In praise of the generation past

Today – my father’s birthday – is a day for celebrating the older (European) generation – their decencies and strivings. We have not seen their like again! They went through more – were so much less selfish and egocentric – and their writings much more powerful than the simpering affectations which passes for modern writing.

I say this in the middle of my reading of English historian Richard Cobb’s Paris and Elsewhere – having bought the lovely NYRB edition after recalling how the impact his writing about Paris had made on me in the 1970s. What a life he lived – and how well his sentences capture life in the mid 20th century.
He first went to Paris in 1935 at the age of 15 and was captivated, living most of the next 20 years there and writing about various other urban settings such as Lyon, Lille and Brussels. He admired Simenon’s writings – and had the same fascination with la vie ordinaire des ordinaires. In Paris, as one obituary put it “he was poor, studied in the day and spent his nights in the bars and brothels that are lovingly described in his writings. He relied on subventions from his mother in Tunbridge Wells, also journalism and a position teaching English to Air France stewardesses. He was briefly married to an employee of the SNCF. Characteristically, Cobb used his wife's cheap rail tickets to study archives in the regions and consult with the erudits locaux who shared his historical interests. His style was at once insolent, erudite and parenthetic (sentences could be as long as paragraphs), and won him many admirers”.

It’s clear who inspired the likes of Theodor Zeldin – and perhaps even Julian Barnes who is one of the few English writers I unreservedly admire. His descriptive power of Paris and Elsewhere as he describes amazing characters in his lodgings or whom he visited on Sundays surpasses that of most novellists (or indeed the fashionable travel writers) I have read. And they are so sympathetically done – clearly borne of much close character observation. He was very much his own man, utterly individualist, with no sense of a career - admitting that he stumbled into his life as an historian of France simple because he loved living in the country and speaking the language.

I count myself lucky because I was able to follow my passions and rarely experienced the role of an employee - and feel so sorry for those who have been compelled to choose a career. For those who don’t know him, let the obituarists give you a sense.

His first book A Second Identity (about the importance of his French life) appeared in 1959 was followed by an armee revolutionnaire of books. Among the best were Promenades: a historian's appreciation of modern French literature (1980), which described favourite novelists such as Marcel Pagnol and Raymond Queneau; The Streets of Paris (1980), a dazzling essay on four arrondissements of Paris, extolling balustrades and courtyards of the 19th century, washable brothel-fronts of the 1930s and Tunisian shops of the 1960s, with photographs by Nicholas Breach; Still Life (1983), sketches from a Tunbridge Wells childhood; A Classical Education (1985), an unforgettable account of his friendship with a Dublin matricide; and Something to Hold Onto (1988), openly Proustian autobiographical sketches describing his relations, the book illustrator Frank Pape and the pleasures of the lavatory.

Cobb believed that a historian should get inside the threshold, step beyond the door, and write about private people and private places. Accents, clothes, family photographs and loneliness in cities interested him more than intellectual debates or economic graphs. He extended the frontiers of history so far that his books included descriptions of the tin trunks of French officials on the way to the colonies in a Marseilles hotel, girls in hotel rooms crouching over bidets in ''a rapid gesture of orthodoxy rather than of hygiene'' and the third army, of ''enormous, long-whiskered, dark-coated, red-eyed rats'', below the Germans and the resisters, which surfaced in Paris during the occupation. His unique ability to understand other people enabled him to make collaborators human and a childhood in Tunbridge Wells between the wars interesting.

The December 1 blog opined that “too much political discussion fails to recognise that politics (like life) is a series of individual choices, decisions and behaviour in a particular context. It is too easy to retreat behind abstractions”. I was therefore delighted to come across his justification of his modus operandi (which came to have such influence on historians such as Christopher Hill, Ralph Samuel and Edward Thompson) in these simple terms -

"I have never understood history other than in terms of human relationships; and I have attempted to judge individuals in their own terms and from what they say about themselves, in their own language. Most interesting of all, to me, is the individual unrelated to any group, the man, the girl, or the old woman alone in the city, the person who eats alone, though in company, who lives in a furnished room, who receives no mail, who has no visible occupation, and who spends much time wandering the streets. For, apart from everlasting problem of violence, the principal one that faces a historian like myself is that of loneliness, especially loneliness in the urban context."

