Patrick Diamond writes that the process of governing is being transformed into a highly politicised form of campaigning, with polling and short-term politics being more important to Ministers than long-term policy. This puts the capacity of the state to steer a sensible course through the perilous post-Brexit landscape in serious doubt.
Dominic Cummings’ arrival as chief strategist in Downing Street has led to a flurry of speculation about the seemingly imminent demise of the British civil service. The newly appointed Number Ten supremo has been a vehement and long standing critic of Whitehall. He believes civil servants are incompetent generalists who are incapable of thinking imaginatively about policy, and hopeless at executing ministerial initiatives. Departments are littered with examples of failed implementation. For Cummings, the very idea of a permanent civil service is ‘one for the history books’. He promises a ‘reign of terror’ that enforces the Prime Minister’s will across Whitehall, and drains the swamp of bureaucratic largesse.
Yet the precarious position in which the civil service now finds itself certainly precedes the arrival of Mr Cummings. As Whitehall watchers have observed for two decades, the machinery of government is being steadily but fundamentally transformed by what the late Peter Aucoin termed the ‘new political governance’: a doctrine that regards the process of governing as a permanent and highly politicised form of campaigning, where Ministers seek on a daily basis to renew their contract with voters. Heightened media scrutiny and a more consumer-orientated political culture have raised the pressures on governments. Ministers increasingly seek experts in polling and short-term politics, rather than long-term policy. We have travelled a long way from the time when the Labour Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, was able to boast that the British civil service, ‘was the envy of all the world’.
This new permanent campaign style, encouraged by the crisis over Brexit and the ensuing clash between representative and direct democracy, means the structure of the civil service in Britain is being recast by three major shifts. The first is the growth of politically appointed advisers. All governments since the 1990s have sought to pack Whitehall with loyal apparatchiks. Their numbers have now reached over 90. Special advisers adept at handling an often hostile media are a particularly valuable commodity, but government has been contaminated by the rise of the spin machine and permanent campaign. Political aides help to enforce the political will of Ministers, overcoming the bureaucratic inertia allegedly imposed by the Whitehall machine. Advisers are free to attack the monopoly over policy-making once coveted by the civil service, to the detriment of due process.
The second shift is the personalisation of civil service appointments with Ministers increasingly hand-picking their favourite officials for the top jobs. Secretaries of state use back-channels to veto the appointment of civil servants to key posts who they believe are not ‘one of us’. Mandarins who seek promotion are encouraged to fulfil the immediate wishes of their political masters. The higher turnover of permanent secretaries leads to instability in Whitehall departments. The independence of the civil service has been repeatedly undermined.
The third shift is the emergence of a bureaucracy that is becoming ‘promiscuously partisan’, unwilling to speak truth to power. Civil servants are more likely than ever to be dragged into defending government policy. For an official to dissent from the expressed views of their Minister is to commit career suicide. Yet the ability of officials to say no is a vital ingredient in the ‘governing marriage’ between Ministers and civil servants.
The consequence of the politicisation of the government machine for the quality of statecraft in Britain have been deleterious. British government is more exposed than ever to ‘blunders’. For the last 30 years, delivery failures in the British state have ranged from the politically catastrophic poll tax to the negotiation of a series of botched government contracts that cost the British taxpayer billions. The late Anthony King observed that policy-making and implementation now resemble, ‘a nineteenth century cavalry charge’. With a no deal Brexit beckoning on 31 October, policy failures may become even more catastrophic.
As well as politicising Whitehall, the ethos of governing by permanent campaign reinforces endemic short-termism. It is easier to toss difficult issues from the funding of social care to prison overcrowding into the ‘too difficult’ box. Governments focused on tomorrow’s headlines fail to think imaginatively about how policy can address the most important issues in public life from improving the long-term rate of economic growth in an era of technological disruption, to strengthening life satisfaction and well-being across a socially and culturally polarized population.
