Why Are We So Badly Governed? - Public Management and Policy

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WHY ARE WE SO BADLY GOVERNED?

Why Are We So BadlyGoverned?

Christopher Foster

In the past 25 years, and especially since 1997, a political, albeitbloodless, revolution has occurred in British politics and government,and not for the better. The forefront of politics remains, as it always hasbeen, the clash of personalities and issues across political divides, butalso within political parties. However, the centrepiece of the Britishconstitution since the 17th century has been the accountability of theexecutive to parliament for its sins of commission and omission: for itslaw-making, policy-making and the multitude of decisions everygovernment makes within the law. It is the decline in effectiveness ofthat relationship between executive and parliament—and betweenparliament and people—that is the underlying cause of the decline inboth the democratic accountability and effective performance of theexecutive, as well as the frequent frustration of its many attempts tocontrol and improve the public sector.

Of course government can never be perfect. Neither can itsrelationship with parliament. As many have observed, it is among theleast predictable and untidiest of human activities, especially in ademocracy. An exceptionally wise minister, Rab Butler, entitled hisreflections on politics The Art of the Possible. But what is possibledepends both on the nature and scale of the problems with whichpoliticians contend and on how government is organized and run. My

This Report, completed in September 2005, is an up-dating and expansionof a PMPA lecture given in the House of Commons on 17 March 2005. Ituses the analysis in my book on British Government in Crisis (HartPublishing, Oxford) to help explain events subsequent to the book going topress in March 2005.

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PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND POLICY ASSOCIATION REPORT

argument is that in various ways, which my recent book, BritishGovernment in Crisis, attempts to describe, the bounds of what it ispossible to do well have shrunk with serious consequences.

No part of our constitution is performing effectively: notparliament, not cabinet, not ministers, not the civil service, not localauthorities, not other parts of the public sector. The clothes are muchthe same, the bodies inside are not. What matters still more is thechanged—and increasingly dysfunctional—interaction between them.In attempting to explain that, I believe I can answer the questionabout why we are so badly governed.

Recent DevelopmentsWhat am I on about? If the analysis contained in British Government inCrisis is sound, it should help explain events subsequent to the bookgoing to press.

Hardly a week passed before the 2005 election without someminister mired in parliamentary disaster. Before Christmas 2004, itwas poor David Lammy (now a minister in the Department ofCulture, Media and Sport) standing like jelly in a storm at the veryend of the progress of the Mental Capacity bill through theCommons, while, over his head, his departmental minister, LordFalconer, and a Catholic Archbishop tried at the last minute toreconcile what may have been irreconcilable interpretations of itsmost important clause. Then, just before the election, CharlesClarke—doughtiest of ministers—was spinning like a top at a similarlylate stage of the Prevention of Terrorism bill. It was plain that thegovernment did not have a complete, coherent bill for the Commonsto scrutinize. And that it would be altered in the Lords, and again andagain, before becoming law. Yet on the basis of these two laws, doctorsand nurses would have to decide when they could let a patient die,police officers under what circumstances they could hold terrorists, orrecommend them going out into the community. After the generalelection there was the Identity Cards bill, where behind the scenes thescope and purpose of the measure altered drastically, and to a largeextent incomprehensibly, as the measure went through parliament.Such bad bills entering, and indeed leaving, the Commons are now alltoo frequent; the deterioration started under Conservativeadministrations (Hansard Society, 1992).

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A different instance was Ruth Kelly, Secretary of State forEducation and Skills, howled down by the Secondary HeadsAssociation (SHA) when she seemed to suggest that teachers couldgive pupils one-to-one attention and small group tuition from withinexisting resources. Whatever the government might hope theelectorate at large might think of such a proposal, SHA knew it wasmeretricious. Then there was John Reid as health secretaryresponding instantly to the case of a woman, Margaret Dixon, whosesurgery had been cancelled many times—by setting yet another targetfor hospitals, coupled with a fine for cancelled, but not immediatelyre-set, operations. (This was rushed through seemingly withoutappreciation of the difficulties of monitoring or enforcing such atarget, or of reconciling its performance with that of meeting othertargets within what might in some circumstances be an appreciablereduction in hospital funds.)

After the election, Lord Adonis, as schools minister, apparentlystepped in personally to order the appointment of 10 teachers whenthe conversion of a school into an academy was threatened by ateachers’ strike.

Then, when the train companies revealed, and got some publicityfor, the fact—known but concealed for five years or more—that therewere severe shortages of capacity on almost all parts of the rail systemwhere there was rising demand, Alastair Darling, as transportsecretary, suggested that double-decker trains might be the solution.This was despite the fact that double-decker trains have for a longtime been known to be prohibitively expensive in Britishcircumstances and often physically impossible. This is because of thegauge of our railways and the extent of built-up areas along railroutes, the problem of either raising bridges or lowering trackbeneath them is insurmountable on almost every route.

A different example again is Tessa Jowell, culture, media and sportsecretary, producing a so-called ‘green’ paper—it did not present realchoices—on the future of the BBC without regard to the fundamentalconsiderations raised by the Burns Report, a report the governmenthad initiated: what should be the respective roles of BBC and ITV inpublic service broadcasting, and in each case what is faircompensation for undertaking them. There have been many similarexamples, as much since the 2005 election as before it.

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The media encourages us to laugh at many of thesemisadventures, especially when patently cock-ups. Are they justincompetence, the failings of a particular individual or individuals?Some may be, but most reflect more fundamental changes in how weare governed: what I have called a revolution.

The Nature of the RevolutionThough I will later recall its main conclusions, I will not here try tosummarize my book, certainly not my account of what I call the ‘oldregime in government’, warts and all; of how and why it proveddefective; or of the stages through which what I call the revolution hasprogressed so far: from Thatcher through Major to early and lateBlair. Rather, my plan is to put my main findings to work. So thisReport concentrates on the continuing relevance of those findings tothe present day. I believe them unaffected by the 2005 general electionor by various promises of fundamental change from ‘sofa’, and backtowards cabinet, government.

Sir Andrew Turnbull in his farewell speech as head of the civilservice in July 2005, gave his reasons for thinking that cabinetgovernment has been reinvented since Iraq. Two stand out:

•The increase in the number of cabinet papers from one a year in1998 to nine (and 23 presentations) in 2004. (Cabinet papersaveraged 340 a year under Atlee, often judged the best and mosteffective of postwar prime ministers, and 140 a year under Heath.)

•The reconstruction of cabinet committees, many now chaired by theprime minister.

My understanding is that cabinet and its committees are still talkingshops—the real business mostly being done at sofa meetings. But I donot have to substantiate that to make my point. If there were goodcabinet papers, and effective discussion of them within the cabinetsystem, which really hammered out the issues—many then going toparliament as green and white papers—fiascos like those concerningthe mental incapacity, prevention of terrorism, and identity cards bills,and many more, simply would not have happened.

Neither is my argument party political, despite my concentrationin this Report, though not in my book, on the shortcomings of the

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present government since its focus is on the most recent past. Ifwritten before 1997 it might as easily be blamed for dwelling too muchon the defects of Tory administrations. (The book, I hope, is balancedin this respect.) What has happened is not one political party’sresponsibility. The nature of many revolutions is that they are notinstantaneous; their effects accumulate over many years. Somechanges in the political environment—economic and politicalglobalization, the influence of Europe once we joined it, and thealtered role of the media—have been virtually outside politicalcontrol. Some defects, which still undermine governmenteffectiveness, originated under Margaret Thatcher, some in the JohnMajor years. Others, contributing to the revolution, go back muchfurther and involve many administrations: the relentless growth ofgovernment business; the gradual, but increasing, centralization ofgovernment, first to Whitehall, and then within Whitehall to No 10;the failure, particularly in the 1960s, 1970s and since, to improve themachinery of government enough to keep pace with that growth; andthe failure to lighten the load at the centre to manageable proportionsby devolving real responsibility for policy decisions and managementto local or regional authorities and other public bodies.

Contrast with a Golden Age?A few critics say I am contrasting government, as it now is, with apresumed golden age, perhaps that of my youth in Whitehall in the1960s or 1970s. I had hoped my book would give no such impression,instead making clear the old regime’s shortcomings. Indeed my ownyouth in Whitehall seemed a constant battle against its imperfections,(though one should never try, I think, to hide the fondness, sometimesquizzical, one feels in retrospect for most with whom one has worked.)However, nostalgia has been the complaint in open discussion of avery senior civil servant against my book; and the burden of the as yetmost hostile written comment on it, that by David Walker in Public(Walker, 2005). There are several issues to be disentangled here. Oneis the suggestion, made by Walker, that I am saying Britishgovernment worked better in the 1960s and 1970s in the sense that ithad better ‘outcomes’. So he alleges that I ignore the fact, for example,that the second Wilson government made profound errors ofjudgement about sterling and, not unconnected, the capacity of

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central government to plan the economy. I am surprised by the notion that my book overstates the power of

past governments to solve problems (especially in chapter 6, which Icalled ‘Overload and gridlock: the old regime’s decline’). Since theSecond World War there have been several—among them themanagement of the economy and the adverse role of the unions—which successive governments did not solve. But the Thatchergovernment largely did and Gordon Brown secured economicmanagement by devolving interest rate management to the Bank ofEngland. Stretching over a much longer period of time, governmentsover several centuries failed to find a lasting solution to the problemof Ireland. They may still have failed to do so. All administrationshave their successes and failures*.

