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Professor Martin Smith
University of York
Major Research Fellowship
2022

The rise of the chaotic state: decline, decadence and failure in British government

Investigating how a long period of public sector reform has been layered on top of an imperial institutional framework without any strategy for modernising government, Martin Smith’s research theorises that the British state has become chaotic

Ambulances in a queue
Ambulances in a queue outside the Royal London Hospital. SOPA Images Limited / Alamy Stock Photo

The UK is a rich country. It has the sixth-largest economy in the world. It is also seen as a model of good governance with relatively low levels of corruption, stable democracy and effective government. Yet, currently, many people are experiencing dramatic failures in public services. The NHS is on the point of collapse and the public transport system is unreliable and expensive. Even relatively well-paid young people cannot afford housing. Social care is in need of reform and education is underfunded and finding it difficult to recruit new teachers. The explanation for many of these problems often focuses on relatively short-term factors: austerity, strikes or Brexit. No doubt these are contributing factors. However, the current crisis in government may run deeper, and this project aims to discover some of the underlying and long-term factors leading to government failure.

The research will attempt to examine several intertwined elements that have led to the development of the UK’s ‘chaotic state’:

  • The imperial legacy: empire has continued to shape the centralised nature of the British government, focusing on concentrated sovereignty rather than inclusive citizenship. Consequently, policy is developed without consideration of how it affects those who deliver and receive services.
  • Adversarial politics: the winner takes all electoral system has prevented the development of long-term and pragmatic solutions to social problems, leading to frequent policy changes and the absence of long-term strategic reform plans.
  • Lack of constitutional reflection: the governing process needs to adapt to meet the requirements of the modern world. Constitutional change has been contested and ad hoc leading to a fragmented and incoherent system of governing.
  • The problem of the Union: devolution has led to an inconsistent governing framework without producing a stable constitutional settlement.
  • The absence of ideological vision: a failure to develop a shared understanding of what the state is and what it should do
  • Financialisation and marketisation: the use of private capital to fund public services has complicated the delivery of public services with long-term contracts making policy change difficult.

At the heart of the chaotic state is the failure to deal with imperial decline and to develop a new sense of post-imperial purpose. The imperial state created a set of institutional governing arrangements that centralised power in Westminster and Whitehall. However, there was an acceptance across political elites that this model would be fit for purpose in a post-imperial world. Yet a series of economic and political crises across the 1960s and 1970s illustrated the system’s weaknesses. The result was, particularly after 1979, a series of politically and ideologically driven reforms that were layered onto existing organisations. The consequence has been an even more fragmented and chaotic system unable to deal with the scale of social, economic and political change facing the UK. This project will investigate how the failure to rethink the institutional framework of the British government and politics has led to a systemic failure in policymaking and policy outcomes.
 

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