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.

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.

Chapter 6 relates how David establishes his position as Saul’s successor and has considerable achievements as king, acquiring a capital, planning a temple, and receiving God’s promise of a dynasty to succeed him.

When planning for this volume commenced in 1997, few signs were present of the turbulence that was to engulf Australian policies in the last years of the twentieth century. Prime Minister John Howard’s desire that Australians should feel ’comfortable’ seemed to have been realised in the foreign policy arena. To reinforce this sense of comfort, the new government, which assumed office in March 1996, sought to reinforce relations with ’great and powerful friends’, particularly the United States. The relationship with traditional friends in Europe was also given a boost: the government characterised its new policy direction with the catch-phrase ’Asia first, but not Asia only’.

Ever since diplomatic relations were normalised by the Whitlam government in 1972, maintaining a constructive and productive relationship with China has been a challenge for successive Australian governments. The period under study here – from 1996 to 2000 – is further evidence that Australia’s relationship with China is shaping up as the toughest foreign policy task in the twenty-first century. There are three reasons for this. First is the growing power asymmetry between the two countries and the fact that while Australia is essentially a status quo power, China is non-status quo, dissatisfied with the current distribution of power in the region. Second, the nature of Australia’s relations with China has now come to depend increasingly on Beijing’s self-perception of its future role and interests in the region. Last but not least, the wide divergence in the two countries’ philosophical approaches to governance, political culture, and values introduces an element of uncertainty and unpredictability in the bilateral relationship.

Writing at the beginning of the 1990s on Australia’s disarmament and arms control policies and achievements, Trevor Findlay noted that, although a relative latecomer to the field, Australia had soon become ’an assiduous, well-respected participant ... sporting a range of considered, often imaginative policies and initiatives’. In the main, however, these efforts and initiatives were concentrated in the international arena, with little cross-over into Australia’s domestic political domain. As Findlay described it: ’There is a sense in which Australia has so far tackled, and in most cases accomplished, all the "easy" arms control tasks – those initiatives which can be taken both unilaterally and with relatively little cost to Australia or the government.’ He further added that ’apart from its technical input in the CW area, the Defence Department has so far played only a minor role in shaping Australian disarmament policy,’ and speculated that ’[t]his could change as the international disarmament agenda broadens to include conventional and high-technology weapons that Defence has or plans to acquire’.

The nature of Australia’s economy and ecosystem ensures that Australian governments have taken a continued interest in the negotiations for, and implications of, most of the world’s multilateral environmental agreements. Australia has an energy-intensive economy. Agriculture and extractive industries, both of which have had severe environmental consequences, contribute significantly to export earnings. The country is both highly urbanised (around 85 per cent of the population lives in cities) and the world’s only industrialised ’mega-diverse’ country, custodian of about 10 per cent of the world’s biodiversity. Australia is also one of the few industrialised countries that suffers extensive desertification – over half of the country’s land area is in need of some form of repair. Australia’s exclusive economic zone – 11 million square kilometres of marine waters – is one of the largest in the world. Australia’s environmental role in world affairs includes its domestic responses to environmental treaty obligations and its commitment to sustainable development both at home and abroad.

This chapter delves into Anglo-Dutch relations and negotiations in the period before the Seven Years’ War and during the war itself. It provides the background for the first two Dutch cases to come before the Court of Prize Appeal, that of the Maria Theresa and the America. The main thrust of the chapter is that, in order to understand Anglo-Dutch relations during the war, it is important to examine the interpersonal relationships between the members of the British government, the government’s relationships with the representatives of the Dutch Republic, the government’s relationships with the privateers who helped carry out commerce predation, and the government’s relationship with the Court of Prize Appeal. Through an examination of these interpersonal relations, the chapter argues that they were critical to the successes and failures of Anglo-Dutch negotiations over neutrality and critical to being able to influence decisions taken by the Court of Prize Appeal.