"In history, intellectual debate can so often be a cover for over-simplification, lack of experience, insufficient culture, lack of involvement and of sympathy, and the impetus to compare and to generalize in cases where comparisons and generalizations are either irrelevant or positively misleading. Why, one wonders, when reading certain sections of Past and Present, why do historians spend so much time arguing, imposing definitions, proposing 'models', when they could be getting on with their research?"

It's not easy to get hold of his books now (Amazon have very few). This is where I need the British second hand bookshops! All credit therefore to the new York Review of Books for adding this collection to their series of classics!

Hollowing out of democracy

Finance kills creativity in more senses than one. I’ve been worrying about the euro in recent days – talking to the bank, switching currencies, contemplating (with inflation risks) going back into investments since the minimal return on money in banks means that my assets bleed. It’s all vivid proof that money does not make you happy – it makes you worry.
What makes me really angry is that, unlike a lot of people whose assets are the result largely of the property inflation, mine have been earned by the sweat of my brow. And were all at risk for a few hours 2 years ago when the Royal Bank of Scotland tottered on the brink of collapse. And still we are incapable of building back into place a banking system which both protects the savings of ordinary people and puts their money to productive use. When I spoke to my bank they sent me a prospectus for a fund which would have tied my money up for almost 5 years – subject to conditions which could have wiped out the minimal benefits I might have received (‘we reserve the right to change these conditions….”). Admittedly one of the funds offered was an environmental one (alternative power) but a closer examination revealed it was the big global players whose claims to environmental commitment are geenrally highly suspect and who often wipe out the real, smaller national players (there was no german company in the list). And another list I was sent invited me to put my money into agrobusiness and timber – the real criminals. So nothing has changed.

And the behaviour of governments to the wikileaks has again confirmed the lack of any liberal principles there – with politicians and bureaucrats alike threatening companies who might have the most miimal link with Wikileaks. I should really boycott Amazon (who have still not solved my problem anyway) and Mastercard! A Guardian article expressed it well -

What WikiLeaks is really exposing is the extent to which the western democratic system has been hollowed out. In the last decade its political elites have been shown to be incompetent (Ireland, the US and UK in not regulating banks); corrupt (all governments in relation to the arms trade); or recklessly militaristic (the US and UK in Iraq). And yet nowhere have they been called to account in any effective way. Instead they have obfuscated, lied or blustered their way through. And when, finally, the veil of secrecy is lifted, their reflex reaction is to kill the messenger.

As Simon Jenkins put it recently in the Guardian, "Disclosure is messy and tests moral and legal boundaries. It is often irresponsible and usually embarrassing. But it is all that is left when regulation does nothing, politicians are cowed, lawyers fall silent and audit is polluted. Accountability can only default to disclosure." What we are hearing from the enraged officialdom of our democracies is mostly the petulant screaming of emperors whose clothes have been shredded by the net.
Which brings us back to the larger significance of this controversy. The political elites of western democracies have discovered that the internet can be a thorn not just in the side of authoritarian regimes, but in their sides too. It has been comical watching them and their agencies stomp about the net like maddened, half-blind giants trying to whack a mole. It has been deeply worrying to watch terrified internet companies – with the exception of Twitter, so far – bending to their will.
But politicians now face an agonising dilemma. The old, mole-whacking approach won't work. WikiLeaks does not depend only on web technology. Thousands of copies of those secret cables – and probably of much else besides – are out there, distributed by peer-to-peer technologies like BitTorrent. Our rulers have a choice to make: either they learn to live in a WikiLeakable world, with all that implies in terms of their future behaviour; or they shut down the internet. Over to them..

I've used the word "hollowing out" myself on a recent post of our democratic system - so clearly we are going to see more of this analysis.
The painting is another Bosch - this time "Death of a Miser" which fits nicely not only with the first part of the post but with Julian Barnes' latest romp - Nothing to be Frightened of - which I've just finished and highly recommend. A wry, reflective book which I would put up there with Tobias Jones' Utopian Dreams and Michael Foley's Age of Absurdity.

