Wanted: a new theory of the state
Simon Parker
The next leader will have to adapt Labour's political and public management philosophy to the Coalition’s likely legacy of a smaller, more decentralised kind of government.
The last election was a battle for theory as well as seats. Much to the dismay of some of their own PPCs, the Tory high command fought on a platform that made explicit reference to a ‘post-bureaucratic age’ and a ‘big society’. One leading Conservative memorably described the big society as ‘bollocks’ during the campaign (Watt, 2010), and there is an argument that the sheer airiness of the idea cost crucial votes and contributed to the outcome of a coalition government.
But Cameron’s team knew what they were doing – this was a raid deep into Labour’s intellectual territory aimed at severely limiting the left’s potential for renewal. By attempting to absorb the liberal tradition through a coalition with the Lib Dems, and by rebranding ideas like mutualism, post-bureaucracy, social enterprise and community activism as Conservative, Cameron’s Tories are deliberately trying to limit the range of new thinking available to the left.
These should have been Labour’s ideas – they were developed by left-of-centre think tanks (1) and in many cases they did influence the last government’s policies. But by absorbing most of Labour’s heterodox thinking, Cameron hopes to push the opposition back towards exhausted traditions of centralism, managerialism and statism. At a time when budget cuts of some kind are essential, the Tories have a prime opportunity to paint Labour as a dinosaur party, wedded to the central state because it has nowhere else to turn.
In this article, I want to argue that Labour has exhausted many of the theoretical traditions that have sustained it over the past decade, if not the past century. The state and society it will inherit at its next election victory will be very different to those it left behind in 2010, and the party will almost certainly have to adapt its thinking to the Coalition’s legacy of a smaller, more decentralised kind of government. The next party leader needs to open up some challenging debates about Labour’s political and public management philosophy.
Exhausted traditions
The period immediately after a change of government is probably a uniquely bad time to try and assess the performance of an outgoing administration – the press, media and public are engaged in a brief moment of repudiating what some see as the past government’s bossiness and profligacy. On the domestic front, history will undoubtedly be kinder to Labour. It will probably record a government that genuinely did raise standards in almost every area of the public service and improved many facets of national life, albeit at great financial cost (2) – health, science and culture policy stand out as particular successes (Uberoi et al, 2009).
But it will also record that Labour tested a number of ideas to their logical conclusion, if not to their exhaustion. To be clear, I do not mean that these exhausted ideas were necessarily wrong, or that they have no place at all in thinking about the future. What I mean to say is that an exhausted idea has nothing new to offer us, and that it cannot be a source of renewal.
The first idea is centralisation, which is exhausted because there is simply no further to go. Look at the international data and the UK stands out as the second most fiscally centralised country in the developed world, beaten only by tiny New Zealand (OECD, 2009). The OECD does not, unfortunately, collect data on the amount of regulation and targetry that central governments impose on lower tiers, but it is a fair bet that the UK would come close to the top of that list as well. It is nigh on impossible to imagine that more centralisation might lead to a better governed England.
Labour’s love of centralisation stems from a lack of faith in local service providers. In a recent speech to the Institute for Government, Tony Blair made clear his belief that: ‘If you want to drive through systemic change, you’ve got to drive it through from the centre’ (Blair, 2010). This attitude combined with Labour’s traditional attachment to equality to create a deeply centralising approach to government in the name of driving through change, managerial efficiency and universally high standards.
The second idea is managerialism: essentially the philosophy of bringing private sector management disciplines into government. It is symbolised by the idea that there should be a ‘line of sight’ from the centre of government down to the frontline, and by the McKinsey slogan that ‘everything can be measured and what gets measured gets managed’. Again, there is simply no further to go with this idea – it is very hard to imagine a state more managerial that Britain at the height of Blairism.
Managerialism created unintended consequences, encouraging public servants to manage the target rather than serve customers, and because simple top-down goals seldom offer a solution to complex social policy goals. One government insider recently described the ‘cycle of despair’ which faced the government in areas like teen pregnancy, as more targets were set, more money was spent and the reality on the ground remained stubbornly resistant to change. The result was too often services that looked good on the government’s performance indicators, but which disappointed citizens. This might be forgivable if managerial approaches had increased efficiency, but it is not clear they did.