However, there are other difficulties in judging governments bytheir ‘outcomes’, especially as far as the efficiency and effectiveness ofall that is contained within the public sector is concerned: itself overthe years a substantially increasing proportion of the nationaleconomy and greater focus of both government and public attention.One is that, though there were frequent economic crises in whichpublic expenditure was cut, governments were once not muchconcerned with the greater efficiency of the public sector andcertainly, not to much effect. Rather they were content to let agrowing public sector be financed by progressive increases in publicexpenditure, and therefore taxation, as a percentage of GrossDomestic Product. Then taxpayers started to rebel against it from themid-1970s, as in other advanced economies (see Foster and Plowden,1996). Thereafter greater public efficiency and economy in the use ofpublic resources became a declared and principal aim of governmentsof developed countries world-wide. Even so it is arguable, especiallysince 1997, that improvements in the outcomes of the public services,

*Neither do I deny the Blair government its successes, high among them inmy opinion the introduction of road pricing. Ironically, some of the bestexceptionally involve a reduction in political intervention: among themgiving interest rate determination to the Bank of England, the withdrawalof the government from monopolies and merger decisions, setting up theFood Standards Agency to take policy for food safety out of politics.

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have mostly come in the old-fashioned way from increased publicexpenditure and taxation rather than from marked improvements inefficiency and labour productivity. By mid-2005, 20% of UKemployment was in the public sector, an increase of a half million and3 percentage points, since 1997 (Telegraph, 16 July 2005).Furthermore one can surely add that if 1960s’ and 1970s’ governmentcould not master the art of controlling a centrally planned economy,the present one—for all its adherence to a Stakhanovite apparatus oftargets, indeed partly because of it—has not mastered that of runninga centrally planned public sector.

Rather than harking back uncritically to a golden age, mycontention is that policy changes and new laws in general wereproperly, intelligibly and democratically explained to parliament andpeople. Therefore parliamentary and media discussion, and otherpublic consultation, was generally thorough and effective. (Overlongconsultation can drive policies into the long grass. Present practicegoes too far the other way.) Therefore bills entering parliament werecomplete, fully explained and capable of detailed scrutiny in billcommittee. David Walker takes me up on this by accusing me ofbelieving that ‘there are proper processes in government whichmatter more than what government does’. I do indeed believe thatprocesses are an important part of good and effective government. SoI agree with Sir Michael Quinlan (see Runciman, 2004) that:

this salutary concern [with delivery] can, however, slide into a sense thatoutcome is the only true reality and that process is flummery. But the two are notantithetical, still less inimical to one another. Process is care and thoroughness;it is consultation, involvement and co-ownership; it is (as we were reminded [byIraq]) legitimacy and acceptance; it is also record, auditability and clearaccountability. It is often accordingly a significant component of outcomeitself…

I would be more impressed by Walker’s argument if government werenow achieving more effective new policies and legislation, and bettermanagement of the public sector, than in the past. But such claims arefrequently not justified, despite more abundant policy ideas than thepast ever knew. However, even if we had a near perfect government,in all respects ruling us economically, wisely and well, the fact that it is

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so autocratic and centralized in one or two persons should make uspause. Sooner or later personal government will produce another polltax or even Iraq.

A different presentation of the same argument is that I am againstthe modernization of government, the civil service and the publicsector. I believe it demonstrably untrue and as evidence that I am notagainst modernization, I instance my chairing a 1998/99 inquiry forGordon Brown’s think tank, the Smith Institute, on empoweringgovernment. There have been many admirable improvements. Ahead of the civil service looking back over his career might reasonablyrecall many achievements: his own and those of his predecessors.When he joined the service, there were many first rate officials, butalso passengers coddled to retirement. Though great speed could beshown when essential, the pace at which issues travelled up and downthe formidably long hierarchies could sometimes seem very slow.There were still a few permanent secretaries keen to stop advice goingforward to ministers from below, which they did not like. Thoughmost officials served ministers with loyalty and intelligence, he wouldremember that a few tried subterfuge to deter ministers doing whatcivil servants did not want them to do; and that the relations betweenministers, nationalized industries and other public bodies were notwell designed to promote efficiency, or for the adequate reflection ofthought-through government policies. The large people-factories forthe processing of licences and for other activities, which manydepartments then contained, were often inefficient, not user-friendlyand badly run. The skills many officials had were not up to the job.Outside the Treasury, economic and scientific understanding couldstill be poor, though it was improving and there were many first-classexceptions.

He might reflect with some satisfaction that over the past 30 yearsthere have been huge improvements in civil service skills andtraining, and in the organization of departments, agencies and therest of the public sector, as in financial and all other aspects ofmanagement. But he—or if not he, others—should set against thissome serious weakening in the relationship between ministers andcivil servants. One could reasonably deplore the new strength ofministers’ actual, and even more attempted, influence over somesenior appointments, promotions and bonuses. Civil servants should

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be as immune as judges from such influences if they are to speak truthto power. Another regret should be to deplore the poor quality andsometimes vacuity of perhaps all recent white papers and similarpublic documents by comparison with the past. It reflects the feweropportunities the civil service has to contribute to the presentationand communication of public policy. It not only reflects, but entails,the atrophy of long-standing civil service talents for communication.It contributes substantially to the declining ability of parliament andits committees, the media and public opinion to hold the executive toaccount.

Were not the papers an exception which the Treasury produced in2003 about joining the Euro? This is Andrew Turnbull’s contention(see Turnbull, 2005). No. They may have contained excellenteconomics and econometrics, but they were nearly 2000 pages long.Brown insisted ministers read them over a weekend without lettingtheir civil servants précis them or brief them on the issues. Such anapproach is the antithesis of writing a cabinet paper, which becomes awhite paper, intended to summarize the issues for non-specialists in asaccurate, intelligible and helpful way as possible. Several people havesuggested to me how odd it is that parliament and its selectcommittees, or the opposition, do not rumble the bad documents anduntruths. The answer is that many do, but with a diminishing numberof MPs having experience of when documents and statements weredifferent, most accept the present situation as a fact of political life:further evidence that the real action is in the media, not parliament,and evidence, too, of the near stranglehold that the Labour partymachine now has over effective backbencher protest.

So one can reasonably believe that much in government and inparliament has changed for the better, but not all. Has the 1979invention of select committees been high among those innovations,which have increased the capability of parliament to hold theexecutive to account? Potentially yes, but not so in practice, unless theexecutive is open enough to provide the materials for them to do so.Has the Freedom of Information Act 2000 helped? Yes, though it hasits downside, it is said, in discouraging minute-taking for fear of theminutes being made public.

There continue to be many improvements and good things to besaid about policy-making and performance in government and the

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public sector, but overall the defects now are greater than in the past.And, more to the point, greater than they need or should be. (Amongthe consequences are what some political scientists would term aserious democratic deficit.) That is my argument. It is not illogical todeny a golden age and still believe that in certain important regardsthe present does not measure up to the past, and that the future couldbe, though at present it seems unlikely, better than either.

The Decline of Good ProcessIn the report of the Review he chaired, Robin Butler (2004) used thephrase ‘informal arrangements’ to indicate some causes of theWeapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) fiasco. It is excellent short-handto indicate changes which are fundamental and systematic. The‘arrangements’ have become markedly less formal, especially near theheart of government. Attention has concentrated on the decline inminute-taking and on the prime minister’s preference for sofameetings at which inappropriate people, often not the relevantministers, are present. Both are important. We have cabinet meetings,but they are ineffective or peripheral. The important decisions aretaken at Blair’s sofa, or at Brown’s equivalent, meetings which aremanifestations of their approach to presidential government. Oftenthey, and meetings down the line, are unminuted. When I was youngand temporarily in a senior civil service position, one could hardlymeet another civil servant, or go out to lunch to discuss business,without recording what was said and decided in a minute, which wasthen circulated to those one thought needed to know. Neither could aminister. Moreover, one needs a minute to ensure that a meeting is theappropriate one; to know in time what the agenda is; that those at itare the appropriate people; that they have had a chance to read therelevant papers; agree on what was decided there; and that thesecretarial arrangements are such as to let those who were not there,but whose job it is to transmit or implement its decisions, know whatthey are to do. A problem is that the formality, which differentactivities require to be done well, varies greatly. My own experiencetells me the formality a business requires is different in kind and extentfrom that government needs, and incidentally varies betweenbusinesses with size, complexity and the importance to them of lawsand regulations. Though large, established businesses do insist on a

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greater formality in their decision-making than is now common inmuch activity at the centre of government, there are several reasonswhy in general government requires more such formality than theprivate sector: the use of more complex and varying objectives thanthe profit motive and the requirements of parliamentary, andsometimes legal, accountability among them.

Hutton shocked ministers into some improvement in minute-taking. However, the recent decline in meeting disciplines remainsserious. But there are yet more significant ways in which ‘informalarrangements’ impede government. Many developments I describe inmy book can be represented as aspects of creeping informality, but,though the criticism would still be just, pushing too far with this wayof describing the problem has its drawbacks. It may seem to trivializethe issue as secretarial (if only a good civil service secretary werepresent, doing his or her stuff, the problem would be solved); orsuggest the problem is only in No 10. But much more is at issue.

Obsession with News ManagementThe fundamental reason why No 10 now operates differently is thatfrom Day 1 in 1997, its purpose changed. Blair is pre-occupied withnews management to an extent no previous prime minister was, noteven Harold Wilson. No 10’s working methods are dominated bythose appropriate to handling the media 24 hours a day. They governits relations with parliament, ministers, the civil service and the publicsector. It has almost seemed as if Blair, and some around him, are somedia-obsessed that they have seen other functions of government—the traditional collective responsibilities of cabinet—as jobs down theline for someone else.