Gloomy Saturday

The rain and wind have been battering us for almost 24 hours – but, so far, no sign of snow. Apart from my daughers and (the beauty of) the Scottish seascape and the dry humour which goes with it, this posting gives the only reason why I would want to make a visit to UK
I’m watching Orson Welles’ 1948 black and white version of Macbeth. He is very impressive (despite the stupid Statue of Liberty hat he wears latterly!) – and, despite (because of?) the low budget, so is the film. Touch of Eisenstein about it.
It’s good weather for Sassoon’s blockbuster – One Hundred Years of Socialism – the west European left in the 20th century (enlarge the book beyond the focus on parties and west Europe and it would be double its 1,000 pages!). It has already opened my eyes – eg how minimal trade union membership was in Britain in 1910 compared with both the scale of industrialisation and other countries (7% maximum compared with minimum of 30% in other European countries less industrialised); and the government experience in the 1920s of many other socialist parties in Europe – particularly the Swedes who emerged with the most coherent and visionary philosophy of gradualist social change. Pity he doesn’t spend longer on this – since my visits to Sweden and Denmark a couple of decades ago introduced me to some of the inspirational figures in the late 19th century who laid the basis for the Scandinavian model. The folk school was a key part of that. Others, like the British labour party, had no coherence and no capacity to learn from others or even from their own mistakes
It was therefore with particular interest that I read this post which puts in historical context our greater inclination to take seriously the ideas and warnings of the ecologists.
Another useful post from boofy about the ongoing EU crisis
And also on how central european economies are being hit.

writing for inspiration and conspiracy

As someone trained in the social sciences - and keen to know what its various disciplines had to contribute to social improvements - I have done my best to keep up with thinking and writing in relevant fields. At least insofar as I can penetrate the dreadful language in which so many social scientists write! Regular readers will know that I am dubious whether the various disciplines in fact deserve to be called “sciences” at all – most of the time they are a collection of hypotheses, opinions and downright ideologies. And the jargon and obfuscated style of writing is simply a stratagem to hide that basic fact. I find it significant that Stanislaw Andreski’s 1972 book Social Sciences as Sorcery has not been allowed a reprint! Here's one quotation which perhaps helps us explain its disappearance!

"The attraction of jargon and obfuscating convolutions can be fully explained by the normal striving of humans for emoluments and prestige at the least cost to themselves, the cost in question consisting of the mental effort and danger of 'sticking one's neck out' or 'putting one's foot in it'. In addition to eliminating such risks, as well as the need to learn much, nebulous verbosity opens a road to the most prestigious academic posts to people of small intelligence whose limitations would stand naked if they had to state what they have to say clearly and succinctly."

The years that students spend in these disciplines may teach them a particular jargon and way of looking at the world; but the more important thing it teaches them is the strange mixture of obedience and arrogance required of those who wish to join the elites of their society. I sometimes think that if we really wanted to change society for the better, we first need to teach people – academics, bureaucrats and citizens alike - certain simple skills of thinking, writing and communicating. I’ve admitted several times here that one of the reasons I do this blog is because the discipline of writing helps me identify questions I would otherwise not be aware of.

 
And I’m composing this particular post because, in the last couple of days, I’ve come across both good and bad examples of writing. First an example of the sort of writing I encountered a lot in post-Soviet countries – piling voluminous fact upon interminable statistic to subjugate the reader into unquestioning silence. It purports to be a study (more than 500 pages) of corruption in the public sector of EU member countries (funded by the EU) but seems rather to be a (very detailed) description of the relevant sections of the various laws which govern corruption. I say “seems” since I do not have the patience to persevere with it after looking at the conclusions on Austria – widely known as one of the most corrupt members – which are so facile and badly written they would not have been allowed into even a newspaper. They did, however, survive the editing process of the EU!

An example of good report writing – at least in terms of the structure of the report – is the Review of Impact and Effectiveness of Transparency and Accountability Initiatives published recently by the Institute of development Studies. I haven't had time to read it yet - but I like the way each section has a basic question as its heading. This gives me a lot of confidence - since everyone (writer, editor and reader) has a reference point by which to judge the text!

Thirty years ago I wrote a short book to try to explain in simple terms for the general public why some major changes being experienced by local government were necessary and trying to demystify the way the system worked. That made me realise how few books were in fact written for this purpose! Most books are written to make a profit or an academic reputation. The first requires you to take a few simple and generally well-known ideas but parcel them in a new way – the second to choose a very tiny area of experience and write about it in a very complicated way.

