This week we’re looking at a new way of thinking about the role of the state in our society: the idea of the ‘precautionary state’. What is it? What are its implications? And is it a good thing?
At a time of breakdown in our public health service, unaffordable childcare bills, and a cost of living crisis, questions over how our society should be governed, and what the state should provide, are pressing.
Meanwhile, the response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the vulnerabilities in the energy and food supply chains exposed by the war in Ukraine reveal, some think, state failure to plan ahead and make provision, just in case.
One person who has thought long and hard about what functions the state should exercise, and how it ought to perform them, is Albert Weale, Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy here in the UCL Department of Political Science. Longstanding listeners to UCL Uncovering Politics may remember an episode we did with him a couple of years ago on his major book Modern Social Contract Theory, which explored the principles that should guide decisions on the role of the state.
Albert is now building on that foundation to develop a new approach to thinking about the role of the state, which he calls the ‘precautionary state’ – one that moves from ‘just in time’ systems, to a ‘just in case’ approach, with ample provision of public goods.
Mentioned in this episode:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
deal, state, public health, prudence, public health measures, thinking, people, precautionary, individual, system, government, resources, uk, problems, crisis, failure, question, albert, ucl, welfare state
SPEAKERS
Albert Weale, Alan Renwick
Alan Renwick 00:05
Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics. And this week we're looking at a new way of thinking about the role of the state in our society: the idea of the 'precautionary state'. What is it? What are its implications? And is it a good thing?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics – the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
At a time of breakdown in our public health service, unaffordable childcare bills, and a cost of living crisis, questions over how our society should be governed, and what the state should provide, are pressing.
Meanwhile, the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and the vulnerabilities in the energy and food supply chains exposed by the war in Ukraine, reveal, some think, state failure to plan ahead and make provision, just in case.
One person who's thought long and hard about the proper functions of the state is Albert Weale, Emeritus Professor of Political Theory and Public Policy here in the UCL Department of Political Science. Longstanding listeners to UCL Uncovering Politics may remember an episode we did with him a couple of years ago on his major book, Modern Social Contract Theory, which explored the principles that should guide decisions on the role of the state.
Albert is now building on that foundation to develop a new approach to the state, which he calls the 'precautionary state' – one that moves from 'just in time' systems, to a 'just in case' approach, with ample provision of public goods. And I'm delighted to say that Albert joins me now to discuss the idea.
Albert, welcome back to UCL Uncovering Politics. And let's start with the obvious question: what is the 'precautionary state'? And why do you think we need this concept?
Albert Weale 01:57
Well thank you very much, and thank you very much for this opportunity to talk about this idea. And I'm very, very grateful indeed.
And you said in your introduction that this is a new idea. And I think, actually, in terms of the sort of recent history of government and political ideology, over say, the last 40 years or so, it is a new idea. But in fact, actually, the earliest recorded example that I've come across of what I would think of as the 'precautionary state' is something that you find in the book of Genesis chapter 41, where Joseph, who, via a rather circuitous route which will take too long to go into, ends up interpreting the dreams of the Pharaoh.
Pharaoh has had two dreams. He's had a dream that there were seven fat cows that walked out of the Nile, and then seven lean cows. And the lean cows ate the fat cows, and there were seven full ears of corn. And there were seven lean ears of corn. And the lean ears of corn ate the full ears of corn. And Pharaoh is puzzled by this dream. And Joseph interpreted it as there being a prediction that there will be seven years of plenty in the land and seven years of famine in the land. And he explains this to Pharaoh.
This turned out to be quite a quick route to major promotion, actually, in Joseph's life, because he ends up as the Chief Executive of Egypt during this period, and basically orders the system by which 1/5 of the grain in the good years is set aside in order to be able to cover the grain in the in the bad years, or the lack of grain in the bad years. This is highly successful, by the way, at least according to this narrative, if we're to believe it, because it created a system in which people came from abroad to buy the grain that Egypt had stored up.
So this is, I think, a model, if you like, of the 'precautionary state', and it's a model, I think, in three respects. First of all, it's about state activity over time. And it's about the fact that the state is the agent, which is capable of planning for a society over time and of dealing with fluctuations in the fortunes of a society over time. I suppose if one were looking at modern public policy terms, the clearest example of this would be counter cyclical economic policy, the idea that government should spend when demand in the economy is low, and there would otherwise be unemployment, and that the government should build up a surplus when the economy is doing well. So we have, if you like, a modern example of this –planning for fluctuations over the course of time.
