History tells us that some policy challenges are intractable. I saw evidence of this first hand when I was the junior civil servant in the Cabinet Office team responsible for writing the Queen's Speech. This is the formal address that the British monarch gives at the start of every session of Parliament, setting out the government's forthcoming programme of legislation. The Speech is a grand ceremonial occasion, full of historical symbolism. The words themselves are printed on special ‘goatskin’ paper and handed to the Sovereign in a velvet bag. Being part of the Speech process showed me that not only did the ceremony hardly change over time, but the policy challenges governments faced also stayed remarkably constant.

I saw this continuity because I was asked to go back over many Speeches from past years in order to get a feel for the language used and to see if there were lessons for those given on occasions similar to that I was working on (in this case a Speech immediately after a general election). What immediately struck me, after summoning many past texts from the depths of the Cabinet Office archives, was how for more than 50 years governments had been promising roughly the same things, often in near-identical words. All these administrations were going to improve health services, raise standards in schools and lower unemployment. Legislation would be needed to address crime and protect the environment. The challenges never seemed to go away, but to recur in similar forms for every generation of political leaders.

The governments who had produced these Speeches had tried lots of different policy tools. Some had favoured market incentives and the outsourcing of public services. Others had preferred high spending in the state sector. Some had wanted to devolve more to local government, others to centralise more control. Over the years, civil servants preparing policy advice for ministers, politicians advancing programmes for government, journalists commenting on policy issues and academics analysing the results all looked at the merits of these different tools. The same policy challenges seemed to persist, despite whatever governments of all political persuasions had thrown at them.