a materialist socialism should look for: not one isolated product, not one behavioural lecture, not one app, not one market niche, but an institution that changes the conditions under which people live.