THE OLD ORDER
Colin Leys, co-author of The Plot against the NHS, the starting point for this series of articles, has written an account of how the old administrative British culture gave way to the more market driven idea of public service management, in his essay 'The Cynical State', originally published in March 2009 in the Socialist Register (the full article can now be found at http://www.british-values.com/index-to-articles/). Leys between 1997 and 2010 was editor together with Leo Panitch (who, as a friend of Ralph Miliband should have been, but wasn't, mentor to Dave and Ed) of the very, perhaps excessively, academic but nonetheless policy orientated Socialist Register. Describing the old regime finally broken by Thatcher and Blair, he says:
'Britain’s previous liberal/social democratic policy regime combined elements of the Liberals’ state reforms of the late nineteenth century with elements corresponding to the interventionist state of the twentieth. The Liberals created a higher civil service recruited competitively from the cleverest members of the same social class, and educated at the same elite private schools and universities, as the elected ministers they served. The idea was that officials of this calibre and background would be in a position to offer elected ministers honest advice and ‘to some extent influence’ them, in a shared ‘freemasonry’ of public service. Because the emphasis was on social and political status, higher civil servants were, like almost all the ministers they served, ‘generalists’, relying for expertise on the advice of professional and technical civil servants – engineers, public health doctors, biologists, etc. For dealing with big issues of a politically sensitive nature they would recommend the establishment of Royal Commissions, composed of eminent experts with powers to commission research and call for expert evidence (between 1950 and 1980 one was appointed, on average, almost every year). For lesser issues that nonetheless called for additional expertise Departmental Enquiries could be set up, also with powers to draw on outside expertise ...'
He describes efforts to develop a more Labour, less public school orientated, version of this culture:
'Thomas Balogh, an economic adviser to the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson in the 1960s, voiced a growing impatience with the higher civil service’s typically humanities-based education and pre-industrial social attitudes, denouncing it as ‘the apotheosis of the dilettante’. In 1966 Wilson created a Department of Economic Affairs to offset what was seen as the Treasury’s bias for financial prudence over economic growth, and a Treasury departmental committee chaired by Lord Fulton (a university vice chancellor) recommended a reorganisation of the higher civil service on technocratic lines. A Civil Service College was established, to emulate the French École Nationale d’Administration, and a Civil Service Department took over the Treasury’s management of recruitment, training and promotion.'
But
'Almost all these initiatives were neutralised, largely by the higher civil service itself. The Department of Economic Affairs was closed in 1969 after only three years. The Civil Service Department lasted longer, but was closed by Mrs. Thatcher in 1981. The Civil Service College survives, but only as a provider of short courses, with no prestige.'
One wonders how the public school system, which produced the cadres for the original idea of a civil service could have ended up producing the likes of David Cameron and Boris Johnson.