Britain is essentially a regulatory state. The civil service and the operations of the central government machine reflect this truth. Various attempts at reform over the last century have failed, or come to very little, with the important exception of the huge shock to the system which came from total mobilization and war socialism in the Second World War, and its aftermath until the early 1970s. Mrs Margaret Thatcher's government and its successors dismantled much of this settlement. There is little positive planning for social and economic outcomes of the sort which underpinned the post-war Japanese economic miracle and the emergence of dynamic industrial competitors in Asia. The Japanese had learned their cooperative model as a matter of national survival; their defeat in the Second World War led them to maintain what were largely wartime forms of social and economic organization.