Politicians love the language of the auto mechanic. They look at a nation of sixty-seven million people, an economy worth trillions, and a healthcare system employing millions, and they promise to "fix the gears."
When Andy Burnham stands at a podium and promises to "fix the big things," he is participating in a grand, decades-old tradition of technocratic hubris. It is a comforting lie. It suggests that society is a machine, that the state is the instruction manual, and that the politician is the skilled technician who just needs four years in office to tighten the loose bolts. Building on this topic, you can find more in: Why Border Controls Are the New Blasphemy Laws.
It is entirely wrong.
The British state is not a broken engine. It is a complex, chaotic, highly adaptive ecosystem. You cannot "fix" an ecosystem with a wrench. The very attempt to do so is what breaks it in the first place. Observers at Reuters have shared their thoughts on this situation.
The Illusion of the Control Room
The central premise of modern center-left politics—exemplified by the Burnham brand of managerial devolution—is that public services fail simply because the wrong people are pulling the levers, or because the levers are located in London rather than Manchester.
This assumes the levers are actually connected to something. They are not.
In the real world of public administration, we run headfirst into Goodhart’s Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Think about what happens when a politician promises to "fix" NHS waiting times.
- They set a hard target: patients must be seen within four hours.
- The bureaucracy responds. Hospitals begin holding patients in ambulances parked outside the emergency department because the "wait clock" only starts ticking once the patient crosses the physical threshold of the hospital.
- The metric looks great on a spreadsheet in Whitehall or a mayoral office.
- The actual patient experience gets worse.
I have spent years analyzing public sector performance data, and this pattern is unbroken. Every massive, top-down intervention designed to "fix" a complex system merely shifts the dysfunction to a part of the system that is harder to measure.
The politician gets their headline. The public gets the bill. The system gets more fragile.
The Complexity Trap: Why Big Systems Reject Big Fixes
To understand why grand political promises fail, we have to look at the work of the legendary cyberneticist Stafford Beer and his principles of viable systems. Beer pointed out that for a system to survive and function, its control mechanism must be as complex as the system it is trying to control.
A modern economy, a social care network, or a public transit system contains billions of variables, individual choices, and localized constraints. A political leader, backed by a cabinet of generalist advisors and a civil service trained in humanities rather than systems engineering, cannot possibly match that complexity.
When a leader tries to "fix the big things" from the top down, they are forced to simplify. They reduce human beings to data points and local communities to regional averages.
The Bee Network Mirage
Look at the celebrated devolution of bus services in Greater Manchester—the "Bee Network." It is held up as the shining example of how taking control of the big things delivers results.
But what actually happened?
- The local authority took on the financial risk of running the network.
- To keep fares artificially low and uniform, they had to cross-subsidize routes using public funds.
- This subsidy must be clawed back from other local services or through council tax increases.
This is not a "fix." It is a financial shell game. You have patched a leak in one pipe by drilling a hole in another. By centralizing the planning of bus routes under a mayoral authority, you have stripped away the market mechanisms that allow routes to adapt dynamically to changing work patterns. If a new business park opens up on the edge of town, a private, agile operator can run a minibus there next Tuesday. A municipal authority must commission a feasibility study, run a public consultation, update its five-year transport strategy, and eventually launch a subsidized service eighteen months too late.
Dismantling the Consensus
The public has been conditioned to ask the wrong questions. The political media class acts as an accomplice in this, framing every debate around a simple, flawed premise.
Can the government fix the NHS?
No. The premise of the question is entirely broken. The NHS is an infinite sinkhole because the demand for free-at-the-point-of-use healthcare is functionally infinite. As medical technology improves, we can keep people alive longer with increasingly complex, expensive treatments.
There is no stable point where the NHS is "fixed." If you double its funding tomorrow, the system will simply absorb the cash, increase its administrative headcount, and demand more money three years later to handle the backlog of an aging population.
The only way to make healthcare sustainable is to stop treating it as a single, monolithic command economy. But no politician aiming for national leadership has the courage to say that. Instead, they promise "reforms" and "efficiencies"—vague, meaningless words that serve as placeholders for actual thought.
Does regional devolution solve economic inequality?
No. Devolution simply relocates the rent-seeking behavior.
When you create a new regional assembly or a metro mayor's office, you do not magically stimulate economic growth. You create a local target for lobbyists, property developers, and public affairs consultants. Instead of traveling to London to pitch for subsidies, they take a tram to Manchester or Leeds.
The real drivers of economic growth are cheap energy, planning deregulation, and a simple tax code. None of these are delivered by adding an extra layer of regional politicians and their associated press officers to the payroll. Devolution is often just centralization in a slightly more convenient geographic location.
The Brutal Truth About the "Fix-It" Mentality
The hard truth—the one that will never appear in a campaign speech—is that the state is incredibly bad at doing big things, but highly effective at preventing small things from happening.
When we ask the state to fix social care, we get a 300-page green paper, five years of cross-party consultations, and a brand-new tax surcharge. What we do not get is more beds or better-paid carers.
Why? Because the state's natural instinct is to regulate, standardize, and audit.
[State Intervention] -> [New Regulations] -> [Increased Compliance Costs] -> [Small Providers Go Bust] -> [Monopoly Providers Take Over] -> [Costs Rise / Quality Falls]
This cycle is predictable. It happened in children's homes. It is happening in elder care. It is happening in social housing. The well-meaning attempt to guarantee quality through centralized standards drives out the small, local, organic providers who actually care about their communities, leaving the field open to private equity firms that specialize in navigating state bureaucracy.
The Downside of Letting Go
Admitting that the state cannot fix the big things requires a massive, uncomfortable shift in how we think about politics.
If we stop demanding grand plans from our leaders, we have to accept some harsh realities:
- Unequal outcomes: If you let local communities run their own affairs without central dictation, some will succeed spectacularly, and others will fail. The UK public has a zero-tolerance policy for postcode lotteries, which means they prefer uniform mediocrity over localized excellence.
- Lack of accountability: When there is no central "fixer," there is no single neck to wring when things go wrong. It is much easier for the media to blame a single minister than to accept that a complex system failed due to a confluence of unpredictable events.
- Chaos over order: Self-organizing systems look messy. A deregulated transport market or a multi-payer healthcare system lacks the neat, branded symmetry of a state-run monopoly.
Choosing this path means trading the comfortable illusion of control for the messy reality of freedom. It is a trade few politicians are willing to offer, and even fewer voters are willing to accept.
Stop Fixing. Start Dismantling.
The obsession with "fixing" assumes that the existing structures of the British state are fundamentally sound and merely suffer from poor management. This is a delusion. The structures themselves are the problem.
If a leader genuinely wants to improve the lives of the public, they should stop building new public bodies and start tearing down the ones we already have.
Instead of a new national strategy for housing, scrap the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act that makes it illegal to build a house on most of the land in this country without years of bureaucratic warfare.
Instead of a new integrated transport plan, abolish the regulations that prevent private companies from offering innovative, shared-ride services that compete with failing municipal monopolies.
Instead of trying to engineer a high-wage economy through industrial strategy and regional subsidies, simplify the tax code so that small businesses can spend their time serving customers rather than filing paperwork.
The path to a functioning country does not run through a mayoral office or a cabinet meeting. It runs through the systematic dismantling of the barriers that prevent people from fixing their own lives. Everything else is just a press release disguised as a policy.