I think the second element of the 'precautionary state', which you mentioned in your introduction, is that it's based on this idea of putting resources aside, just in case you need to be able to provide for an emergency, a famine, or whatever. And I think if you think about the current NHS crisis, it's obviously a very complex phenomenon. But one element of that phenomenon is that, if you look internationally, the UK provision of hospital beds is very low – the ratio of beds per 1000 population is very low. And it's actually been declining over time. Now, you can say, '"Well, look, that's a very highly efficient use of resources, we're using up to 90% of our beds at any one time"'. But of course, when difficulties come along, then that bed shortage really shows itself up. And there are some very interesting models that the operations researchers have done which have shown that you've only got to get small fluctuations, so to speak, unfortunately, before you start to get a really big build up of cases that cannot be accommodated. So I would say this ''just in time' component is very important, and a central element of the 'precautionary state'.
And I think the third element of the 'precautionary state' is that, while markets are very powerful devices – they're very good devices, for example, for using decentralised dispersed information, they're very good at fostering different types of innovation – there are certain problems that markets alone can't deal with. They typically cannot deal with the cumulative unintended consequences of individual behaviour – panic buying would be an example. So I think the lesson we draw from that is a rather old one, actually, which is that markets make good servants but bad masters. And the 'precautionary state' is there, if you like, to offset the deficiencies of markets, and in particular, this inability of markets to deal with the cumulative unintended consequences of individual decision making.
Alan Renwick 06:57
Fascinating. You've given us some hints there of the issues that prompted your thinking to go down this path. Do you want to develop that a little bit further? What were the circumstances that you were reacting to in developing this idea?
Albert Weale 07:15
Oh, that's a very interesting question. I think it's a matter of a number of things coming together. Firstly, I've always thought (I mean, it goes back a long way on my thinking about the welfare state) that if we think about the welfare state – if we think about things like sickness benefits, pensions provision, education, and so on – it's really important to think about that as dealing with the fluctuations over the life cycle. I mean, essentially, what is happening in a welfare state is that the working age population is paying to educate the next generation and is also paying to keep retired people with some income.
So once we start to think about the welfare state not as a means of redistributing income within a given year period (it does that, of course), but we should principally be thinking about the welfare state as an instrument of redistributing resources over the life cycle – it's got this time dimension. And Nick Barr, a very distinguished economist at the LSE, has a very nice formula for this, which he says that, look, even if everybody were middle class, we would still lead need a welfare state, because we would still need to deal with these fluctuations over the lifecycle.
Secondly, I think, I mean, I suppose like everybody else, the 2008 financial crisis was, I think, a wakeup call. I mean, Gordon Brown, I think, with the best of intentions, said before the 2008 crisis that we'd learnt how to avoid boom and bust. Well, the 2008 crisis showed that we hadn't been able to do that. And, again, there are many things to say about that crisis. But a very plausible view, I think, to say about that crisis is that the regulators and the policymakers became complacent: they thought that markets could look after themselves and that if institutions fell, then the liabilities would simply fall where they fell, and that was just a risk of the market, so to speak, that the market was a self-correcting mechanism. And I think, therefore, that the 2008 crisis revealed that.
Thirdly, climate change and the climate emergency. The Rio Declaration On Environment and Sustainable Development took place in 1992. And as part of that Rio process, we also had the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, just over 30 years ago. So we've had these international agreements in place, but since those international agreements have been in place, CO2 emissions have actually increased by 60%. I mean, in other words, they've gone up. It's not that people have acted on that understanding which we had way back in the 1980s. I mean, to give her credit, Mrs. Thatcher saw this issue about climate change, back in the late 1980s, when she was Prime Minister. She famously said to George Bush, '"Look, George, I'm a scientist, I understand these things"'. And so this failure to be able to act on anticipated problems strikes me as being very important.
I mean, that's just like Joseph. Well, imagine what the precautionary sceptics would have said to Joseph: '"Well, we don't know that these 17 years are going to happen, how good your estimates really, are you really saying that we'd love to take a 1/5 of the crop? Couldn't we just take 1/10 or something like that?"' So you can imagine that you'd have sort of famine sceptics, I think, just as we have climate change sceptics. And I think the failure to be able to act on these issues has been very important for me.
