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Orderly Britain

How Britain has resolved everyday problems, from dog fouling to double parking

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Orderly Britain

By: Tim Newburn, Andrew Ward
Narrated by: Ciaran Saward
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How do British pavements remain free of dog mess? Why are paths not littered with cigarette butts or roads not lined with abandoned cars? What does the decline of the public lavatory say about us and is the national reputation for queuing still deserved today?

Orderly Britain takes a topical look at modern society, examining how it is governed and how it organises itself. It considers the rules of daily life, where they come from and why they exist. It asks whether citizens are generally compliant and uncomplaining or rebellious and defiant. This quirky social history takes a close look at shifting customs and practices, people's expectations of each other and how rule-makers seek to shape everyone's lives - even when ignoring some of those rules themselves.

Taking the reader on a journey that covers a range of topics - dog mess, smoking, drinking, parking, queuing, toilets - Orderly Britain examines the rapidly changing patterns of everyday life, from post-war to present day, and concludes with an extended look at the unparalleled shifts in social routines that resulted from the global COVID-19 pandemic. Asking whether it is the proliferation of rules and regulations in the UK or something else that keeps people in line, authors Tim Newburn and Andrew Ward offer a unique insight into what creates orderly Britons.©2022 Tim Newburn and Andrew Ward Europe Freedom & Security Great Britain Politics & Government Sociology Smoking Tobacco England United Kingdom War
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Orderly Britain shins a light on those happenings that we've all noticed but might not be so sure of the cause of the behaviour change. The modular nature of the book makes it easy to jump to the chapters of greatest interest 👌

Interesting subject matter - made accessible!

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Interesting information and a plausible presentation of central theoretical points. But overlong and turgid. And some odd errors -- the use of "broadly utilitarian" to refer to the liberal defence of freedom to manage one's private conduct, and the use of a quotation from Hume which belongs to his account of our idea of causation in the context of a discussion of social orderliness.
The text needed better proofreading to remove annoying stylistic infelicities and errors in word choice, as well as better editing to chop back excess verbiage. It could easily have been a third shorter -- with no loss of content and with a probable gain in clarity.

Disappointing

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