As a consequence of perceived incompetence, trust in public institutions is eroding. The British system of government is passing through a critical juncture. A fundamental debate is required about the future of British governing institutions. Legitimate questions abound. How can the actions of political advisers be better scrutinized? Should the appointment of special advisers be regulated independently? How can civil servants be more effectively protected from political interference? What role should Ministers play in appointing high-ranking officials?
The traditional model of British government where Ministers and officials worked together closely to fashion effective policies has morphed into a ‘them and us’ model, where politicians and civil servants are at odds, believed to have conflicting interests. In an atmosphere of growing turbulence at the heart of Whitehall, the capacity of the British state to steer a sensible course through the perilous post-Brexit landscape is increasingly in doubt.
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Patrick Diamond is Associate Professor of Public Policy at Queen Mary, University of London, and a former adviser in 10 Downing Street. He is the author of The End of Whitehall? published by Palgrave MacMillan.
Featured image credit: Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence.
Get rid of the bloated inefficient generalists and particularly those fresh out of University who have plenty of ideas but absolutely no idea how to get from A to B in the real world and deliver anything tangible that contributes to GDP.
This is a very interesting argument but the author fails to explain
Is there really any evidence that the rise in special advisers and attention to public opinion has led to poor policy making across the board? King & Crewe’s book on UK government failures highlighted many mistakes in low-salience technocratic areas where public opinion simply wasn’t a factor. The government apparatus may be becoming more political in disallowing dissent on the government’s top policy priorities but this does not mean that all UK policy is affected by this sort-term thinking. Any rational ‘campaigning’ government would only focus on a handful of issues at a time due to the electorate’s limited capacity for noticing politics. Why would this change how policy is made on less salient issues?
The rise in Special Advisers stems from the 1997 government change, when the Labour Party was suspicious of whether the civil service would enact its will and few civil servants had any experience of how to treat an incoming government.
Anyone read the Crossman diaries? Anyone heard of Marcia Falkender and Harold Wilson’s kitchen cabinet? Of if you want to go back further, anyone read the account of the Circumlocution Office in Little Dorrit? I think the idea that there was once a time when the Civil Service was the willing partner of Cabinet Ministers and both were dedicated to developing long-term policies for the good of the nation without regard to short-term political issues, power games, or political advisors, and no doubt the trains ran on time and school children always did what they were told, is strictly for the birds. If the author of the original article wants me to think otherwise and persuade me that in some time in the distant past, perhaps before the Northcote-Trevelyan Reforms, things were better, then I think he should provide some hard evidence. Yes, I think it always has been this bad.
The comparison with nineteenth century cavalry charges is telling. Do you think the Civil Service was more competently run in the nineteenth century or any other century than nineteenth century cavalry regiments? Why should it have been?
I read an interesting article on a similar theme some time ago, by the Canadian philosopher joseph heath :
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/politics/the-forever-campaign-have-our-politicians-killed-democracy-by-being-too-good-at-politics
Heath focuses more on how the dynamics of electoral competition can undermine the ultimate purpose of democracy, which is to deliver good government. He gives an example of some fundamentally useless legislation which was introduced, which would serve no practical purpose, since existing legislation already covered the issue in question. It’s main purpose was to serve as political advertising. I suspect there are parallels in the UK with, for example, the psychoactive substances act. Not to mention basically everything the government has said or done relating to brexit.
Cummings is such a deeply cynical operator that under his watch I can imagine this will only get worse, reducing the quality of government even further.
I find a similar problem within a civil service department. People are unwilling to tell senior civil servants that they don’t understand things.
This has been going on for some time. I was a professional civil servant – an Economic Adviser – at the Department for Transport in 1988. I resigned as I felt that I did not have a secure future. After three years of working on Transport issues – including London Transport fare evasion and the collapse of parking enforcement in Central London – I was told that I was going to have to work on Water Privatisation.
This policy had no possible justification in terms of economics. It was simply political dogmatism. I had formerly been employed by the Greater London Council and worked for both sides of the political spectrum. I felt I was being subjected to a stress test
“Is He One of Us?”