And then finally, and most obviously, I suppose, Covid. So the public health system in the UK, before Covid came along, had a very high reputation. In fact, there was an international peer review of public health systems around the world and the UK came very high in the various estimates of epidemic preparedness. And there's absolutely no doubt, for example, that the modelling capacity for epidemics and epidemiology in this country is extremely, extremely good. Nonetheless, there were failures in that. Indeed, I remember saying to a student just after Covid broke out, who asked me how I thought things were going. I said, '"Well, I think it's going to be pretty good in the UK – we've got a pretty good public health system"'. And I was clearly wrong on that. That's, again, a complex matter, and we have to wait for the Hallett Inquiry into Covid-19 to establish, you know, precisely what the responsibilities are for the failures of government policy. But I think that there has been a failure of government policy. And, in a way, the government itself acknowledged a failure of policy when it abolished Public Health England.
So I think just reflecting on these experiences (of failures to deal with climate change; failure to anticipate the need for tighter regulation before the 2008 financial crisis; the need to be able to deal with the unintended consequences of markets and what that means) – those have really been sort of shaping my thinking and making me ask myself the questions about, well, what would we require of a state that was capable of dealing with these very difficult problems and was able to make preparation for them of an adequate kind.
Alan Renwick 12:53
So it's interesting that there are several different types of risk, I think, that you're talking about there. So you're talking partly about kind of lifecycle smoothing and dealing with the natural peaks and troughs that exist in a lifespan. But you're also talking about the big kind of existential threats that might exist. So you've mentioned climate change there, but presumably, one could also talk about, you know, the danger of a meteorite strike or the possibility that at some point AI takes over and controls the world. And these similarly, presumably, are things that one must plan for and take cautions against.
Albert Weale 13:32
Yes, indeed. You're quite right, these are very different issues. But I think that what's common to them is that as individuals, as citizens, and I think as governments, we find it very difficult to deal with these problems. I mean, it's a very good book by Lord Ricketts on hard choices. And he's primarily thinking about defence, but he quotes somebody on pandemics, saying that pandemic preparation involves telling ministers what they don't want to hear, asking them to spend money that they don't want to have, for an event that they don't think will happen. And I think that captures it very well. And if you think about all the things that could go wrong, I mean, there are many more things that could go wrong than actually do go wrong. And so it's an intrinsically difficult issue to be able to think about exactly how we should be prepared for these contingencies.
Having said that, I would say two things at the level of individuals. I do think that individuals ought to be able to think through the implications of, for example, the need for social care. If you go back to the NHS crisis, a large part of that is about the inability to provide social care. Some 20-25% of people in their 80s will have some experience of dementia. It's an utterly predictable event. It's an insurable event. And yet, there's been a political impossibility to devise adequate systems of social insurance in this country to be able to be able to deal with that.
And at the collective level, it's abundantly clear that pressure on water resources is going to become more serious rather than less serious. I mean, it may seem an odd thing to say in a winter where we all seem to be saturated with rain and the ground is sodden and there are floods, but the Environment Agency has said that it's likely that we'll have the same sort of water shortages in 2023 as we had in 2022. The National Infrastructure Commission has done some very good work on showing that the pressure on water resources, particularly in the South East of England, is going to be there for the next 30 years or so. So it's true that there are lots of, if you like, remote events, about which it's very hard to think in a systematic way about how we might prepare for those and what priority to give them. That's true.
But I think my point would be that there's enough that we know about – there's enough that we can predict – for us to be really needing to think about what a precautionary approach would involve, both to protect individuals for the utterly foreseeable risks that they incur as they get older and frailer, and so on, as well as, for example, the risks they face when they're younger. We know enough about those risks to be able to do something about them. And we often do things about them – we do design safety systems and so on. It's just needing to take that process further. And at the collective level – the level of water resources or climate change – then I think, again, we know enough about the need to plan and to think about those systematically.
Alan Renwick 17:02
Before we go a little bit further into some of these practical implications, it would be good to explore the political theory aspect of this a little further. You mentioned that you've found precursors to this thinking in Genesis. How does this relate to the tradition of social contract theory that you explored in such depth in your recent book?
Albert Weale 17:26
Well, I'll try and restrain myself on this answer, because this could this probably takes a long time. And there's a fair amount of theory, particularly theory of rational choice, that's going on in the background to this. And it's particularly tied to the idea of prudence and what it means to lead a prudent life. So I'll just try and explain some of those ideas as best I can.
