The revolutionary english

The Brits have a reputation for respecting tradition which is totally undeserved. The reality is that their government style (at least since the mid 1960s) has been one of the most interventionist – if not revolutionary – putting even Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “waves of creative destruction” to shame. A few examples -

- In the mid 1970s the system of local government was decimated – the average British local authority covers 150,000 people - more than 10 times the European average

- the system has been subject several times since then to massive upheavals

- about two thirds of British civil servants now work in relatively independent Agencies

- virtually everything that can be privatized or contracted out has been so dealt with, with almost no services returning to the municipalities as has been the trend, for example, in Germany

- the National Health Service has been subjected to a never-ending series of organizational upheavals over the past 40 years

- in the mid 2000s, New Labour totally changed the political structures of English local government, encouraging the concentration of power in the hands of a few Cabinet members or a directly-elected mayor.

I supported some of these changes so it’s not the nature of the change I want to draw attention to – it’s rather their frequency and intensity; and the fact that British governments were able to force change through with so little effective opposition. That simply can’t happen in Europe – where the French, for example, are notorious for their rebellious streak; German Governments bound by constitutional constraints and a Federal structure of power-sharing; and the Italians by inertia.

Not for nothing did a British conservative Minister describe the British system as one of “elective dictatorship”. And, in the 1980s, an American political scientist drew attention to this in a book about French and British styles of centralisation subtitled “British dogmatism and French pragmatism”

“Illusions of Adequacy”

Because of the powers at their fingertips, British government leaders develop “illusions of grandeur”. All other European leaders know they have to negotiate – whether with other political leaders, with trade unionists or with industrialists – but not the Brits who can simply impose new policies at the snap of their fingers….

Well not quite…..they have learned that many of the “tools” of government no longer seem to work…But they can go through the motions….

.It was significant that it was only as a last resort that Theresa May tried to negotiate with the Labour leadership on Brexit. In any normal country facing such a crisis, that would have been the first not the last resort…

Britain has experienced only 2 coalitions since 1945 – a brief one Labour was forced to try with the Liberals  in the late 70s; and the one David Cameron negotiated with the Lib-Dems in 2010 which lasted the full 5 years.

“Negotiation” is something the English political class doesn’t do. I say “English” because Labour had a different approach in Scotland in 1999 when the new devolved system of Scottish government got underway.. Although the electoral arithmetic didn’t require it, Labour made a critical decision that the people of Scotland needed a clear signal that the new devolved system would be more consensual than the tired Westminster one….And, since then, a distinctive Scottish approach to policy has developed – as you will see in this article.

I would suggest that we need to explore what it is in the English mentality that makes it so difficult to consider coming together for the common good….Somehow the elites prefer the “Big-Bang” approach to change…..and don’t stay around long enough to realise that it just doesn’t work!

A recent book painted a frightening picture of an elite which is totally isolated from a sense of reality - Reckless opportunists – elites at the end of the establishment; Aeron Davis (2018)

After twenty years of interrogating the managers and politicians of the UK, Davis finds their leadership to be ‘solitary, rich, nasty, brutish and short’. Leadership could and should, he feels, be ‘connected, modestly paid, nice, civilised and long’. But it is not. He provides a two-page list of reforms that might help.
Davis began by assuming that there was a functioning Establishment, with a sense of its shared interests, and decided to investigate how it worked. He was confronted by a growing body of evidence that it didn’t work as he expected. The powerful felt obliged only to look after themselves. While many spoke of their larger ethical concerns, they had to achieve immediate ‘results’ that can be ‘measured’. Davis Davis’s account shows that no one runs the country.

There isn’t an ‘Establishment’. Its demise has been evident for at least a decade. The one that Anthony Sampson describes in his famous “The Anatomy of Britain” (1980) did exist. He revisited it, for it was never monolithic, in further studies after. Now Davis’s book has made me change my mind. My view that the downfall of the system began with the triumph of late Thatcherism and the reforms of Blair. First, there was her confinement of the trade unions and Big Bang deregulation of the City and the full-scale privatisations of the 1980s. This was then followed by an expanded public sector that was crucified by New Labour with its demands for the simulated ‘competition’, of targets, outsourcing and internal markets.

 Postscript

One of the earliest books to draw attention to the hyperinnovation of the English state in the last 50 years was The British Regulatory State – high modernism and Hyper-innovation; by Michael Moran (2003). 

It is a complex - but brilliant - book since it adopts a rare “political economy” approach – looking at institutional changes as part of a wider and deeper change in economic and social structures. 
All previous books I’ve read about British politics (and I’ve read quite a few) focus almost exclusively on what has been called “high politics” ie the high and visible institutions of state. “Low politics” (the field of the professional associations (medical and financial), local government and all their inspectorates) is pretty technical and, although the subject of study, has flown under most people’s radar.

Since the privatization of the 80s and 90s, however, its significance has grown immensely – but this has received proper treatment in Europe only since the publication of a book by Majone in 1994. 

I appear to have read the first third of Moran's book with great interest since my copy (from almost a decade ago) is scored with strong pencil marks – but I seem to have lost interest a third of the way through. I am now going back to read it more carefully. 

As I explained earlier this year, it should be read in conjunction with a book which appeared in 2007 – The Rise of the Unelected Democracy and the new separation of powers (which, typically, I also left about one third into the reading)  

Moran was one of the best UK political scientists – whose focus was much wider than most such academics. In 2005 he also wrote a textbook which, although aimed at undergraduates, is ideal reading (even at 500 pages) for a foreign audience Politics and Governance in the UK - given the breadth of his reading and the originality of his thought.