Oxford Handbook: British Politics
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Ronan McNabbthe oxford handbook of
BRITISH POLITICS
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the oxford handbook of
..........................................................................................................................
BRITISH POLITICS
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Edited by
MAT THEW FLINDERS
ANDREW GAMBLE
COLIN HAY
and
MICHAEL KENNY
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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ISBN 978–0–19–923095–2
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Preface
..............................
The study of British politics has been reinvigorated in recent years as a generation of
new scholars seeks to build upon a distinct disciplinary heritage while also exploring
new empirical territory. It is very much in this context that the Oxford Handbook
of British Politics has been designed and published. However the central ambition
of this collection is not just to illustrate both the breadth and depth of scholarship
that is to be found within the field. It is also concerned with promoting the study
of British politics. It seeks to do so by demonstrating the vibrancy and critical self-
reflection that has cultivated a much sharper and engaging—notably less insular—
approach to the terrain it seeks to explore and understand. In this emphasis on critical
engagement, disciplinary evolution, and a commitment to shaping rather than resta-
ting the discipline, the Oxford Handbook of British Politics is consciously distinctive.
It is not intended as a standard text on British politics, nor a set of review articles,
and it certainly does not replicate the various encyclopaedic survey-like collections
on British politics that are now available. In showcasing the diversity now to be found
in the analysis of British politics, the Oxford Handbook of British Politics is built upon
three foundations.
The first principle that underpins this collection is a broad understanding of ‘the
political’. It is exactly this inclusive approach that has allowed us to embrace a much
broader range of topics, themes, and issues than would commonly be found within
a text on British politics. As a result, topics that would generally be viewed as core
elements of British politics—for example Parliament, the core executive, political
parties, and economic management—are set alongside those which might at first
glance appear outliers when viewed through a traditional lens, like generational
change, risk analysis, political marketing. But what is immediately obvious on reading
such chapters is how readily they complement and build upon more established
themes within the discipline, and how they aid our understanding in teasing apart
the challenges and complexity of modern governance.
This emphasis on an inclusive approach also characterizes the second principle that
has shaped this collection—namely, diversity in relation to commissioned authors. As
a glance at the contents page reveals, the Oxford Handbook of British Politics includes
chapters from both established and emerging names. It also includes contributions
from scholars and practitioners alike. And, reflecting the genuinely international
scope of the contemporary analysis of British politics, the collection includes chapters
written by scholars based in North America, Australia, and mainland Europe.
The final principle underpinning this collection is a focus on the very nature of
the distinctiveness to which we have already pointed. Every chapter in its own way
vi preface
and through a number of approaches seeks to reflect on what is distinctive about
British politics—in terms of both the empirical nature of the issue of concern, and
the theories and methods that have been deployed to unravel the nature and causes
of the debate. The issue of distinctiveness is of critical significance in relation to a
long-standing epistemological and methodological tension between what can (and
has) been termed ‘British political studies’ and those approaches that commonly
fall within the rubric of ‘political science’. The first section of this collection—
‘Approaches’—seeks to engage with this debate and challenge, or at least soften,
the sub-disciplinary barriers that have so often tended to demarcate the study of
British politics. In many ways this aspiration dovetails with the inclusive nature of this
collection, while also fitting with the generally more pluralistic approach to theories
and methods that has formed a defining feature of British political studies since its
emergence as a distinct profession during the middle of the twentieth century.
Taken together these three principles have provided the reference points within
which each author has been asked to prepare their chapter. The result is a unique
collection of commentaries that: draw upon the intellectual strengths of the study of
British politics; reflect the innate diversity and inclusiveness of the discipline; isolate
certain distinctive issues and then reflect on their broader international relevance;
and finally seek to point towards emerging or overlooked areas of research in order to
maintain a certain momentum or dynamism in relation to each particular sphere. In
some chapters the nature of the topic or the approach of the author has encouraged
an emphasis on some of these issues more than others. As with all projects of this
nature, the editors have sought gently to steer whilst resisting the temptation to row,
setting down the key principles and ambitions but leaving it up to each author to
interpret and emphasize these markers as they see fit. However, a degree of indepen-
dent assessment and refinement was achieved through an editorial process in which
each chapter was independently refereed by at least three established scholars. We are
immensely grateful to all those scholars who were willing to contribute some of their
time to this project by acting as reviewers.
The output of this process is a collection of chapters that, we feel, reflects the
resurgence of British politics as a discipline while also seeking to probe and extend
its boundaries in order to draw upon new approaches and perspectives. We hope the
outcome of this project is a more refined and sophisticated appreciation not only of
the British political tradition but also of the varied insights that the analysis of British
politics can contribute more broadly.
The editors were saddened to hear of the death of Sir Bernard Crick, one of
our contributors, shortly before this volume went to press. Bernard’s essay in this
collection is one of the last essays he wrote, and provides an excellent illustration of
his significance and originality as a commentator on our political culture and life.
Matthew Flinders
Andrew Gamble
Colin Hay
Michael Kenny
Contents
.....................................
List of Figures xii
List of Tables xiv
List of Contributors xvi
Abbreviations xix
PART I APPROACHES
Section One: The British Tradition
1. Politics as an Academic Vocation 3
Michael Kenny
2. Antecedents 25
Dennis Kavanagh
3. The British Study of Politics 42
Robert E. Goodin
Section Two: Political Science
4. Institutionalism 57
B. Guy Peters
5. Rational Choice 75
Keith Dowding
6. Behaviouralism 92
Robert Johns
Section Three: Critical Perspectives
7. Anti-Foundationalism 115
Mark Bevir
8. Feminism 138
Vicky Randall
9. The Oakeshottians 154
Paul Kelly
viii contents
Section Four: Modes of Political Writing
10. Political Journalism 172
Peter Riddell
11. Biography 187
David Marquand
12. The Novel 201
Bernard Crick
PART II INSTITUTIONS
Section Five: Democracy
13. Parliament 221
Alexandra Kelso
14. Constitutionalism 239
Adam Tomkins
15. Judiciary 262
Keith Ewing
16. The Party System 283
Peter Mair
Section Six: Governance
17. Delegation 303
Matthew Flinders
18. Regulation 325
Michael Moran
19. Central State 342
Oliver James
20. Lobbying 365
Grant Jordan
Section Seven: Territory
21. Devolution in the UK 384
Charlie Jeffery
22. Localism 404
Jonathan Davies
contents ix
23. European Devolution 423
Michael Keating
PART III IDENTITIES
Section Eight: Identification
24. Political Parties 441
Richard Heffernan
25. Voting and Identity 461
Charles Pattie and Ron Johnston
26. Ethnicity and Religion 484
Tariq Modood
Section Nine: National Identities
27. England 501
Julia Stapleton
28. Ireland 517
Richard English
29. Scotland and Wales 535
Christopher Harvie
Section Ten: Location
30. The European Union 553
Jim Buller
31. Britain and America 571
Andrew Gamble
32. After Empire 590
Joel Krieger
PART IV INEQUALITIES
Section Eleven: Sources
33. Class 609
Fiona Devine
x contents
34. Race 629
James Hampshire
35. Gender 646
Fiona Mackay
Section Twelve: Management
36. Ageing and Generational Politics 664
Alan Walker
37. Welfare Reform 684
Howard Glennerster
38. Aid and International Development 699
Oliver Morrissey
Section Thirteen: Conflict
39. Protest 719
Brian Doherty
40. Immigration and Citizenship 735
Randall Hansen
41. The Security State 752
Richard J. Aldrich
PART V PRO CESSES
Section Fourteen: Social Change
42. Participation and Social Capital 773
Paul Whiteley
43. Political Marketing 798
Heather Savigny
44. Technology and Risk 818
Henry Rothstein
Section Fifteen: Dynamics
45. Europeanization 837
Kevin Featherstone
46. Globalization 855
Colin Hay
contents xi
47. Marketization 879
Colin Crouch
Section Sixteen: Economy
48. National Economic Policy 897
Helen Thompson
49. European Economy 912
Ben Clift
50. International Economy 932
Peter Burnham and Steven Kettell
Author Index 949
Subject Index 965
List of Figures
.......................................................
16.1 Labour and Conservative share of electorate, 1970–2005 291
16.2 Absolute difference in Labour and Conservative seat shares, 1970–2005 296
17.1 The Russian Doll Model 315
17.2 From Russian Doll to spider’s web 318
19.1 The central state 351
20.1 Range of ‘lobbying’ meanings 370
25.1 Declining class voting, 1960s–2000s 467
25.2 Weakening partisanship, 1960s–2000s 467
25.3 Turnout at British general elections since 1945 475
33.1 Staying on rates (proportions) by parental income group 616
33.2 Degree completion by age 23 by parental income group 617
33.3 Average rank of test scores at 22, 42, 60, and 120 months by SES of
parents and early rank position 619
40.1 Unemployment rates by ethnic group and age, 2001–2 744
42.1 The relationship between political participation and government
effectiveness in thirty-seven countries, 2004 775
42.2 Turnout in United Kingdom general elections, 1945–2005 777
42.3 Trends in party membership 1983–2005 778
42.4 The number of political actions undertaken in a year 780
42.5 Membership of organizations 783
42.6 Attempts to influence education, medical treatment, or working
conditions 787
42.7 The relationship between indicators of participation and social
capital in the British Election Study, 2005 793
46.1 Ratio of merchandise trade to GDP at current prices, 1913–2005 864
46.2 Ratio of British exports to the EU to those to the rest of the world 865
46.3a Origin of British imports (goods), 1998–2006 865
46.3b Destination of British exports (goods), 1998–2006 866
46.4a Origin of British imports (services), 1992–2005 867
list of figures xiii
46.4b Destination of British exports (services), 1992–2005 868
46.5a Origin of British inbound FDI, 1996–2005 868
46.5b Destination of British outbound FDI, 1996–2005 869
46.5c British inbound FDI, 1996–2005 869
46.5d British outbound FDI, 1996–2005 870
46.6 Daily average foreign-exchange turnover, 1988–2004 871
46.7 Equity turnover on the London Stock Exchange—UK and foreign
holdings, 1987–2004 871
46.8a British in-migration, 1971–2004 872
46.8b British out-migration, 1971–2004 873
46.9 Britain’s balance of trade in goods and services, 1992–2005 875
46.10 Britain’s balance of trade in goods and services with the EU, 1992–2005 876
List of Tables
....................................................
3.1 Journal impact factors, 2005–7 50
3.2 Department rankings in global top fifty, 1993–2002 51
7.1 Varieties of anti-foundationalism 120
8.1 Percentage of female staff in politics departments in Britain 141
16.1 UK general election results since 1945 290
16.2 Patterns of alternation in government, 1950–2000 293
17.1 The study of delegation: three dominant traditions 306
17.2 Delegated governance, 2007 316
19.1 Mainstream politics research on the central state and its
interpretivist critics 344
21.1 Electoral polarization in Northern Ireland, 1997–2005 392
25.1 Partisan identification, 1964 463
25.2 Household class and voting, 1964 464
25.3 Modelling voting at the 2005 general election: multinomial logit 471
25.4 Modelling party identification at the 2005 general election:
multinomial logit 473
25.5 National identity and the regional vote at the 2007 Scottish
parliament election 479
33.1 Symmetrical odds ratios: men and women 613
36.1 Voting turnout in general elections by age and gender 675
38.1 Allocation of bilateral aid, 2002–3 and 2006–7 705
40.1 Admissions of work permit holders and their dependants,
excluding EEA nationals, by category and nationality, 2000–4 738
40.2 Grants of Settlement for Family Formation and Reunion, excluding
EEA nationals, 2000–4 739
40.3 Asylum applications in select Western countries, 1985–98 740
42.1 Acts of political participation in Britain 779
42.2 Variations in political participation by social backgrounds 781
list of tables xv
42.3 Variations in individual, contact, and collective actions by social
backgrounds 782
42.4 Types of organizational membership 784
42.5 Participatory activities in the ‘most important’ organization 785
42.6 Changes in participation, 1984–2000 785
46.1 The public discourse of globalization in Britain 858
46.2 British policy-makers’ understandings of, and attitudes towards,
globalization 860
46.3 Equity and bond portfolio allocation, 2003 872
47.1 Marketization strategies in response to public service failures, and
newly emerging problems 881
List of Contributors
..............................................................................
Richard J. Aldrich is Professor of International Security at the University of
Warwick.
Mark Bevir is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.
Jim Buller is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of York.
Peter Burnham is Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of
Warwick.
Ben Clift is Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Warwick.
Bernard Crick was an Honorary Fellow in Politics and International Relations at the
University of Edinburgh.
Colin Crouch is Professor of Governance and Public Management at the University
of Warwick Business School.
Jonathan Davies is Reader in Public Policy at the University of Warwick.
Fiona Devine is Professor and Head of the School of Social Sciences at the University
of Manchester.
Brian Doherty is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Keele University.
Keith Dowding is Professor of and Head of Political Science at the Research School
of Social Sciences at the Australian National University.
Richard English is Professor of Politics at Queen’s University, Belfast.
Keith Ewing is Professor of Public Law at King’s College London.
Kevin Featherstone is Professor of Contemporary Greek Studies at the London
School of Economics.
Matthew Flinders is Professor of Parliamentary Government and Governance at the
University of Sheffield.
Andrew Gamble is Professor of Politics and a Fellow of Queens’ College at the
University of Cambridge.
Howard Glennerster is Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics.
list of contributors xvii
Robert E. Goodin, FBA, is Distinguished Professor of Social and Political Theory and
of Philosophy at the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National
University.
Randall Hansen is an Associate Professor and holds a Canada Research Chair in
Political Science at the University of Toronto.
James Hampshire is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sussex.
Christopher Harvie is a Member of the Scottish Parliament and formerly Professor
of British and Irish Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany.
Colin Hay is Professor of Political Analysis and Co-Director of the Political Economy
Research Centre at the University of Sheffield.
Richard Heffernan is Reader in Government at the Open University and a Visiting
Professor at the University of Notre Dame.
Oliver James is Professor of Political Science at the University of Exeter.
Charlie Jeffery is Professor of Politics and Co-Director of the Institute of Governance
at the University of Edinburgh.
Robert Johns is Lecturer in Politics in the Department of Government at the Univer-
sity of Strathclyde.
Ron Johnston is a Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University
of Bristol.
Grant Jordan is Professor of Politics at the University of Aberdeen.
Dennis Kavanagh is Professor of Politics at the University of Liverpool.
Michael Keating is Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute,
Florence; and at the University of Aberdeen.
Paul Kelly is Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics.
Alexandra Kelso is Lecturer in British Politics at the University of Southampton.
Michael Kenny is Professor of Politics at Sheffield University and a Visiting Research
Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research.
Steven Kettell is Associate Professor of Politics and International Studies at the
University of Warwick.
Joel Krieger is the Norma Wilentz Hess Professor of Political Science at Wellesley
College.
Fiona Mackay is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Edinburgh.
Peter Mair is Professor of Comparative Politics at the European University Institute,
Florence.
xviii list of contributors
David Marquand is former Principal of Mansfield College, Oxford and currently a
Visiting Fellow in the Department of Politics, University of Oxford and Honorary
Professor of Politics at the University of Sheffield.
Tariq Modood is Professor of Sociology, Politics and Public Policy and the founding
Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of
Bristol.
Michael Moran is Professor of Government at the University of Manchester.
Oliver Morrissey is Professor in Development Economics and Director of the Centre
for Research in Economic Development and International Trade (CREDIT) in the
School of Economics, University of Nottingham.
Charles Pattie is a Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of
Sheffield.
B. Guy Peters is Maurice Falk Professor of American Government at the University
of Pittsburgh.
Vicky Randall is Professor in the Department of Government, University of Essex.
Peter Riddell is Assistant Editor at The Times.
Henry Rothstein is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Geography and Deputy
Director of the King’s Centre for Risk Management at King’s College London.
Heather Savigny is Lecturer in Politics at the University of East Anglia.
Julia Stapleton is Reader in Politics at Durham University.
Helen Thompson is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Cambridge.
Adam Tomkins is John Millar Professor of Public Law at the University of Glasgow.
Alan Walker is Professor of Social Policy and Social Gerontology at the University of
Sheffield.
Paul Whiteley is Professor of Government at the University of Essex.
Abbreviations
......................................................
AFDC Aid for Families with Dependent Children
AHA American Historical Association
AHRC Arts and Humanities Research Council
AM Assembly Member
APG All Party Group
APPC Association of Professional Political Consultants
APSA American Political Studies Association
AWM adult worker model
B&R Bevir and Rhodes
BCS British Cohort Study
BES British Election Study
BGOP Better Government for Older People
BHPS British Household Panel Survey
BIS Bank for International Settlements
BISA British International Studies Association
BME Black and Minority Ethnic
BNP British National party
BP basic pension
BSE bovine spongiform encephalopathy
BT British Telecom
CA Countryside Alliance
CAP Common Agricultural Policy
CBI Confederation of British Industry
CD Collier and Dollar
CEDAW Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women
CFSP Common Foreign and Security Policy
CIPR Chartered Institute for Public Relations
CMEB Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain
xx abbreviations
CND Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
CRE Commission for Racial Equality
DCLG Department of Communities and Local Government
DFID Department for International Development
DM Deutschmark
DSEi Defence Systems and Equipment International
DTI Department of Trade and Industry
DUP Democratic Unionist Party
DVLA Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency
ECB European Central Bank
ECHR European Convention on Human Rights
ECJ European Court of Justice
EEA European Economic Area
EHRC Equalities and Human Rights Commission
EMA Education Maintenance Allowance
EMU Economic and Monetary Union
EO equal opportunities
EOC Equal Opportunities Commission
ERM Exchange Rate Mechanism
ESRC Economic and Social Research Council
ESS European Security Strategy
EU European Union
FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office
FDI foreign direct investment
FE further education
FSA Financial Services Authority
FSA Food Standards Agency
FSM free school meal
GBS General Budget Support
GCHQ Government Communications Headquarters
GCSE General Certificate of Secondary Education
GDP gross domestic product
GE gender equality
GHS General Household Survey
abbreviations xxi
GM Gender Mainstreaming
GNP gross national product
HC House of Commons
HE higher education
HEFCE Higher Education Funding Council for England
HMT Her Majesty’s Treasury
HRA Human Rights Act
HSE Health and Safety Executive
HSMP Highly Skilled Migrant Programme
IGO intergovernmental organization
ILP International Labour party
IMF International Monetary Fund
IRA Irish Republican Army
ISC Intelligence and Security Committee
IT information technology
ITO International Trade Organization
JAC Judicial Appointments Commission
JIC Joint Intelligence Committee
JTAC Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre
LME liberal market economy
MAFF Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food
MCB Muslim Council of Britain
MCS Millennium Cohort Study
MDG Millennium Development Goal
MEP Member of the European Parliament
MMR measles, mumps, rubella
MoD Ministry of Defence
MP Member of Parliament
MSP Member of the Scottish Parliament
MVT median voter theorem
NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement
NAIRU non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NCDS National Child Development Study
xxii abbreviations
NDPB Non-departmental public body
NGO non-governmental organization
NHS National Health Service
NIMBY not in my back yard
NMW National Minimum Wage
NPC National Pensioners Convention
NPM New Public Management
NSM new social movement
ODA Overseas Development Administration
ODM Ministry for Overseas Development
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
OMC open method of coordination
OMS Oxford Mobility Study
ORR Office of Rail Regulation
PASC Public Administration Select Committee
PFI private finance initiative
PM Prime Minister
PPP public–private partnership
PR public relations
PRSP Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper
PSA Political Studies Association
PSA Public Service Agreement
QMV qualified majority voting
RDM Russian Doll Model
RDR Rural Development Regulation
RIPA Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act
RRB Race Relations Board
SGP stability and growth pact
SDLP Social Democratic and Labour party
SDP Social Democratic party
SEA Single European Act
SES socio-economic status
SF Sinn Fein
SEPA Scottish Environment Protection Authority
abbreviations xxiii
SMPS single-member plurality system
SNP Scottish National party
SRO self-regulatory organization
SSA sub-Saharan Africa
SSRC Social Science Research Council
SV Satanic Verses
TCG Tasking and Coordinating Group
TUC Trades Union Congress
UKACIA UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs
UKIP United Kingdom Independence party
UUP Ulster Unionist party
WDF waste-derived fuel
WEU Western European Union
WM Westminster Model
WMD Weapons of Mass Destruction
WPR Western Peripheral Route
WTO World Trade Organization
WUNC worthiness, unity, numbers, commitment
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part i
.................................................................................................................
A P P ROACHES
.................................................................................................................
Section One: The British
Tradition
................................................................................................................
chapter 1
.................................................................................................................
POLITICS AS AN
AC A D E M I C
VO C AT I O N
.................................................................................................................
michael kenny
1.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
Has there been a distinctively British approach to teaching and studying politics in
its universities? If so, how best should we characterize the amalgam of indigenous
traditions, prejudices, and interests that comprise such a tradition? Is it the case, as
some now argue, that a distinctly British variant of political science has given way
before the pressures to conform to the standards and approaches associated with the
global hegemon in this subject area—American political science? Does British polit-
ical studies fit more naturally with continental European practice? Or does the very
notion of a singular national tradition of political scholarship belie the multiplicity
of perspectives and theories that have been in contention throughout the lifetime of
this subject?
Answers to these questions continue to divide the majority of those whose pro-
fessional careers involve the scholarly analysis and teaching of the subject known
variously as political studies, political science, Government, or Politics in British
universities. The unresolved disagreement on these issues, manifest in the multiplic-
ity of names which departments in this subject still carry, is far from novel. It is,
according to some commentators, one of the hallmarks of the eclectic, tolerant, and
diverse community of scholarship that has grown up in British universities through-
out the twentieth century (Kavanagh 2003; 2007). Others, however, see dysfunction
4 michael kenny
and weakness in this eclecticism (Dunleavy, Kelly, and Moran 2000; Aspinall 2006).
Many practitioners believe that a fully independent and mature political science has
only just begun to emerge in the UK, because the subject was for years held back by
the influence of powerful rival disciplines—History, Philosophy, and Law—and was
too enthralled to the gentlemanly amateurism that infused the study and teaching of
politics in the early twentieth century, at Oxford University above all (Hayward 1999;
Barry 1999).
In this chapter I aim to shed some light on these different perspectives, and
probe some of the assumptions about the development of Politics as an academic
discipline that shape contemporary thinking. I argue in particular that some deeply
entrenched assumptions underpin commonly held ideas about the purpose and
character of political studies as a modern, professionalized academic discipline.
These largely unspoken presuppositions represent encumbrances that deserve crit-
ical reflection at a time when the subject needs fresh, imaginative, and histori-
cally minded thinking about its current status and future development. Academic
practitioners have tended to avoid rather than address these questions about the
identity and purpose of the subject during the intensive years of self-conscious
professionalization. Recently there has been something of a move back to such ques-
tions, typically in the context of critical arguments about what political scientists
and thinkers have assumed about the character and limits of politics (Dunn 2000;
Freeden 2005; Gamble 2000; Hay 2007; Philp 2006; Stoker 2006). But it remains
the case that for most practitioners, the ethos of political science professionalism
is combined with a grudging pluralism about questions of method and theory
(Beer 1977: 5), and a growing acceptance of the idea that the different subfields of
study, such as comparative politics, area studies, and political theory, need to be
granted greater autonomy. The centrifugal dynamic associated with this last idea
is combined with and offset by the presumption that one of the most impor-
tant bonds uniting the disciplinary field is the ethos and status of professionalism
(Bevir 2001).
The identity supplied by such thinking is an uneasy one in key respects for the
subject and is limited as a guide in the face of the challenging and increasingly
competitive environment associated with Higher Education in the UK. Among the
myriad challenges facing the subject are such questions as: how to promote the
academic study of Politics, when politics itself is viewed with increasing indiffer-
ence and cynicism; how to defend the funding quota it receives from the major
funding body in the social sciences—the Economic and Social Research Council;
how to compete in a more competitive struggle for research funding from other
sources; how to convince university managers ever more inclined to invest in sure
returns that some of the subjects, courses, and centres in areas that have drifted
out of intellectual fashion are still worthy of support; and how to compete with
other national and international rivals for students and prestige. Other ongoing
intellectual challenges include questions about whether the boundaries between the
subject and its nearest neighbours—Sociology, Economics, History, and Law—are
aids or hindrances, and how to present as coherent a subject which increasingly looks
politics as an academic vocation 5
like a set of quasi-independent sub-disciplinary fiefdoms (Almond 1988). Whether
professionalism itself offers sufficiently robust and persuasive answers to these issues
is an increasingly vexed issue for the subject as a whole.
The question of what if anything binds political studies practitioners in the UK
needs to be more openly aired. We operate currently with only the dimmest sense of
how the current outlook of practitioners in this field compares with our predecessors.
Indeed a strengthening commitment to the ethos of professionalism is itself likely
to hamper, not help, our thinking in this regard. For it tends to encourage a rather
condescending and occasionally disdainful perspective towards the merits and worth
of earlier contributions (see Robert Goodin’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 3).
A widely held view is that political studies has achieved an overdue rigour and serious-
ness on the back of the disciplinary independence that was won, rather late in the day
for many contemporary tastes, from the late 1960s onwards. Until that point Politics
figured on the curriculum of a handful of universities in the form of papers taught
by scholars associated with the older established disciplines of History, Philosophy,
Economics, and Law (Kavanagh 2007). The development of modern political analy-
sis, it is therefore assumed, required the formation of a separate disciplinary field,
with clearly defined intellectual boundaries, new departments, and the paraphernalia
of professional self-organization. While this narrative captures something of the
importance and benefits that the practice of a strengthened sense of ‘disciplinarity’
(Collini 1988) (including new departments, courses, and a recent upsurge in UK
and overseas students) have undoubtedly brought into being, it is unduly one-eyed
and historically stunting as a guide to the subject’s complex intellectual past. In
the remainder of this chapter I discuss the three major intellectual props that have
nourished a good deal of the hubris that contemporary practitioners feel towards the
subject’s earlier history—the ethos of professionalism, a critical stance towards the
intellectual insularity and parochialism of the indigenous intellectual culture which
is assumed to have held political science back, and the presumption that mature
political analysis requires an epistemologically grounded distance from politics
itself.
1.2 On Professionalism
.............................................................................................................................................
The values and ethos associated with professionalism have over the last twenty years
become one important source of the shared identity of researchers and teachers
in what has become a more diversified academic subject. 1 Since its inception in
British universities, Politics has permitted important differences of focus, method,
1
As far back as 1977, Dennis Kavanagh and Richard Rose reported that ‘in style the study of politics
has become self-consciously professional and specialized’ (1977: 21).
6 michael kenny
and theory. This pluralistic approach was, however, nested within a widely shared
set of intellectual and normative values for much of the last century. These had to
a considerable extent been set down in the early decades of the twentieth century
(Kavanagh 2003), and comprised a rich interweaving of Whiggish liberalism, a lauda-
tory account of domestic political institutions, and a normative commitment to the
values of liberty and representative democracy (Kenny 2004; 2007).
These coordinates all began to lose their hold on British-based scholars in the two
decades after the Second World War. In the political and intellectual ferment of the
mid- to late 1970s, they were all subjected to extensive criticism (Gamble 1990). The
diversity of focus which once prevailed has become more entrenched and extensive,
and ‘the discipline’ has come to assume the form of a large, loosely demarcated arena
in which there coexist a number of fairly separate enclaves, under such headings
as comparative politics, public policy, political behaviour, political economy, and
political theory. International relations, which has developed in a semi-independent
relation to Politics, typically occupies the most separate of spaces within this broad
field, despite its many intellectual overlaps with and borrowings from the Politics
lexicon (Schmidt 1998).
Associated with the construction and separation of these enclaves have been such
developments as: the establishment of more journals covering smaller patches of
intellectual territory; the emergence of leading figures and gatekeepers with repu-
tations as leaders in particular subfields; and an increasingly disparate set of reference
literatures. Where once there were relatively few border posts and low or absent fences
between Politics and neighbouring subjects, there are now higher walls and a stronger
sense of commitment to the identity conferred by association with a specialist field.
The broad interwoven pattern of ‘ideas and institutions’ thinking which had shaped a
good deal of political study in Britain undertaken until the 1960s began to wane in the
1970s (Adcock and Bevir 2005). While some important differences and debates sub-
sisted within this broad paradigm, it also exerted a unifying effect on this fragmented
intellectual community. In the context of these changes, as well as some significant
shifts in the cultures and organizational structures of British universities, the subject
has been encouraged to take up the mantle of social science professionalism as the
medium through which it presents itself to external funders, university administra-
tors, and its potential student ‘customers’. The widespread diffusion of the notion
that, despite differences of specialist focus and interest, those employed to undertake
the study and teaching of Politics are united in respect of the professionally sanctioned
competence and skills which they demonstrate, can be seen as one small instance of
the much larger story of the emergence and power of professionals in the public sector
(Perkin 1990).
David Marquand develops this interpretation, pointing to the steady displacement
of ‘the nineteenth-century citizenship ideal’ in twentieth-century Britain by a:
discourse of professionalism and the self-image of the professional class. The
nineteenth-century themes of service, equity and trust remained central to both, but
they came to be articulated in a language of positivist rationality rather than one of civic
politics as an academic vocation 7
engagement. More and more, professionals saw themselves, and (more importantly)
presented themselves to the wider society, as technocratic specialists rather than mem-
bers of, and contributors to a broader civic community. (2004: 75)
The greater ‘hermeticism and self-confidence’ (76) which he detects among public-
sector professional groups in the second half of the last century found direct echoes
in the academy:
The growing prestige of the natural sciences, and the associated, almost exponential
growth in scientific knowledge and the effectiveness of applied science, led academics in
the humanities and, still more, in the social sciences to imitate their scientific colleagues
in certain key respects. Formerly, they had seen themselves as part of a broader public
culture, to whose development they were duty-bound to contribute, and which they
enriched by doing so. Now they tended increasingly to turn their backs on the public
culture, and on the concerns of those who inhabited it. (76)
Considering such changes in the context of the social sciences, he sees a common
shift within Economics, Sociology, and Politics towards an emphasis on high theory
and the growth of technical expertise in relation to research methodology, and a
concomitant waning of the aspiration for each to play a broader public role. A
major consequence of these changes has been the transformation of the academic
profession into ‘a secular priesthood, preoccupied by its own, increasingly arcane
internal arguments, all too often expressed in a rebarberative and inaccessible jargon,
and developed in obscure journals whose editorial practices aped those of the natural
sciences’ (76).
The kind of critical response to disciplinary developments that Marquand enunci-
ates presents the subject’s past as something very different to an ‘amateurish prequel’
(Hayward 1986) to today’s professionalism. His reading is echoed in arguments that
are still advanced at the margins of today’s disciplinary thinking, some of which
emanate from the hinterlands of the history of political thought and Oakeshottian
thinking in particular (Johnson 1989). This kind of analysis sheds important light
on the poverty of historical awareness displayed by today’s professional political
scientists (Nash 1995). Many of the latter caricature those who preceded them as
gentlemanly-amateurs lacking the requisite training, expertise, theoretical tools, or
properly collected data to deliver rigorous political understanding (Barry 1999). Little
of value, it seems, lies in the scholarly output associated with the subject prior to its
professionalized recent past. Only with the adoption of the theories and methodolog-
ical approaches favoured by political scientists elsewhere, or by other, non-British,
theoretical paradigms, did the cloying hold of a weak, underdeveloped, and inferior
indigenous tradition begin to fade.
This forceful critique offers an inverted mirror image of the conventional account
of how the subject has developed. Where most contemporaries assume a broadly
linear pattern of progression away from our amateurish forebears, Marquand speaks
for those who decry the intellectual effects of the rise of professionalism and its
associated modes of technical reason. This perspective offers a powerful counter-
image of the state of political studies. Its greatest merit for those seeking a more
8 michael kenny
sinuous and independent perspective on the intellectual history of this academic
subject is to remind us of the existence and interplay of rival conceptions of its ulterior
purpose and character. That these have all but disappeared from view ought to give us
pause for thought. Reconnecting with this lineage of critical and imaginative think-
ing is itself an important step towards greater historical awareness within political
studies.
1.3 The Uses of History
.............................................................................................................................................
The weakening sense of anchorage within the resources associated with an array
of familiar traditions of political thinking is closely bound up with some of the
trends and developments that Marquand and other disciplinary critics discuss. It is,
therefore, worth pausing to consider how key figures from the past deployed and
connected with the traditions available to them as they developed arguments for a
more independent and developed political analysis. This assessment has a direct bear-
ing on the adequacy of the presumption that the subject was for a long time inhib-
ited from becoming independent by a combination of the imperialism of subjects
like History and Philosophy, and other supposedly ingrained indigenous intellectual
weaknesses.
In his influential overview of the disciplinary field, The Study of Political Science
Today, published in Britain in 1971, W. J. M. Mackenzie, Professor of Government at
the University of Manchester, presented political studies as ‘awkwardly posed between
two strategies of teaching and research in political science’. The first of these was a
distinctively English liberal humanism in which the idea of political education as
an apprenticeship in coming to understand and deploy the insights of a (national)
political culture was fostered. This was a lineage he had imbibed, and come to
reflect critically upon, during his own years at Oxford. Also influential, Mackenzie
observed, was a rival perspective, the heir to an indigenous pattern of radicalism that
viewed politics as amenable to scientific analysis (understood predominantly as the
gathering and objective interpretation of facts about social issues), which would be
deployed on behalf of schemes of social and political reform. In his inaugural lecture
as Professor of Political Science at LSE, Harold Laski nodded towards the merits
and impact of the thinking of the School’s inaugural Chair in the subject, Graeme
Wallas (Laski 1940). Widely viewed as one of the founding fathers of the lineage later
labelled behaviouralism, Wallas was convinced of the merits of the scientific study of
mass political psychology (Adcock 2007; Wallas 2006). But this tradition was, Laski
observed, always tempered by the political morality and sensibilities associated with
the philosophical liberalism associated with Oxford University. Like Wallas, Laski
conceived of the creation of citizens as an integral aspect of the work he undertook as
scholar and teacher. As Mackenzie also observed, the ambition to foster and deepen
politics as an academic vocation 9
a culture of citizenship, and a related focus upon a growing number of threats to the
civic culture associated with mass democracy, were some of the key motifs around
which the subject developed in the first half of the last century.
These themes were central to the writing and thought of the inaugural Cambridge
Chair of Political Science, Sir Ernest Barker. For him, the study of social and political
thought was the centre-ground of what amounted to ‘a speculation about a group
of facts in the field of social conduct, a speculation intended to result in a general
schema which connects the facts systematically with one another and thus gives
an explanation of their significance’ (1928: 4). Such reflections took their bearings,
Barker believed, from the welter of insights and thinking associated with the grand
tradition of Western political philosophy.
These and other leading figures were thoroughly versed in the thinking and
methods of a range of conventionally separated intellectual fields—history, political
thought, constitutional government, and philosophy above all. All combined their
historical awareness and familiarity with a range of intellectual traditions with a
commitment to the development of the promotion of greater independence for, and
seriousness about, the undertaking of the study and teaching of politics. The ideas
of Wallas, Laski, Barker, and McKenzie were thus important resources for the for-
mation of a stand-alone discipline, rather than obstacles to, or encumbrances upon,
later developments. A detailed survey of what was being taught in this field which
G. D. H. Cole completed for UNESCO in 1950 offered an especially important (and
latterly forgotten) statement of the case for more extensive and coordinated teaching
of Politics, and pointed towards the necessity for disciplinary independence. 2
Similar arguments apply to earlier periods as well. As the historian Dorothy Ross
has demonstrated, the winning of professional independence for political science
in the United States at the very start of the twentieth century was mirrored and
influenced by currents of thinking from England (2007: 26). The decades from the
1880s to 1920s represent an important transitional period in which scholars began to
formulate an understanding of the historical past as a terrain that ought to be under-
stood in more analytical ways, and when important debates about the character of the
methods appropriate to the collection of data took hold. At Cambridge, the historian
J. R. Seeley called for the adoption of a greater sense of analytical detachment in both
the public discussion and the academic analysis of political phenomena. At least a
century before the same kinds of arguments had become de rigueur, he suggested
that politics itself should be looked at ‘as a field of study, if not of science’, and called
for it to be offered as a separate subject in British schools and universities (1923: 7).
Different kinds of ‘scientific’ approach to the study of politics, reflecting some of the
major competing characterizations of science itself, were propounded at all of the
universities where the subject was taught in the first half of the twentieth century.
These examples illustrate how wide of the mark are most conventional ideas about
the subject’s past. But, it might be countered, does a discipline need to be accurate
2
See also William Robson’s historically informed account of the subject, ‘Political Science in Great
Britain’ (1950).
10 michael kenny
or indeed curious about its own past to be successful? Historical awareness is not
an instrumental force dictating the health of a subject. Nevertheless there are good
prudential and intellectual reasons for taking seriously this deficiency. First, given that
judgements about originality and quality of interpretation are intrinsic to scholarly
practice, with what confidence can we gauge whether current analysis is truly original
or distinctive without a proper sense of what has come before (Dryzek and Leonard
1988)? Second, as with any other collective human entity, the adoption of future
trajectories is best undertaken with reference to, and in dialogue with, the shared past.
As a body of social-psychological and philosophical thought attests, it is only through
the establishment of a healthy relationship with the past that a collective entity makes
grounded and confident decisions about its future direction (Taylor 1992). And, third,
a more developed sense of discipline-history is bound to return to the horizons of
contemporaries’ insights from earlier periods as well as forgotten but fertile paths of
intellectual enquiry. These may be of worth in their own right, providing sources for
new kinds of enquiry, or serving as benchmarks for the evaluation of current ways of
thinking.
A more reflective, proportionate, and open-minded consideration of the disci-
pline’s development, current dilemmas, and different possible futures is long overdue.
And there is no better terrain from which to undertake such an evaluation than the
canvass of history. In the United States, a small but influential band of disciplinary
historians have kept alive memories of the noble and significantly political purposes
that infused the subject throughout its history (Dryzek and Leonard 1988; Farr 1988;
Gunnell 1993). They show too that the nature and impact of professionalism have long
figured within the subject’s historiography (Ricci 1984), and have become prominent
again in the wake of the recent perestroika movement that has campaigned against
the drive towards quantitative research and rational choice models (Miller 2001). In
the UK, by contrast, historical analysis of the subject is, with only a few exceptions,
regarded as the property of the great and the good—appropriate subjects for inau-
gural lectures and Festschrifts, rather than being of more general worth or interest
(Adcock and Bevir 2005).
Inadequate though conventional understandings may be, it does not follow that the
tale of unadulterated decline that Marquand and others offer provides an especially
robust alternative. For this perspective is in serious danger of giving undue causal
prominence to professionalism and of misrepresenting its novelty. Anxieties about
the implications of a creeping professionalization have been a recurrent presence
in thinking about the social sciences in universities for well over a century (Collini,
Winch, and Burrow 1983). Declinist arguments tend to posit a pre-professional golden
age, when scholars were driven by civic concern and organically linked to wider polit-
ical debates, that is belied by the complexities of any given period that results from
closer historical examination. More specialist and technically focused scholarship
existed side-by-side with the kind of politically engaged generalism that Marquand
and others applaud, right throughout the last century. The changes he and others
lament are in fact better understood as shifts in the balance between the competing
and interlocked discourses of generalism and intra-disciplinary specialism that have,
politics as an academic vocation 11
as Stefan Collini (2006) argues, been constitutive of intellectual practice throughout
this period.
We should also bear in mind the distinctive ways in which different subject fields
have embraced, interpreted, and internalized the values associated with the concept
of the professional. A spectrum runs from subjects such as Law, Medicine, and Man-
agement across to some of the most established Arts and Humanities fields. Among
the former a major rationale for the curriculum is the preparation of students for
professional qualifications. Departments in these areas are usually closely attuned to
the ethos of particular professions. Among the latter, older liberal-humanist ideas
about the intrinsic value of educational attainment and the independence of forms
of knowledge and thought associated with subjects such as Philosophy or Theology
remain stronger, though are not entirely untouched by the winds of professional
modernity.
Politics as a subject has tended to occupy points between these two poles, though it
has shifted its centre of gravity somewhat over the last two decades from the latter
towards the former. And yet despite this movement, it is not accurate to suggest
that it has been drawn decisively towards the model of the professional scientist
that has been one of the leading self-images of its American counterpart. In the
UK, professionalism has been cross-fertilized with a sense of modus vivendi about
the legitimacy of a range of methodological and theoretical approaches that research
in the subject may deploy (Finer 1980; Crick 1980; Kavanagh and Rose 1977). No
single theory or research paradigm has emerged into the leading position occupied by
quantitative political science methodology and formal modelling in the USA. Some
scholars fear or hope that this may change, not least because of the influence which
the main funding council for social science research has exerted over the last decade
over the methods of training younger cohorts of students.
An additional reason for avoiding the perils of golden-ageism in our evaluation of
the development of the subject concerns the ambivalent character of the practices and
values associated with professionalism. A ‘for’ or ‘against’ stance gives us little analytic
purchase on the complexities of these phenomena. Instead we might separate more
clearly in our thinking an appreciation of the ideas and power of the ethos associated
with ‘professionalism’ from the institutional practices and legally shaped processes
that might be described under the heading of ‘professionalization’. The first of these
concepts helps us understand the different, not always mutually consistent, values
that have been advanced through this notion. Under this heading we should assess the
cogency and rigour of the claims that are developed through the normative ideal of
the professional, including adjacent concept-ideas such as impartiality, detachment,
rigour, expertise, and objectivity.
In relation to ‘professionalization’, we should consider the legal, political, and
institutional processes that have resulted, for instance, in greater equity and trans-
parency in terms of hiring, training, and the wider regulation of workplace behaviour.
Through such a conceptual separation, we might become more adept at distinguish-
ing between the epistemological and ethical claims advanced when scholars claim
the mantle of professionals, and more nuanced in our judgements of the character
12 michael kenny
and implications of these processes. In the case of political studies, therefore, an
appreciation of the undoubted egalitarian and democratic benefits of some of the
changes associated with professionalization does not require that we also celebrate
uncritically the hegemony of professionalism as an account of the identity of the
subject.
1.4 The Peculiarities of
English Thought?
.............................................................................................................................................
One of the most recurrent motifs to surface in discussions of the history and char-
acter of the subject in the UK is the suggestion that political science in the UK
developed slowly and painfully because the intellectual culture in which it sought to
develop was exceptionally inhospitable (Smith 1986; Hayward 1991). A clutch of recent
retrospective essays on the history of the main subfields within the wider subject
couch their accounts in terms of the quintessentially ‘English’ values which their
development reflects (Hayward, Barry, and Brown 1999). These are taken to include
a scepticism towards rationalistic theories and formal modelling, a preference for
historical and empirical modes of thinking, and a disinterest in the kinds of systematic
or comparative analytical models that political science requires. The frequency with
which characterizations of a purportedly dominant strain of the national intellectual
culture are invoked as sources of explanation for developments in this and related
subjects is striking (Easthope 1998). Also significant in these arguments is the related
accusation that political studies has spawned analyses of the indigenous polity that
are irreducibly tainted by a parochial solipsism.
But how accurate are these twin charges about Politics as an academic subject? Has
it been unduly held back by intellectual insularity and unreflective exceptionalism? As
is the case with the historical caricatures posited by linear narratives of the subject’s
development, these generalized assertions carry enough plausibility and resonance to
ensure their ready reproduction and largely unquestioned status. And yet, neither is
as easily demonstrable as is often assumed.
Characterizing the development of the subject in four different national contexts—
Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England—through reference to the posited
characteristics of a supposedly hegemonic English intellectual character is highly
problematic. Quite clearly, the subject has developed in these contexts in close relation
to, but also somewhat differently from, its counterpart in England. Presenting a singu-
lar British tradition as the aggregate or core to these national-intellectual differences
is itself a problematic move. Equally, if we consider the two decades following the
end of the Second World War, a period characterized by one commentator as a kind
of amateurish prologue to the professionalized present (Hayward 1986), it is hard
politics as an academic vocation 13
to reconcile the multiplicity of theoretical positions, ideological perspectives, and
interpretative methods that circulated among those teaching and studying the subject
in England with the image suggested by these characterizations of English intellectual
culture. Major comparative studies—across time as well as space—were produced in
this period (Rose 1995; Finer 1956). And these came well before American political
science made serious inroads. A more important and complex set of intellectual
changes slowly unfolded prior to the sudden expansion of the university sector in
the late 1960s. A younger cohort of scholars (including Samuel Finer, Mackenzie,
and Bernard Crick) sought in different ways to generate a more theoretically aware
approach to political studies that combined historicism, philosophy, political science
theory, and a comparative focus (Kenny 2007). The influence of members of this
grouping on subsequent generations of practitioner has been considerably under-
played in standard historiographies of the discipline.
And yet the notion that political science has now emerged from the cloying
embrace of a parochial national-intellectual tradition has been reiterated to the point
where it has assumed the status of a bedrock myth. It is surely time to acknowledge
the blind-spots of such a blanket generalization. Characterizations of ‘the national’
culture that emphasize English insularity, antipathy to theory, and narcissistic invest-
ment in its own singularity are drawn from a lineage of thought that itself has a
lengthy history. Such laments have been aired since at least the late nineteenth century
and gained a particular hearing in political circles because of a gathering anxiety
about Britain’s economic performance and diminishing role as a world power in
the years after 1955. The attack upon the cloistered, insular, and blinkered charac-
ter of domestic intellectual life that was variously advanced by Edward Shils, Perry
Anderson, and Tom Nairn in the middle of the last century was taken up by political
thinkers of left and right in later decades (Anderson 1992; Anderson and Nairn 1992;
Shils 1972). It has also however become a major target for historians of the intellectual
and cultural life (Collini 2006). Its weaknesses include: the mistaken tendency to
project onto the whole of Britain what is essentially an account of English intellectual
life; a downgrading of the continuing impact of non-liberal traditions of thought; and
an overstatement of the hermetic and insular nature of indigenous thinking across a
range of fields. These objections should give practitioners of political studies pause for
thought. For each of them applies just as well to the ways in which the ‘Englishness’ of
British political studies is routinely caricatured, and sometimes granted independent
causal status in explaining disciplinary developments (or non-developments). While
it is not hard to find evidence of an abiding empirical idiom and some strongly
anti-theoretical and indeed anti-intellectual prejudices among figures in this field in
England especially, the question of whether this offers a sufficient explanation of the
subject’s development needs to be posed much more sharply.
One consequence of the overuse of this standard account of the failings of
England’s intellectual culture is an understatement of the patterns of cross-national
ideational exchange and mutual influence that shaped the subject in its different loca-
tions. In the early twentieth century, political scholarship and teaching at England’s
elite universities were deeply marked by the influence of European philosophy,
14 michael kenny
German constitutional thought, and professional developments in the United States.
The last two decades of the nineteenth century and first couple of the twentieth
witnessed a fairly continual pattern of dialogue and mutual influence between groups
of scholars in the USA and Britain:
Considerable Anglo-American contact, and even more frequent reference, occurred
among these scholars, and for good reasons. In both countries, liberal academic elites
wanted to carve out an authoritative place in the university and to salvage their political
heritage in the face of new challenges posed by industrialization and mass democracy.
(Ross 2007: 18)
On both sides of the Atlantic, political science emerged during these decades as a
‘specialized field of study at the intersection of philosophy, history, and law’ (2007:
18). Ross highlights the development at this time of an important Anglo-American
‘left-liberal network anchored on Toynbee Hall, the Fabian Society, and the LSE on
one side, and Jane Addams’s Hill House, Progressive reform circles, and the social
science departments of the new American universities on the other’ (20). Elsewhere,
the English liberal scholar and MP James Bryce exercised a very direct impact upon
the way in which early twentieth-century American scholars approached the interpre-
tation of their own institutions and political history, through the publication of his
two-volume study, The American Commonwealth (1910). His importance was reflected
in his award of the Presidency of the American Political Science Association in 1907.
A parallel process occurred in reverse and had a lasting impact upon the British
subject. This has occurred through both the employment of American-trained figures
in British departments, and the establishment of some important trans-Atlantic net-
works and research collaborations. Thus, the highly unlikely partnership that devel-
oped between the quantitative specialist Donald Stokes and the doyen of informed
commentary upon the workings of the Westminster elite, David Butler, utterly trans-
formed the content of the influential Nuffield Electoral Studies series (Butler and
Stokes 1969; Kenny 2007). This has had a long-lasting impact upon the intellectual
character and methodological tools of the subfield of electoral studies in the UK in
subsequent years (Dunleavy 1990).
Certainly the volume of traffic between these different national-intellectual spaces
has fluctuated in different periods. In the years after the Second World War, the
USA became a more regular exporter than importer of ideas in this field. As with
its overseas trade, Britain meanwhile was never disposed to deal with one partner
at a time. New waves of Continental European thinking, in the fields of philosophy,
political and social theory, and sociology, gained an influence over many younger
British scholars from the 1950s onwards. Indeed, in conceptual and historical terms,
British traditions evolved within a wider European framework of thinking in a way
that belies simplistic conceptions of exclusively national traditions of scholarship and
thought. Consideration of the impact of the migration of individual scholars and
of thinking provides an important counterpoint to reified ideas about the national
disciplinary past (Farr 2006). Key figures and traditions of thought, including those
that have presented themselves as guardians of indigenous virtues or approaches, have
politics as an academic vocation 15
developed their ideas against the backdrop of a deep familiarity with European and
American intellectual traditions. Only in more recent years have political scientists,
whose training and educational backgrounds mean that they are less likely to enjoy
such a hinterland, come to the fore.
In fact a proper consideration of the nature and impact of these intellectual trans-
actions would lead us to adopt a more widely angled perspective as an interpretative
default in this area. This might enable practitioners to begin to appreciate 3 the degree
to which Empire and Commonwealth have been overlooked as sources of influence
upon academic thinking about politics in the last fifty years. Political studies reflected
and helped engender some of the thinking that flowed into the practice and justifica-
tion of formal imperial rule, and was then greatly affected by thinking associated with
the politics of anti-colonial struggle. Yet despite the many ways in which the period
of Empire shaped the priorities and infrastructure of British governance, provided
the coordinates for a good deal of its political culture, and impacted upon Britain’s
foreign and economic policies, these themes are absent from both the historiography
and self-assessment of the discipline as a whole.
The broader point arising from these reflections is that the endless reiteration of
the myth of English insularity and its supposedly deleterious impact on the subject’s
development may perversely have the effect of obscuring the many non-English influ-
ences on the thinking that has fed into political studies. The migration of individuals
and ideas across national borders has been a constitutive feature of the growth of
universities. Amidst the many disagreements about the strengths and weaknesses of
the subject in the UK, there has lurked a largely unquestioned consensus, that political
science is alien to indigenous modes of thought, which needs serious reconsidera-
tion. Rather strikingly, scholarly investigation into other national-cultural thinking
in Europe about the same issues has unearthed a very similar sense of anxiety about
the degree to which indigenous idioms are hostile to a serious intellectual culture and
theoretical worth, and the latter are routinely seen as typical of various ‘elsewheres’
(Collini 2006). England’s intellectual culture may well be far less exceptional in kind
than is widely assumed. And the widely held notion that political science, or indeed
the social sciences as a whole, developed outside its parameters, and needed to be
imported to its inhospitable terrain, simply does not stand up to any serious account
of the intellectual history of subjects like political science and sociology.
1.5 Academics and the Political
.............................................................................................................................................
The steadily increasing influence of the ideal of professionalism over British-based
practitioners has elicited a growing sense of unease. One sign of the latter is the
3
There are important exceptions to this generalization, not least the development of a field of study
associated with ‘Development’, specialist studies of African and Asian politics, and the newer subfield
known as international political economy.
16 michael kenny
intensification of a long-standing debate about whether political studies has been
weakened by its distance from, and supposed irrelevance to, politics itself. This
theme has been aired by a number of senior figures within this field, and posed by
external bodies and groups that should be among the most important consumers of
its outputs (Crick 1998; Marquand 2004; Pearce 2005).
A particular tributary of discussion branching off this larger debate has focused
on whether the principal mechanism introduced by government’s reforms since the
1980s—the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE)—to guide the allocation of research
funds, has combined with a rising professionalism to generate cohorts of political
scientists who excel at producing technically adept but intellectually narrow research
that is designed above all to impress seniors in their specialist enclave. Many stake-
holders involved in Higher Education have begun to wonder if scholars lack both the
incentives and the cultural environment conducive to translate their work into more
widely accessible kinds of intervention.
The system of peer review bound up in the RAE has actually operated as a brake
on the drive towards specialism and ‘technical reason’ within British political science
research. The outcomes of its deliberations have, probably relatedly, achieved a wide
amount of legitimacy within this subject. Nevertheless, a growing perception in the
Higher Education policy-making community is that it has buttressed a growing
disinclination towards public dissemination and engagement. In the case of political
studies, some important stakeholders see professionalism as a partial obstacle to the
reanimation of a broader sense of civic purpose and democratic commitment, values
that are central to the stated mission and evaluative criteria of the Economic and
Social Research Council, the major funding body for many British political analysts.
There exists too a tradition of thinking within the British politics community that is
markedly sceptical of what one scholar has termed ‘the illusions of utility’ bound up
in the occupation of the role of ‘social engineer’ (Johnson 1989).
Yet despite these opposed kinds of worry, it is striking to observe that many
individual practitioners have communicated their research to stakeholders and users,
and occasionally enjoyed influence with political actors and policy-makers. The dis-
semination of ideas about ‘social capital’, that originated in the reappropriation of
this term in the work of American political scientist Robert Putnam, provides one of
the most spectacular instances of such impact (Field 2008; Putnam 2001). Indeed, the
growth of more technically adept and rigorous models of analysis in some areas of the
study of politics has actually opened up avenues for public commentary and impact—
most obviously in relation to extensive media treatment of elections and the increased
quantity of coverage of ‘high’ party politics associated with the development of rolling
news coverage and the proliferation of media outlets. Nevertheless, the emergence
of the political-scientist-as-pundit is not quite what some of the high-minded civic
and democratic visionaries of the subject had in mind when they urged it to remain
engaged with the public culture. Is media presence quite the same thing as public
influence?
More generally, simplistic assertions about whether the subject as a whole has
become more or less engaged with politics and public life are bound to miss their
politics as an academic vocation 17
target, not least because of the volume and range of activities now associated with
departments and individual academics. Equally, judgements about whether research
has succeeded in having influence and impact is a very different matter to the eval-
uation of whether the subject is more or less publicly engaged and outward facing
than previously. Here too there is much to be gained by turning to the past when
considering an apparently novel dilemma. Such a move leads us to appreciate that
worries about a perceived growing ‘irrelevance’ on the part of political analysis and
theorizing, as well as the invocation of a putative golden age when a more organic
interrelationship purportedly existed between scholarship and political action, enjoy
long precedents. Similar anxieties were aired when the subject became more promi-
nent in the late nineteenth-century university, surfaced again in the face of the rise
of Marxist thought in the 1930s, and were expressed by the clutch of mid-century
figures discussed above (including Mackenzie, Crick, the Finers, and Samuel Beer)
of their more cloistered and complacent elders. Related anxieties about a drift to
greater specialization and the proliferation of technical language, as opposed to the
vernaculars deployed in relation to more ‘general’ publics, are in fact as old as the
academic study of politics itself.
But discursive continuity is not the whole story to be told on this issue. This
emphasis needs to be leavened with a sense of the very significant changes that
have occurred to the foundational ideas about its purpose and character which the
subject has held about itself. The historical amnesia encouraged by the ethos of pro-
fessionalism has tended to obscure the protean character of debate about these issues
that prevailed in political studies until the greater consensus of recent times. The
subject was variously endowed with such missions as: providing an important part of
the education required for the next generation of public administrators; promoting
and disseminating the ideals of the civic culture; providing data about and dispas-
sionate expert analysis of policy issues to improve policy-making; and furnishing
avowedly ideological perspectives upon British politics. The first of these notions was
undoubtedly dominant at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but was
soon in contention with rival versions of these different ambitions. A broadly civic
conception of the discipline was apparent in the thinking and public involvements
of figures as disparate as Wallas, Barker, and McKenzie—though some important
differences marked their views of who were the intended recipients of this education
and what kinds of democratic effect it ought to have. Bernard Crick in the early
1960s called on political studies teachers to adhere to the civic-republican ambitions
which he believed animated the foundation of the subject in the United States (Crick
1959; Kenny 2006). This translated into a long-standing conviction that university-
based academics should do much more to develop and promote the subject in
schools.
Alongside, and occasionally intertwined with, civic idealism, there persisted
through much of the century the social-reforming impulse that stemmed from the
Fabian milieu, and was embodied by Wallas at LSE. This tradition has favoured
rigorous empirical study and the achievement of direct access to and influence upon
members of the political elite. Politics at university level was on this view a policy
18 michael kenny
science that ought to be directed towards the betterment of the community as a whole.
Some other potent ideological conceptions of the purpose and rationale of the subject
have also been in play across this period. Thus, Anglo-Marxists like Ralph Miliband
saw political analysis as committed to the revelation of the veiled power relations that
lay behind the frontage of the British state (Adcock and Bevir 2005; Kenny 2007).
Conservative scholars of various hues have regarded the study of politics and political
ideas as replete with lessons about the perils of rational design, social engineering, or
Enlightenment thinking (Minogue 1985; Gray 1995).
The demise of some of the democratic and civic aspirations that flowed through
the teaching and scholarship undertaken in this field provides an important backdrop
to current anxieties about an apparent decrease in the amount of public engagement
undertaken by political science professionals, even if the relationship between these
two developments is not one of direct causation. It is notable that the figures men-
tioned above—Wallas, Barker, McKenzie, and Crick—all had the experience of teach-
ing and performing public service roles outside the Oxbridge tutorial. Wallas was a
University Extension Lecturer before he took up a Lectureship at LSE. He served on
the London School Board (and was later Chair of its School Management Commit-
tee), as well as being a member of the Technical Education Board for London and of
the Education Committee of London County Council. Such experiences undoubtedly
helped engender and sustain the ambition of extending educational opportunity as
widely as possible, and education figured prominently in his distinctive account of
the importance and dangers of mass democracy. Mackenzie’s experience of teaching
local government officials in Manchester likewise bolstered a sense of commitment to
a civic dimension for the subject. Barker meanwhile combined high scholarship and
classical learning with a commitment to journalistic writing that ensured he had a
mixture of audiences for his political thinking at the forefront of his mind.
