Haywire: A Political History of Britain since 2000

by Andrew Hindmoor

Vladimir Lenin, an occasional resident of North London who went on to other things, has been credited with once saying that there are decades where nothing happens but weeks when decades happen. The first two and a half decades of this century in Britain have had plenty of those weeks. Indeed, our recent history has at times resembled an episode of Casualty, the long-running BBC hospital drama in which every hedge trimmer slips, every gas pipe leaks, every piece of scaffolding collapses and everyone ends up in intensive care.In Haywire Andrew Hindmoor makes sense of the deluge of events which have rained down on Britain since 2000, from the Iraq War to financial collapse, austerity to Brexit, as well as more easily forgotten moments such as the MP’s expenses scandal. He shows not simply how one crisis has quickly followed another, but how each crisis has compounded the next, so that disaster feels like the new normal. Has Britain simply been the victim of a particularly prolonged run of bad luck which will, sooner or later, come to an end? No. Hindmoor argues that the way the British state is organised has, time and again, made a crisis out of a drama – and that it is time to find an alternative before we all go haywire.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, British Literature

649 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 13, 2024

Reviews

[Peter Baran]

It was with a sense of masochism I delved into Haywire, a modern history of British politics from 2000 - 2023. We've just had an election which leaves some of this now moot, or at least consigned to the dustbin of history thank goodness, and there are a couple of predictions near the end (not least the political system no longer delivering large majorities), that I am sure will be edited for second / paperback edition. When I ordered this I assumed, partially because of the title, that this was actually a history from 2010 to the present, and it is a little odd coming into the Blair years three years in. Hindmoo does a good job justifying this period as a coherent set of crises that the government of whatever flavour didn't deal with particularly well, but in the process feeds into the criticism that all politicians are the same, one which he sees is at the heart of some of the problems of our party political system. Indeed whilst this is a very long book, he resists delving deeply into the personalities or driving motivations of his lead actors particularly. It seems odd to talk about Blair without mentioning his later Catholicism, or how Iraq seemed like a crusade for him, and whilst you get a solid sense of Boris Johnson from his chaotic actions, there isn't really any attempt to contextualise that within a chaotic career.

That said with a book like this, criticism is the default mode from the reader. Things don't quite happen how you remember them or for reasons other than the ones Hindmoor ascribes. It is first and foremost an attempt to wrestle the various themes of the last twenty-three years into a coherent narrative, even though history doesn't really unfold like that. COVID is concurrent with the last year of Brexit negotiations, which is mentioned several times, but the process of that happening isn't always laid on as thick as perhaps it should. But there are a few aims here, he doesn't just want to look back and be critical of the (many many) mistakes made, indeed there is a thorough but somewhat threadbare set of suggestions to improve British democracy that I am sure will continue to be ignored by politicians of all stripes. Nevertheless, the value of a book like this is hopefully to show a route to not make the same mistakes again. Should Kier Starmer end up governing too centrally as Blair did, will he pick up on the inevitable endgame of that process? Can it be used to temper political feuds within parties so they work better?

Haywire is interesting partially because it compares the two most recent periods of government, and identifies many of their problems as procedural (and truth be told sometimes overcorrections from previous governments). I think it is a little too harsh on Labour, and if anything a little too soft on the Tories, particularly post-Brexit. But then I would say that that is where my politics lie. The success here is to tell two stories from a relatively neutral viewpoint, identifying flaws without being wholly negative. I am sure it is the first of many modern political histories that will show up, but it does set a pretty high bar.

[Mae]

This was exceptional. I wish I had one of these for every country that I’m interested in because it’s really useful orientation tool. It’s a great example of history written with a social scientific lens that adds a lot of rigor to topics that would be very easy to misrepresent given how recent and polarising they are.

I found the sections on political economy particularly engaging, which is unsurprising given the author’s specialisation.

Great stuff.

[Simon Mee]

Haywire sets out the first quarter century of the 21st millennium by way of semi-chronological themes. It is a fair criticism that this style isolates elements whose interactions may driven decision-making. Despite this, the author does do solid cross referencing work between each theme so I was personally relaxed about the approach. I do prefer Hindmoor's style as I found leaping of crisis to crisis without proper explanation of each problem quite exhausting in The Winner. Haywire devotes a reasonable amount to explaining why the particular issue mattered as much as how the government of the day did or didn’t deal with it.

The narrative was clear, notwithstanding the ostensibly dry presentation where Hindmoor avoids delving into personal foibles and scandals, preferring the rise of broader forces such as populism for their explanatory power (while still holding the relevant governments responsible). Hindmoor does have a dry sense of humour which he deploys occasionally without turning the book into some form of polemic.