After that experience, I realised how true is the saying that “If you want to understand a subject, write a book about it”!! Failing that, at least an article – this will certainly help you identify the gaps in your knowledge – and give you the specific questions which then make sure you get the most out of your reading.

My first real publications were chapters in other people’s books and national journals – which described the experiences in community development and more open policy-making processes some of us had introduced into Europe’s largest municipality. I was “sunk”, however, when one journal then asked me to write one page every 4 weeks. I just couldn’t compress my thoughts that way. Although I was reading a lot, I couldn’t write in abstract terms – only about my own experiences, trying to relate them to the more general ideas. I did four pretty good pieces – but then had to pull out. The effort was just taking up too much of my nervous energy. How much I admired the talks of someone like Alaister Cooke – who each week would take a simple incident and weave around it an insightful essay on an aspect of the American political process! Julian Barnes is one of a few who seems to have this gift these days – although my October 2009 blog recognised what Malcolm Gladwell does.

George Orwell’s 1946 essay Politics and the English Language, however, remains my bible.
A rare blog on this issue of the construction of coherent writing can be found here
By the way - "inspire" is the breathe in (life) and "conspire" is to breath with (others). We need a lot more of the oxygen of clear expositions and collective action to achieve the decent life (which some of us have had the luck to experience from time to time).

Rubbish Amazon

After 6 days and about 5 E-mail and 3 telephone conversations (2 at my expense), Amazon are no closer to sorting out the problem I have now ordering their books. Basically all but the most recent books in my basket have disappeared and cannot therefore be ordered. Even when I copy and paste, most of the books disappear and I am left with only 1 or 2 to order. What really annoys me is the lack of continuity in the service support. Every message tells me that I cannot reply to it – and I have to start each complaint afresh. I've tried typing in what a good customer I am - 800 books in the past decade - but their system just goes round and round - not up anywhere! So much for the new service economy!! And the public sector is supposed to ape this sort of call-centre approach?? We should get a life! Come back bureaucracy! All is forgiven!
I was looking at one of my favourite China blogs and came across an intriguing post on the current Belgian crisis from an Indian journalist who has just arrived there from a 6 year posting in Beijing.

The last time elections were held in Belgium in 2007, the country was without a government for almost 300 days. Many believe that before long Belgium is likely to split into separate nations. From an Indian perspective, Belgium’s woes are puzzling. In India, we balance 22 official languages and almost all Indians are multilingual. The diversity that citizens negotiate on a daily basis is moreover scarcely confined to the linguistic. We are a country of lily-white Kashmiris and coffee-hued Malyalis; of fish-eating Bengalis and herbivorous Gujratis. In our “Hindu” country, there are almost as many Muslims as in all of Pakistan. With no single language, ethnicity, religion or food, India’s existence is immensely more complicated than Belgium’s. And yet, somehow, they are unable to function as a nation. The Walloons rarely bother learning Dutch and the Flemings can’t find it in their hearts to live next to French speakers. Meanwhile, the rich north of the country resents spending its hard-earned money to support what they see as the lazy, left-leaning unemployed of the south.
More worrying is what Belgium’s dysfunctionality says about Europe as a whole. Europe is the birthplace of the “nation state.” Carved out of the multi-cultural fabric of the empires that once cut across the continent, modern European countries are based on the idea of one ethnicity, one religion, one language, one nation. Such homogeneity is, of course, an ideal rather than a reality; Spain with its Catalan and Basque minorities being an obvious exception, yet the fundamental idea of “oneness” that underpins European nation states makes negotiating diversity particularly problematic for them. The creation of the European Union (EU), a hugely ambitious project, could have conceivably helped provide solutions to this problem. The EU is polyphonic with 23 official languages and its ideal of “unity in diversity” is identical to that of India. Driven by the idea that in a new world order Europe must find strength in cooperation, thereby ditching old tribal identities, opening up once insular borders to outside influences and demonstrating solidarity with others within the region, the EU could potentially be a model for a post nation-state world and new multicultural identities. But unlike India, which despite occasional communal violence and serial coalition governments, faces the twenty first century with confidence and strength, the EU is floundering. Popular support for the project remains weak. Decades of Europe-wide institution building have largely failed to create a European identity. An even greater failure has been the ability to integrate and absorb non-European ethnicities and religions. Islamophobia is fast on the way to becoming accepted as a mainstream sentiment. Moreover, even the ideal of “solidarity” has been exposed as hollow by the German reaction to the sovereign debt crisis in Greece. The EU faces challenges from every direction. The current turmoil in Belgium exemplifies many of these and the future of this small country might be an indicator of things to come for the EU as a whole. Belgium is a proof of how difficult resolving the cultural gulf between north and south Europe will be. Even within a single country, large-scale transfers of wealth from north to south, in this case Flanders to Wallonia, are so deeply unpopular that they threaten the dissolution of the nation. But, if the Flemish find it impossible to help their own countrywomen, expecting Germany to pay up for the debts of Greece and Portugal is highly unrealistic. Whether Belgium makes it through the next few years intact is unlikely to have major repercussions around the world. But the manner in which Belgium’s future plays out could be a reflection of what path the EU as a whole may go down, the economic and geo-strategic consequences of which will certainly be weighty. In the short term, Belgium’s shenanigans will only be an embarrassment. From July 1, Belgium has taken over the rotating presidency of the EU. Always quick to present itself to others as a model of regional cooperation, the EU is thus presided over by a country that can’t even get its own two communities to co-operate enough to have a government.

