Class in British writing

What a joy to listen to interviews with working-class writers – whether on the subject of climate change or inequality. And to read books not written by middle-class wankers with clipped accents! Class is one of the barriers I’ve referred to when I’ve argued that being an outsider helps one be a creative writer. If you’re in a middle-class bubble, you simply don’t see the world as it really is! Happily I was saved from such a fate by my membership of the Labour party in my teens and being a Labour councillor for 22 years. Having regular sessions with Clydeside Tenant Associations soon knocks any nonsense out of you!

I viewed 2 videos yesterday – both about books whose authors are proud to 

acknowledge their working class background. The first with Chris Shaw about 

his new book Liberalism and the challenge of climate change which has the 

additional attraction of being only 149 pages long! The very first words in the 

Preface give you a sense of what you are in for -

This book makes a quite obvious point; the language we use and the stories we tell reflect our particular social and historical circumstances. The stories we hear about the solutions to climate change reflect the social and historical experiences of the liberal middle classes of the global North. They are stories intended to reproduce the privilege of the storytellers. I am writing from a subaltern position within the global North, that of someone who grew up in a family who struggled financially and a family with no experience of higher education.

So, the middle-class world has always felt something of an ‘other’ to me. I am not of the middle-class world.

Not being of that world has provided me with an outsider’s perspective on middle-class ownership of climate change campaigning and communication. This book is the viewpoint of someone stood at the window, looking in. I believe Cormac McCarthy once said that people write in lieu of blowing up the world. That feels an apt description of the motivation for this book. I am not a happy voyeur. Whilst I might characterise the middle classes as complacent in the normal run of affairs, and vicious when their privilege is threatened, I must also own up the anger that motivates the writing of this book. That anger is, I suppose, in some part the resentment of someone who has been turned away from the party, who feels not wanted. Yet also, the anger reflects the feeling of being lied to. Lies are easy to justify, easy to live with when you are the one doing the lying. Lies are more difficult to swallow as the one being deceived.

Shaw works at the University of Sussex (he’s Head of Research of Climate 

Outreach) and has worked in the field of climate change communication for 

over 15 years. I have only started the book but it is already making 

me see the world differently. 

By comparison leftist Brett Christophers whose The Price is Wrong - capitalism 

won't save the planet comes across as rather technocratic in this video.  

The second video was with Darren McGarvey who published last year 

“The Social Distance Between Us – how remote politics wrecked Britain” 

whose writing process he describes in this LRB blog. And a podcast called 

Trigger-nometry has a good interview with him here (just have the patience to 

wait for one minute). Clicking the book’s title links to a rather sniffy Guardian 

review which suggests that -

the book’s key theme, which McGarvey wraps up in the term “proximity”, is the fact 

that even at a local level, power tends to operate far away from the people it kicks 

around and manipulates. When it comes to the central state, moreover, decision-making 

turns even more cold and cruel, largely because in Westminster and Whitehall, the 

domination of political and administrative matters by privileged cliques is at its worst. 

Whether the people concerned are “posh politicians who’ve never tasted desperation” 

or “thin-skinned idealists, too short in the tooth to understand the real world”, 

McGarvey insists that their actions are usually based on groundless assumptions and 

false beliefs. What we really need, therefore, is a return of the kind of rooted working

-class voices that might reorientate government towards everyday reality: an update 

of the spirit of Aneurin Bevan, rather than more George Osbornes, David Camerons 

and Boris Johnsons. But even starting such a turnaround will be a huge and onerous task. 