While my view is a distant one, he does appear even-handed in his contributions of the parties. I have seen mention that Labour gets a harsher treatment than expected, but I consider that he (while presenting it as a balanced assessment) is quite critical of the austerity measures of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition.

[Tom]

I bought a copy of this for my brother (lives in Muswell Hill) after being amused by the opening sentence, in which the old saw about years where nothing happens and weeks where years happen is ascribed to “Vladimir Lenin, an occasional resident of North London who went on to other things.” Sadly this is probably the best joke; the book coasts on a broadsheet quasi-wittiness that sometimes drops into the worst kind of journalistic tic; at one point the word “ouch” is used as a sentence, on its own, as comment on the previous sentence. This should not be allowed of anyone whose author photo so clearly marks them as fifty-plus.

The book is mostly okay. That opening chapter points out that the title has more than one reading: not only have things gone haywire, the British government is a haywire outfit; the thesis, if there is one, is that the particular conditions of electoral politics in what Hindmoor intermittently calls UKGBNI have led to a series of mismanagements and bad reactions to the crises of the quarter-century. Occasionally he calls this ‘partyocracy’.

The account of those crises is readable, though sometimes too glib (see above) and occasionally frustrated by the inevitable trade-off between the thematic and the narrative. Part Three, for example, ‘War’, goes from Iraq and Afghanistan (sure) to the IRA’s announcement it is ceasing armed struggle (hm) to the personal conflict between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. We are informed at the outset of Part Five, ‘Union’, that it refers to, among other things, “the party-political union between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats,” “the institutional union of marriage,” and “the shared ‘imagined community’ created by Danny Boyle for the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony.” On the core issues—the boom, the war, the crash—Hindmoor is good; when he goes to the fringes he has to awkwardly pin things back to his argument. (A chapter on globalization via the institution of English football is either his best or his worst.)

I’d forgotten, or not been aware of at the time, a lot few things between ’97 and ’08: the fuel crisis of 2000, here seen as pre-empting the ways in which a variety of different lines would displace previously straightforward ‘class’ and left-vs-right sympathies; the fact that Labour, in ’97, promised not to outspend the Conservatives; the fact that the Tories, before the financial crisis gave them the excuse, had promised not to under-spend Labour. Some things I definitely just didn’t pay enough attention to at the time, too, like, a lot of what’s happened around devolution and the NI peace process, or, more central to Hindmoor’s actual narrative, the notion that May’s manifesto and media framing in ’17 was further to the classical ‘left’ of any pitch to the electorate since Michael Foot, with the exception of Corbyn’s that same year. Hindmoor’s big claim in the hardback edition was that the orthodoxy of the New Labour-Coalition-Bush-to-Trump-One years was over: that both public opinions and government policies were likely going to give up on a Hayekian view of the primacy of pure capitalism. The updates for the paperback suggest a certain sheepishness about this, given how quickly Starmer rowed back from his manifesto claims, and the current global disruption of Trump Two.

Am I convinced that ‘partyocracy’ is to blame, or even that it’s well-defined? I just don’t know. Hindmoor has a long list of decisions he says were motivated by the necessity to frame issues around appealing to voters in a two-party system; I also think, with the exception perhaps of Getting Brexit Done, no British government of the past quarter-century has particularly cared whether their practice in office lived up to what they had promised voters. Two other themes (which Hindmoor sometimes lumps into ‘partyocracy’) seem equally valid: the increasing mistrust of politicians, which leaves the electorate more manipulable to non-realist claims (Brexit, again); the ongoing tendency towards the sidelining of the Cabinet to a near-presidential executive in the prime minister (hence our presence in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) or to effective micro-Cabinets like that of the Coalition years (hence the full-throttle commitment to austerity and the sidelining of what much of the parliamentary Lib Dems and most of their rank-and-file members actually wanted.)

At the book’s end Hindmoor claims that the entrenched miserabilism of British political commentary is bad, that there is room for optimism somewhere. He provides a deeply underwhelming plan to fix British government: increase time for Private Members’ Bills, enhance the role of select committees, reform the House of Lords (making them more powerful (!)), provide a mechanism to guarantee a set number of independent MPs, and limit and formalize the powers of the whip. If this is the best he has to offer I fear I am not converted to the cause of optimism.

[Jason Grainger]

The first quarter of the 21st century in political terms is laid bare in Andrew Hindmoor’s book. I found it a good retrospective review and learned more about some of the crisis described but also wished that further detail could have been provided. The paperback had a couple of extra chapters added due to the gap between both versions being published and the ongoing political stories that were emerging.

Overall an enjoyable and easy to read book.