Boffy has another good blog on the financial crisis. The painting is by one of Belgium's most famous - James Ensor

Adversarial and consensual systems

It's Independence Day here in Romania - hence the picture - which is taken from a wonderful blog which celebrates cultural aspects of RomaniaTrue Romania organised by a school in Ludus in Translyvania!
Remember that one of the main questions behind these recent musings is – can we really offer advice to (say) the Bulgarians and Romanians about how to develop the capacity of their governance architecture and operations when the countries from which we come have made such a mess of things in our own backyards?

As a Brit I tend to assume, for example, that it is normal for one party to take all government posts – even although it has polled only 40% of the votes cast and perhaps only a quarter of voters. More to the point, I am accustomed to the political arena being an adversarial process from which truth is assumed to emerge from imputation of motives, hostile questioning and a clash of personalities. The Scots, it is reasonable to claim on St Andrew’s Night, are not quite as bad at this as the English – the Scottish Parliament which reassembled (or as we say “reconvened”) in 1999 after a gap of almost 300 years gave us European-style coalitions, committee deliberations and conversations instead of altercations. Although on the hustings it is clear that the old bitterness between Labour and the Scottish nationalists has not gone away.

One of the reasons I never joined Tony Bliar and Gordon Brown in Westminster in 1983 was that I could not take the adversarial nonsense which was and remains the protocol of british political life. In the early 1970s I annoyed people both in my own party and the Liberals (who then controlled Greenock Town Council) by persuading the local Liberal Provost to join with me on some initiative I have now (sadly) forgotten. I just knew that the bipartisan approach was the more effective.

It was the same when I joined up with the leader of the UK Liberal party (Jo Grimond) a year or so later on a(nother) Rowntree Foundation initiative which linked an urban ghetto in my constituency with some work in the marvellous Shetlands Islands.
And few things gave me so much pleasure during my work on Strathclyde Region in the 1980s as collaborative work with the Conservative opposition on issues and strategies of social injustice and exclusion.
I was naïve enough to believe that what mattered was (what I judged to be) the integrity of the individuals I dealt with – but so many of the elected representatives of my own party (whether the John Reids, Jimmy Wrays, George Robertsons (the latter groomed at an early stage let me assure you for his NATO role!) were so obviously looking out for themselves and mouthing the rhetoric of tribal loyalties to get them there.

At age 33, I had gained one of the most powerful positions in Scottish political life – the Secretary of the ruling Labour group which controlled the gigantic Strathclyde Region. Jo Grimond indeed referred to me once wryly as its Gauleiter; and our colleagues used the equally ironic term “gang of four” to describe the four of us who held the top positions! Those were exciting days and I was able to use my position not only to encourage community enterprise but also to introduce a more consensual approach to policy-making – the “member-officer group” which had a group of backbench councillors and middle-level officials examine fields which (generally) ran across departmental lines; take evidence and make recommendations.