All of which brings us back to the question of CLASS – a subject which Brits 

are notoriously reluctant to talk about. But, as usual, outsiders can bring a fresh 

(and amusing) perspective - first a French woman Social Classes in Britain 

Isabelle Licari-Guillaume (2019) and then Hiroko Tomida with The history and 

development of the English class system (2009) which contains this recap of 

1960s David Frost skit

The following lines are worth quoting.

the tallest man: I look down on him (indicates the man in the middle) because I am upper class.

the man in the middle: I look up to him (the tallest man) because he is upper class; but I look down on him (the smallest man) because he is lower-class. I am middle class.

the shortest man: I know my place. I look up to them both. But I dont look up to him (the man in the middle) as much as I look up to him (the tallest man), because he has got innate breeding.

the tallest man: I have got innate breeding, but I have not got any money. So sometimes I look up to him (the man in the middle).

the man in the middle: I still look up to him (the tallest man) because although I have money, I am vulgar. But I am not as vulgar as him (the shortest man) so I still look down on him (the shortest man).

the shortest man: I know my place. I look up to them both; but while I am poor, I am honest, industrious and trustworthy. Had I the inclination, I could look down on them. But I dont.

the man in the middle: We all know our place, but what do we get out of it?

the tallest man: I get a feeling of superiority over them.

the man in the middle: I get a feeling of inferiority from him (the tallest man), but a feeling of superiority over him (the shortest man).

the shortest man: I get a pain in the back of my neck.

For more serious analyses of the situation I recommend
Class in Britain David Cannadine (2000)
Who Rules Britain? John Scott (1991) 

A CONFESSION

I was slightly distracted when I wrote the last post - by the English poet Philip Larkin whose book The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin (ed Archie Burnett 2012) I had pulled down from the shelves and started to read – leading me in turn to download both it and two others about the poet  

• Philip Larkin – selected poems ed Gilroy (2009) which is less a selection 

of his poems and more a commentary on his work.

• Philip Larkin – Letters Home 1936-1977 ed James Booth (2012) which is 

hardly the most fascinating of reads being letters to his mum and sister but does contain some of his wonderful cartoon sketches

Larkin was the poet who wrote Annus Mirabilis which begins

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

The last post may have created some confusion in readers between the State 

(as an inanimate object - which continues to fascinate me) and the government 

of the day – about which I am much less interested. It’s passing strange that 

the State arouses so little interest amongst citizens. You would have thought 

that an organisation which controls such a large part of our lives and manages 

such a huge budget would have been of interest. But it’s the Government of the 

day that attracts the attention and ire rather than the functions of the state
and the recent debate about the DEEP STATE (in right-wing circles)  is little 

more than a gross oversimplification. To help readers, I’ve extracted this list of
books about the state from one of the Annexes to the current draft of my The
Search for Democracy – a long journey 

• The State in theory and practice Harold Laski 1923

• The State in Capitalist Society Ralph Miliband (1970) a highly readable account which is vastly superior to the literature on “the Establishment” (Jones, Sampson, Scott).

• Bob Jessop is a British sociologist who is probably the world’s foremost theoretician of the State with The Capitalist State in 1982; The Future of the Capitalist State in 2002 and The State – past, present and future in 2016. These are not easy reads. I would suggest instead Christopher Pierson’s The Modern State (2^nd ed 2004)

• The Private Government of Public Money by Hugh Heclo and Aaron Wildavsky (1974) which made a boring subject (how the UK Treasury controls the budget) really sexy!

• B Guy Peters’ The Politics of Bureaucracy – an HYPERLINK "http://dspace.lzuu.lt/bitstream/1/3316/1/37672.pdf"introduction to comparative public administration (1978) was probably the first comparative and sociological approach to the subject

• Approaches to the State – alternative conceptions and historical dynamics useful 

review article (Comparative Politics vol 16 no 2 Stephen Krasner 1984) From the late 1950s until the mid-1970s the term state virtually disappeared from the professional academic lexicon. Political scientists wrote about government, political development, interest groups, voting, legislative behavior, leadership and bureaucratic politics, almost everything but "the state." However, in the last decade "the state" has reappeared in the literature. If you are feeling very adventurous, I would try two short articles - Stuart Hall’s “The State in Question” (1984) or David Held’s “Central Perspectives on the Modern State” (1984)

• Bringing the State Back In ed Evans and T Skocpol (1985)

• the classic study Bureaucracy – what government agencies do and why they do it JQ Wilson (1989).