Possibly the sharpest lesson from the Hutton Inquiry (2004) wasthe sudden realization that what until then had seemed an efficientnews management operation on behalf of government, wasgovernment; that it was to a large extent how the prime minister andthose around him—and, therefore as a consequence, how manyothers—spent their time. The relationship was not akin to thatbetween the executive of a first-class company and its PR department.Rather the PR department was the executive. Another indication ofchanged priorities is Andrew Neill, reviewing Piers Morgan, pointingout that in 12 years of editing the Sunday Times he saw Margaret

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Thatcher and John Major perhaps each twice. Morgan, as editor ofthe Mirror, saw Blair more than 50 times. Another is Blair, during allthe debates on the Prevention of Terrorism bill 2005, neverappearing in the Commons, only in a TV studio.

Early in the first Blair administration, Alastair Campbell hadexplained to a large meeting of very senior civil servants that blanketcoverage—that is driving the opposition off media pages andbulletins—mattered more than favourable coverage. But for some fiveor six years the news management operation was so skilful, itgenerally got a good press. From Iraq on, at least as frequently it got abad one. The irony was indeed that it scarcely seemed to matter. Whatmattered politically—the Labour party’s, or Blair’s, standing in thepolls relative to other parties’—hardly altered and never for long.What matters is not favourable rather than unfavourable news, butthe government dominating the news, marginalizing other parties.Even the often reverted-to dispute between Blair and Brown maywork in those terms.

Couple with that Blair’s remarkable ability—seemingly wheneverhe chooses—to pick a topic and suddenly triumph before publicopinion, raising his ratings so that for a time widespread misgivingsabout Iraq are muted, and one has the recipe for his long-lastingsuccess. Despite a much reduced parliamentary majority—which asyet does not seem to threaten his ability to get most measures throughthe Commons—the 2005 election was a considerable victory for him.Yet Blair’s image, like that of the other party leaders, was furthertarnished during the campaign. That sense that he might never shrugoff the stigma of Iraq, led the prime minister in the run up to the July2005 G8 summit at Gleneagles to hunt for topics which might revivehis long-term political reputation (as initially did Gordon Brown inhis efforts to strengthen his claim to succeed Blair).

The topics chosen were Africa, the environment and Europe, eachof which daily attracted many pages of favourable coverage overseveral weeks. In each case it was quickly revealed how little thoughthad been given to the topic. A staple of discussion about the problemsof underdeveloped countries is the poor prognosis from cancellingdebt when, as is often the case, the political regime is corrupt, and thedifficulty of promoting trade instead when the economic interests ofadvanced nations are adversely affected. No appreciable dent was

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made in Bush’s opposition to Kyoto principally because of a failure todisentangle, and answer separately, the different questions involvedin the issue:

•Is there global warming?•Does it make any practical difference how much it is man-made?•What priority should be given to countering it compared with other

global problems like poverty, AIDS and other diseases, given thescarcity of economic resources?

•Are quotas, and in particular Kyoto, an efficient means to this end, oris there more to be said for improvements in technology andresearch?

Over Europe and the European constitution Blair showed an instantflexibility unavailable to other national leaders who had to consulttheir cabinets. As a counter to the suggestion that Britain should loseits rebate, Blair threw into the pot the idea that the CommonAgricultural Policy (CAP) should be cut down to size. An immediatelysuccessful debating tactic; it was only later that his agriculturalminister, Margaret Beckett, made it clear that the CAP should not berenegotiated for many years. In all these and similar episodes whatshines out is how the search for immediate media success trumpscareful, let alone consistent, policy preparation.

Do not get me wrong. I am not saying Blair—and Brown in hisdifferent way—did not want results, just as any firm’s PR departmentwants the firm to be a commercial success. Of course they did. Hencethe attention given targets, also Blair’s heavy involvement in MichaelBarber’s Delivery Unit, as well as his demand after the 2005 electionthat one of Home Secretary Charles Clarke’s senior officials,responsible for the war against crime, should report to the primeminister directly, allegedly because he thought Clarke was going softon crime. But Blair’s cast of mind, his pre-occupation, and that of hisclose advisers, with news management and PR, meant that ‘informalarrangements’, sensible and even efficient in the rushed and excitedatmosphere of a busy newsroom, stopped them from going throughthe steps needed to govern well. It frequently interfered with theability of others down the line to manage or otherwise do their job.Most serious of all—for it governed, poisoned and to a large extent

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rendered ineffective their relationships with the public sector—wasthe naive belief that it was the centre’s job to formulate policy top-down—most often with requirements of the media in mind—andeveryone else’s to follow its instructions. If a civil servant could not befound able to impose their will, search for a highly enough paidbusinessman who would and could. This is a fatal strategy for reasonsI also go into in my book.

Consequences of the Priority Given News ManagementThe cumulative effect of this approach has been to jeopardize thetaking of many important decisions of state: palpably the declarationof war in Iraq, but also the whole process by which policies aredeveloped and then turned into law. Fiascos like those over the MentalCapacity, Prevention of Terrorism and Identity Card bills will recurbecause they are the consequences of profound changes in theprocesses of government, ones so serious, as to threaten the claim thatin an operational sense, ours can still be called a representativedemocracy.

For Truth-TellingThis informality has many consequences undermining theeffectiveness with which government and the public sector are run. Acomparatively minor one is—rather than gain affirmation and supportfor a policy by a process of reasoning in parliament—how ready theprime minister is to encourage Bono, U2 and others to promote apolicy in a concert (and how ready the BBC is to allow it space in itsschedules without any thought given to balanced coverage). Morepervasive and important is how ready the prime minister, otherministers and spokespersons are not to tell the truth. The media is fullof it. I have a fair number of examples in my book. A book, influentialduring the election campaign, by Peter Oborne, a political journalistshowed how pervasive and persistent such untruths were (Oborne,2005). Another lively book by Jamie Whyte, a logician, convicts Blairand others, not only of untruths, but of incomprehensible statements,double meaning, the fallacy of equivocation, hooray words, falsedichotomy, inconsistency, and so on, all ways of obscuring meaning(Whyte, 2005). When Blair and others disagree over the number ofpotential terrorists in Britain, who is right? If wrong, is it because Blair

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is too over-loaded to get his facts right? Or because a high number isneeded to justify his version of the Prevention of Terrorism bill? Orbecause the last person he or his staff spoke to, said so? When after theelection Blair unobtrusively, but effectively changed his mind overEurope, was he aware of his changes of position—and had he thoughtthem through? Or did he do it instinctively, and because nobodywithin government was in an effective position to challenge him first?(A French journalist, when interviewing me, told me how surprisedmany continental newspapers were at Blair’s ability to change policyinstantaneously—neither Jacques Chirac, Gerhard Schroeder nor anyother western European leader, he judged, would have dared do sowithout consulting his colleagues first.)

Have not some politicians in a tight corner always wanted to lie? Ina tight corner, some of the greatest—Disraeli, Lloyd George, evenChurchill—have been tempted, and were wily enough to get awaywith it, though not Profumo, and not Eden lying about the Israeliinvolvement in Suez, and not David Blunkett or, eventually, StephenByers*.

The point is that there were safeguards, many now eroded. Aformal minute on the record of a meeting is some deterrent. Cabinetgovernment with its formal processes, proposals being set down onpaper and their merits being argued often face-to-face, was another.(Although Lord Salisbury, among the least flamboyant primeministers, was able to lie to parliament over important aspects of hisforeign policy because his first cabinet was one of the most feeble andunchallenging, and because, certainly in the Foreign Office, thetradition of officials speaking truth to ministers was not yetestablished.) Perhaps most important of all, until recently MPs knew

*Byers admitted lying to the House of Commons Select Committee onTransport, when Secretary of State for Transport, over when he firstconsidered putting Railtrack into administration. A different, but in its way,also a disturbing allegation of ministerial lying was against Ben Bradshaw.As Fisheries minister he was said in a report to have proposed that smallinshore fishermen should pay a licence fee of £1000 a year. When theWestern Morning News revealed it, he apparently denied it vigorously,despite a copy of the report, and his words to that effect, being available.

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each well enough for them to be able to believe they could detect a liein a ministerial statement or quick response from all but the wiliestminister.

Underlying the practice of telling parliament the truth—thoughnot stopping economy with it—was that ministers prepared forparliament with their civil servants, part of whose job it was to be sureministers knew the truth about a situation so far as that wasascertainable. As late as the end of the 1980s, permanent secretarieswould say that perhaps only once, or often never, was there a problemwith a minister telling the truth, once pointed out to them. Mostprobably thought it right not to lie, but the possibility of a minutebeing found detailing the untruth and exposed to parliament was asevere discouragement. The fact that permanent secretaries had theirrooms next door to their secretary of state’s, and were expected tokeep in touch with what was passing through the minister’s privateoffice, encouraged the habit of the permanent secretary minuting thesecretary of state if he thought that something proposed wasinconsistent with cabinet policy, or the policy of another department,or the law.