I considered myself left of centre and, in in the early 1980s, the main trade union offered me their support to replace the renegade Labour MP in my shipbuilding town. But the party had a quite mad set of policies – including withdrawal from Europe. The manifesto was famously called “the longest suicide note in history” (it was 700 pages long!).
I was reluctant to give up the influential position I had on the Region for the uncertainty and isolation of London; unable to defend the indefensible of the party manifesto and therefore withdrew from the contest. Neither Gordon Brown nor Tony Bliar, it is worth noticing, had any qualms about accepting the terms of the labour party manifesto under which they both reached the UK Parliament in 1983. But then, Bliar was a lawyer – and Brown had set his sights since his early 20s at becoming Prime Minister. I was a contributor (with a critical piece on the operation of Labour groups!) to Gordon Brown’s famous 1975 Red Paper when he was still student Rector of Edinburgh University – a good paper here describes his career. I found a good quote on political ambition recently

Our system obliges us to elevate to office precisely those persons who have the ego-besotted effrontery to ask us to do so; it is rather like being compelled to cede the steering wheel to the drunkard in the back seat loudly proclaiming that he knows how to get us there in half the time. More to the point, since our perpetual electoral cycle is now largely a matter of product recognition, advertising, and marketing strategies, we must be content often to vote for persons willing to lie to us with some regularity or, if not that, at least to speak to us evasively and insincerely. In a better, purer world—the world that cannot be—ambition would be an absolute disqualification for political authority.

These personal vignettes may seem a distraction from the main theme – of the capacity of government – but too much political discussion fails to recognise that politics (like life) is a series of individual choices, decisions and behaviour in a particular context.

It is too easy to retreat behind abstractions. Of course there was an element of cowardice in not wanting to give up the (relative) security of my Glasgow position for the loneliness and uncertainty of being one of 600 Westminster MPs – but I have never regretted the decision. Temperamentally I anguish over issues – and would never have been able to give the instant opinions the career required. 

I am an agnostic in more than religion! And, in continuing at the Region until 1990 or so, I was able to help set up and embed policies which the new Scottish Parliament has continued.

I always felt that the British system was too polarised - not only in class and political terms but in the way it forced both politicians and officials to choose between local or national government. Why not both – a la France? Local politicians there can also be national deputies – despite the backlash against the cumul des mandates. And officials in some countries can move between national and local positions – ensuring a better mutual understanding.

Consensuality, of course, has various dimensions – and perhaps one of the most crucial differences is that between policy on the one hand and the spoils of office on the other. Countries such as Austria, Belgium and Netherlands have long been famous for their spoils system – with Ministries and appointments of officials being shared out according to the share of the poll.

The Dutch Pillar system has declined in importance but the spoils system in Austria and Belgium led to deep corruption. Scandinavian consensuality, on the other hand, seems to be based on moral respect. The ruling party is willing to listen to and negotiate with others.
From my stay in Beijing, I know that some of the Chinese government elite are certainly interested in the Scandinavian perspective. And both in practice and in academia the Swedes and Norwegians have carved their own way – separate from the anglo-saxon social sciences.

The Norwegian academic Tom Christensen's various papers - with their concern about the effects of administrative reform on democracy, for example, are typical. And the Swedish Quality of Governance centre offers more useful reflections on government capacity than its British counterparts.

Democratic Discontents

Warning! This is a long post!
Questions about the capacity of government in general and the political system in particular has been prominent recently on the blog. Three years ago, Gerry Stoker published a book which tried to address this issue - summary of argument here. British government is one of the most studied in the world. For a relatively small country, its combination of history, empire, flexible constitution, liberal politics and (global) language has given its outpourings about the nature and effects of its various political and administrative structures and processes a global impact.

And yet I am struck with the absence of realistic and critical studies of the efficacy of the British governance arrangements at this point in the 21st Century. I have thought long and hard – and can produce only four analyses which might be read with benefit by the concerned and perplexed in that country. Two are 10 years old – the other two 5 years old.