And yet, judging the degree to which an academic subject has influence over, or
relevance to, domains and practices outside it, is harder than we tend to think. The
evaluative criteria associated with the terms ‘impact’, ‘influence’, and ‘relevance’ are
multiple in kind and depend crucially upon the wider conceptual fields in which
they are deployed. Put simply, one person’s indirect impact may well be another’s
indication of irrelevance. Further epistemological complications arise because the act
of interpretation which is central to political analysis invariably requires some process
of abstraction—either through the explicit deployment of theoretical categories,
methods, and hypotheses, or through the processes of simplification central to the
assessment of relations of causality. Nor is the language in which a piece of research
is expressed a necessary guarantee of, or inhibitor to, influence or relevance. Some
of the most highbrow and ‘technical’ kinds of theory have been used by authors who
also convey a tremendous sensitivity to political phenomena (Michael Oakeshott and
Isaiah Berlin could be placed in this camp). And many writings in the straightforward
empirical or journalistic veins have very little ‘carry’ into wider public argument and
debate. A range of external contextual factors as well as qualities internal to a piece of
research determine whether influence is achieved. And much depends on which are
taken to be the audiences over whom influence is exerted.
politics as an academic vocation 19
Authoritative judgements about whether a subject has assumed greater or less
political relevance and public engagement over time imply an empirical support that
does not currently exist. What we can determine however is the content of the mental
frameworks that prevail in a subject at a given time and their impact on thinking
about what constitutes relevance, and at what proximity to politics political analysts
choose to operate (Freeden 2005). Here, some discernible trends across the various
subfields of Politics towards a greater emphasis on methodological expertise, the
greater take-up of deductive theories, and important changes to the incentive struc-
tures facing individual academics and whole departments, can be judged to have tilted
the equilibrium of the subject away from a greater sense of political connectedness
and proximity typical of earlier decades. For many political science professionals this
is undoubtedly a move in the right direction, concomitant with adjacent ideas about
detachment and objectivity. But, considered against the backdrop of once powerful
democratic and civic ideas of the subject’s role, there are some losses to be calibrated,
and perhaps compensated for, in this regard.
A less obvious, but nevertheless important, intellectual shift has played a role here
as well. There has been a very broad movement across the last two decades in political
studies towards theoretical approaches to political life that posit ‘the political’ as an
essentially debased simulacrum of the idealized constructs developed in the world
of theory (Newey 2001), or as an irredeemably irrational and corrupt domain (Hay
2007). Is there a danger that the political gets endowed with a series of implicitly
pejorative connotations, or denied any sense of its autonomy or singularity as an
aspect of social behaviour by the models scholars use to interpret and teach political
phenomena? And, has the steady march of deductively derived theoretical models
into the scholarship, textbooks, and curricula of the contemporary subject had the
effect of relegating some of the most banal but distinctive features of ‘the political’—
emotions, passions, rhetoric, messy compromises, coalition building—to the status of
irrational or anti-rational tools of manipulation? Are not these and other recurrent
facets of the political equally deserving of analysis (Dunn 2000)?
It is certainly striking that across this field a discernible counter-trend has gathered
force over the last decade, committed to the reclamation and exploration of what one
scholar calls ‘a political theory of politics’ (Freeden 2005)—the conceptual discussion
of the properties, attributes, virtues, and norms that are distinctive to the practices
and logics of the political domain which appear to have been relegated in importance
in the scholarly mind. A broad range of theoretically inclined authors, including John
Dunn, Quentin Skinner, Mark Philp, Andrew Gamble, and Gerry Stoker, have in
their very different ways and voices lately sought to remind us of the importance
of the specific character of political reasoning. The foundational question, ‘what is
politics?’, and its more rarely articulated subsidiary, ‘what is the study of politics for?’,
would seem to be moving back to the top of the agenda for some of today’s political
scholars. Whether their centrality stems from the entrenchment of a confident sense
of professional authority or from anxiety about a growing distance and detach-
ment from the political and civic cultures we inhabit, is a matter worthy of wider
discussion.
20 michael kenny
1.6 Conclusions
.............................................................................................................................................
This chapter has sought to identify and question the validity of three of the main
props that together have bolstered the sense of collective identity that prevails in
the academic community involved in political studies in British universities. All
characterizations of collective identities run the risk of distorting their inchoate,
fluid, and complex contents. And certainly it would be wrong to assume that a sense
of professionalism is the only frame through which members of this community
understand its ulterior purpose. For many, a sense of commitment to the unique
properties of politics, or an addiction to the peculiarities and processes of politics, are
far more significant as sources of motivation. Yet these values are not reflected in the
public representations that the subject makes of itself.
Highlighting the impact of a commitment to professionalization is not to argue
in toto against its values and practices. Many of the latter should be welcomed for
egalitarian and democratic reasons. However, adopting professionalism as an encom-
passing, overarching identity has, I suggest, banished from our minds an awareness of
the implications and potential losses it brings in its wake. One such consequence has
been the entrenchment of a weak historical understanding of the subject’s develop-
ment and the bolstering of an unduly hubristic approach to the contributions made
at earlier stages of its development. This sensibility has been entrenched too, I suggest,
by the recessive quality of a favourite theme among some of those who have offered
explanations about the relative underdevelopment of British political science—the
exceptional insularity and anti-theoretical bent of English intellectual culture.
Having identified these interpretative failings and criticized some of their distort-
ing simplifications, I close with some indications of the kinds of approaches and
mechanisms through which this narrowed collective identity might be broadened
and imaginatively renewed. The most urgently needed development is the hardest to
will into existence—the development of a specialist field of enquiry into the subject’s
history that may feed into the wider consciousness of this intellectual community.
One way in which such a focus could be stimulated is through a reform to the many
courses devoted to the teaching of ‘methods’ at undergraduate and postgraduate
levels, so that these include and promote historical comprehension of the history
of Politics as a subject, and of the variety of themes, traditions, and ideas that gave
shape to the understandings of politics which have been in contention throughout its
lifetime.
A related second development is equally overdue. This involves a more sustained
and exploratory examination of the relations between how politics, in its institu-
tional, cultural, and ideological guises, has shaped Politics as a subject. This most
obvious and interesting of relationships is, curiously, one of the most elusive within
the scholarly output of this community. Some insightful suggestions about political
factors that may have shaped political studies have occasionally been forthcoming—
for instance Michael Moran’s (2006) discussion of the importance of the context
and influence of the state in shaping social sciences in the UK. Yet, no systematic,
politics as an academic vocation 21
conceptually informed analysis of the role and impact of environmental factors has
been offered. And, most glaringly of all, political factors have rarely been granted
serious attention as variables shaping the subject’s development in the UK. It may be
that an overly strong sense of professional pride and identity inhibit the recognition
of the degree to which political scientists, like the subjects they consider, are also to
some degree shaped by the political circumstances and influences of their age. Yet
the opening up of a serious examination of the complex relations and interchanges
between these domains would not only benefit contemporary scholars but would
most likely bring to life for students an interest in the historical development of the
subject in which they are enrolled.
The third concrete implication of the argument pursued here concerns the need
for a more confident challenge to the dominant myths of British national-intellectual
character to be mounted from within and beyond this community. Lazy references
to ‘English empiricism’ and assumed contrasts with a singular ‘American political
science’ lock us into a cramped and self-limiting way of thinking about the subject.
A richer and more challenging sense of the resources and themes associated with
its intellectual history involves a greater commitment to unearthing trans-national
conversations, influences, and arguments. Approached thus, the history of political
studies may become a more interesting and less familiar terrain, one that is both alien
and surprisingly relevant in different respects. It is above all time for a reconsideration
of whether it makes sense to talk so confidently of ‘the British tradition’ of political
study. I have not addressed this question head-on in this chapter, though some of
the critical reflections that I have offered about some conventional forms of thinking
about the identity and history of the subject do have a bearing upon it. I close with two
more concrete proposals in relation to this question. A first, minimalist one, is that
we encourage our students, our colleagues, and ourselves to elucidate what they/we
mean when we invoke such a tradition. We ought to expect more than some of the
stultifying and self-serving arguments about the study of politics too often entrenched
by its usage. And a second, more ambitious (and no doubt contentious) experimental
suggestion is that we consider giving up the habit of talking about the subject, its
standing, purpose, and historical development, through reference to such a construct.
In so doing, we may quickly become more attuned to wider—European, American,
post-imperial—circles of influence and intellectual fellowship, and more sensitive
to the many important differences—of approach, methodology, and ideology—that
have contributed to the development of political studies in the UK context.
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chapter 2
.................................................................................................................
A N T E C E D E N TS
.................................................................................................................
dennis kavanagh
2.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
The study of politics in Britain, specifically the study of British politics, long precedes
the emergence of a discipline of political science. The origins of something akin to
a disciplinary approach to the study of politics, based perhaps inevitably in univer-
sities, are visible in the late nineteenth century. A mix of politicians, constitutional
lawyers, academic historians, political commentators, and journalists wrote about
politics, principles of government, and relations between the state and the citizen,
and courses were taught at universities.
The antecedents nourished: (a) a distinctively British approach to the subject, with
strong roots in history and philosophy, both the product of a particular context and
culture; (b) an enduring framework which may be termed the Westminster model;
and (c) a legacy that has resulted in a proliferation of overly empiricist studies and
a neglect of theoretical perspectives. All three of these features have been in decline
over the past three decades because of the march towards professionalization.
Professionalizing trends—the growth of disciplinary self-awareness and autonomy,
international conferences, scholarly networks and journals, and an emphasis on
training—have combined to undermine distinctive national traditions of political
science—and other sciences. But there has been a distinctive British approach over
the twentieth century, one that is now under pressure. The emphasis has largely
been on empirical works and there have been relatively few contributions in terms
of theories, concepts, or methods. It has always lacked the hard positivism or interest
in general theory found in the United States and never been subject to the influence
jurists have exercised in France and Germany, where the subject was often taught in
I am grateful for the comments on an earlier draft from Michael Kenny and George Jones.
26 dennis kavanagh
Law faculties. Because the British acceptance of the behavioural revolution across the
Atlantic was muted (see below) the negative reaction to it was less marked than in
the United Sates or the Continent. In the United States there were calls for a post-
behavioural revolution in which relevance and reform would be key elements. In
West Germany and Italy, where Marxism was stronger in the social sciences, the left
mounted a vigorous attack on the new science. One is almost tempted to compare
the gradual changes in the British approach to the study of politics with, to use a
traditional language, the Whig narrative of the development of the mixed British
constitution.
Over the past century the growing professionalization cum specialization of polit-
ical science (see below) limited the scope for scholars to double as scholar-activists.
In the 1920s and 1930s, for example, Laski, Muir, and Cole were heavily involved in
political party activity, often at a high level. For Graham Wallas, ‘The political scientist
was to be not a philosopher but a social engineer’ (Weiner 1971: 67).
Another change has been in the nature of the audience. For the first half of the
twentieth century the major British figures in political studies wrote for an audience
outside academe too, simply because the latter was too small. Laski, Cole, Barker,
and Jennings also saw themselves as ‘citizen-scholars’, expressing views on the issues
of the day in newspapers, magazines, on radio, and serving on public committees.
Shaping public opinion and helping to make better citizens was a justification for
studying and teaching politics (Kavanagh 2003). By the end of the century, however,
scholars primarily address fellow scholars who, thanks to technology, journals, and
conferences, form an audience across national borders.
As Kerr and Kettell (2006) report, there has been some decline in interest in the
study of British politics. Reasons for the decline are various but one is the British
tradition of studying politics, ‘Whiggish developmentalism . . . replete with its anti-
intellectual aversion to theoretically informed debate’ (6).
The chapter analyses British approaches over three periods—pre-1914, inter-war
years, and post-1945—and discusses their merits. Some might want to make a division
around the late 1960s in the last period. The first period is dominated by historians
and a consensus around the Whig interpretation; the second sees the emergence of
a number of academic political scientists based in universities; and the final period
witnesses the stresses and pressures from the expansion and specialization of the
discipline.
2.2 Pre-1914
.............................................................................................................................................
A recognizable British approach to political science had already emerged in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Hayward 1999). The subject, as reflected
in the teaching and writing on the subject at Oxford and Cambridge, was part of a
humane tradition, deeply rooted in the classics, literature, and history, providing a
antecedents 27
liberal elite education. Its supporters argued that studying the relationship between
political ideas and past events and the actions of politicians provided practical knowl-
edge and wisdom for future political leaders. Because of this practical orientation, the
approach ‘tended to be prescriptive and make judgements, proclaiming its values and
priorities openly’ (Gamble 1990: 408). It was a means of inducting would-be rulers
into a political tradition and an appreciation of the wisdom embedded in British
political institutions and culture. The London School of Economics and Political
Science, founded by the Webbs in 1895, provided a different approach, one wedded
to empirical research and the development of a practical social science which would
be useful for rulers.
Historians wrote legal-institutional studies such as The Government of England
(1908) by A. L. Lowell and English Political Institutions (1910) by Sir John Marriot.
In a different vein there was the journalist Sydney Low’s Governance of England
(1904). The lawyers dominated the study of constitutional history and above all
fashioned the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. The key pre-1914 figures of
Maine, Bryce, Pollock, and Dicey all held chairs in law. In an autobiographical essay
W. J. M. Mackenzie (1975) recalls that these ‘Knights of the textbooks’ (his phrase)
dominated student reading at inter-war Oxford. Yet in the post-1945 period this
strand, apart from the work of W. I. Jennings and, to an extent K. C. Wheare and
William Robson, virtually disappeared from British political science and revived only
recently.
History, for this generation, including ancient history, was a source of methods,
knowledge, and values. In late nineteenth-century Cambridge, Benthamite propo-
nents of a deductive approach, which would lead to a science of legislation, lost out to
advocates of an inductive approach, based on history (Collini et al. 1983). Maitland,
Sidgwick, and Seeley provided a historical analysis of politics. Rather than work-
ing from hypotheses to universal generalizations, they claimed that their inductive
approach furnished the knowledge for a so-called ‘noble science’ of politics, a victory
that left ‘an enduring anti-scientistic mark upon the study of politics in Britain’
(Hayward 1999: 3).
The path adumbrated in Graham Wallas’s Human Nature and Politics (1908) found
no followers in Britain, but did so eventually in the USA. He urged that psychology
should figure more prominently in political analysis, not least to achieve a more
realistic perspective. His warning against the ‘rationalist fallacy’, or exaggeration of
the intellectuality of public opinion, discussion of voters’ use of the party image, and
advocacy of more quantitative techniques sketch out an early behavioural approach
to politics, but one that was in Britain largely stillborn. Although Wallas did not
develop his suggestions into anything resembling a programme, his was one of the
two seminal ‘unmasking’ books before 1914. Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution
attempted to describe ‘the living reality’ behind the pieties of the constitution. Where
Bagehot made the best of human irrationality (for example, popular deference to
‘the outward show’ of monarchy and the ‘dignified’ aspects of the constitution),
Wallas feared it. Over forty years ago Richard Rose, one of the first students of
behaviouralism in Britain, invoked the social and psychological insights of Wallas
28 dennis kavanagh
and Bagehot in his Politics in England. He regarded them, as well as Low, Lowell, and
Ostrogorski, as pioneering students of the relationship between English politics and
society.
Crucial to an understanding of the British approach at the time is the higher
education context in which it emerged. Few British writers on politics before 1914—
and the point holds as late as the 1950s—regarded themselves as political scientists.
Most drew on other disciplines for their methods and would have shuddered at
the idea that the subject should seek to emulate the natural sciences. Politics in
the universities was a small subject operating in the small world of British higher
education. The subject lacked a distinct identity; it was studied alongside economics,
philosophy, law, and history, all of which were more securely established as separate
subjects and even departments in universities. Politics operated under the shadow
of more dominant subjects and departments and few held the view that politics
was a self-contained subject. In the United States, however, political scientists had
already begun to assert their identity as a distinct discipline by forming a separate
Political Science Association in 1903, breaking away from the American Historical
Association.
The small scale may have helped coherence but it also meant there was no spe-
cialized audience of a reasonable size, the academics were generalists, and there
was a ‘pervasive amateurishness’ (Barry 1999: 431). The writers lacked a distinctive
methodology, or at least one separate from philosophy or history. They were less
concerned to define politics as a discipline separate from history or philosophy or
law, than to stress its interconnections with them; most had graduated in history or
classics and even as late as 1966 nearly 40 per cent of university teachers of politics in
Britain had taken history as a first degree (Crick 1966). Ernest Barker was unhappy at
his title as Cambridge’s (first) Professor of Political Science and stated his preference
for the study of ‘moral phenomena of human behaviour in political studies’ to be
called ‘Political Theory’.
Important for an understanding of the British approach was the dominance of
the Whig view of the British political system. In the late nineteenth century such
constitutional historians as J. R. Green, Stubbs, and Freeman developed the Whig
interpretation of Britain’s political development. They told a narrative of the rise of
representative institutions, the gradual broadening of liberty and cumulative change
in which institutions and elites adapted to new challenges. The genius of the British
constitution was its adaptability, in implicit contrast to France. According to the
historians, Britain was fortunate in its island position, which provided relatively
‘free’ security, and its moderate centralization of political authority. The attempts
by the Stuarts to subvert the balanced constitution had been defeated and from the
1688 Glorious Revolution emerges the idea of English ‘exceptionalism’. Britain had
successfully resisted absolute monarchy, a royal standing army, and destruction of
embryonic representative institutions. In contrast to France or Prussia, it developed
as a ‘low profile’ state.
Many Americans (and Europeans) shared the Whig view of the merits of the mixed
or balanced British constitution. Starting with Professor Woodrow Wilson, would-be
antecedents 29
reformers of the US parties and the civil service, as well as critics of the Madisonian
model of the US system, looked to Britain for lessons (Kavanagh 1974). Hayward notes
that a similar admiration for the British system was widespread at the time among
Continental political scientists (1999: 28).
By the end of the nineteenth century the Whig view was being transmuted into the
Westminster model—a set of institutions and conventions. Its main features were:
Cabinet government, parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of the law, ministerial and
collective responsibility to parliament, institutionalized and legitimate political oppo-
sition to the government in parliament, and accountability of parliament through
regular competitive elections.
Features of this Whig tradition were coming under challenge. Den Otter (2007:
48 ff.) notes that the modernist empiricism of Maitland, Pollock, and Dicey developed
an ‘inductive study of law and politics that shaped a new discipline of political
studies’. Maitland’s explorations of medieval law undermined the Whig constitutional
narrative of the continued expansion of English liberty. Such key stages in the making
of the ‘free-born Englishman’ as trial by jury or habeas corpus or the origins of
parliament were shown to have begun under royal auspices (Blaas 1978: 264). More
critical historians claimed that the Whig view was teleological, a narrative in which
the past moved smoothly and continuously to the present, eliminating the role of
chance and conflict.
A more ‘realist’ school of writers undermined the Whig narrative, particularly
on the role of parliament. The work of Mosei Ostrogorski on the emergence of
the extra-parliamentary caucus, of Henry Maine and W. H. Lecky on the rise of
‘popular government’ (Maine), and A. Lowell on the development of disciplined mass
political parties and the growing pressure of legislation in the Commons suggested
that relations between the executive and legislature were being reshaped.
Yet the Whig interpretation still influenced much thinking on the constitution. As
Blaas (1978: 34) admits:
The Whig myth concerning the constitution was so irresistible that the constitution had
come to be regarded as the sole explanation for the development of English history
as such. It became the ideal angle from which to illustrate the growth of the British
nation, and its development was the axis of the history of England tout court, the
factor explaining especially the uniqueness of British political development it came to
be almost regarded as an autonomous political force: the object to be interpreted had
developed into a means for interpretation.
2.3 Inter-war Years
.............................................................................................................................................
It is during the inter-war years that the founding fathers of British political science—
Ernest Barker, W. I. Jennings, Ramsay Muir, H. J. Laski, and G. D. H. Cole—emerge.
30 dennis kavanagh
In this period the Whig view of Britain’s political system endures, perhaps because
most of the writers had been educated in such values in the late nineteenth century.
The first three clearly write within the Whig/Westminster model, Barker about the
values of the institutions and political practice, Jennings and Muir more narrowly as
institutionalists. But Laski and Cole are also aware of the shortcomings of a model
developed when the electorate was small and the role of government limited. Plu-
ralists, including the early Laski, attacked the idea of the omnicompetent parliament
and the sovereign state and the collectivists (reflecting the rise of the Labour party
after 1918) welcomed a more active state even if this made inroads on individual
liberty.
Julia Stapleton (1994: 4) notes that in his blend of pluralism, Whiggism, and Ideal-
ism Barker mounts essentially a rearguard defence of the political order that prevailed
before the First World War. He was committed to what he called the ‘parliamentary
system of government’ and its importance in upholding English liberties. These
values emerge strongly in two of the chapters in Essays in Government (1945), on
‘The Parliamentary System of Government’ and on ‘British Statesmen’. For Barker, the
essence of civilized (and British) politics is the place of discussion, rather than the will
of a majority, as a means of reconciling differences. In his Reflections on Government
(1942) he argues that the British political system facilitated discussion in four stages—
the discussions within and between political parties, the choices voters make between
political parties at general elections, the debates in parliament, and, finally, in the
deliberations of Cabinet. It is a deliberative democracy in which the checks on the
influence of public opinion allow it to be winnowed and settled before it is brought
to bear on the rulers.
The public lawyer, W. I. Jennings, was comfortable with the British system and
its political checks and balances. (But he was also a collectivist; see below.) British
government was ‘government by opinion’, since parliament and the institutionalized
opposition in the House of Commons provided the opportunity for the views of the
public to be expressed. In his years at the LSE (1929–40) he produced eleven substan-
tial books on British and other political institutions. His Law and the Constitution
(1933), Cabinet Government (1936), and Parliament (1939) were heavily descriptive,
drawing on statutes, legal cases, and available nineteenth-century political memoirs
and biographies.
Ramsay Muir’s How Britain is Governed (1930) was the first recognizable textbook
on the British system. It had chapters on the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Com-
mons, the Lords, the civil service, the parties, and elections. As befits a prominent
Liberal activist, he anticipated many of the criticisms and recommendations made
by reformers some fifty years later. The book’s subtitle was A Critical Analysis of
Developments in the British System of Government, and the author expressed con-
cern over what he regarded as threats to the Westminster constitution. He com-
plained about the Cabinet’s ‘dictatorship’ over parliament, the stifling effects of
party discipline, the rise of interest groups, and the power of ‘the Permanent Civil
Service’ (on which, he noted, historians and textbooks had been ‘strangely silent’),
all of which had caused the bypassing of parliament. Muir proposed what has
antecedents 31
become a litany of familiar reforms—specialized departmental committees in the
Commons, elections by proportional representation to the two Houses of Parlia-
ment, and devolution to Scotland, Wales, and the English regions. In contrast to
other critics, his purpose was to reinvigorate rather than replace the Westminster
model.
Pluralism was another important theme in the inter-war period. In the early
twentieth century there was, variously, a reaction against earlier individualist notions;
the Whig emphasis on the superiority of territorial representation in an elected
parliament; and the legal doctrine of state sovereignty. Pluralists favoured the dis-
persal of power between many groups and sought to limit the increasing powers
of the state, even though the British state at the time was relatively weak. The
young Laski and Cole, as well as Ernest Barker, no doubt influenced by their stu-
dent reading of Gierke, Maitland, and Figgis, were all sympathetic to pluralism.
They valued liberty and thought it was best gained and preserved by the spread
of power among different institutions and groups. Dismissing the idea that society
was either a collection of individuals or an organic whole, they asserted that it
consisted of self-governing units and voluntary groups which had rights before and
independent of the state. They rejected the claims that the sovereign state could be
realized in practice or, even if it could, was desirable. Laski argued the case in his
Problems of Sovereignty (1917), The Foundations of Sovereignty (1921), and Authority
in the Modern State (1919). In his early work he advanced a liberal case for plu-
ralism, praising a ‘federal’ society of different groups and the checks and balances
which follow from the interplay of separate political institutions wielding separate
powers. By the time of his A Grammar of Politics (1925), however, his support for
pluralism had waned and the active collectivist state was held up for admiration
(see below).
Cole argued for a more thoroughgoing pluralism and advocated self-government
by workers in their industries. In his Social Theory (1920) he argued that representa-
tion should be based on a person’s function in society. Because work was directly
experienced and better understood, it was more meaningful than residence. His
advocacy of creating a series of functional representative bodies challenged prevailing
ideas about representation and the role of the state.
Another counter to the Westminster approach came from supporters of collec-
tivism. Writers of a centre-left persuasion, including the Webbs, believed the actions
or intervention of the state were more beneficial than those of the market and were
confident that the tide was gradually but inevitably turning in their direction. An
elected socialist government could use parliamentary sovereignty and the unitary
state to implement its programme. Within striking distance of achieving power after
1918, Labour supporters had little interest in promoting more checks and balances for
the benefit of their opponents. Laski, in his Grammar, had dismissed such devices
as the referendum, devolution, proportional representation, and MPs electing their
own select committees in the House of Commons because they could be restraints
on the majority party and therefore on the electorate. He restated this view in his
posthumous Reflections on the Constitution (1951).
32 dennis kavanagh
In moving to his neo-Marxist phase, Laski was profoundly affected by the 1926
General Strike and the political and economic crisis that caused the collapse of the
minority Labour government in 1931. In Democracy in Crisis (1933) he expressed
fears that the coming economic crisis and sharper social class divisions, reflected
in the Labour and Conservative parties, would tempt the ruling class to abandon
the traditional rules of the game. He doubted there could be a peaceful path to
the social and economic transformation promised by a radical Labour government.
Parliamentary democracy might not survive the strains of sharp social and eco-
nomic inequalities. He warned that to overcome ‘unconstitutional’ resistance from
the holders of capital, normal parliamentary procedures might have to be suspended
and emergency rule introduced. Here is a rejection of the Whig beliefs in the state’s
neutrality and optimism about progress—restated in Parliamentary Government in
England (1938). Anticipating the later idea of Lord Hailsham’s elective dictatorship
he does not defend checks and balances or independence of the courts and local
government.
This generation, like that of the late nineteenth-century comparative historians,
was also aware of other countries. Herman Finer’s Theory and Practice of Modern
Government (1932) was a comparative study of the political similarities and differences
across Britain, Germany, France, and the United States. But where James Bryce’s
Modern Democracies (1921) was a country-by-country study, Finer broke new ground
in comparing topic by topic and institution by institution across his chosen states.
Jennings was an authority on the constitutions of Commonwealth states, Laski wrote
well-received books on the American presidency and the rise of European Liberalism,
and Barker was steeped in classical Greek politics and wrote perceptively on the
emerging totalitarian states of Russia and Germany.
Although the works are legal-institutional, they are not only legal-institutional.
The literature covers the activities of pressure groups, the influence of the permanent
civil service, the effects of party discipline on MPs, and the influence of the House
of Commons and the rise of the Cabinet and how such features were challenging the
Westminster model. However, with the exception of Laski, there is a failure to relate
the politics to social and economic forces; much of the work is narrowly political in its
focus on institutions. Some express doubts that the system might survive. The early
behaviouralist ideas of Wallas and the criticisms of the neo-Marxist Laski resonate
with themes in British political science from the late 1960s onward. The ideas of
corporatism, so important to political scientists, economists, and sociologists in the
1960s and 1970s, were anticipated in the work of Laski and Cole.
2.4 Post-1945
.............................................................................................................................................
The efforts of the inter-war figures did much to define the character and development
of political science in Britain for at least the first two decades of the post-1945 period.
antecedents 33
Many of the immediate post-war generation still regarded politics as a subject that
properly borrowed from history and philosophy. A practical consideration in 1950
for naming the national professional association the Political Studies Association
was that the new body had to accommodate the historians, constitutional lawyers,
and philosophers who formed a majority of those teaching politics. Most members
explicitly rejected the ideas of a science of politics and of competing with or emu-
lating developments in the USA. In the 1950s the subject was still often taught in
departments of law, history, or philosophy and no department offered a single degree
in politics.
The experience of other European states during the first half-century, and success
in the 1939–45 War, strengthened a sense of British exceptionalism and vindicated
the political system. Its political stability, peaceful change, and legitimacy still stood
out in comparison with European states. Over the course of the previous fifty
years many European states had experienced military dictatorship, occupation or
military defeat, fascist dictatorship, and large regime-challenging communist par-
ties. Britain remained an outlier as a stable democracy, and a generation later the
absence of proportional representation, coalition governments, a written constitu-
tion, or federalism still made it distinctive. Richard Rose began his Politics in Eng-
land with a claim that few contested, that England ‘is important as deviant case,
deviant because of its success in coping with the many problems of the modern
world’ (1964: 1).
In the immediate post-war years students had no general textbook on British
politics and the works of the past masters still clung heavily. A typical reading list
still included Bagehot’s English Constitution, Jennings’s Cabinet Government, and
Mill’s Representative Government. In the late 1960s the first generation of textbooks
on British politics was published to meet the demands of the growing number of
students. The literature still operated within the old paradigm, reflecting a confident
view of the British system and culture (often encouraged by empirical US studies).
The themes of stability, strong government, consensus, social homogeneity, and pride
in the political system were still prominent.
Adherence to traditional approaches stemmed from what Vout (1990: 24) calls
an Oxford style, which involved the study of politics not as a science but a subject
more appropriately approached in historical and philosophical modes. He quotes the
founding editor of Political Studies, Wilfred Harrison, who in 1958 in the course of
a review article of an American book, ‘Some Aspects of American Political Science’,
expressed his distaste for American political scientists who ‘dabble in social science;
and some of what they have to say has been repugnant, depressingly narrow, frighten-
ingly naïve, frighteningly arrogant or just irritatingly verbose’ (Vout 1990: 24, 26). His
was not a lone voice. Michael Oakeshott, Laski’s successor at the LSE, was dismissive
of any scientific analogy and held that politics had to be studied historically because
of the need to understand political activity as a tradition.
Oakeshott, writing in the idealist tradition, offered a variant of the Whig approach.
He argued that because a political system operates in its own distinctive tradition
political analysis calls for a particular mode of understanding, involving the study of
34 dennis kavanagh
a tradition of behaviour. His work accords a central place to history and philosophy
in political analysis and spurns so-called scientific methods. He and other historicists
complained that behaviouralism was ahistorical and sacrificed a crucial understand-
ing of context and change. Oakeshott influenced several writers on political thought
and political philosophy, a number of Conservative political commentators, and some
students of political institutions. For example, a passionate dismissal of the idea that
politics was a science, coupled with the assertion that it can be studied only through
history and philosophy, is found in Nevil Johnson’s The Limits of Political Science
(1989). A student of institutions and constitutions, he is Oakeshottian in his insistence
on the historical-philosophical path as the only valid one. Bernard Crick, in his
American Science of Politics (1959), complained that behaviouralism/political science
was culture bound and, rather than being value free, was shot through with liberal
American values. His later In Defence of Politics (1963) restated the idea of politics as
a civic humanist activity, dating back to Aristotle.
Kenny (2007) has argued that by the late 1960s the older traditions were being
challenged by—and soon coexisted with—the modern empiricism of younger aca-
demics, the latter the product of university expansion and the influence of the United
States. Politics was looking at least as much to the social sciences as to history and
philosophy. ‘Whiggish ideas about the history, values and character of the British
polity were intermingled with newer emphasis upon empirical verification and a
degree of methodological rigour’. This ‘methodological pluralism’ established ‘a dis-
tinctively British variant of the international political science community’ (Kenny
2007: 179). From this fusion emerged a British approach that continues to the
present.
Jean Blondel’s Voters, Parties and Leaders (1963), an examination of the social fabric
of British politics, had chapters on voters, party members, interest groups, bureau-
cracy, and the establishment. Richard Rose’s Politics in England used the structural-
functional categories of Talcott Parsons and Gabriel Almond. The book does not have
chapters on Parliament, Cabinet or the civil service, or monarchy, but on political
socialization, political culture, and communications. In the mid-1960s David Butler
and the American Donald Stokes conducted their first wave of interviews for a land-
mark study of British voting behaviour and Richard Rose embarked on his surveys in
Northern Ireland.
In the United States political behaviouralism developed rapidly in the 1950s and
was dominant by the 1960s. It was applied mostly to phenomena that were observable
and about which quantitative data could be collected. It involved a turning away from
the traditional legal-institutional approaches (except insofar as they were amenable to
the new techniques) and political philosophy. The emphasis was on surveys of mass
political behaviour (particularly voting), hypothesis testing, and statistical techniques
for establishing relationships. It was a challenge to the emerging mixture of histori-
cism, philosophy, and empiricism in Britain. The new political science departments
at Essex and Strathclyde acted as midwives of the new approach, explicitly following
the American model and emulating the postgraduate training in research methods
found across the Atlantic (Blondel 1997).
antecedents 35
2.5 Linkages
.............................................................................................................................................
During the 1960s the subject significantly expanded; new departments of politics were
created, the number of academics and students of the subject grew, and more journals
were established. But, according to one critical narrative of ‘discipline history’, the
subject still reflected too much of the influence of the inter-war years, particularly
the same tendencies to amateurishness and insularity, the continuing influence of
history and philosophy, focus on institutions, and Whiggish assumptions. Such a
view is heavily influenced by the claims that the discipline today is more professional,
autonomous, and methodically self-aware. Kenny (2004: 587) complained that the
1950s and 1960s are viewed ‘as a kind of amateurish prequel to the establishment of a
modern autonomous discipline’.
Yet during the 1950s and 1960s a number of scholars were challenging some
assumptions of the Westminster model, particularly the important place it accorded
parliament. S. E. Finer’s ‘The Individual Responsibility of Ministers’ (1956) drew on
case studies to dismiss the claim that parliament’s control of the executive extended
to the dismissal of ministers where the minister had clearly blundered. Geoffrey
Marshall and Graham Moodie (1959) further argued that the doctrine of ministerial
responsibility was undermined by the strength of party government; the troubled
minister could usually rely on the support of the majority party in the Commons
to see him through. They added that the doctrine was damaging because of the
courts’ reluctance to intervene in cases where public authorities were abusing their
power. The courts often claimed it was for parliament to provide remedies in the
case of proven abuses. Finer and W. J. M. Mackenzie in their work on pressure
groups challenged the assumed primacy of political parties in policy-making. Robert
McKenzie (1955) challenged the portraits and ‘myths’ the Conservative and Labour
parties presented of themselves and of each other. He claimed that the distribution
of power within the parties was broadly similar; borrowing from Michels, he argued
that in both parties the parliamentary leadership was dominant over the membership
outside parliament. Another example of ‘realism’ was Mackenzie’s translation of the
1961 Plowden Committee report on public spending. Drawing on his experience of
Whitehall and his classical philological training, he claimed it was a classic Whitehall
ruse of speaking in public but in code so that the public could not understand the
subject matter. In other words, there was a good deal of ‘unmasking’ of myths of the
British constitution.
During this period two figures, both educated in the 1930s, stand between Ameri-
can and British methods. Neither was entirely comfortable with the new science but
they adapted to it and in their hands forged a British approach (Vout 1990; Kenny
2004; 2007). W. J. M. Mackenzie at Manchester acted as a filter for American political
science and tried to reconcile what he described as the separate ‘idioms’ of the two
political science communities, one based on history and philosophy, the other on
behavioural science. This fusion was most evident in his work on pressure groups,
community power, and public administration. A classics don who grew bored with
36 dennis kavanagh
teaching the subject, he switched to Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 1936,
teaching himself the subject by reading widely and drawing on his knowledge of
ancient history, philosophy, and constitutional law. In his ‘The Conceptual Frame-
work and the Cash Nexus’ (1962) he noted the older generation of political scientists
wrote as pupils of linguistic classical scholars, historians, lawyers, and philosophers.
He added that the study of politics could never be a hard science (although that was
a useful aspiration), but it could be organized knowledge and communicable as a set
of propositions. ‘The job (of political science) is to talk in an orderly manner, paying
regard to consistency and verifiability, about a unique situation which is extremely
complex and changes rapidly’, he wrote in his Politics and Social Science (1967).
Despite the move to professionalism (e.g. graduate research training) he acknowl-
edged that: ‘our standards have been acquired by disciplines in the humanities and
not in mathematics or natural science [and] . . . we regard ourselves as scholars,
rather than scientists, as learned men and careful writers, not as discoverers of new
truths’ (1975: 311). Vout asserts that Mackenzie wanted to strike a middle ground
between historical and philosophical analysis and modern empiricism. While pre-
serving the former dimensions, he encouraged the use of quantitative and sociological
methods.
The other key figure is S. E. Finer. He kept up with American political science,
although maintaining his distance. He dismissed the idea of a pure science of
politics—‘an empty set of mechanical calculations’, he once called it. But he employed
the techniques of classification, typologies, and models, and used the language
of variables and relationships to make generalizations about political phenom-
ena. In an autobiographical essay, he described his work as variously ‘interpret-
ing a body of factual knowledge, making a pattern out of it . . . making sense
out of it’, rather than seeking universal laws (1980: 363). Like his older brother
Herman, he regarded comparison as the nearest approximation to the scien-
tific method, classifying cases and looking for patterns of regularities and causal
interrelationships.
Finer had little time for general theoretical frameworks and wrote critically of
structural functionalism and systems analysis. His aversion to grand theory is, as
Vernon Bogdanor notes (1999: 148–9), a British characteristic; there are no British
counterparts to Easton, Almond, or Deutsch. Instead, Finer advocated a problem-
centred approach; why, for example, did military dictatorship occur in so many newly
independent states, or why had the military been so important in the formation of
the great European states, or what were the circumstances in which British pressure
groups succeeded?
A reason why Finer was suspicious of mainstream American political sci-
ence/behaviouralism was because of its tendency to reduce the political factors to a
dependent variable. Too often the political was analysed as being determined by eco-
nomic, psychological, or social factors. The systems approach relegated to a political
‘black box’ government which converted inputs from the environment into outputs.
But, in contrast to Oakeshott, he held that governmental and political data were
not unique to time and place but could be classified, analysed, and compared. He
antecedents 37
became more convinced of the case for taking the historical route as the best means
to explaining causation. Ultimately he took the historical path with a vengeance,
going back over 5,000 years for The History of Government from the Earliest Times
(1997). 1
Another challenge to the Westminster model emerged from what Bevir and
Rhodes (2007: 248 ff.) call a quasi-Marxist or socialist approach. Miliband (1961;
1969), a former student of Laski at the London School of Economics, claimed that
British politics should be studied in the framework of an advanced capitalist soci-
ety, and the latter’s consequences for the opportunities and constraints on political
actors. A particular target for Miliband was the Labour Party, which he thought
had been crippled by its acceptance of Whig values and the Westminster model.
Its commitment to achieving socialism by the parliamentary route and acceptance
of the culture of parliamentarism caused the containment of pressure from below
for transformation. Miliband claimed that the Labour party has, in history, been
only reformist, making marginal and ameliorative changes, while capitalism remains
intact.
What Miliband—and the neo-Marxist insights of Jessop, Marsh, Leys, Kingdom,
Dearlove, and Saunders—bring to British politics is a discussion of political economy,
of elites (and their socio-economic backgrounds), of structured inequalities, and of
interests. They show how such agents of legitimization as the media and education
system buttress inequality. Although a challenge to the consensus, their analysis may
be viewed as a backhanded tribute to the strength of the Westminster model. They
may refute some of the claims to be scientific made by behaviouralists, notably
those of value neutrality—accusing behaviouralism of peddling pluralist views and
masquerading as science—but they still employ their methods of data collection and
analysis.
2.6 The End of a British Approach?
.............................................................................................................................................
Challenges have emerged from outside the discipline, particularly from: (a) signifi-
cant recent changes in British political institutions and behaviour, (b) dissatisfaction
with the performance of British political institutions and by extension with the
mindset associated with the Westminster model, and (c) the growing tendency to
study British politics as part of a European system or polity.
1
During a faculty meeting at Oxford in the 1970s Finer, then the Gladstone Professor of Government
and Public Administration, shocked many of his colleagues by claiming that history and politics were
different subjects and he had taught both. His immediate predecessor as the holder of the Gladstone
chair, Max Beloff, and his immediate successor, Peter Pulzer, regarded politics as a branch of history, the
first openly so. The first two holders of the chair, W. G. S. Adams and Sir Arthur Salter, regarded the
subject as the insights of practical men, in their cases drawn from their considerable experience of
government.
38 dennis kavanagh
Since 1997 the introduction of devolution for Scotland, Wales, and Northern
Ireland—a form of quasi-federalism—and continued membership of the European
Union have imposed limits on the sovereignty of the parliament. The steady decline in
popular support for the two main parties has led to coalition and minority rule, aided
by proportional representation, in executives outside of the House of Commons.
There has been greater use of referendums and a more important role accorded the
judiciary. For some the Westminster model has been overtaken by a Differentiated
Polity Model (Rhodes 1997) in which governance has replaced government, and
is marked by segmented pluralism, policy networks, and a hollowing out of the
state.
Dissatisfaction with the performance of the British political system has come from
various quarters. On the free market right wing there developed in the 1970s a critique
of government, particularly in the wake of the claims in the 1970s that government
was ‘overloaded’. Government, it was claimed, was too big and too interventionist,
and, according to the new public management school, it was allegedly too often
captured by special interests and government actors, whether elected or not, who
had interests of their own to protect and promote. Their answer involved break-
ing up state monopolies and providing greater consumer choice through privatiza-
tion, markets, and contracting out. New Labour’s acceptance of neo-liberal views
of economic management went some way to accepting the above analysis as well
as abandoning a key feature of socialism—public ownership; the party promoted
constitutional reform involving freedom of information, devolution, and a Human
Rights Act. The Liberals and their successor party, the Liberal Democrats, claimed
the Westminster political system had come to be a frail defence against the elective
dictatorship of the executive. They have long advocated (cf. Ramsay Muir) a stronger
House of Commons, more decentralization, stronger local government, and electoral
reform.
British membership of the European Union and collaborative trans-European
political studies encouraged and facilitated by the European Consortium of Political
Research may have caused a relative reduction in scholarly interest in British
politics per se. The constitutional changes of the past decade have made the British
political system today less different from that in mainland Europe. The ‘Europeaniza-
tion’ of British politics (however incomplete) is being reflected in a Europeanization
of British political science.
These developments raise the question of whether it is still possible to have a
distinctive national approach to the study of politics, while adhering to cross-national
criteria and norms of professionalism. The latter are not about subject matter or
approach but ideals of objectivity, theorizing, and rigour.
There have been three main drivers towards this professionalization/
institutionalization. The first comes from the United States. On some calculations
over 80 per cent of political scientists work in the United States (in 1960 there were
160 members of the PSA and already some 7,000 in the American Political Science
Association); the USA is the home of large graduate and research schools of great
prestige which train students in the latest techniques and house big social science
antecedents 39
projects. American universities place a greater emphasis than British on research,
which in turn is encouraged by the greater availability of funds. The outcome of these
forces is that professionalization is easily seen as approximating to American norms.
Britain is particularly exposed to its influence because of a shared language as well
as the number of Americans writing on British politics and of academic exchanges
between the two countries. In virtually any branch of the subject, particularly rational
choice, voting, the new institutionalism, and new public management, America is the
market leader and Britain has drawn on ‘homeopathic doses of American political
science’ (Hayward 1991: 104).
A qualification to the US hegemony is the influence of ‘the English school’ in the
quasi-discipline of international relations. As Dunne (1998: 18) notes, the ‘school’
preferred a more interpretive approach over a positivist one, a more historical than a
social science one. Its concern for rigour and precision pays less obeisance to models,
measurements, and testing propositions
The financial support and remits of state-funding agencies (starting with the cre-
ation of the Social Science Research Council in 1965) and charities, as well as the
type of publications favoured in the periodic research assessment exercises in higher
education, are a second influence. Certain topics and research methods are favoured,
notably policy-relevant or ‘useful’ projects, and proposals employing ‘harder’ social
science techniques, again a force for Americanization.
A final force is the fragmentation of the discipline, both of topics and of methods.
As late as the 1960s it was widely expected that most British political scientists would
teach political institutions and political ideas and be familiar with most of the topics
covered in the few academic journals (Barry 1999: 447 ff.). The Founding Fathers in
the inter-war period sat at the same table, to borrow Terence Rattigan’s metaphor, a
consequence partly of the small London and Oxbridge axis but also of a shared educa-
tional background and interest in both political institutions and political theory. The
pre-1914 interest in history and philosophy was still strong, as was the caution about
positivism and scientism. The subject lost the old coherence, based on historical
analysis of political ideas and institutions, in the wake of the expansion and greater
specialization in which sub-disciplines have their separate journals, conferences, and
working parties.
For some critics the pace of professionalization has been too slow. Kerr and Kettell
complain that the study of British politics in particular has not kept pace with
other areas of the discipline. This allegation is probably true, but may be part of a
general decline in single-country studies. Despite the long history of attacks on their
shortcomings, both the Westminster model and Whiggish assumptions—Britain as
a model stable democracy and therefore a key topic for study—survived until the
last twenty-five years. A consequence of the field’s historical inheritance for Kerr
and Kettell is ‘its overly circumscribed conception of, and its theoretically under-
developed approach towards, its own subject matter’ (2006: 7). Only in recent years
have scholars used theoretical perspectives, often imported from the United States, in
analyses of British political institutions and processes—yet more examples of Bernard
Crick’s ‘tolerant eclecticism’.
40 dennis kavanagh
2.7 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
This chapter has argued that there have been trends to professionalization and pos-
itivism in British political science. But, as Bevir and Rhodes note (2007: 257), these
forces have not driven out other traditions from the discipline. A legacy of the British
inclination of some fifty years ago for an inductive, reflective, and largely atheoretical
approach rather than a quest for general theories and deductive models remains the
chief characteristic today. If the sense of professionalism and scientism in Britain
still lags behind the United States, the same judgement applies to other countries.
This characteristic has allowed a variety of approaches to flourish, including history,
social humanism, idealism, and a post-Marxian socialism. As a result of the improved
scholarship, in quantity and quality, political scientists are much better informed
across virtually all areas of political science than our predecessors were.
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chapter 3
.................................................................................................................
TH E B RIT I S H
S T U DY O F
POLITICS
.................................................................................................................
robert e. goodin
My assessment of the British study of politics—forgive me, I shall call it ‘political
science’, everyone else in the world does 1 —inevitably takes the form of a set of
traveller’s tales. Like all good travellers, I lingered for a time in new-found lands
before moving on again. Like all good travellers, I revisit from time to time. But the
eye I bring to this task is as much an outsider’s as others in this section of the Oxford
Handbook of British Politics are insiders’.
3.1 The Revolution of 1975
.............................................................................................................................................
I first encountered British political science en masse in 1975, at the Political Studies
Association annual conference at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. It was an auspicious
I am grateful for comments on earlier drafts from Brian Barry, Albert Weale, and the editors of this
volume. Conversations with participants in the 2007 ESRC International Benchmarking exercise have
also fed powerfully into this chapter. None of course is to be blamed for the use I have made of that
advice.
1
What else to call it? ‘British Politics’, as in the title of this volume, conflates the practice of politics in
Britain with the academic study thereof. That there is no convenient phrase for referring to British
students of politics is itself telling evidence of weak professional self-identity in the UK.
the british study of politics 43
year for making a first acquaintance. That was the year the Old Guard was decisively
routed by a slate of Young Turks, organized by Brian Barry and consisting more or
less wholly of the professionalized subprofessoriate who formed the Editorial Board
of the British Journal of Political Science at the time. 2 The revolution succeeded.
(The Warden of Nuffield, Norman Chester, muttered darkly that it would not have
done, had he been present—and the darkness of his utterance convinced me he was
probably correct.) After the vote was announced at the AGM, the head of the Electoral
Reform Society, Enid Lakeman, rose to express the hope that there would be no more
talk of ‘slates’ and ‘contested elections’ in the PSA ever again. From the back of the hall
Ian Budge offered the observation, ‘Some of us spend a lot of our time on elections,
and think they are pretty good things on the whole’.
The event marked a sea change in British political science. 3 Political Studies
jolted decades forward: Jim Sharpe replaced Fred Ridley as editor with his post-
doc, Patrick Dunleavy, as editorial assistant; and peer reviewing was systematically
introduced. And polytechnic lecturers were welcomed into PSA membership on the
same basis as university lecturers. Of course it would be wrong to exaggerate the
depth of this revolution, as any other. The great bulk of people always invariably
carry on doing things much as before. But even if not everyone cared to practice
the profession in the new way themselves, the back of the rearguard resistance to
contemporary political science was broken, and the institutional barriers to those
who those who were tempted by that mode of political analysis were beginning to
crumble.
Nowadays, in certain quarters on both sides of the Atlantic, there is nostalgia
for the ‘amateurish prologue to the professionalized present’ (Kenny, this volume;
cf. Gunnell 2005; Kavanagh, this volume; Kenny 2004). Certainly something was
lost—and now is happily being reclaimed (more of which below)—when technical
professional language cut the discipline off from its civic roots and undercut its
capacity to make relevant contributions to politics and policy, popular discourse, and
civic education (Crick 1975; Farr 2004). Still, I defy anyone hankering for a return to
the pre-professional past to say in all honesty that they wish they had written any
of the chapters in, for example, the (pre-Royal) Institute of Public Administration’s
survey of British Government Since 1918 (Campion et al. 1950).
Emblematic of the Ancien Régime was the dispute raging within the Oxford Sub-
faculty when I had first arrived to do a D.Phil. there. The debate was over when
‘history’ ended and ‘politics’ began. Like all demarcation disputes, that one was
heated. But much more revealing was what was not at dispute. It was agreed on all
sides that there is no real difference in the methodology used in studying history and
politics. 4 Both were purely a matter of storytelling, well-crafted narratives laced with
2
Prescient, the Old Guard of the Political Studies Association had tried (as one former editor puts it)
to ‘strangle BJPolS at birth’, protesting to its publisher that they could not produce a journal under that
title, since PSA was the official organization representing British political studies and already published
the official British journal.
3
The difference can be calibrated by reference to a pair of memoirs of the profession, written by the
leaders of the opposing forces a quarter century apart: Chester (1975) and Barry (1999).
4
Of course the US profession grew out of History, too: the American Political Science Association
was founded at the 1903 meeting of the American Historical Association, and twelve of its first sixteen
44 robert e. goodin
telling anecdotes collected by mining the archives or, better yet, by plying the key
players with sherry in some SCR or St James club. 5
Oakeshott’s (1962) talk of ‘traditions’ provided the fig leaf for British insouciance
towards the new science of politics. But only the Cambridge ‘ideas in context’ school
of political theorists and the English School of constructivists in international rela-
tions really engaged in the depth required to make good that claim. Most of the best
work in this pre-professional past was hard to distinguish from quality journalism. 6
For all the time spent picking politicians’ and civil servants’ brains, it ironically took
two American blow-ins—Heclo and Wildavsky (1974)—to provide the first richly
ethnographic account of the ‘Whitehall village’ on a par with Evans-Pritchard’s (1937)
account of the Azande. 7
It is wrong to suppose that those stories always lacked any theoretical edge. Many
writers about politics (as about history) did so from a very particular point of
view: Whiggish or Marxist or Fabian or whatever (Rhodes 2006). It would be fair
to say, however, that those stories were written in almost complete innocence of
any theories emerging out of twentieth-century social science. Opening the British
profession to those vistas was the aim, and the accomplishment, of the Young Turks
of 1975.
There are exceptions in every generation, and Bill Mackenzie certainly was one in
his. 8 His Politics and Social Science (1967)—written during a sabbatical alongside Stein
Rokkan in Bergen—gives a glimmer of what it must have been like to have studied
with him at Manchester. It is unsurprising that so many of the Young Turks of 1975
hailed from there one way and another. 9
Essex and Strathclyde came to symbolize the new ways of studying of politics,
although from the inside (and I did time inside both) neither was as monolithic as
outsiders imagined. The Essex-based European Consortium for Political Research
meetings were held jointly with AHA (Farr 2004: 38; 2007: 90–1). Whereas that practice ceased in 1927 in
the USA, such affinities persisted in the UK for the next half-century.
5
As Crick (1980: 302) describes the period, ‘There were always the good old fellows who had no fancy
thoughts about . . . problems of theory and practice, but who simply assumed that if you lived in London
or Oxford . . . , you simply talked to civil servants and Cabinet Ministers, as in the good old days of the
war’. Hayward (1999: 2) says, ‘Not until the subject was recognized as an autonomous discipline, with its
own professionally qualified practitioners, did political zoologists become separated from the denizens
of the political zoo’.
6
Compare e.g. Williams (1972), Sampson (1962). Far from being just some snide outsider’s swipe, this
is their self-description of their preferred research technique: the way Philip Williams announced he had
terminated the academic study of French Politics was by announcing in the Common Room one day,
‘I’ve made a big decision: I’ve stopped reading Le Monde every day’.
7
Although for delightful anecdotes, journalists-cum-contemporary-historians such as Hennessy
(1989) cannot be beat.
8
As were Sammy Finer and Hugh Berrington, albeit in this period placed in outposts with less
pervasive professional impact. Kavanagh (this volume: n. 1) reports that ‘during a faculty meeting in
Oxford in the 1970s Finer, then Gladstone Professor of Government and Public Administration, shocked
many of his colleagues by claiming that history and politics were different subjects and he had taught
both. His immediate predecessor as holder of the Gladstone chair, Max Beloff, and his immediate
successor, Peter Pulzer, regarded politics as a branch of history, the first openly so’.
9
For a delightful memoir of the department see Birch and Spann (1974).
the british study of politics 45
powerfully furthered the cause. Initially built by Blondel and Rokkan around an
axis of the four pre-eminent new-look political science groupings in Europe (Essex–
Mannheim–Leiden–Bergen), its summer school modelled on Michigan’s proselytized
the new political science to junior staff and students Europe-wide; and its Joint
Sessions of workshops, initially drawing participants disproportionately from the UK,
Scandinavia, and the Netherlands, further solidified links among new-style political
scientists across Europe, just as the ‘Madison exchange’ solidified Essex’s link to a
pre-eminent centre of US behaviouralism.
But as I have said, even Essex and Strathclyde were never as monolithically new-
look political science as all that. And even in the early years after the 1975 revolution,
there were new-look political scientists dotted all around: at ancient universities,
redbricks, new universities, and polytechnics alike. Nowhere were they quite so
predominant as at Essex or Strathclyde, but in many surprising places they were at
least a minor presence. 10 That was UK political science as I found it upon returning
in 1979.
3.2 Still ‘a Self-deprecating Profession’
.............................................................................................................................................
All ancient history, you might say. But skipping three decades ahead, I find things
interestingly the same (as well as, of course, interestingly different). The remarks that
follow are another set of traveller’s tales, these from my sojourn chairing an Inter-
national Benchmarking Panel on Politics and International Studies, convened by the
Economic and Social Research Council jointly with the Political Studies Association
and the British International Studies Association. The official report of the Panel is
available for all to read (ESRC 2007). What follows are my own impressions, based
on observations, evidence, and interviews as part of that exercise. In what follows, I
shall obviously be speaking for myself; not for the ESRC, PSA, BISA, other members
of that Panel, or anyone else.
To an outsider, much the most striking feature of British political science is its
overwhelming modesty. Asked what ‘big ideas’ it had contributed to the discipline,
people insistently refused to answer. 11 It is, as Jack Hayward (1999) wrote, a deeply
10
As Crick (1980: 300) puts it, ‘Behaviourism only really dominated Essex and then Strathclyde, most
of the other new departments hedged their bets and lazily or wisely added a behaviourist or so to
political ideas and institutions men’.
11
Nor is this merely a recent development, apparently. Ridley (1980: 471) begins his contribution to
the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of Government and Opposition devoted to ‘a generation of political
thought’ by saying, ‘It was only when I came to reflect on what I might write that I realized the folly of
my acceptance. That shock of the exercise, indeed, was that I could make no list of developments in
political science to trigger off this article; clearly, no thoughts on the important books of the past
generation were stored at the back of my mind, awaiting this invitation for their release’. See similarly
Dunleavy, Kelly, and Moran (2001: 7), reflecting back on the first fifty years of Political Studies.
46 robert e. goodin
‘self-deprecating profession’. The general sentiment, as the Panel met with depart-
mental representatives up and down the country, was that ‘flashy Americans up
themselves parade “big ideas”; we don’t do that sort of thing, around here . . . ’ 12
That modesty is unwarranted. Within my home sub-discipline of political theory
I can think of several ‘big ideas’ that have emanated from Britain: conceptual analysis
(Barry 1965), participatory democracy (Pateman 1970), analytical Marxism (Cohen
1978), the politics of presence (Phillips 1995). Within electoral studies, dealignment
(Särlvik and Crewe 1983) was a pretty ‘big thing’, at least until it was overtaken
by disaffection. Buzan, Weaver, and de Wilde (1997) coined the term ‘securitiza-
tion’ before it became a worldwide phenomenon. Goodhart and Bhansali (1970)
introduced the ‘political business cycle’ five years before Nordhaus (1975) gave it
its name; and Sanders, Ward, and Marsh’s (1987) study of ‘Government Popularity
and the Falklands War’ remains one of the most dramatic demonstrations of it. The
Cambridge School of ideas in context is one of the dominant influences on political
theory worldwide, as is the English School on international relations. As we point
out in the ESRC (2007: 12) report, ‘some of the earliest work on what has come to
be known as “international political economy” was British’ and ‘some of the earliest
work on “networked governance” and “new public management” came from the UK’.
It is simply not true that ‘big ideas’ do not come out of Britain. It is merely the case
that there is a reluctance there to brag about them.
The other constant refrain, linked with the first, is the self-conception of the
British profession as an insistently ‘pluralist’ one. 13 There is no big idea, still less any
methodological orthodoxy, that anyone is trying to sell everyone else. It is a matter of
live and let live. ‘[F]rom the 1950s and through the 1960s’, Crick (1980: 303) reports,
‘there was no possible general characterization of British political studies, except to
say “tolerant eclecticism” ’. 14 That mood very much remains to this day.
One way in which this can be seen most clearly is in the way in which sub-
disciplines are fiercely fenced off in the UK. This is most evident with international
studies, which in some places in the UK is a separate department and which through-
out the UK is represented by a separate professional association, BISA, which has
virtually no overlap with the PSA (ESRC 2007: 11). But as Kenny (this volume) points
out, various other sub-disciplinary groups—in comparative politics, area studies, and
political theory—stake greater claims to autonomy within British political science
than they do even within the US discipline, where numbers are larger and critical
mass within sub-disciplines is easier to obtain (more of which below). Whether this is
a manifestation of genuine sub-disciplinary exceptionalism or mere sub-disciplinary
protectionism is a matter of judgement.
12
For elaboration of the (largely US) phenomenon of ‘big things’, see Barry (1974) and Goodin
(2009).
13
‘There are many styles in political science’, writes Ridley (1980: 480), and, ‘The freedom of the
scholar to choose his own is essential to our academic tradition: pluralism is a “good thing” in this
respect as in others’.
