The revolutionary english - part v of a series

A few years back, I had occasion to comment that the Brits have a reputation for respecting tradition which is totally undeserved. Their government style (at least since the mid 1960s) has been one of the most revolutionary – putting even Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “waves of creative destruction” to shame. Brexit is simply the most recent example A few others -

- In the mid 1970s the system of local government was decimated – the average British local authority covers 150,000 people - more than 10 times the European average

- the system has been subject several times since then to massive upheavals

- about two thirds of British civil servants now work in relatively independent Agencies

- virtually everything that can be privatized or contracted out has been so dealt with, with almost no services returning to the municipalities as has been the trend, for example, in Germany

- the National Health Service has been subjected to a never-ending series of organizational upheavals over the past 40 years

- in the mid 2000s, New Labour totally changed the political structures of English local government, encouraging the concentration of power in the hands of a few Cabinet members or a directly-elected mayor.

I supported some of these changes so it’s not the nature of the change I want to draw attention to – it’s rather their frequency and intensity; and the fact that British governments were able to force change through with so little effective opposition. That simply can’t happen in Europe where –

• the French, for example, are notorious for the strength of their protests about basic rights

• German Governments bound by constitutional constraints and a Federal structure of power-sharing; and

• the Italians bound by inertia.

Not for nothing did a British conservative Minister describe the British system as one of “elective dictatorship”.And, in the 1980s, an American political scientist drew attention to this in a book about French and British styles of centralisation subtitled “British dogmatism and French pragmatism”

I have in this series been trying to understand what has brought a country so admired just a decade or so ago to its knees. The last post suggested that the rot always starts at the head – and the first real sign of things going badly wrong was probably the British decision in 2001 to thrown in its lot with the Americans and invade Iraq – although there were signs of hubris a few years earlier with the Kosovo war.

More than half of all British Prime Ministers were educated at Oxford University (30 out of 57) – and most of them at private schools such as Eton Little wonder they have such a sense of entitlement – with Boris Johnson being in a class of his own. Chums – how a tiny caste of Oxford Tories took over the UK (2022) uses one journalist’s experience at the University to explore how and why the establishment split over Brexit - and the radicalization of the Conservative Party by a relatively small band of right-wing ideologues who happen to have been educated at Oxford. It’s a fascinating story

But I said I wanted to look at the recent and sharp decline of Britain from various perspectives. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian journalist and David Walker was, for a time, Director of one of the sections of the abolished Audit Commission and they have jointly written books which have tried to assess (as objectively as possible) the performance of both Labour and Conservative governments of the past few decades. In 2020 they gave us The Lost Decade 2010-2020 And what lies ahead for Britain; Polly Toynbee and David Walker which has only now come into my possession.

And then there is the UN rapporteur on poverty and human rights Philip Alston’s report on the UK which came out in 2018.

a fifth of the population lives in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line,1 and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basic essentials. Various sources predict child poverty rates of as high as 40%. For almost one in every two children to be poor in twenty-first century Britain is not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one.

A year later, there was an appropriate follow-up All together now? One’s walk in search of his father and of a lost England; Mike Carter (2019). Both trace the horrific impact of growing poverty in the UK