The Ways Britain's Weird

Why can't we have what other countries have?

The language of crisis has become commonplace across lots of areas of policy making in this country.

There’s a crisis in social care. There’s a crisis in the NHS. There’s a crisis in local government funding. There’s a crisis in mental health services. The Home Office is in crisis. So is our national energy strategy. Brexit is both a crisis and the symptom of other crises.

Nothing works, basically. We’re paying Scandinavian taxes for American services. Systems are failing, strategies are not delivering and the levers we are pulling aren’t making things better. What’s going on?

The problem with the austerity explanation

Austerity offers a plausible medium term explanation for much of this. We spent ten years deliberately hacking away at state capacity, the story goes - and now, surprise surprise, the state isn’t able to do very much. 

There is a good deal of truth in this. Austerity was a catastrophic period of British fiscal policy – one that failed in just about every way imaginable. It failed on its own terms, as we did not achieve a budget surplus. It failed politically, as it undermined the coalition for Toryism that David Cameron tried to build, laying the groundwork for things that Cameron would view as disastrous in the forms of Brexit and Corbynism. And perhaps most importantly, austerity was a failure as it caused deteriorations in outcomes from child poverty to life expectancy.

In no way do I wish to downplay any of this. However, whilst it certainly hasn’t helped, I still want to argue that austerity is an insufficient explanation for what’s going on.

The crises that exist in Britain are visible comparatively. Our outcomes are bad in comparison to our peers. Things don’t work here that do work abroad. We are different.

But austerity isn’t really that different. Whilst it’s true that the campaign of cuts embarked on by the coalition government went further than most – Britain’s story of state retrenchment over the past 40 years, looked at in the macro, is just not that weird.  We do spend less on public services than some other western countries – but we spend more, for example, than social-democratic cause celebre New Zealand. In other words, money is important, but our crises can not be explained by money alone.

It seems to me that if the question is why can things not work here like they do in other countries – then our focus needs to be on the ways in which Britain is not like other countries.

In what ways are we weird?

Britain the outlier

It is beyond the scope of this blog to get into the weeds of comparative public policy here and really pick apart the ways in which structural factors lead to different policy outcomes in different systems.

However, what is achievable in a blog is to draw attention to ways in which Britain is an outlier by international standards. If those of us that work in policy can be more aware of these things as we go about our jobs, if we can be mindful of them, I believe that we can greatly enhance our ability to understand the issues in the systems we work within and against - to spot opportunities, to see the wood for the trees, and to make positive change.

So with that in mind let’s get into the ways Britain’s weird.

Let’s start with where we stand out the most. Britain is the most centralised developed country of its size in the world. In. The. World.

This is a startling fact, and one that should be front and centre of basically every policy discussion. There is no other nation on the planet that reserves so much power and control to such a small group of people. The House of Commons decides all. Any powers given to local government can be taken away at a moments notice. Any local decision can be overridden, regardless of the size of the issue in question.

Centralisation, to its advocates, means control, decisiveness and agility. However, even if you accept these things (and I for one do not), we need to have a serious reckoning with their drawbacks, for example: a lack of local or specialist knowledge, a lack of accountability to relevant stakeholders, a lack of capacity for experimentation in the system, and a lack of depth of engagement with any particular issue due to capacity constraints.

Another way in which Britain is weird relates to productivity. We are 15% less productive than many of our near neighbours, despite working as many, or in many cases more, hours. This ‘productivity puzzle’ is impacted by a range of factors, and precise causation is quite contested. However, when we analyse any given policy problem it can be useful, sometimes, to forget the “why” and acknowledge that the fact that our workers seem to achieve less per hour than they do in many other places is likely to be a part of the story.

Another way in which Britain is weird relates to the way our public expenditure pie is put together. Our veneration of the NHS - and the way in which we protect it from wider trends in political economy - means that the health service has become an unusually dominant monolith within the context of the British public sector. This leads to a situation in which it becomes a sort of public service of last resort, absorbing the demand and the problems that are missed by the rest of the state. This leaves Britain with an unusually lopsided state make-up, which is surely worth considering when crises both within health and care and beyond.

A framework for analysis

This list of issues is not exhaustive, and any of the items on it are worthy of a deep-dive to really explore their impacts.

What I’m trying to do here is get at an alternative way of thinking about Britain’s problems. Rather than focusing on the dominant strains in the discourse, if we can think more comparatively, I believe we might be able to get under the hood of at least some of our crises a little bit more effectively.

 We are in a situation where a range of systems are not delivering in the way they are in other places. It stands to reason then that it is worth thinking about the ways in which those systems are fundamentally different from how they are in other places.

If we want to deliver normal outcomes, perhaps we’ll have to become a normal country. And that starts with thinking about the ways we’re weird.