14
This chimes, of course, with Crick’s (1962: 21, 32, 141, 160) distinctively British conception of
politics itself: as the ‘conciliation of differing interests’, as ‘a way of ruling in divided societies without
undue violence’; for ‘conciliation is better than violence’ and ‘diversity is better than unity’.
the british study of politics 47
In his valedictory lecture, Adam Roberts (2008: 335–6) celebrates what he sees
as the characteristically British ‘pluralist approach both to the actual conduct of
international relations and to the academic subject’. He elaborates:
It is a pluralism that accepts the relevance of many different approaches to international
relations: not just the proper emphasis on power and interest that is found in realist
theories, but also approaches that stress the significance of ideas and norms, the impact
of domestic political and economic structures on international politics, the roles of
transnational movements and international organizations, and the existence of new
challenges. It is a pluralism of theories, a pluralism of political systems, a pluralism of
different cultures and mindsets, a pluralism of methods of analysis and a pluralism of
academic disciplines.
Roberts concludes by quoting approvingly from Mill’s Autobiography: ‘Goethe’s
device, “many-sidedness”, was one which I would most willingly . . . have taken for
mine’.
One can easily imagine some bedraggled American departmental chair saying
those sorts of things, after the wars of methodology have been fought to a stand-
still. Such things are said in Britain, however, less out of war weariness than out of
something more akin to a failure to engage. These are simply not things to be fought
over in the first place. To each his or her own, methodologically. Funnily enough, that
is precisely what the revolution of 1975 itself was fought in the name of: the right to
practice modern political science if you wanted to, not any serious attempt to impose
that practice on everyone else around you. 15
In one way, that might sound like bad news. It might sound as if people do not
care enough about their profession to insist that others practise it right. Or it might
sound like post-modernism before its time: there is no truth, only perspectives. Or
it might sound like best scientific practice: triangulate on the truth from as many
angles as you can. There is evidence of all three, in Britain as elsewhere. But much the
most interesting is the third. Colin Hay dedicates his marvellous primer on Political
Analysis to the thought that ‘there may be more than one way to explore the political
world’ (2002: 1), and to showing the ways in which they can be fruitfully combined.
Of course there are similarly synthetic projects afoot in many corners of the world,
with many (different and hotly contested) suggestions for uniting qualitative and
quantitative methods, for example (King, Keohane, and Verba 1994; Oakley 2000;
Box-Steffensmeier, Brady, and Collier 2008). A pluralist synthesis is not a peculiarly
British project. But in the UK it seems now to be a major part of the self-conception
of the discipline as a whole, in a way it is not elsewhere.
These first two phenomena are, perhaps, connected. The puzzle of why big ideas do
come out of Britain, but there is a reluctance to brag about them, might be explained
by the simple fact that there is a live-and-let-live reluctance to try to shove one’s own
ideas, however big, down the throat of the profession as a whole. It is a reluctance to
proselytize, not a reluctance to think big, that characterizes the UK profession.
15
That right had to be fought for, in the face of stiff resistance: pluralism of this sort was far from the
hallmark of the pre-1975 profession; anyone who doubts that needs only consult Johnson (1989).
48 robert e. goodin
The size of the UK discipline, compared to the US, might go some way towards
explaining that, in turn. There are around 1,500 academics in UK departments of
Politics and International Studies; in the USA more than ten times that number
are members of APSA. Combine that fact with the observation that the ‘big things’
dominating the discipline—‘ “behaviouralism” in the previous generation or “ratio-
nal choice” in the present one’—‘are practiced to any high degree by only perhaps
five percent of the . . . discipline’ (ESRC 2007: 9). In the USA, 5 per cent amounts to
750 people, critical mass for a specialist conference every year. In the UK, 5 per cent
would amount to only 75. That is not really critical mass, assuming you could only
ever get half of them in the same room at once. 16 Any temptation to form a clique
locally is further tempered by the ease, nowadays, of making common cause with the
much greater numbers of like-minded colleagues globally. Such is the fate of locals
and cosmopolitans in all professions (Gouldner 1957).
Of course, 5 per cent of the UK profession is a much larger number of people than
it would have been a couple generations ago (Barry 1999: 431). Still, I think some truth
remains in Ridley’s (1975: 2) observation in introducing the issue of Political Studies
commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of the PSA: ‘The size of our own [UK]
profession makes generalizations even harder to sustain. We know too many of our
colleagues individually, too much of their individual work, to accept trends . . . : most
will seem to us typical only of themselves’.
There is a cost as well as a benefit to all this think-small self-deprecation and
modesty. It shows up clearly in the bibliometric analyses conducted for the ESRC
Panel. Overall, UK journal articles get cited in roughly the proportion that should
be expected: ‘the UK accounts for around 15 per cent of journal articles indexed in
[ISI/Thompson] databases, and around 14 per cent of citations there are to articles
from the UK’ (ESRC 2007: 10). That is 92 per cent of what you would expect—just a
shade off the pace.
But when we look at important articles—at those most often cited—the UK polit-
ical science profession is increasingly underrepresented the further you go up the
academic food chain. Some 9.5 per cent of UK journal articles in political science
are among the 10 per cent most cited—merely half a per cent less than expected. But
only 4.1 per cent of UK articles are among the 5 per cent most cited. And only 0.7 per
cent are among the 1 per cent most cited (ESRC 2007: 15). Among those ‘very most
important articles’, UK political science scores only 70 per cent of what should be
expected—way off the pace.
That suggests that UK political science probably is not pulling its weight at the very
highest levels of political science worldwide. There is plenty of solid good work, and
nearly as much very good work as there should be. But there is less than there should
16
And it depends on how the sub-discipline conceptualizes itself. The UK is strong in the history of
political thought, for example: but if people identify themselves with particular periods or particular
authors rather than as ‘historians of political thought’ as such, the critical mass evaporates. Ditto for area
studies: if people see themselves primarily as country specialists rather than as ‘area studies’ or
‘comparativists’, what could have been a critical mass ceases to be so.
the british study of politics 49
be of the very highly innovative work that attracts really widespread professional
notice worldwide. 17
At the institutional level, too, UK political science is rather off the pace, interna-
tionally. One way to see this is to look at the comparative impact of the main UK-
based journals. Since impact factors (ISI 2008) fluctuate substantially from year to
year, Table 3.1 reports three-year averages.
Looking first at generalist political science journals, two US journals—the Amer-
ican Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science—have far
greater impact than any others, due partly (but only partly) to their status as journals
of the largest professional associations in US political science. 18 One UK-based jour-
nal, the British Journal of Political Science, joins the next tier of important journals
worldwide. But the main journal of the UK Political Studies Association—Political
Studies—has only half as much impact as BJPolS, and a quarter that of AJPolS and
less than a fifth that of APSR. 19 Its performance is broadly on a par with that of
lesser regionally based journals, such as the Australian Journal of Political Science and
Scandinavian Political Studies.
The second set of columns in Table 3.1 reports similar statistics for journals of inter-
national relations. One US-based journal, International Organization, clearly domi-
nates the field, with another (Foreign Affairs) following at some distance. Another
pair of US-based journals, International Studies Quarterly and World Politics, are a
little way behind that. The highest-impact UK-based journal, International Affairs,
is that distance again further back, followed by the Review of International Studies
and Millennium. One way of looking at these statistics, again, is to say that the official
organ of the British International Studies Association, Review of International Studies,
has only two-thirds the impact of World Politics or International Studies Quarterly and
one-third the impact of International Organization.
A second set of institutional markers relate to world rankings of political sci-
ence departments, based on impact-weighted journal publications of their members.
Scorecards of this sort are regularly produced for US departments; and a more deeply
informed ranking of UK departments is produced by periodic Research Assessment
Exercises. But so far as I know the only systematic attempt at ranking departments
worldwide is that of Hix (2004). These data too display considerable variability year
to year, so I shall focus on Hix’s report of departmental rankings based on sets of
rolling five-year averages.
As seen in Table 3.2, there are fourteen UK departments that, at one time or
another over the decade 1993–2002, figured among the world’s top fifty departments
17
One explanation might be that, once they begin writing high-impact articles, UK scholars are
poached abroad. Certainly it is true, looking at the list of most-cited political scientists in the Oxford
Handbooks of Political Science, that twice as many moved from the UK overseas as moved from overseas
to the UK at the height of their careers (Goodin 2009: appendix 3).
18
Subscription to which is included as part of membership in the American Political Science
Association and the Midwestern Political Science Association, respectively.
19
Other journals of the PSA—the British Journal of Politics and International Relations; Politics; and
Political Studies Review—are not included in the ISI database at the time of writing, likewise other
journals of the APSA.
50
robert e. goodin
Table 3.1. Journal impact factors, 2005–7
Political science Impact factor Average International relations Impact factor Average
2005 2006 2007 2005 2006 2007
American Political Science Review 3.233 3.023 2.317 2.858 International Organization 2.060 2.200 3.000 2.871
American Journal of Political Science 1.845 2.167 2.032 2.015 Foreign Affairs 2.058 1.482 1.854 1.795
Annual Review of Political Science 0.860 1.368 1.359 1.196 International Studies Quarterly 1.415 1.369 1.386 1.390
British Journal of Political Science 0.785 1.205 1.311 1.100 World Politics 1.308 1.132 1.568 1.336
Political Studies 0.575 0.500 0.488 0.521 International Affairs 0.992 0.674 1.131 0.932
Australian Journal of Political Science 0.538 0.397 0.582 0.506 Review of International Studies 1.015 0.451 0.855 0.774
Scandinavian Political Studies 0.457 0.342 0.553 0.451 Millennium 0.400 0.500 0.673 0.524
Source: ISI 2008.
the british study of politics 51
Table 3.2. Department rankings in global top fifty, 1993–2002
1993–7 1994–8 1995–9 1996–2000 1997–2001 1998–2002
Essex 7 8 4 7.5 16 16.5
Warwick 14 14 27 31 — —
Oxford 17.5 21 13 20 22 19
Birmingham 25 16 24 13 17 22
Strathclyde 37 45 — — — —
Cambridge 38 33 32 22 20 23
Glasgow 40.5 35 50 — — —
LSE 40.5 39 37 37 24.5 15
Sheffield — 49.5 38 26 35 25
Hull — 49.5 48 — — —
Bristol — — 31 25 36 34
Aberystwyth — — — — 40 38.5
Cardiff — — — — 44 37
UCL — — — — — 46
Source: Hix 2004: 311.
of political science assessed in this fashion. But of those fourteen, only five depart-
ments have continuously ranked in the top fifty, and only Essex consistently in the
top twenty.
Put that way, it does not look as if UK political science overall has exactly been a
world leader. But looking at those statistics another way, a more encouraging picture
emerges. In the beginning of that period, there were eight UK departments in the
global top fifty, four of them in the global top twenty-five. By the end of that period,
there were ten in the global top fifty, six in the global top twenty-five. Clearly, there
was movement in the right direction over that decade. And although I know of
no data to confirm it, my sense is that that movement has continued and perhaps
accelerated since.
These three ways of assessing the British profession converge on the same con-
clusion: good, but not great; doing well, but at the very top end could be doing
better. Of course all these three ways of looking at the profession view it through
the bibliometric lens of the ISI database; and there are well-known problems with
bibliometrics in general and that database in particular. 20 For all their shortcomings,
however, bibliometrics are surely the clearest indication that others take notice and
make use of what you write. Of course, most social scientists doing the citing are
American, so citation counts inevitably reflect American academic preferences. But
those wishing to claim that they do something important but different need to explain
why others so systematically fail to notice their contributions.
Many institutional factors impact upon UK political science. In many ways,
constant reviews and compliance costs associated with an increasingly demanding
20
Two of the most glaring are its underrepresentation of non-English-language journals and its
indexing only references in journals and not in books.
52 robert e. goodin
regulatory culture and accountability regime doubtless impede academic perfor-
mance. In other ways, they help to enhance it. No doubt the recurring Research
Assessment Exercises have been a mixed blessing. However mixed, I am nonetheless
inclined to think them definitely a blessing, on balance. Without the incentives that
they provided, the improvements just remarked upon would almost certainly never
have occurred.
The UK discipline is in very good health on a vast array of indicators, ranging
from student numbers to the demographic profile of the profession (ESRC 2007).
Most strikingly, there has been an internationalization (largely but not exclusively a
‘Europeanization’) of the junior ranks of the UK profession, making it more outward
looking and comparative in nature (ESRC 2007: 34–5). That development, in partic-
ular, is much to be celebrated.
3.3 Contributions to Public Life
.............................................................................................................................................
While this chapter has primarily focused on providing an academic assessment of
British political science, as seen from afar and on intermittent revisitings, I close with
some comments on the contribution of the profession to British public life more
broadly.
There is anxiety, both within some sectors of the scholarly community and par-
ticularly among funders, that by becoming hyper-professionalized British political
scientists have lost both the capacity and the willingness to contribute to the civic life
of the community. The fear is that they have become ‘eunuchs or voyeurs’, in Crick’s
(1980: 307) acidic phrase. But that is simply not what our ESRC Panel found. British
political science makes a massive contribution indeed to public life.
Much of that contribution comes through deep-background influence on public
values and public culture, through media appearances and helping to shape public
debates. Research Councils UK (2006)—an umbrella organization which includes
both the ESRC and AHRC—rightly emphasizes that those are as important as direct
economic impacts. Our ESRC Panel found much evidence of British political scien-
tists doing just that.
Even just in terms of direct engagement with non-academic users ‘in indus-
try, Government, the professions and the voluntary sector’ (which is ESRC’s nar-
rower specification), members of the British profession make a very considerable
contribution:
They have served as advisors to Parliamentary committees at home and abroad; to the
UK Cabinet Office, the Scottish Executive, the Wales Office and the Northern Ireland
Office of First Minister and Deputy First Minister; and to various departments of state
at home and abroad. At home, the discipline has provided members of the House of
the british study of politics 53
Commons, the House of Lords, and the Scottish Constitutional Convention; it has
provided directors of the Home Office Research Programme and the Scottish Public
Sector Ombudsman, as well as members of the Competition Commission and the
Defence Advisory Board. Overseas, UK Politics and IS scholars have testified to the
Lebanese National Assembly, to the International Energy Agency, to the US Defense
Intelligence Agency and NATO Defence College. UK Politics and IS scholars assist a wide
range of international organizations, including the European Central Bank, European
Commission and the Council of Europe, the International Monetary Fund, NATO, the
UN Development Programme, the UN Human Rights Commission and the UN World
Food Programme. They advise foreign governments on electoral reform in Australia,
Bermuda, Canada, China, Lebanon and the Netherlands. They advise NGOs like Oxfam
and businesses like Siemens and Shell.
I reiterate our conclusion: ‘We would be hard-pressed to name any other country in
which a larger proportion of the Politics and IS profession was directly engaged with
high-level policy-makers in this way’ (ESRC 2007: 26; see similarly British Academy
2004; 2008: 16–20). Furthermore, in ‘the special survey of end-users we commis-
sioned . . . well over half of potential end-users report that they do use UK Politics and
International Studies Research, and use it heavily and appreciatively’ (ESRC 2007: 26).
No profession with three so distinguished of its practitioners as Philip Norton,
Bhikhu Parekh, and Raymond Plant sitting in the House of Lords, commenting
on matters of great public concern on the basis of their considerable professional
expertise, can be said to be failing its larger public mission.
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Section Two: Political
Science
................................................................................................................
chapter 4
.................................................................................................................
INSTITUTIONALISM
.................................................................................................................
b. guy peters
4.1 Introduction: Institutional Theory
in Political Science
.............................................................................................................................................
Institutions are central to our understanding of politics and government. Their
importance can be seen easily in day-to-day discourse about government, as citizens
and scholars alike discuss the importance of parliament, the courts, or political parties
in making policy and exercising the authority of the public sector. In addition to this
quotidian sense of institutionalism in understanding government, the roots of polit-
ical science are in the study of formal institutions (see Eckstein 1963). Even as early as
Aristotle’s discussions of comparative politics, institutions and the constitutions that
created them constituted the core of political analysis. Central to this form of analysis
was the idea that formal structures would shape behaviours and shape the outcomes
of political processes.
Much of the ‘old institutionalism’ in political science (see Peters 1996; Greenwood
and Greenwood 1996) did not involve explicit theorizing about institutions but
remained largely descriptive and normative. The description of institutions in this
extensive body of research was often very detailed and intensive, but generally did not
attempt to use that evidence to construct explicit theories about the performance of
institutions. That having been said, however, there were often implicit theories about
the structure of government, and about the manner in which institutions themselves
functioned. For example, the study of electoral laws has long assumed that those laws
(an institution) influenced, and in some ways determined, the outcomes of elections
(Duverger 1951). Indeed, to the extent that there was theory in the old institutionalism
it was legal and constitutional, and tended to lack the more behavioural assumptions
that would inform later theoretical developments.
58 b. guy peters
The ‘new institutionalism’ in political science (March and Olsen 1986; Steinmo,
Thelen, and Longstreth 1992) was built on the background of the old institutionalism,
but also reflected the more theoretical turn in the discipline. The new institutionalism
remains concerned with using institutional variables to explain important depen-
dent variables in the discipline. For example, the fundamental differences between
presidential and parliamentary institutions appear to have a major impact on policy
choices (Weaver and Rockman 1994), and federal systems have been assumed to
produce very different outcomes in public finance than unitary systems (Breton
1996). As new institutional theory developed, it imported ideas from rational choice
theories (Shepsle 1989), sociological organization theory (March and Olsen 1986), and
a variety of other sources such as institutional economics (Pierson 2000).
All of these theoretical approaches to institutions have at their core some assump-
tions about political behaviour and also have some interest, if limited in some
important cases, in testing their assumptions empirically using quantitative as well
as qualitative methodologies. Institutionalism therefore has now returned as one
contender for a paradigm in political science. Unlike the other contenders that rely
on individual-level variables, institutionalism bases its explanations on the structure
of formal (and sometimes informal) organizations, or on the values, symbols, and
routines that those institutions inculcate into their members. Those institutionalist
explanations, however, further have been informed by an increased understand-
ing of political behaviour coming from the ‘behavioural revolution’ in the disci-
pline. Further, unlike most other explanations in most versions of institutionalism,
the preferences of individuals are assumed to be derived from their membership
in institutions, rather than exogenous to those memberships. Those preferences
may be commitments to particular policy solutions or to particular institutional
structures.
In this chapter I will examine the role of institutional theory, and institutional
analysis more broadly, in British political science. Institutional analysis has been
central to the British science of politics, but often has focused more on the nature
of individual institutions than on developing more general theories of institutional
formation and/or behaviour. That having been said, however, there have been some
notable contributions to theory, and I will discuss and evaluate these theoretical
statements. Finally, institutional analysis poses some interesting paradoxes about
analysing and understanding British politics, and I will develop several of these and
explore their implications.
4.2 Institutionalism as the Root of
British Political Analysis
.............................................................................................................................................
The development of British political science has not been significantly different
from that of the discipline outlined briefly above. There was an extremely strong
institutionalism 59
tradition of the ‘old institutionalism’ in British political analysis, some of it from
well before political science developed as a separate academic discipline. To some
extent that tradition persists more clearly than in most other national political science
professions. There are a continuing number of interesting and important studies of
Parliament and other institutions, many without explicit attempts to develop political
theories about those institutions. At the same time, however, the new institution-
alism has become a significant part of the language of political science, and may
serve as an explicit theoretical foundation for expanding understanding of those
structures.
Some of the leading figures in the development of British political science, or
perhaps more aptly ‘political studies’, can be easily identified with the old institu-
tionalism. For example, one could easily begin with Walter Bagehot’s (1873) study
of the English (sic?) constitution as a central institutionalist document for British
government. This study of the constitution was followed by other notable studies such
as Dicey (1908) and Jennings (1941) that focused on the importance of the written
and unwritten elements of that constitution, and especially the legal foundations of
public action. At the same time, very much as would a contemporary normative
institutionalist, they emphasized the myths, symbols, and routines that shaped the
performance of politics in Britain.
While the above scholars were concerned primarily with British government, oth-
ers among the old institutionalists were more concerned with comparative politics
and the impact of institutions in shaping other political systems. For example, while
Britain has been and remains a very centralized political system, K. C. Wheare
(1947) produced one of the most important studies of federal systems, as well as
important comparative studies of legislatures (1955) and the nature of the British
Commonwealth (1960). Likewise, Samuel Finer (1962; 1999) has made a number
of significant contributions to understanding governance and political institutions
in a broad comparative manner. Again, the list of significant contributors to ‘old’
institutional understandings of politics coming from British political scientists could
be extended to a substantial length, but it is clear from the sampling presented here
that there has been a notable, and continuing, contribution.
4.2.1 Analysis of Particular Institutions
The persistence of the ‘old institutionalism’ in British political science can be seen
in the large number of studies that continue to be published with an explicit focus
on particular institutions and that seek to describe the internal dynamics of those
institutions. Again, these studies constitute major contributions to the understanding
of politics and governing and should not be demeaned. Further, they have often been
addressed to significant analytic questions of British government, e.g. the increasing
power of the Prime Minister relative to Cabinet and Parliament, or the increasing
judicialization of governing in Britain and other EU countries. At the same time,
however, many of these studies have not contributed to the broader development of
the discipline, and are often unseen outside the specialist community. This is perhaps
60 b. guy peters
especially true because of the tendency not to consider the British parliament in
comparative context, even of its close relatives in the other Westminster systems.
The study of Parliament is one of the clearest examples of the persistence of the
‘old institutionalism’ as a mode of research in British political science (Giddings
2005). Despite some notable exceptions (Judge 2003; Patterson 1989) the study of
Parliament has produced primarily the type of descriptive studies of institutional
dynamics described above. These studies describe one or more aspects of parliaments
extremely well, and fit them into broader patterns of governance in the United
Kingdom, but they do not move the theoretical literature forward, nor locate the
British parliament in a comparative context—indeed, to the extent that the European
Parliament appears to have been more of a focus for theory development, e.g. in
agenda setting, than has the national parliament.
The same story told about the legislative branch might be extended to cover the
executive, both the political executive and the permanent executive in the public
bureaucracy. To some extent the relative absence of theory about the political execu-
tive may be a function of the United Kingdom being a ‘majoritarian’ political system
and therefore being denied the issues of coalition formation and maintenance that
have been at the centre of a good deal of theorizing about cabinets (Müller and Strøm
2000; Laver 1998). Crafting theories about prime ministers is often extremely tricky,
given that they occur one at a time and their behaviour is often seen to be determined
by individual factors. Likewise, much of what happens in Cabinet happens in private,
especially given the tradition of secrecy in the United Kingdom, making studying the
institution that much more difficult.
On the other hand, however, one area in which British political science appears
to have made major theoretical contributions is in the area of studying the public
bureaucracy (see below). Not all of that theorizing might fit into the usual institu-
tionalist model, but it has certainly illuminated the bureaucracy as a public institution
and served as a foundation for further theorizing about this institution. This work is
especially significant given the tendency of political science in some other countries
(notably my own) to denigrate public administration, and to exclude it from the usual
canon in the discipline. Further, British political science has provided a number of
interesting theoretical analyses of the relationship between political executives and
their civil servants (Hood and Lodge 2006).
Finally, the study of local government in the United Kingdom has a long and
honourable tradition, again much of it highly descriptive. There have been seem-
ingly endless studies of local government and the various formats through which
both management at the local level and the relationships between central and local
government have progressed. That having been said, however, here too there has been
greater effort at building theory for local government than for some other institutions
in British government. For example, the ‘resource dependency’ approach (Rhodes
1988) has been central to the analysis of central–local relations in the United Kingdom,
and has been extended to other elements of government as well. Urban regime theory
(Mossberger and Stoker 2001; Pierre 2005) has been a more recent contribution to
that important strand of research.
institutionalism 61
I should be careful to reiterate that these descriptions of the old institutionalism as
a style of research are meant to be far from entirely negative. These studies illuminated
the central institutions in British government and their role in governing. Further,
they formed the foundation for the subsequent development of more theoretical
approaches to institutions and governance. Indeed, contemporary political science
has had some tendency to forge ahead with theories and analysis while lacking the
type of information and understanding these studies would provide and the conclu-
sions reached are worse for that lack of background.
4.2.2 New Institutionalism and Conscious Theorizing
The ‘old institutionalism’ in British political science was an extremely rich tradition of
analysis of the institutions of British government, and to a lesser extent comparative
analyses of other political systems. There was, however, little if any self-conscious
theorizing about the way in which institutions worked or their complex interrela-
tionships, or their relationships with the broader social system. There often was a
theory that was informing the institutional research, but that theory was well hidden
through the close attention to detail and it was mostly expressed in the form of specific
understandings of particular institutions, or perhaps of the British constitution taken
as an entity (Johnson 2004).
Partially in response to the development of the ‘new institutionalism’ as a major
approach to political analysis, and its more explicit theorizing about the nature
and role of institutions, British political science has undertaken more extensive and
explicit analyses of institutions. These analyses have built on the tradition of detailed
analysis of British institutions but have added more explicit concerns with theory
and comparison. This shift in the style of analysis occurred at approximately the same
time that British institutions were undergoing significant and perhaps unprecedented
change. Thus, the ‘real world’ of government provided academics with an interesting
laboratory for analysis, and helped to elucidate the nature of institutions in British
government.
4.2.2.1 Whitehall Series
One of the most important applications of institutional analysis in the British public
sector has been the Whitehall Series, a major study of the centre of government
funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. This project produced an
extremely large number of scholarly publications (see, for example, the review by
Wilson 2001) about the changing nature of structure and behaviour within the
central institutions of the state. This research project followed closely after large-scale
changes in Whitehall, and therefore had significant practical as well as academic value.
The project also reinforced the resource dependency approach of Rod Rhodes that
had been applied to other aspects of British government, notably local government,
62 b. guy peters
and therefore helped to move the British study of central institutions in the public
sector away from the descriptive emphasis of old institutionalism.
Although the Whitehall Series itself was concerned primarily with the British
public sector, it appeared to have encouraged a number of other more comparative
studies examining the role of central government institutions. The work of Vincent
Wright, Jack Hayward, and Edward Page, among others, who have examined the core
executive in a number of countries, was also influenced by the Whitehall Project.
And the group of younger scholars trained by Rhodes, Smith, Wright, and the other
scholars has helped to develop further this strand of institutionalist research in British
political science. This continuing interest in institutions is in marked contrast to
developments in American political science that too often ignores the complexity of
institutions in the search for more easily quantifiable variables.
4.2.2.2 Christopher Hood and the Public Sector
British political science has also had one of the major international students of the
public bureaucracy and the public sector taken more broadly. Although not explicitly
working in an institutionalist paradigm, Hood has applied a range of theories to
public administration and other political institutions. For example, his book on
‘Bureaumetrics’ (Hood, Huby, and Dunsire 1981) was an attempt to measure the
nature of public organizations and to represent their differences in a more under-
standable manner. More importantly, Hood applied cultural theory to the study of
the public sector (1998) and generated a number of insights into how organizations
link to society, using that approach which is not entirely dissimilar to normative
institutionalism.
The research by Hood and his colleagues has not only kept public administration
in the centre of political science in Britain but has also advanced institutionalist
thinking. This research has helped to understand the interactions of institutions in
areas such as accountability and the relationships of ministers and their mandarins,
and has also provided ways of linking various strands of social and political theory to
the analysis of political institutions.
4.2.2.3 Rational Choice Institutionalism
British political science has also made a number of important contributions to
rational choice studies of institutions, again especially the public bureaucracy. For
example, Patrick Dunleavy (1985) developed a useful critique and alternative to more
simplistic assumptions about the budget-maximizing behaviour of bureaucrats. The
‘bureau-shaping’ model has been applied primarily in the United Kingdom but
should be applicable in a wider range of settings. Dunleavy and Keith Dowding have
also developed more general rational choice approaches to the role of the civil service
in governing.
British political science has been less taken with the rational choice approach than
has American political science, but has been perhaps more conscious of the existence
institutionalism 63
of policy networks and policy communities that generally function in an institutional
manner. Indeed, there has been substantial intellectual conflict over the relative utility
of these approaches and their relative contributions to the scientific aspects of politi-
cal science (Dowding 2001). The two approaches to political science represent ways of
thinking about politics that involve structure but which also elaborate the workings
of institutions, or sets of institutions. Thus, their interactions add some aspects of
agency to the study of structure.
4.2.2.4 The Welfare State and Path Dependence
Much of the discussion of institutions focuses on formal institutions in government,
but long-standing policies and programmes can also acquire the status of an insti-
tution. Indeed, much of the ‘historical institutionalism’ in political science is more
concerned with policies than with structures, and the welfare state in the United
Kingdom and the rest of the Western Europe has become institutionalized, by any
interpretation of that term. With that level of institutionalization it is important to
understand the political logic of these institutions as well as their persistence and the
possibilities for transformation. In the United Kingdom the level of attention given
to the politics of the welfare state, and perhaps especially the National Health Service
(Castles 2002), helps to understand institutionalism as well as this complex set of
public policies (Jessop 1999).
The decisions concerning the welfare state made over half a century ago continue
to have importance for contemporary policy decisions, but contemporary political
values and social change challenge the existing institutional understandings. The
demographic, fiscal, and ideological pressures on the welfare state constitute one
of the important sources of institutional change in European politics (Leibfried
and Zürn 2006), and the United Kingdom is certainly no exception. The logic of
historical institutionalism and path dependence (Torfing 2001) has been central to
understanding the retrenchment and the persistence of the welfare state, including
the comparatively gradual reforms in the United Kingdom.
4.2.2.5 Devolution and Federalism
The devolution of powers to Scotland and Wales has created greater interest in the
nature of federalism and other devolved forms of governing in British political sci-
ence. As noted, the old institutionalism in British political science produced several
interesting studies of federalism, but these were not directly relevant to British poli-
tics. However, with the changing status of Scotland and Wales (Bogdanor 2001; Laffin
and Thomas 1999) understanding intergovernmental dynamics becomes increasingly
important. Likewise, British membership in the European Union (see below) adds
another dimension to the analysis of intergovernmental relations.
The Constitution Unit has played a major role in the study of devolution in the
United Kingdom, and in studying the relationships among the various components
of the country. For example, the Unit has published a series of studies monitoring
64 b. guy peters
devolution and regionalization within the United Kingdom (Trench 2001; Hazell and
Rawlings 2005). These studies correspond very much to the description above of the
old institutionalism. They have concentrated on the formal aspects of constitutional
and institutional change in the United Kingdom, and especially on the devolution of
powers to Scotland and Wales.
4.2.2.6 Institutional Analyses of the EU
British political science has made major contributions to the institutional analysis of
the European Union. A great deal of the academic discussion of the EU continues to
be mired in the debate between ‘neo-functionalist’ and ‘liberal intergovernmentalist’
theories. While this debate was important as this proto-political system was being
developed, it appears to have little continuing relevance for understanding the system
as it now exists. Many of the institutions now in place in the EU are not at all dissimilar
to those of the constituent national governments, and can be understood through the
same modes of analysis, including institutional analysis.
Although certainly not alone (Tsebelis and Garrett 1996) a number of British schol-
ars have been central in understanding individual institutions within the European
Union, and as understanding the entire structure in institutional terms. For example,
Anand Menon (2003) and John Peterson (1999) have both made important statements
about the use of an institutionalist perspective to understand the EU. Likewise, Keith
Dowding (2000) has applied rational choice versions of institutionalism to critique
some of the existing research in the area. Other British scholars (Radaelli 2004;
Featherstone and Radaelli 2003) have been concerned with institutional isomorphism
and the process of ‘Europeanization’ of national policy and administrative systems.
This process has perhaps been especially interesting in the United Kingdom, given the
perceived differences between its institutions, and governance traditions, and those of
the EU.
The list of British scholars concerned with the institutions of the European Union
could be extended greatly. Indeed, like political science in many other European
countries, the study of the EU approaches being an obsession. Even with that the
complexity of the EU structures and procedures provides an interesting locus for
applying institutional analysis. Further, to some extent the development of ideas
such as multi-level governance (Flinders 2008) has added to the armamentarium of
institutionalist scholars.
4.3 Questions Arising from the
Institutional Approach
.............................................................................................................................................
To this point I have been describing the changing nature of institutional analysis
in British political science. The picture that has emerged from this very personal
institutionalism 65
account of the contributions that this approach has made to the discipline in Britain
raises some more general questions. Phrased rather broadly, we need to ask what
institutionalism has contributed to British political analysis, and in turn what the
British version of institutionalism has contributed to the discipline more broadly.
The first question is what institutional analysis, especially the more theoretical
versions, has contributed to British political science. In particular, what has it demon-
strated that other approaches to politics could not have? The most obvious answer
to that question is that the other dominant approaches in contemporary political
science rely primarily on the individual level for explanation; institutional answers
tend to focus more on the collective properties of organizations and institutions.
Perhaps especially in a political system with such well-developed institutions this
approach to politics can explain some patterns of behaviour that others could not.
In particular, as discussed below, institutionalism helps explain how even individuals
with strong political views appear to adapt those views to conform to institutional
contexts.
Of course, this strength for institutional approaches to politics is also their weak-
ness. While the institutional approaches emphasize the role of institutions they tend
to ignore, or at least to de-emphasize, the role of the individual and of social context.
Further, institutionalism may ignore agency, and needs to provide some place for
individual actions if the explanations involving these structures are to be active, and
the decisions required of the institutions are to be understandable. This role for
agency is especially important for explaining changes in institutions and their policy
choices. Likewise, institutions are anchored in a cultural and social environment and
must be understood as reflections of that environment.
Given the complementary strengths and weaknesses of institutional approaches
and the alternative paradigms for contemporary political science, the obvious ques-
tion is can these approaches be blended to provide a more complete picture, and if so
how? One such composite approach has been suggested by Fritz Scharpf (1997) in his
‘actor-centered institutionalism’. The notion here is that institutions may comprise
a great part of the landscape for any political system, but those institutions act
only if the individuals within them make decisions and activate the capacity of the
institutions. Likewise, institutions are not atomistic but they also must be understood
as a part of that institutional context.
We also need to ask what is distinctive about British institutional analysis. I have
also demonstrated the deep roots of institutional analysis in British political sci-
ence, and the persistence of that mode of analysis. Indeed, the persistence of older
styles of institutional analysis is one aspect of the distinctiveness of the British style
of analysis. Much of American political science has lost that detailed institutional
knowledge in its pursuit of methodological rigour. There is certainly nothing wrong
with rigour, and generally it is to be applauded, but the implicit assumption that
methodology should drive research, rather than vice versa, will ultimately undermine
research.
Finally, we need to think about the reasons for the persistence of such a strong
institutionalist strand in British political science. Perhaps the simple answer is the
historical institutionalist response to questions such as this—path dependence. This
66 b. guy peters
style of research has been successful in the past, and has tended to be reinforced by
education and graduate training, so that the rather distinctive style has persisted.
Further, British political science has tended to maintain a stronger sense of the
political than most other versions of political science. That is, there is less sense
that politics is merely a poor relation of economics in British political science than
in many, if not most, other national approaches to the discipline. The maintenance
of this keener sense of the political requires a continuing concern with the formal
institutions through which that politics is manifested.
4.3.1 Intellectual Puzzles and Paradoxes in Institutionalism
While in many ways the story that emerges about British institutions is familiar
and predictable, still a more careful examination of these institutions produces some
interesting paradoxes. These puzzles become more apparent when the analytic tools
provided by the new institutionalism are applied to the existing, but still changing,
institutions of the public sector. Indeed each of the major approaches to institutional
theory (Peters 2002) appears to provide at least one interesting puzzle about the
formal institutions in British political life. These paradoxes are not dissimilar to those
identified by scholars dealing with institutional theory in a more abstract manner
(Fernandez-Alles and Valle-Cabrera 2006). Further, in several of the paradoxes I have
identified, one of the other approaches to institutionalism offers a means of resolving
the apparent paradox in institutional life.
4.3.1.1 Few Formal Veto Points but Deliberative Processes
The structure of institutions can be described in a number of ways. The old institu-
tionalism tended to describe institutions and the constitutions in exacting detail, and
to focus on the legal underpinnings of institutional performance. Rational choice
institutionalism, on the other hand, considers those formal structures as a collection
of ‘veto-points’ (Tsebelis 2002). The fundamental idea behind this analysis is that
the more points at which decisions can be blocked—the greater the number of veto
points—the more difficult making decisions will be. So, for example, presidential
political systems with their multiple independent actors will, everything else being
equal, find making decisions more difficult than parliamentary systems without sep-
aration of powers (Weaver and Rockman 1994; Ackerman 2000). And even individual
institutions may vary significantly in the number of veto points with, for example,
the US House of Representatives being much simpler for decision-making than with
the more complex rules of the Senate.
Beginning with the veto-point model of institutions and their decision-making,
the British appears to place fewer restrictions on the political executive than most
other democratic governments. Not only is the system parliamentary, but it has
had single-party governments and thus has not faced the complexities and con-
straints of coalition government that tend to impose restraints on most continental
institutionalism 67
parliamentary governments (Müller and Strøm 2000). This majoritarian (Lijphart
1984) style of governing should enable quick and decisive action, a property that
may have been accentuated by the increasing power of the cabinet, and especially
by the prime minister (Heffernan 2003). Thus, as has been noted any number of
times, the British constitution provides relatively few veto points and hence has the
capacity to run roughshod over its opposition, and over the wishes of much of the
public.
The puzzle then is that government, and especially the Prime Minister, in the
United Kingdom does run roughshod rather infrequently, although critics will cer-
tainly point to examples, perhaps notably involvement in the war in Iraq. Why is
that the case? One answer is that it is easy to underestimate the number of veto
points, especially as long as the electoral mechanism functions. The familiar example
of Mrs Thatcher and the poll tax is still apt (Butler, Adonis, and Travers 1994), and
backbench rebellions also constrain just how far a Prime Minister and the Cabinet
can go in pushing their own policy priorities. Likewise, the House of Lords, despite
major constraints on its powers, continued to function as a veto point for important
legislation during the Blair government (Flinders 2005). The view of scholars such as
Martin Smith (1999) also is that there are a number of levels of mutual dependence
among actors in the core executive so that alliance building rather than imposition is
the fundamental dynamic.
Perhaps the other answer to the absence of as strong a government as we might
expect from the veto-point argument comes from normative institutionalism, and the
‘logic of appropriateness’. That is, governments do not act in that way because it is not
appropriate to do so. The normative structure of the public sector therefore produces
a more deliberative and cooperative style of governing than might be necessary,
albeit always conducted within the ‘shadow of hierarchy’. The intellectual ‘compost’
(Hennessy 2000) in which British political institutions grow stresses custom and
collegiality, so that an emphasis on hierarchy may not be as acceptable as it might
in other settings.
4.3.2 Large-scale Change but Path Dependency
A standard critique of institutional theory in political science is that while it is very
good at explaining stability, it is much less successful in explaining change (see Peters,
Pierre, and King 2005). In particular, the development of historical institutionalism
as an approach to political phenomena has made the persistence of programmes
and organizations once adopted a central analytic concern (Steinmo, Thelen, and
Longstreth 1992; Pierson 2000). The historical institutionalism has had at its core a
concept of ‘path dependency’, originally developed to analyse the persistence of sub-
optimal economic structures, but then adapted to describe the persistence of public
programmes. In addition to the importance of sheer inertia (see Rose and Davies
1993) in explaining persistence, scholars have argued that even programmes that are
68 b. guy peters
sub-optimal provide positive feedbacks to political elites and to clients, and therefore
produce political pressures for maintaining them (Pierson 2000).
British government is usually taken as a clear case of the persistence of policy and
formal institutions in the face of massive social change outside the public sector.
Many of the formal institutions of government have elements and procedures that are
centuries old. All governments have procedures that are employed not only simply
to process their business but also to constrain conflict as well as to legitimate laws
and other public decisions. The British political system has maintained more of these
vestigial elements than have most others, and reform of some of these elements, e.g.
the House of Lords, has been accomplished only through overcoming substantial
difficulty.
The experiences during the Thatcher government might be taken as a clear refuta-
tion of the perspective of historical institutionalism (Marsh and Rhodes 1992). Both
the institutional structure of the public sector, e.g. the nature of the civil service, and
the general style of governing were altered dramatically during the eleven years that
she was Prime Minister. In particular the organizational structure of the public sector
and the manner in which services were delivered were transformed significantly.
Likewise, the Blair government was able to make even more transformations of the
public sector, some following in the Thatcherite direction, others embarking in new
directions.
The post-Thatcher period provides an interesting test for the historical institu-
tionalist arguments. One part of that strand of theory would argue that the Thatcher
reforms that went so far from the underlying institutional pattern would be reversed,
and the dominant features of the status quo ante would be restored. Although that
return has not been as pronounced as for some other major reformers, e.g. New
Zealand (Scott 2000), there was some return to the former style of governing. On the
other hand, however, the often-made, if exaggerated, argument that the Blair govern-
ment is really a continuation of the Thatcher years appears to argue that the tradition
could be changed, and that a new pattern of governing could be established without
the extreme levels of disruption implied by some notions of ‘punctuated equilib-
rium’. Gordon Brown’s becoming Prime Minister now presents another interesting
challenge to these arguments concerning persistence and the power of underlying
traditions in government.
4.3.3 Myth and Symbol, but Substantial Efficiency
A third paradox in an institutional analysis of British government might be seen as the
flip side of the first discussed above. We have argued that conventions and customs in
the public sector have been used as a constraint on the capacity of a prime minister
to exercise what might be virtually autocratic power. Here, however, we return to
Bagehot’s familiar distinction between the dignified and efficient components of
government. Commentators on British government, especially coming from abroad,
institutionalism 69
may be quick to note the numerous ceremonial and seemingly antiquated elements
of political practice. The symbolic elements of governing are important in the United
Kingdom, and cannot really be avoided.
On the other hand British government can be extremely efficient, and reforms over
the past several decades have been attempting to modernize government and make
it even more efficient (Burch and Holliday 2004). The massive changes in the civil
service and the delivery of public services makes some parts of government appear
fully modernized and efficient, especially when compared to other presumably more
efficient governments, e.g. the United States or France (see Smith 1998). The British
delegation also has the reputation of being by far the most efficient in dealing with the
Brussels bureaucracy, so that the United Kingdom has been able to influence policy
more than might have been expected, even being one of the larger members of the
European Union (Kassim 2001).
Again, the paradox may be more apparent than real. As Richard Rose (1963) argued
some time ago, there may be some ‘modernity in tradition’ in British government,
and the persistence of common political symbols serves important functions for the
political system. As the normative institutionalists (March and Olsen 1986; Olsen
2008) have argued, myths, symbols, routines, and so on are crucial for legitimat-
ing institutions, so that indeed without the persistence of many seemingly vestigial
functions of the political system the desired level of economic efficiency in the public
sector might not be attainable. In those terms the understanding of the numerous
symbolic elements of British institutions may be important for making them work
effectively and efficiently.
4.3.4 Institutional Power but Personal Leadership
The final puzzle that arises in an institutional analysis of government in the United
Kingdom is to some extent endemic in any institutional analysis. Although insti-
tutional analysis tends to focus on formal institutions in the public sector, those
institutions are to a great extent shaped by the individuals who occupy them. The
office of prime minister, for example, was to some extent transformed by the Thatcher
years, and perhaps again during the Blair years. In turn, however, individuals and
their personal values are shaped by their involvement in institutions or, phrased
differently, individual preferences can be conceptualized as being endogenous to
institutions. Politicians often disappoint their supporters by becoming a part of an
institution once elected and seeming to abandon the preferences that those support-
ers had found attractive. Individuals must learn how to survive and be successful
in their institutions, and often also adopt the prevailing institutional ideologies as
their own.
Both of these points of mutual influence are apparent at all levels of the political
system, but are perhaps most apparent for the political leaders at the top of the
government pyramid. Each prime minister, for example, to some extent redefines the
70 b. guy peters
office, and the massive literature on the changes—real and imagined—brought about
by the Blair government is the most recent example of that simple fact (Seldon and
Kavanagh 2005). If institutions, especially those in the centre of government, are as
powerful as they are often argued to be, then how can any individual reshape them so
readily (see Grafstein 1992)? Likewise, why do individual political leaders who clearly
have their own political personalities and goals permit themselves to be shaped by
the often amorphous character of the institutions within which they happen to find
themselves? This is by no means just an issue in British government, but the centrality
of the prime minister in the system makes it more evident.
4.4 Where Next?
.............................................................................................................................................
The rich tradition of institutional scholarship in the United Kingdom is unlikely to
melt away, nor should any serious scholar of politics hope that it would. That having
been said, however, the limits of uni-dimensional accounts are also apparent, and
some of the scholarship already discussed has demonstrated those limits. One of the
major limitations demonstrated above is that to apply just one form of institutional
analysis risks obtaining an imbalanced and limited perspective. Just as triangulation
(Flick 2006) using more varied techniques may help understanding social phenom-
ena, so too can the use of alternative forms of institutionalism.
In addition to understanding the complexity of institutional explanations for
politics, we need to identify the limitations of the approach both in general and
especially as it is applied within the United Kingdom. Most fundamentally, by its
very nature institutional theory emphasizes the impact of the structures of the
public sector, and therefore has the tendency to become static. To be effective in
explaining how British government, even as one of the more stable governing sys-
tems in the world, actually functions, those formal institutional structures must be
instead placed in motion and their interactions better understood. Thus, institu-
tional analyses must be supplemented by a more encompassing concern with public
governance.
Therefore, like the rest of the discipline, British political science may need to
integrate more dynamic elements into the study of institutions. The strong insti-
tutionalist strand in British political science may actually facilitate that integra-
tion. Having the rich body of information about their own institutions, as well
as those of the European Union and many European countries, providing a more
complete understanding of the evolution of these institutions is more than fea-
sible. To some extent it has already been achieved in a number of studies of
specific institutions (Flinders 2007; Gamble 2003), but not at a broader level of
analysis.
institutionalism 71
4.5 Conclusions
.............................................................................................................................................
Institutional analysis has been, and in many ways continues to be, at the centre of
British political science. Unlike many national versions of the discipline, the ‘old
institutionalism’ involving detailed analysis of particular institutions, or of the entire
political system, continues to be practised and to produce useful analyses of politics.
That version of institutionalism now, however, is complemented and to a great extent
displaced by a more theoretically motivated version of institutionalism. The coexis-
tence of these two styles of political analysis does appear to provide a more complete
understanding of institutions and governance than is true in many other national
‘brands’.
The use of institutional analysis also reveals some interesting paradoxes about the
practice of governing in the United Kingdom, and also illuminates the theories that
bring forth the paradoxes. The formalism and presumed static nature of institutions
in much institutional theory can provide part of an explanation for governance, in the
United Kingdom or elsewhere, but can go only so far in providing that explanation.
The other dimension of institutions, their symbolic and social elements, provide a
complement to the formal discussion of institutions but also raise several paradoxes
of their own.
A final point to be made is that institutional analysis, as practised, is both a
strength and a weakness of British political science. On the one hand the tradition
has produced a number of rich and important studies of institutions, largely in the
British central government. At the same time that strong tradition of institutional
analysis has tended to isolate many aspects of British scholarship from comparative
analysis. This separation of scholarly traditions is unfortunate for the individuals, but
even more unfortunate because of the relative failure to place British institutions in a
broader comparative context. Again, that problem is also very evident for political sci-
ence in the United States, but it certainly has limited a more nuanced understanding
of British institutions as well.
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Rhodes, R. A. W. 1988. Beyond Westminster and Whitehall. London: Allen and Unwin.
Rose, R. 1963. ‘The Modernity of Tradition’. In L. Pye and S. Verba (eds.), Political Culture and
Political Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
and Davies, P. 1993. Inheritance in Public Policy: Change without Choice in Britain. New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
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Seldon, A., and Kavanagh, D. 2005. The Blair Effect, 2001–2005. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Shepsle, K. A. 1989. ‘Studying Institutions: Some Lessons from the Rational Choice Approach’.
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chapter 5
.................................................................................................................
RATIONAL CHOICE
.................................................................................................................
keith dowding
5.1 Rational Choice Methodology
.............................................................................................................................................
Rational choice is understood very broadly in this chapter. I assume any article
informed by the idea that we best explain political institutions, processes, events, or
outcomes by assuming that actors respond rationally to their environment counts
as rational choice. ‘Rational’ here is a technical term meaning actors’ behaviour
is predictable by the principles of revealed preference theory under certainty; that
is, their ordinal preferences are reflexive, complete, and transitive; and for cardi-
nal preferences abide by the continuity assumption. All this really means is that
we assume we understand what actors are doing and ‘rationally reconstruct’ their
behaviour to reveal their maximand. Many models of rational choice assume ‘self-
interest’ meaning that for the purpose of analysis the actors optimize as defined by
their role. Thus party leaders are thought to act so as to maximize the number of
votes their party receives; consumers try to buy the best goods at the lowest price; and
environmentalists maximize the least damage to the environment given their other
aims. Because so few people understand the technicalities of rational choice theory
and because rational choice can be highly mathematical, there are many misinformed
criticisms and the technique is often considered controversial, though few of the
items I consider here would be considered controversial because they are informed
by the rational choice approach, even if others might take issue with their substantive
conclusions. 1
1
Green and Shapiro (1994) is one of the better misinformed critiques; for response, Friedman (1995)
and Cox (1999).
76 keith dowding
5.2 Why so Little Literature?
.............................................................................................................................................
Despite the broad understanding of rational choice there is not a great deal to review,
hence part of this chapter considers obvious areas of British politics that rational
choice could examine. Why is there so little literature? One reason is there are few
British political scientists trained in the relevant techniques. The 1960s department at
Essex University that could have provided the powerhouse for graduates in rational
choice dissipated by the late 1970s as the leading lights pursued higher salaries and
better research facilities at US universities. 2 Today Essex still has some of the UK’s
leading rational choice political scientists, with the LSE and Oxford providing other
homes for small viable groups, but most other universities only provide shelter for
the odd rational choice advocate much as they once did for Marxists in the 1970s and
1980s. This fact also explains the peculiar ‘British quality’ to rational choice writing,
which tended to be less technical and empirical than its US counterpart (Ward 1996;
see Dowding and King 1995 for some examples) though some young academics,
notably at the three universities mentioned, are proving their technical competence
with important articles.
North and Weingast’s (1989) classic article is an exception demonstrating a rule.
They argue that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the fundamental redesign of the
governmental and fiscal arrangements of seventeenth-century England allowed gov-
ernment to commit credibly to non-predation and protect property rights allowing
the growth of capital markets and of Britain as a world power. The central role of
parliament alongside the Crown and an independent judiciary limited the Crown’s
ability unilaterally to alter agreements. Thus the Crown could credibly commit to
repaying loans allowing the development of capital markets, nascent industry, and
strong armed forces (see also Stasavage 2002; 2003). The commitment problem is cen-
tral to the development of the modern state re-emerging in discussions surrounding
central bank independence, where Gordon Brown ensured the credibility of Labour’s
commitment to high growth and low inflation with his first act as Chancellor of
the Exchequer in 1997 (King 2001; 2005). Why is North and Weingast an exception
demonstrating a rule? It is exceptional because of the relative paucity of literature
on British politics informed by rational choice theory. And it demonstrates a rule,
since what there is tends to be historical and based more on analytic narrative
than hard data: though in this review I show that this ‘rule’ is now being broken
as rational choice analysis of British political institutions is starting to come of
age.
A second reason for the paucity of literature is the general structure of the British
political system, which provides less obvious scope for interesting strategic modelling.
Strong parliamentary party discipline leaves the British legislature less open to the
strategic manoeuvring that occurs with weaker parties or multi-party systems. Many
2
In modern times rational choice began with Arrow (1951/1963) and Downs (1957). Essex in the late
1960s was a world leader. See Dewan, Dowding, and Shepsle (2009) for a review of some of the most
important articles in the field.
rational choice 77
of the important formal results are driven by the strategic possibilities of multidimen-
sional issue-space and legislative organization to structure more stable equilibriums.
The weakness of the British parliament makes its internal organization inherently
less interesting. Potential parliamentary disequilibrium is solved by one party dom-
inating between elections. Parliamentary oversight of executive functions is also less
important in the UK where the core executive has traditionally been hierarchical
with the minister directly accountable to parliament. All in all this means that the
standard models of rational choice have less obvious applicability to central areas
of British politics. And the secrecy surrounding the central state makes data-driven
empirical analysis problematic. However, in recent years attention has been given
to the central organs of the state—Cabinet relations, ministerial responsibility, and
agency problems within the civil service. And rational choice models have been widely
applied to voting behaviour and the electoral party system; and to local government
and service provision. Furthermore in recent years a stronger awareness of historical
processes has led rational choice writers to examine the past.
5.3 Electoral Politics
.............................................................................................................................................
The dominant theme of British psephology has been (the breakdown of) class voting
and how the economy affects voter choice. Class dealignment has made more appar-
ent the economic effects upon government popularity as voters rationally weigh up
their party differential and decide whether retrospectively to punish governments for
past economic failure.
Early models applied the political-business cycle to explaining economic crisis in
the UK (Nordhaus 1975). Governments were thought to manipulate the economy to
ensure an upturn prior to an election only to face inflationary problems immediately
afterwards. A great deal of econometrics has never conclusively demonstrated the
political-business cycle though its existence might depend upon institutional factors
(Schultz 1995). The general forecasting of election results on macroeconomic vari-
ables began with Goodhart and Bhansali (1970) and following them others predicted
government popularity using objective economic indicators (Pissarides 1980). Others
have examined specific economic effects on voting, Johnson, Lynch, and Walker
(2005) suggesting that British government’s fixation on the level of income tax is
misplaced electorally. The most comprehensive and successful forecaster has been
David Sanders (1991; 1996; 2000; 2003; 2005), who uses a ‘core’ model of governing
party popularity using a lagged endogenous variable specification to map objective
economic (largely) variables onto subjective perspectives including a set of ‘events’
which shock the core model. His earlier models concentrate on lagged interest rates
(though unemployment was important in the 1970s); more recently he favours an
inductive approach of specifying models which predict past popularity extended to
78 keith dowding
forecasting the near future. There remains no specific theory or political economy of
government popularity.
Analysis of party competition from a rational choice perspective has an august
history. Anthony Downs (1957) used the UK as an example in (perhaps the first)
classic of rational choice theory. He suggests electoral politics in a single dimension
lead the parties to the centre. The account can be underpinned by Black’s (1948)
median voter theorem (MVT) demonstrating that single-peaked preferences and a
single dimension ensure the median voter is a unique majority winner. Certainly, the
failures of Labour in the 1970s and 1980s can be seen as a result of losing the middle
ground as they moved leftwards, and the strategy of New Labour has been to regain
that centre ground (Hindmoor 2004). However the Conservatives hardly mapped
out a centrist policy stance in the 1970s and 1980s, but rather won through Labour’s
incoherence. Dunleavy and Ward’s (1981; Dunleavy 1991) story of preference shaping
where government shifts the political spectrum through policy initiatives might be
used to explain the ideological relocation of the median voter.
The Downsian story applied to British politics seems to have entered the conscious-
ness of political leaders but its assumptions are simple, and more complex models
produce very different predictions. Whilst a class dimension might allow for an
approximation to a single ideological dimension, other issues achieve valence and the
multiplicity of issues concerning people mean the MVT single-peaked assumption
may not always hold. Probabilistic voting models (Coughlin 1990) and uncertainty
over policy positions predict non-convergence (Roemer 2001). Analyses have shown
the parties have not consistently moved towards the centre ground to win elections
(Robertson 1976; Budge 1994), although whether they adopt complex strategies or
simply follow a random walk is not clear (Burt 1997). Recent work combining valence
and issue dimensions applying to the UK is found in Adams, Merril, and Grofman
(2005: ch. 9) which shows how ‘rival’ approaches can be represented within the
rational choice canon, whilst Kang (2004) uses British data to explain abstention and
protest voting in a parties quality-satisficing framework.
5.4 Political Parties
.............................................................................................................................................
Whilst rational choice theory views parties as vote, office, or policy seeking within
competitive settings, there is relatively little work that examines their function within
a political system. Parties can be viewed as organizations reducing the cost of col-
lective action and transactions costs in governmental and electoral arenas (Muller
2004). As arbiters of ideology (Downs 1957; Hinich and Munger 1994) parties help
solve commitment problems ensuring leaders do not renege on their promises to
the electorate once in power. Dewan and Myatt (2007a) show leaders can overcome
coordination barriers and give a sense of direction so clarifying a party’s position
rational choice 79
helping instrumental voters in plurality elections coordinate their votes. Other recent
formal work on leadership suggests leaders buy their support by distributing private
benefits to members of the winning coalition (Bueno de Mesquita et al. 2005). The
changing funding nature of the Labour Party helps explain both recent malfeasance
and its lack of interest in altering industrial policies inherited from the Conservative
administration.
Quinn’s (2005) book examines organizational change in the Labour Party explain-
ing the strengthening position of the Labour leader through democratic change. His
focus is on how office-seeking politicians transformed the organizational structure
to bring control for electoral gain. He demonstrates how organizational changes
did not always operate as their supporters thought they might. It can be nicely
juxtaposed to Tsebelis’s (1990: ch. 5) nested games explanation of why Labour Party
activists committed political suicide in the 1980s. Hindmoor (2004) uses a post-
Downsian model to explain the success of New Labour, not only in capturing the
middle ground but also in persuading the media and public that their policies are
centrist.
Motivated by the collective action problem, Whiteley, Seyd, and collaborators
(Seyd and Whiteley 2002; Whiteley, Seyd, and Richardson 1994) examine incentives
motivating political activists in the main British political parties taking a broad
though critical look at political-economic motivations. However, they do not locate
their work in broader literature on governing organizational structures, nor examine
the role of organizations in shaping the motivations of activists. There is much still
to learn about British political parties and the party system from a rational choice
perspective.
5.5 Cabinet Studies
.............................................................................................................................................
Constitutional law, descriptive analyses, and the relative power of the prime minister
once dominated core executive studies. Given the obvious strategic nature of cabinet
relations formal techniques should be well placed to examine such power dependen-
cies and develop testable hypotheses about cabinet and core executive relations. The
first stage of any such analysis is the mapping of the relationships. Little work, beyond
simple line figures, has gone into such a mapping. Dunleavy (1995) has applied a
weighted score to ministers in terms of their membership and chairmanship of cabi-
net committees but without strategic analysis it gives little insight into more general
power relations; nevertheless; it provides a first step at quantitatively examining the
structure of the innermost core executive. The strategic interrelationships have been
little studied, perhaps due to the general secrecy surrounding central government
structures, and the difficulties of gaining hard data on those relationships (though
see Steunenberg 2005).
