I run a French university course on why Britain is such a mess – I won't run out of material

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05-06-2025

Your 60-minute exam on 'Public Policy Failure and the British State: A History in Twelve Case Studies' starts…. now.
Turn the page and read Clarissa Eden's diary entry for November 4 1956, in the midst of the Suez Crisis, and answer the question:
'Do the personalities involved in a given policy failure matter as much, if not more than, the ideas themselves?'
Bon courage!
For the past three years, 38-year-old Oxford academic Oliver Lewis has been teaching an oversubscribed course at Sciences Po – the Paris university that produced six of France's last eight presidents – while researching a DPhil (equivalent to a PhD) on UK rail privatisation as a 'case study in British public policy failure, 1985-1997'.
The source of Lewis's inspiration, he believes, was his father's scientific expertise in materials failure. After earning degrees in History and Politics at the London School of Economics and King's College London – and a short stint in financial services – Lewis was unable to shake off his interest in a different sort of failure, dating back to his study of the privatisation of British Rail for A-level Economics.
Having enrolled at Oxford for his DPhil, he won a year's fellowship to Sciences Po in 2021 as part of an exchange programme. The following year, he was asked to develop a 12-week course. It has now been taken by over 200 French, British and other international students at the university dubbed 'la fabrique des élites' (the elite factory).
'Regardless of citizenship, there is a universal curiosity in a country that has gone from one of the richest in the world to a mediocre one,' says Lewis. 'There is definitely a general feeling that something has gone deeply wrong for Britain. When I tell people that my DPhil is on railways and public policy failure, they say, 'Well, you won't run out of material'.'
There has certainly been no shortage of recent stories highlighting problems with Britain's rail infrastructure. In December, The Telegraph reported on an 18-mile line in Northumberland – a victim of the Beeching cuts in the 1960s – which took three decades to be rebuilt after plans for its reopening were first mooted in the 1990s.
When work finally began in 2019, the £160 million project was due to be completed by spring 2023. It eventually opened in December 2024, by which time the estimated cost had nearly doubled to £298 million – and only two of its six stations were ready.
Nevertheless, the curiosity displayed by Lewis's enthusiastic students appears untainted by any contempt for the country they have been studying.
'I have always been a fan of the UK,' says Milan Wojcieszek, a 23-year-old Polish student at the University of Amsterdam, currently on a year-long exchange at Sciences Po. 'I admire your newspaper culture and the civilised way in which you debate in Parliament. But for me, Brexit appeared an irrational decision in a country where everything seemed to be going right, and I wanted to understand the motivations behind it better.
'I still like the British attitude, but the course put an end to the picture in my head that people from western Europe have a superior intellect when it comes to statecraft. It raised my national self-esteem: if these guys can f--- up, maybe we're not so stupid.'
But what about his French classmates, the Pompidous, Mitterands and Chiracs of the future? Did they enjoy a good laugh about les Rosbifs while quietly taking notes on mistakes to avoid? 'I did not see a visible enthusiasm for smirking about their arch-rivals shooting themselves in the foot,' says Wojcieszek, who hopes to become an entrepreneur when he graduates. 'I guess what I saw was more sympathy and curiosity.'
Wojcieszek's classmate Amélie Destombes, a second-year student at King's College London currently on secondment to Sciences Po, confirms the impression that Britain is a fascinating country to study – if not for the most reassuring reasons.
'I've had conversations with many French students who have brought up Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss or Boris Johnson – so there's a pretty bad reputation,' she says.
Brexit is often the hook that attracts European students to Lewis's course – although many might be unaware that he stood for Reform, originally founded as the Brexit Party, in last year's general election for the Montgomeryshire and Glyndŵr seat, where he came second to Labour. Now no longer active in the party, Lewis adopts a rigorously apolitical stance in his seminars.
'Our duty is to truth, not to subjectivity or opinion,' he explains. In any case, he argues, 'it's too early to tell' with Brexit.
Instead, he roots his teaching in historical method, blending aspects of anthropology and law, as befits Sciences Po's interdisciplinary approach. This results in a 12-part lecture series on the 'long 20th century' that seeks to understand 'how we got to this malaise,' what lessons can be learnt for other countries, and whether British decline is reversible.
