The collapse of government in the UK

This latest series of posts is trying to understand how british governments have in recent decades been brought so low as to have become the subject of international ridicule.

For more than 40 years (1979-2022), it hasn’t mattered which British government was in power – the economic model remained the same. And that has been worship of the market. If public utilities weren’t being privatised, they were (in health and education for example) being “contracted out” viz public money being used in a “mock market”. Except that this has, for specific health procedures, been increasingly a staging post for eventual privatisation – with patients having to pay (often to American companies who have been invited in by the government).

Schools have been increasingly the subject of mock competition – with league tables supposedly identifying and rewarding “performance”; local government removed from its management role; and charities and religious bodies invited to take over. “Choice” was one of Tony Blair’s most important principles for the “modernisation” of public services New Labour undertook. There was a time when countries were interested in learning from one another – and Finland’s schools are remarkable for the way in which teachers are trusted by society to conduct their business without the regulatory control which has been such a feature of the UK – with a huge growth in managers at a time when, otherwise, the state was being significantly scaled down. “Hollowing out” was the term used– although that was more than 2 decades ago. .

One of the devices New Labour inherited from the Tories was the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) which allowed Gordon Brown to rack up huge government debt to private companies who just wallowed in cash. A hospital or school would be commissioned with money borrowed from the private sector – with the subsequent interest payments costing the taxpayer 3-4 times the original cost. One result is that hospitals are now paying billions of pounds in interest payments to private companies

New Labour also followed Thatcherism in its treatment of the Civil Service which has an important role in challenging the practicalities of political preferences. After 18 years of Conservative rule, New Labour was suspicious of the civil service and chose to ignore its advice. Political adviser positions multiplied and “sofa government” kept the decision-making political. This, of course, is a recipe for the dreaded “groupthink”, the importance of which has been reasserted in recent books by Matthew Syed and Gillian Tett

Much more could be said – about the way corrupt practices have seeped into everyday government decision-making; about the scale of lobbying in the UK; about the dramatic decline of public trust in government.

Brexit was the last nail in the coffin – with propoganda from both sides insulting our intelligence and the immigrants whom Bliar had let so carelessly into the country in 2004 serving increasingly as a scapegoat for the damage and indignities heaped on the precariat during the post-2010 Austerity. Brexit has damaged both the political and administrative machine equally with the scale of the unravelling 40 years of EU membership stretching what was left of the previously famous capacity of the UK civil service to breaking point – particularly when its political “masters and mistresses” proved to be uninterested in such detail.

The country now finds itself with a multi-millionaire Conservative Prime Minister whose privileged background does not inspire confidence. After 12 years in power, the party to which he belongs needs to show some sign of humility.

But it is the country as a whole which needs to ask itself some very tough questions about how on earth it has reached this point of disaster, draw some fundamental lessons – and develop a serious strategy. Make no mistake, this is a profound crisis both of government and of “governance” (a word I rarely use except critically)

In using these terms, I’m trying to convey the message that changing personnel and structures takes us only so far; what is required is a deep change in how we as a society approach the future. We’ve been having debates about computers and artificial intelligence for almost half a century – have we really learned so little? The pandemic gave us, momentarily, a sense of possibilities – Ireland and Iceland have both given us recent examples of a more positive type of democracy. And why should our voting be restricted to the political sphere (and only every few years) when we have the example of industrial democracy to demonstrate the importance of extending the meaning of democracy?

Further Reading

The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s ed A Davies and B Jackson et al (2021) This is really an intellectual history of an idea and doesn’t, unfortunately explore the effect that neoliberal ideas have had on our institutions. For this, the work of David Marquand is useful

Democracy at work – a cure for capitalism Richard Wolff 2012 A must-read!

The political economy of cooperatives and socialism Bruno Jossa 2020 A curoius book - with only the chapter on Richard Wolff perhaps being worth reading

George Monbiot’s piece in today’s Guardian demonstrates that he is the only person able to raise his vision from the current spectacle and recognise the scale of the change Britain needs

The UK Puzzle

The last post didn’t do justice to the seriousness of the question it raised. It was a rather self-indulgent whinge at the rage most of us Brits feel about the English upper-class twits who pollute our political culture. We think ours is a democracy – when, deep down, we know that it is no such thing and are humiliated by the realisation.

I had actually wanted to bring the story slightly up-to-date with a few comments about how managerialism (in both the private and public sectors) had somehow managed to insinuate a semi-feudal element into our organisational systems. In schools and the health system – as well as the industrial and financial sectors – the power of managers seems to have become all-pervasive - for no obvious reason.

We experience this in the workplace as a malevolent form of bullying – but we need to be more aware of the real evil which is senior managers taking millions in buy-back share options which artificially inflate share prices to their (short-term) benefit

I was, of course, aware that the Netherlands, as an old Imperial power, posed an immediate threat to my argument about class and Empire - but Boffy (my old friend and fellow-blogger) was soon on the trail and suggesting that the real issue is the development of what Christopher Bett calls “rentier capitalism”

Governments enable and support rents and rentiers in many ways -they help shield assets from competition – through the granting and enforcement of strong Intellectual Property rights, for example. They also shield rents from tax, most notably via generous treatments of capital gains and of income from property.