So a very common, but in my view, mistaken understanding of prudence is that it's just about being rational in the world. It's about weighing up costs and benefits, and making an accurate calculation of those costs and benefits and acting so as to maximise net benefit. It just reduces down to a certain sort of calculating rationality.
Now, I don't think that gives you prudence. And it doesn't give you prudence for one reason, which is that there's nothing irrational about taking risks in life. I mean, there's nothing irrational in somebody, for example, who thinks they've got artistic talent, throwing up a safe job, living in an attic for years and trying to produce paintings which might not sell at all. There's nothing irrational about that. That's just a life plan that that somebody has chosen. So, it's imprudent, but I don't think it's irrational. I mean, it may turn out that it was the right thing to do if somebody turns out to be a superb selling artist, but somebody may end up starving in a garret, wishing that they'd stayed in their job in accountancy or a state agency or whatever.
So I think prudence has got something to do with the idea that we want to offset the risks – that we're prepared, if you'd like, to take less at the top end of a risk distribution in order to protect us against what's at the bottom end of the distribution. Now, that I think is what marks out prudence as a distinctive virtue, and indeed the person who really, I think, identified this, above all was Adam Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he has a chapter on prudence and explains that the prudent person isn't just everybody when they're being rational. It's a particular type of personality.
Now my point is that if we're thinking about government, we don't want our governments to play the roulette wheel and risk what we know we can have for some speculative future. We want governments to handle our affairs wisely. That does not mean that they have to offset every risk. But we want them to have the prudence, for example, which we would expect trustees of a charitable trust to have to manage the resources at their disposal in a way that they can account for them, so when a reasonable person under these circumstances tried to take stock of the facts, bearing in mind the obligations that the trustees have to the beneficiaries, the reasonable person would take these judgments.
So the origin of the idea – in social contract theory, what this amounts to is something like the following: that justice is generalised prudence. Justice is the way in which we would treat people as we would want them to treat us, on the assumption that we were being prudent in our relationships. So we cooperate with others in a prudent way – we don't just give them resources and say, "Get on with it". We have terms and conditions of cooperation and so on. And that's what the social contract defines. And what underlies that is a concern for prudence – for creating a set of circumstances in which, as individuals, we can then plan our lives and undertake the activities that we need to undertake.
Alan Renwick 21:44
Let's get into some practical implications then. You've talked quite a lot there about public health. And indeed, you're a co author on a recent article in The Lancet on the public health system in the UK. So what do we get from the idea of the 'precautionary state' about how the public health system ought to operate? What are the state's responsibilities in respect of public health? And what does that imply about how the system should be structured in the UK?
Albert Weale 22:12
Well, thank you for mentioning that article. And it's been it's been very interesting working with Peter Littlejohns and David Hunter on this area, both of whom are, in many ways, much more experienced in public health than I am. But I think I'd say the following, really, in answer your question. First of all, public health is a classic state responsibility. I mean, the state needs to be able to deal with infectious diseases, it needs to be able to deal with provision for extreme weather events, it needs to be able to deal with hazards that come along, that threaten individual lives, which we can't deal with as individuals or, indeed, even as collections of communities. So it's a paradigmatic state activity.
However, it suffers a problem that I don't think is unique as a matter of policy. But it is very distinctive, I think, public health, which is that it's very easy to be conscious of the costs of public health measures. Think of lockdowns, for example. It is very easy to be conscious of the costs of public health measures. And it's very hard to understand the benefits of public health measures because when public health measures work well, what they do is they protect statistical lives. I mean, they protect all those people who would have had disease and injury were it not for the fact that you had the public health measure in place. And we never seen those studies, we never see those statistical lives, we never we never see the counterfactual.
Also, I think the other difficulty with public health is that it is an extremely wide field. I mean, it's typically divided into health protection, health promotion, and then health service quality improvement. I think the third in this context is less relevant. But it's extremely wide. And so you're dealing for example, with infectious diseases, you're dealing with extreme weather events. One of my favourites are the hazards of the processionary moth, the caterpillars of which dropped down from trees and caused skin irritation on those sitting below. It is an extremely wide field. You're trying to deal with the health improvement, which covers things like diet, alcohol intake, exercise, and so on. And so you're covering a very wide field, and determining the priorities and remits within that field is very difficult.