The course begins with the First World War, a well-documented event, before exploring three further foreign policy failures: appeasement in the 1930s, the Partition of India in 1947, and the Suez Crisis of 1956. It then shifts focus to domestic issues, covering Northern Ireland, comprehensive education, the 'financialisation' of the economy, the poll tax, rail privatisation – which Lewis estimates has cost taxpayers over £120 billion – and Private Finance Initiatives (PFIs).
This shift in focus reflects the changing role of a state that, over the past 100 years, has been asked to do more with less.
'For most of its history, the British state dealt only with defence and with imperial concerns,' explains Lewis. 'Its culture and institutions were designed to serve a different purpose. They are, therefore, not terribly efficacious when it comes to solving domestic problems. Britain is in a uniquely unfortunate position because its global role coincided with a domestic economy that could not shoulder its defence burden.'
This, Lewis says, did deep, long-term damage, meaning the country 'could not adjust to its drastically reduced role post 1970, with the result that domestic public policy has been poorly planned, poorly executed – and at times poorly financed too.'
Prof Sir Ivor Crewe, a distinguished political scientist, is the author of The Blunders of Our Governments, which features on the reading list for Lewis's course – alongside films such as Rogue Trader (the Nick Leeson biopic), and The Navigators, Ken Loach's story of Sheffield rail workers affected by privatisation.
'It's hard to say if Britain is appreciably worse than other countries such as Italy, France or Germany,' he says. 'But it's difficult to imagine students in Britain being very interested in the mistakes of those countries.'
The Blunders of Our Governments, co-authored with the late Prof Anthony King and published in 2013, includes well-known British disasters such as the Millennium Dome and membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, as well as more niche blunders like New Labour's individual learning accounts and the Child Support Agency spending two years chasing a childless gay man over a daughter who didn't exist.
The book argues that the British political system suffers from a dwindling talent pool, limited understanding of project management, ineffective checks and balances and inconsequential penalties for failure. Although decisive governments can make effective policy, it is just as easy for incompetent ministers to make bad decisions – a problem that has worsened since the Thatcher and Blair governments.
'With the best will in the world, I have found it difficult to identify successes since 2010,' says Crewe, who is currently working on a new edition of the book covering fresh blunders such as austerity, High Speed 2 and Covid. 'Even when I ask Conservative commentators, it's pretty thin gruel.'
Lewis's course at Sciences Po concludes with the Iraq War, before devoting the final lecture to a handful of public policy successes, including PAYE and Bank of England inflation targeting, followed by a plenary discussion on the past and the future.
'My main takeaway is that, when we make policy, it impacts real people,' says Destombes, who hopes to work in British public policy after graduating. 'There needs to be better research on the communities that are affected.'
Gabriel Ward, a third-year student at the LSE who took the course at the same time, cites Nicholas Ridley – the Cabinet minister responsible for introducing Thatcher's poll tax (and the son of a viscount) – dismissing people's financial worries by saying, 'Well, they could always sell a picture.'
'There's a disconnect between policy makers and those who would feel it most,' says Ward. 'I was constantly struck by the gap between ideology and practicality.'
Wojcieszek's conclusion is that even a strong political system can lead to bad decision making. 'It reinforced my belief that what really matters is visionary leaders who can propose something unpopular,' he says.
Lewis wants his students to 'leave with a knowledge that ideas can be as dangerous as they can be powerful.' But inevitably, he has some interesting ideas himself on how Britain might extricate itself from problems that began last century and have worsened since the millennium.
'I used to think that dealing with Britain's 'issues' would be a 30-year project,' he says. 'I now think it's a 50-year one. In the short run, the solution is attracting the best human capital into politics. In the long run, it's education. The education of our future political elite is a massive burning platform.'
Lewis is an admirer of the French lycée system, as well as the strong sense of national pride at Sciences Po, where 'virtually every corridor has a tricolour and its primary duty is to the people of France.'
Dismissing claims in a recent book that Sciences Po is a hotbed of woke radicalism – 'This obviously afflicts all institutions' – Lewis applauds 'the genius of de Gaulle and the reset of the 1950s,' which Britain has never had, with the possible limited exception of the Northcote-Trevelyan Civil Service reforms of the 19th century, aimed at moving away from patronage and towards a meritocratic system.
'Our electoral system creates a duopoly in which there's no market for ideas,' he says. 'We've never really had a proper conversation about the role of the state in our lives.
'An absence of vision and standards seems to affect every branch of the British state. It's now at emergency levels. Britain's standard of living is on course to be overtaken by Poland's by 2030. The electorate is not going to accept that decline. Something will have to give.'
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