80 keith dowding
For all the welter of anecdotal and historical evidence surrounding the relationship
between the prime minister and ministers, or between ministers and departments,
there is little that is truly systematic beyond analytic narratives. Cox’s (1987) exam-
ination of the development of the cabinet is suggestive but the general thrust of
cabinet studies remains descriptive. However, the relationships between individual
and collective ministerial responsibility are now being formally analysed. Kam (2000)
argues that holding ministers solely accountable for departments makes sense as
it enables ministers to control senior civil servants more easily than if there were
more direct parliamentary scrutiny of those civil servants. Dewan and Myatt (2007b)
game-theoretically model the relationship between individual and collective cabinet
responsibility. Protecting cabinet colleagues has obvious individual advantages when
one finds oneself under close scrutiny, but there are costs to such protection. Min-
isters may have to resign, not so much for what they have done, but because too
many colleagues have been protected in the near past. If policy activism is correlated
with the propensity to be publicly criticized and if a prime minister wants policy
activism, then ministers need protection. Dewan and Myatt demonstrate that such
protection enhances ministerial value meaning that tainted ministers will not be as
active as untainted ones. Prime ministers do not want to appoint ministers who
attract scandal or criticism, but on the other hand they do not want ministers who
simply sit on their hands. A balance between risk and stability is required. Berlinski,
Dewan, and Dowding (2007) have started to chart the hazard function of ministers.
Controlling for the contingencies associated with the particular personalities and
problems found with individual prime ministers they find experience is not rewarded
in the long run, with ministers who have served the prime minister in a previous
government having a higher hazard than those without such experience; older min-
isters also have a higher hazard, though full cabinet ministers are less at risk than
more junior colleagues. Alt (1975) notes that British ministers seem less experienced
than those in other countries, and the structure of single-party government might
causes the oft-bemoaned feature of their relatively short careers and inexperience
(Rose 1971; 1987; Headey 1974). However, the more direct accountability found in
the British system as opposed to the strategic nature of coalitional governments sug-
gests the opposite. Shorter terms might make for greater accountability. Indridason
and Kam (2008) show that cabinet reshuffles reduce agency loss and moral hazard
facing ministers and that efficiency can be enhanced with greater prime ministerial
control.
For individual accountability Dewan and Dowding (2005) discover a corrective
effect where, contrary to popular belief, individual ministerial resignations enhance
government popularity. It is the scandals that are bad for government popularity,
resignations (more than) correct for such falls. Such corrections would not take place
if ministers always resigned when in difficulty. In order for the public to believe prime
ministers sack bad ministers and protect good ones they must act strategically with
an eye on the long term even when a scandal seems to be damaging the government.
If there are short-run advantages to sacking ministers in trouble, long-run advantages
reassure the public that the prime minister only gets rid of the most inefficient. Better
rational choice 81
ministers must be protected so the less efficient ones or those too damaged can be
sacked with impunity.
Stories told by politicians and insiders teem with strategic considerations, but
little has been formally modelled. The distinction between individual and collective
responsibility is much discussed, but what is the function of each? Who benefits from
individual and who from collective responsibility? Collective responsibility developed
in the late nineteenth century in order to rein in criticisms of ministers by other
ministers. It enabled the prime minister to gain control over the government and
keep talented but warring ministers within the cabinet. Is this its only function? What
do ministers gain from collective responsibility? Blondel and Manning (2002) suggest
that the collegiality of cabinet government as opposed to hierarchical systems reduces
agency problems, and that idea needs closer scrutiny.
5.6 Core Executive
.............................................................................................................................................
Continuing reforms of core executive organization provide an ideal subject for study.
Relationships between the prime minister, different departments, and especially the
Treasury and other departments could be analysed using Tsebelis’s (2002) veto-player
analysis. The problem for scholars of British politics using such techniques is the
relative secrecy of British government. Only in retrospect as government papers
become available might we discover the importance of agenda-setting powers—and
for example why recent prime ministers have seemingly acted so early in the policy
process—and just how powerful PMs and the Treasury are as agenda setters and
veto players. Steunenberg (2005) applies such analysis to the budgetary decisions
suggesting departments are not as weak as might be imagined; the prime minister is
a crucial actor and transactions costs increase departmental discretion. McLean and
Nou (2006) provide an analytic narrative around veto-player theory to explain the
failure of land tax reform between 1909 and 1914. Similar techniques could be utilized
in other areas of policy analysis.
Political economy models have been applied rather simply to the civil ser-
vice using a selected and rather dated band of models. Dunleavy’s (1991) trans-
action costs bureau-shaping model was developed with the British civil service
specifically in mind. It has been intensively utilized and criticized (Dowding 1995;
James 1995; 2003; John 1998; Pollitt, Birchall, and Putnam 1998; Marsh, Smith, and
Richards 2000; Dowding and James 2004), and unlike other models is concerned
with what goes on inside bureaucracies rather than relationships between bureau-
crats and politicians. Niskanen’s (1971) early principal–agent budget-maximizing
model has been extensively critiqued in the British context (Dunsire and Hood
1989; Dunleavy 1991; Dowding 1995). Its restrictive assumptions give it only lim-
ited applicability. More mainstream modern principal–agent models have hardly
82 keith dowding
been touched upon in the British context. The amount of discretion allowed
bureaucrats is contained within the framing of legislation. The more detailed the
legislation, the less discretion bureaucrats are allowed. The standard line is that
politicians write less detailed legislation giving bureaucrats more discretion accord-
ing to:
(a) the more risky the legislative intent (the less informed politicians are about the
precise outcomes of their legislative intent); and
(b) the more stable the governing coalition (the more sure that they will stay in
power for a long period of time).
Legislation and executive directives could be coded to see whether uncertainty affects
the degree of discretion, and whether governments with smaller majorities and less
certain futures push legislation that is harder to unravel or give less discretion to
agencies.
Rational choice teaches us that the degree and type of monitoring depends on the
strength of government’s policy preferences. If legislation is an electoral response
to public demands government is happy to allow ‘fire alarm’ monitoring where
failures are brought to government attention by the public or pressure groups. If
legislation is designed to secure the policy preferences of the politicians themselves
they are more likely to follow a ‘police patrol’ monitoring regime, putting in place
regular procedures to ensure their wishes are executed. The latter form of moni-
toring is more costly than the first. Again careful coding and quantitative analysis
could tease out whether the monitoring of policies that are publicly demanded
does have a different character from that closer to politicians’ own preferences.
Is the regulatory state a result of the stronger policy preferences of professional
politicians?
With the proliferation of agencies there are many applications for examining the
subtle differences that might be found in the nature of contracts between agencies
and departments. Surprisingly little quantitative work has been conducted to see
whether the types of goods and services provided by different agencies correlate with
perceived contractual success or failure as suggested in transactions costs economics
(Williamson 1996). Targets are another area where modelling could be applied. Set-
ting targets for agencies, health trusts, local governments, schools, universities, or
civil servants gives obvious gaming opportunities (Hood 2002). That targets distort
policies is well known. In the British audit era where targets proliferate there should
be a host of examples of such gaming. A theoretically comprehensive account of how
incentives affect gaming activity as well as empirical studies examining the distortion
of policy instruments would be compelling. We could do with a Horn (1995) or
Huber and Shipan (2002) analysis devoted to the civil service–politician relationship
in the UK, as well as analysis of core department–agency relationships more broadly.
Miller’s (1992) work on organizational structures and the efficiencies of hierarchies
against contractual relations might also prove illuminating. Examining the culture
and authority relations within public organizations (Kreps 1990) and comparing
these with modern contractual relations might help us see more clearly the different
rational choice 83
types of public-sector failure. The role of information and the signalling games played
between actors would be a key feature of any such analysis. One aspect missing from
the economic literature on principal–agent problems that political science might be
well placed to examine is the role of authority. Political science sees authority as a two-
way relationship where those above can give authoritative commands, but in order
to command respect and gain efficiency, should also listen to the problems of those
below.
5.7 Parliament
.............................................................................................................................................
The British parliament offers less scope for strategic analysis than stronger less coher-
ent legislatures. Analysis of parliament in the nineteenth century is more advanced,
making use of Aydelotte (1970) and the greater interest of a legislature before strong
parties. Of particular interest, of course, has been the ructions around the repeal
of the Corn Laws (Schondhardt-Bailey 1994). Cheryl Schondhart-Bailey’s (2006)
significant book examines the interplay of economic factors and ideas from the
voting records, constituency interests, and speeches of MPs during the free trade
discussions in the nineteenth-century parliament. Using new empirical techniques
and strong data she argues that the generation and interplay of ideas play an impor-
tant role in structuring changes well beyond economic models based purely upon
self-interested material benefits. The Corn Laws are also one of McLean’s (2001)
cases in a book applying rational choice to British political history, though here
his analytic narrative is focused upon the art of manipulation and Riker’s (1986)
heresthetic politicians. Heresthetics is the art and science of political manipulation.
McLean’s masterful book shows how some leaders have manipulated issue dimen-
sionality and underlying cyclical majorities to transform political situations, and,
sometimes successfully, build new long-term alliances at various important historical
junctures. This book is the paradigm example of British rational choice analytic
narrative.
More recent parliaments are dominated by parties, so the voting records of parlia-
ment are concerned with backbench revolts. There are no general theories of revolts
beyond the personal characteristics of MPs (Cowley 2002; Cowley and Norton 1999;
Norton 1978; 1980; Benedetto and Hix 2005) but perhaps, in the British context, there
is not much more to say. Spirling and McLean (2007) demonstrate the problems of
using an optimal classification system of voting records from binary data such as
Poole (2005) in a strong party system such as Westminster to try to classify voting
patterns. The problem is that whilst government rebels will be voting sincerely, the
Opposition are likely to be voting strategically with the result that left-wing rebels
such as Tony Benn and Dennis Skinner appear to the right of the Labour Cabinet in
a second dimension.
84 keith dowding
The strategic interaction of the Lords and Commons has been under-studied.
The relative weakness of the committee system also leaves little room for analysis of
parliamentary oversight of the executive in comparison with many other nations. 3
What might be considered are the strategic possibilities afforded by amending in
committee and in the Lords especially in the context of timing when the parlia-
mentary year draws to a close. Another neglected area is the analysis of legislative
careers. Diermeier, Keane, and Mirlo (2005) attempt to quantify the career returns
of members of Congress. Dynamically modelling career decisions they assess the re-
election chances for members of Congress, estimating the effect of Congressional
experience on income—from both the public and the private sector. Whilst it is
notoriously difficult to analyse such counterfactuals, a similar analysis in the British
context would be fascinating. One might hypothesize that the monetary value of a
parliamentary career is negative for those who do not make it into cabinet, or high
in the shadow cabinet, but surprises might be in store. There might well be different
findings for those from, say, backgrounds in law to those with backgrounds in public
service—such as teachers or university lecturers. This might teach us something
about the changing social composition of parliament and also add both empirical
and analytic bite to King’s (1981) professionalization of politics thesis.
5.8 Local Government
.............................................................................................................................................
The large literature on fiscal federalism is little utilized in studying the political
economy of local government in the UK. Theories of the effects of intergovernmental
grants, notably the flypaper effect, where higher tier grants to lower tiers increase
spending by the income elasticity of demand (see Cullis and Jones 1992: 307–20), are
constrained by restrictions central government has placed upon local government’s
tax-raising powers. Not only does the UK not have a federal system, it barely has
differential fiscal units, making potential welfare gains from ‘competing’ authorities
problematic. Where there are economies of scale in production, differential size of
providers might produce allocative efficiencies. This has led to theories concerning
the optimum size of local authorities using club theory (Buchanan 1965; Musgrave
and Musgrave 1989) and Tiebout competition. Testing these ideas has proved prob-
lematic (Dowding, John, and Biggs 1994) and increasingly so as government gives
way to governance, and the numbers and responsibilities of collective-good providers
multiply. Exiting behaviour in the UK has been demonstrated (John, Dowding, and
Biggs 1995: Dowding and John 1996) and capitalization occurs especially for schools
(Cheshire and Sheppard 1998; 2003). Dowding and Mergoupis (2003) claim Tiebout
is better tested in the UK than the US despite the lack of tax-raising powers of local
3
Or is that true? Where is the comparative analysis of oversight effectiveness?
rational choice 85
authorities because there is a lower mix of single- and multi-purpose providers, with
larger non-overlapping authorities whose management and service practices vary less
due to national standards allowing for more controlled analysis. For the first time they
bring together the three parts of the Tiebout framework: (a) preference revelation (the
demand side); (b) competition among local authorities (the supply side); and (c) the
combination of the two, leading to superior allocation outcomes (the equilibrium
side). Their evidence suggests that English local authorities are smaller than optimal
size. 4
Exiting might have consequences for political activity or voice (Hirschman 1970;
Dowding et al. 2000) and survey evidence suggests that collective voice is greater
where exit is impossible (Dowding and John 2008, who also challenge the normative
foundations of the Labour’s government’s choice agenda—Dowding and John 2009).
One of the difficulties of measuring local government performance is the poor quality
of the UK’s objective indicators (Boyne 1997; Jacobs and Goddard 2007; McLean,
Haubrich, and Guitierrez-Romero 2007), making comparison with subjective sur-
vey assessments problematic. Quite how people make assessments—by comparison
with other authorities or the private sector or relative gains from past services—is
not clear; nor how performance really affects political success. Some progress has
been made recently by Besley and Preston (2005). Using electoral and performance
data on English local authorities, they examine how patterns of districting affect
electoral incentives by making jurisdictions marginal or safe for incumbents. They
argue that where the incumbents need to capture the swing voters we should expect
to see greater efficiency in government. Competition will enhance governmental
effectiveness. Using Audit Commission data on valence issues—that is, policies where
virtually every voter would concur on what constitutes improvement—they show
that patterns of bias within districting seem to have effects on local government
performance.
More traditional analyses try to judge policy differences between ideologically
opposed parties. The effects of party control on services and especially tax levels have
been extensively examined in the UK. In a survey of the literature Boyne (1998b: ch. 3)
concludes that party competition seems to have little or no effect on local policies
probably reflecting the incentives and constraints on local politicians from national
policies. Ward and John (1999) develop an English pork barrel model where national
government targets marginal Westminster constituencies by using local government
expenditures and John, Ward, and Dowding (2004) and John and Ward (2005) sug-
gest that some competitive funding under the single regeneration budget was indeed
targeted to ministerial constituencies in some regions. Ward and John (2008) spatially
model the competitive bidding process and show that in efficient equilibriums many
bids will not be under competitive pressure because preferred bids will be so far from
the ideal points of erstwhile competitors that competitors would sooner not win the
bid. This supports the John, Dowding, and Ward (2004) finding that there were no
efficiency gains made through the competitive process in successive rounds of the
4
Kay and Marsh (2007) provide a critique of applying Tiebout in the UK. Dowding (2008) responds.
86 keith dowding
single regeneration budget nor were the most deprived communities rewarded. These
results suggest government attempts to increase efficiency through competition have
failed.
Earlier attempts to drive efficiency through competition via privatization and
contracting-out demonstrated that the nature of the product determined success.
Where writing contracts is easy—such as refuse collection or the provision of
passports—competition and contracts (‘framework agreements’) drove efficiency
gains; where contracts are difficult to specify and police, efficiency gains were minimal
(Hoopes 1997; Boyne 1998a; 1998b). More generally where privatization led to gen-
uine competition efficiency gains were made, but where private monopolies replaced
public ones no significant gains were made (Martin and Parker 1997; Parker 2004).
5.9 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
The relative paucity of rational choice analysis is being addressed by a new set of
scholars. It is more difficult to apply off-the-shelf models of the US Congress or
legislative–executive relations to the UK than it is to the European Union or presi-
dential systems, and the large literature on coalitional politics is almost irrelevant to
Britain. Nevertheless there are areas where rational choice has provided great insights,
historically to key features of the British state, to local government and local–central
relations, in voting studies, the core executive, and more recently new sets of ideas
applied to cabinet studies and the relationship between parliament and the executive.
Rational choice theory is not a dominant mode of analysis in Britain, but there is
much that can be usefully studied through the rational choice lens.
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chapter 6
.................................................................................................................
BEHAVIOURALISM
.................................................................................................................
robert johns
Behaviouralism is often regarded as synonymous with Americanization. However,
this is not a chapter about American invasion or about the British discipline’s suc-
cessful resistance against that threat. Adcock et al. caution that ‘assumptions about
the exceptionalism of Britain and America have obscured, for historians of each, the
transatlantic exchanges that have informed the development of their traditions of
inquiry’ (2007b: 7). And indeed American and British behaviouralism differ little,
predictably since many behaviouralist researchers of British politics were from (or
at least trained in) the USA. Nonetheless, aspects of the British context have shaped
the timing, extent, and substantive focus of behaviouralist research. Thus, although
British behaviouralism is not highly distinctive, the British experience of behavioural-
ism is more so.
Behaviouralism is often regarded as a 1950s revolutionary movement, a sharp break
with what had gone before. Some also refer to a ‘post-behavioural revolution’, with
powerful critical forces reshaping the movement in the early 1970s. It is a considerable
exaggeration to refer either to behaviouralism or (especially) post-behaviouralism
as revolutionary. Still, this over-dramatic view of the approach’s history helps to
provide a structure for the chapter. First, I define and specify three key features
of (‘early’) behaviouralism. Then the focus sharpens onto the various reasons why,
and ways in which, the British experience of behaviouralism was distinctive. The
third section concerns the notion of post-behaviouralism, supposedly a new version
emerging in response to potent criticisms of the approach. While the extent of change
has been overstated, the post-behaviouralist critique highlights several criteria for
evaluating behaviouralist research. Fourth, I apply those criteria to behaviouralism
in Britain, and pick out some of its notable contributions to our understanding of
British politics. To conclude, I mention possible ways to enhance that contribution
further.
behaviouralism 93
6.1 What is Behaviouralism?
.............................................................................................................................................
Broadly defined, behaviouralism is a positivist and systematic approach to the study
of political behaviour. In this section, I examine the three key elements within that
definition.
The most prominent—and controversial—aspect of behaviouralism is its philoso-
phy of social science. Presthus describes this as ‘the acceptance of logical positivism
as an epistemological system’, and characterizes positivism as follows: ‘Facts, publicly
verifiable and sensually perceived, are regarded as the only valid basis of truth or
reality’ (1965: 19). Logical positivists furthered an empiricist tradition originating
with Hume, and advocated in social science by Comte. They insisted on a distinction
between descriptive statements and value judgements. Since only descriptive state-
ments could be verified by observation, only they were held to be meaningful and
suitable for political analysis (Elcock 1976: 11–12; Kavanagh 1983: ch. 1). Popper’s cri-
tique of logical positivism led to falsifiability replacing verifiability as the key scientific
credential, but the emphasis on observation remained. Few political behaviouralists
stated positivist precepts as starkly as Presthus, but the demand that claims about the
political world must be empirically verifiable is the core of behaviouralism.
Perhaps, then, it seems odd that a driving force behind behaviouralism was a feel-
ing that American political science had become dominated by atheoretical descrip-
tion or ‘hyperfactualism’ (Easton 1953: ch. 2; Dryzek 2006). However, the call was not
for theory instead of empirical observation; rather, theory was needed to organize
empirical data and highlight the patterns therein. Theory thus becomes ‘a language
for recording exhibited regularities’ (Hay 2002a: 29). Although derived inductively,
such ‘empirical theory’ (Sanders 2002: 47) can then be used deductively to generate
hypotheses for subsequent empirical testing. This ‘iterated interplay of theory and
empirical research lay at the heart of the behavioralist vision’ (Adcock 2007: 189),
and reflects the commitment to ensuring that theoretical propositions are subject
to possible falsification. Pure empirical theory is unattainable: at the core of any
(social) scientific theory are basic definitions and assumptions that are not falsifiable
(Lakatos 1971). Nevertheless, Sanders argues, the theory itself is still falsifiable if it
yields testable propositions, thus allowing researchers ‘to specify the conditions under
which they would know that the theory was “incorrect” ’ (2002: 50). The importance
of falsifiability, and the difficulty of testing general assumptions as opposed to specific
predictions, helps to explain why most behaviouralists swiftly abandoned the search
for a grand theory of political behaviour (cf. Easton 1953).
The second key feature of behaviouralism is the commitment to observable
behaviour as the dependent variable in political analysis. This was driven partly
by impatience, growing during the inter-war years, with a perceived preoccupation
with formal structures and institutions (Kavanagh 1983: 1). Behaviouralists were
more interested in ‘what do the actors involved actually do and how can we best
explain why they do it?’ (Sanders 2002: 45). Their motives were epistemological as
well as substantive. Behaviour—at least, some behaviour—was observable, a point
94 robert johns
of obvious significance given the positivist agenda. The questions posed by Sanders
were paramount for behaviouralists, not necessarily (or not only) because they were
most interesting or important, but because hypothesized answers could be tested
empirically.
This perspective owes much to behaviourists in psychology (e.g. Watson 1913) who
rejected as unscientific those explanations of behaviour based on introspection or
on non-observable phenomena like thought or consciousness. However, as discussed
below, behaviouralists in political science were never as stringent. Rather than dis-
missing psychological phenomena (personalities, motivations, intentions, and so on)
as unobservable, behaviouralists sought to measure them, typically via surveys. These
variables were as important as the more immediately observable political behaviour
(Butler 1958: 17). Thus, it was as much behaviouralism’s substantive focus—on the
mental states and processes underlying behaviour—as its epistemological underpin-
nings that linked the approach to psychology. 1
The third core element of the approach, the commitment to ‘scientific’ methods,
is probably the most important. Behaviouralism is as much about how as about what
to study (Kavanagh 1983: xiii). Given the obvious difficulties of applying methods
from physical sciences to politics, behaviouralists modified the standards for ‘scien-
tific’ research, the key signifiers being ‘systematic’ and ‘rigorous’ (Adcock 2007: 180;
Kavanagh 1983: 10). Of course, these terms are wide open to interpretation (and, as
Mackenzie (1971: 25–6) remarks, no political scientist was ever committed to unsys-
tematic research). For Adcock, ‘being systematic entailed self-reflection about and
refinement of the methods used to gather and analyze information and, where pos-
sible, using techniques that yield quantitative data and analyze it statistically’ (2007:
191). The first element is uncontroversial, with general agreement that behaviouralism
encouraged reflection about methods (Mackenzie 1967: 75; Adcock 2007: 180). The
second element, about quantitative methods, needs further discussion.
There is no necessary connection between behaviouralism and quantitative meth-
ods (Sanders 2002: 47; Adcock 2007: 191), since qualitative analysis can be systematic
and replicable. In practice, though, the behaviouralism–quantification link is strong
(Presthus 1965: 19; Blondel 1981: 67). The main reason lies in behaviouralists’ commit-
ment to using ‘all the relevant empirical evidence rather than a limited set of illustra-
tive supporting examples’ (Sanders 2002: 47). This entails quantities of data that are
more easily analyzed quantitatively. Moreover, some projects are practicable only with
representative samples, and inference from samples to populations is inextricably
bound up with quantitative methods. For Butler, ‘the Gallup poll and its successors
constitute the greatest technical innovation in the study of political behaviour in
this century’ (1958: 61). This is one of several mid-century developments facilitat-
ing behaviouralism, including exponential increases in computer processing speed,
advances in multivariate statistics, and the development of quantitative content
analysis (Miller 1999: 223). More recent advances extend the list: computer-assisted
1
Wallas had long ago asserted human nature as the crucial element in political behaviour,
complaining that, while ‘the study of human nature by the psychologists has . . . advanced
enormously . . . it has advanced without affecting . . . the study of politics’ (1908: 14).
behaviouralism 95
interviewing; the establishment of data archives; huge comparative data collection
projects; and a proliferation of training opportunities in quantitative methods.
Behaviouralism was driven by the excitement generated by such innovations (Adcock
2007: 187) and in this sense was a revolution in methods more than ideas.
6.2 A British Behaviouralism?
.............................................................................................................................................
While it has roots elsewhere too (including Britain, courtesy of Graham Wallas),
behaviouralism was definitely born in the USA. And whether it is obesity, an interest
rate rise, or a new TV drama, Britain usually follows America’s lead. There is no
reason to suppose otherwise in political science: America accounts for three-quarters
of the world’s political scientists (Marsh and Savigny 2004), and many leading US
scholars have worked in Europe, directly exporting current agendas and—crucially—
methods. Yet Britain does not passively accept US output, whether cultural, eco-
nomic, or academic. Here, I discuss barriers to behaviouralism in British political
science, and then consider whether these have left Britain with a distinctive experi-
ence, even a different version, of the approach.
6.2.1 Barriers to Behaviouralism in Britain
If behaviouralism in the USA is depicted as a radical disjuncture, then British resis-
tance might be straightforwardly explained by an anti-revolutionary intellectual cul-
ture (Bogdanor 1999: 149). Goldsmith and Grant describe the British approach to
political science as ‘one that resists the wholesale importation of orthodoxies into the
discipline, be it 1950s behaviouralism or 1990s rational choice’ (2006: 3). However,
despite widespread reference to a ‘behavioural revolution’, there was no dramatic
break with the past. Dryzek argues that ‘most of the changes involved shifts in empha-
sis rather than radical novelty’ (2006: 490), Dahl (1961a) describes behaviouralism as
a ‘protest’ rather than a revolution, and some of the loudest protesters bemoan the
failure to achieve sweeping change (Eulau 1981; Wahlke 1979). 2 Hence an explanation
of British opposition goes beyond general conservative inclinations, relating instead
to the theoretical and practical specifics of behaviouralism (Kenny 2007: 178–9).
One barrier is in the long-standing eclecticism of political studies in Britain, and
especially the persistence of two currents of research—idealism and Marxism—whose
proponents reject the behaviouralist agenda (Bevir and Rhodes 2007). Pre-eminent
idealist Michael Oakeshott had long dismissed any notion that political knowledge
2
According to Eulau, the notion of a radical revolution has been propped up by ‘the latter-day myth
that there were ever so bitter and raucous confrontations between “behavioralists” and
“antibehavioralists” ’; in fact, he argues, the intellectual combat was ‘quite genteel and measured’ (1981:
xi). Disciplinary histories suggesting otherwise often lack references to the supposed belligerence (e.g.
Goodin and Klingemann 1996: 10–11).
96 robert johns
was obtainable anywhere other than from history (Hayward 1999: 30; Kenny 2007:
166), and later writers in that tradition were fiercely critical of behaviouralism (Green-
leaf 1983; Johnson 1989). Meanwhile, Marxists dismissed behaviouralists’ claims to
value-freedom, pointing to the movement’s roots in liberal pluralism and emphasiz-
ing its neglect of economics (Bevir and Rhodes 2007: 248). In short, there was strong
opposition to behaviouralism from British-based scholars writing in traditions that
were (and remain) important in the British discipline.
It was not only idealists and Marxists who denied the possibility of value-freedom.
According to Kavanagh (2007: 114), all of the ‘Founding Fathers’—those scholars,
including G. D. H. Cole, Harold Laski, Ramsay Muir, and the Finer brothers, who
did most to shape the study of politics in Britain—would have rejected the notion.
Further, as they fathered the modernist empiricism that is a dominant strand in the
British discipline (Kavanagh 2007; Bevir and Rhodes 2007), anti-scientism can be
seen to have pervaded even those subfields sharing behaviouralism’s commitment
to empirical observation. 3 For Bogdanor, ‘if there is a central tendency to the disci-
pline as it has developed in Britain in the twentieth century, it lies in the aversion
to positivism, understood as the doctrine that the model of the natural sciences
constitutes the only valid form of knowledge’ (1999: 150). There was also ‘scepticism
about model building’ (Kavanagh 2007: 97) and an ‘aversion to over-arching theory
[and] to general laws’ (Bogdanor 1999: 149).
To some extent, the critics were reacting to a caricature of behaviouralism, or at
least to some of the movement’s grander ambitions that were quickly scaled down.
As argued below, US behaviouralists were not bent on uncovering immutable laws of
politics, and few harboured hopes of building a general theory of political behaviour.
However, many British political scientists were sceptical even about the possibility of
modest generalizations. Their doubts were as often empirical as philosophical, the
objection being that the real world was too complex and unpredictable for the kind
of general tendencies or regularities sought by behaviouralists to hold (Butler 1958:
18–19; Miller 1999: 228–9; Finer 1980). Exceptions to rules would abound, explicable
only with the attention to (historical) context that distinguished the work of the
‘Founding Fathers’ and is widely seen as central to the British approach (Bogdanor
1999; Kavanagh 2007; Kenny 2007: 178–9).
Methodological aspects of behaviouralism also caused concern. Mackenzie asso-
ciates the movement with ‘a rather silly emphasis on introducing quantitative meth-
ods at all costs’ (1967: 18), and there remain widespread misgivings about quantifying
key political concepts (e.g. Byrne 1998; Ragin 2000). More broadly, Crick (1962)
and Johnson (1989) strongly criticized a perceived obsession with methodological
rigour rather than substantive importance. Bevir and Rhodes (2007: 234) argue that
scepticism about methodological fussiness and quantification are important aspects
of the self-image of British political science.
3
The symbolic expressions of these attitudes are familiar: Britain has a Political Studies and not a
Political Science Association, and there are only two departments of ‘Political Science’ in the entire
country (Hayward 1999; Goldsmith and Grant 2006).
behaviouralism 97
A limited appetite for quantitative methods exacerbated supply-side constraints
on behaviouralism in Britain. Many relevant technological and institutional devel-
opments happened later. British universities were slow to provide the kind of meth-
ods training available at, say, Michigan in the USA (Kavanagh 2007: 115), and few
departments appointed more than a token quantitative specialist (Crick 1980: 300). In
its first decade, the British discipline’s house journal, Political Studies, published few
behaviouralist articles and little methodological discussion (Kenny 2007: 170–1). And
it was some time before academics obtained the funds required for behaviouralism’s
methodological exemplar, a national sample survey (Miller 1999: 237–9).
6.2.2 What was Different about British Behaviouralism?
Here I consider four ways in which the British experience of behaviouralism might
have differed: timing (when did behaviouralism arrive?); quantity (how much did it
pervade the discipline?); substantive scope (in which subfields did it take hold?); and,
most importantly, nature (was British behaviouralism different?).
Behaviouralism certainly arrived later in Britain (Hayward 1999; Kavanagh 2007).
When Mackenzie refers to ‘the controversy over the “behavioural movement” which
divided American political scientists in the 1950s’ (1971: 29), he implies that even
the debate over behaviouralism, let alone the approach itself, was then remote from
Britain. Just two British scholars (Wallas and Laski) are cited in The American Voter
(Campbell et al. 1960), illustrating the then marginal relevance of behaviouralism to
British political science—and vice versa (Miller 1999: 226). However, Crick’s (1961)
forceful attack on ‘The American Science of Politics’ indicates that it was becom-
ing harder to ignore, and in Britain behaviouralism started to gather momentum.
The late 1960s saw several relevant developments: new departments at Essex and
Strathclyde embracing behaviouralism (Kavanagh 2007: 116); the first national elec-
tion survey (Butler and Stokes 1969); the instituting of the Essex methods summer
school and the UK Data Archive; and the establishment of the ECPR in a bid to
‘ “Americanize” European political science—beginning with British political science’
(Blondel 1997: 117). The timing and impact of the new movement is summarized by
Kavanagh: ‘the efforts of the [pre-behaviouralist] interwar generation did much to
define the character and development of political science in Britain for the first two
decades of the post-1945 period, although not much beyond that’ (2007: 115, emphasis
added).
Its delayed arrival meant that initially behaviouralism was something of a minority
pursuit in Britain (Kenny 2007: 170–1; Hayward 1991: 96). And the eclecticism of the
British discipline ensured that it remained one among several strands of research
(Mackenzie 1971: 34; Kenny 2007). Bogdanor (1999) picks seven representatives of
major trends in British political science, and the only behaviouralist, the American
Richard Rose, has worked mainly on wider comparative studies. No British behav-
iouralists are cited in Almond’s (1996) ‘History of the Discipline’. Turning to more
systematic evidence of the limited inroads made by behaviouralism, the PSA’s surveys
98 robert johns
of British political scientists consistently show that only around one in ten mention
‘political behaviour’ as a principal research interest (Goldsmith and Grant 2006).
Admittedly, some of those citing, say, ‘comparative politics’ may take a behaviouralist
approach. Still, the rarity of self-identification as a scholar of political behaviour is
telling, and contrasts sharply with the results of Marsh and Savigny’s (2004) analysis
of the disciplinary orientations of articles published in leading UK and US jour-
nals. In both countries, behaviouralist articles comprised around two-thirds of all
those published between 1975 and 1979, and around half of those published between
1997 and 2002. These are probably overestimates, given the small number of other
categories and hence the likely classification as behaviouralist of articles that Bevir
and Rhodes (2007) might call ‘modernist empiricist’. But here the absolute values
matter less than the comparison, which shows that behaviouralism is (and indeed
was by the late 1970s) as dominant in British as in American journals (contra Marsh
and Savigny 2004: 164). Hence, notwithstanding the enduring pluralism of British
political science, behaviouralism has become a prominent strand.
The question of the approach’s reach through British political science can also be
addressed by comparing subfields. The major manifestation of behaviouralism is ‘a
developed body of research devoted to the empirical study of mass political behav-
iour’ (Kenny 2007: 169–70). The approach has totally dominated the study of voting
behaviour (e.g. Butler and Stokes 1969; Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 1985; Clarke et al.
2004), and predominated in the study of political participation (e.g. Parry, Moyser,
and Day 1992; Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004). Such dominance, established once a
generation of scholars trained in behaviouralist methods had entered the profession,
has not wavered since. The statistical techniques are more sophisticated but the basic
approach has remained the same and monopolizes those subfields. Behaviouralism’s
imprint on most of the rest of British political science is, however, much less deep (e.g.
Smith 2000). 4 To some extent this is inevitable, behaviouralism (like any approach)
being better suited to some areas than others. Yet much pioneering American behav-
iouralist research was in subfields little touched by the approach in Britain (e.g.
Kaplan 1957; Dahl 1961b; Miller and Stokes 1963). The contrast makes sense given
earlier arguments. However resistant to positivist scientism, the British discipline still
experienced the technological progress that drove behaviouralism. Predictably, then,
the approach is largely confined to that area—mass behaviour—whose horizons were
expanded furthest by such advances. 5 This segregation of behaviouralism has left
it largely impervious to trends and disputes elsewhere in British politics. Insofar as
there has been controversy about epistemology and method in the British discipline
(which is not really very far 6 ), the debates have neither involved nor particularly
4
The major exception is Budge’s studies of parties’ programmes and strategic behaviour (e.g. Laver
and Budge 1992).
5
Hayward (1991) offers another explanation: stringent rules plus a culture of secrecy in British
government mean that important behavioural data are often unavailable to researchers.
6
Save for the sporadic outbreaks of debate over various brands of institutionalism, and the
accompanying arguments about structure and agency.
behaviouralism 99
threatened behaviouralists, who remained as peripheral to the mainstream as they
were dominant in their subfields.
Finally, there is the question of whether British behaviouralism was qualitatively
different. Crucial here is the distinction between behaviouralism and modernist
empiricism, the latter a broader category of work sharing the commitment to empir-
ical observation and classification but stopping short of the scientism and hypothesis
testing of behaviouralism (Adcock, Bevir, and Stimson 2007b; Bevir and Rhodes
2007). Kenny (2007) suggests that, insofar as a distinctively British political science
emerged in the post-war period, it was modernist empiricist, based on a fusion—
promoted by Mackenzie, Finer, and Samuel Beer—between a traditionally British
historical (Whiggish) empiricism and the new American behaviouralist thinking
and methods. There is wide agreement that ‘homeopathic doses’ of behaviouralism
boosted the rigour of modernist empiricism in Britain (Hayward 1991: 104; Mackenzie
1967: 19; Kenny 2007: 168). 7 Equally, many argue that British behaviouralism was
distinguished—and enhanced—by association with the historical empiricism that
dominated the pre-behavioural era. Kenny (2007) cites the collaboration between
British electoral historian David Butler and American behaviouralist Donald Stokes
as a particularly productive instance of the fusion mentioned above. Given that
their book Political Change in Britain is probably the key founding work of British
behaviouralism, the tone was set for a more nuanced, more historical brand of the
approach. Indeed Miller praises British electoral research for ‘the balance between
theory, history, awareness of contingency and sensitivity to context on the one hand,
and abstract analysis on the other’ (1999: 255; see also Bogdanor 1999). Similarly, Hay
(2002b) commends British behaviouralists for their willingness to consider institu-
tional as well as historical context.
This credit is due, but the implied criticism of US studies is unwarranted. Most
American studies of voting and participation were just as grounded in history and
context (and for that matter theory) as the British equivalents (e.g. Key 1949; Dahl
1961b; Almond and Verba 1963; Burnham 1965). 8 Furthermore, while some prominent
American behaviouralists sought ‘deep-seated “laws” of social behaviour’ (Campbell
et al. 1960: 36–7), many others—notably V. O. Key (1958)—were just as sceptical as
their British counterparts, favouring only modest and context-specific generaliza-
tions. In sum, the key difference between America and Britain lies in the amount
of behaviouralism as opposed to modernist empiricism, the latter more clearly and
widely predominant in Britain (Bevir and Rhodes 2007). There is little evidence that
British behaviouralism is distinctive, not because it lacks the subtlety and sensitivity
to context with which it has been credited, but because American behaviouralism
7
Hayward suggests that the adoption of certain behaviouralist characteristics and methods was ‘a
classic case of dynamic conservatism: changing enough so as to keep things basically the same’ (1999: 31),
in this case to maintain the dominance of the less scientized brand of empiricism.
8
Adcock (2007: 183–4) dismisses as a misconception the notion that the behaviouralist movement
‘turned the discipline away from history’. A similar story—of behaviouralists misrepresented as ignoring
or dismissing an entire strand of research—can be told with respect to institutions (Dryzek 2006: 490;
Dunleavy 1996: 281).
100 robert johns
was never as unsubtle or unequivocal as some implicitly comparative treatments have
suggested.
6.3 ‘Post-behaviouralism’
.............................................................................................................................................
According to Almond, the prevailing view of the discipline’s history is ‘that we are now
in a ‘post-positivist, post-scientific, post-behavioral stage’ (1996: 81). The ‘postbehav-
ioral era’ was heralded by Graham and Carey (1972) in a sustained attack on positivist,
supposedly ‘value-free’ political science. Exactly as with behaviouralism, there is a
danger of overstating both the impact and the novelty of post-behaviouralism. 9 Both
denote the attitudes and objectives of a movement within political science, not a radi-
cal reorientation of the discipline. Moreover, many post-behaviouralist criticisms had
been rehearsed ever since the first stirrings of a behaviouralist movement. Nonethe-
less, there is a perception that such criticism intensified in the late 1960s (Dryzek 2006:
489), and that behaviouralists responded to the complaints (Gunnell 1983; Sanders
2002). Geertz recommends that, ‘if you want to understand what a science is, you
should look in the first instance not at its theories and findings, and certainly not at
what its apologists say about it; you should look at what the practitioners of it do’
(1973: 5). In this section, then, I examine four lines of post-behavioural criticism, in
each case assessing whether behaviouralist researchers do things differently as a result.
The first line of criticism concerns the objects rather than the methods of behav-
iouralist study. By 1962 Crick was lamenting the tendency ‘to make the criteria for
research and study not political importance, but various notions of methodological
impeccability’ (190). The raised political temperature in the 1960s meant that such
detachment seemed still more misguided, and in the US triggered the formation of
the ‘Caucus for a New Political Science’, which demanded that the discipline prioritize
commitment and relevance over science (Dryzek 2006: 490–1). Such criticism—
of behaviouralism as an apolitical and hence somewhat irrelevant enterprise—was
central to Graham and Carey’s (1972) arguments. Eulau, less sympathetic to the
Caucus cause, describes post-behaviouralism as ‘a near-hysteric response to political
frustration engendered by the disconcerting and shocking events of the late sixties
and early seventies’ (1981: viii).
While few dismissed it so scornfully, behaviouralists have generally paid little heed
to this criticism. The same charge—too much science and too little politics—is still
levelled at the discipline, notably by Ricci (1984) who described it as the ‘tragedy of
political science’. It might be thought that behaviouralists are entitled to disregard this
complaint: those regarding another research agenda as more pertinent should follow
it, leaving behaviouralists free to pursue their usual concerns. That argument hinges
9
As Eulau bluntly puts it, ‘there never was a “postbehavioral revolution” because there had never
been a “behavioral revolution” in political science in the first place’ (1981: viii).
behaviouralism 101
on the acceptance of pluralism in methods of study. If some important phenomena
are not readily susceptible to empirical observation and testing, and behaviouralists
dismiss research based on any other method, then the discipline as they envisage
it is inevitably less politically relevant. Hay credits post-behaviouralists with the
recognition that other (especially normative) traditions have a role, suggesting that
behaviouralists are ‘far more prepared than once they were to accept an academic
division of labour within political analysis’ (2002a: 43; also Sanders 2002: 51). How-
ever, without references to these doctrinaire behaviouralists of yesteryear, it is difficult
to gauge whether such acceptance is new, and hence whether it can be attributed
to the impact of post-behaviouralist critique. This may be a case of limited impact
exaggerated by a caricatured view of early behaviouralism.
A second line of criticism is based on the mistaken belief that behaviouralists
rejected as non-observable those psychological variables crucial to understanding
why people behave as they do (Mackenzie 1971: 25). Instead, it was anti-positivists
who warned that scientific laws of human behaviour could not include intentions,
motivations, and values, because statements like ‘X did p because of q’ or ‘X iden-
tifies with p’ are too difficult to falsify (Quine 1960; MacIntyre 1985: ch. 7). Behav-
iouralists have from the outset not only incorporated but built their work on such
variables. Prominent examples include the civic culture (Almond and Verba 1963)
and party identification (Campbell et al. 1960). 10 The dependent variables—party
choice, turnout, legislative voting—were behavioural, unsurprisingly since observ-
able behaviour is the end of the causal chain of human engagement with politics:
belief → attitude → intention → behaviour (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975). But far from
rejecting those prior variables as unscientific, behaviouralists are distinguished by the
attempt to measure them systematically. Any resulting loss of scientific rigour was
deemed a price worth paying for extra explanatory leverage.
Little has changed in the post-behavioural era, with numerous important behav-
iouralist works based on psychological phenomena (e.g. Inglehart 1977; Zaller 1992;
Green, Palmqvist, and Schickler 2002). Moreover, insofar as the treatment of such
variables was deemed inadequate, the problems persist. Achen (1992) castigates elec-
toral behaviouralists for treating demographics as explanatory rather than exploring
the causal paths along which their effects operate. Dunleavy argues that researchers
largely ignore ‘the known limitations of pre-coded survey questions in uncovering
people’s complex meanings’ (1996: 286). And any atomistic method (quantitative or
qualitative) struggles to capture underlying societal ideas and norms, which influence
behaviour whether or not consciously internalized (Hay 2002a: 45; Berman 1998: 16).
Again, then, the impact of post-behaviouralist critique is negligible, and exagger-
ated only through a misreading of early behaviouralism. For Goodin and Klinge-
mann, ‘contemporary political science is decidedly substantially post-positivist, in
that it certainly has taken lessons of the hermeneutic critique substantially on
10
Given the pre-eminence of attitudinal variables in the hugely influential Michigan model, it is not
obvious what Susser is referring to when asserting that ‘in voting studies . . . there is a clear tendency
toward reduction to such empirically distinct factors such as age, sex, income and education in
establishing a voter’s profile’ (1974: 277). No citations are provided.
102 robert johns
board . . . Subjective aspects of political life, the internal mental life of political actors,
meanings and beliefs and intentions and values—all these are now central to political
analysis across the board’ (1996: 22). Were these aspects previously peripheral to
behaviouralism? Are they noticeably more central than before? The answer to both
questions is no.
In any case, this addresses only part of the hermeneutic critique. There is also
the subjectivity of the observer to consider, if anything a more fundamental bar-
rier to a science of political behaviour (Taylor 1967; Marsh and Furlong 2002).
This third line of post-behaviouralist critique was readily acknowledged by behav-
iouralists. Decades ago Elcock reported that ‘there are few nowadays who accept
Max Weber’s belief that ultimately a value-free social science will develop’ (1976:
20). More recently Sanders asserts that ‘modern behaviouralists . . . roundly reject the
notion that theory and observation are independent’ (2002: 54). The key question,
though, is whether this postmodernist turn in behaviouralists’ thinking is reflected
in their research practices. The short answer is that it is not. Indeed it is difficult
to see how it could be, given the continued centrality of empirical observation in
(post-)behaviouralism (Sanders 2002). Such observation is futile unless the data gen-
erated are assumed to be at least partly independent of the subjectivity of the observer
(Marsh and Furlong 2002: 24–6). Otherwise, testing theories against data becomes
an abstract exercise, detached from the real world that is supposed to be under
observation.
The implication is that behaviouralists have paid only lip service to this aspect
of post-positivist critique. But there was no obvious alternative. Such fundamental
epistemological objections could not be addressed by fine-tuning behaviouralist
research practice. Bevir and Rhodes suggest that an appropriate reaction to the
‘lethal’ philosophical attack on positivism would be for ‘a broad interpretive or
constructivist church to replace modernist empiricism’ (2007: 257, emphasis added).
Dunleavy advocates a similar overhaul, urging students of political behaviour to
follow the example of other social science disciplines in which ‘postmodernist
criticisms have been taken on board as part of an overall process of constructive
disciplinary self-renewal’ (1996: 291).
The final line of post-behaviouralist critique also owes something to a ‘postmodern
turn’. Goodin and Klingemann identify ‘a retreat away from generality and toward
particularity, away from universality and toward situatedness, in the explanatory
accounts we offer for political phenomena’ (1996: 22). This retreat was prompted by
the same concern with the exception argued above to be central to the discipline
in Britain. The corollary is distrust of a predictive science of politics. MacIntyre
(1985: ch. 8) specifies various sources of unpredictability in social science, concluding
that generalizations about political behaviour cannot approach law-like status, being
inevitably subject to plentiful counter-examples.
Once more, it is easy to exaggerate the impact of post-behaviouralism. Behav-
iouralists were never as committed to mechanical laws and predictions as latter-
day accounts (e.g. Miller 1999; Hay 2002b) suggest. As Taagepera (2007) laments,
genuine prediction was never really on the political science agenda. The summit of
behaviouralism 103
behaviouralist ambition was usually ‘postdiction’ (as delivered by techniques like
regression): ‘post hoc rationalizations in the form of prediction of events that have
already occurred’ (Hay 2002b: 9). Behaviouralists would agree with Finer that politics
is a science not because of its predictive accuracy, but because ‘it can offer reasons and
causes from events once those events have happened’ (1980: 361).
This more limited ambition—the systematic search for empirical regularities in
political behaviour—remains at the heart of behaviouralism (Miller 1999: 223; Hay
2002a: 43–4). The aim has been to apply that approach to the complexity and con-
tingency that confounds prediction. Consider Butler’s verdict on the finding that
many middle-class voters turned against Labour between 1945 and 1950: ‘on its own,
it remains merely an interesting fact. It only assumes major significance in the light of
an explanation of the period that must perforce be based on qualitative observation
and even intuition’ (1958: 63). Behaviouralists would disagree, seeking instead to
measure perceptions of those key variables—Labour’s class image, ideological posi-
tion, and performance in government—that may explain the observed swing. This
approach is expressly designed to deliver just what Hay asks of a new British political
science: ‘detailed and measured assessments of the conditions of such outcomes’
(2002b: 9).
So post-behaviouralism differs little from its earlier incarnation. The criticisms
above have undermined the philosophical basis of behaviouralism, and highlighted
constraints on its explanatory and predictive power, but they have left its research
practices largely unchanged. And, since behaviouralism is above all a way of doing
political science, that is the crucial point. The post-behavioural critique is important
not because it drastically reformed the approach, but because it draws attention to
criteria—sensitivity to context and heterogeneity, consideration of meanings, and
awareness of methodological limitations—by which behaviouralist research can be
judged. In the next section, I use these criteria to evaluate ‘modern’ British behav-
iouralism.
6.4 Behaviouralism and British
Political Science
.............................................................................................................................................
This section begins with that evaluation of behaviouralist studies in British political
science. Then I assess the contribution of the behavioural approach to our under-
standing of British politics. As noted, British behaviouralists have focused mainly on
electoral behaviour and political participation, and here I pay particular attention to
major recent studies on those topics, Clarke et al. (2004) on voting and Pattie, Seyd,
and Whiteley (2004) on participation. While both are quite recent, they are fairly
representative of an approach that, again as noted above, has at root changed little
since its rise to prominence.
104 robert johns
6.4.1 Evaluating Behaviouralism in Britain
‘Central to virtually all political behaviour research, and still virtually unchallenged
in 1990s studies, has been the search for the single best decision algorithm with which
to characterize the alignments and behaviour of an entire electorate’ (Dunleavy
1996: 279, emphasis in original). Dunleavy thus implies that British behaviouralism
scores badly on the first criterion for evaluation, namely sensitivity to heterogeneity.
The continued commitment to full-sample multivariate regressions to predict party
choice (Clarke et al. 2004) and political participation (Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley
2004) at best downplays difference, and at worst encourages the implausible assump-
tion that everyone decides how to vote and whether to participate in the same way.
Bartle (2005) highlights political awareness as one source of heterogeneity, demon-
strating that leadership effects on party choice are stronger among the less aware.
Partisanship is another obvious source: strong identifiers and non-identifiers will
almost by definition approach party choice in wholly different ways, yet are almost
always lumped together in analysis, allowing partisanship to operate as a prior but
not a moderating variable.
An honourable exception to this neglect of heterogeneity is the extensive litera-
ture on variations across geographical context. This began with a focus on social
class, Miller (1977) tracking the changing relationship between constituencies’ class
composition and election results, and Butler and Stokes (1969) analysing contextual
variations in the individual-level relationship between class and party choice. More
recently, Johnston and Pattie (2006) have undertaken more wide-ranging research
into the geography of electoral behaviour. Researchers studying participation have
also been mindful of context. Parry, Moyser, and Day (1992) supplement survey
data with an in-depth study of participation in six diverse localities, while Pattie,
Seyd, and Whiteley (2004) adopt a quantitative approach to assessing community-
level variations in citizenship. Multi-level models facilitate such analyses, thereby
responding to Dunleavy’s objection to homogenizing methods.
The second yardstick for evaluation is the attention paid to what Goodin and
Klingemann (1996: 22) call the ‘internal mental life’ of political actors. It has been
established that behaviouralists have always incorporated psychological variables into
models of behaviour, and recent major British studies give prominence to such
phenomena as party identification, emotions, altruism, national identity, and social
trust (Clarke et al. 2004; Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004). Even so, British electoral
researchers have been rebuked for a failure to consider—and measure—those aspects
of ‘internal mental life’ that explain the impact of demographic variables on political
behaviour. Again, class is central to the debate. As Scarbrough puts it: ‘in conceptual
terms class voting remains a “black box”: socio-structural inputs, behavioural out-
puts, but only glimpses of what converts the one into the other’ (2000: 399; see also
Achen 1992). Butler and Stokes (1969) are largely exempt from this criticism, having
paid considerable attention to what voters understood by class. Since then, though,
Scarbrough’s point holds, remarkably given the centrality of class in British electoral
research (e.g. Sarlvik and Crewe 1983; Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 1985). A parallel
behaviouralism 105
‘black box’ argument can be made about education in models of participation (e.g.
Parry, Moyser, and Day 1992; Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004: 138–9).
Even rudimentary perception variables would shine some light into these black
boxes. However, a more sophisticated treatment of hermeneutics is difficult with
the usual behaviouralist methods. Hence the area of meanings and interpretations
is one wherein ‘behavioural electoral research has simply not dared to tread . . . it is
very hard to envisage how the responses to such questions—given the difficulty of
measuring those responses systematically—could ever be incorporated into formal
analysis’ (Sanders 2002: 53). Blondel suggests that the quantification of such variables
‘does depend in part on an “act of faith”’ (1981: 163). This perspective is unhelpful.
The quality—that is, the reliability and validity—of measurement is not a matter of
faith; the onus is on the researcher to demonstrate it. Awareness of methodological
limitations, the third criterion for evaluating behaviouralism, is not about defeatism;
it is about being open about how—and how well—difficult variables are measured,
and of striving to maximize the quality of that measurement.
Such openness is well illustrated by Clarke et al. (2004) and Pattie, Seyd, and
Whiteley (2004), who report exactly what they did and how they did it, enabling
readers to evaluate and potentially to replicate their analysis. In terms of ensuring
quality of measurement, the record is somewhat less impressive. British contributions
are thin on the ground in the large literatures on the measurement of, for example,
post-materialism, political sophistication, or social capital. Party identification is an
exception, long-standing controversy over this key variable triggering both qualitative
(Bartle 2003) and experimental work (Sanders, Burton, and Kneeshaw 2002), part of
what should be an ongoing methodological programme.
Question design research, though plainly worthwhile, will not overcome the
broader problems with survey methods. Dunleavy argues that behaviouralists tend
simply to ignore the approach’s decontextualizing of behaviour, its inherent atomism,
and the inevitable ‘losses of understanding involved in reducing people’s complex
meanings to dots and dashes on computer disk’ (1996: 283). And indeed, amid a
mass of methodological detail, neither Clarke et al. (2004) nor Pattie, Seyd, and
Whiteley (2004) mount any defence of their use of (only) the survey method. 11 A
related concern is the reluctance to include open-ended questions, especially about
reasons for behaviour. If the aim is to understand why political actors behave as they
do, there is a strong case—despite coding costs and problems of introspection—for
inviting respondents to give their own accounts (Butler 1958: 64–5). 12
The final issue is the danger of ‘hyper-empiricism’, ever present with the huge
samples and long questionnaires typical of behaviouralism. Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley
11
Since both volumes are based on very well-funded research programmes, alternative approaches
would have been feasible. The point here is not that such alternatives should have been deployed; rather,
it is telling that the authors clearly regarded it as more or less self-evident that the national sample survey
was an appropriate and sufficient tool for the task.
12
It is instructive that Sanders describes a key question for behaviouralists as: ‘how can we best
explain why they do it?’ (2002: 45, emphasis added). We and they are liable to generate different types of
explanation, and validity is likely to be maximized by considering both.
106 robert johns
(2004: 58–73) cross-tabulate twelve aspects of citizenship with eight background vari-
ables, resulting in 1,044 cell entries. (Even the table summarizing these data is hard
to follow.) Later they report a series of multivariate regressions predicting citizenship
attitudes and behaviour (2004: 173–82). The welter of numbers is overwhelming and
tends to obscure substantive significance. The authors carefully compare coefficients
across analyses, but ignore probably the most important feature of the regressions,
namely the very low R 2 values (only surpassing 0.2 in huge composite models). This
is not unusual, given the difficulty in surveys of accounting for highly situational
behaviour. Still, insofar as the goal here was to explain (or ‘postdict’) participation,
then the behaviouralists’ stock approach has not been a success. This point is lost in
a flurry of data.
6.4.2 The Behaviouralist Contribution in Britain
Having just sounded a critical note, it is fitting to begin here with Miller’s (1999: 253)
reminder that virtually everything we know about elections and public opinion in
Britain has been learned courtesy of behaviouralism. The approach has, as he also
notes, failed at ‘uncovering important mechanical “laws of nature” in politics’, but
then it was not intended to do so. Instead ‘careful research proved better at limiting or
destroying grand assertions than inventing them’ (1999: 254). 13 Rather than reviewing
the entire contribution—impossible in many times the space available—I want to re-
emphasize that behaviouralism is less about finding universal laws, and more about
testing common conjectures against systematic evidence. So I discuss three popular
but evidence-light propositions about British politics that have been refuted, or at
least modified, by behaviouralist research.
6.4.2.1 ‘It was The Sun Wot Won it’
This claim, made on the newspaper’s front page two days after the 1992 election,
encapsulated the widespread belief that a decisive late swing to the Conservatives
was the result of stridently partisan coverage in the Conservative-supporting tabloids,
principally the Sun (Linton 1992). The key issue was whether the two phenomena—
press coverage and late swing—were causally linked, a question that obliged behav-
iouralists to go beyond the usual cross-sectional survey. Using long-term panel data,
Miller (1991) had already shown that in 1987 the swing to the Conservatives among
Sun readers took place before the official campaign. Curtice and Semetko (1994) drew
the same conclusion about 1992: while the Sun—and other newspapers—solidified
Conservative support in the long run-up to the election, its intensified campaign
coverage had little impact on vote intentions. Newton and Brynin (2001) took an
alternative approach, focusing on ‘cross-readers’, those whose partisanship conflicts
13
Which is of course what would be expected from a Popperian research tradition.
behaviouralism 107
with that of their newspaper. They reached the same verdict: ‘if the Sun did indeed
help to win it in 1992 it was probably because of its steady drum-beat of support
over the preceding years, not because it decided to throw its full weight behind
the Conservatives in the last week of the campaign’ (2001: 280). This maintained a
tradition of behaviouralist research puncturing inflated claims about media influence
on British voting behaviour (Blumler and McQuail 1968).
6.4.2.2 It was the Falklands that Won it
‘Most political commentators have argued or assumed that the Tories’ sweeping
victory in the 1983 general election was at least partly due to a “Falklands factor”—
the surge of support for the government associated with the Falklands war of 1982’
(Denver and Hands 1992: 243). This was based partly on the common supposition
that military success benefits incumbents, but also on timing: government popularity
turned so sharply upward so soon after the conflict that to doubt causality seemed
perverse. Academic calculations of the war’s impact were based on estimating models
with a range of independent variables, one of them a Falklands term, to account for
these trends in government popularity. Early studies vindicated the popular view,
the war being credited with boosts to government popularity of between seven
(Clarke, Stewart, and Zuk 1986) and sixteen (Dunleavy and Husbands 1985) percent-
age points. The consensus was shattered by Sanders, Ward, and Marsh (1987), who
showed that the trend in Conservative support—both before and after the war—
could be accounted for by aggregate economic expectations (whose upturn could
be explained by objective economic indicators rather than post-Falklands triumphal
optimism).
This conclusion was strongly challenged on methodological grounds, relating to
time lags, functional forms, and model specifications, and debate ensued (Norpoth
1987; Clarke, Mishler, and Whiteley 1990; Sanders, Ward, and Marsh 1990). Hence
this cannot be regarded as a simple case of a popular myth exploded. Nonetheless,
later contributions to this literature are characterized by more modest estimates of
the Falklands effect, and by closer attention to other (principally economic) factors.
So this is another instance of behaviouralist analysis undermining a common but
over-simplistic explanation of voters’ behaviour.
6.4.2.3 Turnout and Political Engagement
In the 2001 British general election turnout plummeted to 59 per cent, its lowest level
since 1918. This was widely interpreted as indicating deep disillusionment with the
British political system, if not a full-blown crisis of democracy (see Bromley, Curtice,
and Seyd 2004). The reasoning was broadly as follows: if turning out to vote betokens
some sort of commitment to the system, virtually unprecedented levels of abstention
must imply a worrying weakening of such commitment.