The main problems with rentier capitalism are twofold. First, rentiers are inclined to sit on and sweat their income-generating assets, rather than innovate; it is a recipe for economic stagnation. And second, because incomes accrue disproportionately to the asset-owning elite, it is an engine for growing inequalities of both income and wealth. You only have to look at the London housing market to see that process in action.

Rentier capitalism is not unique to contemporary Britain. It exists, and has existed, much more widely, geographically and historically. But, courtesy of policies that have been almost unimaginably rentier-friendly since the 1970s, the UK is rentier capitalism’s apotheosis, where its prototypical ills – vast inequalities combined with entrenched stagnation – are on full display.

“Let’s talk about the real money,” George Monbiot wrote in 2014. “The Westminster government claims to champion an entrepreneurial society, of wealth creators and hard-working families, but the real rewards and incentives are for rent.”

I’ve taken this table from Bett’s 2020 book on the subject to explain the multiple forms which rent extraction takes these days. When we talk about “the economy” we are simply unaware of what I agree with Boffy is a dramatic new form of extractive power.

Table P.1 Forms of contemporary rentierism

Asset	Primary means of gaining asset control	Principal income streams
Financial	Creation of credit money by private banks Acquisition of financial assets in primary and secondary markets	interest Dividends Capital gains
Natural resource reserves	Leasing agreements with mineral rights owners	Product sales
Intellectual property	Registration of rights (e.g. to patents, trademarks) with state intellectual property	Product sales Royalties
Digital platforms	Organic creation	Commissions Advertising fees
Service contracts	Bidding processes (various)	Service fees
Infrastructure	Privatization of state-owned enterprises licensing by government	Service fees Licensing fees
Land	Acquisition in markets Privatization of public-sector landholdings	Ground rent

Not enough of us understand these now forms of power – the question, however, is how exactly such developments account for the implosion of political power in the UK?

One book which may help answer the question is The Neoliberal Age? Britain since the 1970s ed A Davies and B Jackson et al (2021)

Why has the UK fallen so far – so fast?

They say that understanding is 90% of problem-solving or – as Einstein once put it -

“if I was given an hour to solve a problem, I would spend 55 minutes trying to understand it and just 5 minutes to solving it”.

The UK may have been the first country to industrialise and certainly had in the 19^th century a very good record for scientific understanding but – since then – it has had a deplorable attitude to critical thinking. My question today is why the country finds itself with its reputation in total tatters?

Brexit, of course, is the immediate reason but, in the spirit of the five why s, I want to go much deeper and to explore what it is about british/english institutions that might explain the disaster which has overtaken the country in the 15 or so years. We were, after all, always “semi-detached” from the EU project. “Decline” has been a favourite conversation piece since the 1960s reaching a pinnacle in the debate surrounding Martin Wiener’s 1981 English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980 which argued that the Victorian middle class had been seduced by the values of the aristocracy and lost its edge to the competence of the Germans.

Certainly the monarchical, imperial and class trappings of the British system are not a pretty sight – and have got up my nose since I became a Scottish politician in 1968. What accompanies imperial success is, of course, a lazy complacency which reveals itself in upper-class English arrogance and, in its political class, in sheer HUBRIS (in my book the worst sin). The old Etonians really still imagine that they are a superior race = and Johnson;s fall from grace has still not persuaded them otherwise. Until the country faces this reality, it is doomed – however much well-intentioned think-tanks put out documents (such as this most recent) trying to persuade us differently

Public intellectuals and the question of british decline is a very good review of th e dbate until 2001 by English and Kenny

The UK self-destructs

Truss has gone - the 4th UK Prime Minister to fall on the sword since 2016. The UK is destroying itself under this latest government. 

The situation is unravelling with such speed that it is difficult to find an article which does justice to the situation. 

Let me rest for the moment with this useful article which picks up all the key points 

An Important Milestone

The blog is proud to announce that it has achieved half a million clicks!

It started in 2009 and I never imagined that it would still be running 13 years later – although my statistic is dwarfed by a friend’s blog which has clocked up three times as many clicks for a highly specialised blog which posts daily with a Marxist exegesis and the occasional contemporary comment.

Most blogs milk the writer’s specialism. And, indeed, that’s how I started – having worked for 20 years in ex-communist countries on issues of “institutional development”. Forgive the jargon – it’s the term used by consultants to describe the dubious processes used to justify the establishment of state structures which then allowed western capital to ravage central European societies. It should be noted that I defined “consultants” in my little, sceptical Just Words as “con-merchants who act as Sultans”. 

I started this blog a few months later – with three objectives

· This blog will try to make sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in; to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on; to restore a bit of institutional memory and social history (let alone hope).

