Gwyn Bevan (author) October 2023
ISBNs: 978-1-911712-10-7 (Print) 978-1-911712-11-4 (PDF) 978-1-911712-12-1 (epub) 978-1-911712-13-8 (Mobi) |
If every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets, what is wrong with the design of the systems that govern Britain? And how have they resulted in failures in housing, privatisation, outsourcing, education and health care? In How Did Britain Come to This? Gwyn Bevan examines a century of varieties of systemic failures in the British state. The book begins and ends by showing how systems of governance explain scandals in NHS hospitals, and the failures and successes of the UK and Germany in responding to Covid-19 before and after vaccines became available.
The book compares geographical fault lines and inequalities in Britain with those that have developed in other European countries and argues that the causes of Britain’s entrenched inequalities are consequences of shifts in systems of governance over the past century. Clement Attlee’s postwar government aimed to remedy the failings of the prewar minimal state, while Margaret Thatcher’s governments in the 1980s in turn sought to remedy the failings of Attlee’s planned state by developing the marketised state, which morphed into the financialised state we see today.
This analysis highlights the urgent need for a new political settlement of an enabling state that tackles current systemic weaknesses from market failures and over-centralisation. This book offers an accessible, analytic account of government failures of the past century, and is essential reading for anyone who wants to make an informed contribution to what an innovative, capable state might look like in a post-pandemic world.
"A coruscating analysis of the failings of British governance and public policy that led to the catastrophe of the Covid pandemic and its aftermath."
Professor Gwyn Bevan is Emeritus Professor of Policy Analysis. He was previously the Head of the Department of Management. Professor Bevan also held the position of Director of the Office for Healthcare Performance at the Commission for Health Improvement, which regulated quality of care in the NHS in England and Wales from 2000 to 2004. He is a member of the Advisory Committee on Resource Allocation that advises the Secretary of State for Health on the formulas to be used in allocating resources for health care and public health in England and of the Advisory Board to Her Majesty's Inspector of Constabulary on the programme of regular force inspections. He is also a Visiting Professor at the Blavatnik School of Government of the University of Oxford and Affiliate Professor in the Istituto di Management of the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa.
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