108 robert johns
Compared to the Falklands analyses, the behaviouralist research debunking this
thesis was fairly straightforward (Clarke et al. 2004: chs. 8–9). 14 It began with the
demonstration that much of the dynamics in turnout can be explained by two con-
textual factors: the closeness of the race and the perceived gap (in terms of ideology
or policy) between the parties. Hence, in 2001, much of the plunge in turnout could
be attributed to the fact that the parties were close but the race was anything but. The
second element was the revelation (via simple time series of attitudinal indicators)
that interest in politics, caring about election results, political efficacy (internal and
external), and willingness to participate had been fairly stable not only since the early
1990s—when turnout (in 1992) was 77 percent—but even since the 1960s (Clarke et al.
2004: 284–9). Plainly these static independent variables could not explain dynamics
in the dependent variable.
The tendencies to infer causality and to simplify explanations are common biases
in human judgement. Behaviouralism offers the possibility of subjecting these intu-
itively plausible popular beliefs to systematic test. This is useful beyond academia.
After all, the policy consequences of the ‘mass disillusionment’ interpretation of 59
per cent turnout are very different from those implied by the account in Clarke
et al. (2004). And the discovery that few voters were affected by the heat of the Sun’s
coverage in 1992 paints a brighter picture of democracy than was widely envisioned.
An important task for behaviouralists is to convey such results to wider audiences.
6.5 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
Behaviouralism is political science, but inexact science, and in practice behavioural-
ists were always less rigidly positivist, and less grand in ambition, than is often
assumed. Systematic empirical observation is the crux not because it is value neutral,
because everything is perfectly measurable, or because precise prediction is feasible.
Rather, it allows for the incremental build-up of ordered knowledge. The approach
has changed little over time, and differs little between Britain and the USA. However
fierce the philosophical attack on positivism, it did little to change the methods used
by behaviouralists. An ingrained empiricism meant that they saw no alternative; at
least, none that could satisfactorily address the ‘how would you know if you were
wrong?’ question. Through full reporting of methods and results, behaviouralists gave
their readers the opportunity to judge whether they were wrong. As well as generating
their own propositions about political behaviour—limited and modest rather than
universal and grand, but still important—behaviouralist researchers have also tested,
and often refuted, many popular hypotheses about British politics.
14
Some observers managed without it. Even before the election, Anthony King (2001) commented
that the parties need ‘just provide the voters with a closely fought election at which a great deal is at stake
and, make no mistake, they will again turn out in their droves’.
behaviouralism 109
There is nevertheless considerable scope for development. The crucial difficulty
is that variables offering real explanatory purchase are, for interpretivists, exactly
those meanings and reflections that are beyond the reach of behaviouralists. To argue
convincingly otherwise, behaviouralists need to command the alternative language—
heuristics, impressions, self-perceptions—of psychology (see Kinder 1998). In the
USA, political psychology is an established subfield; in Britain, political scientists
are only beginning to consider seriously the way in which actors receive, process,
and store information. The same focus on cognitive psychology is the key to
improving measurement of those genuinely explanatory variables. Since the survey—
fielded increasingly often over the Internet—seems likely to remain the workhorse
of behaviouralist research, insights into question answering from cognitive science
(Tourangeau, Rips, and Rasinski 2000), and the techniques for cognitive pre-testing
of questionnaires (Willis 2005), are very valuable.
But behaviouralists should also move beyond the survey. Declining response
rates—especially among certain groups—seriously weaken the sample survey’s claim
to represent public opinion (Brehm 1993). This is much less problematic for exper-
imental research, and probably the biggest advantage of the Internet mode is that it
enables a range of experimental designs. These demonstrate causality in a way that
cross-sections and correlations cannot (Druckman et al. 2006). Meanwhile, the rou-
tine merging of individual-level survey data with aggregate information has enhanced
behaviouralism’s sensitivity to context. Finally, Dunleavy heralds new text-search
technologies, which allow researchers to conduct many semi-structured interviews
and then to ‘analytically surface what influences people’s alignments and attitudes by
a process of post-hoc interrogation of their full text’ (1996: 286). At the very least,
this should be done with a subset of respondents from the main sample. Alterna-
tively, the main themes discerned from quantitative analysis could then be explored
qualitatively. Such triangulation and iterative interaction between quantitative and
qualitative methods is widely advocated (e.g. Creswell 2003). Behaviouralists’ unwill-
ingness even to include open-ended questions in surveys signifies how far they have
still to move in that direction. This intransigence is misguided, because combining
methods offers depth of understanding, currently behaviouralism’s weak point, while
maintaining the systematic and replicable measurement that is its strength.
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Section Three: Critical
Perspectives
................................................................................................................
chapter 7
.................................................................................................................
ANTI-
F O U N DAT I O NA L I S M
.................................................................................................................
mark bevir
Let us get one point out of the way at the beginning: anti-foundationalism is an
epistemological doctrine not a critical approach to politics. Anti-foundationalism is
a doctrine in the philosophy of knowledge. In most versions it asserts that none of our
knowledge is absolutely certain. In some versions it asserts more specifically and more
controversially that we cannot provide knowledge with secure foundations in either
pure experiences or pure reason. I will argue, moreover, that we would be wrong,
especially if we are anti-foundationalists, to assume that epistemological doctrines
ever lead directly to particular approaches to political science. Anti-foundationalism
could be compatible with a wide range of political sciences—from rational choice
to ethnography—and an equally wide range of ideologies—from conservatism to
socialism.
There is something strange about an epistemological concept being used to define
an approach to British politics. This sense of strangeness dissipates, however, if we
allow that the connection between anti-foundationalism and critical approaches
to politics is a historically contingent one. Hence, after briefly reviewing anti-
foundational philosophy and its relation to political science, this chapter will pro-
vide a historical narrative of the contingent ways in which anti-foundationalism
has been brought to the study of British politics from within critical, socialist
traditions.
Thanks to Alan Finlayson, Mike Kenny, and Anna-Marie Smith for helpful comments on this chapter.
116 mark bevir
7.1 What is Anti-foundationalism?
.............................................................................................................................................
To begin, I want further to spell out the relationship of anti-foundationalism to
political science. An anti-foundational epistemology has several implications for
social philosophy. I will begin by briefly mentioning some of the less contentious
implications, although even these might be subject to some debate. Thereafter I will
explain why anti-foundational philosophy is compatible with diverse approaches to
political science, and, to end this section, I will consider the implications of my
analysis of anti-foundationalism for its place in the study of British politics.
7.1.1 Anti-foundationalism and Philosophy
The term ‘anti-foundationalism’ is of recent popularity. It is used to refer to any
epistemology that rejects appeals to a basic ground or foundation of knowledge
in either pure experience or pure reason. Anti-foundational epistemologies thus
include many that pre-date the recent spread of the term itself. Examples of anti-
foundationalism include not only postmodernists and post-structuralists but also
many analytic philosophers who follow the pragmatists, W. V. O. Quine, or Ludwig
Wittgenstein. 1 It has even been argued that the high positivists of the Vienna Circle
were anti-foundationalists (Uebel 1996). So, contrary to what many political scientists
appear to believe, anti-foundationalism is not an obscure, outlandish doctrine to
be easily dismissed as a ridiculous rejection of the idea of an external world. Anti-
foundationalism is a commonplace among philosophers, and it is surely time political
scientists developed enough philosophical literacy to understand it and consider its
implications.
The most obvious implications of anti-foundationalism are perhaps meaning
holism and anti-representationalism. 2 Given that we cannot have pure experiences,
our concepts and propositions cannot refer to the world in splendid isolation.
Concepts cannot directly represent objects in the world since our experiences of
those objects must in part be ones that we construct using our prior theories.
Hence anti-foundationalists conclude that concepts, meanings, and beliefs do not
have a one-to-one correspondence with objects in the world, but rather form webs.
Although anti-foundationalists have defended many different epistemologies, from
pragmatism to radical scepticism, many of them conclude that we cannot justify
isolated propositions; rather, any justification of a knowledge claim must be one that
applies to a web of beliefs or research programme. It is these kinds of epistemological
1
For a useful (if unsatisfactory) account of anti-foundationalism as temporarily having triumphed in
a perennial philosophical debate, see Rockmore and Singer (1992).
2
The philosophical implications of anti-foundationalism are debatable, especially in their details.
I have mentioned only those about which there is considerable agreement. Yet, in discussing why
anti-foundationalism implies various other positions, I inevitably hint at my personal analysis of the
logical connections involved. For details see Bevir (1999).
anti-foundationalism 117
ideas that inspire anti-foundational critiques of the positivism and naive empiricism
found in much political science.
Anti-foundationalism, with its meaning holism, has implications for social ontol-
ogy. Meaning holism implies that our concepts are not simply given to us by the
world as it is; rather, we build them in by drawing on our prior theories in an attempt
to categorize, explain, and narrate our experiences. Hence anti-foundationalists
typically uphold social constructivism: they argue that we make the beliefs and
concepts on which we act and thus the social world in which we live. This social
constructivism asserts not only that we make the social world through our actions,
but also that our actions reflect beliefs, concepts, languages, and discourses that
themselves are social constructs. It is this constructivist ontology that inspires anti-
foundational critiques of the reified and essentialist concepts found in much political
science.
Meaning holism feeds into anti-foundational analyses of social explanation. It
undermines reductionist attempts to explain actions by reference to allegedly objec-
tive social facts without reference to the relevant beliefs or meanings. The crucial
argument here is that because people’s beliefs form holistic webs, and because their
experiences are laden with their prior beliefs, therefore we cannot assume that people
in any given social location will come to hold certain beliefs or assume certain inter-
ests. To the contrary, their beliefs, including their view of their interests, will depend
on their prior theories. Hence anti-foundationalists conclude that social explanation
consists not of reducing actions to social facts but of the interpretation of meanings
in the context of webs of belief, discourses, or cultural practices.
Social constructivism also feeds into anti-foundational analyses of social expla-
nation. It undercuts a scientism in which social explanation appears as a quest
for ahistorical causal links. The crucial argument here is that because beliefs and
concepts, and so actions and practices, are historically contingent social constructs,
therefore we cannot adequately explain them in terms of a trans-historical correlation
or mechanism. Human norms and practices are not natural or rational responses to
given circumstances. Hence many anti-foundationalists conclude that social explana-
tion contains an inherently historicist moment: even those concepts and practices
that seem most natural to us need to be explained as products of a contingent
history.
7.1.2 Anti-foundationalism and Political Science
Approaches to political science are peculiar entities. What political scientists identify
as an approach is usually a jumble of philosophy, methods, and topics. So, for exam-
ple, behaviouralism combined positivist philosophy with new statistical methods and
the study of the political behaviour of individuals and groups. Yet the philosophy,
methods, and topics do not entail one another. They do not logically have to go
together. So, for example, several political scientists study group and network behav-
iour without using any statistical techniques, and even political scientists who use
118 mark bevir
statistical techniques to explore voting behaviour now often do so without adhering
to a positivist philosophy.
To understand the implications of anti-foundationalism for political science, we
should distinguish between philosophy, method, and topics. Anti-foundationalism
supports a social philosophy characterized by holism, constructivism, interpretivism,
and historicism. This social philosophy provides a stark contrast to the lukewarm pos-
itivism of much political science. It is clear, in that respect, that anti-foundationalism
offers a major challenge to political scientists to clarify and defend the philosophical
assumptions that inform their work. Yet, to challenge political scientists to rethink
their philosophical assumptions is not necessarily to require them to reject their
favoured methods or topics. Anti-foundationalism cautions political scientists how
to reflect on the data they generate; it does not tell them that they must or must not
use particular techniques to generate data on particular issues.
I am suggesting that an anti-foundational philosophy does not require or pre-
clude particular methods or topics in political science. Anti-foundationalism itself
should lead us to recognize that there is just such a conceptual gap between a social
philosophy and an approach to political science. Meaning holism implies that our
beliefs or concepts form a web. Hence it is possible that political scientists could
reconcile anti-foundational philosophy with any given method by suitably modifying
their other beliefs or concepts. Political scientists can make their favoured techniques
of data generation compatible with anti-foundationalism by modifying their other
beliefs so as to suggest that the data they generate are not only saturated with their
prior theories but also data about holistic and constructed webs of meaning to
be explained by interpretations that include a historical moment. Foundationalists
might insist on particular techniques on the grounds that some techniques generate
pure facts while others do not. Anti-foundationalists, in contrast, should allow that
all kinds of techniques generate theory-laden data that we can accept or challenge in
narratives.
Anti-foundationalists might choose to undertake critical studies that reveal the
historical contingency and partiality of beliefs that present themselves as naturally
given or inherently rational. Equally, one might imagine anti-foundationalists relying
on large-scale surveys to generate data from which to postulate certain beliefs for
which they then offer a historical explanation. Or one might imagine them using
formal models to explore the outcomes that arise from actions based on particular
beliefs and desires, and even then postulating particular beliefs and desires on the
grounds that doing so best explains certain observed outcomes. No doubt any anti-
foundationalists who used behavioural or rational choice approaches to political
science would have to allow that the stories they told were provisional ones that
related actions and practices to socially constructed webs of meaning. But there is
no reason why their provisional stories should not rely heavily on surveys, statistical
analysis, or formal models to generate data.
It is worth adding here that anti-foundationalism might even prove compatible
with only slightly modified versions of the forms of explanation that are associated
with behaviouralism, institutionalism, and rational choice. Anti-foundationalism
anti-foundationalism 119
is, of course, incompatible with a naive belief in the validity of explanations that
treat data as pure facts to be explained in ways that reify practices so as to treat
them as natural, fixed, or inherently rational. However, political scientists might
accept an anti-foundational analysis of social explanation while offering ad hoc or
pragmatic justifications for explanations couched in terms of reified concepts. Per-
haps they might argue that such simplified explanations are more able to generate
policy-relevant knowledge than are nuanced accounts of historical contingency and
diversity: they might defend aggregate, formal correlations between poverty and
race, gender, marital status, and education on the grounds that these help the state
to develop policies that alleviate poverty. Equally, of course, anti-foundationalists
might respond by arguing that the dangers and exclusions of having power and
policy based on essentialist concepts and formal explanations always outweigh the
benefits of acting on simplified correlations or models, or they might argue that
other approaches to policy formation are capable of generating similar or more
substantial benefits. For now, the important point is that anti-foundationalism
itself does not appear conclusively to resolve such arguments in a way that rules
out all possible uses of reified or essentialist concepts in formal correlations and
models.
7.1.3 Varieties of Anti-foundationalism
In principle anti-foundationalism could be combined with all sorts of approaches
to political science. Hence we cannot explain the impact of anti-foundationalism on
the study of British politics by appealing to purportedly intrinsic conceptual links
between an anti-foundational epistemology and a particular approach to the study
of politics. To the contrary, the links between anti-foundationalism and approaches
to political science must themselves be contingent historical ones. To explain the
impact of anti-foundationalism on the study of British politics, we thus have to
explore the particular historical traditions against the background of which political
scientists have turned to anti-foundationalism. Indeed anti-foundational approaches
to British politics owe as much to the persistence of concepts, concerns, and topics
from various historical traditions as they do to purportedly logical consequences of
an anti-foundationalist epistemology.
While anti-foundationalism in principle could be combined with all kinds of
approaches to British politics, it in practice is associated more or less exclusively
with political scientists inspired by critical, socialist traditions of inquiry. We might
identify three types of anti-foundationalism in the study of British politics. Each
arose against the background of a different critical socialist tradition and absorbed
a different type of anti-foundationalism. Table 7.1 provides an overview. Govern-
mentality theory arose against the background of socialist theories of social control,
and it absorbed a focus on regimes of power/knowledge. Post-Marxists combined
Saussurean linguistics with a socialist concept of hegemony. Social humanists infused
postanalytic themes into the New Left’s concern with culture, agency, and resistance.
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Table 7.1 Varieties of anti-foundationalism
Governmentality Post-Marxism Social humanism
Socialist background
(i) Thinker(s) (i) Louis Althusser (i) Antonio Gramsci (i) New Left—Raymond
Williams and E. P.
Thompson
(ii) Key concept (ii) Social control (ii) Hegemony (ii) Radical cultures and
traditions
Anti-foundational background
(i) Thinker/Theory (i) Michel Foucault (i) Post-structuralism (i) Diffuse postanalytic
themes
(ii) Key concept (ii) Power/knowledge (ii) Semiotic code—relations (ii) Agency situated in
among signifiers cultural practices
Prominent topics Technical discourses Collective Governance, with an
as ways of making identities—especially emphasis on ideologies
subjects through those of gender, race, and resistance
public policy and sexuality
Examples (i) Rose (1999) (i) Laclau and Mouffe (1985) (i) Hall (1983)
(ii) Barry, Osborne, and (ii) Smith (1994) (ii) Bevir and Trentmann
Rose (1996b) (2007)
My aim in distinguishing these three traditions is to offer an admittedly simplified
account of broad movements in the study of British politics. I have divided anti-
foundational approaches according to intellectual background because my aim is to
provide a historical narrative of the contingent ways in which anti-foundationalism
has entered into the study of British politics. Let me stress, then, that these three
traditions are not separate from one another. To the contrary, themes often flow
from one to the other, and anti-foundationalists often combine themes from dif-
ferent traditions. To offer one example: Stuart Hall’s work combined the New Left’s
emphasis on the sociology of culture with a concept of hegemony quite a while before
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe combined the concept of hegemony with a post-
structuralism linked to Saussurean linguistics (Hall, Lumley, and McLennan 1978;
Laclau and Mouffe 1985). To offer a more personal example: my work on New Labour
instantiates a social humanist concern with ideologies and agency, but one of its
main focuses is on how discourses from the social sciences have impacted on public
policy to create a new governmentality (Bevir 2005). Bearing such caveats in mind,
let us look at the three anti-foundational approaches to British politics. In each case,
we will trace a historical movement from an early socialist background (Althusser,
Gramsci, the New Left), through the appearance of anti-foundational themes
(Foucault, Laclau and Mouffe, Hall), on to the studies of British politics they have
inspired.
anti-foundationalism 121
7.2 Governmentality
.............................................................................................................................................
Governmentality theory derives from the writings of Michel Foucault. It has been
applied to British society and politics mainly by the so-called Anglo-Foucauldians.
The early Anglo-Foucauldians typically had been attracted to the work of Louis
Althusser, and, more generally, to Marxist theories of social control. Foucault’s work
reproduced many tropes from social control theory (Resch 1992; Stedman Jones
1996). He deployed structuralist and post-structuralist ideas to imply that distinctions
such as those between madness and sanity or sickness and health were products of
particular epistemes or discourses rather than neutral or rational ways of capturing
reality (Foucault 1989; 1973). He suggested that the function of institutions such as
asylums and clinics was not the scientific and humanitarian promotion of health, but
rather social control and the normalization of deviant individuals. Governmentality
theory applies a similar approach to explore modern power.
7.2.1 Foucault on Modern Power
Foucault defines governmentality as the conduct of conduct (Foucault 1991). He
traces it back to the emergence of the ‘art of government’ in the middle of the
sixteenth century. Before that time, writers, notably Machiavelli in The Prince, had
adopted a monarchical notion of sovereign power: princes stood apart from their
territory, having a fragile relationship to it, so that ruling consisted of identifying and
forestalling threats to their rule. Then, in the middle of the sixteenth century, anti-
Machiavellian theorists of the art of government began to focus on the conduct of
conduct. These theorists explored questions about how to act on individuals so as to
influence, limit, correct, and determine their behaviour, whether in terms of the state,
the economy, the family, or the soul. They concerned themselves with the activities
and relationships in a given society, not the one relationship between a prince and
his territory. In doing so, Foucault argues, they set the scene for the rise of modern
governmentality.
In Foucault’s account, modern governmentality combines sovereignty with bio-
power and pastoral power (Foucault 1977; 1978–85). The anti-Machiavellian concept
of the conduct of conduct implied a downward continuity from the well-organized
state to an efficient economy and well-run families. In the seventeenth century, this
downward continuity was associated with a broad concept of ‘police’ that embraced
all attempts to exert disciplinary political power over people and their activities,
including schooling, work, family life, and consumption. In the eighteenth century,
populations were constructed as a social object liable to death rates, epidemics, and
patterns of growth, and the extension of policing to populations gave rise to what
Foucault describes as bio-power; that is, new techniques of discipline that aimed to
increase the health, longevity, and productivity of the population.
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The final stream that feeds into Foucault’s analysis of modern power is a pastoral
one. Foucault traces pastoral techniques of government back to practices that devel-
oped in the Church. Pastoral power requires individuals to internalize various ideals
and norms so that they both regard an external body as concerned with their good
and strive to regulate themselves in accord with the dictates of that external body. For
Foucault, the secularization of pastoral power involved the state replacing the spiritual
end of salvation with worldly ends such as health and well-being. When people accept
such ends, they examine, confess, and transform their own behaviour in accord with
the regime of bio-power.
7.2.2 The Anglo-Foucauldians
Anglo-Foucauldians often deny that Foucault provided a theory that constitutes the
best way of understanding politics. They take him instead to have sketched out a mode
and field of inquiry. The mode of inquiry (or method) is genealogy. The aim is to pro-
vide cultural histories of discourses that inform current practices so as to reveal their
contingency and undermine any suggestion of their being neutral, humanitarian,
or scientific. Anglo-Foucauldians describe themselves as offering critical genealogies
of problems set by the present. Nikolas Rose writes, ‘rather than conceiving of our
present as an epoch or a state of affairs, it is more useful, in my own view, to view
the present as a series of problems and questions, an actuality to be acted upon and
within by genealogical investigation, to be made amenable to action by the action of
thought’ (Rose 1999: 11). Typically the Anglo-Foucauldians suggest that the purpose of
genealogy is to open up new possibilities, and even new ways of being. They dismiss
the idea of promoting a particular way of being as tarnished by the utopian dream
of eliminating all forms of power/knowledge. They argue that through genealogies,
‘the received fixedness and inevitability of the present is destabilized, shown as just
sufficiently fragile as to let in a little glimpse of freedom—as a practice of difference—
through its fractures’ (Barry, Osborne, and Rose 1996a: 5).
The Anglo-Foucauldians’ field of inquiry (or empirical domain) directs us away
from an excessive focus on the state towards a study of the diverse processes by
which subjects are normalized so as to sustain a pattern of rule. This field of inquiry
covers all the diffuse ways in which government and social power impact upon
individuals, groups, and populations. It draws our attention to the ways in which
conduct is shaped to certain ends by discourses and practices. As Rose explains, ‘the
state now appears simply as one element—whose functionality is historically specific
and contextually variable—in multiple circuits of power, connecting a diversity of
authorities and forces, within a whole variety of complex assemblages’ (Rose 1999: 5).
The concept of the state as just one element in circuits of power might sound very
similar to a much elder literature on policy networks. Yet, the Anglo-Foucauldians
depart significantly from this literature precisely because their interest lies not with
the study of formal institutions but with genealogies of discourses that inform con-
temporary practices. Anglo-Foucauldians are interested in how apparently neutral,
anti-foundationalism 123
scientific discourses serve to establish particular forms of subjectivity. They might
focus on the ways in which expert discourses about education, health, risk, and
insurance feed into public policies that then establish normal patterns of behaviour.
Or they might focus on the ways in which statistical analysis and formal modelling
provide new ways of measuring and analysing populations and thereby governing
people.
7.2.3 Liberal Governmentalities
Foucault’s essay on governmentality was first made available in English in 1978. It
appeared in a collection of essays, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality,
edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller. The Foucault Effect also
includes essays exploring governmentality written by French and Italian scholars as
well as some Anglo-Foucauldians. The essays define the mode and field of inquiry
associated with governmentality, but they do not particularly focus on themes ger-
mane to British politics. Nearly twenty years later, there appeared another collection
of essays, Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-Liberalism and Rationalities
of Government, edited by Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Rose. This collection,
with its Anglophone cast of contributors, illustrates themes that characterize a gov-
ernmentality approach to British politics.
The subtitle of Foucault and Political Reason captures one such emphasis. Anglo-
Foucauldians conceive of liberalism in terms of a series of political technologies that
arose from the nineteenth century through the welfare state and on to the neoliber-
alism of the Thatcher years. 3 Governmentality theorists portray nineteenth-century
liberalism as a political rationality that arose out of worries about extensive policing.
In this view, liberalism appears less as a rejection of state intervention and more as
a positive political rationality by which to manage complex interactions in society
and the economy. Liberalism seeks to produce certain outcomes through dynamics
in society and the economy themselves rather than by state activity.
Governmentality theorists discuss the rise of the welfare state in relation to chang-
ing problematics of liberalism. In their view, modern industrial society gave rise to
new social problems with which liberalism had to contend. Liberalism tried to guar-
antee the security of the economy and the state, in other words, by addressing social
problems through an array of new technologies that collectively constituted the wel-
fare state. For governmentality theorists, public housing, unemployment insurance,
and public health are understood as technologies of power that serve to normalize
subjects.
The governmentality theorists’ account of liberalism sets the scene for their under-
standing of neoliberalism and contemporary British politics. On the one hand,
neoliberalism appears as a critique of welfare state liberalism: it promotes rationalities
3
For Foucault’s own discussion of liberalism, especially German post-war liberalism and the Chicago
School, see Foucault (2004), and for comment Lemke (2001).
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in society and the economy, especially technologies of the market, on the grounds
that welfare systems, trade protection, state planning, and Keynesian intervention are
unproductive interferences with market relations. On the other hand, neoliberalism
appears as a range of governmental technologies that actively foster competitive
market relations so as to shift responsibility to the individual while increasing social
efficiency: under neoliberalism ‘it was the responsibility of political government to
actively create the conditions within which entrepreneurial and competitive conduct
is possible’ (Barry, Osborne, and Rose 1996a: 10).
7.2.4 Making Subjects
The governmentality theorists have also extended Foucault’s concern with the ways
in which apparently neutral, scientific discourses establish particular forms of subjec-
tivity. Indeed, they often conceive of liberalism, welfare state liberalism, and neoliber-
alism as composed of policies that seek to normalize subjects by drawing on technical
discourses from disciplines such as medicine, social science, statistics, and public
health. Rose’s work on the self, freedom, and psychology provides a more general
exploration of contemporary forms of subjectivity (Rose 1999; and also Rose 1989;
1998). Rose argues that the shift from liberalism through welfare liberalism and on
to neoliberalism saw the morals and psyche of the individual replace larger units as
the main objects of governing rationalities. In his account, early nineteenth-century
liberalism, guided by classical political economy, did not seek to manage individual
morality so much as to guarantee the security of economic relations. Yet, Rose adds,
in the middle of the nineteenth century, liberal governments began to regulate the
morals of certain segments of the population. Distinct institutions, such as the poor-
house, appeared to discipline and correct people who had particular pathologies of
character.
For Rose, an even more dramatic change occurred with the rise of the welfare state.
He argues that early in the twentieth century, statistics, which had been used mainly
to calculate national incomes, began to be used to analyse and govern characteristics
of the population. In his view, an emerging discourse of ‘social’ issues focused on
problems that afflicted large portions of the population, and a new governmentality
arose to prevent these problems spreading further. The welfare state and Keynesian-
ism appear, in Rose’s account, as technologies by which experts attempt to govern
subjects so as to manage pathologies made visible by new social statistics.
Rose also suggests that neoliberal governmentality constructs and enforces a par-
ticular subjectivity. He associates advanced liberalism with an individualization of
responsibility. Whereas the welfare state embodies a collectivist ethos, individuals
are now constructed as responsible for their own conduct. Neoliberalism promotes
freedom, understood as personal choice, at the same time as it deploys psychology
to create new forms of control. Psychological technologies increasingly affect how
individuals think about almost every aspect of their lives, including sexual relations,
work, health, and consumption choices. For Rose, then, advanced liberalism is a form
anti-foundationalism 125
of governmentality in which individuals discipline themselves to use their freedom
to make responsible choices. Individuals are expected to analyse themselves and to
improve all aspects of their lives in ways that benefit themselves, their community,
and the state.
7.3 Post-Marxism
.............................................................................................................................................
The post-Marxists, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, are influenced less by the
structuralist Marxism of Althusser than by Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. Mind
you, they modify, and arguably even overturn, Gramsci’s humanism by infusing it
with the concepts of language and mind developed by structuralists such as Ferdinand
de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss and then reworked by post-structuralists such
as Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau
and Mouffe analyse discourses primarily in terms of the quasi-structural properties
of signs. They trace the relations and properties of signs and discourses not to
class or other social conflicts but to a quasi-structural psychology associated with
Lacan.
7.3.1 Laclau and Mouffe
Laclau and Mouffe set out to rework Marxism in order to dissociate it from founda-
tionalism and essentialism. They reject theories that privilege the economic (rather
than the ideological) and social class (rather than discursively constructed identi-
ties). In doing so, they redefine hegemony to evoke a submerged strand of left-
wing thought that resisted essentialism. Gramsci used hegemony to refer to class
domination through ideology: a class could establish an ideological hegemony such
that its dominance rested on moral consensus. Gramsci implied, in particular, that
bourgeois hegemony explains why the workers consent to capitalism and so why
there has not been a revolution. Laclau and Mouffe, in contrast, use the concept of
hegemony not just to think about the role of ideologies in a capitalist system defined
by its means and relations of production, but also actively to dismiss social theories
based on economic and class analysis. In their view, ‘the search for a “true” working
class and its limits is a false problem, and as such lacks any theoretical or political
relevance’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 84).
Once Laclau and Mouffe empty Gramsci’s concept of hegemony of its Marxist con-
tent, they can suggest that historically it has acted as what Derrida calls a supplement.
Hegemony has acted as a concept with which to deal with evidence that does not
accord with a privileging of the economic base over the ideological superstructure;
that is, cases in which the identity of a class does not correspond to its objective
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social location. Laclau and Mouffe define their project, echoing Derrida’s strategy
of conceptual inversion, as one of making their concept of hegemony central rather
marginal.
Laclau and Mouffe hope that by rethinking Marxist theory, they will redefine the
strategy of the left. They argue that the reduction of ideology to class consciousness
and thus objective social facts inspires a totalitarianism associated with the belief
that Marxist parties can act as a vanguard of the workers. Leninism, they explain,
promotes ‘political leadership within a class alliance’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 55).
Leninism legitimates an authoritarian Party or state by suggesting that the Party or
state purses the objective class interests of the workers. In contrast, the post-Marxist
concept of hegemony is meant to draw attention to the need to provide ‘intellectual
and moral’ leadership to construct subject positions, identities, and discourses. Laclau
and Mouffe even write, ‘political subjects are not—strictly speaking—classes, but
complex “collective wills” ’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 67). Hence they conclude that
the left should renounce Leninist vanguardism in favour of a historically specific,
grassroots struggle.
7.3.2 Discourse Theory
The debt Laclau and Mouffe owe structuralist theories of language appears again in
their use of the word discourse as an alternative for ideology. The concept ‘discourse’
is, after all, less tied to ideas of class and social location than is the concept ‘ideology’.
Post-Marxists approach a discursive formation as ‘a configuration, which in certain
contexts of exteriority can be signified as a totality’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 106).
Their language and approach stem from Saussurean linguistics. Saussure argued
that the relationship of a signified (or concept) to a signifier (or word) is arbitrary
(Saussure 1966). Any signifier can evoke any signified provided only that it differs
from other signifiers. Hence the value of any signifier derives solely from relations of
difference in a system of signs. Post-structuralists, such as Derrida, are often taken to
have argued that the relation between concepts and reality is similarly arbitrary: our
concepts too can be understood not as referring to the world but solely in terms of
the relations of difference among them within a discourse.
A Saussurean legacy appears in three prominent features of Laclau and Mouffe’s
concept of discourse. First, Laclau and Mouffe dismiss concerns with the relationship
of discourses to a putative extra-discursive reality, such as that of class struggle.
Sometimes they imply that the world, including class antagonisms, is a product of
discourses. At other times they appear to allow for an extra-discursive reality while
contending that only signs in existing discourses can be comprehended. Either way,
they rule out attempts to understand discourses as either reflections of or responses
to the world. Second, Laclau and Mouffe stress the constitutive role of relations of
difference within and between discourses. They imply, for example, that in any given
discourse, a binary structure governs concepts of identity such that identities are
necessarily defined in opposition to an excluded other. Third, Laclau and Mouffe
anti-foundationalism 127
are dismissive of human agency: they argue that discourses fix or limit what indi-
viduals say and do, and they analyse discourses in terms of the structural relations
among the signs of which they are composed rather than the use of language by
agents.
Laclau and Mouffe tie their concept of discourse not to pre-discursive social facts
but to Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory. In their account, the subject (or individual)
desires ‘fullness’, conceived as psychological stability based on the integration of the
self with the other. Yet, this desire for fullness is thwarted structurally by a primordial
‘lack’ since there is always doubt as to whether the ‘other’ has recognized the self. This
‘lack’ then leads to the other getting blamed for blocked identity. This psychoanalytic
theory implies that a quasi-structural antagonism between self and other is integral
to the very process of identity formation. Laclau and Mouffe argue that this quasi-
structural logic also applies to discourses. On the one hand, discourses exhibit a logic
of equivalence in that they try both to integrate many views into one world-view
and to stress commonalities in contrast to another, but, on the other hand, they
thus exhibit a logic of difference in that they are constituted by an antagonism to
the other—an antagonism that always limits the extent to which they can achieve
integration. The interplay between equivalence and difference in discourses consti-
tutes hegemonic struggles. So, Laclau and Mouffe argue that a hegemonic discourse
increases its bloc of control through the logic of equivalence but its ability to do so is
limited by a logic of difference that precludes its achieving full closure and so creates
a space for counter-hegemonic discourses to emerge.
7.3.3 Racial Identities
After Laclau and Mouffe wrote Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau concentrated
on redefining and defending their approach to discourse analysis, while Mouffe
attempted to link their approach to a normative theory of agonistic democracy
(Laclau 1990; Butler, Laclau, and Zizek 2000; Mouffe 1993; 2000). The job of applying
their work to specific discourses has fallen mainly to students of Laclau from the
University of Essex (Howarth, Norval, and Stavrakakis 2000; Howarth and Torfing
2005). 4
Many attempts to apply post-Marxism have concentrated on discourses connected
with identities of gender and race. Post-Marxists argue that subject positions are the
constructs of contingent discourses, rather than natural or biological givens. In their
view, the subject positions that a discourse creates derive not from pre-discursive
social relations or biological facts but from political strategies and the structural
relations between concepts in discourses. The appearance of normality that attaches
to some subject positions is merely an effect of the hegemonic status of the relevant
discourse.
4
Laclau’s students have also written books introducing his theory (Howarth 2000; Smith 1998;
Torfing 1999).
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One attempt to apply post-Marxism to British politics is Anna-Marie Smith’s
New Right Discourse on Race and Sexuality. In the 1950s, Enoch Powell opposed
the retreat from imperial power on the grounds that Empire was integral to British
identity. Then, once decolonization seemed inevitable, he promoted a new British
identity distinct from Empire. Smith writes, ‘by representing the Empire as accidental
and external, Powell was able to claim that Britishness had remained essentially the
same through the imperialist period and would not be significantly altered by de-
colonization’ (Smith 1994: 132). Powellism arose as a discourse of a ‘pure’ British
identity defined against a menacing alien identity. Race was its ‘nodal point’. It needed
to create an ‘other’ if it were to postulate some internal space destroyed by decoloniza-
tion. Hence Powellism reconceived black populations as aliens. Black immigrants rep-
resented a disorderly and dangerous other threatening Britain. What is more, Smith
adds, Powellism constructed black immigrants as predatory, masculine subjects. In
Powell’s famous ‘rivers of blood’ speech, for example, he read from the letter of a
‘white woman old-age pensioner’ portraying her as the victim of a black invasion
that was taking over the once ‘respectable’ street on which she lived. The influx of
blacks had made her a prisoner in her own home. No one came to her aid.
In Smith’s account, Powellism exhibits the logics of equivalence and differ-
ence that post-Marxists associate with hegemonic discourses. Powellism claimed
inclusiveness—a centrist position against ‘excessive’ immigration—even as it
excluded groups. More particularly, Smith identifies several devices by which Pow-
ellism pursued equivalence. Powell claimed to represent the interests of both whites
and blacks: he ‘invoked the image of black supporters . . . to de-racialize his consis-
tently racist discourse’. Powellism also left a place for the ‘good assimilable black’
even as it railed against the ‘dangerous black invader’ (Smith 1994: 140). Powell did
not assert that blacks are inherently ‘prone to wrong-doing’ so much as claim that
the immigration of unassimilated individuals leads to social problems, tensions, and
violence.
7.3.4 Governance and Policy
Post-Marxists have focused on discursive identities associated with gender and race.
There is less work addressed to topics such as parliament, political parties, policy
networks, and local politics. One exception is Stephen Griggs and David Howarth’s
analysis of the campaign against a second runway at Manchester Airport (Griggs
and Howarth 2000). In exploring this case study, Griggs and Howarth ask: how
did the local village residents and direct action protestors overcome their collective
action problem? As post-Marxists, they take the problem of collective action to be
less about individual rationality than creating a shared identity through discourse. In
the Manchester case, they point to three bases for the creation of such a discourse.
First, there was a group identity in that all were affected by the environmental costs
of the runway. Second, there was a social network and political entrepreneurs. There
was a strong conservationist tradition in the villages and the leaders of the relevant
anti-foundationalism 129
associations had the support of professional people in meeting the costs of the
campaign. Third, the campaign forged new political identities aligning ‘the Vegans
and the Volvos’. According to Griggs and Howarth, this alignment worked because
the pro-runway campaign used heavy-handed tactics and stigmatized residents and
protestors alike, and because the media linked residents and eco-warriors as fighting
a common foe. But, Griggs and Howarth continue, the alignment of the Vegans
and the Volvos proved temporary. The protestors lost. The eco-warriors, after being
evicted, moved on to the next protest site. The residents split over whether to mount a
national-level campaign or to concentrate on the public inquiry. The local authority
offered an environmental mitigation package and pursued their case with ‘ruthless
efficiency.’
7.4 Social Humanism
.............................................................................................................................................
It is interesting to compare Smith’s study of race in Britain with one written some
ten years earlier—Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. 5 Both studies
concentrate on meanings, and both are inspired by socialist traditions. Yet, whereas
Smith’s title gives pride of place to ‘discourse’, Gilroy’s subtitle proclaims his study
to be one of ‘culture and politics’, and whereas Smith draws on Laclau and Mouffe
with their quasi-structuralist theories of language and psychology, Gilroy adopts
a historical and even ‘materialist theory of culture’. For Gilroy, culture is both a
product of agency and the inherited life-world of agents. His extensive use of black
music (reggae and hip hop) suggested that subaltern agents might forge cultures of
resistance to a dominant ideology.
Gilroy’s concerns with agency, culture, resistance, and history all reflect the influ-
ence of the New Left on another tradition of anti-foundationalism. Governmentality
theory and post-Marxism draw on structuralism and post-structuralism with their
dismissal of subjects, agency, and humanism (Bevir, Hargis, and Rushing 2007). In
contrast, the New Left, including E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams, espoused
a humanist Marxism that emphasized the processes by which agents and classes made
cultures, especially cultures that resisted capitalism (Thompson 1978).
5
It is well worth pointing out that one legacy of the New Left and cultural studies is an extensive and
important literature in post-colonial studies. The combination of an anti-foundational focus on
meanings with a post-colonial focus on transnational flows seriously challenges the almost ubiquitous
persistence of assumptions about the nation state in the study of British politics—arguably including the
very idea of a ‘handbook of British Politics’. Tariq Modood’s chapter in this volume provides one
approach to race. Good examples of the studies of race and transnationalism associated with cultural
studies include Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1982) and Gilroy (1993).
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7.4.1 The New Left
The New Left preceded Laclau and Mouffe in attempting to liberate Marxism from
authoritarian politics and economic determinism. Many members of the New Left
responded to the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and knowledge of the brutalities of
Stalinism, by leaving the Communist Party and championing an indigenous tradition
of radical cultural and moral criticism (Dworkin 1997; Kenny 1995). Historians such as
Thompson and Christopher Hill reconstructed a popular tradition of resistance from
the Peasant’s Revolt through the London Corresponding Society to Chartism (Hill
1965; Thompson 1981; and more recently Stedman Jones 1983). Literary critics such as
Williams and Richard Hoggart reconstructed working-class auto-didacticism, and a
tradition of literature from the romantics to George Orwell in which the concept of
culture challenged capitalism (Williams 1958; Hoggart 1957).
Williams provided arguably the most influential theory of culture from within
the New Left. He appealed to culture as a way of explaining aspects of social and
political life that did not fit with economic reductionism. He suggested that post-
war economic prosperity had dampened the class struggle in a way that made
culture an ever more pertinent counter to capitalist values. In doing so, he trans-
formed the concept of culture. Whereas culture had often been associated almost
exclusively with high culture, he conceived of mass culture as a site of political
dissent and struggle. In The Long Revolution, for example, he argued that politi-
cal battles were being fought out in the world of art and ideas (Williams 1961).
He rejected the idea that the economic base determines the cultural superstruc-
ture. In his view, the impossibility of dominant groups entirely controlling social
processes means that there is always space for subordinate groups to contest ruling
ideologies.
7.4.2 Cultural Studies
While Williams and Thompson made culture and agency prominent concepts in the
New Left, the emergence of cultural studies owed much to Stuart Hall and his work
from 1968 to 1979 as Director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the
University of Birmingham. Indeed, the relationship of the New Left to cultural studies
was sometimes problematic. On the one hand, there is no denying the importance
of the New Left as personal and intellectual influences on a younger generation who
pursued critical approaches to the study of culture. Thompson’s approach to a history
from below inspired numerous explorations of the lived experience of subordinated
groups—women, racial minorities, gays and lesbians, and peasants, as well as the
working class. On the other hand, however, the New Left often remained at least
loosely tied to an orthodox socialist historiography that privileged the economy,
production, and class relations (Bevir and Trentmann 2002a). Students of race, such
as Hall, and gender, such as Angela McRobbie, sometimes found themselves fighting
anti-foundationalism 131
against the privileging of idealized white male working-class cultures from which the
racism and sexism had been written out. 6
Hall followed the New Left in conceiving of culture as a form of expression that is
manifest not only in high art but also in the everyday life of subordinated groups. But,
in the late 1960s, an encounter with anti-foundationalism and post-structuralism led
him to modify the New Left’s notion of lived experience. 7 Williams, and especially
Thompson, tended to describe cultures of resistance as responses to experiences of
the brutal realities of capitalism. In contrast, Hall now paid more attention to the way
in which ideological traditions constructed people’s experiences (Hall and Jefferson
1993). The point was not to return to the old view that ideologies represented a
false consciousness that hid the reality of the class struggle. The point was, rather,
to insist on the importance of ideology as a site of struggle for social change. Other
authors have recently explored the ways in which even capitalism and markets have
been constructed in part through cultures of resistance (Bevir and Trentmann 2002b;
2004).
To bridge the gap between culturalism and anti-foundationalism, Hall turned to
Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. For Hall, hegemony is a specific process of ideo-
logical struggle—a process that he understands in terms of a humanist historicism
rather than the quasi-structural psychology adopted by Laclau and Mouffe (Hall
1988; 1986). Culture thus appears as a site of hegemonic control and struggle: it
reinforces present power relations while allowing space for dissent and resistance.
Popular culture can reinforce hegemonic ideas and identities, notably by representing
them as, say, natural, inexorable, or rational. But popular culture can also be a site of
resistance by subordinated groups. Indeed, Hall’s concern with agency and resistance
spills over into an emphasis on the consumption as well as the production of culture.
Subordinate groups can resist cultural discourses and symbols by consuming them in
ways that draw on local patterns of dissent.
7.4.3 Thatcherism and After
Social humanists characteristically explore ruling ideologies and resistance to them.
The most obvious examples have been studies of Thatcherism and New Labour.
In the 1980s, Hall offered an account of Thatcherism as a hegemonic project char-
acterized by ‘authoritarian populism’. In his view, Labour attempted to be both a
working-class party and a responsible caretaker of a capitalist economy. When the
6
Much gender theory is anti-foundational. For a detailed discussion of feminism see Vicky Randall’s
contribution to this volume.
7
Hall identifies with an ‘eclecticism’ that has little concern for coherence. Typically, he flirts with a
range of fashionable Marxist terms—from the Althusserian ‘articulation’ to signification—inserting
them into a broadly constructivist and yet sociological approach to ideologies and cultures of resistance.
His lingering debt to the New Left appears in his constant return to agency, practice, resistance, and (in
my view rather problematically) modernist sociological categories. Compare Proctor (2004).
132 mark bevir
economy declined, Labour tried to sustain its caretaker role by adopting corporatist
management strategies. It thereby weakened its connection with the workers. The
failings of the left thus set the scene for Thatcherism. Thatcherism aligned the
neglected workers with anti-collectivism as an alternative solution to the problems of
the economy. It presented neoliberal ideas as the common sense of the British people.
Hall explains, ‘the essence of the British people was identified with self-reliance and
personal responsibility, as against the image of the over-taxed individual, enervated
by welfare state “coddling” ’ (Hall 1983: 29; and also see Hall 1988). This right-wing
populism combined themes from a tradition of ‘organic Toryism—nation, family,
duty, authority, standards, traditionalism—with the aggressive themes of a revived
neoliberalism—self-interest, competitive individualism, anti-statism’ (Hall 1983: 29).
However, Hall adds, Thatcherism governed through authoritarianism. It brought an
‘intensification of state control over every sphere of economic life’, the decline of
democratic institutions, and even the curtailment of formal liberties. The tensions
between Thatcherism’s populism and its authoritarianism provided a space in which
the left might recoup its ideological losses.
No doubt New Labour likes to think it recouped these losses. Social humanists gen-
erally disagree. Hall himself portrays New Labour as little more than a continuation of
neoliberalism. He argues that New Labour is a hybrid regime, combining a dominant
neoliberalism with a subordinate social democratic notion of active government, and
able to hold these two discourses together only through the constant use of ‘spin’
(Hall 2003). Younger social humanists, in contrast, have been more attentive to the
ways in which New Labour has transformed both social democratic and neoliberal
traditions. Some suggest that New Labour has given up on grand ideological visions
of a transformed society, and turned instead to modernization in accord with social
theories that purport to analyse inexorable changes in the world (Finlayson 2003).
Others argue, in addition, that the social theories on which New Labour most relies
are communitarianism and new institutionalism (Bevir 2005; also see Moss and
O’Loughlin 2005). They suggest that New Labour’s policies deploy these theories in
an attempt to transform state and society.
7.4.4 Governance and Resistance
Social humanists have explored the ideologies associated with political parties. They
have also studied other traditions of governance and cultures of resistance. Social
humanists decentre governance. They show how several different traditions con-
tribute to the construction of the complex patterns of rule found in contemporary
Britain. 8 Even when governments promote policies inspired by a given discourse, the
formation and implementation of these policies involves diverse actors who imbue
the policies with different content against the background of other traditions. These
8
The literature includes Bevir and Rhodes (2003; 2006); Clark and Gains (2007); Clarke and
Newman (1997); Dudley (2003); Morrell (2006); Newman (2001); and for comparative studies Bevir,
Rhodes, and Weller (2003).
anti-foundationalism 133
actors, whether intentionally or inadvertently, draw on diverse cultures to resist the
governing narratives.
Dissent and resistance are, of course, found far beyond Westminster and Whitehall.
Social humanists such as Thompson and Williams argued, as we have seen, that
citizens are situated agents who can and do draw upon local cultures to express
scepticism and resistance to governing discourses. More recently, social humanists
have explored resistance among street-level bureaucrats and citizens. Several chapters
in a volume on Governance, Consumption, and Citizenship, which I co-edited with
Frank Trentmann, show how social movements, street-level bureaucrats, and citizens
have actively developed their own beliefs and narratives of ‘choice’ in explicit con-
trast to government narratives. John Clarke argues, for example, that the meanings
of choice are contextually bounded not universal, and that service providers and
citizens alike are sceptical about official discourses (Clarke 2007). His interviews in
policy areas such as policing and health reveal a resistance to the appropriateness
of ‘consumer’ and ‘choice’ as identities and activities. Service providers and service
users alike believe that the idea of choice sits uneasily alongside values such as equity.
Citizens resist the language of choice and shopping as inappropriate for policing and
health care.
Social humanists emphasize the contingent, diverse, and contested nature of gov-
ernance. In doing so, they imply that governmentality theorists and post-Marxists
adopt too monolithic an analysis of discourses such as neoliberalism. Governmen-
tality theorists, with their debt to ideas of social control, focus almost exclusively on
official discourses and policies, paying little attention to how these are received or
enacted at local levels. In contrast, social humanists, with their debt to the idea of
traditions of resistance, explore the diverse ways in which street-level bureaucrats and
citizens articulate and practise consumption and citizenship in their everyday lives,
often in ways that challenge government narratives. The focus thus shifts from the
discourse of policy-makers to the fractured and diverse processes by which discourses
and policies are translated into actions.
7.5 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
Anti-foundationalism is an epistemological position that has implications for ontol-
ogy and social explanation. While in principle it is compatible with all kinds of
approaches to political science, in practice it has been absorbed by a range of
overlapping critical, socialist theories. On the one hand, the different socialist tra-
ditions do much to explain the different concepts and topics associated with the
Anglo-Foucauldians, post-Marxists, and social humanists. Yet, on the other hand, we
would do well to recognize that, whatever their differences, anti-foundationalists have
134 mark bevir
developed a broadly shared research programme. That research programme contains
at least the following four themes:
r A commitment to studying meanings (beliefs, discourses, and traditions) as con-
stitutive of social and political practices.
r A belief in the contingency and contestability of meanings, and so an opposition
to claims that a culture, web of beliefs, or practice is natural, inexorable, or
inherently rational.
r A commitment to historical explanations of meanings, where historicity conveys
contingency thereby undercutting appeals to formal models, fixed institutions,
or reified social patterns.
r A use of historical critiques to reveal the contingency of webs of belief, which
understand themselves as natural, inexorable, or inherently rational.
So, anti-foundationalists portray British government as a historically specific and
contestable endeavour. They highlight the importance of exploring the changing
meanings that constitute British economic, political, social, and cultural practices in
broader post-imperial, European, and other transnational settings. They encourage
studies of changing patterns of governance and conceptions of politics, notably in
relation to how practices of statecraft are conceived in relation to their objects of
intervention. They encourage studies of how society and its discontents have been
understood, especially in the context of traditions of social thought and protest
and their role in framing patterns of sociality, inequality, and resistance. And they
encourage studies of the role of the cultural domain in these transformations and
the separation of culture as a discrete realm with its own institutions, forms, and
conventions.
The anti-foundationalists’ emphasis on meanings, contingency, historical nar-
ratives, and critique opens up the study of British politics. Anti-foundationalists
have initiated dialogues between British politics and historiography, cultural studies,
and post-colonial studies. In addition, they have posed theoretical and interpretive
challenges for other students of British politics. They have challenged a lingering,
lukewarm positivism that tries to hide questions of meaning and contingency behind
appeals to social facts, institutions, structures, and correlations. If other political
scientists take up this challenge, the benefits would include greater philosophical
sophistication and recognition of new research topics.
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chapter 8
.................................................................................................................
FEMINISM
.................................................................................................................
vicky randall
8.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
Feminism as it reformed and regalvanized from the late 1960s was a revolutionary or
‘transformative’ political movement. It opposed and criticized practically everything
about the then status quo. Feminism in the intervening four decades has undoubtedly
impacted, in both intended and unintended ways, on British society and politics. It
has also made itself felt within the ‘academy’.
This chapter is concerned with the extent and manner in which feminism as a
critical perspective has informed scholarly analyses of British politics. Identifying and
assessing this impact is no easy task; it is complicated by the broader consequences
of feminism as a movement for British politics itself, and by the diversity of forms of
feminist thinking. The main conclusion must be that feminism has had a consider-
able impact, especially in terms of subject matter but also in modifying normative
and conceptual understandings. Even so its overall influence has been limited in
some significant respects, which have to do with features of feminist discourse itself
and possibly also with the predominant character of ‘the political science of British
politics’.
The chapter begins with an account of British feminism as an evolving dialogue. It
assesses the impact of feminism on the study of British politics, in comparison with its
impact in other areas of social science and the humanities, and even as compared with
other fields of politics such as international relations. It then goes on to examine that
impact in greater detail, under the heads of normative thrust, epistemology, subject
matter, concepts, and methods.
feminism 139
8.2 Feminism in Britain
.............................................................................................................................................
The heyday of second-wave feminism as an activist political movement in Britain was
in the 1970s and early 80s. From the start it was subject to internal division and bitter
arguments, so that it has always been difficult to generalize about what feminists stand
for. The very term implies an identification with women, or ‘woman’, and generally
feminism is prompted by some resentment of injustice towards women and a demand
for change, but beyond this differences open up concerning the nature and causes of
injustice, the desired end-state, strategies, and so forth. In the early days, three strands
of feminism were generally identified.
The most distinctively new strand was Radical feminism which put the division
and opposition between men and women before anything else. Whilst in some sense
extreme, and in the long term unsustainable, this approach played an essential role in
legitimizing and clearing intellectual space for examining men–women relationships
without having immediately to factor in class, race, culture, and so forth. It high-
lighted the political character of the supposedly private sphere (the ‘personal’) and
advanced the notion of ‘patriarchy’, or the system of male rule. It also catalysed the
emergence of a series of key issues for women—abortion, rape, domestic violence,
incest, pornography.
Over time a new more ‘cultural’ form of Radical feminism emerged which pos-
itively celebrated women’s difference from men. This more pro-woman version,
though less directly political, also generated new concepts and questions for polit-
ical analysis, especially to the extent it gave rise to a specific philosophic strand of
‘standpoint feminism’, discussed below.
‘Liberal’ feminism had roots in eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinking but by
the late twentieth century reflected a kind of pragmatic or commonsense approach.
It tended to take the existing social and political framework as given and look for
ways of improving women’s position within it. But it also evolved, particularly in
response to emerging issues and criticism from within the movement, for instance
taking on board the arguments for positive discrimination (Radcliffe-Richards 1980),
and developing the critique of the public–private distinction.
Third was Marxist, later socialist, feminism, which initially sought to accommo-
date feminism to a Marxist capitalism-focused framework but later sought a more
balanced combination. In the process, socialist feminists came to make the by now
widely adopted distinction between ‘sex’—the biologically given—and ‘gender’ or
the social construction of masculinity and femininity built upon it. Socialist femi-
nism also contributed some of the most thoughtful early analysis of the relationship
between gender and the state (see for instance McIntosh 1978). There is a recent
tendency to erase socialist feminism as a distinct approach but we should underes-
timate neither its past contribution to feminist thinking nor, as Lynne Segal (1999)
emphasizes, its continuing relevance.
Feminism as movement and as ideas has changed almost beyond recognition since
this time. To some extent practical politics and thought have changed in parallel.
140 vicky randall
First and probably inevitably has been a tendency over time towards increasing
diversification and fragmentation. Sparked especially by black women’s critique
of the racism of white feminism, but also by conflicts over sexuality, this took the
form in particular of an intensifying politics of identity in which it became very
difficult for any group of feminists to claim to be speaking for others, let alone
some universal category of ‘women’. At a more pragmatic level the way through
this has often been seen as a ‘politics of coalition’, ‘transversalism’ 1 or contingent
solidarity between differently identified women’s groups. Intellectually however it
strengthened the appeal of post-structural approaches. Post-structural feminism, to
be discussed further below, is of course primarily concentrated in the academy, but
does constitute a major new development in feminist thinking—assuming we accept
that it is possible to be both post-structuralist and feminist.
The second trend has been the increasing assimilation of feminist activists and
much of the feminist agenda into the political mainstream. One trigger was the advent
of Thatcherism, prompting many socialist feminists to join the Labour Party and
engage in more conventional forms of politics. With this incidentally went a reap-
praisal of earlier rather monolithic conceptions of the state, and a growing interest in
women’s political representation. Such feminist integration received a further boost
with the advent of the New Labour government in 1997.
As an autonomous movement, however, British feminism is by now much
depleted. Political activism persists, as in the Fawcett Society, the women’s refuge
movement, and the Women’s Environmental Network, and even the thriving ‘F-word’
website launched in 2001 and successfully targeting young British feminists.
For some feminists these developments amount to ‘deradicalization’; to some other
observers and even self-styled feminists like Ros Coward (1999) they signal that we are
entering a ‘post-feminist’ era (a suggestion, however, that would seem clearly refuted
by the Equal Opportunities Commission’s latest report (2007) 2 ). At any rate such
changes have made it more difficult to specify a clear feminist political agenda. By the
same token they make it more difficult to identify and evaluate a specific ‘impact of
feminism’.
8.3 Feminism within the Academy
.............................................................................................................................................
Feminism as a movement has inevitably altered British society; it has seeped into
our culture and more directly impacted on the nature of British politics. But in
examining its impact on the study of British politics, we need also to consider
feminism as a critical perspective within the academy. Whilst feminism has had a
1
For a discussion of this term see Yuval-Davis (2006).
2
See Sex and Power: Who Runs Britain 2007? which details women’s under-representation in the
senior ranks of key institutional arenas: ‘Progress is painfully slow and at risk of going into reverse’.
feminism 141
Table 8.1 Percentage of female staff in politics departments in Britain
Year 2002 2007
All female staff (as percentage of total staff) 24.2 27.0
Female professors (as percentage of total professors) 11.5 12.5
considerable impact on scholarship altogether, the form and intensity of that impact
has varied between subject areas and disciplines. Perhaps understandably it has been
greatest in fields like sociology and literature. When it comes to politics, we may
first need to make a distinction between the study of politics and political science
as a discipline. The study of politics—but this begs the question to be taken up
shortly of what we mean by politics—especially where it has been undertaken from
a sociological disciplinary perspective may well be more obviously influenced by
feminism than is political science. Additionally, within the broad field of political
studies, political theory and especially international relations seem to have been
more influenced by feminism than empirical, including country-based, political
studies.
To the extent this is true for the study of British politics, I suggest it is for a combi-
nation of reasons. Although feminism is innately political, it brings a normative and
conceptual perspective on politics that runs counter to conventional understandings.
Traditionally mainstream political activity has seemed a very masculine world in
which neither feminist nor feminine notions have much place. Partly reflecting this,
perhaps, political science as a profession has been extremely ‘male-dominated’ (as
compared say with sociology or history). The numbers and proportion of women
within the discipline have only slowly been increasing (see Table 8.1 3 ). Within the
senior ranks progress has been still slower.
Of course there is no reason to suppose that individual female political scientists
will necessarily be feminist or that male political scientists will not—although it must
be said that most research into women/gender and politics in Britain is undertaken
by women (Childs and Krook 2006). However the demographics are significant for
what they say about the likely culture and power structure of political science as a
profession.