· I read a lot and want to pass on the results of this to those who have neither the time nor inclination to read widely.

· A final motive for the blog is more c omplicated - and has to do with life and family. What have we done with our life? What is important to us?

And the blog has become something to which I devote most mornings. I came young to responsibility (becoming a Chairman of a social work authority at the tender age of 28) giving me a certain sense that what I was doing had some wider significance. And by the time I was 32 I found myself one of the leaders of a Region responsible for the public services of half of Scotland. And able to use this position to develop new ways of doing things – and having the luxury of sharing my reflections about our work in academic and other journals. A year ago, I mused about these aims using the johari window to be a bit more personal than I normally allow myself.

It’s appropriate that the 60 page paper I put up recently on the blog focused on how various writers have treated the issue of change since understanding change and making appropriate interventions has been the story of my life since 1968.

Memoirs and autobiographies allow us all to reflect on our lives – and I recently posted a very personal selection of what I considered to be some jewels in this genre. A recent example was a collected tribute (or Festschrift) to one of the true greats of decision-making entitled An Heretical Heir to the Enlightenment – politics, policy and science in the work of Charles Lindblom ed Harry Redner (1993) which takes 110 propositions attributed to him by his colleagues and has him assess their veracity in a final chapter.

Types of Change

When we talk about change, we’re really exploring, firstly, our perception of change and, second, the stories we tell to make sense of it.

Kurt Vonnegut was a great story-teller and this video is his fantastic summary of the basic plots of stories - which we might reduce to the statement that “things go up and down – and roundabout”

Applying the same principle to this issue of change, I would suggest that a useful typology could be -

Name	Its theory	Key reference
civilisational cycles	Societies reach a peak and then decline	The Decline of the West Oswald Spengler 1926 A Study of History (12 vols) Arnold Toynbee (1934-61)
generational cycles	Societies have zeitgeists which are generally every 20 years	“The Fourth Turning – an american prophecy”; William Strauss and Neil Howe (1997)
critical junctures	When the various levels combine to create an irresistable force	Out of the Belly of Hell; Anthony Barnett (2020) Literature review of critical junctures (2006)

From the Stable State to total Disruption?

We live in chaotic times and I have been trying in recent weeks to map how various authors have tred to make sense for us of the changes which our societies have been experiencing simce I was a boy. My drafts never seem to finish but I am reasonably content with the new one I now present - From the Stable State to Disrupted Societies (with a short 14-page version being available here) 

My own focus has tended to be on the institutional and political aspects of change – but as this paper has developed I realised that I had largely neglected the technological and commercial aspects of change. And, as more and more titles have appeared about the pending collapse of the western system. I have included these – as well as samples of the scientific writing which suggests that, in the face of the complexity of the world, we all require a huge dash of humility.

Table One suggests these are the key fields of writing – and offers a few examples

The Level	The Focus	Example
1 individual	Psychology Self-help,	In Over our Heads – the mental demands of modern life Robert Kegan 1995
2. techno-logical	Engineering and economic	The Discoverers; Daniel Boorstin (1983) The collected works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 2014 (on creativity) The Technology Trap; Karl Frey (2019) Rethinking Humanity James Arbib and Tony Seba 2020
3 organisation -al	2.1 Commercial – managing change, Organ Development	In Search of Excellence Peters and Waterman 1982 Managing Change in Organisations Colin Carnall (5th edition 2007) Management challenges for the 21st century Peter Drucker (2001) Managing Change; Bernard Burnes (2004)
	2.2 Public – new public management, public value	Reinventing Government Graeber and Osborne (1992) Change here – managing change to improve local services (Audit Commission 2001) Appraising public value; past, present and futures (2011) useful (academic) summary article Public Value Management – governance and reform in Britain; John Connolly et al (2021)
	2,3 Non-governmental	Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world J Bryson and B Crosby (2015)
4 societal	Social change complexity, the adaptive cycle	Change the World Robert Quinn (2000) Power in movement – social movement and contentious politics; Sydney Tarrow (2011 edition) Can Democracy be Saved? - participation, deliberation and social movements; Donatella Della Porta (2013) Panarchy – understanding transformations in human and natural systems N Gunderson and C Holling 2002
5 Networked	The dynamic between the levels	Life and How to Survive it R Skynner and J Cleese 1993 The Rise of the Network Society; Manual Castells (1996) The World We Create Tomas Bjorkman 2019 Unlearn – a compass for radical transformation Hans Burmeister (2021)

I have already drawn attention to the fact that there are few papers on the all-embracing nature of change. It is a subject which is highly compartmentalised and table 1 of From the Stable State to Disrupted Societies is the core which describes each of the schools of writing

The UK slides to a new Nadir

With the UK pound now in free-fall, the Minister of Finance, with a name that sounds like a suicide pilot, has announced huge tax advantages to the rich - and giving apoplexy to commentators such as prominent radio commentator James O’Brien who is one of his beneficiaries

And Francis Coppola, one of the most objective economists, can’t understand what the government is up to