This chapter charts the nature of political power from the earliest Merovingian kings to the unification of the kingdoms under Chlothar II in 613. The period witnessed conquest and civil war, as competition for power between kings, queens, and their families transformed late Roman political structures into more fluid and responsive modes of government. It covers the key reigns of Childeric I and Clovis for establishing the power of the Merovingian dynasty through a mixture of war, legend-building, and performance. It also examines how competition between kings in subsequent generations affected how the family was defined, especially under the influence of queens Brunhild and Fredegund.

The British State intervened in the Port of London in 1800. It did so again a hundred years later by appointing a Royal Commission, which provided the basis for eventual reform in 1908. The immediate reason for the Royal Commission was a dock proposal to abolish free entry to docks by river. But the wider context was long-standing, loudly voiced, shipping company grievances about river governance, licensing of lighterage and compulsory pilotage. The Commission’s conclusion that London should have a port authority was generally accepted. However, issues of constitution and compensation bedevilled the Conservative attempt to legislate. In the event, it was a Liberal government, with all-party support, which established the Port of London Authority, effectively nationalising London’s port. In an ironic coda, the port unions soon discovered their new public employer to be a more formidable opponent than their dock company predecessors had ever been.

London’s seasonal foreign trade reflected its access to northern and continental Europe and the City’s association with the East and West Indies, but coal and other coastal trades dominated daily port activity. London was a tidal river port centred below London Bridge, with waterfront industry spread more widely. Organisationally, it was complex, with many different interests. As foreign trade increased, legal restrictions on landing places for foreign produce were blamed by merchants for congestion. A campaign by mercantile interests for the introduction of docks followed. The author examines the motives here. For leading West India merchants, specialised dock facilities would enable them to control and discipline a directly employed labour force, reducing theft. The eventual outcome, the construction of docks by joint-stock companies, owed much to State support. Its involvement went beyond the introduction of docks. For the government, this was an element of a warehousing scheme designed to develop London as an entrepôt. General port efficiency would be promoted by appointing the Corporation of London as harbour authority.

Compensation was paid to river interests adversely affected, including some waterfront labourers, the State became owner of the Legal Quays until the 1830s, the Corporation built a canal across the Isle of Dogs, and a new London Bridge eventually replaced the Old. All this depended to some degree on State support; in the case of compensation payments, a Treasury loan was repaid by a tax on shipping. River port prosperity was largely unaffected by the introduction of docks, although their warehousing privileges deprived waterfront wharves of potential business. Coastal and low-duty European imports continued, boosted by the introduction of steamship services. Vessels carrying coal, grain, timber and provisions competed with passenger steamers and river traffic for water space, leading to conflict between users and with the Corporation as Harbour Authority.

The year 2021 saw extreme weather events outside the range of what experts had thought possible, signs of a growing acknowledgement among scientists of the need to take risk assessment more seriously, and the launch of a new initiative that might finally tell heads of government what they need to know.

Traditional economics tells us that to meet policy goals, government should only do the minimum needed to fix a ‘market failure’. A new understanding shows that when the goals are innovation and change, a ‘do the maximum’ approach can be more effective. We should stop aiming to achieve ‘decarbonisation at least cost’, and instead aim to move to the clean economy at maximum gain.

Innovations do not occur in isolation. There is a system or framework in which different actors are connected to and affect each other. This chapter discusses three interrelated concepts: market failure, government failure, and the National Innovation System (NIS) and the government’s role in innovation. After defining and providing examples of market and government failure, this chapter explores how market and government failures impact innovation as well as the NIS and the government’s role in innovation. Understanding government operations, interpreting the relationship between public and private organizations, and evaluating government innovations are complex tasks. Each policy is subject to limitations and unexpected consequences. In many cases, the market fails. To correct these market failures, the government intervenes, changes, or implements a new policy or uses a tool (e.g., subsidy or tax). However, the government’s involvement in the market may lead to government failure. Therefore, fixing market and government failures is not easy, although innovations can help to fix both failures. In addition, this chapter discusses how innovative activity affects economic growth, employment, and entrepreneurship, as well as how technological innovations can enhance social welfare and living standards.

Anthony Seldon introduces the concept of the Effect series, the key questions and the fourteen wasted years accusation. This Effect book will be the eighth in the long line of academic and historical analyses dating back over fifty years of history to 1970 – and it builds on the conclusions and methodology of previous works in the series. One of these, The Coalition Effect (Cambridge, 2015), encompassed five of the years in question – allowing reflections to be made on the authors’ arguments in that volume, and for the impact to be judged in a longer time frame of government.

Any fair evaluation of the Conservative effect (2010-14) must be cognisant of the context. Tom Egerton’s chapter will place the Conservative premierships in the six external shocks Britain faced, beginning with the Great Financial Crash and the Eurozone Crisis, before the impact of Brexit (and a debate over its external and structural causes), Covid, the Russo-Ukrainian War and the inflation crisis. How did each government succeed or fail in the face of compounding shocks? What opportunities and constraints emerged as a result? Only through an analysis of a decade of poly-crisis, and in the perspective of wider political change, can we make a conclusion on the question of ‘fourteen wasted years’.

In this final chapter, we consider how history might judge these years of Conservative governments. Our focus, as laid out in the Introduction, is: what were the achievements of these years? Were there mitigating factors? What is the overall verdict?

The accusation of ‘thirteen wasted years’ was first levelled against the Conservatives by Labour in 1964 about the period in office since 1951. To gain perspective on the years 2010–24, we open with an acknowledged authority assessing progress in the last fourteen years compared to what was achieved then. Kellner’s chapter will aim to synthesise the charge made about the ‘thirteen wasted years’ (1951-64) narrative and build the foundations of the analytical approach for the rest of this book by considering what governments abroad, notably in Europe, were achieving at the same time.

Chapter 5 examines the BJP’s attempt to build centres of elite, traditional intellectuals to legitimise its identity politics. While dismantling advisory committees, quashing dissent, and attacking universities and established research institutions, the BJP has built think tanks to bring together stakeholders in government and civil society and give its political ideology a footprint in already established policy networks. Some scholars have characterised the BJP’s think tanks as institutions of ‘soft Hindutva’ (see Anderson 2015), that is, organisations that avoid overt association with the BJP and Hindu-nationalist linkages but pursue a diffuse Hindutva agenda nevertheless. Through an ethnographic study of the BJP’s two most prominent think tanks, this chapter demonstrates how manifestations of Hindutva can be both explicitly political and anti-political at the same time: advocating for political interventionism while eschewing politics and forging an apolitical route towards cultural transformation.

Understanding the government’s role in achieving the nation’s fundamental political values provides a roadmap for appreciating why time after time, the country has expanded government sometimes in bunches and sometimes in smaller batches. Government has been necessary to create, sustain, and expand markets, to protect people from economic loss and physical injury, and to maintain a social safety net for people mired in poverty due to age, health, or market conditions, not of their doing. History establishes that the defenders of government have a good story to tell. But they must tell it. The future of the country depends on appreciating what the government does and why it does it because the government remains essential to achieving our nation and its values.