I’ve just come across a little book The End of British Politics? published in 2017 by Michael Moran which has made such a deep impression that I’ve been driven to try to identify what it was about the writing that appealed to me. But first I need to say something about the author -
WJM McKenzie Professor of Government at the University of Manchester
from 1990 to his retirement in 2011. The British Academy has this wonderful
tradition of requiring the few academics who warrant the honour of being invited
to join of having a third party write a detailed obituary which goes under the
name of “bibliographical memoir” (It’s not clear whether the recipient gets to
see it before his death). This is Moran’s which covers his unusual dive into
trade union history, industrial relations and banking – fields which are rarely
linked and reveal a dangerous interest in inter-disciplinary work evident in his
link with the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute (SPERI).
Let me give you a taste of the writing -
This
analytic history is tied together in the following pages by three
ideas.
Providentialism
is the conviction that the British are a people with a special
destiny. That imagined destiny has changed over time. It began as an
almost biblical conviction that the British were a chosen Protestant
people. It ended in the tragedy of Iraq as military providentialism:
the conviction that Britain’s destiny was to have a warfare state
which would help police the world. That is why in the final chapter
there is an account of the Iraq tragedy and, in particular, of the
verdict of the Chilcot Report on that tragedy.
Messianism
is connected with providentialism. It expresses the conviction that
the British have a pioneering purpose –
whether that purpose was the diffusion of Protestantism, the
creation of Empire, or the invention of Parliamentary government.
Statecraft
is the practice which
allowed different versions of providentialism and messianism to
prevail at different historical moments. It is so called because it
covers the ways elites competed for control of the state and what
they did with state power once it was in their grasp.
The
more or less permanent 18th-century sense of crisis in the face of
aggressive multinational Catholicism had disappeared, and the state
was edging towards absorbing the excluded sects – congregational,
catholic and Jewish – into some kind of accommodation.
But the 18th-century age of creation
left powerful marks. By the beginning of 19th century,
latitudinarianism and scepticism were being powerfully challenged by
new evangelical public philosophies. In
Britain – by contrast with Germany, for instance – religion
remained central to civic philosophy. The rituals of the British
state were infused with religious symbolism. Across much of northern
Europe elites turned from the consolations of religion to the
consolations of art – exemplified by the extraordinary cult of
music, especially opera, in Germanic societies. By contrast the great
Victorian musical experience was Mendelssohn’s Elijah (1846), a
self-conscious homage to the Handelian celebrations of the British
elect. The complexities and ambiguities of Britishness are symbolised
by the fact that it was composed by a Berliner of Jewish heritage
patronised by a Queen who spoke German
by preference.
Imagine
someone in 1914 trying to predict the course of British politics over
the succeeding sixty years. Had they read the future from the past
they would surely have been misled. The constitution looked likely to
be a perpetual source of conflict. The place of established religion;
the allocation of authority between the centre and Celtic fringes;
the range of the suffrage, especially as it concerned women: all were
disputed, and all went to the core of British identity. Yet within
a few years of the end of the War, all had either been resolved or
suppressed. The system settled into a sixty-year period of stability
in a centralised polity dominated by elites rooted in the metropolis.
A new kind of Britishness had been created. It is as well to begin
with the disputes that disappeared. The Representation of the People
Act of 1918 enfranchised women over the age of thirty, to all intents
and purposes enfranchised all men aged over twenty-one, and in the
process tripled the size of the electorate (from about seven to
twenty-one million). For the remainder of the century, electoral law
was subject only to tweaks: equalising the qualifying age of women
and men (1928) and lowering the qualifying age to eighteen (1969). In
short order there were two astonishing achievements: establishing
a long lived consensus about a critical boundary of the constitution,
the electorate, and settling the “woman question.”
The
new rules guaranteed two party hegemony by rejecting all systems of
proportional representation, thus establishing one of the key
features of British politics for over sixty years: electoral
domination across Britain by two Britain wide organised parties.
And the woman question was decisively settled in favour of men:
beyond the vote, women made almost no advance until the renewal of
political feminism in the 1980s. And the BBC
version of high culture was astonishing in its metropolitan
parochialism: talks and debates typically involved boulevardier
philosophers (Isaiah Berlin), Bloomsbury bohemians (Vita
Sackville-West), and Farm Street Jesuits (Father Copleston).
What
is evident for me is -
a
strong historial sense
creative
use of language
familiarity
with a wide range of literature
wicked
asides
revealing
a self-confidence which comes perhaps from the relief of knowing
that he can now, in retirement, speak his mind
He
continues -
The
post-war settlement was not excessively generous but was
thin and mean. It was restricted in the range of entitlements it
offered. It was restricted in the range of class groups that it
attached to the state by those entitlements. As
a consequence it could not effectively do the job for which it was
designed – to attach citizens to the state. Esping-Andersen’s
comparative study of welfare states, published just at the moment
when the terminal decay of the post-warmodel was becoming plain,makes
the problem clear. It placed the British welfare state, alongside
nations like the United States, in a class of welfare regimes which
extended only residual entitlements:
they
restricted the range of benefits to particular social groups rather
than creating entitlements universally available to all citizens;
they
used gatekeepers with wide discretionary powers to control the power
of citizens to claim entitlements.
