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.
