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All societies face periodic and extreme challenges. In the past decade and more, many episodes have become ingrained in collective memories, such as the global financial crisis and Brexit. Andrew Hindmoor discusses the way in which leaders, parties, groups, media and citizens respond over what should be done to address the crisis.

Image courtesy of interviewee. June 4, 2024

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This video discusses the concept of crisis in politics and economics, notably referencing the 2008 financial crisis (GFC) and its aftermath. The speaker reflects on how crises shape political and economic landscapes, often leading to a series of compounded crises. They describe how politicians frame events as crises, influencing public perception and justifying state actions that might not normally be accepted.

The speaker categorizes crises into two types: sudden crises that arise abruptly, such as 9/11 or COVID-19, and long-term crises that develop gradually, like the social care crisis in the UK. They note that crises are often overused in language, leading to a dilution of the term's meaning.

The GFC is highlighted as a culmination of various factors, including a widespread belief that such a crisis could not happen and a culture of risk management that failed to recognize warning signs. The speaker emphasizes that even when some within financial institutions recognized risks, profit pressures hindered proactive measures.

Additionally, the text touches on the political dynamics during crises, particularly how they consume government focus and resources. The author argues that crises can erode public trust in government, complicating responses to subsequent emergencies.

The speaker's upcoming book, "Haywire," examines Britain's recent crises, noting that events like austerity measures and Brexit illustrate how one crisis can lead to another. They argue that crises can snowball, creating complex, interrelated problems.

Overall, the text underscores that while crises are inevitable, effective management and the ability to adapt in response to new information are crucial for governments facing such challenges. It advocates for recognizing the limits of crisis management and finding ways to navigate political pressures while remaining flexible in policy decisions.

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I guess if you're just interested in politics

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and economics, which is at the core of my work kind

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of crisis, ends up defining a lot of, of what you do.

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So over time,

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I've written a lot about the 2008 financial crisis,

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which was obviously the kind of, economic media hit

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that, that hit a lot of governments.

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And more recently I've been writing about modern British

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history, which if you were, you know, somewhat jaded,

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looks like a kind of long list of one crisis

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after another, each of which makes things a lot worse.

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So crisis is just feels to me a really interesting idea,

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but it's also kind of bread and butter thing.

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It's what gets people interested, it's

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what gets students interested

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and how you go about managing crisis just strikes me

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inherently interesting.

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The word gets bandied around, right?

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And you know, it can risk being overused.

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You can, I was, I picked up the newspaper the other day

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reading it online and it was talking about a crisis

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in the cardboard industry.

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And it turned out what it meant was that there were some

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of the supply chains had stuffed up

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and there was a bit of a short term shortage

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of cardboard coming out as a result.

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And that probably over pushes the word crisis.

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So first thing to say is it gets overused.

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Next thing to say is I think we associate crisis

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with sudden something sudden

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and abrupt where we can point to the world as it is one day

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and then it looks very different a day

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or two later, I guess most obviously nine 11.

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Um, you can also then point to the start of covid, not

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to a point the global financial crisis as well,

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because whilst it had actually been un winding for a while,

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we all kind of suddenly stood, stood up

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and took notice at a particular point.

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So southernness is one thing you can, at the same time,

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I think reasonably meaningfully talk about long-term crises

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where there's not just one particular moment,

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but a particular state is getting worse and worse

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and not showing any sign of turning it around.

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So I think it's legitimate, for example,

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to talk about the crisis in social care in the UK

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and many of the countries.

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And then the final thing I'd say in answer to

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to the question is first

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and foremost, crises are politically constructed

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in the sense that something becomes a crisis When

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politicians frame something as the crisis

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for have a go at arguing, what causes the crisis

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and what needs to be done.

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So pretty obviously sometimes you get a big earthquake

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or something, you know, we, we immediately will reach

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to the idea of a crisis.

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But calling something a crisis legitimate, a certain range

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of responses and it feels to me is always a political act.

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One of the things about the GFCs, it's kind

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of a perfect storm moment.

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It is lots and lots of things that go wrong

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and they all go wrong at the same time.

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And you could argue that's often a common thread with,

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with the nature of crisis.

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So, you know, and that's true of accidents more generally.

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You go into health and safety.

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The general, the general view is it's not just one thing

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that happens, it's one mistake compounds another

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mistake, compounds another mistake.

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Okay, so what causes the GFC?

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I think first and foremost, what causes the GFC is a belief

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that the GFC can't happen.

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So everyone manages to convince themselves as

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The famous saying, has it that this time is different,

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that the banks have worked out how to calculate

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and refine risk and parcel it out

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and distribute it across the financial system.

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And the regulators by and large buy that story.