Beyond this there may be further factors concerning the character of political
science in Britain. There is no consensus on this matter. One view is that political
science in general and specifically in Britain is extremely pluralistic in terms of
approaches and methodologies (Goodin and Klingemann 1995). Furthermore Hay
(2001: 11) has recently claimed that the trend in the study of British politics is towards
‘A broadening and re-specification of the legitimate terrain of political analysis and
3
I am extremely grateful to Richard Topf for these figures. The available data—based on respondents
to a survey—incidentally show that female staff are on average considerably younger than male staff:
nearly 73 per cent of women but only 60 per cent of men were born in 1960 or later. This does suggest
that one factor in women’s under-representation in the professorial ranks may be the age distribution.
142 vicky randall
a growing recognition of extrapolitical variables (such as cultural and/or economic
factors)’. Others such as Marsh and Savigny (2004: 155) argue that ‘political science,
particularly US political science, is still dominated by a positivist epistemology and,
particularly, by behaviouralist and rational choice approaches that are underpinned
by that positivism’ and point to specific ‘positivist gatekeepers’ such as key journals.
Far from diminishing within British political science, some believe these traits are
strengthening (Aspinall 2006). To the extent that such fears are well founded, they
imply a disciplinary framework not highly receptive to feminist influences. It is
perhaps significant that the major impact of feminist ideas in international relations
coincided with a strong ‘post-positivist’ turn and explicit ensuing debate about basic
theoretical assumptions (see Steans 2003).
8.4 Feminism and the Study of
British Politics
.............................................................................................................................................
We can now examine more closely feminism’s impact on the study of British pol-
itics. As already noted feminism’s influence has occurred in many different ways,
including changes in British politics as the object of study, but the emphasis here
is more on the impact of feminist analysis and thought. In assessing the impact,
there is an inevitable tension between a sense of what possibly feminism could
contribute and what it actually has contributed. Gauging the potential impact is
further complicated by the way in which feminism has been a constantly evolv-
ing dialogue rather than one unified coherent position. Even so there are ways in
which its implications—normative, conceptual, ontological—could be far-reaching.
To provide a coherent account, I consider feminism’s impact under five heads—
normative thrust, epistemology with particular reference to a feminist standpoint,
subject matter, conceptual frameworks, and methods. In each case I discuss what fem-
inism has contributed, the limits to that contribution, and related to this the extent
to which its insights have been incorporated into the mainstream of British politics
scholarship.
8.4.1 Normative Thrust
Feminism’s many, often quarrelsome voices share a strongly normative tone and
demand change. We could then expect feminism to provide the basis first for a critical
assessment of developments in British politics and second for an effective critique of
the way that British politics is studied. Without doubt over time the tone of analyses of
British politics has become much less overtly sexist, though this partly reflects wider
feminism 143
cultural diffusion of many feminist assumptions, together with the stronger female
presence within the country’s political elite. But feminism has had less obviously
transformative effects than in cognate fields of study.
Initially feminist perspectives informed a telling critique of the ‘sexist’ masculine
lens through which British politics was studied. This lens either ignored women,
subsumed them in supposedly gender-neutral generalizations such as ‘mankind’,
considered them only in relation to significant male others, or, finally, portrayed them
in terms of traditional and unexamined stereotypes.
Subsequently feminism was the basis for cogent critiques of organizing concepts
in (British) political analysis such as the public–private divide and citizenship (see
below). Feminist perspectives also contributed to a significant critique of both the
‘male breadwinner’ British welfare state and its analysis in the mainstream litera-
ture, although much of this was undertaken by sociologists (for a valuable overview
see Lewis 1997). All these have to some extent been taken up in the mainstream
literature.
Despite having to satisfy the discipline’s expectations of empirical rigour at the
same time as negotiating the increasing diversities both of women and of feminism,
feminist-inspired assessments of a whole range of aspects of British politics have if
anything grown in number and sophistication in recent years. Authors have found
ways of indicating and formulating their basic value orientation. In assessing policy
and institutions, they have used expressions like ‘woman-friendly’, ‘gender equality’, 4
and ‘gender justice’ as normative anchor points. A current example is the edited
volume (Annersley, Gains, and Rummery 2007), entitled Women and New Labour, in
which Wilson (2007) notes that all the contributing authors, despite using differently
labelled yardsticks, share a common underlying set of values.
Alternatively they have implicitly responded to charges of overgeneralization by
relating their assessment to a specific category of women. The journal Critical Social
Policy, for instance, recently carried two articles assessing the implications of policy
for mothers: Carol Smart (2004) discusses the implications of a growing concern with
‘father’s rights’ and Ruth Lister (2006) the implications of New Labour’s otherwise
laudable preoccupation with child welfare.
Valuable as such feminist criticism has been, it has tended to be somewhat piece-
meal. There has been no comprehensive critique of the British (masculine) state and
politics, such as might be derived either from a Radical feminist or a standpoint
feminist (discussed in the next section) position, comparable to feminist state analysis
in International Relations. As suggested earlier, this may reflect the more general dif-
ficulty facing radical critique in the study of British politics. Ideological perspectives
such as feminism are perceived to lack credibility because of their prior commitment
to a particular value position, and because their claims about non-decisions, the
concealed faces of power, and so forth seem to fly in the face of common sense and
4
As used for instance by Lewis and Campbell (2007) in their appraisal of New Labour’s work/family
balance policies.
144 vicky randall
are open to the charge of non-falsifiability. And yet to the extent that ‘Sex class is
so deep as to be invisible’, 5 meaning male power and authority are normalized and
naturalized, it is often difficult to detect and expose with standard political science
tools.
8.4.2 Epistemology
Normative perspective obviously overlaps with epistemology. In fact the greater
part of feminist-influenced scholarly analysis of British politics has assumed a con-
ventional epistemology; that is, a fairly unreflective empiricism. Nonetheless it is
necessary to consider two other kinds of epistemological stance in this connection,
standpoint feminism and (feminist) postmodernism.
Standpoint feminism can be seen as logically rooted in cultural feminism, although
Hartsock (1983), who provided its most sustained and political formulation, was
originally a Marxist. Echoing the idea of the privileged consciousness of the prole-
tariat, she suggested women, as a historically oppressed category, potentially had a
superior understanding of reality, combining the received masculine account with
the insights of their own distinctive position and experience of production, especially
their contribution to subsistence and their role in child-rearing. As in the Marxist
formulation, women could not arrive at this privileged understanding on their own;
it would need to be refined through a feminist prism. However the resulting feminist
standpoint could be a powerful analytical tool.
Hartsock’s suggestions rapidly came under fire for generalizing about women’s
experience, for appearing to confirm socially conservative gender stereotypes, and
for ‘essentialism’, and in later versions she watered this strong thesis down (Hartsock
1998). Yet, for all the problems with the idea of a feminist standpoint, it has been seen,
within the field of International Relations, by writers like Ann Tickner (1988) as offer-
ing the basis for a powerful critique both of Realism and of militarized conceptions
of the state. Such a perspective has also been evident in the field of British politics
as in attempts, discussed further below, to ascertain whether women in politics do
indeed speak ‘in a different voice’, or identify with ‘an ethic of care’. But arguably
scholars could have proceeded further down a road which, whatever its scientific
shortcomings, promises to open up the field imaginatively and expand the range of
questions and hypotheses brought to bear.
Whilst standpoint feminism could be seen as the one distinctively feminist
epistemology, reflecting a particular feminist ontology, postmodernism 6 emerged
independently of feminism and to a very mixed feminist reception. It has also inci-
dentally inspired some of the most devastating criticisms of standpoint feminism.
Many feminists have been drawn to postmodernism for reasons including the way
it problematizes and delegitimizes traditional masculine discourses; its sensitivity
5
The opening sentence of Shulamith Firestone’s pioneering Dialectic of Sex (1970).
6
For convenience sake I am using this as the generic term but it is understood here to include
post-structuralism, post-Marxism, and discourse analysis.
feminism 145
to aspects of discourse construction which are of great relevance in thinking about
gender relations; the way it appears to provide a solution, conceptually at least, to the
political challenge of female diversity; and more specifically the Foucauldian focus on
the micro-politics of resistance resonating with feminist interrogation of the public–
private divide. However to the extent it calls into question the subject ‘woman’ and
the meta-narrative of feminism itself (Butler 1992), postmodernism is a two-edged
sword.
In practice thoroughgoing postmodernist feminist approaches have not been
extensively adopted in studies of British politics, certainly not in those based in
empirical political science, but drawn on more selectively. So for instance Pringle
and Watson (1990) used post-Marxist insights to question monolithic conceptions
of the patriarchal state and to demonstrate the constructed and contingent character
of ‘women’s interests’. More recently Karen Bird (2005) has analysed ‘discourses’ of
‘woman’, ‘man’, and ‘gender’ in her analysis of House of Commons debates in New
Labour’s first term, while (sociologists) Ball and Charles (2006) develop the notion of
discursive opportunity in analysing gendered policy-making in the Welsh Assembly.
8.4.3 Subject Matter
Perhaps feminism’s major achievement in regard to British politics as a field of study
has been to dramatically expand its subject matter. Initially this often involved ensur-
ing that women were acknowledged as a distinct category in political analysis, rather
than ignored or subsumed. Some of its more radical feminist detractors dismissed
such activity as ‘adding women in’ but this was always, and continues to be, necessary,
and in any case almost inevitably leads on to more searching questions about reasons
for the patterns observed.
A substantial literature by now describes and analyses sex differences in rates and
forms of political participation, especially voting. Rosie Campbell (2006) pursues
the question of a British voting ‘gender-gap’, including an analysis of data from the
2005 general election. Numerous studies have also focused on women’s access to and
experience in the House of Commons, with the emphasis shifting from explaining
women’s relative absence to assessing the consequences of women’s growing presence
or ‘feminization’ for the content and normative assumptions of policy, and for styles
of political behaviour (as in Childs 2004). Other studies examine women’s experi-
ence in political parties, local government, and so forth. The continuing need to
bring women into the picture is illustrated in Lowndes’s (2004) criticism of typically
gender-silent discussions of the fashionable concept of ‘social capital’ in the local
British context.
With the growing recognition of diversity and its attendant responsibilities within
British feminism, feminist-inspired studies have also analysed the experience and
concerns of specific categories of previously marginalized women—or at least women
marginalized as far as the study of politics is concerned. Brown (2006) for instance
considers the complexities of British Muslim female identity and rights, whilst Afshar,
146 vicky randall
Aitken, and Franks (2005) explore the strategies of a group of Muslim women in West
Yorkshire negotiating competing claims and pressures of their community, rising
Islamophobia, and forms of feminism. Phillips and Dustin (2004) provide a critique
of recent UK policy on forced marriages.
But in addition feminism has helped to bring a range of new issues, formerly
perceived to be essentially private or social, onto the public political agenda, and
thence into the purview of policy studies, such as domestic violence (see for instance
Abrar, Lovenduski, and Margetts 2000), abortion, and childcare (Randall 2000).
With the development of ‘women’s policy machinery’, itself an outgrowth of feminist
activism, there has been considerable research interest in experiences of ‘state fem-
inism’, including latterly bodies such as the Women and Equality Unit in Whitehall
(see for instance Squires and Wickham-Jones 2004; Breitenbach et al. 2002).
A broadly feminist perspective has further inspired an impressive literature explor-
ing gender aspects of New Labour politics and policy. Thus Russell (2005) provides
a perceptive analysis of the gender politics of Labour Party ‘modernization’. The
contributors to Women and New Labour (Annersley, Gains, and Rummery 2006) offer
a wide-ranging assessment of the extent and consequences, for women and for gender
more broadly, of ‘feminization’ under Blair. Some of this literature is not, incidentally,
political science strictly understood. For instance McRobbie (2000), who discusses
the implications both for women and for feminism of the ‘Third Way’, is a cultural
theorist, while Lewis and Campbell (2007) who assess Labour’s work/family balance
policies work in the field of social policy.
If then feminism has enormously raised the visibility of women as a relevant
category of British political analysis and has helped to introduce major new policy
areas and even institutional forms into the subject’s purview, even so there is a sense
in which much of this research agenda is not mainstreamed. That is, if feminist
scholars were not deliberately continuing to raise these issues, it remains questionable
whether they would be raised. It’s worth noting, in this context, Annersley, Gains,
and Rummery’s (2007: 12) comment on writings about policy and politics under New
Labour: ‘One notable aspect of this whole genre is, with a couple of exceptions—the
discussion of the Women’s Policy Unity by Flinders (2002) and Squires and Wickham-
Jones (2004)—the lack of attention paid to gender or gender issues’.
8.4.4 Concepts
Turning next to the conceptual frameworks within which British politics is analysed,
feminism, especially Radical feminism, clearly has considerable implications for the
way that politics itself is conceptualized. In addition feminist critiques and debates
potentially contribute to the elaboration of some central ideas such as citizenship,
and in particular representation. British feminist academics have played their part
in introducing these feminist themes and critiques into the study of British politics,
although the extent to which such ideas have been absorbed and applied within the
mainstream of research is at the least uneven.
feminism 147
Feminism has raised crucial questions about the scope of politics. For the early
Radical feminists a central concern was to demonstrate that politics—defined above
all as power relationships between men and women—was not confined to a specific
formalized public sphere but coextensive with society and the family. Indeed there
was sometimes the sense that the foundation of (sex) politics lay in the family and
the ‘personal’: not only were the roots or determinants of conventionally understood
politics to be found there but this domestic or ‘private’ level was intrinsically political
and worthy of study.
Such a broad understanding of the scope of politics obviously challenges tradi-
tional notions of the proper field of concern for political studies. Although Radical
feminists were hardly the first to argue that politics was about power relationships,
it was their focus on relationships between men and women that indicated spheres
largely disregarded within the discipline of politics, though recognized as appropriate
for sociologists, social historians, and psychologists. To that extent a feminist critique
implicitly calls into question the discipline’s sense of its own boundaries, almost its
self-image.
In practice the impact of this alternative conception of the scope of politics has
been more complex. The notion of the politics of everyday life, not only due to
feminism, has become part of popular culture. Within academia also, particularly
sociology, studies have explored the ‘politics’ of gender relationships in homely and
intimate settings. To take a couple of recent instances, the feminist political theorist
Valerie Bryson (2007), drawing in part on British survey data, reflects upon the gen-
dered politics of time. McRobbie (2007) considers the current widespread incidence
of different forms of young women’s self-harm in relation to what she terms a ‘post-
feminist melancholia’ or the loss of a feminist discourse through which to address
their discontents. Political scientists, including those who would describe themselves
as feminist, have been less inclined to follow through on this perception in terms
of their own research focus, generally preferring to concentrate on ‘mainstream’
political processes. So whilst there is much greater acceptance amongst students of
politics these days of the idea that politics is potentially everywhere, in practice it
has not made that much difference to the study of British politics, in the sense of
who, discipline-wise, does what. It does mean that, as already suggested, some of the
most interesting feminist analysis of politics, broadly understood, in Britain has been
undertaken by practitioners of other disciplines such as sociology.
Closely linked to the question of the scope of politics has been that of a public–
private divide. Radical and socialist feminists critiqued what they saw as a ‘liberal’
insistence on distinct public and private spheres as an ideological, patriarchal con-
struct. Some Radical feminists seemed to want to dispense with the notion altogether.
To the extent that notions of public and private, however oppressive, have had prac-
tical force, feminists in academia have largely preferred to hold on to the distinction
as an organizing idea but apply it critically. Okin (1991), herself an American liberal
feminist political theorist, has provided the best dissection of the confusions and
inconsistencies in the way notions of public and private have been construed in
different contexts. She also, incidentally, stresses the need to hold on to the idea of
148 vicky randall
privacy as something positive for women as for men. Mary McIntosh (1978) showed
how the notion of a sovereign private sphere has been used historically to justify the
British state’s non-interference in domestic violence. Exploring the articulation and
consequences of a public–private distinction has continued to prove a fruitful con-
ceptual approach for feminist analysis. To cite a recent example, Fidelma Ashe (2006)
shows how traditional assumptions in Northern Ireland about women’s place in the
private domestic sphere have both constrained and provided symbolic opportunities
for the McCartney sisters’ campaign to bring their brother’s killer(s) to justice.
One further aspect of conceptions of the scope of politics concerns the forms of
politics that are studied. Given feminism’s history as a social movement, feminist
political scientists were for a long time drawn to approaches that included all kinds
of informal, local, ‘grass-roots’ or anti-system activism (see for instance Lovenduski
and Randall 1993). There was also specific interest in the interface of the formal
and informal, as in Gail Stedward’s thoughtful analysis of the ambiguous location
of women’s aid in Scotland, as a kind of ‘thresholder’ organization, neither inside
nor outside processes of government (1987). However, as noted above and as well
described by McKay (2004: 100), with the relative decline of movement feminism
and the parallel increase in women’s political representation within parliament and
other arenas, there has been a clear shift of focus to formal political representation,
which she suggests now constitutes ‘the most identifiable area of concentrated work
by feminist political scientists in British politics’.
In addition to questioning conventional understandings of the scope of politics,
feminists, again especially Radical feminists, depicted mainstream political institu-
tions and processes as patriarchal; that is, male-dominated and dedicated to male
interests and accordingly exhibiting a series of supposedly repugnant masculine traits.
Such an intuition to some degree underlies the whole research endeavour of ‘gen-
dering’, or providing a gendered account of, British state institutions (Lovenduski
1998). A forthcoming workshop will include a session on organizational cultures,
with specific reference to changes in the masculinist political culture of our legislative
assemblies. 7
As we have seen, one response to the masculine character of politics has been to
hypothesize an alternative, women’s contribution, which may or may not require,
amongst others things, a certain critical mass of women to become apparent. Women
might, for instance, bring a different style to politics. In her study of the New
Labour intake of women MPs (2004: ch. 10), Childs found that a majority of them
believed—and this belief strengthened between first and second interviews in 1997
and 2000 respectively—that they did tend to share a feminized style, which included
being less combative, less vociferous, more inclined to adopt a down-to-earth lan-
guage, hard-working, and preferring to operate informally and ‘behind the scenes’.
Women might also bring distinctive values. Thus drawing on the suggestions of
standpoint feminism, that women are associated with a distinctive ethic of care, in
contrast to more masculine rights-based notions of justice, McKay (2001) in her
7
Workshop on ‘Engendering Politics and Devolution’ at Warwick University, Feb. 2008.
feminism 149
study of Scottish women councillors investigated the extent to which they articulated
a distinctive ‘vocabulary of care’.
Such explorations do by implication tell us about the masculine traits of main-
stream politics. But few studies of British politics have as yet engaged more directly
with the notion of ‘masculinity’. An early and valuable exception was Cockburn’s
study (1991), investigating forms of resistance to equal opportunities initiatives in
local and national government offices and in trade unions, which evoked a range
of ‘masculinities’, their interrelationships, and the consequences of these dynamics
for gender relations. Another is the article by Bird (2005) already cited, on the House
of Commons. But otherwise there has been little attempt, by political scientists of
whatever sex (or gender), to apply or develop in the context of British politics the
frameworks of writers like Australian sociologist Robert Connell (1996). His broadly
social constructivist conception of masculinity, or masculinities, and hypothesis con-
cerning the existence of hegemonic forms alongside subordinate forms, have stimu-
lated tremendous debate (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005) as well as feeding into
a spate of sociological and historical writing. But for British politics most analysis of
this kind seems to stop short at around 1945—a partial exception being writing on
social policy responses to ‘masculinity’ or the ‘problem of men’ (for instance Popay,
Hearn, and Edwards 1998; Scourfield and Drakeford 2002).
Beyond its contribution to broad understandings of the meaning and nature
of politics, as these pertain specifically to British politics, feminism has helped to
inspire critiques and reworkings of some central political concepts. One of these
is citizenship, where feminist scholars, predominantly political theorists, have not
only demonstrated the extent to which earlier conceptions, notably Marshall’s,
were gendered but have been central to subsequent debates around the term (as
recounted in Squires 1999). But a further important feminist-inspired intervention
has been into our understandings of ‘representation’. Feminist political theorist Anne
Phillips (1998), partly responding to Pitkin’s earlier sceptical account of descriptive, as
opposed to substantive, representation, introduced the idea, or at least the hypothesis,
of a ‘politics of presence’. This has been taken up eagerly for instance by Puwar
(2004) and Childs (2004) in their research into the experience of women MPs, whilst
Campbell (2006) analyses British electoral survey data in order to examine how
far women do appear to have distinct ‘interests’ or concerns requiring an effective
women’s presence in the House of Commons.
8.4.5 Methods
Finally and more briefly we need to consider methods-related issues, both the impact
of feminism on methods and the impact of the prevailing methods regime on
feminism’s influence. This links back to the issues raised earlier about possibilities
for adopting a normative approach and conceptual innovation. Feminist political
scientists, partly in response to the methodological preferences of the discipline, have
perhaps been insufficiently adventurous in the range of methods they have applied.
150 vicky randall
Within social science more broadly, feminists have discussed the necessity and
possibility of a distinctive feminist method. 8 One particular concern, about the power
relationship between researcher and researched, has resonated little in the context
of research into British politics. Another, partly related, question is about giving
voice to women. The early movement prioritized this as an important aspect of
consciousness raising. In these post-postmodern days it is more difficult to believe
in the simple authenticity of women’s voices or that they are entirely unmediated
by broader cultural discourses. Nonetheless in-depth interviews with women, in the
movement or within mainstream political institutions, have been a significant and
fruitful dimension of feminist political research (Childs and Krook 2006).
In general, however, feminists studying British politics have neither adopted dis-
tinctive feminist methods nor restricted themselves to using any particular subset of
available methods—Krook and Squires (2006) characterize this as a healthy ‘method-
ological eclecticism’. Even so, issues of method should perhaps be of concern. To the
extent that there is a growing preoccupation with method in the study of British
politics, and that particular methods of research and analysis, notably quantitative
and rational choice approaches, command most prestige, these are not necessarily
inimical to feminist-inspired research. Quantitative methods in particular have much
to contribute, for instance in testing and adjusting received wisdom, and there is by
now a substantial body of quantitative work analysing gender differences in voting
behaviour, opinions, political knowledge, and political preferences (as in Frazer and
MacDonald 2003; Campbell 2006). At the same time other kinds of method have
been regarded more suspiciously in the profession. Childs and Krook (2006) suggest
this even applies to elite interviewing, but it is much more the case with forms of
participant observation and other kinds of ethnographic approach, although these
can be extremely revealing (participant observation was one method employed in
Cockburn’s study cited earlier).
The direct contribution of feminist perspectives to methodological approaches in
the study of British politics, then, has been limited. To the extent that those pursuing
a feminist-inspired research agenda are methodologically eclectic, this may be helpful
in diffusing awareness and accessibility of their work. However the methodological
priorities of mainstream British political studies may also limit the ways in which
feminist research questions can be posed and investigated.
8.5 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
Despite—even in some ways because—of its internal conflicts and debates, feminism
as a perspective has tremendous relevance for politics and specifically British politics.
8
For a fuller account of the question of a feminist method see Randall (1991).
feminism 151
In practice, too, and in tandem with developments in the sphere of politics itself,
it has significantly impacted on the study of British politics, not simply through
an expansion of its subject matter and the greater accuracy with which women’s
involvement in politics is reported, but through more fundamental questions it has
raised. Such questions especially concern definitions of politics, and the nature and
interrelationship of public and private, but also relate to central analytical concepts
such as representation. In other respects its impact has been more muffled: the strong
normative challenge, questioning of the standpoint from which politics is ‘objectively’
related, exploring the manifestations and constructions of masculinity within and
through the state are all potential contributions of feminism which could have been
taken further in the context of the study of British politics.
Feminism continues to inspire scholarly research into many different aspects of
British politics, and indeed seems to have enjoyed a recent surge with the emergence
of a new generation of scholars. Nor is publication of this research ‘ghettoized’ in
particular journals (Childs and Krook 2006: 19). McKay (2004) suggests that gender
and politics is by now a well-established subfield of the discipline. Even so there is
a sense in which on the one hand feminist-inspired research is constrained both by
debates internal to the feminist movement and by the character and methodological
inclinations of British political science and on the other ‘mainstream research contin-
ues not to engage fully with feminist analyses’ (Childs and Krook 2006: 20).
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chapter 9
.................................................................................................................
TH E
OA K E SH OT T I A N S
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Although a historian of science would find the idea of a national variant of a natural
science a puzzling notion, in the social sciences the idea of a national tradition or
style is far from a curiosity, however perplexing it may be to those who defend the
hard scientific credentials of the social sciences. Yet in the study of politics the idea of
national traditions and styles is far from puzzling, and indeed is used as a common
subject of enquiry (Hayward, Barry, and Brown 1999: Stapleton 1994). The study of
politics in Britain in the post-war world has been shaped by a dialectic between two
main approaches; one, an attempt at scientific professionalization that draws upon
developments in American political science, and another which draws on a complex
of humanistic disciplines such as history, philosophy, and law. This characterization
of the development of British political science is somewhat crude, but nevertheless
serviceable for our purposes, as it explains the importance of the English historian,
philosopher, and sceptical political theorist Michael Oakeshott (1901–90) on the shap-
ing of the subject and profession of political science in Britain.
The Oakeshottians who are the focus of this chapter are not a single self-identifying
group of scholars, like the Straussians in American political science, and it would
be highly misleading to compare Oakeshott’s influence with that of Leo Strauss. Yet
Oakeshott certainly attracted many followers within the growing profession and had
an impact on the character and ethos of many British politics departments through
his humanistic approach to the study of politics. This group of scholars includes such
figures as Elie Kedourie and Ken Minogue at LSE, W. H. Greenleaf at Swansea, Bhikhu
Parekh and Noel O’Sullivan at Hull, Preston King at Sheffield and elsewhere, and
Robert Eccleshall at Belfast. Each pursued careers in areas close to Oakeshott’s own
research interests in history and political thought, yet they could not be described as
the oakeshottians 155
an organized group, but were rather a series of strong individual personalities in the
profession inspired by Oakeshott’s strong personality and example. But Oakeshott
was also a major influence on figures who practised a style and approach to the
study of politics that has had an influence beyond Oakeshott’s own immediate field of
interest, namely political philosophy and the history of political thought. And many
in this latter group, which includes figures as diverse as Bernard Crick (a colleague as
opposed to a student of Oakeshott) and Vincent Wright, but especially their students,
many of whom are now dispersed throughout the profession, would perhaps not
recognize themselves as directly following in Oakeshottian tradition or approach. In
fields such as British politics, European politics, and public administration and policy,
an Oakeshottian influence and approach can be detected, just as much as in political
philosophy and the history of political thought. In many ways this Oakeshottian
approach draws together themes and styles of thinking about politics that have a
much more venerable lineage than simply Oakeshott’s own teaching or publications
from the 1940s through to the 1980s. That said, in tracing the lineaments of this
Oakeshottian approach, I will argue that Oakeshott himself brought together many
of these styles, methods, interests, and objects of inquiry into a unique synthesis that
has undoubtedly affected the British study of politics.
The chapter will begin with a brief overview of Oakeshott’s life and career, followed
by a section which outlines the three main components of his philosophy of history
and politics. The next section will turn from the abstraction and scepticism of his
peculiar variant of philosophical idealism to his inaugural lecture at LSE on ‘Political
Education’. This important essay provides a distillation of Oakeshott’s philosophical
ideas and their implication for the study of politics. It is this important lecture
along with another essay, ‘The Study of “Politics” in a University’, also published in
Rationalism in Politics (Oakeshott 1962: 330–3) which shaped the Oakeshottian legacy
within British political studies. The remaining sections will focus on areas of the study
of politics in which the Oakeshottian impact has been greatest. Some of these subjects
were addressed directly by Oakeshott in his major writings, but others still retain
distinct signs of his approach to the study of politics set out in ‘Political Education’.
These sections will cover the political ideas and ideology, the study of government
and public administration, the study of nationalism, and more controversially his
impact on new fields such as the political theory of multiculturalism. The chapter
will conclude with an assessment of the Oakeshottian legacy. Though always a small
and never an organized group or faction, the Oakeshottian approach continues to
exercise an important influence on the character of British political science.
9.1 Life and Career
.............................................................................................................................................
Michael Oakeshott was an idealist political philosopher, historian of political ideas,
sceptical student of politics, and Professor at LSE, where he helped shape a generation
156 paul kelly
of scholars of politics. Born in Chelsfield in Kent, the son of a Fabian socialist
and civil servant in the Inland Revenue, Oakeshott became the most sophisticated
exponent of a distinctively British anti-rationalist style of thinking about politics. His
writings, lecturing, and personality provided a strong influence on the way in which
the study of politics in Britain has been conducted since the mid-1940s, and despite
his own scepticism of such things he remains one of the very few British scholars of
politics who can be said to have established that most un-Oakeshottian of legacies,
an ‘ism’.
After an unconventional (for his class) and happy education at the coeducational St
George’s School, Harpendon, Oakeshott went up to Gonville and Caius, Cambridge
in 1919 to read Political Science under the History tripos. Then as now Cambridge had
no political science department, a fact which reflects the prejudices of one of the dom-
inant Cambridge figures at the turn of twentieth century, the historian F. W. Maitland,
who claimed that political science is either ‘history or humbug’. The founder of
politics teaching at Cambridge, Sir John Seeley, had hoped that the History Tripos
would provide the education necessary for the domestic and Imperial ruling elite.
In fact the study of politics at the time Oakeshott arrived at Cambridge comprised
a form of descriptive comparative institutionalism, with a large dose of institutional
history and a crude form of inductivism as the basis for its claim to the mantle of
a science. He provides a disparaging description of this form of political science as
a vocational education in ‘The Study of “Politics” in a University’ (Oakeshott 1962:
323). Oakeshott nevertheless excelled in his studies and achieved a First in both parts
of the Tripos. In 1923–4 he travelled to Marburg and Tübingen to study theology, and
in 1925 won a Fellowship at Gonville and Caius.
Oakeshott’s philosophical and theological interests are reflected in a series of early
essays and reviews and culminated in his first major publication, Experience and
its Modes, in 1933. In this important work Oakeshott established his philosophical
credentials and developed an idealist philosophy of experience that drew on the
tradition of T. H. Green. F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet, and J. E. M. MacTaggart.
Although the book received a favourable review from R. G. Collingwood, Oakeshott’s
philosophical idealism put him outside the mainstream of philosophy, which under
the impact of the Cambridge Trinity of Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig
Wittgenstein had taken an empiricist and logical atomist turn. One implication of
this logical empiricist direction in philosophy was the abandonment of substantive
moral and political philosophy and the philosophy of history by the English speaking
philosophical mainstream for nearly half a century.
Oakeshott’s philosophical idealism was not a complete obstacle to his career as
it created an affinity with his friend and colleague Sir Ernest Barker, who from
1927 became the first Professor of Political Science at Cambridge. Barker had been
schooled under the influence of Green and philosophical idealism whilst a student at
Oxford. During the 1930s Oakeshott and Barker introduced a much greater emphasis
on the study of political philosophy within the History Tripos, which even included
Oakeshott lecturing on Marx at Cambridge in 1938, something no one else had done
despite the presence of prominent Marxist scholars such as the economist Maurice
Dobb.
the oakeshottians 157
After war service in intelligence, Oakeshott returned to Cambridge before taking
up a Fellowship at Nuffield College, Oxford, having been passed over to succeed
Barker by Denis Brogan. Oakeshott’s time at Oxford was cut short by the surprise
offer of the Chair in Political Science at LSE in 1950, following the death of Harold
Laski. Laski and his predecessor Graham Wallas were part of the Fabian and social
democratic tradition that had founded the LSE: Oakeshott’s appointment to the Chair
marked an abrupt break in that tradition, at least in the field of political science. 1
Oakeshott’s arrival at LSE was marked by his famous inaugural lecture on ‘Political
Education’ where he set out a manifesto for the study of politics in the British univer-
sities in the post-war world. He devoted himself to administering the department
of Government and transforming the teaching of politics at LSE and continued
to have an impact on the wider development of the study of politics in Britain
as one of the founders of the Political Studies Association (Chester 1975: 152–3).
During this period he published relatively little, with his main book Rationalism
in Politics (Oakeshott 1962) being a collection of essays written between the 1940s
and early 1960s. Oakeshott’s real impact was through his appointments at LSE and
the placement of students elsewhere, and also through his teaching; first through
his undergraduate lectures on the history of political thought, taught over two
years, and secondly from the mid-1960s through the famous M.Sc. seminar on the
History of Political Thought. A number of departments at other universities such
as Swansea, Durham, Sheffield, and Hull acquired an Oakeshottian ‘ethos’, but his
impact extended much more widely and less formally in Britain and the Common-
wealth.
Oakeshott shied away from the direct supervision of Ph.D. students but influenced
a large part of the profession of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s through his lectures and the
M.Sc. seminar. He retired from the school in 1969 but continued to attend the M.Sc.
seminar until 1980. During his retirement the fruits of work carried out during his
tenure of the Chair saw publication with On Human Conduct (Oakeshott 1975) and
On History (Oakeshott 1983), enhancing his reputation as a major political philoso-
pher and philosopher of history. Since his death in 1990 a number of lectures and
collected essays have been published as interest in his ideas and influence continues
to grow amongst scholars who had no direct contact with him whilst alive.
9.2 Oakeshott’s Idealist Philosophy
and the Understanding of Politics
.............................................................................................................................................
Oakeshott’s first major philosophical book placed him firmly in the idealist tradi-
tion of Green and Bradley and outside the logical atomist and analytical tradition
1
The Webb’s Fabian vision for the School had already begun to give way to a more independent and
academic vision of the social sciences in the late 1920s and early 1930s where LSE professors such as
Friedrich Hayek and Lionel Robbins provided opposition to Keynes’ General Theory and the policy of
Keynesian demand management (Dahrendorf 1995).
158 paul kelly
that was emerging with Russell, Moore, and Wittgenstein. Experience and Its Modes
continues the idealist attack on the idea of unmediated experience as the basis for
knowledge and consciousness of the world. Although a discussion of the intricacies
of Oakeshott’s idealism would take us beyond the scope the of this chapter, it is
important to note the view of one of Oakeshott’s closest and most careful students,
W. H. Greenleaf ’s claim that an understanding of Oakeshott’s idealism is central to an
understanding of his conception of the nature and point of politics (Greenleaf 1968:
93–124). There is indeed an important connection between his philosophical idealism
and his sceptical and limited view of philosophy and the study and practice of politics,
although it would be a mistake to see his political writings as a simple implication of
his metaphysics.
The central tenet of idealism is the denial of a pre-given or unmediated experience
as the basis for knowledge. Traditional empiricist theories of knowledge and
science assume the idea of a world of facts which are prior to experience and which
experience and perception then accumulates into complex bodies of knowledge.
Idealists deny this approach to philosophy and claim that all experience is situated
and mediated by traditions of enquiry or the theoretical structures with which we
approach the world. One consequence of this is that the task of philosophy is not
to get behind these theoretical structures to the world as it is in itself, for this is
impossible. Instead philosophy is concerned with rendering that manifold of expe-
rience coherent. We cannot, therefore, sort true from false claims about the world by
comparing them to the world as it really is: we must search for truth in terms of the
coherence of a world of experience. One of Oakeshott’s central tasks of Experience
and Its Modes (Oakeshott 1933) is to distinguish the languages we use to render that
world of experience coherent. These languages or modes of experience are discrete
perspectives of the whole of experience and for Oakeshott there are three main modes,
history, science, and practice. Later Oakeshott introduces a fourth mode, namely
poetry, which includes the whole of artistic experience.
Each of these modes of experience is complete unto itself, but it persists with
others. No one mode is superior to others nor can one mode of experience completely
displace other modes of experience. This plurality of experience is irreducible. From
this simple idea Oakeshott develops a complex approach to the understanding of
politics and the possibility of political science in the rest of his writings. We can,
however, already identify a number of features that shape his distinctive approach
to understanding politics as both an activity and an object of enquiry.
In the first instance, Oakeshott challenges the essential tenets of a naturalistic
political science. The aspiration to a fully scientific understanding of politics reduces
the whole of human experience to one mode or language of explanation. This is
unsatisfactory for a number of reasons, not least that it ignores the claims of other
modes of experience which continually infect a strictly natural scientific approach
to politics. But more importantly than simply involving a category mistake, the
naturalistic approach assumes a stable object of enquiry (such as a single human
nature or fixed institutions) which might make sense in the case of chemical analysis
when one is studying the properties to carbon, but does not make sense in the study
the oakeshottians 159
of politics, as is shown by the malleability of the object of enquiry when considered
from the point of view of history.
Oakeshott and his followers are sceptical about the prospects of a naturalistic
science of politics, but they are also sceptical about other approaches to the study of
politics such as Marxism that derive from similar category mistakes. This also explains
the hostility most Oakeshottians show to Marxism as both a tool of political analysis
and a political theory.
One immediate consequence of the rejection of a science of politics based on
the methods of the natural sciences is a rejection of rationalistic political reform
and government, or the application of scientific methods to the solution of political
problems. This view of the task of political science was at the heart of the Fabian
vision of the LSE and it is relentlessly attacked in Oakeshott’s criticism of rationalism
in politics. In contrast to the claims of the rationalist, Oakeshott argues that the world
of politics is essentially a world of ideas and the task of the student is to make sense
of it. Yet the student is no more privileged than the participant in the way in which
he or she does this. The defence of the study of politics as a humanistic discipline
leaves no room for technical expertise or method over judgement. Oakeshott’s anti-
rationalism manifests itself in a scepticism of any social scientific techniques for
explaining the hidden truths or causal mechanisms behind the practice of politics.
His scepticism of methodology is also found in his criticism of the ‘methodology
of the history of ideas’ popularized by Cambridge scholars such as Quentin Skinner
and John Dunn in the 1960s. Although this Cambridge methodology also devel-
oped as part of a reaction against the dominance of naturalistic political science,
its adoption of a ‘methodology’ in place of a genuinely hermeneutic approach to
historical enquiry attracted the particular criticism of both Oakeshott and many of his
students.
Consequently the scholar is not the possessor of special knowledge or expertise
that can be lent to the politician to make his practice more effective or successful. His
scepticism of technical expertise extends to the practice of politics itself, as there is
no expertise to be had, politics has no point beyond the contingent points offered
by a particular tradition. This Oakeshottian vision of politics is nicely captured in
Minogue’s Politics: A Very Short Introduction (Minogue 1995).
Another example of a category mistake exposed by Oakeshott’s philosophical
framework is the prescriptivism of much contemporary political philosophy. If there
is no end to which politics is directed then there cannot be a privileged perspective
from which they can criticize moral and political principles. The mode of practical
experience is engaged moral life and this includes the activity of doing politics. But
within that mode of experience there are internal rules, conventions, and ways of
doing things. Changing or defending those rules and conventions is the business
of political or ethical agents and not of some disinterested field of enquiry. So the
introduction of the mode of practice into the study of politics raises an important
question of academic authority. How does the special knowledge of the academic give
rise to political or moral authority? Oakeshott’s conclusion is that it does not and
the assumption that a scholar’s knowledge gives her the authority to prescribe how
160 paul kelly
we should live is a crude and dangerous mistake. Consequently, although Oakeshott
was a major scholar of political thought and many of his most famous students
followed him in this field (such as Minogue, Parekh, King, O’Sullivan, Greenleaf),
Oakeshott set himself against the development of prescriptive theory by Isaiah Berlin,
H. L. A. Hart, and Brian Barry in the 1960s and 1970s. Prescriptive normative the-
ory was merely a category mistake and political practice masquerading as special
knowledge. Philosophy itself cannot help us avoid this mistake, for as we have seen
philosophy is merely concerned with the higher-order task of rendering that expe-
rience coherent as it does not give rise to any substantive knowledge or access to
moral truths. Thus the study of politics and of political theory has to be rooted in
the practices of particular political traditions. This is an idea that has come to have
a greater impact on politics and political theory in light of the communitarian and
multiculturalist response to rationalist enlightenment liberalism and the dominance
of the normative liberalism of John Rawls (for an Oakeshottian inspired critique of
Anglo-American normative political theory, see Gray 1989).
It is through a combination of political scepticism and communitarianism that
Oakeshott distinguishes himself as a conservative and provides the basis for the
recovery of a conservative voice in political theory. Whilst Hayek shies away from
the title of ‘conservative’ (Hayek 1960: 397–414), Oakeshott is more comfortable
especially in the essay ‘On being Conservative’. Through his influence the conser-
vative voice in political philosophy is preserved into the early twentieth century,
yet that conservative voice remains distinctive. Despite being invited to the Con-
servative Philosophy Group in the 1970s and his thought being associated with the
renewal of political conservatism under Margaret Thatcher, Oakeshott’s conservatism
remained a philosophical disposition rather than an ideological commitment. He
rejects the ideological approach to politics, even including the ideology of anti-
ideology that was espoused by Hayek. Consequently he can be associated, in only
the most loose and general sense, with the development of the ‘new right’ in the
late 1970s.
9.3 ‘Political Education’ and ‘The Study
of “Politics” in a University’
.............................................................................................................................................
Oakeshott’s general philosophical approach to politics is given concrete form in two
important essays, ‘Political Education’ and ‘The Study of “Politics” in a University’.
The former was his inaugural lecture at LSE in 1951 and both are published in Ratio-
nalism in Politics (Oakeshott 1962). Both directly address the question of what scholars
in politics departments should study and what politics departments are for. ‘Political
the oakeshottians 161
Education’ is a subtle but iconoclastic essay. Its tone is modest and on the surface
respectful, but it smashes the legacy of both of Oakeshott’s forebears at LSE, Graham
Wallas and Harold Laski, the twin pillars of the Fabian tradition of political science.
Against Wallas, Oakeshott challenges the idea of an empirical science of politics, and
against Laski he dismisses the intellectual respectability of the study of politics with
an ideological purpose. He also offers his own conception of politics as a historical or
humanistic study of distinct traditions of activity.
Graham Wallas had advocated the idea of a naturalistic science of politics based
on a study of political behaviour and human psychology. Yet Oakeshott challenges
this idea because of its crude naturalism and empiricism, drawing on his idealist
philosophy. He begins his critique by claiming that politics as an academic study is
concerned with ‘The general arrangements of a set of people whom choice or chance
have brought together’ (Oakeshott 1962: 112). As such he emphasizes the contingency
of the activity of politics and therefore rejects its universal character. Furthermore,
it cannot be an empirical study as there is no unmediated object of experience to
be studied. Even the idea of political behaviour depends upon some conception of
the activity of politics. As we shall see, this does not mean that Oakeshott denies
that we should study the political behaviour of voters, parties, and elections. Instead
he makes the more fundamental claim that in order to identify political behaviour
we already need a conception of the activity in which it occurs, so that we can
distinguish it from other kinds of behaviour. Consequently, the study of politics
must engage with the presupposition of how we identify political activity in the first
place. His conclusion is that this is a historical construction, consequently the master
language of the study of politics is a historical and not a scientific one (Oakeshott
1962: 130).
Does this suggest that Oakeshott was sceptical about the need for distinct depart-
ments of politics with their own sub-disciplinary identity? Some commentators and
followers of Oakeshott do regard him as sceptical about the role and value of the
sub-discipline, favouring instead the Maitland preference for history over ‘humbug’.
Yet this sceptical case is overstated and also misunderstands his peculiar conserva-
tive temperament. The emergence of a sub-disciplinary identity had already taken
place, so for Oakeshott the question is not whether there should or should not be
politics departments. Instead the real task is to pursue the intimations of this activity
and respond to these, rather than try to impose a rationalistic plan on these new
departments or alternatively to engage in a kind of nostalgic rationalism that would
prefer to return the study of politics to history departments. The study of politics in
British universities is a distinctive activity and the task before Oakeshott in these two
important essays is to survey and characterize that activity.
The other main target of ‘Political Education’ is the idea of political science with
a single ideological purpose and here his target is Laski. The problem posed by Laski
is different to that posed by Wallas. Wallas wanted to subsume political experience
under the mode of science, whereas Laski wanted to subsume it under the mode of
practice: both involve category mistakes but each is different. This critique of Laski’s
162 paul kelly
approach identifies one of the more persistent themes of the Oakeshottians, namely
the criticism of what they take to be the reduction of politics to ideology (see Minogue
1985; Manning 1980).
An ideology is an abridgement or simplification of a tradition of politics into a
number of distinct principles or values. In ordinary political discourse such abridge-
ments are unavoidable and a necessary part of the practical activity of doing politics.
Conceiving of British politics as a struggle between the forces of progress and the
forces of reaction or conservatism is fair enough for a politician whose task is to
promote his values and beliefs. But this is where the category mistake of Laski’s
ideological politics arises. Any ideology will be a contingent and partisan abridgement
of a complex tradition of politics. Whilst this might be acceptable and containable
in the realm of practical activity, in the sphere of the academic study of politics it
is both inadequate and dangerous. It is inadequate because it assumes the primacy
of a single ideological perspective as a basis for understanding political activity and
behaviour, yet this is incoherent as all ideologies are abridgements of traditions of
political activity. We cannot distinguish between these ideological perspectives by
identifying which contains the truth because of their nature all ideologies are partial
abridgements of a tradition of practice and cannot ever be the final truth. Once again
to conceive of the object of political inquiry as ideological is a category mistake. That
said, the study of ‘ideologies’ or the different abridgements of political traditions is
an important part of the study of politics. This study must distinguish itself from
ideological commitment or advocacy as that would collapse the distinction between
a historical mode of experience in understanding a political tradition and a practical
mode of activity which is doing politics. Laski failed to maintain the proper distinc-
tion between political activity and the study of politics. The study of politics must
therefore confine itself to the study of traditions of the activity of politics. And it is for
this reason that Oakeshott and his followers were unsympathetic to the development
of prescriptive normative political theory as this forms the basis of a rationalist and
ideological approach to politics, by conceiving of political activity under the heading
of freedom or social justice.
In opposition to these two distortions of the proper study of politics Oakeshott
suggests that the task of political study remains fundamentally historical, and is
concerned with the pursuit of intimations of a political tradition. The proper study
of politics therefore involves the study of political ideas in which conceptions of
political activity are presented and analysed, but also the study of the structures and
institutional practices.
This critique of a naturalistic science of politics or the subordination of politics to
normative political theory as well as the bold manifesto for a more nuanced historical
approach to the study of politics is further fleshed out and qualified in ‘The Study of
“Politics” in a University’. In this essay Oakeshott is responding to the development of
the study of politics in the British university system and once again he urges caution
and defends an approach to the study of politics that looks remarkably similar to
that he received at Cambridge in the 1920s. The essential qualifications in this paper
concern the acceptance of both a level of vocational study and the technical study of
the oakeshottians 163
political behaviour within the study of politics. The study of politics can indeed be of
value to those who wish to pursue careers in politics and government and, therefore, a
level of technical sophistication in the analysis of political behaviour and institutions
is appropriate. So the study of politics is not simply the historical examination of
traditions. But Oakeshott, nevertheless, wishes to keep this technical specialization
in its place. Technical tools of analysis remain tools, and as such they are only of use
to those who have an appropriate understanding of traditions of political activity.
Of further interest is the qualification he makes of a claim in ‘Political Education’
concerning the propriety of studying more than one tradition of political activity.
Oakeshott remains committed to the value of comparative government (historically
conceived) and of comparative historical institutionalism, but he cautions about
the potential expansion of ‘traditions’ studied as a response to the state of current
affairs. In particular he was especially concerned about the development of the large-
scale study of Russian politics at many British universities during the cold war, and
the recruitment of a disproportionate number of ‘Russianists’ or ‘Sovietologists’ to
service this study. Against this trend Oakeshott urged the need to be selective in
the choice of historical political traditions and to avoid the fashion of pursuing an
‘area studies’ approach which fails to concentrate on mature political traditions. For
example, Oakeshott did not believe that the USSR embodied a political tradition at
all; at best it is a kind of despotism which does not have a politics to study. This is
not the expression of a narrow Eurocentrism but follows from his concept of what
political activity is. Again the absence of a proper historical sense had the potential of
expanding beyond limit the boundaries of what could count as the study of politics
at the expense of rendering the subject of study incoherent. For all of Oakeshott’s
attempts to deflate the claims of ideological politics to dominate all other aspects of
human experience, he remained committed to the idea that political education was
important and its subject matter could be rendered coherent.
9.4 The Study of Politics 1: Political
Philosophy and Political Theory
.............................................................................................................................................
Despite the broad concerns of ‘Political Education’ and ‘The Study of “Politics” in a
University’, Oakeshott’s greatest impact has been on the field of political theory and
the study of political ideas. All of his closest students have been scholars of polit-
ical thinkers or of contemporary political philosophy (see Minogue, Parekh, King,
O’Sullivan, Kedourie, Greenleaf). Yet in this field an Oakeshottian tradition is diffi-
cult to distinguish as it is largely sceptical and reactive. Although Oakeshottians are
committed to the idea of history as the primary language of political studies, they have
rejected the reduction of philosophy to history as advocated by many contemporary
164 paul kelly
historicists. So although sensitive to the minutiae of historical traditions of political
discourse, they were also hostile to the alternative Cambridge tradition of linguistic
contextualism that is associated with J. G. A Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and John
Dunn. These Cambridge thinkers reduced the claims of philosophy to historically
contingent utterances and therefore deny the possibility of genuine philosophical
claims. Oakeshott’s whole enterprise leaves philosophy above history and politics,
and challenges the idea of a reductive historicism. Thus although Oakeshottian and
‘Cambridge’ scholars have both been attentive to the historical contexts of political
thought and discourse, the Oakeshottians have rejected the idea of a single method-
ology of historical enquiry and the idea implicit in linguistic contextualism that all
political thought is conducted in the practical mode. For Oakeshott and his followers,
great political philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes, are indeed philosophers and
not merely politicians and pamphleteers.
The one area of political theory where Oakeshott has had the least impact was
in the field of normative political theory. In Britain this field originated in the work
of H. L. A. Hart and Brian Barry, but since the 1970s it has proceeded under the
long shadow of John Rawls and other American liberal political philosophers. Many
Oakeshottian scholars have tended to be sceptical towards this style of thought,
seeing Rawlsian liberal political theory as another ideological version of politics and,
therefore, committing a category mistake. Yet it would be too simplistic to suggest
that Oakeshott was wholly dismissive of normative political theory. His essays in
Rationalism in Politics leave little scope for normative political theory, yet by the time
he published the essays that comprised On Human Conduct, it was clear that his view
was more complex. His careful distinction between civil and enterprise associations
provides an interesting and peculiarly liberal analysis of the modern state. When
his defence of civil association is coupled with the communitarianism implicit
in his idealist vision of politics, it is clear that Oakeshott provides an alternative
to the constructivist approach to political theory exemplified by Rawls. With the
exception of John Gray and Noel O’Sullivan, few Oakeshott-inspired scholars have
been inclined to develop this line of thought, and whether it proves a viable research
project remains to be seen. Yet it does challenge the simplistic assumption that
Oakeshott was hostile to normative political theory as such.
9.5 The Study of Politics 2:
Political Traditions
.............................................................................................................................................
Perhaps the most faithful example of an Oakeshottian approach to the study of poli-
tics is provided by W. H. Greenleaf ’s massive four-volume (technically three but the
third is in two substantial parts) The British Political Tradition. Greenleaf had already
the oakeshottians 165
established himself as a historian of seventeenth-century political thought and was
the head of department at Swansea, one of the more self-consciously Oakeshottian
departments. Yet as we have seen, the Oakeshottian approach to political theory
had transformed it into a historical activity much more closely connected with the
history of traditions of political activity. Greenleaf ’s massive study of the British
Tradition provides a survey of the language of politics in Britain from the 1830s until
the present. This language is structured using the categories of libertarianism and
collectivism which Greenleaf claims are the two main ideas that animate political
argument and debate. This ideological heritage is traced through a vast literature that
includes political theory and pamphlet literature, but also the institutional changes
and developments in local and central government, parliament, and the civil service.
This vast literature covers the whole range of British politics with the exception of
foreign policy and relations which was supposed to be the subject of the final and
as yet unpublished volume. 2 Yet Greenleaf ’s austerel Oakeshottian work is not the
only attempt to study politics along Oakeshottian lines. The complex interweaving
of political ideas, ideological analysis, and institutionalism is also well exemplified in
Bernard Crick’s approach to the study of British politics. One can see the legacy of this
Oakeshottian approach in the example of Vincent Wright and the field of comparative
politics and historical institutionalism.
Wright began as a student in the Government Department at LSE, where he
fell under the influence of Oakeshott’s sceptical approach to politics. After doctoral
studies in Paris and brief period at Newcastle he joined the staff at LSE teaching in the
field of public administration with a research interest in the history of French public
administration. He moved to Nuffield College, Oxford, in 1977 where he continued to
develop his own distinctively historical and sceptical approach to comparative politics
and public administration. Unlike Greenleaf whose interest in the British political
tradition is heavily shaped by an interest in British political theory and ideas, Wright’s
scholarship is more traditionally historical. His The Government and Politics of France
(Wright 1978) is in many ways as authentically an Oakeshottian work as Greenleaf ’s.
It reflects a fundamentally historical approach to politics; a strong emphasis on the
value and distinctiveness of national traditions; as well as a sceptical awareness of the
limits of more scientific approaches to the study of politics. Like Oakeshott he does
not eschew the value of the tools of political analysis from other approaches to the
study of politics, but remains sceptical about the ability to reduce the study of politics
to the language of a naturalistic political science.
Wright’s influence and that of other scholars like him is an example of the more
resilient legacy of Oakeshott’s understanding of the study of politics. It is perhaps
obscured by the more obviously Oakeshottian concern with political theory by his
closest colleagues. Yet Oakeshott was committed to the proper study of the historical
traditions of modern politics. As the example of Wright illustrates, this commit-
ment inspired and influenced many students of politics who passed through the
2
Whether this final volume will ever appear is an open question, but Greenleaf has certainly done a
considerable amount of work on the potential volume, according to his friends and former students.
166 paul kelly
LSE in the 1950s and 1960s who were not particularly interested in the study of
political philosophy, but also demonstrates the way that legacy is passed on through
many other departments and institutions including Nuffield College, Oxford, during
Wright’s time. Wright’s own students, who are now widely dispersed throughout
the profession in Britain, continue to pursue the careful comparison of national
traditions along with a detailed study of the historical contingency of national admin-
istrative institutions and their cultures. Although acknowledging a great debt to
Wright himself, few would immediately acknowledge the Oakeshottian roots of this
approach.
9.6 Nationalism, Multiculturalism,
and Identity
.............................................................................................................................................
Perhaps the most curious manifestation of an Oakeshottian voice in contemporary
political analysis is in the field of identity politics and multiculturalism in the writings
of Bhikhu Parekh and Tariq Modood (Parekh 2000; Kelly 2001; Barry 2001; Modood
2007). That this should be surprising is due to the opposition of Oakeshott to pre-
scriptive political theory as a category mistake, but also because in respect of another
manifestation of identity politics, namely nationalism, two of Oakeshott’s students,
Kedourie and Minogue, wrote scathing dismissals of nationalist ideology. Kedourie’s
critique is the most forthright, claiming that nationalism is a fiction invented by
intellectuals and another example of trahison des clercs (Kedourie 1966). However,
Oakeshott’s sensitivity to the intimations of traditions of political activity has been
precisely the idea used by Parekh and Modood in setting out the conditions of fair
accommodation into the dominant culture of British society by minority ethnic and
cultural groups.
Parekh’s interest in the theory and politics of multiculturalism and related issues
of ‘Britishness’ derives in part from his involvement in the commission for racial
equality, but also reflects his Oakeshottian background. Rethinking Multiculturalism
(Parekh 2000) consists of an Oakeshottian rejection of the tradition of monistic
political liberalism on the grounds of its abstraction and false impartiality. This
approach when applied to the terms of minority group integration imposes a set
of arbitrary principles and values on different cultural groups whilst claiming that
they are universally applicable and justifiable. However, this abstract universalism is a
chimera and another example of rationalistic ideologies distorting living traditions of
politics. In place of this discredited normative strategy Parekh suggests that minority
cultural accommodation should involve a debate about the operative public values
of the majority society. In effect, Parekh’s account of operative public values is a
version of Oakeshott’s intimations of our tradition of political activity. Modood, who
the oakeshottians 167
is also indirectly connected to the Oakeshottian tradition as a student at Swansea
during the time of Greenleaf, has also recently adopted an Oakeshottian approach to
conceiving of the society into which minority groups must integrate as a living and
contingent historical tradition. For Modood, the lesson derived from Oakeshott is not
the creation of a new ideology of multiculturalism, which he sees in Parekh’s theory;
instead Modood sees the fact of multiculturalism as part of British political society.
It is part of the tradition of our activity and therefore attempts to impose coercively
a monocultural or stipulative account of Britishness is itself a form of ideological
abridgement. In this sense Modood’s politics of citizenship is a warning against a
similar concern with the conditions of British identity defended in Bernard Crick’s
work on citizen identity, becoming merely another ideological abridgement of the
British tradition of politics.
9.7 Oakeshottianism in Contemporary
Political Analysis
.............................................................................................................................................
Oakeshott’s influence on British politics and political analysis is complex and subtle.
He was, according to Noel Annan, a ‘deviant’ in respect of the political commitments
and sympathies of what Annan called ‘Our Age’ (Annan 1990). For Annan, who was
an establishment liberal and university administrator, Oakeshott was a deviant in two
ways: his political conservatism and his position as a critic outside the mainstream
of his disciplinary developments. In respect to both positions Oakeshott’s deviance
can be overstated. Whilst his own sympathies were conservative he had only a very
indirect influence on the conservative revival in British politics. His impact on the
resurgence of an ideologically confident conservatism during the 1970s and 1980s was
as much personal, through his close associations with writers and commentators such
as Shirley Letwin (mother of Oliver Letwin, a prominent Conservative MP), historian
of conservatism and political thought as well as close friend of Margaret Thatcher, as
it was theoretical. Oakeshott attended the Conservative Philosophy Group, but by
all accounts his contributions were small. By the time of the rise of Thatcherism,
Oakeshott had already returned to a more strictly philosophical approach to political
ideas through his development of the idea of civil association in On Human Conduct.
This was a complex and sophisticated book that generated some perplexity on publi-
cation, yet it is a crude caricature to see this as an inspiration for Thatcherism or the
New Right.