It is interesting that, though common, lying is still thoughtreprehensible. However, there is more to it than that. As in a firm, aprofessional practice or virtually any human endeavour, if thoserunning it are not truthful with each other; or reasonably truthfulwith their business associates; or, say, mislead the public about theside-effects of the drugs, food or laws they produce, sooner or later,they will be rumbled. Accountability in ascending order to cabinetcolleagues, parliament and the electorate demands a considerablerespect for the truth. Habitual untruths and other forms of obscurity,thought helpful for getting the story-line one wants into the media,are high among the reasons why parliament, cabinet colleagues, civilservants and, of course, the media now find it hard to do a proper job.

The move after 1997 to replace more objective civil servicedepartmental press releases by more politicized ones was one nail inthis coffin. Another was the politicization of much statistical and otherroutine reporting information. A third was the habit, publicized by JoMoore, of slipping out bad news when the media were full ofsomething else. (Ms Moore suggesting that 11 September 2001 wouldbe a good day to bury bad news was not an isolated event. It is hard

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not to see slipping out the information that the new computerizedHeavy Goods Vehicle Licensing system was to be abandoned after theexpenditure of millions on the same day as London winning the racefor the 2012 Olympics as a possible example of similar deviousness.)Yet another—going back to Thatcher—has been the rundown ofstatistical and professional staffs in departments among whose dutieswas the assembly and safeguarding of information. Anyone interestedin any part of the public sector will recognize the difficulty one nowoften has in getting complete, let alone comprehensive, annual runsof figures, particularly where there is bad news. Even that supposedcornerstone of the many efforts to improve service delivery—thesetting and meeting of targets—has often been undermined bychanges in definition and by other obscurity in the publication offigures. The percentage passing A-levels may rise inexorably, but wedo not know if secondary education is improving or worsening sinceschools and pupils are said to be going for easier subjects and examstandards are falling. Similar doubts arise over almost every publicservice.

I argue it would be in parliament, the public’s and the media’sinterest if responsibility for handling media inquiries went back tounpoliticized departmental press officers who were civil servants, andother changes made to ensure facts were verified by impartial people(see Oborne, 2005, chapter 11). Giving the Office of National Statisticsgreater independence from political interference is also important,but safeguards are needed more widely through government toensure factual information is more likely to be correct and notmassaged politically. This always has been, and should again be, a taskfor the civil service.

For Policy and Law-MakingBut other failings, more important still, now make it harder forparliament, the media or anyone else to hold government to account.They, too, may be attributed to less formal arrangements than normalin the past. Except insofar as the system is overloaded mostgovernment decisions can, or could, be taken, and many policiesprepared, fairly quickly, even those that had to go through the cabinetsystem—in urgent cases rapidly. Thereafter their communication toparliament and the media, in a ministerial statement or answer to a

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parliamentary question, could be straightforward, yet intelligible.When the policy change under consideration required substantial

legislation or was politically difficult, or far-reaching, there was amore or less standard drill through cabinet system and, roughly inparallel, a sequence of steps taken in parliament. Questions needed tobe answered to the satisfaction of ministerial colleagues, usually incabinet papers. When worked up and found satisfactory, these paperswould be the basis of a white or green paper. They might need carefulreading, contain passages which were ambiguous or evasive—ripe forattack in parliament—but intelligible enough to be the basis forintelligent debate there and elsewhere. Then there would be the bill,which by then would have been fully explained, and complete beforeentering parliament, so that there could also be intelligent discussionat second reading and in bill committee. The David Lammy, CharlesClarke and many other such fiascos would have been impossible.

Talking to MPs when writing my book, it was a shock to find justhow little today’s white and green papers helped them understandpolicy and legislation. (A further shock was the frank admission by ahighly respected political journalist and commentator that he hadnever glanced at a white paper. Soundbites, press releases and face-to-face interviews were the sources of what he learned about policy.)Spun, illogical, poorly argued, poorly evidenced, often vague andambiguous in their reasoning, and frequently no more than PRdocuments, that was unsurprising since they have generally beenwritten, or at least re-written, by spin doctors rather than by civilservants. Similarly, bills often entered the Commons so incompleteand left it changed, but still so muddled, as to make any discussion oftheir contents a travesty. While in better shape after the Lords, theirrelation to the initial policy, itself frequently a muddle, could remainhighly obscure. A better—or is it worse example?—than the first 2005Prevention of Terrorism bill is hard to imagine. But there have been amultitude of such bills showing such defects in worrying degree.

In my book I give many examples of how impoverished orsometimes non-existent white papers—one at least going back as faras Margaret Thatcher—have seriously misled cabinet colleagues,parliament, the media and public opinion. Two rather different kindsof example may reinforce the point that, more than simple untruths,it is the absence of factually accurate, well-argued and readily

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intelligible prior explanations of significant changes in policy(whether or not to be embodied in bills) which best explains why theHouse of Commons—despite the modernization of committee andother relevant procedures—and, for that matter, the media,frequently no longer effectively hold the executive to account. That is,unless and until uncomfortable facts and analyses are leaked, andeven then not very effectively because usually belated, fragmentaryand out of context. What holds for the important issues is mirrored inmany ministerial statements to parliament on lesser issues. They, too,are primarily meant to get favourable comment in the media ratherthan careful, detailed scrutiny.

Identity Cards: A good example of the confusion, which the absence ofan adequate white paper can cause, is illustrated by the fracas overidentity cards in summer 2005. The impression the government hadcreated was that it was going to introduce an identity card of someelectronic sophistication which it was hoped, among its uses, would bea help against terrorism. On that premiss the London School ofEconomics (2005) produced a remarkably pertinent document whichshowed, among other matters, that the government had vastlyunderestimated the cost. In my judgement, this report had only twomajor defects. One of which was that it was just the kind of report onthe detailed implications of the scheme which should—and oncealmost certainly would—have been produced as a government whitepaper and laid before parliament. Presented by the Home Secretary—and with its factual accuracy ensured as far as possible by Home Officecivil servants, using outside help wherever relevant—it would havehad more authority than the admirable LSE paper could have, andwould have been the greatest help in promoting intelligentparliamentary debate. The second defect flowed from the first. Itwould appear that the government behind the scenes had decided todrop the sophisticated ID card as too expensive, complicated, under-researched and as such unlikely to be much help against terrorists. Ithad switched its attention to a more modest measure, more suited tohelp with benefit fraud, but apparently did not want this to be publicknowledge. So Home Office civil servants were reportedly reduced toimploring the LSE not to produce its report until the relevant debatewas over. The episode was a ripe example of how poor bill preparation

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and poorer public explanation can make a farce of parliamentaryproceedings.

The Birt Reports: A similar moral can be drawn after the publication ofthe Birt reports under the Freedom of Information Act on 1 July,2005. Lord Birt, ex-director-general of the BBC, was a close associateof the prime minister. He had become a more than usually influentialmember of the prime minister’s Forward Strategy Unit, writingreports on subjects as various as drugs, health, education, London,crime and transport. They are not short. That on the criminal justicesystem is some 70 pages, that on health nearly 90 pages and that ontransport 118 pages. As Simon Hewlett said in the Guardian (4 July2005):

…the reports have clarity and as a crammer on important social policy are easyto follow…as a first-time reader of Lord Birt’s reports intended for Tony Blair’seyes, I am only surprised that there appears to have been so much departmentaland political bad feeling about his work. This kind of strategic overview ofimportant areas of policy must surely be a fact of life in Whitehall.

Well, yes and no. The Birt reports have some affinity to white papersand to the old CPRS reports, but there are vital differences. (Started byHeath, abolished by Thatcher, CPRS produced policies for cabinet toconsider.) First, unlike both white papers and CPRS reports, they arereports to the prime minister and not to the whole cabinet. Second,they were not laid before parliament as white papers, green papersand similar documents or otherwise published as, sooner or later, mostCPRS papers were. Exceptional were white papers on somecomponents of the major constitutional changes like devolution andHouse of Lords reform, but as Richard Wilson (2005, p. 282), pointsout:

…there was none to unite and bring together all the measures within a coherentframework. The nearest thing was the section ‘We will clean up politics’ in theNew Labour manifesto of 1997 and the slogan ‘bringing government closer tothe people’.

Even now, years later, the government refuses, as against the public

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interest, to publish Birt’s Part 2s in which presumably hisrecommendations lie. My own belief is if these reports had had toundergo rigorous scrutiny by other ministers and civil servants as theyprogressed through the cabinet system, and with the added incentiveof prospective publication, those which I am in a position to judge,would have been much improved. They are lengthy slide-shows, notargued positions. In those I have read there are no clear statement ofthe problem addressed; no setting out of the options; no statement ofthe principles, economic or otherwise, used to choose between them;no demonstration of practicality or other outcome of any consultationprocedures followed; no process of evaluation. There are many facts,many trends and forecasts, but the logic, if any, by which the primeminister was converted to a particular viewpoint, if he was, is missing.As a consequence their relationship to a substantial white paper israther like that of a comic-strip, however good, to a well-argued book.Yet, even as they are, they would have been valuable—both toparliament and public opinion—if published at the time they wereproduced. They would have provided indications of the primeminister’s mind, and many facts then not publicly available. However,their real significance is as an indication of the falling away that hasoccurred in the practice of cabinet government and in the standards ofgovernment policy-making.

My contention is that it is mostly because of incoherent, poorlyargued and evidenced, spun and often largely unintelligible—frequently non-existent—white papers and other policy statements,that neither parliament, the media, professional nor public opinioncan properly hold the prime minister and other ministers to account.It is also why there are so many poor new laws.