I don’t think that the UK has considered that Brexit might be the first step in making nations irrelevant to multinational corporate power. The queen is a dottering old lady with no influence, whose offspring are philandering dimwits. The parliament cannot lead and is hell-bent on leading the UK like lemmings over the cliffs of Dover into a deep economic depression and the citizens sit idly by drinking Guinness and humming Rule Britania till they take their last breath. From the USA, Britain looks like it wants to see what the Irish potato famine was like.
Eventually US mulitcorps will buy up the country 19 cents on the dollar because the pound will be worthless. It will be the American revolution in reverse. At least that appears to be Trump’s vision. By 2021, the UK will invite conquest by the US just to restore civil order and Trump can gloat that he achieved what Hitler could not, and without dropping a single bomb – just by conning a selfish Prime Minister Boris mini-me.
This column is right on the mark. I don’t have any experience in the UK but I worked for central government in New Zealand. The civil service there as well as here was established to provide “free and frank” advice to decision makers who by and large do not have specialized experience in all aspects of policy, and can’t be expected to. When the National government came in, we were told what we could and could not say or write, down to the banning of specific words and phrases. Free and frank, indeed. More like free, frank, unchallenging and convenient. I was told in no uncertain terms when I first joined the ministry that I worked for the minister, not the people of New Zealand. That would have come as a surprise to the people of New Zealand who, it must be said, paid my salary.
It’s puzzling that people in general don’t care about this change, or actively support it. “Unelected bureaucrats” they say. But that implies that they would rather put their faith in politicians. Do they really understand this?
Most informed observers have always known that the political class has evolved innovative methods of communication which estranges its members from the voters they are supposed to represent.
In a well-functioning democracy, the Government has a moral duty to be open and honest with citizens about its policy positions. However, in an age of media-driven Government, tensions have become acute between the governing elite’s need to get their message across to citizens, and the Civil Service’s obligation to compile factually-based Government pronouncements.
However, it is nigh on impossible to separate out the true facts from such policy pronouncements because they are framed in language which propagates half-truths and sometimes, downright lies – with the deliberate intention of deceiving. Even more worryingly, press releases which are the primary source of information for the press and media about what Government is doing are crafted in such a way as to, in effect, say ‘look here, not there’ thereby focusing their attention exactly where Government wants them to, away from areas it would rather not defend in public.
One of the reasons for this modus operandi is that Government is preoccupied with presentation, manipulation of words and the dark art of spinning – instead of working on its programme of reform to deliver public services efficiently, to satisfy the wants, needs and expectations of the electorate.
The political imperative of needing to put a positive slant on everything the Government does or will do, irrespective of whether it is true or not, is the reason why spin has become the centrepiece of this Government’s communications strategy. And because Government has got a monopoly on inside information (enabling it to maintain extremely tight control), it uses spin to divert attention away from the key issues that really matter to citizens and consequently, succeeds in suppressing alternative views and criticism from those on the outside, including Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
Conventional wisdom has it that Ministers shape high-level policy and select from policy options developed by special advisers and mandarins, whilst it is the job of senior Civil Servants to define lower-level policy detail underneath, so that it can be used by the rest of the Civil Service to implement the policy of the Government. However, the eagerness with which senior Civil Servants have complied with their political masters’ desire to see policy announcements framed around presentation and spin, at the expense of substance, would explain why their skills set has been narrowed down to this single, dark art.
It would also explain why the Civil Service has failed to deliver against promises made by the governing elite, in their election manifestos. This failure has been brought about by the erosion and downgrading of traditional specialist disciplines in the Civil Service like technical, commercial and project execution & delivery – skills which are absolutely essential to the delivery of public services in today’s world.
What’s more, this intense focus of attention on presentation alone has resulted in a massive gap opening up between the leadership and lower ranks of the Civil Service, who have to deal with the reality of delivering public services on the ground, on a day-to-day basis, which has in itself led to alienation and disaffection.
@JagPatel3