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And even though there are risk signals there in the system,

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everyone thinks that even if bad stuff happens,

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that the market will continue to function.

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So first and foremost, what causes the GFC is a belief

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that the GFC couldn't happen after that point.

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Second point, and I think this is a common one in crises

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as well, there's some people within the banks can see this

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coming and in some cases,

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and JP Morgan would be the best example,

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some banks from really senior levels start to get scary

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and unwind their positions

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and as a result come out the crisis looking pretty strong.

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But okay, there's a huge profit profit pressure here.

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If you've sat around in 2005

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and start to ask some difficult questions,

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you'd have been up against it

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because the banks at that point

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and their show shareholders were making so much money.

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Nobody wants to pull away the punch bowl at a party.

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And so what causes the crisis also is a sense of kind

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of almost wishful thinking.

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Even amongst those people who can see some

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of the writing on the wall, it doesn't mean

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that any one individual person

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then has a strong enough incentive to start changing

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mass behavior within an organization.

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And some of those who tried it ended up pretty much out on

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their ears fairly quickly in 2006, seven.

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It was a pretty brutal environment in which

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to be starting saying to your managers,

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we're making too much profit, I think we need

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to wind back on our risk.

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Well that's a tough one.

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So, you know, it, one

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of the old things about the crisis when it started

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and I was, you know, I remember the Lehman moment

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as it gets caught when Lehman Brothers goes under,

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I mean on the one hand you've got newspaper pictures of

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and, and, and TV pictures of people turning up for work

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and being locked out or leaving the offices,

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carrying all of their possessions.

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But at the same time it was really, really hard to grasp

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what was actually at stake.

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We all kind of knew someone had lost a lot of money.

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We probably all guessed that someone's

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that it's gonna be a pretty bad story

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rather than a good story.

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But it was incredibly abstract.

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I think the key moment in the British context comes shortly

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after when Gordon Brown basically says, look,

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we're gonna have to act here.

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'cause like it or not, there's a danger

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that people are just gonna go to a cash point.

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They're gonna put their card in and nothing will come out.

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Actually bring home to people

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that this thing they've taken entirely for granted

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actually turns out to be so fragile it can simply stop

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working overnight.

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That was the moment when I think it

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brought home to a lot of people.

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And that was key 'cause

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for Gordon Brown sitting for a labor party.

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What you then had to do, what he convinced himself he had

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to do was save the banks using public money.

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Now there was a nuanced story there about

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how saving the banks was good for the taxpayer

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because if you bought a share in the banks

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When they were doing badly, you can then sell it off later

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and make a profit something the American government did

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really well, the British less so,

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but you had to justify a set of actions

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that previously would've been unthinkable.

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And it looks to me looking back, yeah, the key moment is,

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is we've got no sense of alternative here.

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And this is in a very tangible way gonna affect people

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at a very ground level.

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I guess one of the things, so I've just finished a book

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called Haywire, a Modern History of Britain,

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which is being published by Penguin in June, 2024.

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And that's a, that's a kind of 600 page tomb, a lot

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of which ends up being about crisis

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because Britain looks a lot, a lot like a place that

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where a lot of people have come across the the BBC tv,

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hospital drama casualty, the premise of which,

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and it's like a lot of hospital dramas across the world.

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You've got a core number of staff

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and then every week someone turns up having cut their hand

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off as a result of hedge trimming

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or falling off a roof or whatever.

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And the kind of the story I tell at the start

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of the book is, Britain looks like a lot like an episode

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of casualty or another hospital drama.

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Things just keep going wrong.

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And in the British state, one of the things

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that's happened is the way in which something goes wrong at

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one point compounds problems

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and it almost creates create crises at a latest point.

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So we've just been talking about the financial crisis.

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The financial crisis causes austerity,

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which I think creates some of the conditions for Brexit.

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It means cuts to public expenditure that mean

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that the country's less prepared for covid when it happens

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and one thing leads to another and so on and so forth.

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And that's part of the nature of crises. They snowball.

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Now we are used to the idea of a poly crisis

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that we live in an age at the moment

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where there's multiple crises at the same time,

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including climate change.

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And that's right. But actually I think the more interesting

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story is about how think of a snowball

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as it goes down the hill, it grows larger and larger.

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One crisis has compounded the effects of a previous one

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and then in turn laid the grounds for

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and is part of the reason why another crisis then occurs.

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Covid iss a good example of that.

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And I can kind of, we can go on

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and talk about covid if you'd like some of the, the crisis

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that we're talking about here.

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No, so I don't, again, I think it's unrealistic

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and the financial crisis is a good,

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a good example of that one.

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Yeah. At some point in the two thousands a financial system

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could have been designed that made the crisis less likely.

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But the bottom line is you've had banking crisis going back

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to the year dot banking crisis happen.