Over-Centralization and the Delivery ProblemAnother cause of government overload focuses more on Brown andthe Treasury than on Blair: the attempt to solve the public servicedelivery problem through centralization of power there. Thiscentralization has been possible because the origins of our system ofgovernment are lost in the mists of time. Local and other publicauthorities never had a legal framework to define their powers andduties closely. That is why it has proved easier to put them—and thosereceiving money from them—under central government control.

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From the 1980s, financial controls—currently often extremely precisefinancial incentives and disincentives—have been directly andindirectly used to force obedience, sometimes on apparently smallpoints. Again, there are no legal constraints on such use of publicexpenditure. Before the early 1980s the convention was that localgovernment deliberately received a block grant—and many otherpublic bodies, equivalent public money—which they were able tospend with considerable discretion (see Foster et al., 1980, chap. 7).Starting in the 1980s, financial pressures have meant local authoritieshave progressively lost their independence (Wilson, 2005, pp. 282–287). Many public bodies set up as public trusts are now under similarpressure. There is greater central control over the police, moreintervention even in Iraq over the internal affairs of the army.Government intervention has grown immensely in institutions notunder the control of government, like universities. Stephen Byers’confrontation with the regulator, Tom Winsor, over the future ofRailtrack is far from the only pressure that government has put onlegally independent regulators. The Hutton report showed the BBCas better able to resist than most, but undergoing a daily bombardmentof suggestions and complaints from Downing Street. Government haseven set targets for entities not under ministers’ control. Lord Wilson(2005, p. 284) gives the example of one of the Department ofTransport’s targets being to ‘cut journey times on LondonUnderground services by increasing capacity and reducing delays’.There is unprecedented intervention in private business and thevoluntary sector under contract to government.

This huge increase in government intervention—in thecentralization of power—has taken place in a decision-making climatehere not characterized by ‘sofa’ meetings and other informal,frequently rushed procedures, but by the more careful anddeliberate, usually triennial, processes through which Brown and theTreasury allocate public expenditure and set targets for the publicsector. It is such an enormous task—and one so constantly unsettledby day-to-day political pressures—that it, too, suffers from theconsequences of overload.

But if these facts show why extreme centralization of power hasbeen possible, it does not explain why current ministers, unlike theirpredecessors, have wanted to exercise so much power. A simple

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question of power going to the head? I do not think so. A reason givenis that since Government now provides so much of the money, it hasthe bounden duty to oversee, and if necessary determine, theoutcomes. This argument does not stand up. Until the 1980s, theirministerial predecessors did not believe this, especially in relation toelected local authorities. They put far more store on protecting localliberties. (Similar thoughts about protection against domination byover-mighty government operated to limit ministerial intervention inother public bodies—see Lubenow, 1971.)

A more interesting reason is the belief that such centralization ofpower is not only perfectly right and proper, but necessary if thepublic sector is to be efficient and cost-effective. Andrew Turnbullseemed to suggest something like this in July 2005 in his retirementspeech as head of the civil service:

Following the establishment of Public Service Agreements in 1998,departments’ ambitions are now defined not at the boundary of the departmentitself or its agencies but as a wider outcome much further beyond its boundaries.DfES is seeking outcomes at the level of schools, or even seeking to influence thebehaviour of parents, whether they send children to school in the first place. TheDepartment of Health is seeking improvements in health such as the reductionin death from cancer, and to improve some indicators of quality of service suchas waiting times. The Home Office is seeking a reduction in crime, i.e. achange in behaviour in society itself. The effect has been to change the focusfrom delivery by a department itself to the much more difficult challenge ofinvolving all the providers in the long chain of delivery—teachers, doctors,police, courts etc. No longer is it enough to frame the legislation, agree thefunding and then issue circulars and guidance in the hope that things willhappen. With PSAs came framework documents and targets…now applied toall the players in a delivery chain.

Since the Treasury negotiates the PSAs, the question arises how far theUK Treasury—now master-minding our public sector—has found thesecret which eluded Soviet planners for 70 years and ignorance ofwhich brought first the Russian economy, and then the Soviet state,crashing in ruins. However, such optimism sits uneasily with all thesymptoms of central overload and poor preparation of policy andlegislation already mentioned.

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Principal-and-Agent Theory: The use of financial incentives anddisincentives—and the introduction of markets and quasi-markets—are powerful sets of tools for trying to ensure that agents—even downa long delivery chain as far as nurses, doctors, teachers, etc.—do whatthe ‘principal’, in this case Gordon Brown’s Treasury, wants and aredoing it efficiently (see Le Grand, 2003). It generally implies turningmost intermediate bodies—from ministers and their departments toelected local authorities—also into agents, or eliminating or by-passingthem instead as unnecessary. The overall aim is to motivate the serviceproviders—say schools or hospitals—to provide the services the centresets down and to meet the targets the centre gives in relation to them.Hence, for example, the money schools or hospitals get broadlydepends on the number of pupils and patients they attract and, tosome extent, on their success in meeting various targets in relation tothose pupils and patients. Competition is introduced to promoteefficiency and save costs through the threat that parents and doctorswill otherwise switch their allegiance to other schools and hospitals.Similarly patients can—at least in principle—switch GPs if they believethey will get better treatment or hospital referrals. In return for thepublic money the Treasury gives departments, there are many suchtargets and incentives specified in the PSAs it negotiates with them.

Principal-and-agent is a powerful instrument, but works besttechnically if kept simple. But the notion, for example, thatprimary schools exist to achieve numeracy and literature alone, orsecondary schools to achieve certain exam results, quickly provespublicly and politically unacceptable. So targets multiply inrelation to many services, the stimulus for them being not just theTreasury, but the media, the prime minister and other ministers:as we saw, for instance, when John Reid added a ‘speed of makinga new hospital appointment’ target because of the Margaret Dixonaffair. The multiplication of targets then raises difficult questionsof the priority to be given many different targets when they clash,and who is to decide those clashes. Moreover, targets arefrequently found to be unsatisfactory for one reason or anotherand are changed. All this can so complicate the pattern,particularly of financial rewards and penalties, as to make it hardfor those concerned to predict the financial consequences of whatthey do. The more targets, the more measurement, form-filling,

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inspection and audit is needed. The greater, too, the temptation tocheat if sometimes substantial funds are not to be forfeited. Suchcomplications can easily end in a situation where, because ofconfusion and uncertainty, for any given service, or for that servicein a particular place, the principal-and-agent approach becomesdemotivating, not positively motivating. Given the complexities ofits implementation in even a small country like England—for it isEngland alone which the Treasury tries to plan in such detail—theorderliness the proponents of this approach hanker after isprobably impossible to achieve. It is certainly very far from havingbeen achieved. (The difficulties of target-setting are welldocumented in House of Commons Select Committee onAdministration, 2003.)

As among the greatest of organization specialists, HerbertSimon (1957), once said: ‘The capacity of the human mind forformulating and solving complex problems is small compared withthe size of the problems whose solution is required for objectivelyrational behaviour in the real world’.

But even if there were not practical, and for that mattertheoretical, obstacles to running all from the centre down to eachteacher and doctor, there would remain great difficulties inmaking it all satisfactorily accountable to parliament. Theprocesses set out in PSAs and other Treasury documentation arenot well explained and therefore do not get satisfactoryparliamentary scrutiny. Furthermore the Treasury’s insistence ona ‘something-for-something’ deal (Turnbull, 2005) can completelyoverrule any previously held obligations to respect the liberty ofindividuals or institutions: of any freedom they have had by law orconvention to take their own decisions within the law if directly orindirectly in receipt of public money: whether nurses, doctors orteachers, or other skilled professionals; whether universities, schoolsor public trusts; whether elected local authorities, independentregulators or private firms. Such widespread assertion of dominantpower deserves to be called what it is, an erosion of our liberties,whether those were based on law or often ancient convention. If itwere all patently efficient—if it could be convincingly demonstratedthat most targets are met—it would be one thing, but there is toomuch confusion and complication for that.

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Other Causes of CentralizationThe demands of 24-hour-a-day news management also helps explainthe spread of detailed government intervention throughout and evenbeyond the boundaries of the public sector. One element in it is that wehave more MPs with smaller constituencies than almost any otherlegislature and that a series of developments in parliament means thatmost MPs find that their constituency work is the most rewardingthing they do. They are besieged by local grievances and, perhaps,naturally now turn to ministers and the media for redress. Another isthat more than most countries we have a media centred on our capitalwith an increasing tendency to concentrate on the drama of theparticular highly-coloured incident than on white papers and themerits or demerits of proposed policies and laws. A third is themantra—never realized—that the media and the general public expectpublic services to be identical everywhere with the same standards andachievement of those standards. A fourth strand is the perceived needthe prime minister and some other ministers feel to be seen to bedeeply caring and omni-competent in the media in all circumstancesand at all times, even though the strategem often fails. Hence for allthese reasons, the reluctance of ministers ever to say, ‘Not mybusiness’.

The Folly of OvercentralizationOne can go only so far with positive objections to such a nexus ofattitudes:

•Local needs and wants do vary. More independent local authoritieswould reflect that diversity.

•Through the local experiments which greater autonomy makespossible, others may learn.

•Local government—and other local public bodies—have been longrecognized as good nurseries in which MPs and then ministers gainvaluable experience; but that experience is the more valuable ifthose institutions require policy-making and judgement at the topthan if they are just agents of central government.

•Liberty, freedom—that is the opportunity for an individual orinstitution to do its own thing—within a framework of law has itsown value. It allows greater opportunity for what philosophers

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used to call ‘self-realization’, ‘self-development’ or ‘positivefreedom’.