These
principles governed the heart of welfare regimes in labour markets,
but they also governed what was emblematic of the British system of
social citizenship, and supposedly a great mark of universalism, the
National Health Service. Far from being generous, the
Service was, by international standards, strikingly parsimonious,
and it was parsimonious because the medical profession – especially
the General Practitioner – was the gatekeeper to the exercise of
entitlement.
This
was the system that fell apart, mostly in the 1970s. The experiences
of that decade shaped the cult of epochalism, the ‘decline of
Britain’ imagery that for so long dominated political vocabularies.
But agency and statecraft falsified this dismal vision. The state was
recreated, mostly after 1979, though some important reinventions of
what it meant to be ‘British’ preceded that date. The recreation
took four particularly important forms:
recasting
the post-war settlement;
reshaping
the relations between the state and civil society;
reshaping
the constitution; and
reshaping
British identity.
Far
from being a tale of endless decay, it is a story of renewal,
especially by Thatcherite Conservatism and by New Labour. Much of
that renewal has endured. But nothing lasts forever. By the new
millennium, the reinvented state was in trouble, troubles that
culminated in the turbulence of the Great Financial Crisis, the
fiasco of military providentialism in Iraq, the challenge of Scottish
nationalism and the option for ‘Brexit’.
P56
The democratic state that emerged in a very brief time at the end of
the First World War was produced by the crisis of war and panic at
the spectre of left wing militancy. But it was only ever partly
modernised. The new leading party of the left, Labour, became a
defender of constitutional traditionalism: of Unionism, of
Westminster Parliamentary sovereignty, of the dignified monarchy, of
Whitehall secrecy and, generally, of a constitution which substituted
tacit understandings for explicit codification. This half antiquated
constitution was modernised by the state after 1979, with governments
of both parties making a large contribution. Since ‘modernisation’
carries normative implications I should stress that it is used here
in a dispassionate sense: to denote a shift from the tacit to the
explicit, to equipping the state with the means to inspect itself and
to inspect and control the wider community. It is thus of a piece
with the changes already described in the relationship between the
state and civil society. The state thus did far more than reshape
institutions external to itself. It revolutionised its own capacity
to practise self-inspection.
This
is the theme of the large literature, mostly concerned with the years
of Conservative, rule that documents the rise of regulation inside government. It amounted to a momentous shift, especially in the
administration of the core executive and the agencies over which it
had control like the prison service. It involved a shift within
public administration from autonomous systems of collegial
self-government to inspection, measurement and appraisal. The
institutional manifestation of that change was the rise of a whole
new system of inspecting institutions inside government: the
reorganisation of audit in the foundation of the National Audit
Office in 1983; and the creation or reform of
inspectorates for policing, for prisons, for social services, for
pollution and health and safety.
This
shift in internal inspection capacities overlapped with a profound
reshaping of the territorial constitution. Three key parts were
transformed.
First,
the Conservative Governments after 1979 destroyed the
arrangement dating from the end of the First World War involving an
informal division of spheres between the metropolitan centre and the
institutions of local government. After 1979, in pursuit of
budgetary controls and the search for public sector efficiency the
government destroyed those understandings, replacing them with
greatly increased control by the central state expressed in formal,
statutory language. This destruction was confirmed by the Blair
Governments after 1997.
Second,
in passing the Single European Act of 1986 the state abandoned the
Diceyan doctrine of Westminster Parliamentary supremacy. An
increasing proportion of policy, and indeed of law, from then on was
the product of the EU policy making system. The shift is all the
more striking because the abandonment of the doctrine was the work
of a Conservative, ‘unionist’, government. That shift went with
another well documented change: the ‘Europeanisation’ of the
governing system, which meant in large part the increasing
codification of governing practices to bring them into line with EU
norms.
In
the decades after 1979, the Thatcher and the Blair governments also
profoundly reshaped a third feature of the territorial constitution,
beginning with what was the coping stone of the Union – Northern
Ireland. The original imposition of direct rule in 1972 was a
prelude to the wholesale dismantling of the Ulster system. The state
performed the herculean task of cleansing out the Augean stables of
Unionist jobbery. The Fair Employment Acts of 1976 and 1989 imposed
on the public sector in the province the most comprehensive fair
employment regime in Europe. By the 1990s the state had, at great
human cost, used its coercive and surveillance resources to fight
the nationalists to a stalemate and to bring them to the point of
seeking a negotiated settlement. The Conservative Government in the
1990s, as the historical standard bearer of the Union, could for
obvious reasons only engage in covert negotiations with Sinn Féin
and the Provisional IRA. Towards the end of the Major Premiership
its capacity to negotiate was hampered further by the contingent
fact that the Government’s Westminster Parliamentary majority
relied on Ulster Unionist votes.
All
these measures are institutionalised. That is, while they may be
modified,
and even repealed (as the Conservative Government returned in the
election of 2015 threatened to do with the Human Rights Act) they
have now irrevocably changed the practice of government, and changed
it in the direction of modernisation
– which is to say, in the direction of codification and reporting
in the language of accountability. But they are also plainly closely
connected to another key development in the state’s capacities: a
great increase, in the new age of cross border terrorism, in the
state’s powers to spy on its citizens, and to exchange the results
of spying with allied states. That was the dominant revelation of the
‘Snowden papers’ published in 2013.
