Ruling Britannia: The failure and future of British democracy

by Andrew Marr

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• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0718139135
• ISBN13: 9780718139131
• Release Date: January 1995
• Publisher: Michael Joseph Ltd
• Length: 384 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.4" x 1.4" x 6.4"

Customer Reviews

A worrying analysis of Britain today

Reviewed by PETER UNWIN in International Relations, Volume XIII, No 1, April 1996 This is an important book. Behind a wilfully silly and facetious style that seems designed to irritate and interrupt, Andrew Marr, political columnist of The Independent, has given us a serious and worrying analysis of the state of politics and government in Britain today. He brings out three topical themes in particular. A Conservative administration which professes itself intent to limit and diminish the power of the state has in fact concentrated power in its own hands still further. Many of the changes it has introduced have replaced openly accountable bodies with organizations answerable only to ministers. In doing so it has contributed to a process already in train that is diminishing - some would say destroying - the reputation and authority of poli-tics and of the state. Most of Mr Marr's analysis concerns Britain's domestic arrangements, and is perhaps not a fit subject for review in an international journal. But at the heart of the book, between pages 162 and 229, he gives us a brilliantly observed and sus-tained account of `The Decline and Fall of the Free State'. Here at least half his argument concerns Britain's external circum-stances, and demonstrates vividly that the plight of government today results as much from international as domestic develop-ments. Mr Marr asks himself what is the essential story of the state throughout the period since the British people as a whole got the vote. His answer `can be summarized in a single, brutal sentence. It has declined'. The state has lost world power. In compensation it has attempted to become more powerful at home. And it has discovered that this is a forlorn ambition. Why has the British state lost world power? Essentially because of an inevitable decline in the country's economic weight relative to its most immediate competitors. The decline goes back in years far beyond the responsibilities of any of today's polit-ical actors; at best and worst, their policies have only margin-ally affected the rate of a decline inevitable as other economies followed where Britain first led. The two wars concentrated power in the hands of the state in an unprecedented way, but their outcome, victorious though it was, undermined Britain's relative economic standing and hence its international power. Other factors have come to join secular economic change in the factors reducing the power of the British state. Before the First World War there were fewer than forty multinational organizations. Now there are nearly four hundred. `Some of these bring little or no threat to the autonomy of nations, but most bring some, and some bring a lot'. Taken together these organiza-tions - political, economic, scientific, social - have trenched on the international power of British statesmen. At the same time the world's business, particularly the world's economic business, has been `globalized' - back to the global nature of the planet