And then thirdly, you're dealing with one of these issues, which in governance terms is extremely difficult to deal with, namely, that it necessarily involves a number of different government departments. And if you're thinking about public health measures, you may be talking about tax measures (for example, on alcohol); you may be talking about urban planning in terms of the need to deal with air pollution and designing urban transport systems that minimise pollution, devising ways of living in urban in urban settings which allow for exercise, for example; you may be dealing with environmental protection – I mean, think of the issues over sewage discharge that we've had in this country for the last few months. All of these are public health related.
And to be able to take effective action on public health requires governments to be able to work across departments of state. And we know that's difficult. I mean, that's just intrinsically difficult for multi-agency organisations of any sort. But I think it's particularly difficult for governments as it involves delicate questions about interdepartmental responsibilities and coordination and so on. It's very difficult for people to take the credit and so on.
Then, on top of all that, and I think that this is not unique to the UK, but I think it is particularly acute in the UK, is you've got the demands of the National Health Service. Now, people have been saying for decades, '"Look, the National Health Service is not really a health service, it's a sickness service which deals with people who are sick. That's its job."' But the point about the National Health Service, particularly in a period in which public expenditure constraints have been very tight (and so the health service funding has been squeezed since 2010) is the failures of the National Health Service are very visible. Their failures are people being able to get appointments on time or to find a dentist or to be able to get appointments for surgery and so on, in reasonable amounts of time.
And so naturally, there's a political imperative for politicians to feel the need to deal with those health service problems. And that preempts resources going into the public health system. And I have to say, before I was doing this work with Peter and David, and also with one of our former students, actually at UCL, Jacqueline Johnson, and then somebody from KCL, Toslima Khatun. I mean, I hadn't quite realised the squeeze on public resources going into public health until we actually looked at the numbers. And they are very, very striking. If you look at the public expenditure since 2013 on public health, it just goes steadily down. So, in some ways, it's not surprising that the public health system in the UK when Covid came along, in 2020, you know, was not capable, really, of rising to that challenge.
Alan Renwick 27:37
So is the problem simply one of resources, or is there also a difficulty in structures?
Albert Weale 27:43
I think there is a difficulty in structures. And I think that's to do with political priorities. I mean, there is supposed to be cabinet-level coordination. But the last evidence I've seen on this, which goes back to a BMJ piece in the beginning of November, was that the relevant Cabinet Committee has not yet been established under the new prime minister. So I think there is a question about priorities at the top. And we know that driving public health measures forward requires high-level decision makers to take it seriously. We know that.
And then I think, in the case of Covid, there was a genuine incidence of groupthink: the planners thought that they were going to be dealing with something like a serious flu epidemic; they didn't really understand the possibility of asymptomatic disease with asymptomatic transmission. And there was a House of Commons committee looking at this and I think there was a general acceptance that among the planners, there had been this sort of intellectual failure of groupthink, which was important. So all of these things come together – resources come together, political priorities come together, the mindset of crucial administrative actors in the system also comes together.
The difficulty, I think, is that not one of these things is offsetting the other. I mean, that is to say, it's not as though there's enough resources going in that even if the high-level decision makers don't have time (because they're being preoccupied with something else), then nonetheless, the administrators can get on and they've got the resources to be able to think about it and so on. What this requires, I think, is this combination of elements: of clear thinking, of organisational relationships and cooperation, and of resources.
And these problems are not new. I mean, in 1976, the Labour government produced a document called Prevention and Health – Everybody's Business. A few years later, the Canadian government had its Lalonde Report in 2004. I think it was Derek Wanless who made the point about the need to deal with public health. And the reason this is important is that all of this is feeding into demand on the NHS. So the 2014 five year plan on the NHS made the point that 10% of NHS expenditure goes on diabetes. I didn't believe that when I first read it – I tried to go back to the original research to find out. Well, diabetes is one of those things that, again, is complex, but it emerges from food systems, which encourage sugar intake and so on, and to deal with that you need public health measures. Think about the demands on A&E that arise from alcohol-related incidents on a Friday and Saturday night in this country. Again, this is feeding into demand on the system. And unless we start to deal with that question of demand, we'll be constantly finding ourselves in this situation of patch and mend and crisis and emergency measures and so on in the National Health Service, at a time when we still haven't been able to think in this lifecycle way about how to deal with social care and discharges from hospitals. So you've got to think about this as a system.
