Recent posts from Aurelien and Dominic Cummings on this coincided with
this more positive post from Paul Cairney about a new vision for UK
government. Cairney’s post references a 2021 article of his which has,
at the end, a link to “a contemporary story of policy” which links in turn
to a fantastic article on “Ostrom and the bright side of public service”
which superbly summarises the entire literature on government failures and suggests
a way forward.
It’s hardly surprising that some 50 years of neoliberalism have seriously
dented the capacity of the State. But it’s taken some time for us to
notice the combined effects of privatisation and Austerity on the British
State. I’m loathe to credit Cummings with anything since he was the brains behind
Brexit and also the key political adviser not only to Michael Grove (when he
was Education Minister) but also to Boris Johnson (before becoming one of
his bitterest critics). But the man blogs interestingly (if belatedly) eg
almost all large organisations incentivise (largely implicitly/unconsciously)
preserving existing power structures and budgets, preventing system
adaptation, fighting against the eternal lessons of high performance
excluding most talent, and maintaining exactly the thing that in retrospect
will be seen as the cause of the disaster. Large organisations naturally train
everyone who gets promoted to align themselves with this dynamic: dissent
is weeded out. Anybody pointing out ‘we’re heading for an iceberg’ is ‘mad’,
‘psychopath’, ‘weirdo’ — and is quickly removed.
And even the very occasional odd characters who a) see, b) are able to act
and c) have the moral courage to act are highly constrained in what they can
do given the nature of large institutions and the power of the forces they
confront. (Even Bismarck in 1871-5 or Stalin in the 1930s, more powerful
than anybody else in their country, were highly constrained in their ability to
shape forces like automation, though they could help or hinder their particular
country’s adaptation
Even Boris Johnson was forced to put his pen to an admission of failure
when he allowed this Declaration on Government Reform to be published
in 2021, before is ignominious resignation.
One of the signatories to the note on a New Vision for the UK government
was Matt Flinders who has written this response to the 2013 book on
“Blunders of Government”
There can be no doubting that King and Crewe provide 12 “horror stories”
to support their argument, but without any meaningful reference
points against which to evaluate the frequency or nature of these
cases the reader is left with little more than an entertaining list
of policy failures. (“the politics of pessimism”) without offering a greater
sense of balance or governing perspective. Even the briefest discussion of
Bernard Crick’s classic In Defense of Politics (1962 and recently
republished by Bloomsbury) with his warnings about the innate messiness and
fragility of democratic politics would have broughtwarmth to an otherwise
cold book. The insights and arguments offered by scholars including Andrew
Gamble (Politics and Fate, 2000), Gerry Stoker (Why Politics Matters, 2006),
and Colin Hay (WhyWeHate Politics, 2007) would all have added tone and texture
and balance in way that intensified the social relevance and reach of the book.
Others who would have challenged the general narrative offered by King and
Crewe—Natan Sharansky (The Case for Democracy, 2007), Peter Riddell
(In Defence of Politicians, 2011), Danny Oppenheimer and Mike Edwards
(Democracy Despite Itself, 2012), Stephen Medvic (In Defense of Politicians,
2012), and Cobb (Unbroken Government, 2013) to mention just a few—are
equally absent and sorely missed.
It is also true that many of the “blunders”—but not all—will be well known to
many readers, as will many of the explanations that King and Crewe offer to
explain the frequency of such failings. Failure in British Government (David
Butler, Tony Travers, and AndrewAdonis) and Groupthink in Government
(Paul ‘t Hart)—books that deal with specific failures or explanations were
both written two decades ago, whereas Gerald Kaufman’s How to Be a Minister
(first published over three decades ago) provides a magisterial insight into the dangers of departmentalism, reshuffles, and
ministerial hyperactivism that King and Crewe offer as explanatory variables.
More recent books like Christopher Hood’s The Blame Game (2013) or the
content of specialist journals like Contingencies and Crisis Management might
also have added a clearer sense of the complexities of modern governance.