Rather, the deadly arguments against such centralization remain thepractical ones. Running everything from the top does not work. Thereare mistakes and near-mistakes. There are few signs of beginning toend the post-code lottery, the intellectual basis for much intervention.New anomalies are turning up all the time. The pressures on thecentre are so great from trying to decide everything that decisions,even on the most important issues, are all too frequently very badlymade. As Andrew Marr said on retiring from the political editorship ofthe BBC, ‘I had never emotionally appreciated how much of politics atthe top is desperate reaction to the hurtle and press of theunprepared-for: these are people under extraordinary pressure, withbarely a moment for reflection and second thoughts. It is so damnedeasy to be a critic, a columnist or a television political editor, and sovery hard to survive as a political success’. Blair was reported as notreading many of the briefs written for him over Iraq, no doubt overmany other matters, too. Anthony Seldon, Blair’s biographer, isreported as discovering this. It was, presumably, because Blair had notsufficient time to read them (Sunday Times, 31 July 2005).).

Such over-centralization at the centre is too dangerous to tolerate.Enough must be devolved elsewhere to reduce that load to morehuman proportions.

Dysfunctional ChangesWhile changes in the way the media treats politics and government,and, especially since 1997, in how government tries to manage themedia and micro-manage the public sector, are the most importantcauses of what in my book I call a ‘crisis’ in British government, thereare other increasingly widely-perceived shortcomings of moderngovernment, which I also discuss, that have contributed to it. Togetherthey amount to a revolution in how we are governed, and not a benignone from the standpoint of the requirements of representativedemocracy. All parts of our constitution are to an extent performingdysfunctionally. In some instances the changes have been slow todevelop, in others sudden.

To list them, they affect:

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•The Commons, whose ability since 1997 to hold the executive toaccount has worsened, and to pass clear, effective laws has notimproved. It is now composed almost entirely of career politiciansincreasingly drawn from those with a media or politicalbackground. Though many able people still become MPs, theirprevious experience is narrower, their ability to acquire subsequentexperience diminished, and their contacts with the outside worldalso narrowed, if only because of the weight and nature ofconstituency business and the unintelligibility or irrelevance ofmuch else they are expected to do.

•The Lords, whose reform became a shambles and descended intofarce, but which now, as never before, is an essential revisingchamber. However, while they clarify the often muddled billsreaching them and reconcile them with existing law, the outcome isno better than the underlying policy which all too often is hasty, ill-thought out, untested for its practicality and soon overtaken byanother policy initiative and another law.

•Cabinet and the cabinet system. The cabinet no longer exercisesexecutive supremacy, though the fiction is doubtfully maintainedthat the prime minister’s decisions are cabinet’s. Similarly there isno longer any real attempt to achieve collective responsibility andcabinet solidarity by disciplined and rigorous discussion amongcabinet ministers, only through a discipline imposed on them and,since that collapsed, through discursive discussion unsupported byenough staff-work to be rigorous.

•No 10 and the Cabinet Office. Modelled increasingly on the WhiteHouse, executive supremacy and collective responsibility haveeffectively passed to it. Acquiring so much responsibility has madethe prime minister overloaded beyond his capacity. (A quirk of theBlair government—since it is so dependent on the personalities ofprime minister and chancellor of the exchequer—but oftenfundamental to its operations, is the anomalous creation of adiarchy between them. Diarchy further complicates and slowsdown the often chaotic working methods of the prime minister, thechancellor and their close advisers.)

•The status of cabinet ministers has declined to that of agents of theprime minister or Gordon Brown without resolving the question ofhow that subordination is consistent with their retention of most

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statutory powers. Because they have these powers the centre oftensees them as blocking what it wants and not satisfactorilyimplementing its policies. The freedom ministers once had toinitiate policies and take decisions, now depends practically onwhether they attempt what the centre does not have the time orinclination to do.

•The relationship of partnership between ministers and civilservants—important for the effective despatch of business andconstitutionally in helping ministers protect their integrity—hasbeen replaced by close relationships between ministers and a new,unelected political class of special advisers who are no longer justadvisers, but powers. They are more numerous, and treated asmore senior, especially at the centre. Despite exceptions, relationsbetween ministers and their political advisers are generally moreimportant for policy and decision-making than those with their civilservants. Moreover, the relations that matter most on a day-to-daybasis for departmental ministers, senior and junior—more thanthose with their own advisers—are with No 10 and the Treasury.

•The end of the Northcote-Trevelyan tradition in which seniormembers of a politically impartial civil service chosen by merit hadworked in close partnership with ministers. They had been selectedand given enough independence to speak truth to power. Becausedistanced from policy and decision-making in No 10, they are nolonger as able to practise their ‘institutional scepticism’; tochallenge the good sense and practicality of policy issues; or toargue for objectivity and factual accuracy in ministerial statementsand public documents, especially, but not only, in those originatingfrom or vetted by No 10, as most important ones now do.

•An increase in the number of public bodies of all descriptions, whichhave experienced a great reduction in the freedom they once hadto manage their affairs as if a public trust, but without that freedombeing replaced by well-defined legal relationships. Rather they aretreated as independent and responsible when required to shoulderblame, but the centre interferes with, and tries to override them,whenever it wants.

•The growth of a new political class of MPs, special advisers and othertemporary political appointments, politically appointed lords,members of the European, Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland

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parliaments, and of local authorities, together with their closely-related counterparts in the media and the lobbies.

•The opposition finds it far harder to make an impact and therefore toplay its traditional role. It is not just because of personalities orfissures within the Conservative party. How can opposition beeffective confronted with slippery, evasive, inexact ministerialstatements and public documents? Evidence to the Hutton Inquiryreinforced the view that the Blair centre saw the media, butespecially the BBC, as more its opposition than was theConservative party.

The Succession ProblemWhat should we do about it? Many people still seem to believe thatchanging one person, Blair, is all that is needed. But there areserious difficulties with this supposition. One, which I explore inmy book, is the greater difficulty now of finding a worthy successorto an incumbent prime minister. The domination of mediaattention by one, sometimes two politicians—Blair and Brown—the turning of other ministers as much as possible into agents, hasgreatly reduced the opportunities even able and potentiallycharismatic ministers have to demonstrate their prime ministerialqualities. In too many cases promising ministers, even successfulones, find themselves returned to the back-benches. Others arekept too much the agents of Blair or Brown for their ownindividual political character to emerge and be valued. Cabinetand parliament were once great testing grounds where the naturalleaders proved themselves and the merely pretentious were seenthrough. Similarly media concentration on the Leader of theopposition means shadow cabinet ministers, too, have greatdifficulty in proving their ability to a wide audience. (A Populuspoll, reported in the Times, 30 July 2005, said 97% of thepopulation recognized photos of Blair; Kenneth Clarke at 50% wasthe most recognized candidate for the Conservative leadership,David Cameron was recognized by 6%.)

But there is an even greater difficulty. More than ever before, asuccessful prime minister needs presentational skills. How can one besure any successor as prime minister or as leader of the opposition hasany of the other skills good government needs?

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The British Political System: Infinitely Adaptable?‘Do nothing, just wait’ may still seem a sound prescription if oneregards government primarily in any or all of three ways: as theinterplay of political personalities, as an entertainment provided bythe media or as a game whose main aim is achieving high standing—once in the House, now in the polls—and then always winningelections. Personalities matter in politics and always have done, as theydo in running a firm, or a school, or a hospital: who is in charge, howpeople relate to each other, their different foibles and strengths. But ifthe study of politics—whether journalistic or scholarly—fastens toomuch on personalities and elections, one can gain, and retain, theimpression that nothing much really changes except in the short run.

Was not Gladstone called dictatorial by colleagues, as was HaroldWilson by Crossman and others, usually when worsted in a cabinetbattle? Have there not been ‘presidential’ prime ministers before:Palmerston in the Crimean war, Lloyd George in the First, andChurchill in the Second, World War, Eden briefly at Suez? Was notLloyd George’s Garden Suburb, though his successor rapidlydisbanded it, a forerunner of No 10 today? Blair and Brown are notthe first prime minister and leading cabinet minister to have fallenout, at times spectacularly. Gaitskell and Bevan divided the Labourparty, though with greater intensity and effect in opposition than inoffice. Lord Rosebery, as prime minister and Harcourt as leader ofthe House of Commons, were barely on speaking terms, disagreeingwith each other on almost everything: the importance of empire,economy, Ireland, the lot, while Joe Chamberlain was a severe trial toevery prime minister in whose cabinet he sat. Eighty years or sobefore, Castlereagh and Canning, in cabinet together, fought a duel,over policy differences. So by focusing on people one can gain somereassurance of continuity underlying the ups and downs of politicallife. However, that view of the limitless resilience of British politics—that it will rebound after periods of stress and weakness, perhaps allthat is needed is a government with a small parliamentary majority—such optimism, my book suggests, in arguments I believe you mayfind persuasive, is becoming harder to sustain.