Alan Renwick 31:02
We should also think about counterarguments to your view. And I think one view that is widely held, particularly on the right of politics, is that the state is already too risk averse. So it's not that it's insufficiently thinking about long term risks, but it's too risk averse – it's too cautious, too over bureaucratized, there are too many rules and regulations and procedures and so on that are constraining the state from doing new and exciting things that will push the country along in a more positive direction. How would you respond to that kind of critique?
Albert Weale 31:39
Well, I think it depends precisely what the criticism is. So I think it's certainly true that, probably from the libertarian side (not exclusively from the libertarian side of politics, but from the libertarian side of politics), there is often a critique of the precautionary principle, which says that this inhibits innovation. And I suppose the sort of poster child for that view is genetically modified crops. That's the example that comes out.
My own view, and this comes this comes from some work on water reuse that I've been doing with a long-standing colleague, Robert Field, is that actually precaution can facilitate innovation. The reason why we sometimes need to accelerate the implementation of certain technologies is because, unless we do so, we know there are going to be problems down the line – unless we do something technologically really interesting about water use, for example, we are going to find ourselves in 2030-2040 really struggling with effective water supply. So part of my answer is that you can't generalise about the relationship between precaution and innovation across the board – it depends on the particular technologies and particular issues that you're dealing with.
The second part of my answer, I think, is that there is a real difference. And this goes back to the theoretical points I was making about the fact that individuals can be imprudent without being irrational. But given the fact that we need governments to be prudent, there's a difference between what we expect governments to do and what we allow individuals to do. And when you come to, for example, infectious diseases, it's no use saying, '"Well, look, there's an individual freedom for people to live their lives as they will"' if that individual freedom has spillover effects on others. So you need to be able to think about that.
Interestingly, and in this book that colleagues and I working on – we're planning a book that sort of emerges from the article that I mentioned before – I cite Hayek on this. So Hayek is extremely interesting. He makes the point that it's quite right to compel people to contribute towards social security. If you're in a situation in which people, if they're poor, will require Social Security, he says, '"Look, society wants simply not to turn away people who are poor"'. So those people, if you like, owe an obligation to contribute to the system. And I think the same is true of public health measures. I mean, the NHS will simply not close its doors to those who are thought to have had self-inflicted injuries. I mean, that gets very difficult to disentangle anyway. But it won't close its doors to those suffering from diabetes or sexually transmitted diseases or whatever.
So there's a corresponding obligation, if you like, which only the state I think can facilitate, to get people to be in a context in which they can think about their own responsibilities and about the possible demands that they might be making on the wider society. I think that's, you know, a point that Hayek quite correctly makes. I mean Hayek is a guru of the libertarians. But even Hayek is prepared to allow it. So I think that would be my response – that precaution is not always anti-innovation. We need to be able to deal with the spillover effects. And, in any case, we need to be able to think about things collectively rather than just individually.
Alan Renwick 35:35
And is there also an idea here that people will be freer in their own lives to innovate and to try new things if they know there is a robust safety net, and the state needs to be cautious in order to ensure that it can be can provide that safety net?
Albert Weale 35:51
I think so. I mean, I think it's a very interesting question. Actually, Beveridge, in the famous Beveridge Report Social Insurance and Allied Services, discusses precisely this point. He says, '"Look, some people say that if you have social insurance, it's going to stop risk taking and innovation and so on"'. And he says, '"Well, look, Francis Drake was not stopped from risk taking because, nonetheless, he was economically secure"'. And I think you're right, and I think this is a central part of precaution, that what people need to be able to rely upon, are robust systems in place, that are going to protect them in case things go drastically wrong, for example, that they buy a house that subsequently turns out to be a floodplain or prone to some other environmental hazard later on or something like that, that's going to protect them in that case, but that also protects them from the untoward action of others.
So, I mean, I think that this collectivism, at the level of the state and of state organisations, is actually an expression of what I would think of as an ethical individualism. So I do think that the ultimate unit of value are individuals and their experiences and the quality of lives that they can lead and so on. I don't think there's a supra-individual entity called 'the state' or 'the glory of the nation' or whatever that that we ought to be pursuing. I mean, I think that is a form of totalitarian democracy. If you try and say, '"Well, an individual should be subservient to some super individual goal"', I think that is not the ethical theory that's required. But what social contract theory tells you (and you might think about it as a paradox, but I don't think it is a paradox if you reflect upon it) is that in order to protect individuality, and indeed, the value of individual experience, and the value of individual lives, we need robust forms of collective organisation.