The theories, the concepts, the analytical depth, and comparative analysis are
absent to a great extent because this is a book that is written for a broad public
audience and not a narrow band of political scientists. Such endeavors are to
be applauded if they contribute to the public understanding of politics, but
the risk is that without some sense of balance, they contribute to rather than
address public cynicism about politics. In many ways and like all good books,
The Blunders of Our Governments raises as many, if not more, questions than
it answers. In many ways, it provides a rich seam of empirical material that has
been expertly prepared and now demands careful mining from a range of perspectives and
positions in order to tease out exactly what, if anything, the 12 cases of
failure provided by King and Crewe tell us about the changing nature of
British government. One provocative step along this intellectual journey
might attempt to turn King and Crewe’s thesis inside-out and upside-down by
daring to suggest that the changing nature of political rule (i.e.,the sociopolitical
context within which political decisions are now taken) actually undermines their
argument about blunder frequency and blunder avoidance. Could it be that a
careful analysis of the changing nature of political rule in the twenty-first
century leads to the conclusion that blunders are actually far rarer—actually
far more infrequent—than analysts might expect from the scale of challenges
faced by those in the business of government? The hook, twist, or barb in this
argument is the manner in which it draws upon Anthony King’s own work on the
concept of “political overload” in the mid-1970s.
“Once upon a time, then, man looked to God to give order to the world,”
King argued in Political Studies (1975, Vol. 23, p. 288). “Then he
looked to the market. Now he looks to government. The differences are
important. . . .One blames not ‘him’ or ‘it,’ but ‘them,’” and in the decades since
King’s article was first published, a massive literature on “disaffected democrats,” “the crisis of democracy,”
and “why we hate politics” underlines the simple fact that large sections
of the public increasingly blame “them” (i.e., politicians and governments)
for a range of social ills.
The important element about King’s analysis, however, was his focus on
expectations and intractability (or what we might relabel capacity
and demand). The former simply highlights that the range of tasks,
issues, and functions for which governments are now held responsible
increased greatly during the quarter of a century following the
Second World War; the latter adds a qualitative dimension to this
fact by noting that not only had the responsibilities of governments
increased but also the nature of the challenges being faced by
governments was becoming more intractable.
The business of government was becoming far more difficult, and there
were no simple solutions to complex problems. The crux of the issue
for King in the mid-1970s was therefore that “the reach of British
government exceeds its grasp; and its grasp, according to our second
proposition, is being enfeebled just at the moment when its reach is
being extended (288). Feed that logic through the three decades
covered by The Blunders of Our Governments and then set it against
even the most cursory appreciation of the social, technological,
economic, and political trends that are so beautifully captured in
Zygmunt Bauman’s notion of “liquid modernity,” and “the blunders of our
governments” arguably appear far less damming and our systems possibly
even slightly more resilient that at first might appear.
The challenges faced by governments are more complex (the “wicked
issues” of the twentieth century replaced by the “super wicked
issues” of the twenty-first that demand complex and inevitably
risky “megaprojects”) and the public’s expectations more immediate and
unrealistic than ever before. (No government can fulfill a world of ever-greater
public expectations.) If the resources of governments (physical, financial,
intellectual, etc.) have declined relative to the rate of demands (quantity and
intractability), then is it any wonder it is possible to identify a series of blunders?
Although counterintuitive, an increase in the number and visibility of government
blunders is theoretically consistent with a less blunder-prone, more resilient, and
ever more transparent governmental structure.
Could it be that blunders are to some extent woven into the very fabric of
modern governance in a way that defies political science’s way of interpreting
the world? Could it be that blundersare, to some extent and echoing Bernard
Crick, little more than the price we pay for living in a democracy? Can something
really be a blunder if it is a failed response to a unique problem? Could it be that
this book is not really about the politics of failure but the value of hindsight?
These are the questions that The Blunders of Our Governments points to but
arguably does not answer.