The second of Annan’s charges is that Oakeshott remained an outsider in the
academy. It is certainly true that Oakeshott did not become an establishment figure
like Isaiah Berlin, and as the fortunes of political conservatism rose, the academic
legacy of Oakeshottianism appears to have declined as the character of departments
168 paul kelly
changed. The LSE, through which Oakeshott had managed to shape a generation of
academics, no longer produced Oakeshottians in a recognizable form. By the time
Brian Barry occupied the Graham Wallas Chair at LSE in 1986 most of Oakeshott’s
students were in the latter part of their careers or in retirement. Barry’s tenure of
the Chair marked a return to the naturalistic aspiration to political science with a
normative purpose that had been the aspiration of Wallas at the Chair’s inception. It
seemed in effect a repudiation of the Oakeshottian approach, and indeed it was. Yet it
would be wrong to see Oakeshottianism as merely a temporary block on the way to a
fully naturalistic science of politics. In many respects Oakeshottianism was indeed a
sceptical reaction to trends in the social sciences and the British university system, and
as such it could not survive as a positive tradition or school. But it would be a mistake
to see Oakeshott’s conception of political studies in doctrinal terms. He did not lead
an ‘insurgent’ group nor did the Oakeshottians have a distinct manifesto. As we have
seen, their influence was just as strongly felt in comparative institutionalism as it
was in political theory or the history of ideas. Whilst there remain self-consciously
Oakeshottian scholars in Britain and the USA, many are younger scholars who are
interested in Oakeshott’s political and historical thought in the same way that others
are interested in John Rawls or Ronald Dworkin. A certain mystique has grown up
around Oakeshott the man, as he avoided both the cult of personality and the orga-
nization of a faction, yet his ability to attract fierce and sometimes partisan loyalty
appears to have achieved precisely that. Annan’s judgement is partly a reflection of
Oakeshott’s being part of the opposition team: a team that looked sceptically at the
accomplishments of the likes of Annan’s hero Isaiah Berlin, of whom Oakeshott had
a rather low opinion. Yet if one probes a bit deeper beneath Annan’s ad hominem
assessment we can see Oakeshott’s legacy in a different light.
The challenge to simplistic normativism amongst many British political theorists
and a concern with the pursuit of intimations within national traditions of politics,
administration, and governance remains central to the study of politics in many
British universities. Oakeshott was not the only prominent figure in the emergence of
post-war British political studies who objected to social scientific naturalism and who
saw the study of politics as being primarily rooted in a historical mode of experience.
He drew on a tradition of thinking about political studies that was shared with Sir
Ernest Barker amongst others and which goes back to the emergence of the subject
in the late nineteenth century. In the field of international relations Martin Wight
played a similar role. However, Oakeshott’s distinctiveness was that he succeeded in
providing (in a way that Barker or Wight could not) one of the most sophisticated
expressions of that rejection of philosophical naturalism with its reduction of a
humanistic study of political activity to the model of the natural sciences. For students
coming of age in the 1940s to 1960s that philosophical restatement of the study of
politics on the intellectual map remained unchallenged in Britain. Later generations
of students have proved less sympathetic and subsequently turned to continental
critical theory or hermeneutics for a similar philosophical foundation to their con-
ception of non-naturalistic political science, but without the attendant conservatism.
Yet Oakeshott’s philosophical politics remains a serious challenge to the aspirations of
the oakeshottians 169
scientific and philosophical naturalism in the social sciences in a way that has not been
matched by the Cambridge School, or Marxist and postmodernist critics. And the
continued presence of an Oakeshottian voice amongst many students of politics who
are uninterested in the philosophical provenance of their academic practice refutes
Annan’s view that Oakeshott and the Oakeshottian voice was a deviation from the
proper development of the subject, however much Oakeshott might have enjoyed
cultivating the status of an outsider.
References
Annan, N. 1990. Our Age: Portrait of a Generation. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Barry, B. 2001. ‘The Muddles of Multiculturalism’. New Left Review, 8: 49–71.
Charvet, J. 1982. Feminism. London: Dent Everyman.
Chester, N. 1975. ‘Political Studies in Britain: Recollections and Comments’. Political Studies,
23: 151–64.
Crick, B. 1959. The American Science of Politics. London: Routledge.
1989. ‘My LSE’. Pp. 93–105 in Essays on Politics and Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Dahrendorf, R. 1995. The LSE. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gray, J. 1989. Liberalisms: Essays in Political Philosophy. London: Routledge.
Greenleaf, W. H. 1968. Oakeshott’s Philosophical Politics. London: Longmans.
1968. ‘Idealism, Modern Philosophy and Politics’. Pp. 93–124 in King and Parekh
1968.
1983a. The British Political Tradition, vol. i: The Rise of Collectivism. London:
Methuen.
1983b. The British Political Tradition, vol. ii: The Ideological Heritage. London:
Methuen.
1987. The British Political Tradition, vol. iii (parts 1 and 2): A Much Governed Nation.
London: Methuen.
Hayek, F. A. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty. London: Routledge.
Hayward, J., Barry, B., and Brown, A. (eds.) 1999. The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth
Century. Oxford: British Academy.
Kedourie, E. 1966. Nationalism. London: HarperCollins.
Kelly, P. 2001.‘Parekh and the Dangers of “Oakeshottian” Multiculturalism’. Political Quar-
terly, 72: 428–36.
King, P., and Parekh, B. (eds.) 1968. Politics and Experience: Essays Presented to Michael
Oakeshott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Manning, D. 1968. The Mind of Jeremy Bentham. London: Pall Mall.
1976. Liberalism. London: Dent Everyman.
1980. The Form of Ideology. London: Allen and Unwin.
Minogue, K. 1969. Nationalism. London: Methuen.
1985. Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
1995. Politics: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Modood, T. 2007. Multiculturalism. Cambridge: Polity.
Oakeshott, M. 1933. Experience and its Modes. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
170 paul kelly
Oakeshott, M. 1962. Rationalism in Politics. London: Methuen.
1975. On Human Conduct. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
1983. On History and Other Essays. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Parekh, B. 2000. Rethinking Multiculturalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Stapleton, J. 1994. Englishness and the Study of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Wright, V. 1978. The Government and Politics of France. London: Routledge.
Section Four: Modes of
Political Writing
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 10
.................................................................................................................
POLITICAL
J O U R NA L I S M
.................................................................................................................
peter riddell
Journalism has always played a central role in political debate in Britain, but an
inherently ambiguous one. Despite changes in patterns of ownership and technology,
the underlying relationship, and its associated paradoxes, have not altered. On the
one hand, there has been a combination of mutual dependency and constant conflict
in trying to find out what governments and politicians do not want disclosed. On the
other hand, journalists and their editors and owners have often not been content with
observing and informing on political developments; they have also sought to influ-
ence the policy outcomes and the careers of politicians, as players in the Westminster
game.
This chapter will discuss the nature, and results, of these relationships in the chang-
ing framework in which the media operates, covering the transition over a century
from when the printed press enjoyed a monopoly, via the slow growth to dominance
of radio, and then television, to a world of almost infinite diversity with not only
multiple television channels, but also the Internet, blogging, and text messages. It
is a transition from a hierarchical and largely oligopolistic structure to an infinitely
diverse and potentially democratic one.
For most of the period, really until the last decade of the twentieth century, political
journalism was dominated by a relatively few newspaper and broadcasting outlets
which concentrated mainly on Westminster. They were interpreting and seeking to
influence the world of high politics. The political culture in which they operated was
an elite one, in which both journalists and politicians were insiders. The world outside
Westminster, out of doors as the Victorians called it, seldom intruded. Journalists,
editors, and proprietors were part of the small world about which they wrote and
political journalism 173
broadcasted. There was little sense of distance. This has not meant that the press has
automatically sided with the party in power. Far from it. For much of the time, a
significant section of the press has been sharply critical of the Prime Minister of the
day and the party in power. But this has often been on behalf of the out-group and
within the terms of the Westminster power game.
The very adversarial nature of politics, and the competition between media outlets,
has encouraged disclosure. All papers like to trumpet their exclusives. Despite protests
about a continuing culture of secrecy, the workings of government have been opened
up since the 1960s. Attitudes in Whitehall have changed, and changed before the
Freedom of Information Act forced the disclosure of many background documents.
For instance, not only does the public know about the line-up of the arguments
over entry into the euro, thanks to an active press, but the Treasury also released
volumes of supporting evidence in summer 2003 to back up the decision to defer
entry indefinitely. By contrast, debates on exchange rate policy were held in total
secret in the 1960s.
But these disclosures have commonly been within a narrow definition of news.
The frequent focus has been on the fate and reputation of ministers and leading
politicians rather than necessarily of policies. Moreover, the insider political culture
has occasionally worked against disclosure. For instance, until the 1980s, details of the
private lives of politicians—their drinking habits, their adulteries and homosexuality
(illegal until 1967)—were generally kept out of the press, even when widely known
within the political world. As Jeremy Tunstall records (1996: 243–4), one of the biggest
ever peacetime cover-ups occurred in June 1953 when Winston Churchill, in his final
premiership (and then aged 78), had a stroke. ‘Lords Camrose, Beaverbrook, and
Bracken (owners of the Daily Telegraph, Daily Express, and Financial Times) were
summoned to Chartwell by Churchill’s private secretary; and a press statement was
released which concealed the seriousness of the Prime Minister’s illness.’ Not only
would such a situation have been inconceivable today, but the private lives not just
of political leaders but also of backbench MPs, and even senior public appointees,
are regarded as fair game by both the red-top and middle-market tabloids—and even
more by some of the populist muck-raking websites.
Anyone who thinks close relations between the media and political leaders only
developed in the Thatcher and Blair eras just needs to look back to the mid-
nineteenth century when Delane, the editor of The Times, used to go riding with
leading politicians such as Palmerston. The mixture of mutual dependency and polit-
ical and financial advantage which still runs through media/political relationships was
vividly illustrated in August 1855 when Delane and Palmerston met. As Oliver Woods
and James Bishop record (1983: 87–8):
Palmerston, the new Prime Minister, had been The Times’s bete noire for over two
decades, but he had been helped to his position by Delane’s attacks on Aberdeen’s Gov-
ernment and he badly needed Delane’s continued support if his own Government was to
prosper. Delane wanted a new contact at the top. In August there was a meeting between
the two, and the alliance was sealed by a curious letter in The Times of 10 October
signed by ‘A Constant Reader’. . . . Queen Victoria was so disgusted by the Crimean article
174 peter riddell
[attacking the conduct of the war] and particularly by the attack on the reigning house
of Prussia that she wrote to Palmerston asking ‘whether it is right that the Editor, the
Proprietor and the Writers of such execrable publications ought to be honoured and
constant guests of the Ministers of the Crown?’
That episode epitomizes many of the characteristics of the journalist/politician
relationship: the hope by the editor of obtaining privileged insider information to
scoop rivals, and the hope of a leading politician for press support. Since the mid-
nineteenth century, there have been plenty of examples of proprietors, editors, and
journalists becoming closely involved with leading politicians in the hope of mutual
advantage: from Gladstone’s ‘Hawarden kite’ on Irish Home Rule in 1885; via Lloyd
George’s complicated manoeuvrings with the press barons during and after the First
World War; Neville Chamberlain’s courting of Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The
Times, to back his appeasement policy and to suppress alternative views; to Harold
Wilson’s love/hate relationship with the press; and then Margaret Thatcher’s close
links with the right-wing press during the 1980s. There was a mutual interest between
the Thatcher government and proprietors like Rupert Murdoch and Lord Rothermere
in weakening the trade unions, cutting taxes, and promoting deregulation. The pro-
prietors, and their papers, backed her. Yet, as I wrote (1994: 6–8) about her memoirs:
Margaret Thatcher received a more consistently favourable, and at times fanatically
loyal, press than any recent Prime Minister, and certainly than her successor. Yet she
almost entirely ignores these supporters in the 914 pages of her Downing Street Years. The
Sun never rises on these pages, nor does the Daily Telegraph. Sir David English, Kelvin
Mackenzie, Sir Nicholas Lloyd and even Rupert Murdoch might never have existed. That
is curiously ungrateful given what they did to sustain her in power.
Yet even if politicians are reluctant publicly to acknowledge the relationship, it
exists. The vivid diaries of Piers Morgan, editor of two tabloids, the News of the
World and the Daily Mirror from 1994 to 2004, record how almost every other week
he was either meeting or having a meal with Tony Blair and other senior members
of his government. He was on first-name terms with them. Whatever the politicians
privately thought of the erratic and often hostile Morgan, they were keen to try and
win him over, to persuade him about their viewpoint. Morgan writes (2005: 233) how
on 3 August 1999, he went to Chequers for the first time for tea with Blair—‘we got
the full-blown charm offensive for two hours, with Blair even pouring the tea’. The
same process of courting has been even more true of Paul Dacre, the Savonarola of
his day as editor of the moralistic Daily Mail, arbiter of prejudices to Middle England,
or so he supposes. He was briefly courted by Blair and on a longer-term basis by both
Gordon Brown and David Blunkett.
The Brown/Dacre links continued after the change of Prime Minister in June 2007.
The editor of the Daily Mail was invited to Chequers. The closeness between the
Prime Minister and the editor was essentially personal, a shared puritan personal
outlook and commitment to success through hard work. And just as Labour MPs
and activists were unhappy, so were many Daily Mail journalists eager to put the boot
into the Brown government (as they did despite their editor).
political journalism 175
Blair and Alastair Campbell, his chief press adviser and spokesman from 1994
until 2004, pursued a deliberate campaign of winning over Rupert Murdoch, both
in opposition and in government, in the hope of obtaining the backing of the Sun, as
they did ahead of Labour’s victory in the 1997 general election. The closeness of the
relationship is brought out in the diaries of Lance Price, who worked for Campbell
during Labour’s first term. Price notes (2005: 13) in an entry for Wednesday 24 June
1998 how: ‘This morning the Sun did a heavy number on the single currency with
a pic of TB asking “Is This the Most Dangerous Man in Britain?” And in the past
week both Murdoch and the new editor of the Sun, David Yelland, were in Number
Ten for dinner—not something we’ve been advertising’. Even more striking are the
many references to Murdoch in Alastair Campbell’s own diaries, which appeared
within a fortnight of Blair’s departure from 10 Downing Street. Throughout Blair
is portrayed as eager to court and win the approval of Murdoch, and, in particular,
the backing of the Sun. Campbell argues (Campbell and Stott 2007: 160–2) that
Blair’s article on the eve of the 1997 election giving an impression of caution over
Europe and the euro was crucial in persuading Murdoch. In January 1999 (ibid. 363),
Blair is annoyed at the hostility to the EU of Murdoch and his chief advisers, and
Campbell says: ‘It was faintly obscene that we even had to worry about what they
thought, but we had to do what we could to get a better debate going on Europe’. The
desire to keep on the right side of Murdoch probably led to a toning down of Blair’s
instinctive pro-Europeanism and was one amongst a number of factors leading to
his decision in April 2004 to promise a referendum on the then EU constitution. It
was a Murdoch/Blair relationship rather than a Murdoch/Labour one. Nonetheless,
Murdoch also maintained a relationship with Brown, both as Chancellor and then,
after June 2007, as Prime Minister. Murdoch appreciated Brown’s global viewpoint,
and his desire to move away from a European trading bloc approach.
Blair and Campbell only courted Murdoch and other proprietors and editors
because they believed they mattered and could influence the political debate and
the attitudes of voters. While their motives were the same as Palmerston, Lloyd
George, and Wilson, the techniques used have changed considerably (as discussed
in Tunstall 1970; 1996; Franklin 2004; and by Nicholas Jones in his accounts of how 10
Downing Street tries to influence the news agenda, notably 2002; 2006). We have had
media monitoring units, communications strategies, a Strategic Communications
Unit, grids about the timing of announcements, and the daily battle to dominate
the news agenda. There is, however, a great danger of succumbing to the mythology
of ‘spin’, propagated either by media advisers or by its ‘victims’ in the media (the
role Nicholas Jones often adopts). The techniques may be different from the past,
but the motives are the same. And the results are often less dramatic than assumed.
For all the alleged skills of Alastair Campbell in ‘spin’, Tony Blair faced a hostile press
for most of his time as Prime Minister, provoking his ‘feral beasts’ speech discussed
below.
Until the 1920s, the written press enjoyed a monopoly in the provision of political
news and they remained the dominant force until the late 1950s since the BBC was
limited by statute and by ethos in both what it could report and how it reported
176 peter riddell
news. The key characteristic of the British press was, and is, that it is national. Ever
since the arrival of the railways and the abolition of the stamp tax in the 1850s, it
has been possible to read a copy of a London edited paper virtually everywhere in
Britain. Welsh and Scottish papers have continued to have leading roles in political
debate, partly reflecting their distinctive political cultures which have been sustained
by legislative devolution in the late 1990s. Many of the English provincial papers
had a significant national influence on politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries but have suffered declines in circulation, particularly since the 1980s, leaving
the London edited nationals as the dominant voice in political debate in England.
However, while daily morning and evening papers in the big cities are in serious
decline, local weeklies are surviving and the Metro freesheets (financed by advertising)
have generally been very successful. The 1,300 local and regional papers still matter
within their circulation areas. In both the 2001 and 2005 general elections, Labour,
and then the Conservatives, targeted such local papers, as well as women’s magazines
and the ethnic press, in order to bypass the more partisan national press. Local can-
didates, and challengers, spent a lot of effort getting their message into such papers,
which are widely read precisely for their local focus, including on local candidates
rather than national parties.
The reach of the national newspapers has been considerable. The circulation of
daily newspapers peaked in the early 1950s at more than 16.6 million, dominated
by the strongly pro-Conservative Daily Express and the equally strongly pro-Labour
Daily Mirror, both with daily sales of well over 4 million. Since each paper was read by
several people, this meant that the vast majority of the adult population saw a daily
paper in this period. Total daily circulation began to decline from the early 1960s
onwards, at first gradually, then more rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s. Daily sales went
below 14 million at the end of the 1980s and dropped sharply from over 13 million to
around 11.5 million between the 1997 and 2001 elections. In 2007, total circulation of
the daily newspapers was less than 11 million. This amounts to a loss of more than
a third in daily sales in half a century. This decline varies between market sectors,
being much worse for the daily and Sunday red-tops. The ‘qualities’ have sought,
with mixed success, to resist decline through DVDs and other promotions, as well as
discounted sales to subscription buyers.
The British press has also been fiercely partisan, at least at a national level, though
often less so locally (where Metros and other freesheets have taken a more impartial
stance for marketing reasons). Before 1914 some papers even received direct subsidies
from parties and wealthy politicians, and the Daily Herald was partly backed by the
TUC until the 1960s. A majority of papers, particularly at the mass-selling tabloid
end of the market, have strongly supported one party or the other. According to
the analysis by David Butler and Gareth Butler (2000: 537), the total circulation of
Conservative-supporting papers during the 1950s was roughly half the total, and
with around two-fifths of the sales by Labour-supporting papers (the Daily Mirror
and the partly TUC-financed Daily Herald). The remaining tenth of the circulation
came from Liberal supporting papers, the News Chronicle and the then Manchester
Guardian. At this period, there was a close correlation between the relative share of
political journalism 177
Conservative circulation and the party’s share of the vote in general elections. But
the Labour Party tended to perform between six and nine points better than the sales
share of the two Labour-supporting papers. And the Liberals always underperformed
the relative sales of their newspaper allies in the 1950s.
The picture changed in the 1960s, both with the death of the News Chronicle in 1960
and its absorption into the Daily Mail and the transformation of the Daily Herald
into the Sun in 1964, and its takeover by Rupert Murdoch’s News International in
1969. In time, this dramatically changed the balance of partisanship. The percentage
of total sales accounted for by Conservative-supporting papers rose steadily in the
1970s, hitting a peak of 78 per cent in the Thatcher landslide election victory of
1983. By the contrast, the relative share of Labour-supporting newspapers declined
steadily, to only just over 30 per cent during the 1970s and a low point of 22 per cent
in 1983. Support for the Labour Party also dropped sharply in this period, touching
a low of 28 per cent in 1983. By contrast with the 1950s, the Liberals, and then in
1983 and 1987 the Social Democratic/Liberal Alliance, were under-represented in the
press.
A big change occurred in 1997 when the Conservatives were swept from power
by Tony Blair, and the party won just 31 per cent of votes cast. Then, Conservative-
supporting papers accounted for just 34 per cent of total circulation. By contrast,
Labour-supporting papers accounted for 60 per cent of total sales, and the party won
43 per cent of the total vote. The switch was almost entirely explained by Rupert
Murdoch’s decision to swing the Sun behind Tony Blair. In sales terms, there was a
swing of more than 32 per cent from Conservative to Labour between 1992 and 1997,
at the same time as there was a 10 per cent swing among voters themselves. These
trends were broadly maintained over the following two elections when Conservative-
supporting papers had 29 and 37 per cent of total sales in 2001 and 2005 respec-
tively, while Labour-supporting ones had 71 and 54 per cent respectively (see Butler
and Butler 2006: 274). The changes between the 1997 and later elections are largely
explained by the switch to, and away from, Labour by the Daily Express, while The
Times backed Labour in both 2001 and 2005. Although pro-Labour support was at its
peak in 2001, the most significant shift occurred between 1992 and 1997, when Labour
won power.
But these shifts do not mean that the press was itself responsible for changes in
voting behaviour: ‘It’s the Sun wot won it’ was claimed after the unexpected Con-
servative victory in the 1992 election. Some studies have suggested that the Sun and
other tabloids made a difference in the final week of the campaign, but mistakes made
by Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader, could have been as important. Moreover, the
line of causation can as plausibly be seen in the opposite direction with newspapers,
particularly the tabloids, following their readers rather than leading them. That was
certainly true of the Sun’s decision to back Tony Blair at the 1997 election. Polling
evidence shows Sun readers had moved heavily against the Conservatives much ear-
lier in response to the party’s bitter divisions over Europe and a rise in taxes. The
eventual switch of political support was much more a case of a newspaper fitting
in with a majority of its readers’ views than of a proprietor determining voters.
178 peter riddell
The pro-Conservative bias of the press in the 1960s did not stop Harold Wilson
from winning elections. It is important to distinguish between various degrees of
pro-Labour, or often pro-Blair, support. The Daily Mirror, for instance, remained a
pro-Labour paper throughout the Blair years, but, as the Piers Morgan diaries (2005)
record, was often fiercely critical of the government, notably over the Iraq War.
Television and radio have become much more important as a source of political
news and in shaping public views than the written press since the 1960s. In the
1960s and 1970s, the national political conversation was conducted through the main
television evening news bulletins. But the position has become more diverse since
the early 1980s as a result of a series of Broadcasting Acts, which have led to gradual
deregulation and the proliferation of outlets. First, there was the arrival of Channel 4
in 1982, and then cable and satellite news from 1989. This led to the creation of round-
the-clock news channels in Sky News and BBC News 24, matching CNN and later Fox
and other channels in the USA. This meant that the combined viewing share of BBC
and ITV, including BBC2 and Channel 4, fell from 100 per cent in the late 1980s to less
than 75 per cent by 2004.
The main broadcasters are statutorily forbidden from backing one party or
another, and have elaborate rules on balance. Until the arrival of ITV in 1955, the
BBC’s political coverage was anodyne. A more assertive, adversarial, and, at times,
aggressive style developed from the 1960s onwards. Together with the changes in
newspapers noted above, and the arrival of the Internet, the narrow, heavily regu-
lated, and essentially parternalistic media culture of the middle of the century had
disappeared by the mid-to-late 1990s. So far, the Murdoch-controlled Sky has not
adopted the stridently conservative partisan style of Fox, its American counterpart in
the News Corporation empire.
The influence of newspapers and television has been debated at length. David
Denver (1992: 99) has argued that the impact is complicated and indirect thanks to
selective exposure (that is, many people avoiding politics altogether in the press or
on television); selective perception (existing values editing out information so that
people accept what they want to believe and ignore what they do not); and selective
retention (so that people remember only what they want to remember). This is what
is known as the reinforcement through filter effect. The media may reinforce attitudes
and, perhaps most important of all, affect the agenda of the political debate by
highlighting issues such as the number of asylum seekers, violent crime, and Europe.
The strong Euro-scepticism, indeed Euro-phobia, of the Daily Mail, Sun, and Daily
Telegraph from the early 1990s onwards probably had a cumulative impact on voters’
views of the European Union. This stridency made political leaders very reluctant to
reach new European agreements which might prove to be very unpopular with voters,
particularly when there was the implicit threat that proprietors like Rupert Murdoch
might withdraw their general support from the governing party.
The rise of television altered the way in which political journalism worked. This has
been much less to do with partisanship as such than with deference to the established
political order. The world of the fourteen-day rule, banning discussion of issues
due to come before Parliament over the following fourteen days, was Westminster
political journalism 179
centred. Sir Winston Churchill defended the rule shortly before he left 10 Downing
Street in 1955 on the grounds that ‘it would be shocking to have debates in the
House forestalled, time after time, by expressions of opinion by persons who had the
status or responsibility of MPs on this new robot organization of television and BBC
broadcasting’ (as discussed in Cockerell 1988: 50–1). The rule was only abandoned in
1956 with the arrival of ITV and the Suez Crisis.
In this period, senior politicians regarded most political journalists as social, and
intellectual, inferiors rather than as equals from a similar educational and social
background. Writing about the early 1950s, Anthony Seldon argued (1981: 51) that
‘Many of the journalists themselves, compared to their successors a decade later,
were comparatively docile and deferential to establishment figures’. That picture is
underlined by the classic analysis of lobby correspondents in the late 1960s by Jeremy
Tunstall (1970: 33–7): ‘the broad picture of the majority of Lobby men coming from
middle and lower-middle class backgrounds is supported by the occupations of
their fathers, which were mainly within the clerical and white collar range, with a
sprinkling of manual workers at one end and professionals at the other’. The median
age for finishing education of these correspondents was seventeen. A few had left
school at fifteen; two-thirds had gone to a grammar school and just a quarter had
been to university. Until 1950, university graduates made up only a tiny minority of
entrants to British journalism, including political writers. This is not surprising since
only a small minority of the population, even only 6 per cent by 1960, went into full-
time higher education. There was, and is, no formal training for political journalists:
socialization is informal and on the job. Political correspondents, in particular, have
tended to spend a large part of their careers in this role rather than moving on or up
a hierarchy.
The rapid expansion of higher education from the 1960s onwards has meant that
all but a handful of senior political correspondents in their late fifties now have a
university education, a majority at either Oxford or Cambridge. Their backgrounds
are very similar to those of the politicians they cover, in both cases from either the
public- or private-sector professional middle classes. There are several examples of
journalists turned politician and politicians turned journalist, a permeable divide.
Similarly, in many cases, journalists and politicians have known each other from uni-
versity days, so there is no sense of deference. Indeed, in many cases, the relationship
has been turned round with MPs envious of the prominence and higher salaries of
leading journalists, particularly on television. Fewer younger political journalists have
spent time on provincial papers and more have entered nationals via graduate trainee
schemes, and there are many more women political correspondents (who hardly
existed in the period covered by Tunstall’s 1970 book). Women political journalists
have formed a group which lunches collectively from time to time with leading
politicians, including, but not exclusively, female ones. The Tunstall study has not
been updated, but Ian Hargreaves (2003: 122–3) quotes research showing that a British
working journalist is as likely to be a woman as a man; more than two-thirds are
aged under forty; only 4 per cent are from ethnic minority groups; just 3 per cent
of new entrants have parents who were unskilled or semi-skilled; 98 per cent are
180 peter riddell
graduates and are relatively low paid (earning an average of £22,500 in 2002). Political
journalists are more likely to be male (despite the growing numbers of female cor-
respondents), older (certainly among political editors and senior correspondents),
and even in 2002 to have earned at least twice the average, and in many cases much
more.
The similarities of background between many correspondents and the politicians
they cover risks reinforcing the image of a closed Westminster world. Even so, this is
now much more open than in the 1950s, when not only was the BBC muzzled, but
the politicians could also be sure of having their views fully and faithfully reported in
the pages of the newspapers. The broadsheets all carried full-page gallery reports of
what was said on the floor of the House of Commons. The amount of space devoted
to these reports began to decline in the late 1970s and had disappeared entirely by the
end of the 1980s. In 1992, Jack Straw, then a member of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet,
organized a study of the quantity of press reporting of Parliament over a sixty-year
period. This highlighted the extent of the decline in gallery coverage. In The Times, the
daily coverage of Parliament varied between 450 and 1,050 lines on a series of sample
dates between the early 1930s and the late 1980s, and was often nearer the upper end.
In the Guardian, the average was between 300 and 700 lines. But by 1992, fewer than
100 lines a day were dedicated to the proceedings of Parliament in either of these
papers (for more details see Straw 1993). However, the public now has direct access
to what is said on the floor of the Commons and the Lords via the Parliamentary
website, so that many more people follow debates than in the past.
There are two main reasons for this change. First, the decline in newspaper cir-
culations noted above had increased competitive pressures and put a premium on
both space and articles which executives believed would attract new, and younger,
readers. Second, the Commons chamber was no longer the centre of political debate.
This was partly because of the greater importance of television and radio: ministers,
opposition spokesmen, and leading backbenchers would far rather have a prime spot
on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 in the morning than open a Commons
debate. Moreover, power and debate had shifted away from the Commons chamber
not just to the broadcasting studios but also to select committees within Westmin-
ster and, more importantly, to European institutions, to the judiciary, to devolved
legislatures and assemblies, and to semi-independent regulators. The proceedings of
Parliament became part of broader political stories. The decline in gallery report
has been matched by the increased prominence given to sketches, or witty colour
pieces, by star writers on papers. The disappearance of gallery coverage coincided
with the arrival of television cameras in the Commons chamber in 1989. Its main
effect, paradoxically, was indirect since the creation of extensive television studios at
4 Millbank, a few minutes’ walk from the main Palace of Westminster, made it much
easier for MPs to give interviews.
These gallery reports have been superseded by more wide-ranging political stories
on the key events of the day. These were, and are, written by lobby correspondents,
a much misunderstood term for journalists based at Westminster, on a list kept by
the Commons authorities, largely for security reasons since attacks by Fenian groups
political journalism 181
in the 1880s. They are allowed access to parts of the Palace of Westminster, notably
the members’ lobby outside the Commons chamber and adjoining areas, denied to
members of the public.
The most contentious, and misunderstood, aspect of the lobby system is the
twice daily briefings (once on Friday) conducted by the Prime Minister’s chief press
spokesman. As Jeremy Tunstall has noted (1996: 257): ‘These daily briefings probably
do not generate more than one-fifth of the stories and take up much less than one-
fifth of the working time of a team of lobby journalists’. Most of the daily briefings are
about the Prime Minister’s engagements and comments on the events of the day.
The main criticism is that lobby journalists become too close to their sources. This
turns on the unattributable basis of conversations. A politician will talk on so-called
lobby terms; that is, his or her identity will not be revealed. This leads to some
absurd circumlocutions. Is a senior minister a member of the Cabinet? Is a friend
of X minister X himself, or his or her special adviser, or a friendly backbencher?
This cannot only be confusing but can also lead to lazy and inaccurate journalism.
But unattributable conversations are an inescapable part of political journalism, as
of all other kinds of journalism. To insist as some high-minded critics do that all
quotations in political stories should be attributed is naive and would unquestionably
deprive readers and listeners of their understanding of what is happening in politics.
From time to time, newspapers such as the new Independent in 1986, and then the
Guardian, have boycotted the lobby briefings, or have said they will no longer carry
unattributable quotations, claims easily contradicted by looking at their papers. The
real issue is not the use of unattributable quotations, but their accuracy and reliability.
(These issues are well discussed in the account of parliamentary reporting by Andrew
Sparrow, a political correspondent himself (2003).)
A more pertinent question is whether political coverage is too Westminster
centred—too concerned with parliamentary politics and not enough with what
is happening in town and country halls, let alone in the devolved legislatures in
Edinburgh, Cardiff, and Belfast. That remains a valid criticism. However, the down-
grading of political coverage has been matched by an increase in specialist reporting
by non-Westminster based journalists on home affairs, education, health, defence,
etc. The political editors of the main papers are no longer as important as they once
were. Yet comparing the lengthier stories of the 1950s and 1960s with the shorter ones
of the 1990s onwards, the balance sheet is not all negative. There is now a greater
willingness to probe behind the words of the official spokesman, while the absence of
deference has meant that more is known about internal government discussions.
However, coverage has become more personality and scandal driven. Hard cases,
and scandals (alleged or real), make good stories, not analysis or a sense of perspective
and proportion. Policy and analysis are seen as boring. Major bills will be discussed
only when they are introduced—and then more often by a specialist correspondent
rather than by a political journalist. This shift has worked against parties like the
Liberal Democrats, or even smaller groups, and individual backbench MPs. More
recent moves away from a broadsheet to a tabloid or compact format have reinforced
these trends. Instead of a choice of stories on a front page, there is now just one,
182 peter riddell
which is presented more vividly and sharply. But secondary stories suffer and com-
petitive pressures and declining sales have meant more of an emphasis on health and
consumer interest rather than political stories.
These trends—the decline in gallery/straight reporting, the decline in deference,
the squeeze on political news—have fuelled an adversarial, cynical attitude, an exag-
gerated populism of ‘they are in it for themselves’ and ‘they are all liars’ variety.
That has been linked to the rise of the celebrity journalist, often a columnist or
broadcasting interviewer, who is not only better known and paid than most elected
politicians but is also seen as having a higher public standing, not least by himself or
herself. These changes place a premium on attracting audiences: strong opinions and
ranting are preferred over analysis and detachment. This is less about partisanship
in the traditional sense of a newspaper backing one party or another than of a
well-known columnist becoming a partisan figure, in effect a player in the political
world.
The growing numbers of by-lined columnists and correspondents, particularly
from the 1960s onwards, has had a major influence on the political debate. Via their
close, daily contacts with leading ministers and Opposition spokesmen, they have
been able to offer superior and more up-to-date insights into the working of the polit-
ical system than the vast majority of political scientists. If distinguished political sci-
entists such as David Butler, Robert Mackenzie, Anthony King, and Dennis Kavanagh
were able to bridge the academic/political divide in the second half of the twentieth
century, they were increasingly rivalled by columnists such as David Watt, Hugo
Young, and Peter Jenkins as authors of the first draft of history. The latter three, who
all died in their prime, were highly influential on the centre and social democratic
left and in the elite worlds of Whitehall. They had access which no political scientist
could rival. However, from the 1990s onwards, the most influential journalists were
on the centre-right and among broadcasters, such as Trevor Kavanagh of the Sun
(because of the paper he wrote for) and BBC political editors such as Andrew Marr
and Nick Robinson. Newspaper columnists tended to be more committed rather
than detached, arguing, often cogently, from a clear ideological viewpoint: Polly
Toynbee of the Guardian or Matthew D’Ancona of the Sunday Telegraph and the
Spectator.
John Lloyd (2004) has forcefully argued that the media are no longer functioning
as an inquiring check on the excesses of the political class. Instead, they have become
an alternative establishment, dedicated to a theatrical distrust of both individual MPs
and of politicians as a class. The counter-view is that political journalism exists to
challenge the political world rather than to be responsible or civic. But it is ques-
tionable whether many journalists, and media outlets, any longer perform that role.
From a different perspective, Peter Oborne (1999; 2007) has discussed the growth
of an exclusive media class, as the counterpart and collaborator of a political class,
increasingly privileged and detached from the ordinary voter.
Arguments about the role of the press and political journalists boiled to the
surface in the second half of the Blair government, notably over the Iraq War. The
complicated saga of the open conflict between 10 Downing Street and the BBC
political journalism 183
over Andrew Gilligan’s reports over weapons of mass destruction, the death of the
government scientist David Kelly, the subsequent report by Lord Hutton, and the
resignations of both the chairman and director-general of the BBC have been fully
discussed elsewhere (from one side in Campbell and Stott 2007: 711–54; in Raymond
Kuhn’s chapter in Seldon 2007: 123–42; in Lord Hutton’s report, 2004; and in Oborne
2007: 147–8, 173–4). Without going into all the detail, the affair highlighted the issue
of ‘spin’, tarnished the reputation of Alastair Campbell, and led to lengthy soul-
searching at the BBC itself. Before these controversies had erupted, an official com-
mittee had been established under Bob Phillis, a distinguished former BBC executive
and then chief executive of Guardian Media, to examine the three-way breakdown
in trust between government and politicians, the media, and the general public. The
report (Phillis 2004: 7) concluded that this had led to popular disillusionment and
voter disengagement. In particular, the aggressive approach of Labour and ‘increased
use of selective briefing of media outlets, in which government information was
seen to be being used to political advantage, led to a reaction from the media that
has produced a far more adversarial relationship with government’. The result was
some organizational changes within Whitehall but little change in the fundamental
relationship.
Consequently, on the eve of his departure from 10 Downing Street, Tony Blair
gave a major lecture (2007: 476–87) solely about relations with the press, which
attracted most attention for just one phrase about the media hunting in a pack
and being like a ‘a feral beast’. He related this to five complaints: first, ‘scandal or
controversy beats ordinary reporting hands down’; second, ‘attacking motive is far
more potent than attacking judgement’; third, ‘the fear of missing out means that
today’s media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack’; fourth, ‘rather than just
report news, even if sensational or controversial, the new technique is commentary
on the news being as, if not more, important than the news itself ’; and, fifth, ‘the
confusion of news and commentary’. The speech divided opinion, largely reflecting
the views held about Mr Blair in the first place. Many felt that Mr Blair was an
unconvincing media commentator in view of what he and his advisers had themselves
done. They were blamed both for day-to-day ‘spin’ and for changes in regulation
which encouraged more competitive and ‘feral’ media practices. Nonetheless, most
of Mr Blair’s charges stand up even if some are exaggerated and are the by-product
of a vigorous press. The same themes were taken by Alastair Campbell (2008) in
the Cudlipp Lecture when he attacked the media’s failure to distinguish between
speculation and information, or between the important and the trivial; the incestuous
way in which television, radio, and newspapers retell each other’s stories without
further verification; the focus on getting the story first rather than getting it right;
and ‘the language of extremes’ in which most news is framed. Again, most, even
sympathetic commentators argued that Campbell was hardly the right person to
make the critique since he had been guilty of many of the sins about which he now
complained. Gordon Brown came to office determined to be more open, cutting
down the size of the Downing Street media operation, and telling Parliament first
about government announcements rather than trailing/leaking stories first in the
184 peter riddell
media (his own frequent past approach). These good intentions only lasted into the
autumn of 2007. Although there were many Commons statements, the practice of
pre-briefing revived, and, after a general reappraisal of his Downing Street operation,
the media planning side was strengthened, along lines very similar to the Blair era.
Many long-standing assumptions about political journalism have been challenged
by the rise of the Internet since the 1990s. According to research commissioned by
the Carnegie Corporation of New York (cited in Riddell 2006: 70), among eighteen to
thirty-four-year-old Americans, the Internet beats newspapers by 49 to 9 per cent
in providing news ‘only when I want it’ and by 29 to 4 per cent in being up to
date. Only on trustworthiness is there a virtual tie. There are now a multitude of
political websites, some of which set out deliberately to challenge the mainstream
press, proclaiming that they are outside the journalistic establishment (though, in
practice, their sources come from within the world of Westminster). They range from
the anarchistic and muck-racking like Guido Fawkes, to a forum for Conservative
Party news and developments such as ConservativeHome. The latter supplements
the much reduced coverage in most newspapers and has become essential reading for
anyone following the Conservative Party. There is a close mutual relationship between
conventional journalists and bloggers as each feeds off the other. Many leading print
and broadcast journalists are themselves active and influential bloggers. Moreover,
the most successful sites are those run by mainstream media groups, notably the
BBC and the Guardian, followed by The Times and the Sun. Many newspapers are
integrating their print and online operations so that political journalists can expect
both to blog and write for the paper. This is leading to changes in approach: between
the immediate, often fast written, blog or post and the more reflective piece in the
paper. The extent of these changes is only beginning to be seen.
Blogging has the virtue of being democratic, rather than elitist, and personal
and individual. It broadens accountability in that most news stories, features, and
columns in the main papers are posted online where readers can blog. So the initial
story initiatives a discussion. But the very unchecked spontaneity of blogging—its
inherent lack of discipline and constraint—is also its central weakness. Blogging can
easily descend into the spreading of unreliable and untested assertions, and ignorant
and ill-informed prejudices. There is no intermediary, no editing function, apart
from the blocking out of the most obviously defamatory or obscene. The comments
on the main political sites reveal a world of bigoted and highly partisan obsessives
who often do not have a clue what they are talking about. That is pub gossip, not
journalism. So, while political blogging is, in theory, democratic, it is in practice often
dominated by activists and enthusiasts. Debate may be widened but not the provision
of information and analysis. Bloggers can provide instant, on-the-spot reports—and
photographs via mobile phones. But they cannot, by definition, provide a rounded
picture which can only come through the collective enterprise of conventional
journalism.
Nonetheless, the Internet can, and should, supplement conventional newspaper
and broadcast journalism. For newspapers, at any rate, it will soon become secondary
whether a story or feature is communicated via paper or online, or even by text
political journalism 185
message on a Blackberry or a mobile phone. Media groups will become brands
which communicate in a multitude of different ways. Moreover, official news can
be made available more cheaply and widely via the Internet. This applies not just
to government publications but also to the Hansard reports on the proceedings of
Parliament.
If the Internet is, at its best, an opportunity to broaden political debate away from
the traditional elite-talking-to-the-elite model, and to ensure that readers are better
served and informed, some traditional journalistic virtues need to be reasserted. The
lines between partisan politics and journalism need to be clearer. The party line is the
enemy of vigorous, independent journalism. Yet, for all the valid criticisms of parti-
sanship, and an excessive emphasis on personalities, splits, and triviality, the public
has the opportunity in at least some parts of the national media, and increasingly
the Internet, to become better informed about the main issues of the day, and the
background arguments, than in the closed political and media worlds of the 1940s
and 1950s.
References
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2006. British Political Facts Since 1979. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Campbell, A. 2008. Cudlipp Lecture, Monday, 29 Jan.
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c h a p t e r 11
.................................................................................................................
BIO GRAPHY
.................................................................................................................
david marquand
In Britain, at least, the relationship between political biography and the academic
study of politics varies between the distantly tolerant and the mildly suspicious.
Perhaps because politics as an academic discipline had a remarkably slow birth in
Britain, and for much of its history had a lower status than many other social sciences,
British political science has always been heterogeneous, eclectic, and untidy and has
successfully resisted capture by any single orthodoxy. In the early days of the politics
profession, what was misleadingly called ‘behaviourism’ was fashionable, at least
among its young Turks. But behaviourism never drove out older institutional and
historical approaches and, in any case, the fashion did not last. In the turbulent 1960s
and 1970s, Marxist approaches enjoyed a certain vogue, but they too never dominated
the discipline. The same has been true of rational choice and its derivatives in our
own day. In the crooks and crannies of the politics profession, minority species,
which might have perished in a more uniform and tightly organized discipline, have
survived and even prospered—biographers among them.
The late Ben Pimlott is perhaps the most glittering case in point. He held a Chair
in Politics before becoming Warden of Goldsmith’s College, London, and was elected
a Fellow of the British Academy, where he belonged to the Politics section. He had
gained a doctorate with a careful study of the Labour Left in the 1930s, but he made
his reputation with a masterly, and exceptionally well received, biography of Hugh
Dalton. He then went on to write biographies of Harold Wilson and the present
Queen. Another example is Bernard Crick, a distinguished political theorist who held
chairs at the Universities of Sheffield and London, and wrote a best-selling biography
of George Orwell. Anthony Wright, now a Labour MP but before his election a
political scientist at Birmingham University, has published studies of G. D. H. Cole
and R. H. Tawney which are, at least in part, biographical in approach. The best
biography of Harold Laski was written by Michael Newman, Professor of Politics at
188 david marquand
London Metropolitan University, who has also published a biography of the Marxist
political theorist, Ralph Miliband. David McLellan held a politics post at the Univer-
sity of Kent when he published his acclaimed biography of Marx. The present writer
was appointed to a Politics Chair at Salford University, largely on the strength of a
biography of Ramsay MacDonald.
But though biographers have found homes in the academic discipline of Politics,
and have even flourished within it, their numbers have been comparatively small.
The ranks of academic biographers have swollen substantially in recent years (a
point I shall return to later), but most of them have been historians, not political
scientists. And though some political scientists have published political or intellectual
biographies, sometimes of high quality, political science as a discipline has made little
use of their labours, and has had little or nothing to say about the light that biography
might throw on the life of politics or on the great questions which students of politics
have addressed or might profitably come to address. By the same token, political
scientist biographers have rarely tried to apply insights gained from their academic
study of politics to their biographical writings.
There is an oddity in all this which deserves more attention than it appears to
have received. Political life is, after all, lived by individual people, not by sociological
abstractions or economic categories. When Mrs Thatcher famously said there was
no such thing as society, but only individuals and their families, she was making a
political point designed to discomfit her ideological opponents and give heart to her
supporters. But, though her aphorism shocked (and was almost certainly intended to
shock) the bien pensant liberal-left, it embodied a truth which students of politics,
irrespective of their ideological affiliations, ignore at their peril. There is a sense in
which there is indeed no such thing as society—and, for that matter, no such thing
as class, or party, or nation, or the Treasury, or the Foreign Office, or the Cabinet.
Terms like ‘the Treasury view’, ‘the Cabinet’s decision’, ‘the British position’, or the
‘working-class demand’ are convenient shorthand for messy and indeterminate real-
ities, procured by complex interactions between different and sometimes divergent
political actors. Decisions are not taken by institutions; they are taken by individuals
who belong to institutions. (Anyone who doubts that should read Stephen Roskill’s
massive and masterly biography of Maurice Hankey (Roskill 1970–4), the first and
still the longest-lasting Cabinet Secretary and the effective creator of the Cabinet
Office.) The individuals concerned are, of course, constrained in a host of ways by
the institutions to which they belong and the values and assumptions which those
institutions embody and transmit. But different individuals react to these constraints
in different ways.
Even that stern determinist and unbending materialist, Karl Marx, conceded that
‘men make their own history’, albeit with the caveat that, since the circumstances
they encounter are inherited from the past, they cannot make it ‘just as they please’
(Marx 1951: 225). ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, from which these
famous phrases come, is a mordant study of the interplay between the personal
character of Louis Napoleon, an ‘adventurer blown in from abroad, raised on the
shield by a drunken soldiery’, and the social and economic forces with which he had
biography 189
to deal. The tacit premise on which the essay is based is that Louis Napoleon’s coup
d’état was (unsurprisingly) made by none other than Louis Napoleon—and that in
making it he made a difference to the balance of social forces in France and the fate
of the French. Some contemporary political scientists have followed where Marx led.
Ivor Crewe’s and Anthony King’s study of the SDP (1995) is not a biography, but it
contains penetrating analyses of the roles of Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams, and David
Owen in the party’s rise and fall and of their motives, assumptions, strengths, and
weaknesses; and it shows that the complex interactions between these and others
helped to determine the party’s fate. Andrew Gamble’s now classic account (1988)
of the Thatcher revolution leaves the reader in no doubt that Thatcher herself was a
prime mover in the story: that a history of the Thatcher years that ignored her extra-
ordinary combination of will, courage, guile, and rhetorical skill would be Hamlet
without the Prince of Denmark. But Crewe, King, and Gamble have had all too few
imitators.
11.1 Life Without Theory?
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A further oddity is that political biography is very much an Anglo-American spe-
ciality. Distinguished political biographies have, of course, appeared in Continental
Europe. One thinks of Jean Lacouture’s biographies of Leon Blum and Charles de
Gaulle, for example, to say nothing of Franz Mehring’s classic biography of Karl
Marx (Lacouture 1977: 1990–1; Mehring 2003). But the tradition of writing about
politics in a biographical mode is far stronger in this country and the United States
than on the Continent, perhaps reflecting a certain suspicion of high theory endemic
in the English-speaking world. (It was not for nothing that Disraeli extolled biog-
raphy as ‘life without theory’.) British and American politicians are not, of course,
ideology free, but they are—or at least pretend to be—ideology light, and they
inhabit a culture that purports to value robust and down-to-earth common sense
more than theoretical speculation. Lord Salisbury’s disdain for Iain Macleod on the
grounds that he was ‘too clever by half ’ might have been echoed in the United
States, but it is hard to imagine a French or German politician saying anything of
the sort. Outside the academy, British and American readers have shared Disraeli’s
assumption that the biographer’s ‘life without theory’ is somehow more real, because
less clever, than straightforward history. Non-academic writers have tended to
follow suit.
Against that background, I want to trace the evolution of political biography,
particularly in Britain, over the last century and a half. The story begins with the
vast, intimidating, so-called ‘tombstone’ biographies of the Victorians and their early
twentieth-century successors. The most famous examples are probably the biography
of Disraeli by the distinguished Times journalists, William Monypenny and George
190 david marquand
Buckle; the biographies of Gladstone and Cobden by the Liberal politician and man
of letters John Morley; Lady Gwendolen Cecil’s biography of her father, the great Lord
Salisbury (a much grander figure than the Salisbury who sneered at Ian Macleod);
and the biography of Joseph Chamberlain started by the famous Observer editor,
J. L. Garvin, and completed by the Tory imperialist, L. S. Amery. These were massive,
in some cases multi-volume works, enriched with copious quotations from Hansard,
from speeches outside Parliament, from letters, and (where they were available)
from diaries.
Private lives were treated very decorously, if at all. The working assumption of
the authors was that the private lives of public men were irrelevant to their public
roles. Their public lives were treated with commensurate respect, partly because the
authors shared the political attitudes of their subjects, but much more because, in
what was both a highly deferential and an intensely political culture, political activ-
ity seemed supremely worthwhile and political leadership inherently praiseworthy.
Political biography had, in fact, a celebratory as well as an explanatory function.
Biographers wrote (and were expected to write) in the spirit of Ecclesiasticus: ‘Let us
now praise famous men’. (Sometimes, praise was laid on with a trowel. ‘How delicate,
how decent is the English biography’, wrote Carlyle, ‘bless its mealy mouth’ (quoted
in Pimlott 1995: 153).)
The First World War, with its savage bloodletting, its endless succession of unsuc-
cessful offensives, its bovine military incompetence, and its shameless profiteering
and jockeying for promotion, led to a change of mood, among biographers as well
as elsewhere. In May 1918, Lytton Strachey’s iconoclastic, subversive, and best-selling
Eminent Victorians swept into the world of the tombstone biographers like a tornado
into an enclosed garden. It was not really a biography at all; it was a collection of
biographical essays, elegant, short, brilliantly written, and wonderfully funny. It was
also a manifesto, even a declaration of war. ‘The art of biography’, Strachey wrote in
the preface, had ‘fallen on evil times in England’.
Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to commemorate the dead—who
does not know them, with their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style,
their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of selection, of detachment, of
design? They are as familiar as the cortège of the undertaker, and wear the same air of
slow, funereal barbarism. One is tempted to suppose, of some of them, that they were
composed by that functionary, as the final item of his job. (Strachey 1979: 22)
Eminent Victorians was a best-seller. Unlike many best-sellers, it left an enduring
mark on the public culture. It epitomized and, at the same time, reinforced a post-war
mood of scepticism, verging on cynicism, about the pretensions of the famous, partic-
ularly if they were Victorians. The great—great men of action, above all—were inher-
ently suspect. The task of the biographer was to get behind the façade of pompous
respectability and probe the hidden weaknesses it concealed. Celebration was out,
mocking scepticism was in. Strachey’s Cambridge friend, John Maynard Keynes,
followed the same approach in his famous depiction of the leading figures at the
1919 Paris Peace Conference. Woodrow Wilson was an ‘old Presbyterian’, so stubborn
biography 191
and unimaginative that it was impossible to ‘de-bamboozle’ him once he had been
bamboozled. Clemenceau felt about France what Pericles had felt about Athens,
‘unique value in her’. He had ‘one illusion—France; and one disillusion—mankind’
(Keynes 1951: 11–31). Lloyd George, the arch-bamboozler, was a ‘syren’, a ‘goat-footed
bard’, a ‘half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted
woods of Celtic antiquity’—cynical, inconstant, and with no discernible principles
(ibid. 35).
Strachey and Keynes did not dispute the tombstone biographers’ assumption that
history revolved around individuals; famously, Keynes thought ideas (produced, of
necessity, by individuals) ruled the world. But, in another Strachey phrase, they saw
the individuals they wrote about as ‘specimens’, rescued from the distant depths of the
past, to be examined with ‘careful curiosity’ rather than admiration, or even sympathy
(Strachey 1979: 21). Theirs was biography in the spirit of the Cambridge Apostles,
among whom they were numbered; and they shared the Apostles’ disdain for the
vulgarity and crudity of public life, and their emphasis on unflinching private honesty
as a supreme good.
11.2 A New Golden Age?
.............................................................................................................................................
Strachey and Keynes had few imitators—not least because they were both superb styl-
ists, with a mastery of epigram that few could equal. Partly because of their writings,
however—and much more because of the mood these encapsulated—tombstone
biographers became an endangered species. The mammoth lives of Chamberlain and
Disraeli which had been started before 1914 continued on their stately paths after
1918, but they were exceptional. For a generation or so after the First World War,
biographers mostly wrote short.
The last forty years, however, have seen an intriguing, though only partial, return
to the biographical fashions of the nineteenth century. Increasingly, biography writ-
ing has been colonized by scholars, operating in an academic mode, most of them
professional historians, as I mentioned above, though with a small admixture of
political scientists. (Not all the scholars concerned have been professional academics,
however.) With varying degrees of success, the biographers of our day have tried
to combine rigorous scholarship with literary grace. As well as the private papers
of their subjects, they have used a wide range of archival sources, including other
private collections and the voluminous public records in the National Archives.
Wherever possible, they have also relied heavily on interviews with survivors. Unlike
their nineteenth-century predecessors they have sought to exhume their subjects’
private lives as well as their public roles. The result is a new golden age of polit-
ical (and for that matter intellectual) biography, of remarkable intellectual fertil-
ity and literary quality. Biographies are now indispensable sources for the study
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of recent political and intellectual history; and in many cases they are a pleasure
to read.
Ian Kershaw’s two volumes on Hitler; Alan Bullock’s three volumes on Ernest
Bevin; Alistair Horne’s two volumes on Harold Macmillan; John Campbell’s two
volumes on Margaret Thatcher; Roy Foster’s two volumes on Yeats; and Robert
Skidelsky’s magnificent three volumes on Keynes are all great history as well as
great biography, rivalling the old tombstone biographies of the nineteenth century in
length, but far surpassing them in insight, depth, and scholarship. Substantial single-
volume biographies—Philip Williams on Hugh Gaitskell; Robert Rhodes James on
Eden; Kenneth Morgan on James Callaghan; José Harris on Beveridge; Robert Blake
on Bonar Law and Disraeli; Simon Heffer on Enoch Powell; and V. S. Lyons on
Parnell—tell the same story. Seemingly, Disraeli has been vindicated. ‘Life with-
out theory’ has never been more popular outside the academy or more respected
within it.
Yet, on closer inspection, the latest version of ‘life without theory’ is not as new as
it seems. As Ben Pimlott has argued, today’s political biographers nearly all follow a
set of conventions—implicit, rather than explicit, in characteristic British fashion—
different from those of their tombstone predecessors in the nineteenth century, but
almost as constraining (Pimlott 1995: 149–61). For example, it has become almost de
rigueur for biographers to discuss the private lives of their subjects (and particularly
their sexual lives), even if the evidence is scanty or if the exercise reveals nothing
of value; it is not difficult to see why this convention should have taken root in
our prurient age of ‘kiss and tell’. But, to put it at its lowest, it is not self-evident
that the tacit assumptions underpinning it hold water. According to Pimlott, ‘public
and private facts clearly cannot be put in separate boxes. Real life accepts no such
partition’ (Pimlott 1995: 158). But, in truth, ‘real life’, whatever that might be, does
accept that partition, and it is a symptom of morbidity when it ceases to do so.
The sexual life of my dentist is a matter of complete indifference to me. All I want
from him is to care properly for my teeth. In times gone by the sexual lives of Prime
Ministers were viewed with comparable indifference. Everyone in the political world
knew that Lloyd George’s private secretary was also his lover, but no one lost sleep
over it, and the fact was not revealed in the public prints. (To be sure, open scandal in
the divorce courts could, and sometimes did, destroy public figures: Charles Stewart
Parnell, the leader of the Irish Home Rule party, and Sir Charles Dilke, the radical
Liberal, are obvious examples. But the political world was extraordinarily good at
avoiding open scandal.) The working assumption of today’s biographers seems to
be that our knowledge of Lloyd George’s sexual proclivities yields a fuller or deeper
or somehow more valid understanding of his political life than was available to the
public of his day, but no one has explained why this should be so. Or take the case
of Ernest Bevin. Bullock’s magisterial biography has virtually nothing to say about
Bevin’s private life, presumably because he could find no evidence about it. Suppose
someone discovers that Bevin was, in fact, having an affair with one of his secretaries.
The discovery would add to the gaiety of nations, but would it really make Bevin’s
foreign policy more comprehensible?
biography 193
This leads on to a wider point. Today, almost all biographers are happy to acknowl-
edge errors of judgement on their subjects’ part, and some are also prepared to
acknowledge flaws of character. But though the celebratory mode of the nineteenth
century has died out, its modern successor is essentially exculpatory. (Biographies
of monsters like Hitler and Stalin are, of course, exceptions.) All too often, today’s
biographers behave rather like defence counsels in an imaginary court of history,
deftly admitting their client’s faults in order to disarm hostile criticism, and abusing
the plaintiff ’s attorneys whenever they get the chance to do so. It is not difficult
to see why. Biography writing is an art, not a science; it depends on feeling and
intuition as well as on scholarship and analytical skill. Biographers become intimate
with their subjects, particularly if the biography is substantial and the trail of paper
and interviews long. Often the biographer knows more about the subject than did
any single contemporary. Of course, intimacy does not necessarily breed affection; in
principle, at least, it might breed contempt or even hatred. Intimacy and indifference,
however, are mutually incompatible.
After prolonged immersion in the sayings and doings of another person, even
if the person concerned is dead, an emotional relationship of some kind is almost
inevitable, and it is usually one of sympathy, even if not of affection or admiration.
If the subject has been subject to attack—and few have not—the sympathetic biogra-
pher is apt to slide into the role of partisan defender, almost without realizing what
is happening. By the same token, necessary and healthy sympathy for the subject
often breeds unnecessary and unhealthy hostility towards the subject’s rivals and
enemies. Roy Jenkins’s scrupulously fair-minded biography of Asquith was marred,
he conceded himself, by unfair denigration of Lloyd George (private information);
I now think that my own biography of Ramsay MacDonald did not do justice to
Arthur Henderson, MacDonald’s chief adversary in the battle over spending cuts that
destroyed the second Labour government.
To use a hackneyed, but indispensable comparison, biographers are like portrait
painters. They have to try to uncover the soul of the sitter—knowing, of course,
that they can never do so completely. They have to do their best to see the world
through their subjects’ eyes. In some measure, at least, they have to feel what their
subjects felt, or at least convince the reader that they have done so. This means that
their approach to the transactions in which their subjects were involved is bound to
differ from the straightforward historian’s or social scientist’s approach. Their task
is not primarily to offer an ‘objective’ analysis and explanation of what happened. It
is to explain—subjectively, as it were—how and why their subjects came to act and
feel as they did. Of course, good biographers perform both tasks, at least to some
degree. The third volume of Robert Skidelsky’s biography of Keynes contains the best
accounts I know, both of the long and complex negotiations that led to the Bretton
Woods agreement in 1944, and of the shorter and less happy negotiations over the
American Loan to Britain in 1945. But inevitably (and rightly) the focus is on Keynes.