At the same time, central government – and members of the cabinet themselves – were completely overloaded by the sheer weight of accountability they took on for things that were beyond their control – as David Blunkett put it in one speech, they had ‘responsibility without power – the worst of all worlds’ (Blunkett, 2002). Experiments such as Foundation Trusts struggled to make much difference, because in the absence of an unambiguous devolution of full responsibility for a service, the public tends to default to holding central government responsible (ippr/PwC, 2009).
The final exhausted idea is Labour’s particular tradition of bossy statism, which is deeply connected to the previous two strands of thinking. As Labour tried to find new ways to achieve outcomes, it increasingly started seeing the public themselves as an adjunct to the public sector. People’s behaviour become another factor for government to manage through new criminal offences and regulations, while community and voluntary action was all too often instrumentalised as a mere tool for achieving government objectives.
Between 1997 and 2007, the Blair governments dreamt up 303 initiatives designed to change public behaviour, with the Department of Health and the Home Office producing the most (6 et al, 2010). On some measures, Labour created a new criminal offence for every day it spent in office. The voluntary sector doubled in size on the back of state contracts that usually came with strings attached.
While these three ideas might have driven the mainstream of new Labour thinking, there was always a lively heterodox debate bubbling under the service. It was expressed in ideas drawn from traditions like mutualism (Foundation Trusts), communitarianism (community empowerment and asset ownership) and post-bureaucracy (Personal Budgets and patient choice). But these are precisely the ideas that have been raided by the Coalition.
The worrying exhaustion of Labour’s narrative about the relationship between citizen and state is already expressing itself on the public stage. Gordon Brown hardly spoke about public services in his last few years as Prime Minister (3), and the candidates vying to succeed him offer a narrow choice between continuing down a broadly Blairite track or tacking slightly to a more traditional leftism.
At the same time, think tanks are busy rummaging through pre-Labour traditions for inspiration about what might come next. Phillip Blond and Maurice Glasman – ‘red Tory’ and ‘blue Labour’ respectively – are only the most visible players in this game. Other examples include Richard Reeves’ attempt to disinter new liberalism (Reeves and Collins, 2010); Stuart White’s revival of republicanism (see, for instance, White and Leighton, 2008); and Charles Leadbeater’s rather unconvincing attempt to reinterpret the post-Civil War diggers as the forerunners of today’s computer hackers (Leadbeater, 2010) (4).
The Coalition critique
If Labour presided over a period of optimism and growth in the role of the state, then the Coalition promises an era of modesty and scepticism. The most obvious difference lies in the esoteric but fundamental difference in attitudes to outputs – the widgets that government produces – and outcomes – the result those widgets achieve when they interact with society.
The Coalition appears much less interested in outcomes. It does not seem to want to be held to account for its management of complex social issues like education or health where it sees itself as just one contributor among many. Instead, it wants to provide resources and create frameworks that allow wider society to take care of the outcomes. Look at Michael Gove’s policy on free schools, which is at least as much about devolving responsibility for education to parents as it is about raising standards for all. Or take Theresa May’s plans for elected local sheriffs, again at least as much an attempt to shift responsibility as to reduce crime.
Combine this with a promise from Eric Pickles at the Communities department of a ‘revolutionary’ project to devolve power to localities, and you start to see the outlines of a very different kind of state emerging. It will be smaller, less ambitious and, if it can find a way to translate the idea of a ‘big society’ into meaningful reality, then it will rely much more on voluntary action by citizens themselves. If you work in a local public service, then expect your spending to look a lot more like it did in 1996, and if you work in the civil service then you are probably already trying to work out which 25 per cent or more of your budget to cut.
The next Labour Prime Minister will inherit a central government and a system of governing that is radically different from the one they left behind. Whitehall departments will be smaller and perhaps with less ambition in their DNA. They will certainly have much less direct control over the public sector. In this context, simply increasing spending again and trying to return the state to the golden age of the mid-2000s is highly unlikely to be a winning election strategy.
New ideas are out there, and in the current set of leadership challengers we have four candidates with a demonstrable interest in creative thinking. But if they want to renew the party’s intellectual wellsprings and help it adapt for the future, they need to open up debate across the Labour movement about some tough issues. Looking solely at my own discipline of public management, I can see three key issues that need to be addressed to start developing a renewed vision for the role of the state.
The first is equality. Labour has always found it hard to embrace devolution because of the fear that this will lead to postcode lotteries, with the poorest most likely to suffer from poor services. Central control has become a sort of comfort blanket for the party – it creates the illusion of uniform national standards, but in practice fails to deliver them while squeezing out space for local innovation. A key goal for the next Labour government should therefore be to build the capacity of local government and local communities to decide for themselves what level of service should be provided, how it should be provided and at what cost.