We have, of course, countless academic studies of the operation of the British Parliament, of political parties, of voting systems, of local government, of devolved arrangements, of the civil service, of public management (whether Ministries, core exectuve, agencies), of the Prime Minister’s Office, of the European dimension etc – and a fair number of these are reasonably up-to-date. But most of it is written for undergraduates – or for other academic specialists who focus on one small part of the complex jigsaw. There is so very little which actually tries to integrate all this and give a convincing answer to the increasing number of citizens who feel (like Craig Murray recently) that there is no longer any point in voting; that politicians are either corrupt or hopelessly boxed in by global finance and corporate interests.

I used the epithet “realistic” above in order to distinguish the older studies which painted a rather ideal picture of the formalities of the system (what the 19th century Walter Bagehot called the “dignified”parts) from the more rounded studies of the “hidden”(Bagehot), informal processes which were encouraged by the seminal 1970s book about the British budget process – The Private government of public money by the outsiders Heclo and Wildavsky.

A “Critical” study or analysis is a more complex term – since the word can mean “carping” to the man in the street or textual deconstruction to an academic. When I use the phrase critical study (as Humpty Dumpty might have said) I mean one which tries not only to describe a system but to assess how well it works (begging the obvious question - For whom?!) Despite the knowledge which academics in political science, sociology or public management can bring to the subject, several major factors seem to conspire to prevent social scientists from making any critical contribution to our understanding of the health of the governance system.

First is the strength of academic specialisation - which has discouraged and continues to discourage the sort of inter-disciplinary approach needed to explore the question of the capacity of a governance system. Then there is the aloofness of the academic tradition which makes it difficult for specialists to engage in critiques which might be seen as too political. Not, however, that this prevented people like Peter Self from lambasting the nonsenses of market thinking in government in the 1980s. And this blog has already mentioned the powerful critique of the effect of commodification on some public services carried out by Colin Leys in Market-driven Politics (2003) and by Alysson Pollok in NHS plc (2004).
Rod Rhodes is a more typical example – a leading public administration academic who invented the phrase “hollowed-out executive” to describe the loss of government functions in the last 30 years - but who chose to keep his critique incestuous both in the language and outlets he used. He played a major role in developing the “network” understanding of government – but then allowed anthropological and phenomenological assumptions to overwhelm him.
The blandishments of consultancy are a potential counter pressure to this tradition – which gets a small minority of academics too engaged with peripheral issues which so excite civil servants and Ministers.

A final factor explaining the lack of academic contribution to the understanding of the nature of our current democratic system is the contempt in which academics who write for (and become popular with) the wider public are held in the academic community - and the damage which is therefore done to one’s academic career if one chooses that path. I remember how the charismatic historian AJP Tayor was treated. And it’s interesting that Zygmunt Baumann began to write his books only after he retired from academia. Major developments in public management have, of course, encouraged academics like Norman Flynn to present and assess them for a wider public. And the same has happened in the field of constitutional theory – eg Anthony King’s The British Constitution (2007). But the first is a bit long on descriptions and the second on historical figures. And both are very partial pictures of the governance system.

This is getting to be a long post – so we need to be clear why it is important to have a systematic, up-to-date and plausible statement about how (well) our governance arrangements (or architecture) work. First as a check (or benchmark) for the myriad iniatives which governments have inflicted at large cost on an increasingly confused public and public servants. This is widely accepted as a major problem – the new Prime Minister, for example, had promised not to inflict any more changes on the health service – and yet, within a few weeks, he was making plans to introduce one of the biggest organisational upheavals ever seen.

But a second, even more powerful reason why a critical study is needed is that the British public no longer feels that it is worth engaging in democratic politics. “They are all the same – promising one thing, doing another – looking after themselves”. In the 1970s some academics helped pave the way for the neo-liberal revolution by demonstrating in addition (in the new field of implementation studies) that the machinery of bureaucracy made it very difficult to implement political decisions; the popular phrase was “the overloaded state”. Margaret Thatcher completed the hollowing out of democracy by her infamous slogan – There is no alternative (TINA)
Consistent with the post-modernist mood,Gerry Stoker places the problem firmly within our own minds -

A propensity to disappoint is an inherent feature of governance even in democratic societies. I think that a substantial part of the discontent with politics is because the discourse and practice of collective decision-making sits very uncomfortably alongside the discourse and practice of individual choice, self-expression and market-based fulfilment of needs and wants. As a result too many citizens fail appreciate these inherent characteristics of the political process in democratic settings.
Making decisions through markets relies on individuals choosing what suits them. The political processes that are essential to steer government struggle to deliver against the lionization of individual choice in our societies. Democracy means that you can be involved in the decision but what the decision is not necessarily your choice yet you are expected to accept the decision. As a form of collective decision-making politics is, even in a democracy, a centralized form of decision-making compared to market-based alternatives.