• Chris Hood was one of three academics I came to rely on in the 1990s for clear, insighful analyses of UK public administration (Chris Pollitt and Rod Rhodes were the other two). And in 1991 he produced a masterful article analysing the new public management (NPM) A Public Management for all Seasons?

• Managing Core Public Services; David McKevitt (1998) was a useful textbook for its analysis of the distinctiveness of public services

• The History of Government Sam Finer 1999 some 1700 pages

• Captive State – the corporate takeover of Britain by investigative journalist George Monbiot (2000) was the start of my painful realisation that UK politics was not as pure as I had imagined.

• In Praise of Bureaucracy; Paul du Gay (2000) A wonderful defence of a much maligned institution

• The Modern State (2^nd ed 2004) C Pierson. A far easier read than Jessop

• The Middle Aging of New Public Management - into the age of paradox?; C Hood and B Guy Peters; The Journal of Public Admin Research 2004

• The Civil Service Commission – a bureau biography 1855-1991 by Richard Chapman (2005) was then the best guide to civil service reform in the UK.

• ”Good and Bad Power – the ideals and betrayals of government”; Geoff Mulgan (2006). One of the moșt interesting books about the state.

• ”The Social Construction of Public Administratian” Jong Jun (2006) an early and promising post-modern take on the subject by a South Korean

• The Innovative Bureaucracy – bureaucracy in a time of fluidity; Alexander Styhre 2007 – a highly original account of a much-maligned system

• Public Administration – the interdisciplinary approach to government; J Raadschelders (2011) A Dutch scholar whose specialism is the history of the subject

• A Theory of Governance Mark Bevir (2013) a British political scientist who, with Rod Rhodes, adopts an interpretive and postmodern approach

• The American Deep State – Wall St, Big Oil and the struggle for American Democracy by Peter Dale Scott (2015) 

• Rebalancing Society – radical reform beyond left, right and centre Henry Mintzberg (2015) was a superb summary of how corporate greed had upset the balance which trade unions and government had supplied in the postwar period to corporate power

• The Deep State – the fall of the constitution and the rise of a shadow government Mike Lofgren (2016) – US oriented

• Dismembered – the ideological attack on the state Polly Toynbee and David Walker (2017) a more popular book

• The Rise of Managerial Bureaucracy – reforming the British civil service by L Castellani (2018) updates Chapman’s book

• History of the Deep State by Jeremy Stone (2018) only 82 pages

• Reimagining the State – theoretical challenges and transformative possibilities ed J Newman 2019 

• The Three Ages of Government – from the person to the group to the world Jos Raadschelders (2020) This is the book I’ve been waiting for. TABLE 1.1. State concepts and characteristics and what they mean for the role of government gives 20 definitions.

• Out of the Belly of Hell Anthony Barnett (2021) an extended essay which places Covid in the context of the key “turning points” of the past half century

• The Return of the State – restructuring Britain for the Common Good Ed by Patrick Allen et al (2021)

• The Deep State – a history of secret agendas and shadow governments Ian Fitzgerald (2021) only 94 pages

• The Return of the State – and why it is essential for our health, wealth and happiness Graeme Garrard (2022)

• The Project State and its rivals Charles Maier (2023) 

• The Battle for Britain – crises, conflicts and the conjuncture J Clarke (2023)

RUMINATIONS ON WHAT THE STATE CAN AND CAN’T DO

Twitter was alive yesterday with the aftermath of Monday’s big speech from the UK PM about the grim actions needed to repair the 22 billion deficit left from the Conservatives (whoever said they managed the economy well?? The Labour party generally is left inheriting their mess)

This has brought into focus the question of whether states actually need to 

balance their budgets. Economists such as David Blanchflower and Richard Murphy 

are amongst those who take a different view, supporting the work of Stephanie 

Kelton in her The Deficit Myth – Modern Monetary Theory and the birth of 

the people’s economy (2020) which she presented (with useful slides) in a 

discussion a few years ago with the OECD. It’s not an easy topic to get your 

head around and I found this a good objective presentation 

But it takes me back to a more fundamental question which has been exercising 

me for the past couple of decades – namely the limits on state capacity. 