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If you, if you're prepared to abandon capitalism full stop

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and not have banks, then okay, but

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otherwise banking crises are gonna occur.

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So the issue with a lot of crises I think is not

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so much whether you can simply reduce the risk to zero

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or avoid them altogether, but it's about managing

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and reducing the risks and the frequency of a crisis.

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So to go forward to Covid,

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I don't think it was possible to avoid covid.

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Yeah, there's lessons to be learned

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and the start in China

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with the way information was shared earlier on.

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But I think it's too easy to look back with hindsight

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and just simply list all of the mistakes that were made

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and to imagine some future world in which there could have

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been no deaths, no economic costs

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and everything could have carried on as normal.

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I think one of the things about crisis is also it's a,

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for politicians, it's a tough gig

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because part of the art of it is to persuade voters

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that you've done the best possible job

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that you could have done.

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And there is nothing harder in politics than persuading

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somebody of that case in a situation in which something has

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still gone wrong at some level.

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Well I think I kind of touched on one of them,

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which is crises are gonna occur so you manage them

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as best as you can.

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Um, but every time they occur, and

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because voters are so mistrustful of government,

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we live in an age of political mistrust.

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That's the background. Now there's a bigger story there

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about what causes that mistrust

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and whether it's always justified,

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but that's kind of the background conditions for the conduct

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of modern politics today.

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And crisis is really hard

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because in a low trust situation, government finds it harder

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to take actions that it believes are necessary

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because the public already doesn't believe them on a

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range of other issues.

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Now we see some exceptions to that one at the start

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of the covid crisis, when UK

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and other governments asked citizens

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to take extraordinary sacrifices,

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then there was a widespread,

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widespread skepticism at the time about whether

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that would occur because trust in government was so low.

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And I think looking back, it's kind of remarkable

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that people by and large stepped up to the plate.

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So there is this kind

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of Batman signal effect when things really go wrong.

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I think one of the big themes there is you can signal

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to people and people will respond.

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But the other big theme is I think crisis just SAPs the

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energy and attention of government.

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So looking back on Brexit, I think one of the things,

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and you know, people are gonna continue

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to differ on this day on the relative costs

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and benefits of Brexit, but what's extraordinary

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and I think is a really big theme is the way in which

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that political crisis over a three

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or four year period just about paralyzed everything else

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that was going in terms of decision making.

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Theresa May, everyone forgets this had come in with a really

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interesting, in some ways quite unconservative looking

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political agenda, wanting

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to change the direction of the country.

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She got precisely nowhere with that agenda

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because she thought she could manage Brexit

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and it turns out you simply couldn't.

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So crisis, I think the big theme is they're like,

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they're just the way they can overwhelm politics

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and political processes.

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And that I think in many ways

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is the real cost that they have.

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There's different strands to this literature.

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So I think I'll just pick out two, both

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of which are pretty longstanding.

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Um, one's kind of abstract one's is pretty,

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pretty practical.

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So the abstract one, which comes out

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of a literature called securitization, is the way in which,

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and I talked before about how politicians construct crisis

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and label something as a crisis.

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So by doing that, you can justify actions that the state

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otherwise might not take.

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So let's take one at the moment, a really contentious one,

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which is the small boats crossings of the English channel.

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By labeling that a crisis

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and saying that the status quo is completely unsustainable,

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you can potentially as a government justify actions that

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otherwise might have been seen as wrong, such

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as suspending some of the human rights legislation,

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deploying troops, and so on and so forth.

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So that's part of the story of crises.

12:34.705 --> 12:37.005
And I think that large literally has been ongoing

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for a couple of decades now.

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And what gets called securitization is always

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interesting and worth looking at.

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Switching to kind of the practical level, there's people

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who do jobs of looking back on individual crises

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and trying to develop almost manuals, maybe lessons

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for policy makers during a time of crisis

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and pick out common themes of things that people get wrong.

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And that's a particularly tough but interesting literature.

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And I think one of the things,

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and it'll take us back to Covid Covid perhaps, is, you know,

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sometimes what you most want to do is not have

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to make an immediate decision, but the pressure politically

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and in terms of management

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to make a decision can be overwhelming and unavoidable.

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And in the case of Covid, you know, I think essential,

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but having taken positions to kind of retain flexibility

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so you can wander into, you can change your policies

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and change direction as new information becomes available

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and not get locked into a kind of group.

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Think of only thinking of one policy.

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I think that's really important.

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But it's also politically so tough

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because governments getting accused

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of U-turns look incredibly vulnerable.

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But one lesson of crisis, COVID would be an example

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of this one is that sometimes you turning on a policy

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and how you're handling something can be the best thing

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that you can do.

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