Drawing on experienced scholarly observation, Michael Moran has written a strikingly critical evaluation of Britain's recent development of state regulatory authority. Its now legalistic form more nearly resembles the long-prevalent American pattern. Perhaps the British development would seem to follow from the privatization of industries in the last two decades of the twentieth century. Enterprises like railroads, telecommunications, and electricity are no longer government corporations but privately owned “public utilities,” to use the American term for businesses especially affected by the public interest. For Moran, however, other forces also help account for the growth of regulation in Britain. He persuasively argues that legal regulatory authority has also been extended to several enterprises not previously nationalized and then privatized.

Mainly, the author believes that large-scale regulatory development came to Britain because of the obsolete nature of a long-standing clublike relationship between government and business enterprise, be it private or public. That relationship had survived from Victorian times despite the democratization of British politics in the half century after World War I. Not until the 1970s was the regulatory style of gentlemen's clubs effectively challenged. Thus, Moran describes a shift from the first two-thirds of the century, when British governing arrangements were “among the most stable and least innovative in the advanced capitalist world,” to the last few decades of “turmoil” and leadership “in institutional and policy change” (p. 1). His context is impressively comparative, notably with respect to the United States, and he makes good use of a considerable body of relevant American scholarly literature. Moreover, he is well aware of the impact of globalization and Europeanization.

The United States, in Moran's words, invented the “characteristic institution of the regulatory state: the specialized agency designed to manage public control as an alternative to public ownership” (p. 14). Its development he attributes to the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the social regulation of the 1960s. Its extension to Britain and other nations, the author suggests, owes something to American influence, although he does not blame the United States for the ways in which Britain adopted American-type regulations.

Nor does Moran portray Britain's pre-1970 arrangements as any kind of golden age. He does not profess an admiration for nationalized industries, and he does not champion the old order of club regulation. He treats such regulation as the protection of elites from democratic threats, and scorns its reliance on a gentlemanly trust between regulator and regulated in industrial, professional, and, most emphatically, financial affairs of the City. By the 1970s, at any rate, it appeared obsolete.

To show that the post-1970 transformation occurred in sectors besides those of the newly privatized industries, Moran describes what happened in banking and finance, in the professions of accounting, law, and medicine, and in sporting activity. Yet the major thrust of his analysis is devoted to the regulation of newly privatized enterprises. The privatization itself he treats as a constitutional revolution, overturning more than a century of political commitments to public ownership and transforming the British system into a laboratory of regulatory hyperinnovation. Creating a new network of regulators followed from a recognition that traditional company law was insufficient for the regulation of business enterprises of the kind called utilities. As Moran says, the most important privatized enterprises “required their own special governing systems” (p. 112).

That these systems failed is a central claim of The British Regulatory State. So, as might be expected, the prime exhibit is the collapse of railway regulation in the Railtrack crisis of 2001–2 that put into receivership the private corporation charged with maintaining railways and led to political intervention. Somewhat similar politicization, Moran finds, is characteristic of Britain's regulatory hyperinnovation in areas previously insulated in one manner or another from state control. The consequences, he argues, are chaos and fiasco. Of the latter, he offers five cases, in addition to rail privatization, to illustrate the inability of the state adequately to discharge its “high modernist” ambitions. At least two of these fiascos, concerning the Millennium Dome and the Community Charge (poll tax), do not seem to be administrative regulatory cases in the usual sense of the term, but instances of failed governmental policies of another kind. It is not clear whether Moran regards governmental failures, be they regulatory or general, as more frequent and serious in Britain than elsewhere.

At any rate, in concluding with doubts that the British government has the capacity to effectively realize its regulatory ambitions, Moran strikes a profoundly pessimistic note. Not only does he not yearn for the old club regulation or for nationalization, but he does not propose to emulate the American model, which as we well know has had its own difficulties, especially with respect to the colonization of agencies by the interests they are supposed to regulate. And if Britain cannot cope with the regulatory problem, what nation would be better able to do so? Probably, it is too much to expect an author to develop an attractive alternative regime in a book of merely 183 pages of text. The book's brevity, though it might cause a prospective buyer to question its price, does not diminish the significance of the author's richly suggestive, interesting, and cogent thesis.