As a contrast to the present, consider more closely some of thoseso-called episodes of prime ministerial or presidential government.Palmerston became prime minister after early disasters in the Crimea

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because he had charismatic powers of leadership, but among othershortcomings, he appointed bad generals and had other problemswith cabinet and parliament, as he did thereafter when as the mostconservative leader of the Liberal party ever, he did his best to blockreforms. However, he was far from a presidential, dominating primeminister in reality, though he was so in appearance. Lloyd George’sassumption of presidential power came after a realization thatAsquith’s slow and relaxed ways of running the war were disastrous.Far from being associated with informality and sofa meetings, itcoincided, not accidentally, with a step-change in formality: thecreation of the cabinet system with its habitual minute-taking andpaper factory. But even in his relationships with the generals—to getthem to win the war—he could not be purely autocratic. He had tojustify all he was doing to some cabinet colleagues, especially theConservative leader, Bonar Law. And, depending on ConservativeMPs for his parliamentary majority, he was eventually dismissed bythem. Some of Churchill’s cabinet colleagues sat in on his regular andimportant meetings with his chiefs of staff. However, he understoodthe issues so much better than they did, that his was a bravuraperformance. But—in his way as prodigious and indefatigable aninterrogator as Margaret Thatcher was to be—Churchill never over-ruled his chiefs-of-staffs’ firm opinions, though he persistently,splendidly and constructively challenged their analyses and plans.Moreover, providing the material for him to challenge, and the back-up to meet those challenges, required considerable and efficientlyexecuted formal arrangements. Then the least said the better aboutEden’s attempt to go it alone over Suez. It did not last long andcabinet government quickly returned.

The essential difference now is that in the past 25 years we havehad two peace-time attempts at presidential government. BothThatcher and Blair’s have failed, though for different reasons. Inneither case have we reverted to effective cabinet government.

Survival of the Fittest?But is not an optimistic rationalization of developments still possible?For about 350 years British government—aided by not having awritten constitution—has been rightly praised for showing aremarkable ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Am I

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overestimating the impact of particular people—Thatcher, Major,Blair, Brown—and underestimating the famed resilience of ourpolitical system? That is a question you must decide. But evolutionthrough natural selection, in politics as in biology, need not be benign.You may think that pessimistic, but it is surely prudent at least toconsider that possibility. World history has many examples of forms ofgovernment, which, sometimes quite suddenly, have failed theirnations. Voter apathy is only one, though an important, indicationthat may be on the verge of happening in Britain.

Does it Amount to a Crisis?Some reviewers, while not disagreeing with what I say about nowdysfunctional elements in our constitution, imply it is an over-statement to suggest that British government is in crisis (for examplesee the Economist, 14 May 2005). However, if one considersgovernment not just as being about winning elections, or as anentertainment or a game, but as a concentration of people able to take,or not take, decisions of utmost importance, the significance of manyof the changes, which I have called revolutionary, increases. Thedecline in the quality of government matters more because—as well asdecisions about peace and war and other decisions past governmentshave also made—government has spread its tentacles further intomore and more aspects of everyday life, especially since 1997.Government need not matter much to those whose experience of, say,the NHS and education for their children is relatively trouble-free.But, despite undoubted improvements of the public services in manyrespects, it does to those—many of whom may complain to theirMPs—who have suffered from long queues, postponed operations orMRSA. Or tax credit clawback. Or those who wonder if they can scrapetogether the money to buy a house near a better school so that theirchildren may have a better chance in life. Or those who feel the effectsof crime, drug-trafficking, drunkenness or racial disharmony in theirneighbourhoods. Modern life may seem responsible for an escalatingnumber of problems for government to solve, though some come fromthe greater attention the media give to them than once they did, andless to what is good and commendable. That the prime minister andother ministers repeatedly announce a praiseworthy intention to endthe post-code lottery, further rubs in its continuing existence in many

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public services.However, such consumers are not the only losers from poor policy-

making and poorly prepared laws. There are the producers, thoseemployed in the public sector who know they are not giving as goodservice as they might. That is not to say they or their forebears oncegave better service. Sometimes they did, sometimes not. But theyknow it could be better now. There are the many IT cock-ups andcost-overruns, caused, as the NAO repeatedly shows, mostly bypolitical changes of mind and over-complicating of systems. There arethe managers trying to keep up with never-ending new initiatives,trying to decide which are serious, which are not. Then there is theform-filling, the trying to meet targets, knowing that they may losemoney for their patients, their school-children or other consumers, ifthey do not do so. It is not only in hospital accident and emergencydepartments where the temptation to cheat may seem very strong.

So for the many at the sharp end of receiving or providing publicservices—as for all concerned to avoid another misconceived war andto lower the chances of terrorist attacks—government is more than agame. It matters that policies are carefully thought through and havebeen substantially consulted over; that new laws are based on soundpolicies, and drafted with enough forethought for them to be effectiveand practical; that new policies and laws are not there mainly to meetthe media’s thirst for novelty or insistence that action be taken, evenwhen unnecessary; furthermore as essential for better governmentthat all at the centre of government, but especially the prime minister,are not so overloaded by media presentations that nothing much elsehas a chance of being done well.

It is in this context, and against this background, that it isreasonable to claim that our form of government is in crisis and thatthere is a disconnect between even the best of intentions and whathappens on the ground.

RemediesWhere should we go from here? I believe we must hope for agovernment—sooner rather than later—prepared to attemptgenuinely fundamental reform so as to increase the thoroughness ofpolicy preparation and practicality of its implementation. We could tryfor a truly presidential system—one in law and with appropriate

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checks and balances—but my book suggests there would be formidableobstacles to be overcome. We could try bringing the judges, the lawand in particular rights-based legislation into a position where theycan be more of a check on ministers. But there are severe limits to thedesirability of government by judges.

My own conclusion, which you may think tame, but I think morerealistic, is to re-establish our own system of cabinet government,though adapted to meet the demands of modern times and takingevery advantage of modern technology. More important thanparticular changes there must be the political will—at the head of oneparty or another—to develop team spirit and behave like a team; torecognize cabinet colleagues’ views should be taken into account whenpertinent to an issue, and not simply overridden; to hope that whilethe prime minister may be a great man—much more than a mediafigure with a gift for presentation—he is only first among equals whenit comes to decision-making; and to recognize that the collectivewisdom and good sense of a cabinet is commonly greater than that ofany individual in it.

But if there is to be a chance of revived cabinet government beingsuccessful, there must be some changes—that is, modernization—tofit it for modern times. Several I discuss in my book. But let me saymore.

News ManagementA prime minister will never free herself or himself to spend the timeneeded on other activities unless he or she can devote much less timepreparing for and engaging with the media. Neither, unless thishappens, will anyone whose leading qualities are other than those of afirst-rate presenter be able to do the job successfully. Yet a genius forpresentation is far from the most significant quality a nation wantsfrom its prime minister, whatever the ups and downs of media successand failure suggest. Therefore:

•To reduce the prime minister’s overload, and that of his immediatestaff, the first port-of-call for policies, information, answers tocomplaints involving their department’s business—all that forwhich they have statutory responsibility—should again be theindividual secretaries of state in question.

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•When ministers are asked questions which are not about theirdepartment’s business, they should decline to answer them andsuggest instead that an approach is made to the relevant minister.(Special arrangements may have to be made, as they always havebeen, when there are cross-cutting issues.)

•The prime minister should not make a statement to the media aboutpolicy, or any other matter concerning a department, withoutdiscussing it first with the secretary of state concerned and, ifimportant, with cabinet; and even then only if there is a strongreason why it should not be made first by the secretary of state.

•Rather than rush into saying something unprepared, the primeminister and other ministers should not hesitate to say what theyare saying is only a preliminary reaction or, even better, that theywill make a considered statement in, say, two days’ time—or inhowever many days they need.

•Rather than a news management operation controlled by No 10,there should be a strong unit in cabinet, responsible to it and undera senior minister co-ordinating news management acrossWhitehall.

•While ministers may have their own ‘special’ media advisers, theirdepartmental press officers should be politically impartial careercivil servants whose prime duty should be to uphold factualaccuracy as best they can.

•Unless there are especially strong circumstances warranting it,neither the prime minister nor another minister should take thelead on a story about a local authority or a public body, not aconstituent part of his or her department. Certainly in the firstinstance, let them deal with the media.

Improving the Executive’s Accountability to ParliamentMuch has been suggested on how this might be done throughbettering parliament’s institutions and processes. Far more importantnow is improving what ministers present to parliament for debate andscrutiny. To that end:

•The prime minister should show restraint in not answering (and theleader of the opposition not asking) questions at prime minister’squestion time which obviously belong to a secretary of state.

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•While ministers may make prior statements to the media, it should beunderstood and emphasised that the first authoritative statementon any matter of importance should be made to parliament by thesecretary of state in question.

•Any such statement should be prepared by ministers and their civilservants. Among officials’ roles should be that of ensuring that anysuch statement to parliament should be as factually accurate,appropriately evidenced and well argued as it reasonably can be.

•Except in a sudden emergency, or in other circumstances carefullyspecified, cabinet should follow the German example, based on oldBritish practice, of not taking a decision unless it first has before it acabinet paper, available for all cabinet ministers to read in advanceof discussion, setting out the issues and arguing through to itsconclusions. Sir Nicholas Monck makes a similar suggestion, usingthe precedent of such standards as are commonly adopted by plcboards (Monck, 2005).

•Any significant major policy change, whether resulting in legislationor not, should be explained in a well-argued green paper, whitepaper or similar document presented to parliament by the relevantsecretary of state after approval by cabinet. This is far from saying itis either possible or necessary for every issue to be considered byfull cabinet. On how cabinet committees and the cabinet systemlightened the load while retaining collective responsibility seechapter 5 in my book.

