Everything Seems Broken: Capability And The State
An evening of discussion with Abby Innes (Associate Professor of Political Economy at the LSE) and Gordon Guthrie (Research Fellow at Scottish Government) with John McTernan (former Political Secretary to Tony Blair) in the chair.
There is a general pessimism across politics in the UK - a feeling that everything is broken. Capability and the State is a pair of talks about how the current UK state lost its capabilities under relentless reform and what capabilities it needs to function in the new complex world of entangled digitally-supported services.
Abby Innes is the author of Late Soviet Britain - a critique of the marketised state.
Late Soviet Britain (cambridge.org)
Why have British governments since 1979 become so poor at systems-thinking and strategic investment? We rightly think of Soviet and neoliberal/neoclassical economics as exactly opposed in their values, but the problem lies in this exact mirroring.
Examine the theoretical small print of neoliberal orthodoxies and you find a materialist 'governing science' as circular in its reasoning and deterministic as Leninism. After forty years of economic transformation in pursuit of 'the withering away of the state' - via the New Public Management, policies of marketisation, quasi-marketisation, tax and regulatory competition and the management of future risk via presumptively productive corporate rationality - successive governments of right and left have contrived to reproduce Soviet state failures in capitalist form.
The result is an ever more centralised state that is beginning to collapse, in terms of functionality, under the weight of its own contradictions. Utopian and tautological as it is, our neoliberal governing science proves as impossible to refute as it is to implement.
Gordon Guthrie is a Research Fellow at the Scottish Government studying how services and the digital systems underpinning them are created by the state.
Digital Policy | Gordon Guthrie | Substack
How do we govern and develop a Complex State? The digital age is an age of infrastructure - but not visible bridges, roads and sewage works but an invisible infrastructure of data flows and technology.
The building of this infrastructure poses complex constitutional and machinery of government questions. How does the state organise itself to build this complexity? and how do we implement separation of powers and parliamentary oversight of it?