Mass democracies face a potential crisis because of the scale of discontent surrounding the political process. Discontent comes in two main forms: disengagement from politics and frustrated activism. If the twentieth century saw the establishment of mass democracy the scale of discontent surrounding the political process in these democracies runs the risk of making these systems unsustainable in the twenty first century.

Some Journalists have made an honourable effort over the decades to give the wider public some critical overviews – starting with Anthony Sampson who famously tried to track the operations of the system over 4 decades finishing his last, angriest version only months before his death in 2004. Andrew Marr had a book in the mid 1990s on the failure and future of British democracy. So did Simon Jenkins (Accountable to None – 1996).
But it was a campaigning (rather than mainstream) journalist who produced in 2001 the most revealing and critical study Captive State - the corporate takeover of Britain which gave us the real detail, for example, behind Gordon Brown’s horrendous Private Financial Initiative (PFI) and it is therefore Monbiot’s book which is my first nomination – despite being now 10 years old and concentrating its attention on only part of the picture (the political-business interface). Part of the critique, of course, of our governance arrangements is how the corporate ownership of the media has muzzled the critical journalistic voice – Will Hutton is very eloquent about that in his latest book.

Some politicians, of course, do produce books which advance our understanding of the whole process. I speak not of Tony Blair – and that whole self-justifying political autobiographical genre - but the writings of people such as RHS Crossman (on whose notes on Bagehot I grew up); John McIntosh (who was my tutor); Leo Abse (whose book Private Member was a marvellous psychological study of politicians); David Marquand; and, of course, the monumental diaries of Tony Benn. And New Labour had some honourable people in its ranks – who accepted that their critical or maverick approach denied them office. Chris Mullin was one - and has given us 2 wry reflections of politics and government in action. But, over 50 years, not a single title which deserves the epithet “critical”.

Tony Wright is an academic who for more than a decade operated quietly as Chairman of the prestigious Select Committee on Public Administration and helped produce a raft of critical reports on various aspects of governance operations. How retired from parliament, he has become a Professor (of Politics) and I look to him for some of the missing critique. Pity he can’t get together with George Monbiot to produce an expanded and updated version of the GB book!!
So far I’ve discussed academics, journalists and politicians. But what about the shadowy world of political advisers, Think Tanks and NGOs? As we might expect from such a concentration of putative brainpower, three of my 4 recommendations come from this stable. Political Power and democratic control – the democratic audit of the United Kingdom was commissioned by the Rowntree Trust and produced in 1999 - by Stuart Weir and David Beetham. Weir followed it up in 2009 with a short spoof constitution of the UK. These focus very much on the centralisation of power.

My third nominee for useful study of government capacity is ubiquitous (advisor) Chris Foster’s British Government in Crisis (2005)
which extends the analysis to the administrative aspects which Flynn describes but which (as befits someone who was a senior Price Waterhouse employee) fails to mention the interstices with the business world.

My final nomination is another product of a british Foundation – Rowntree again. Power to the People (2006) was the result of an independent inquiry (which in true british tradition invited evidence and organised dialogues) and can therefore reasonably be seen as a mainstream diagnosis and set of prescriptions. I would fault it only because of its basic assumption that, if the system is made more transparent, representative, decentralised and accountable, everything will be OK

After all this scribbling, then we are left with a central question – is the British problem one of political centralisation? of government overreach? A failure of the political class? Adversarial politics? Civil service incompetence? Corporate takeover? Or, as Stoker argues, misunderstanding? At one or time or another in the past 5 decades each has been proposed as the key problem - and led to frenetic initiatives. Little wonder that I am sympathetic to systems approaches or to constraints on initiatives!

So far, so parochial! A key question I would like some help on is the extent to which this concern is a British/Anglo-saxon phenomenon – or a wider European issue. I will try to say something (much briefer) about this in my next post.