Understanding governance failures: a review of How Did Britain Come to This? by Gwyn Bevan

Such is the now overwhelming evidence of Britain’s decaying public infrastructure, that the New Statesman has eloquently described Britain as ‘a state in disrepair’ in an ‘age of public affluence and public squalor’.  

How Britain has come to occupy this invidious position is something that Professor Gwyn Bevan seeks to answer in his new book, How Did Britain Come To This?, helpfully providing the answer in his sub-title as no less than a ‘century of systemic failures of governance’. The book is no mere catalogue of disaster, however, taking effort not only to diagnose the causes of failures of governance across critical areas of public life in Britain, but to emphasise why they matter. Governance failures cause very private tragedies, and only the stoniest of hearts could fail to be moved by the stories of those parents afflicted by the NHS Bristol babies scandal that start the book.

That Britain’s public services are now (literally in many cases) collapsing around us is becoming an increasingly unavoidable fact. In establishing the breadth of governance failure in Britain, through case-studies on the economy, healthcare and education, amongst others, Bevan helps us to locate the origin of our now everyday experience of public sector decay. More recent political events such as Austerity or Brexit are mere accelerants of governance failure in Britain, the root cause for which can be found in the transition towards market-based and financialised governance beginning in the 1980s, on which Bevan trains his sights throughout the book (although he equally finds criticism in ‘central planning’ approaches to governance inaugurated by the Atlee government).

In reminding us of the historical origins of Britain’s more recent visible manifestations of governance failure, whether it be record NHS waiting lists, crumbling schools, or shit-infested waterways, worries about the possibility for transformative policies to reverse Britain’s economic and social decline after years of state-sponsored vandalism and neglect become clear. Governance problems in Britain are longstanding and deep-rooted. Sustained resources and significant political capital are required to dismantle the financialised governance mechanisms that have been created. In short, structural change to British capitalism is required. Tinkering at the edges to manage the system in a more compassionate way won’t do. No political party at present appears appreciative of this fundamental argument or are presenting policies that rise to the scale of the challenge.

If that is not enough to convince of the need for structural change in Britain, then market and financialised forms of governance simply don’t deliver even on their own terms. The great paradox of modern British political economy is that as the British state has ceded ever more power to the market over recent decades, so it’s role in the economy has grown ever greater as the state has had to step in to rectify growing inefficiencies and inadequacies of the market. That is why the Conservative party, after nearly fourteen years in power, is bestowing upon the nation a low-growth and high tax economy as they strive to maintain some semblance of basic provision of essential public services under what feels like perpetual conditions of austerity. Indeed, as intended, austerity has successfully cannibalised the capacity of the British state to act as the progenitor of new and existing sources of economic prosperity, but the result has been ‘more state’ not ‘more market’. Much like Craig Berry’s recent work on ‘substitutive statism’, in which the British state has increasingly had to intervene in key economic sectors (such as housing and pensions) to maintain private sector profitability, so Bevan talks of the ‘parastate’ to denote the large-scale transfer of taxpayer cash by the British government to private sector companies.

Bevan’s book also speaks to the bourgeoning academic literature identifying governance failures in Britain as a consequence of the persuasive myth that the market has been the successful organisational principle driving British capitalism throughout its history. It hasn’t, but the people in charge over recent decades think it has, and therein lies the governance problem identified by Bevan. I have made my own small contribution, finding that in periods of history in which policymakers often believe the market to have been the driving force behind the development of the British economy, such as in the nineteenth century, there was often a strong directive and enabling role played by the central state. That those in power have so badly misunderstood the history of the British state and the role it should play within governance mechanisms, is in essence, the story that Bevan is telling.

If the valuable contribution of this book is to direct our attention towards the ills of financialised governance, then it is absolutely crucial that later research situates the British state within the narrative advanced by Bevan, especially in an era when structural change of British capitalism is necessary. There is a desperate need for us to understand why the British state has persisted in reproducing financialised governance mechanisms (which in relation to the British economy date back to the 1688 Glorious Revolution) when centuries of data now exist to demonstrate their fallibility. Only in comprehending an answer to this conundrum might we start to navigate our way towards more fair and equitable modes of governance in Britain.

James Silverwood is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Leeds Beckett University