Recent posts from Aurelien and crazed Dominic Cummings on this coincided 

with this more positive post from Paul Cairney about a new vision for UK government.

Cairney’s post references a 2021 article of his which has, at the end, a link to 

“a contemporary story of policy” which links in turn to a fantastic article on  

“Ostrom and the bright side of public service” which superbly summarises the 

entire literature on government failures and suggests a way forward.
It’s hardly surprising that some 50 years of neoliberalism have seriously dented 

the capacity of the State. But it’s taken some time for us to notice the combined 

effects of privatisation and Austerity on the British State.  
I’m loathe to credit Cummings with anything since he was the brains behind 

Brexit and also the key political adviser not only to Michael Grove (when he was 

Education Minister) but also to Boris Johnson (before becoming one of his bitterest

 critics). But the man blogs interestingly eg

almost all large organisations incentivise (largely implicitly/unconsciously) preserving 

existing power structures and budgets, preventing system adaptation, fighting against 

the eternal lessons of high performance excluding most talent, and maintaining 

exactly the thing that in retrospect will be seen as the cause of the disaster. 

Large organisations naturally train everyone who gets promoted to align themselves 

with this dynamic: dissent is weeded out. Anybody pointing out ‘we’re heading for an 

iceberg’ is ‘mad’, ‘psychopath’, ‘weirdo’ — and is quickly removed. And even the very 

occasional odd characters who a) see, b) are able to act and c) have the moral courage 

to act are highly constrained in what they can do given the nature of large institutions 

and the power of the forces they confront. (Even Bismarck in 1871-5 or Stalin in the 

1930s, more powerful than anybody else in their country, were highly constrained in 

their ability to shape forces like automation, though they could help or hinder their 

particular country’s adaptation

Even Boris Johnson was forced to put his pen to an admission of failure when 

he allowed this Declaration on Government Reform published in 2021, before 

his ignominious resignation. In 2024 this note on a New Vision for the UK government

 was published by the Academy of Social Sciences 

Positive Public Policy embraces a range of approaches aiming to facilitate effective 

government and policymaking. Some are relatively new while others have been discussed 

and studied for decades without realising their full potential. These include the 

concept of the strategic state, systems-thinking, place-based approaches, evidence

-informed government, public participation, and behavioural public policy. 

What connects these approaches is (i) an appreciation of the complexity and 

inter-connected nature of policy contexts, (ii) a belief in the capacity of collective 

action to address shared challenges, and (iii) a commitment to the collection, synthesis 

and application of different forms of knowledge. Each has been tested and is 

underpinned by an accumulation of evidence – including, good practice, frameworks, 

case studies, and policy learning – and together they provide a coherent reform 

agenda and a fresh portfolio of ways of designing and delivering high-performing 

public policy.
Years of instability in UK government have eroded underlying capacity for reform. 

The General Election will be conducted against the backdrop of financial stress 

across government, and no reform is cost-free. Will an incoming government give 

priority to getting its own house in order? And taking the leap of faith reform 

requires? Positive Public Policy embodies the vision of real change to drive change 

to address the significant social, economic and environmental challenges we face. 

It provides a range of approaches, tools and methods for designing and delivering 

effective public policy, and the clear, coherent and sustainable story of reform 

required to lower barriers to change and to leveraging resources.
What we need is the political will and sustained capacity to trial and test the insights 

of Positive Public Policy in a UK context, and this in turn calls for investment in 

connective and catalysing engagement opportunities between researchers and 

policymakers. There’s an urgent need to connect the positive public policy academic 

community with practitioners at scale in order to help constitute the policymaking 

tools that governments can use as they grapple with the ‘art of the possible’ to 

translate lofty ideals into practices that might work in their own context. 

Now is the time to attract and devote resources towards trialling, tracking and 

evaluating experimentation in more future-oriented, holistic, and more participatory 

approaches to government.

Quite a few mouthfuls there!!

See also “Pathways to Positive Public Administration”  a book scheduled to 

come out in October 2024. The opening chapter is here; and the second here