•Ministers should, if required, be able to give the legal basis for anyinterference or intervention they make in the affairs of localauthorities and other independent public bodies. To make thispossible, a wholesale clarification is needed of the powers andduties of public bodies, the powers that ministers have over them,and the discretion, or freedom for action, they retain.

•The Office of National Statistics, in conjunction with NAO, shouldhave the authority it needs, and its surveillance of all governmentfigures strengthened and widened, so as to able to protect theintegrity of such numbers, especially from political falsification andmanipulation.

•There should be a civil service act to regularize relations betweenministers and officials, officials and special advisers. The primeminister has announced that, while eventually there might be such

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legislation, he did not intend to proceed with it in the near future(see the Independent, 29 July 2005).

No such a set of changes is possible unless the leader of at least onepolitical party and his shadow ministers are willing to presentthemselves publicly and collectively as believing that such a return tocollective responsibility and decision-making is in the interest of theelectorate, as I have argued—here and in my book—that it is. Itrequires an effort of political will and imagination to see that nobody—not even prime ministers—gain in the end from the over-concentration and centralization of power on one overloaded personand his or her immediate circle of appointed cronies. ‘Absolute powertends to corrupt absolutely’. Otherwise, as already suggested, sooneror later, there will be another poll tax or Iraq.

Three models, or mechanisms for enforcement, suggestthemselves. One is that the current ministerial code be revised tocover such points, but also to make it clear that the obligation toobserve them is as much the prime minister’s as any other ministers.Unless voluntarily engaged in, it will be hard to make it work. (Forexample Richard Wilson, 2005, p. 283, quotes Blair against Hague in2000: ‘no one will be better governed through fine-tuning theministerial code’.) But an experienced senior minister—perhaps, ifavailable, one with substantial legal experience—might be given aresponsibility of overseeing how it might work. The second is thatparliament should take a hand in imposing such requirements. Thethird is the German one already referred to whereby under theGerman constitution there is a duty laid on the president and cabinetto promulgate a document called the General Rules of Procedure of theFederal Government to cover such matters. However, whether itstheoretically greater legal enforceability makes much practicaldifference is itself an interesting issue.

The Need to Reduce Government OverloadSuch reforms, however conscientiously engaged in, will not restoreeffective cabinet government, which is thorough and pays dueattention to practicality, unless there is also a substantial reduction inministerial overload at the centre, particularly that falling on the primeminister and Brown, and their close advisers. In other words there

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must be some decentralization of political power, some devolution ofresponsibilities for policy and decision-making, from Whitehall andWestminster.

There are many excellent arguments for devolution (for exampleJenkins, 2004; Foster et al., 1980), but of the greatest importance formy book is that if regional and/or local authorities, or even unelectedbodies, are given the power to decide more, central government cando less and therefore, if appropriate measures are taken, can do itbetter. To secure a better chance of good and effective government,overload at the centre could have been reduced by devolving realresponsibility, powers of decision and accountability to suchauthorities and bodies. Instead we have had—and, despiteappearances and counter-claims, still have—unremittingcentralization. (On the tension between progressive centralizationand the wish to appear to decentralize, see Wilson 2005.) One canruefully compare how the centre of government, at least in England,now overloads itself constantly and eagerly in the belief that only itcan get things right, with past years, even centuries, of struggle whenlocal people fought with some success to check central dictation.

Moreover, there is now a deep-seated paradox in British publiclife. The executive asserts almost unlimited power over the publicsector, and the prime minister attempts absolute, so-calledpresidential, power over it, parliament and other ministers. Yet at thesame time the prime minister’s ability, except in foreign and defencepolicy, to get his way has been substantially diminished by hispersonal overload, by the ability of at least some ministers to frustratehis intentions, if they so choose—through procrastination and otherdevices (in Brown’s case by an accumulation of organizationalchanges). Many of these were first intended by Margaret Thatcher toreduce the size of the public sector, which they did, but ultimatelythey—reinforced by further organizational changes under Major andBlair—also fragmented and complicated it, and complicatedinteractions between its constituent parts, and between them and thecentre.

Furthermore, though I believe the most adverse developmentshave been since 1997, neither the Conservatives nor the LiberalDemocrats—for example, in the 2005 election—have made a stand,certainly not an effective stand, against the principal manifestations of

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this revolution: the excessive concentration of power in one person,the diminishing of ministers, the distancing of civil servants fromcentralized policy-making, and the attempt to run the public sector asif one vast private company.

During the election, however, Michael Howard was prompted todeclare on the Today programme that he intended to instruct hisministers what to do and sack them if they failed to deliver, a Blairiteposition. A secret of Blair’s success has been the ability he inheritedfrom Kinnock to control the national and constituency parties,initiated to stamp out Militant. By threatening de-selection andheavily influencing selection of MPs, he overcomes most oppositionwithin his own party, but alienates activists who feel frozen out(Independent, 15 July 2005). In the Howard Flyte affair, andsubsequently in attempts to eliminate constituency parties fromelecting the party leader, one can see the Conservative party tornbetween yielding to the party leader’s absolute domination overpolicy, as the media seem to demand, and freedom of speech.

A Flawed DevolutionBut surely we have devolution? Has not that lightened the overload.No, we are in a fools’ paradise over devolution. We have four differentsystems: in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London. (JohnPrescott’s scheme for the English regions would have been a fifth.)Even so, as introduced, it is a policy with two gears. As soon as opposedparties are in power in Westminster and Edinburgh, and if financialcontrols over Scotland are relaxed, we will find Scottish and Englishdomestic policy moving so rapidly apart as to create two nations. Buteven then there are features—chiefly financial, in this badly designedsystem which could let Whitehall exert very great, even decisive,power over Scotland. In other regions it is far from clear thatdevolution has led to the real decentralization of power, only to theappearance of it. Whitehall can still make it hard for Cardiff to beother than its agent, still more it could want to do so when differentparties are in control at Cardiff and Westminster. While in London—and in English devolution as planned—all the levers were still there fordaily interference, if the centre wanted it. (The prime minister couldhave stopped Ken Livingstone’s experiment dead—I know, as I wasfortunate enough to have had most of an hour of his time to persuade

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him it was an experiment well worth attempting.)Rather, in domestic policy we need to go back to the drawing-

board and design a system in which Westminster sets a broad legalframework and regions—and/or local authorities—have considerablefreedom of implementation within it, but with auditing institutionsthat closely monitor and assess what they do. It is a sad reflection onwhat is possibly Blair’s single most significant reform, that it reallydoes need to be done all over again, certainly if we are to get real andlasting devolution of responsibility to relieve central governmentoverload, but, even as it is, to put right its own structuralinadequacies. (A trenchant, penetrating criticism of the inadequacyand instability of current financial arrangements for devolution isMcLean, 2005.)

ConclusionWhichever route forward we take, and whatever the mechanicsselected, I suggest that no set of reforms will be successful unless itovercomes three problems. First—and many may say it is the mostdifficult—it has to find a way of organizing and delegating newsmanagement, so that it does not dominate the real business ofgoverning. Second, it must find a way by which the often snapdecisions of a prime minister are capable of being turned into well-based cabinet decisions which can be challenged both in parliamentand, before that, in cabinet and otherwise within the governmentsystem. Third, it must find a way of decentralizing and devolving realdecision-making responsibility outside Whitehall in order to reduceimpossible pressures on the centre.

Without these changes the revolution will continue its probablyunpredictable course, but further undermining our politicaldemocracy. ■

ReferencesButler, Lord (2004), Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass

Destruction, HC 898 (The Stationery Office, London).Foster, C. D., Jackman, R. A. and Perlman, M. (1980), Local Government

Finance in a Unitary State (Allen and Unwin, London).Foster, C. D. and Plowden, F. J. (1996), The State Under Stress (Open

University Press), chapters 1 and 2.

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Foster, C. D. (2005), British Government in Crisis (Hart Publishing,Oxford).

Hansard Society (1992), Making the Law (London).House of Commons Select Committee on Administration (2003), On

Target? Government by Measurement (HMSO, London).Hutton, Lord (2004), Report of the Inquiry into the Circumstances

Surrounding the Death of Dr David Kelly CMG, HC 247 (House ofCommons, London).

Jenkins, S. (2004), Big Bang Localism: A Peace Plan for British Democracy(Policy Exchange, London).

Le Grand, J. (2003), Motivation, Agency and Public Policy: Of Knights andKnaves, Pawns and Queens (Oxford University Press, Oxford).

LSE (2005), The Identity Project: An Assessment of the UK Identity Cards Billand its Implications. Interim Report (London).

Lubenow, W. C. (1971), The Politics of Government Growth (David andCharles, Newton Abbot).

McLean, I. S. (2005), The Fiscal Crisis of the United Kingdom (PalgraveMacmillan, Basingstoke).

Monck, N. (2005), Governance in government: A modest proposal.Political Quarterly, 76, 2.

Oborne, P. (2005), The Rise of Political Lying (Free Press, London).Peston, R. (2005), Brown’s Britain (Short Books, London).Runciman, W. G. (2004), Hutton and Butler: Lifting the Lid on the

Workings of Power (British Academy/Oxford University Press,Oxford), p. 128.

Simon, H. (1957), Models of Man (Wiley, Chichester), p. 198.Walker, D. (2005), Time to take off those rose-tinted glasses. Public

(March).Whyte, J. (2005), A Load of Blair (Corvo, London).Wilson, R. (2005), Constitutional change: A note by the bedside.

Political Quarterly, 76, 2, pp. 281–287.

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