The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper‐Innovation
| Date | 01 November 2005 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2005.00572_2.x |
| Published date | 01 November 2005 |
legislate for devolved matters, would have been welcome ^ the discussion largely
addresses inter-executive co-operation in this ¢eld. Similarly, it would be useful
to lookat the role of Scottish Parliamentcommittees in the legislative process, as a
substitute for a second chamber: how e¡ectively are they able to play the role of
scrutinising policy and revising legislation? In the context of discussing private
bill procedures, the role of theTransportandWorks Act 1992 and its order-mak-
ing procedure ought to be noted. And a disc ussion of the relationship betweenthe
1706 Treatyof Union and the Scotland Act 1998 would also be interesting, illu-
minating the extent to which one constitutional settlement for Scotland has been
laid imperfectly over another, thereby creating a confusion of authority between
Westminster and Holyrood.
Such a comprehensive and clear bookon an important, and developing, topic
is to be warmly welcomed. Onehopes that this will be the ¢rst of many editions,
and that oversights noted here will be addressed. It is a book that deserves a place
on many shelves ^ not just of undergraduate students but of all lawyers (and
many others) interested in Scottish devolution.
Alan Trench
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Michael Moran,The British Regulatory State: High Modernism and Hyper-
Innovation,Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, x þ239pp, hb d42.00.
It is sometimes claimed of legal scholars who focus on regulation that they are
attempting to colonise the ¢eld of law, viewing all legal phenomena through a
regulatory lens. I do not know what truth there is in that claim, but suggest that
MichaelMoran’sThe BritishRegulatory State o¡ers a parallel attempt within political
science to view the wholeof government and governancethrough the lens of reg-
ulation. Moran’s core argument is that the stable patterns of British government
for much of the twentieth century were spectacularly disrupted by the displace-
ment of a style he characterises (following David Marquand) as ‘club government’
with a model of government labelled ‘the new regulatorystate’. Aproduct of both
¢scal and systems crises originating in the1970s, this‘hyper-innovation’in govern-
ance has caused the state totake on more than it can manage, to claim a capacity
for control over phenomena which are without its reach,and is the root cause of a
number of very signi¢cant failures of government. Attempts at regulating the
operation of the railways and matters of food safety provide key examples.
Moran is not the ¢rst to identify the shift towards a regulatory state model of
governance in the UK. However, there are two aspects of the analysis that are
novel and important. First is Moran’s starting point for analysis of the shift.The
pre-regulatory state model has conventionally been conceived as that of the wel-
fare or provider state, conceived asbeing bureaucratic and hierarchical.This char-
acterisation has, perhaps, derived froman excessivefocus on changing governance
in the muchdiscussed utilities sectors and a neglect of otherkey domains. It is also
a product of an excessive degree of formalism in understanding governmental
arrangements.Working with a much extended horizon that takes in not only
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The Constitution Unit, Schoolof PublicPolicy, University College London.
Reviews
103 5The Modern LawReview Limited 2005
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