7 Comments on The state I’m in

Joe Nutt on Fri, 16th Oct 2009 7:38 am


Although genuinely sympathising with your sense of frustration about the crude polarisation of the state / anti-state debate, I think your phrase, the state “lacks the capacity, subtlety and responsiveness to affect the changes in people’s lives that it intends” doesn’t just beg, but gets down on all fours and screams a number of questions.

Firstly, although I absolutely agree with you that this current state “finds it very hard to successfully manage local public services” is this true of all states, or just the one we have now?

And secondly, my experience of what this state “intends” is something that equates very much to the political objectives of any one individual at any one time, and shows no interest whatsoever in genuinely assimilating either the views of those served, or the views of genuine, apolitical experts in the field.

As I commented on another Matthew’s blog recently, “I suspect one of the most defining characteristics historians will lay at the feet of Teflon Tone and not the Iron Lady, will be… utter selfishness.”
http://blog.matthewcain.co.uk/climate-change-i-dont-care-enough/#comments

Susmita on Fri, 16th Oct 2009 11:55 am


“(I say this partly in response to the complete stranger who came up to me the day before yesterday on the Piccadilly Line platform of Kings Cross underground station and called me ‘a nasty right wing s**t’).”

That is bizarre. Perhaps he thought you were someone else???

“The thing is I am not anti-state.”

Um, I wouldn’t worry that anyone might think that of you.

” my inexplicably overlooked Prospect piece, ”

Philistines, every last one!!

Will Davies on Fri, 16th Oct 2009 1:55 pm


This might be the New Labour equivalent of telling Paul McCartney that John Lennon had already used that chord progression, but there is quite a nice line in this Geoff Mulgan article that “Governments overestimate their power to achieve change in the short term, and underestimate it in the long term”.

I suspect that this isn’t so different from being “an enthusiastic collectivist but a sceptical statist”. After all, states are prime actors in the construction, defence or destruction of collectives, but over much longer time horizons than either politicians or policy-makers can work with. For instance, the impact – positive and negative – of the welfare state upon collectivism occurs over an entirely separate temorality than the imperatives (fiscal, media, economic cycle, elections) that shape how it is governed.

Equally, the quality and quantity of a society’s collectivism has an impact upon states’ capacity and requirement to act. High levels of collectivism increase the capacity to act: in the US the GI Bill (or maybe even the Civil Rights Act) was only possible because of the social capital built up over the war. But they also reduce the necessity to act: if we were a more collectivist society, the state would not have to intervene so much to alter behaviour and make us clean up after ourselves environmentally and culturally.

Perhaps one of the main reasons to be sceptical of the British state is that our society is not sufficiently collectivist for it to function as well as it might… (I think this was why Rousseau held out hope for very small states, with Denmark perhaps a case in point).

oldandrew on Fri, 16th Oct 2009 5:09 pm


I think you are spot on here. I despair at the bureaucratic, incompetent mess I see in state education. However, the idea that the state shouldn’t invest heavily in education, and in ways that reach the worst off and least able, or that we just need middle class escape routes, is even worse. I find myself equally annoyed about those who think the market can solve the problems in education, and those who won’t believe the problems exist. The state is generally useless, but it is often necessary, and the obvious alternatives to public services, such as publicly funded charities or private contractors, are probably even more inefficient and ineffective.

TimHood on Thu, 22nd Oct 2009 5:38 am


I think Will nails it here:

‘if we were a more collectivist society, the state would not have to intervene so much to alter behaviour and make us clean up after ourselves environmentally and culturally.’

There’s a paradox here that Cameron is going to run into very quickly. As I understand it, his vision depends upon nurturing the kind of individual and collectivist behaviour that will reduce the need for a large interventionist state.

To do that he will have to introduce Nudge-inspired policies that will feel very alien to traditional conservative values. It’s difficult to reconcile central government initiatives on behaviour change with the self-reliance of traditional Tory voters.

And he’ll need at least one term’s worth of high profile central government action to ween us off our dependency on big government- all this against a backdrop of major cuts.

Just as you pointed out in your post about Barnet Matthew, the transitions that the Conservatives plan, while exciting in some areas, are going to require huge investment and a lot of hands on state action to begin with.

On the education debate- well, I’m with you, I just despair. We get Troops to Teachers after how much research? Yet the Cambridge report gets brushed aside.

matthewtaylor on Thu, 22nd Oct 2009 4:59 pm


Hi Will. Yes I like the Mulganism and i also really like the question about whether size matters to the capacity of states to foster and draw upon social capital. While we are quoting the masters there is Daniel Bell’s famous ‘in the modern world nation states will be too big for the small things in life and too small for the big things in life’ – how true is that of England?i

matthewtaylor on Thu, 22nd Oct 2009 5:01 pm


Oh dear. Andrew. not much hope then? The question for me is how do we return public service to the community so they feel more like the expression of collective solidarity and compassion and less like tentacles of the central state.

Tell me what you're thinking...
and oh, if you want a pic to show with your comment, go get a gravatar!