Some thoughts for the Mile End Institute webinar, “‘A Hard Rain’? Reforming the Civil Service” At last week’s Conservative party conference, Lord Agnew – a British government minister involved in civil service reform – echoed Dominic Cummings’ many attacks on the service for its over-centralisation, mediocrity, risk-averseness, inefficiency, failure to […]
The UK’s public admin failure: round up the unusual suspects? Read More »
In a speech today (“The future of public health”) Matt Hancock confirmed reports in the Sunday Telegraph that he plans to scrap Public Heath England (PHE) and replace it by early-September with a new National Institute for Health Protection modelled on the German Robert Koch Institute (but operating in a
What the PHE imbroglio tells us about UK governance Read More »
Last month, Dominic Cummings warned the Civil Service that “a hard rain is coming”. Ten days ago Michael Gove put some flesh on the bones of that message in his landmark speech at Ditchley Park on the future of government (“The privilege of public service”). He began with an arresting
Michael Gove on Civil Service reform and ministerial (un)accountability Read More »
The impact on Britain of the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 and the illness that it causes (Covid-19) has been profound. Meeting its challenge has made extraordinary demands on the British state. Its performance has been patchy, to say the least. It is possible to discern some significant achievements. Yet, when we
Thatcherism and Britain’s Covid-19 state failure Read More »
Brexit has pushed British politics into uncharted waters in which the furore over Speaker of the House of Commons’ failure to follow precedent in Parliamentary procedure seems slightly surreal. In an unprecedented situation, perhaps the ability of the Speaker to create a new precedent should be seen as a strength
In an unprecedented crisis, how useful is precedent? Read More »
Writing on the morning after the election, the fog of war has lifted to reveal a battlefield on which all sides are claiming victory but nobody has actually won. Others more prescient than me wondered before the election if it did not have a whiff of another ‘snap election’ –
The 2017 General Election: first thoughts Read More »
On Monday 23 January, Theresa May and her business secretary Greg Clark launched their ‘industrial strategy’ green paper, promising that their proposed strategy would not be on the lines of the ‘fatally flawed‘ approach of the 1970s, which sought on the whole to protect industries and firms in difficulties as
Industrial strategy, past and present Read More »
An updated version of this piece can be found on the PolicyBristol blog. What have we learned in the eight days since Britain voted to leave the EU by a margin of 3.8 percentage points? The country has jettisoned the foreign policy followed by all governments since 1961 yet the
Brexit requires radical change in the UK political system Read More »
In the wake of the EU referendum result the UK faces a crisis unparalleled in peacetime. The financial crash of 2008 was bad enough, but at least our political system was not then in melt-down. Today, half a century of carefully crafted foreign policy has crumbled to dust. Each of
The EU referendum crisis is this generation of MPs’ ‘Narvik’ moment Read More »