Second, Labour needs to debate its attitude to money. In the past, the Labour movement has sometimes come close to assuming that the mere act of spending is progressive, especially if combined with reform. Health service pay, for instance, rose by 26.6 per cent between 1998 and 2008 (ONS, 2009). There are lots of good reasons for this, but the net result was sometimes just to pay existing staff a lot more, sometimes for less work (see, for instance, National Audit Office, 2008). In reality, taxing the public to pay for social programmes is only really justifiable if we know that those programmes will deliver good results at a reasonable price.
We might need a more disciplined sort of progressive politics which is ruthless about assessing the effectiveness of social spending and in stopping things that aren’t working. Labour could learn from Canada, where departments are required to regularly cut five per cent of their total budget. This would allow the government to scrap poorly performing programmes and create a large pool of money to reinvest in the government’s key priorities. Labour could also signal a change in direction by including sunset clauses in new legislation, requiring departments to report back to Parliament on whether the act is meeting its aims in practice. If a new initiative consistently underperformed, Parliament might be allowed to trigger a sunset debate to scrap the legislation.
Finally Labour might need to do less in government, but do it better. The central state can change society, but it cannot change everything at once, and it must recognise that real social change usually happens only through a lot of hard work over a long period of time – parliaments rather than months. This will be especially true in the kind of fragmented, devolved state that the Coalition will leave behind.
A Labour central government should still want to change the world, but it should focus on a few long term goals – perhaps five to ten really big things like ending child poverty – where it will use spending and political capital to focus a highly decentralised and independent public sector, and the energy of citizens themselves. In some of these areas, the goal might be to organise social movements for change, with the centre working in partnership with delivery organisations to develop policy frameworks that allow local discretion and flexibility (5). This is not necessarily a call for a small state – ending child poverty is likely to be very expensive indeed – but it definitely is a plea for the prioritisation and successful implementation of a few transformative initiatives at the expense of less important programmes.
Whether it’s a more disciplined and devolved kind of state, or crime, poverty, health and foreign policy, the Labour movement badly needs to open up intellectual space and a pluralist debate to renew itself in a world where much of the best rhetoric and many of the most obvious ideas have already been taken. Let’s start now.
References
Blair, T. (2010) ‘The importance of governance in the modern world’, speech, Institute for Government, 28.06.2010.
Blunkett, D. (2002) ‘Responsibility without power, the worst of all worlds’, extracts from a speech to Labour local government and women’s conference, Cardiff, The Guardian 01.02.2002.
Davies, W. (2010) ‘Forward to the past!’, OurKingdom 1.04.2010.
Harker, L. and Oppenheim, C. (2010) Will New Labour leave a lasting legacy?, London, ippr.
ippr/PwC (2009) Who’s accountable? The challenge of giving power away in a centralised political culture, London, ippr.
Leadbeater, C. (2010) ‘This is one utopian vision that need not be so far from reality’, The Independent 29,03.2010.
National Audit Office (2008) NHS Pay Modernisation: New contracts for general practice services in England, London, NAO.
OECD (2009) Government at a Glance 2009, Paris, OECD.
ONS (2009) Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings.
Parker, S, et al. (2007) ‘Beyond Delivery’, in The Collaborative State, London, Demos.
Reeves, R. and Collins, P. (2010) The Liberal Republic, London, Demos.
Uberoi, V. et al. (2009) Options for a New Britain, London, Palgrave MacMillan.
Watt, N. (2010) ‘“There’s no such thing as ‘big society’”, senior Tories tell Cameron’, The Guardian 20.04.2010.
White, S. and Leighton, D. (eds) (2008) Building a citizen society: the emerging politics of republican democracy, Lawrence and Wishart.
6, P et al. (2010) ‘Making People More Responsible: the Blair governments’ programme for changing citizen behaviour’, in Political Studies 58 (3): 427-449.
Notes
1. After Cameron’s election as party leader, the Conservatives showed a particular interest in Demos, with Cameron and David Willetts giving significant speeches there. Senior Conservatives attended a number of policy seminars with Demos staff.
2. For a fuller account see Harker and Oppenheim, 2010.
3. Author’s analysis of prime ministerial speeches presented on the Number 10 website.
4. For a general discussion on this trend, see Davies, 2010.
5. For an example of this approach in action, see Parker, S. et al, 2007.
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