I have probably given this example before, but it's worthwhile giving it again. But that is the great lesson that comes out of Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Hobbes said, '"Look, in a state of nature, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"'. And what he meant by that was that you were prone in a state of nature to the depredations of other people. And so you needed some collective arrangement, some form of public authority, which was capable of regulating the relationships among individuals, such that they can actually be freer in their interactions. And so this is not anti-individualist in any way. It's just that the paradox is that to be an individualist, you also need to be a collectivist.
Alan Renwick 38:52
We're going to have to wrap up very soon. But one final question: if we agree that the 'precautionary state' is a good idea, how do we get there? And I guess I'm particularly thinking about how we reform our politics. You've talked about the fact that a lot of the activity of a well-functioning 'precautionary state' is focusing on the long term, whereas politicians famously have a tendency to focus on the short term. How can we overcome that? How can we get the state to think about these issues that might come along at some point in the future, but long beyond the time when a given politician is has left office?
Albert Weale 39:30
So I think it's terribly easy to get pessimistic about this. And I don't want to be pessimistic about this. One of the things I want to say in answer to that sort of question is, let's think about the variability of state performance. I mean, I've, if you like, been talking generally about the difficulty that states have in organising things and so on, but I think that some parts of the UK state actually work really quite well in a precautionary way. I mean, I think the work that the National Audit Office does is very good in terms of reporting back to Parliament on how well implementation has gone. It actually had a very interesting chapter on public health in its recent discussion of health service reform.
So I think we can look to bodies like that. I think we can look to the National Infrastructure Commission. I have been critical about a particular piece of work, but I think the National Infrastructure Commission, you know, is a good organisation. I think that we look to bodies like the Bank of England. I think we look to parliamentary committees, many of which I think are very conscious of these issues.
I think, actually, devolution is an interesting opportunity here. I mean, I think one of the things that when we think about public policy in the UK (and this is not a point original to me, others have made it), is that we haven't really exploited the fact that the Home Nations have had different policies, and we ought to be able to learn from those. So minimum unit pricing for alcohol has come in in Scotland, it's been resisted in England. Well, we ought to think about that and think about the Scottish experience and see whether, you know, it's led to the sort of awkward consequences that people opposed to minimum unit pricing in England thought it would do, or whether, in fact, it has been beneficial in terms of public health. So I think we can we can exploit those variations.
Finally, I mean, I suppose you would expect me to say this as a political theorist, wouldn't you? But finally, I think it's very important that we think clearly about this. And I think that thinking clearly really requires us to have a system of public information and public communication that is strongly fact based; that can distinguish between questions of value and questions of fact; that maintains a robust evidence base in terms of the important issues that are facing us; and that can handle uncertainties and disagreements in a sort of adult, civilised way (rather than turning them into partisan advantage, and so on). And so I think that we need to pay attention to those systems of communication.
But I'm not wholly pessimistic about this. I mean, I don't want to fall into this mode of pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. I mean, I think we ought to have some optimism of the intellect provided that we're prepared to think clearly about this. And all one can do as an academic, I think, (you know, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't), is do what academics do, which is: they scribble away, they talk away endlessly, and they try and persuade people of the value of ideas. And I think, if they're doing their job well, they take on board the criticisms and try and reflect and think about them.
Alan Renwick 42:58
Well you've been a model of clear thinking here, as always, Albert, and it's great to finish on a positive, optimistic note as well. Thank you so much. This has been fascinating. I've got lots more questions that I would want to ask, but we'll have to have you on again when the book on public health comes out.
So thank you, Albert, and full details of Albert's Lancet article, and also a blog post in which he develops the idea of the 'precautionary state', are available in the show notes for this episode.
Next week, we'll have a very special guest, a leader of a UK political party no less. I won't say more than that for now, but do look out for information about that episode in the coming days.
Remember, to make sure you don't miss out on that or other future episodes of UCL Uncovering Politics, all you need to do is subscribe. You can do so on Apple or Google podcasts, or whichever podcast provider you use. And while you're there, we'd love it if you could take a moment of time to rate or review us as well.
I'm Alan Reddick. This episode was produced by Conor Kelly and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann. This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.