Skidelsky throws a massive flood of light on these tangled episodes, but his purpose
is to show the reader (and ‘show’ is the right word, not ‘tell’) what Keynes thought
and did. Biographies may, and often do, help us to unravel complex past events. But
194 david marquand
that is a bonus. The spotlight is trained on one single actor, who may not be the most
important one from the historian’s or political scientist’s point of view. As the old saw
had it, biography is, in the end, ‘about chaps’—and nowadays, to some degree, about
chapesses. Everything else is secondary.
11.3 The Smell of Blood
.............................................................................................................................................
By a fortunate paradox, therein lies biography’s chief contribution to political under-
standing. A focus on individual ‘chaps’ helps to bring political transactions to life,
in a way that more ‘scientific’ approaches cannot do. A good biographer helps us to
smell the blood on the floor in moments of crisis, and to feel the swirling emotions
that crisis generates, and is generated by. Reading Blake’s biography, we gasp at
the breathtaking chutzpah with which Disraeli voiced the resentment and sense of
betrayal of the Tory country gentleman during the battles over the repeal of the
Corn Laws in 1846, destroying the Conservative Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel,
in the process, and transforming himself from marginal political gadfly into front-
rank politician. F. S. L. Lyons paints an unforgettable picture of the turbulent, self-
destructive emotions that led Parnell into a doomed battle with a majority of the
Irish Home Rule party after the revelation of his adultery with Kitty O’Shea, and
of the terrible series of meetings in a House of Commons committee room where
the Irish party tore itself to pieces. Ben Pimlott tears off the mask of stentorian self-
confidence that concealed Dalton’s inner insecurities from the world (and perhaps
from himself), and in doing so helps us to understand why, despite great apparent
qualifications for the post, his Chancellorship of the Exchequer was a story of political
weakness, wishful thinking, and ultimate self-destruction.
Straightforward historians, and still more straightforward political scientists, are
apt to concentrate too much on structure and not enough on agency. When they
do focus on agency, they are apt to overemphasize the role of reason, logic, and
calculation and to underemphasize the role of feeling. This is not to say that rational
calculation plays no part in political life; patently, it plays a large part. But no one
who hopes to understand political decision-making should forget Hume’s famous
dictum that reason is the slave of the passions. In times of crisis or perceived crisis,
that slavery is particularly prominent. Then, above all, the light of reason burns low.
Particularly when the decision is difficult or in some way critical, above all when it
has existential significance for those involved (as important political decisions nearly
always do), rational calculation—careful assessment of the odds, balancing the pros
and cons—can only take the decision-maker so far. At the moment of truth, when
the die has to be cast, the decision-maker must jump more or less blindly into the
unknown, and that final jump can rarely be explained in purely rational terms. The
sudden leap from cogitation to decision, in conditions of uncertainty and peril, is, in
biography 195
essence, a leap of faith which has more in common with a religious experience than
with the petty transactions of day-to-day politics.
Afterwards, reason may take over again; but it does so post facto. By then Hume’s
‘passions’ have prevailed and the balance of forces which rational calculation has
to reckon with has changed for good or ill. Retrospectively, observers are apt to
say that the decision-maker was always likely to take the decision she actually took,
but that is wisdom after the event. In his history of twentieth-century France, Rod
Kedward writes that resistance to the German occupation and the Vichy regime in the
unoccupied zone was often a ‘reflex response. A haphazard encounter was frequently
the defining moment.’ And he adds that there was ‘no photo-fit resister, no ideal type,
no model’; only biographies could ‘do justice to the individuals involved’ (Kedward
2005: 274–82).
Much the same applies, albeit in a different way, to the decisions of political life.
One example is Ramsay MacDonald’s handling of the financial and political crisis
of August 1931. His minority Labour government was deadlocked over spending cuts
to halt an accelerating run on sterling. After two weeks of havering, it was clear that
it would have to resign. All the evidence suggests that MacDonald’s initial reaction
was to resign with it, but that, at the urging of the King, he changed his mind at
the last moment, and decided to form a National Government instead. The results
included a crushing Labour defeat at the subsequent general election, and almost
a decade of Conservative hegemony. Many Labour people jumped to the conclusion
that MacDonald had planned all along to betray his party. Many more came to believe
that his conduct stemmed from deep-seated weaknesses of character and/or a long-
standing lack of socialist faith.
But this was hindsight; and, as so often, hindsight was delusive. The truth is that
MacDonald was torn. He faced in one direction at one moment, and in the opposite
direction at another. Almost certainly he did not know what he was going to do
until shortly before he did it. And by the same token, the King’s urging—though
not haphazard in any normal sense—played a similar role to that of the ‘haphazard
encounters’ that Kedward describes in his paragraphs on the French resistance. We
cannot know what went through MacDonald’s mind at the crucial moment, but it is
hard to believe that rational calculation played much part in it. After he made his leap
of faith, events swept him and the Labour Party on, towards a split that no one had
wanted or expected at the beginning. Not surprisingly, Labour people looking back at
the whole episode once the split had taken place were apt to assume that the confused
prelude, the leap of decision, and the bitter aftermath formed a consistent pattern.
But consistency was imposed after the event.
There are plenty of other examples. The Falklands War of 1982 was the making of
Margaret Thatcher. Before the war she had been one of the most unpopular Prime
Ministers in recent British history, but it transformed her into an icon of reborn
patriotic pride. Yet before Argentina seized the Falkland Islands in 1982 she had shown
no interest in them, and had done nothing to convince the Argentine government that
Britain would use force to prevent them from falling under Argentine rule. On the
eve of the Argentine invasion it looked as if Britain would be forced to acquiesce: the
196 david marquand
military chiefs thought it impossible to retake the islands by force, and the Foreign
Office wanted to lower the temperature. Then came a haphazard encounter, in the
shape of the unscheduled arrival of the First Sea Lord, Sir Henry Leach, at a meeting
in Mrs Thatcher’s room in the House of Commons. Leach insisted that the navy could
assemble a task force capable of recapturing the islands if the government had the
necessary political will. Thatcher was persuaded; took her leap into the unknown;
made a belligerent Commons speech announcing it; and within days the first ele-
ments of a British task force were under way. It was an extraordinary gamble. Rational
calculation would have counselled against it, but passion prevailed. Thereafter, events
swept on; and Thatcher won the 1983 election with a crushing majority.
Blair’s decision to fight alongside the Americans in the Iraq War was also a gamble,
as subsequent events have shown. We do not know when he made his leap, and there
is no evidence of a decisive haphazard encounter. Arguably, the moment of truth
came long before the war—conceivably in his Chicago speech of April 1999 when he
singled out Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic as uniquely evil men; perhaps
in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; perhaps early in 2002. But there is little doubt
that there was a moment of truth and no doubt at all that, once Blair had made his
leap into the unknown, rational calculation was subordinate to passion. Gladstone’s
decision to embrace Irish Home Rule followed a long, somewhat confused period of
ratiocination—about the Irish Question itself; about the party politics involved and,
not least, about the need, as he saw it, to deflect radical liberalism from the social
issues pushed by the rising star of the Liberal left, Joseph Chamberlain. But by the
time Gladstone took his decision, passion was in charge. A visitor to his house at
Hawarden in the winter of 1885–6 found him:
so excited when he talked about Ireland, it was quite frightening. He ended the conver-
sation by saying ‘Well it has come to this, we must give them [the Irish] a great deal or
nothing.’ And I answered with some warmth ‘then nothing.’ Upon which he pushed back
his chair with his eyes glaring at me like a cat’s, he called to his wife that it was time to
go out. (Quoted in Shannon 1999: 392)
Once again, events then swept on. Gladstone introduced his Home Rule Bill with one
of the most powerful speeches ever heard in the House of Commons. The Liberal
Party was hopelessly split; the Home Rule Bill was lost; and the broadly liberal
hegemony which had prevailed for most of the time since 1832 Reform Act gave way
to a twenty-year period of Conservative hegemony.
11.4 Friends and Enemies?
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In all this there is more than a hint of Carl Schmitt’s famous insight that the crucial
political relationship is that of ‘friend’ to ‘enemy’, indeed that politics is about the
identification of friends and enemies (Schmitt 1996). In all the examples I have cited,
biography 197
the leap into the unknown was closely associated with that process—a process which
often became one of unmasking false friends as real enemies. For Ramsay MacDonald
in August 1931, the enemy was the TUC, whose indifference to the possible conse-
quences of the sterling crisis and refusal to recognize that spending cuts were needed
to overcome it stiffened his determination to fight for the cuts, and may have helped
to make him receptive to the King’s urgings. For Thatcher, the chief enemy was,
of course, the Argentine regime, but lesser enemies included the appeasers in the
Foreign Office and the faint-hearts in the Defence Department. For Blair, the enemy
was Saddam Hussein, who became the local, Middle Eastern incarnation of the forces
of darkness at work in the world. For Gladstone, the enemies included the selfish
and ignoble upper classes, the mean and partisan Conservatives who refused to see
that it was their duty to cooperate in righting Ireland’s historic wrongs, and, as the
Liberal split intensified, the anti-Home Rule rebels in his own ranks who refused to
follow him in what became a crusade for political righteousness. In all these cases, the
enemies were not just personally obnoxious; once the leap of decision was made, and
the adrenaline (aka the passions) started to flow, the struggle against them took on
the exalted character of a battle of right against wrong.
There is no reason to think that biographers are intrinsically better at disentan-
gling passions from reason, or at analysing the effects of Schmitt’s friend–enemy
distinction, than anyone else. Nor do they have some special insight into the nature
and significance of the passions involved, or the mysterious processes through which
friends and enemies are identified, in any particular case. But because it focuses
on particular individuals at particular moments, biography as a genre does draw
attention to the role of non- or supra-rational factors at play in the eye of the decision-
making storm. It reminds us of the centrality of emotion in decision-making; and
it helps us to understand what happens when decisions are taken. In doing so, it
underlines the role of contingency in political life, and reminds us that the accidents
of personality must never be left out of the account.
11.5 Biography and Charisma
.............................................................................................................................................
Biography also helps to sensitize us to the crucial role that leadership, and particularly
charismatic leadership, plays in political life. Weber, the inventor of the notion,
famously believed that charismatic authority was, as he put it, ‘outside the realm of
everyday routine and the profane sphere’. As such it was utterly different both from
traditional and from rational-bureaucratic authority. Where traditional authority
was bound by precedents handed down from the past, and bureaucratic authority
by ‘intellectually analysable rules’, charismatic authority repudiated the past and was
inherently irrational. It was, in fact, ‘a specifically revolutionary force’. While it lasted,
charismatic authority swept all before it, by virtue of the ‘devotion and trust’ that the
198 david marquand
leader inspired in his followers. But these lasted only so long as the followers believed
in his ‘charismatic inspiration’ (Weber 1964: 358–63).
Charismatic leadership in the full Weberian sense is rare in democratic regimes;
indeed, it is hard to see how it could be squared with democratic norms. But De
Gaulle came close to it in the later stages of the Second World War and during
and immediately after the fall of the Fourth Republic. So did Churchill in the ter-
rible, magnificent summer of 1940; and so did Franklin Roosevelt in the depths of
the Depression. Gladstone had more than a touch of the charismatic leader about
him, particularly in his philippics against the so-called ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ in the
1870s, and in his campaign for Irish Home Rule after his conversion to that cause
in 1886. In both cases he believed—in true charismatic fashion—that he had been
‘called’ by a higher power to eschew the retirement he thought he longed for, and
to fight for a righteous cause that only he could champion effectively. And in both
cases his extraordinary combination of self-belief, forensic force, and rhetorical power
enabled him to communicate with his followers on a plane beyond mere quotidian
reason. According to H. C. G. Matthew, the editor of Gladstone’s diaries, whose intro-
ductions to successive volumes are a tour de force of biographical writing, a typical
Gladstone speech to a Liberal audience ‘was both a rationalistic transfer of opinion
and the focal point of an emotional rally’; Gladstone, he added, was a ‘mesmeric
figure’ (Matthew 1995: 298–9).
During the First World War, when he became the chief standard-bearer of the
tiny and much-vilified anti-war camp, Ramsay McDonald also drew his authority
from personal charisma rather than from bureaucratic or traditional sources. He
had resigned from the chairmanship of the Labour Party when the war broke out,
in protest against its decision to vote for war credits. He had no bureaucratic support,
and cut himself off from the traditional power centres both of the country and of the
Labour movement. But he was sustained by the devotion of a tiny band of disciples
for whom he was a heroic figure. Listening to a MacDonald speech, wrote one of
them later, ‘we trembled and exulted’ (quoted in Marquand 1977: 244). Lloyd George,
with his blithe indifference to precedent and his contempt for official forms, was a
classic case of a charismatic leader in democratic clothes, certainly in the last two
years of the First World War and to some extent in the early years of his peacetime
Coalition.
Weber’s insights still resonate. Like all British Prime Ministers, Margaret Thatcher
and Tony Blair both enjoyed a degree of Weber’s traditional authority and also of
its bureaucratic counterpart. They controlled a large government machine, operating
on classic bureaucratic lines, and they stood at the apex of a traditional state whose
roots lay deep in the past. But unlike all other post-war Prime Ministers their hold
on their followers and their fellow citizens also derived, in large part, from a form
of Weberian charismatic authority, supra-rational if not exactly irrational, and in
certain senses, at least, revolutionary. Both defied convention; both spurned ‘intel-
lectually analysable’ rules of procedure and conduct; both sought to cut through
the established structures of party and bureaucracy to make direct contact with a
(largely imaginary) ‘people’. Above all, both had a magic about them which none
biography 199
of their colleagues could equal, and which won them the ‘devotion and trust’ that
Weber saw as one of the chief signs of charismatic authority. In two respects, above
all, they fitted the Weberian charismatic model remarkably well. Though they could
command conventional bureaucratic support from the official machine, they made
no secret of their disdain for the ordinary bureaucracy, and depended far more on
close-knit groups of personal followers. And both fell when their charisma wore out.
Thatcher was brutally deposed in extraordinarily painful circumstances that left a
gaping wound in the Conservative Party that lasted for a decade and a half. Blair
avoided her fate, but when he told his 2006 party conference, through gritted teeth,
that that would be his last conference speech as leader, everyone knew that he had
jumped only to avoid being pushed.
There may be a lesson here, which conventional commentators have been slow
to draw. Thatcher and Blair held office for a total of twenty-one years out of the
twenty-eight since Thatcher first crossed the threshold of No. 10 Downing Street.
The reign of John Major, one of the least charismatic Prime Ministers of modern
times, was not only comparatively short, it was also miserable and chaotic. In quieter
times he might have done well, but he was incapable of navigating the turbulent
currents of a rapidly changing society in a globalizing world. This suggests that, in
times of confusion, when party loyalties are fluid and party identities evanescent,
when established authority of all kinds is suspect, and when the traditional bonds
of social class are increasingly fragmented, leadership has to be charismatic, at least
in some degree, if it is to succeed. And that, in turn, suggests that we are likely to
experience more charismatic leadership in future than we did in the comparatively
stable years after 1945.
Charismatic leadership is—or at least ought to be—fertile soil for political biog-
raphers. It is, by definition, individual. Charismatic leaders all have something in
common, but no two charismatic leaders are exactly alike. The sources of their
charisma and the mysterious, supra-rational ties that bind their followers to them
are individual too. Here, above all, the empathy, intuitions, and imagination of good
political biographers could helpfully redress the balance of conventional political
science.
References
Crewe, I., and King, A. 1995. SDP: The Birth, Life and Death of the Social Democratic Party.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kedward, R. 2005. La Vie en bleu: France and the French since 1900. London: Allen Lane,
Penguin.
Lacouture, J. 1977. Léon Blum. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
1990–1. Charles de Gaulle (English translation), 2 vols. London: Collins Harvill.
Marquand, D. 1977. Ramsay MacDonald. London: Jonathan Cape.
Marx, K. 1951. ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’. In K. Marx and F. Engels,
Selected Works, vol. i. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
200 david marquand
Mehring, F. 2003. Karl Marx: The Story of his Life. London: Routledge.
Pimlott, B. 1995. Frustrate their Knavish Tricks: Writings on Biography, History and Politics.
London: HarperCollins.
Roskill, S. 1970–4. Hankey: Man of Secrets, 3 vols. London: Collins.
Schmitt, C. 1996. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shannon, R. 1999. Gladstone: Heroic Minister, 1865–1898, London: Allen Lane, Penguin.
Strachey, L. 1979. Eminent Victorians. London: Chatto and Windus.
Weber, M. 1964. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. T. Parsons. New York:
Free Press.
c h a p t e r 12
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TH E N OVE L
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bernard crick
Little has been written in Britain on the relationship between literary culture and
the study of politics. Beyond glancing quotations (E. M. Forster’s ‘only connect’ is
the favourite), too little use of is made of literary sources even in analytical let alone
empirical studies. But the novel can both stimulate the imagination (consider Popper
on how hypotheses are imaginative leaps beyond existing theories) and broaden the
contexts of inquiries and speculations.
The matter is complex and could range wider. This writer once imagined that if one
set a class of good students an essay on ‘Literature and Politics’ at least a dozen themes
might follow—among them: the antipathy of the two concepts; writers and political
commitment; the influence of politics on writers and vice versa; censorship and free
expression; what constitutes good and bad political writing (vide Orwell, ‘Above all I
wanted to make political writing into an art’); and Lukacs’s argument that the novel
exemplifies bourgeois elitism. Today this point might be put in populist, postmodern
mode—anything goes if enough people like it. But it is at least a half-truth. The novel
was, indeed, a novel institution of bourgeois society; but originally, of course—as in
Cervantes, Defoe, Rousseau, and Rowlandson—a critique of aristocratic values.
12.1 Opening Windows: Theorizing
.............................................................................................................................................
Stefan Collini’s subtly titled Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain can point us in that
direction—as Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature at Cambridge.
Whether academics of all kinds are also intellectuals largely depends on their liter-
ary culture, in which the novel is still salient despite the recent growth, mainly in
202 bernard crick
populist mode, of studies of political film and theatre. But while there are many dual
honours courses in Politics and English, they are more often arms-length alliances
than integration. Few dual honours courses have a Collini-like intellectual intelligence
behind them, or the old idea (not to be rejected as, indeed, elitist) of a liberal
education.
Those who in an Arendtian sense think (Arendt 1958) usually grow up learning
about the wide world through novels: the world is people and places, it is experiences
(like sex; nothing like sex—as a young boy I read bad novels to try to find out about
sex); and novels rehearse moral, social, and political dilemmas. If popular behaviour
and consciousness is influenced by the arts at all, most directly it is by cinema and
television. The serious novel is the preserve of intellectuals—those who try with an
independent integrity to understand, preserve, or change a culture, conscious of the
interplay between tradition, creativity, and modernity. In this dialectic all complex
novels mirror or influence to some extent the context of political beliefs, behaviour,
and morality. This is rarely so with popular novels and thrillers which simply use
unreflectively a political background for a story-line, just as they might sport or travel,
however well painted such backcloths—inside No. 10 or the Chief Whip’s office. Our
political science can do that better.
Novels of greater complexity can both broaden the imagination of political scien-
tists and raise for the reader many of the ethical dilemmas that political philosophers
discuss so well—among themselves, with few exceptions (Crick 2000). Novels can
more easily raise dilemmas or themes which are often neglected in political studies.
For one thing, the novel does not respect disciplinary borders. One could look, for
instance, at Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) as part of political history, economic history,
the sociology of political movements, or in philosophy as the ethics of divided loy-
alties between persons and causes. Novels, however, have to be taken as a whole,
bringing all these things together, before one can usefully use them for disciplinary
understanding. But a relevant quotation in a Politics lecture or book can often
stimulate the listener’s or reader’s imagination. This small pedagogic point can be
as fruitful as formal theoretical discussions. Political insights will occur in novels that
are not themselves primarily political.
This chapter arbitrarily limits itself to British and Irish novels in the last century. A
transatlantic or a Commonwealth canvas would demand a book not a mere chapter.
But a chapter can make the case that reading novels should be part of the mentality of
the student of politics; and then to point to some instances which have both literary
merit and political interest. I make this necessary if parochial limitation fully aware
that many American novels, such as those by Philip Roth or John Updike, or those of
the South African J. M. Coetzee, are often more rich and explicit carriers of social and
political dilemmas than are typically found in the English novel. Many Irish, Scottish,
and novels by new Britons tend to be more political. Illustrations, however, are but
illustrations, stimulants to thought about wider issues, not professing impossibly
full knowledge of a field nor settling rather than opening up dilemmas inherent to
political life.
An obituary by Jonathan Bate (2007) of the literary critic Tony Nuttall said that he
was ‘receptive to new ways of thinking but always committed to a classically humanist
the novel 203
view of literature as a means of helping thoughtful people to make sense of reality’.
Part of reality is always political. But making sense of it is not always found in the self-
consciously ‘political novel’, those which are deliberately persuasive and polemical—
E. M. Forster’s ‘world of telegrams and anger’. Often the contrary is the case. Like
‘political theatre’, most self-consciously political novels distort and simplify. For them,
protagonists solve big problems or if defeated then defeat is a personal tragedy with
‘the system’ to blame; dilemmas vanish and painful compromises between values and
interests are never allowed to be a moral virtue—as in Kant’s ethics of practical reason.
The ‘crooked timber of humanity’ is hammered straight. J. A. Morris, a professor of
English, in his Writers and Politics in Modern Britain, gave far more value to books
that would engage, challenge, or just interest political and moral philosophers than to
what he nicely called the ‘hardcore political novels’ supposed to be his remit as editor
of a comparative series on ‘the political novel’. Rather, he examined politics in the
novel or in the poem. An incidental minor theme or political incident in any complex
work of art can often be more thought provoking than the more famous clamour of,
say, propagandizing for socialism or, nowadays, against environmental despoliation.
Morris invoked Sartre’s argument that a novelist must have an implicit commitment
to freedom to be able to empathize with and to portray plausibly social and personal
diversities. Echoing Sartre he asked, ‘where is the great totalitarian novel?’ (Sartre
1948). ‘Fine lyric poetry’, however, writes Morris, has come ‘from enemies of freedom,
like Ezra Pound or Stefan George’, or from writers hostile to civil humanism, like
T. S. Eliot or W. B. Yeats in some of his moods or modes (Morris 1977: 30–42).
I wrote in a review of the series:
. . . the novel is a unique carrier of ideas of freedom and of a republican or political cul-
ture. If political philosophy in its academic mode remains esoteric, even to the educated
reader and citizen, and has lost its public role, the novel often carries this tradition of
speculation about types of political justice and the nature and limits of freedom. Where
else can one look to for graphic portrayals of moral dilemmas in general and of conflicts
of ethical principle and political prudence, or of the individual and conscience against
the state? (Crick 1980)
But that is perhaps only half the point, even if one that political theorists rarely
acknowledge explicitly. For among Collini’s or Berlin’s ‘general intellectuals’ or Mor-
ris’s ‘educated readers’ the dilemmas of political philosophy may only be found in the
novel. The other half-point is that reading novels may stimulate the imagination of
both political theorists and political scientists and lead them into broader contexts of
society and human motivations.
12.2 Two Novelists Theorize
.............................................................................................................................................
Susan Sontag once put the same point more generally: ‘A novelist, then, is someone
who takes you on a journey. Through space. Through time. A novelist leads the reader
204 bernard crick
over a gap, makes something go where it was not’. She pointed to what the non-stop
diet of snippets of stories in the media can do to us:
By presenting us with a limitless number of nonstop stories, the narratives that the
media relate—the consumption of which has so dramatically cut into the time the
educated public once devoted to reading—offer a lesson in amorality and detachment
that is antithetical to the one embodied by the enterprise of the novel.
In storytelling as practiced by the novelist, there is always an ethical component.
This ethical component is not the truth, as opposed to the falsity of the chronicle.
It is the model of completeness, of felt intensity, of enlightenment supplied by the
story, and its resolution—which is the opposite of the model of obtuseness, of non-
understanding, of passive dismay, and the consequent numbing of feeling, offered by
our media disseminated glut of unending stories. (Sontag 2007: 33)
But ‘completeness’ to her is not just ‘felt intensity’. Enlightenment must take place in a
social context that is in itself part of the ethical dilemmas of the characters in a novel.
Milan Kundera has shown how the two main storylines in what he sees as Tolstoy’s
greatest novel, Anna Karenina, Anna’s adultery and Levin’s attaining spiritual and
personal tranquility, exist in an ever-present but lightly stressed political background
which moves to the fore after her suicide. Vronsky in despair goes off to seek death in
the war against the Turks while Levin mocks the pan-Slav hysteria of the volunteers
marching off to war. ‘Tolstoy’, says Kundera, ‘has obeyed the fundamental propensity
of the art of the novel. For narration as it exists since the dawn of time became
the novel when the author was no longer content with a mere “story” but opened
windows onto the world that stretched all around’ (Kundera 2007).
12.3 Themes and Books for
the Curricula
.............................................................................................................................................
Having stated a case to read complex novels to see ‘the world . . . stretched all around’,
let me now suggest some themes and associated novels particularly supportive of
political studies. Many of the novels will already be ‘on the list’ in ‘Politics and the
Novel’ options or in joint ‘Politics and Literature’ courses, now far more common
than a generation ago. But simply to hop from one book to another, like in old-
fashioned History of Political Thought courses, is unlikely to add much to under-
standing unless tied to themes.
12.3.1 The First World War
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the incidence of the First World War
had a more lasting effect on both literary imagination and popular memory than
the novel 205
did the even more world-shaking Second World War (Fuselli 1977; Hynes 1990). My
mother and her generation, young adults in the First World War, though they mostly
‘did their bit’ in 1939–45, had no doubt which was the war. The cult of the dead
appeared everywhere entre deux guerres: lists of the dead in stone, new memorial
halls, limbless men in wheelchairs on the touchlines of football matches; and the
traffic did stop at 11 a.m. each Armistice Day. My mother’s cousin, Primrose League and
Earl Hague poppy day organizer, saw the Second World War as profaning the memory
of ‘the Glorious Dead’. She ignored it, so did my father—old soldier and Chamberlain
pacifist.
Many are surprised that most of today’s English novelists writing about war (unlike
American novelists) go back to 1914 not 1939, say Pat Barker in her masterly trilogy
Regeneration (1991–5) and Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong (1994) (a title catching the irony
of love of nature even amid the slaughter of the Somme). Perhaps this disjunction
between the two World Wars is because novelists who are drawn to consider extreme
conditions—how men could habituate themselves under command in abnegation of
any free will to the slaughter and suffering of the trenches—these novelists find the
horror of seemingly complete irrationality in the disproportion between the causes
and motivations of the two wars. The consequences of defeat in 1914–18 would have
been less when compared with facing Nazism, and yet ‘the war’ for British novelists
has more often referred to the conflict that began in 1914. No major British novels
describe the Second World War or the Holocaust. William Golding’s experience of
war may have given his novels a far more intense awareness of evil than even Catholics
like Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Muriel Spark. But one does not have to be
a Christian, only to have lived in the last century, to say that the myth of ‘the fallen
state of man’ has descriptive power lacking in liberal theories and assumptions of
progress. Perhaps only the very closing section of Ian McEwen’s Atonement (2001), on
the shambles of the retreat to Dunkirk and the meaningless contingency of death in
war, comes near to the intensity of those novels set in the First World War that force
us to think about the limitations of humanity.
Ford Madox Ford survived the trenches to write the four books of Parade’s End
(1924–8), one of the acknowledged masterpieces of the twentieth-century novel in
English in both content and technique. 1 The content both of characters and contin-
gent events has a Tolstoyian depth and sweep. And the technique was innovative, for
while he uses the authorial voice, he does so sparingly; most of the narrative is carried
by fragmentary colloquial dialogue of misunderstanding between people of different
classes and assumptions. His two main characters—Christopher Tiejens, Tory of
Tories, and Valentine Wannop the suffragette (‘Miss Wannop had not met a Cam-
bridge Tory man before’)—are half the time only half-listening to the other, thinking
of something else, and even when only half-listening often misunderstanding. He
accurately reproduces the oral experience of overheard speech. Yet from scraps of
seemingly inconsequential talk, banalities, and English understatement can come
1
Malcolm Bradbury calls it ‘the central modern novel of the 1920s’, Anthony Burgess ‘the finest novel
about the First World War’, and Samuel Hynes ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’.
Quoted by Max Saunder (1982: xiv).
206 bernard crick
depth-charges exploding half-hidden psychological and political crises (as Harold
Pinter was to do in his plays). We get three narratives: the Tory ultra-individualist
(say Tory anarchist) hating but enduring the vulgarity and harshness of a society
growingly dominated by money values and compulsive obsessions with ‘getting on’;
Miss Wannop’s dislike of his principles but growing respect for his integrity and
tolerance; and what happens when Tiejens joins the army as a field officer in the
trenches, proudly refusing to use wealth and connections to join ‘Staff ’. Ford Madox
Ford had himself done time in the trenches and been invalided out with shell-shock
in 1917.
So here is a novel testifying realistically and poignantly to the tragedy and chaos
of war, not the heroism and glory, as did the soldier poets of immortal memory—
Owen, Blunden, Sassoon, Gurney, Edward Thomas, Reid, and Rosenberg. Tiejens can
inwardly detest most people’s manners and ambitions but be outwardly tolerant, even
punctiliously helpful to unwanted people, because he is a complete relativist. I called
Michael Oakeshott a ‘Tory anarchist’ some years before meeting Christopher Tiejens.
Through the confused perceptions and eccentric behaviour of Tiejens, the novelist
shows Edwardian England and the cult of the gentleman being slowly disorientated
and then dismembered by the war.
Pat Barker, in her Regeneration trilogy, owes something to Parade’s End. She herself
says of her trilogy that it was ‘trying to tell about parts of the war that don’t get
into the official record’. One of those parts is the perspective of northern working-
class women, so Sarah Lumb and her friends; and another is of her boyfriend,
Billie Prior, who comes up from the ranks, uneasily and unhappily, to be an officer.
Barker sets down empathetically the thoughts and reactions to war of the semi-
articulate and the unreflective. Another neglect in the official record, neglected until
recently, was madness (Barham 2004). Some soldiers returned did not return, others
returned deranged. The trilogy deals in fictional form with the real William Rivers,
the anthropologist and early medical psychiatrist: his anguish at using his new skills
at Craiglockhart hospital for officers with ‘shell-shock’ to get them back into the
firing line and probable violent death. Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, and William
Owen mix with fictional patients including Billie Prior. Barker handles this ‘factoid’
form with far greater care for historical truth than so many film and television bio-
pics. She even set a little fashion for other ‘well-researched’ novels by acknowledging
sources and advisers (as Ian McEwen in Saturday thanks a neuro-surgeon). Political
philosophers and students of public policy now encounter professionals in medical
ethics. Saturday may prepare for such encounters.
The savagery and despair of war appears most strongly in two of the seven obsessive
Chronicle series—The Wet Flanders Plain (1929) and The Patriot’s Progress (1930)—of
a largely forgotten solitary, Henry Williamson (1895–1977). He is forgotten except as
the author of the ever-popular Tarka the Otter, and not as the naive hero-worshipper
of Hitler and Mosley Blackshirt. He had actually taken part in the legendary, sponta-
neous Christmas truce of 1914, which agonized him to think what could have followed
from it but didn’t. Perhaps these imaginings pushed him to political extremes and
made him expert and knowing as a portrayer of extremes.
the novel 207
12.3.2 Nostalgia and Time: Town and Country
Through nearly all the Great War novels and poetry, the obverse occurs of the steel
and mud hell of the trenches: images of the green and pleasant land of the English
countryside. The British, the English markedly, have an extraordinary love of the
countryside, the background of so many novels in the vein of Thomas Hardy’s
Wessex, let alone the utopianism of William Morris’s News from Nowhere where
the Upper Thames becomes the New Jerusalem. The belief that the countryside was
‘the real England’ has long had political implications. The aristocracy and the well-
off commercial and professional classes had both a town house and a place in the
country. Edinburgh’s New Town was an exception. In the early 1900s the garden
suburb was invented: well-spaced houses built with purely ornamental gardens and
restrictions on further and different development. Even where there were no controls,
the inter-war semi-detached had its own front and back garden, even amid ribbon
development. The urban terrace had gone. Students of public administration usually
take for granted this strange phenomenon, almost unknown elsewhere, which was
plainly not simply a response to new technologies like the suburban railways and the
motor car, but rather an emotional rejection, from a deep-rooted national mindset,
of the more rational building style, of the urban terrace. William Morris with the
Red House was not wholly to blame. His neo-medievalism was itself a reaction to
the downside of Britain’s great and leading industrial revolution. When Blair in 1997
called for modernization there was a widespread ambivalence about the term itself,
unnoticed by him and almost inexplicable if one was not steeped in English novels.
The ideal of gentlemanly conduct and love of the countryside went hand in glove. But
Machiavelli had been serious in a completely contrary belief: that the countryside was
the haunt of the useless gentiluomini who hated the republicanism of civic culture.
The campagna was the haunt of superstition. Most political theorists today have lost
these thoughts. Only the environmentalists take them up as if new.
English pastoralism was not necessarily political Conservatism, even though the
oeuvre of Shropshire novels by Mary Webb (1881–1927) only became famous when,
just after her death, Stanley Baldwin praised her as ‘a neglected genius’. Hampstead
Garden Suburb, Letchworth, and Bourneville were built by and for men and women
of progressive principles, usually political Liberals. Both D. H. Lawrence in his early
novels and Orwell in Coming up for Air (1939) had radicalism in their heads with
progress and emancipation from poverty to be gained via the city, the workshop,
and science; but in their hearts was nostalgia for the image of an ever ‘unspoiled
countryside’. Lawrence’s way was to turn his back on anything urban and escape to
the hills of Tuscany and then the Mexican desert. But to Orwell the good life was to be
found in alternation between town and countryside—‘town and country’ even before
post-war Town and Country Planning and the greenbelt. ‘Winston Smith’ imagined
a ‘Golden country . . . A landscape I’ve seen somewhere in a dream.’ Orwell’s friend
Cyril Connolly called him ‘a revolutionary in love with the nineteen-hundreds’. But
even the urbane Connolly habitually lugged his fat frame down to country house
weekends. That was the social round of bucolic nostalgia of the upper-middle and
208 bernard crick
the professional classes; and for the others there was the weekend family drive in
the Morris, Ford, or Austin, to the seaside, the South Downs, the Pennines, or the
Trossachs. And for the absolutely others this was done en masse in tight formation on
bicycles. After all the nastiness in novels about the city (say George Gissing’s New Grub
Street), country life finally reconciles differences of class as in E. M. Forster’s Howard’s
End. Popular novelists still commonly set their amatory plots in rural settings, what
they and their readers think to be the real England. Stella Gibbon’s Cold Comfort
Farm brilliantly sent up such literature—but with a teasing affection. (The film made
us even possessive or preservationist, not disowning, towards the Starkadders). And
bodices don’t get ripped in sordid city bed-sits—that was for crime, soft-porn novels,
and Brighton Rock. But Stella Gibbon would not have cared to mock Laurie Lee’s
phenomenally popular Cider with Rosie (1959), nor the once almost equally popular
rural short stories of A. E. Coppard (1878–1957) such as his Adam and Eve and
Pinch Me (1921). The third book of Laurie Lee’s memoirs, recounting his time in the
International Brigade, had poor sales.
Oakeshott was right. We are more influenced by tradition than by bouts of abstract
reasoning; but there are more rival traditions than were dreamt of in his philosophy.
‘Merry England’ was a radical myth. Today second-home lovers of the countryside
are rapidly driving out the old country dwellers; myth engenders political and social
problems.
So the theme of time in the novel is worth considering. Joseph Conrad’s The Secret
Agent (1910) is a narrative of anarchism, terrorism, and personal betrayals. Students of
terrorism and political extremism will find it familiar, and his Nostromo is a profound
meditation on conflicts of loyalty. But why was the target for the secret agent’s terrorist
bomb, of all places, the Greenwich Observatory? Just as his Heart of Darkness shows
the depths of man’s cruelty to man, perhaps the targeting of the observatory may show
anarchist philosophy attempting to turn back the very key to modernity—the new
universal and standardized. It meant that every working human could then be called
to account precisely. 2 Both political theorists and sociologists have written little about
the nature of time, although like historians we are pretty free and inventive about
giving names and dates to arbitrary chronological ‘eras’. Many demand a change in
values, but no one theorizes how long it takes for values to change, if at all, through
policy and legislation. Generation novels at least give us some sense of this.
12.4 Class and the Powers that Be
.............................................................................................................................................
Once upon a time it was all Marxist or quasi-Marxist theory about social class, but
where did we actually learn, if at all, any complex sense of the nuances of habit,
2
I thank Professor Randall Stevenson for this thought, the joint editor of The Edinburgh Companion
to Twentieth Century Literatures in English (Edinburgh University Press, 2006).
the novel 209
conventions, and behaviour, beyond the class in which we grew up and the others?
From observation and experience, certainly—some of us learnt more, some of us
less; but surely also from reading novels which opened windows on other people,
other experiences, and other places. Admittedly some misunderstandings can arise
due to time-lag. We know we are in historical time when reading Dickens, George
Eliot, Trollope, or Hardy. But Soviet intellectuals in their ideological fix on time really
did think that Dickens told of our present. I once talked in 1986 to a young Black
ANC gay activist on trial who asked me to send messages of comradely support to
the British miners whom he believed were still living as D. H. Lawrence described in
Sons and Lovers, among books sent to him by Peter Tatchell. But H. G. Wells’s Kipps
(1905) and his Mr Polly (1910) had once opened the eyes of our middle and upper-
middle class to how their lower-middle class lived. His Anna Veronica may have gained
more understanding of the justice of female emancipation than what Beatrice Webb
in exasperation called ‘the screaming sisterhood’ of the platforms. Orwell, following
Wells, in his pre-war novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and Coming up for
Air (1939) saw the lower-middle class as the key factor for the future. Would they
go for Socialism or for Fascism? He was expressing a once common view of those
activists of the Labour movement, those whose only university was the free public
library.
Another missing dimension from academic study has been the most famous for-
mer stereotype of Britishness—the image and cult of the gentleman. Paternalism
indeed, but civilizing and restraining compared to the ethos of most other European
elites, albeit many came to adopt superficial aspects of that code. A good final-year
essay might ‘Compare and contrast the political background and assumptions of The
Forsyte Saga with A la recherche du temps perdu’. The cult of the gentleman was
one of manners, not of birth, and it enabled a social mobility—say Kornhauser’s
‘penetrable elites’—and provided a code that was binding even on high aristocracy.
Henry Cockburn recalled in Memorials of His Time an Edinburgh old lady remarking:
‘the Prince is no gentleman’. It was a code of mutual trust of great importance in the
history of the old Conservative Party, but seldom if ever explored in the literature.
The gentlemen paternalists began to lose control of the party, opening the door for
the Thatcherite suburban free-market arrivistes, when Macmillan assumed that he
could always accept a gentleman’s word, even at second hand. But Jack Profumo was
not a gentleman. He lied to the chief whip.
A major theme of Anthony Powell’s irony in his twelve-volume A Dance to the
Music of Time (1951–75) is the decline of gentlemanly values. John Le Carré chronicles
the declining moral code of the English political establishment, somewhat as C. P.
Snow attempted, except with ever-increasing anger. His books are far more than
spy novels. Each of his recent books have been darker than its predecessor. George
Smiley after Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) came to agonize in Smiley’s People
(1979) (though good fellows all) about using dirty tricks to entrap Karla (the old
Machiavellian, Jesuit, and republican dilemmas never go away, of whether the ends
can justify the means). But the good national purpose is still clear when facing a
totalitarian enemy. By A Perfect Spy (1986), however, Magnus Pym, MI6 and diplomat
210 bernard crick
(and son of a con man), loses this sense of purpose and ends up out of weakness and
friendliness working for both sides. He ends all his contradictions by suicide. (E. M.
Forster did say, ‘I would rather betray my country than my friend’). But by the time
of the Tailor of Panama (1996), the Constant Gardener (2001), and the ironically titled
Absolute Friends (2003) (a tale of absolute betrayal by British and American agents
in collusion), the establishment is portrayed as sleazy and corrupt. Justin Quayle, the
constant gardener (again that symbol of ‘real England’), trusts his superiors when
seeking to find who killed his wife. But they have been complicit to cover up, even
to his death, collusion with a multinational’s fatal drug trials on African guinea
pigs. Then in the Mission Song (2006) a gifted African translator is tricked by his
MI6 employers into helping destroy his mother’s own people. Presumably in case
some readers of spy stories were put off by the new dark Le Carré (his imagery is
somewhat more disturbing than John Osborne’s Archie Rice, ‘Don’t laugh too loud.
It’s a very old house’), the publishers of The Constant Gardner put on the jacket David
Martin of the FT saying ‘A vintage Le Carré thriller’; but also A. N. Wilson in the
Daily Mail: ‘Full of righteous fire to offset its desperate prognosis’—a prognosis of
what our governing elites have become. Le Carré is not an entertaining satirist. He
means it.
Still talking of gentlemen, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) is a
masterpiece on the English class system before 1939, the inhibition of personal rela-
tionships involved upstairs and downstairs in an allegorical great house; then came
the shattering of both its code and ownership by the war. In Ishiguro’s case (not so
fond of gentlemen) the shattering destroys the pre-war delusions—the gentleman had
patronized the British Union of Fascists and his subservient butler saw no fault until
too late.
The rise of a Leicestershire Grammar School boy to become a gentleman via Cam-
bridge and ‘the corridors of power’ is the main thread of C. P. Snow’s fifteen-volume
Strangers and Brothers—and gentlemen, we learn, can fall out. Here the novel is most
clearly written as social and political history. Snow fell out of fashion, the novels were
of unequal quality, and few of us could see it all through. Left-wing reviewers scorned
his attempted objectivity and literary critics mocked his old-fashioned narrative style.
For the student of politics perhaps the most interesting are The Light and the Dark
(1962), a picture of the build-up of fear of catastrophe in the late 1930s and then of
the deep uncertainties in the early years of the war. The Masters (1951) certainly, but
to be read less for the storyline of academic politics than for the dynamics of drawn-
out committee decisions in general; and similarly The Corridors of Power (1964). It
is interesting to note that in the mid-1990s Iain Crichton Smith called on Scottish
novelists ‘to imagine themselves in the corridors of power’ as a means to raise national
consciousness. But are The Masters and The Corridors of Power on any Pub. Admin.
reading list? The late and great W. A. Robson had read them appreciatively but would
never have put novels on his reading lists, friend though he was of Leonard Woolf,
joint editors of the Political Quarterly. But perhaps Snow’s early novel George Passant
(1940) was his best. The character of Passant, a provincial solicitor and an eccentric
but idealistic socialist, marvellously embodies the ethos and dilemmas of old Labour
the novel 211
in the Thirties. And to note in passing that the good ‘working class novel of the
1930s’ was something more people thought should exist rather than actually existed.
Minor and banal works figured in Communist propaganda, praised for their passion
and political correctness. But better descriptions of working-class life in the mode of
social realism (‘let the facts speak for themselves’) came from such ‘an intellectual
of bourgeois origin’, as even Grassic Gibbon was called for his pains with his Grey
Granite (1934), the third part of his trilogy A Scots Quair. 3
12.5 Power and the Reason of State
.............................................................................................................................................
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) was his first novel, only rivalled by Orwell’s
Animal Farm (1945) as most young pupils’ first immersion in political thought. For
it raises in a terrifying way how legitimate authority can degenerate into absolute
power, the plausibility of libido dominandi and of reversion to barbarism if we are
removed from conventional society. Young readers may distance it as ‘just a story’
rather than a dark parable of human nature. But the very title has a double resonance:
the existential terror of King Lear—‘As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods. They
kill us for their sport’; but it also suggests Satan or Beelzebub—in Hebrew Baalzuv
or lord of the fly. Golding does not believe in Satan but he has seen Satanic forces—
the war, the bombing of cities, the Holocaust. And the story suggests that thoughtless
acceptance of even seemingly benign rule can allow descent into savagery. ‘We have
got to have rules and obey them, after all we are not savages. We’re English and the
English are the best at everything’. The island can be as familiar to us as Hobbes’s state
of nature, but Golding had seen bellum omnes contra omnes as the two World Wars,
not as civil war and speculative anthropology. He came out of the fire of the Second
World War with his work marked and himself marked for life:
Before the Second World War I believed in the perfectibility of social man; that a correct
structure of society would produce goodwill; and that therefore you could remove all
social ills by a reorganization of society . . . but after the war I did not because I was
unable to. I had discovered what one man could do to another. . . . I must say that anyone
who moved through those years without understanding that man produces evil as a bee
produces honey must have been blind or wrong in the head. (Golding 1965)
Political thinkers might challenge this view (for the political view of the world is
one of possibilities not of foreclosures), but they would have to understand it first
wherever it occurs at its strongest—not wait for an article in a learned journal to
3
See Cunningham (1988), Bergonzi (1978), and Hynes (1976), none of whom find political novels to
match the poetry, essays, or memoirs. Cunningham’s study makes Stephen Ingle’s interesting Socialist
Thought in Imagination Literature (Ingle 1979) appear mistaken in considering socialist writings apart
from other mutually interactive non- or anti-socialist political writings.
212 bernard crick
critique. Titles in the early issues of Political Studies and even the post-war issues of
Political Quarterly carry none of this Weltschmerz—un-British, unprofessional.
Golding’s Rites of Passage (1980) and its two sequels (published entire as To the Ends
of the Earth (1991)), are parables of staatsraison exhibiting once again the abandon-
ment of his pre-war scientist’s faith in a rational and progressive society. The uncouth
autocratic Captain Anderson—no respecter of persons—and his officers keep the
decrepit ship-of-the-line afloat so that his mixed bag of self-concerned and unwanted
passengers can reach their promised land of the convict settlements of Australia. Such
ironies run deep but there is also the horror—the handy common seamen can rape
the ineffectual Revd James Colley to madness and death, but with no one caring to
inquire too closely what happened. Justice could cause worse trouble for all. The
closed order of a ship is, of course, symbolic of the state: liberty and justice yield
to arbitrary order for the sake of survival. The fear of anarchy and bleak despair if
conventions are not followed permeates both cabins and quarter-deck. Nonetheless,
Golding told his Nobel prize audience that as a genre ‘The novel stands between us
and the hardening concept of statistical man’ (Golding 1984: 8).
Lord of the Flies may have had less influence on political opinions than Animal Farm
but it is more profound philosophically. We can lament the failure of the animals’
revolution as preached and prophesied by Old Major—but not despair of progress,
for it might have succeeded. Contingencies can work both ways. Orwell’s pessimism
was of a different kind than Golding’s. ‘All revolutions are failures’, he said, ‘but not
all are the same kind of failure’. Original intentions may never be fulfilled, but some
betterment is always possible. 4
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) is misread if seen as bleak despair and prophecy, and
misplaced in courses on ‘Utopias and Dystopias’ alongside Aldous Huxley’s Brave
New World; for it is Swiftian satire—savage satire of grotesque exaggeration (like the
cartoons of Scarfe). Students of Politics seldom study modes of satire as political
weapons and their effects. Satire as distinct from cynicism measures against a humane
and hopeful standard. The satirist knows there is something better. The cynic (as in
so much so-called satire today) mocks not only the abusers of power but all we silly,
simple souls who think that things can be made better. If read as a satire, the famous
ending of Nineteen Eighty-Four, ‘He loved Big Brother’, becomes ironical. Consider
what Big Brother had got, not a newly reconstructed party superman but a pathetic
broken everyman whose ‘gin-scented tears trickled down the side of his nose’. And it
was not ‘The End’, for there follows the Appendix on Newspeak which admits that
the difficulty of translating ‘Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens and some
others’ has led to the postponement of the final adoption of Newspeak ‘for so late a
date as 2050’. The hope for humanity is that the language of great writing cannot be
controlled.
Political theorists can relate to his satire of total power, so well written that we
might incautiously think the author really believed with the insane O’Brien that ‘If
4
‘Socialism is not perfectionist, perhaps not even hedonistic. Socialists don’t claim to be able to make
the world perfect: they claim to be able to make it better’ (Orwell 1943 and Anderson 2006: 74).
the novel 213
you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot smashing on a human face—for
ever’. 5 But amid the several themes of the satire consider Julia’s job and that she
worked among:
a whole chain of separate departments dealing with proletarian literature, music, drama
and entertainment generally. Here were produced rubbishy newspapers containing
almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films
oozing with sex and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical
means on a special kind of kaleidoscope known as a versificator.
But such debauching was no part of either Nazi or Communist practice. Imaginatively
Orwell had reinvented and applied to his own society the high theory of Frankfurt
School Marxism: capitalism controls the masses not by physical force but by cul-
tural degradation. We now casually call it dumbing down and hesitate to see it as
systematic.
12.6 Empire and the Dog that
did not Bark
.............................................................................................................................................
Whoever wishes to understand the human relationships between the British and the
native inhabitants of the Empire can find a rich literature. But it is inspired not by the
sometimes too easy assumptions of guilt found in the anti-imperialist polemics, but
rather by difficulties of understanding and moral dilemmas of living with radically
different cultures and assumptions. E. M. Forster’s Passage to India (1924) is still
the supreme example of this, masterful in its empathy for the nuances of mutual
misunderstanding and the gradations of British prejudice. Burmese Days (1934) is
arguably Orwell’s best novel. The hopelessness of the main character faced by the
racism of his colleagues and the decency of the Indian doctor is yet put alongside
portrayal of a very corrupt Burmese. Orwell later said that it took him many years to
realize that the oppressed are not always right. Leonard Woolf ’s first novel The Village
in the Jungle (1913), happily reprinted in 2005, is a tale of the lives of poor villagers as
if wholly in their own terms. Woolf also knew that to change the world one must first
understand it, as when later he was secretary in the 1930s of both the Fabian Society’s
and the Labour Party’s colonial committees. And no academic account of the ending
of the Indian Empire could not but benefit from the narrative of the last days in Paul
Scott’s ‘The Raj Quartet’—The Jewel in the Crown (1966), followed by The Day of the
5
Said Acton, ‘All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’. But surely Orwell means us
to think that the vision of absolute power has destroyed O’Brien’s sanity, that he is truly mad when he
tells Winston Smith in the torture chamber that ‘We control matter because we control the mind. . . . The
stars . . . we could reach them if we wanted to. . . . The earth is the centre of the universe. The sun and the
stars go round it’.
214 bernard crick
Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, and A Division of Spoils. The quartet was, however, a
minority taste, too political and seemingly purely descriptive for the taste of literary
critics (as if always defending literature against politics in reaction to the myth of the
1930s). It had big sales only after the television series, The Jewel in the Crown. Then
Scott reached the audience for whom Wells and Orwell had written.
But there was a dog that did not bark despite nearly all of us in the post-war left
believing that dispossessed Anglo-Indians, the Sahibs and the ‘heaven born’ coming
home, would be a strong reactionary force in British politics. Few if any novels try
to chronicle the imperial mindset long after real power had gone. Theatre, television,
and radio satirists made a hearty meal of Thatcher’s and Blair’s desire to ‘put the
“great” back into Great Britain’ (through the delusion of the ‘special relationship’).
But no British novelists have bitten on this big bait, except in incidental allusions. No
modern Ford Madox Ford has appeared. Nor has any one novel tackled directly the
British identity question in the way that American novelists will tackle ‘the American
way’ or ‘Americanism’ head on, and at length (Roth 1997; 2004; Updike 1996). The
national grand narrative is not the way of English novelists (as perhaps only Anthony
Burgess attempted in his portentous Earthly Powers); their way has been more typi-
cally a modest walk along ‘The Guermantes Way’, the interplay of character, memory,
manners, and circumstance, the imperatives and hesitations of psychologies; even if
sometimes with political and social background.
12.7 What have we Today?
.............................................................................................................................................
Many contemporary novelists touch on political questions, as background or
incidents—Peter Ackroyd, Monica Ali, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, William Boyd,
Hanif Kureishi, Doris Lessing, Blake Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, Gra-
ham Swift . . . Swift’s Waterland (1983) notably carries constant echoes of both World
Wars amid the contingencies of his characters’ lives. Tom Crick ends his days as an
unsuccessful teacher, adding to his misery by discussing with his boys the likelihood
of atomic world war. There is the brilliant satiric subplot in Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam
of the ambitious editor of a national newspaper grasping greedily at an exclusive on
a Foreign Secretary’s infidelity but overthrown by his blindness or indifference to
the pain of friends; or the picture in McEwan’s Saturday of the uncouth violence
of the city streets suddenly bursting into the living room of a professional and
intellectual household. Both are superb descriptions of contemporary political and
social concerns, but these are only incidental to personal relationships. In raising
these problems, which are all over the media anyway, they take us no further in
considering the master question of political thought—what is justice? There are no
resolutions that make us ask even whether the price of progress is worth paying—
as with Golding’s autocratic captain who keeps his rotten ship afloat and on course
the novel 215
by any means. No one could read Paul Scott’s less well-written Raj Quartet without
having to think through—and out of—stereotypes of imperialism good, bad, or
simply historical. Scott agonizingly considers and reconsiders the loss of indigenous
native traditions as against the gains of an alien modernity.
Alan Hollinghurst in the Line of Beauty (2004) reveals the psychology and society
of his gay protagonist and of the womanizing Tory minister whose household he
enters, witnessing his fall; but again, purely descriptive, or at least commendably non-
judgemental, albeit sometimes mere descriptive can open up questions for political
theory. Blake Morrison’s South of the River (2007) follows five characters through
the first years of the Blair era. A shrewd reviewer said ‘Morrison is never so crude
as to venture a direct statement [about the Blair project]. In any case this is not an
overtly political book, merely one about a group of people at the mercy of events over
which they have no control. Or perhaps that makes it a political book after all’ (Taylor
2007). John Banville’s The Untouchable is a semi-fictionalized life of Anthony Blunt, a
profound picture of treachery through sociability, and perhaps an Irish author’s irony
about the English establishment.
Another chapter would be needed for Ireland, north and south, with their indis-
soluble interconnections with mainland British culture and politics. There were vivid
description of the politics of the streets in the Troubles, from Liam O’Flaherty’s The
Informer to Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man; and the original father of all ‘threat
to the nation’ political thrillers was Erskine Childers’ The Riddle of the Sands (1902).
But more illuminating on conflicting loyalties and moral dilemmas today are such
as Bernard MacLaverty’s Cal (1983), Glenn Paterson’s The International, That Which
Was (1999), Brian Moore’s Lies of Silence (1990) especially (Hughes 1991; Longley,
Hughes, and O’Rawe 2003). A seemingly purely descriptive account of how low-life
characters on the streets saw the Troubles, drawn with Dickensian gusto, is Robert
McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1998). 6 Yet another typical bombing:
Several of the shocked onlookers sat staring dumbly at the excrement and tissue and
blood, incapable of comprehending how political this was. One naive fireman, upon
retrieving what seemed to be a portion of a severed head, naively believed this to have
been a sadistic act. A woman with a bloody face who comforted her young son near the
bookshop had no real conception of the historical imperatives leading to such an event.
Such ‘pure description’ is moral irony of a truly Swiftian kind.
Andrew O’Hara’s Our Fathers is not merely a good source for understanding
aspects of Scottish identity but also raises again the oldest theme of political phi-
losophy, the means/ends dilemma. The father of the central character was once a
hero of the Glasgow working class for what he did for council housing and urgent
slum clearance. But in old age recriminations burst upon him for the short-cuts and
backhanders needed to get it done quickly; even if he himself lives simply and poor
in one of the crumbling tower blocks consequent to his methods. The author’s tone
is an understanding sadness. The ever-popular Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean
Brodie (1961) deserves rereading not just as a Scottish comedy of manners but as a
6
I thank Dr Eamonn Hughes of Queen’s University Belfast for help with these references.
216 bernard crick
study in the mistaken use of authority, and how unchallenged authority can make
deadly mistakes (the girl’s dead brother was on the other side in Spain).
One last example. National identity is now much debated. But much of the
debate both in the press and in the academy is either polemical or full of muddled
abstractions. For personal identities can be manifold and national identities cannot
be expressed in precise definitions, certainly not quantifiable; politicians who try
to do this make fools of themselves (Aughey 2007; Crick 2008). National identities
are to be understood by the experience of simply living in a country perceptively
and interactively and by reading both those histories and novels which convey the
variety and complexity of beliefs, feelings, sentiments, prejudices, and traditions (in
Burkeian and Oakshottian senses). Such novels can help the student of politics reveal
what are often the inarticulate presuppositions with which we understand or narrow
experience.
12.8 In Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
Many teachers of English Literature and literary critics are a priori suspicious and
even censorious of any use of literature for political argument, study, or reflection.
This is mistaken, as if to keep novels from all but English Literature graduates. Novels
are for all who care. And they can miss a point on which we began: that the novel is
‘a unique carrier of ideas of freedom and of a republican or political culture’ (Crick
1980). Relationships between English Literature and Political Science can never be
definitively theorized. Dual honours courses can lie side by side pleasantly enough
and are perhaps the better for not being obsessed with theory and methodology
but simply with mutual recognition of disciplinary difference, each a good part of
a liberal education. Sometimes it is better not to formulate relationships too pre-
cisely or explicitly. Social relationships are always contingent and always changing,
adjusting, modifying in different ways. Formal courses on ‘Politics and the Novel’
or even on ‘The Political Novels’ may be a small part of a curriculum but can be of
disproportionate interest and importance.
References
Anderson, P. 2006. Orwell in Tribune. Petersfield: Politico’s.
Arendt, H. 1958. The Human Condition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Aughey, A. 2007. The Politics of Englishness. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Barham, P. 2004. Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War. London: Yale University Press.
Bate, J. 2007. ‘Obituary: Tony Nuttall’. Guardian, 27 March.
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Bergonzi, B. 1978. Reading the Thirties. London: Macmillan.
Collini, S. 2006. Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Crick, B. 1980. ‘Writers and Politics’. Critical Quarterly, 22/2: 63–73.
1989. ‘Literature and Politics’. Pp. 1–19 in B. Crick, Essays on Politics and Literature.
Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
2000. ‘The Decline of Political Thinking’. Pp. 169–90 in B. Crick, Essays on Citizenship.
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2008. ‘The Four Nations: Interrelations’. Political Quarterly, 79/1: 71–91.
Cunningham, V. 1988. British Writers of the Thirties. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Fuselli, P. 1977. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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and Faber.
1984. Nobel Prize Lecture. Leamington Spa: Sixth Chamber.
Hughes, E. (ed.) 1991. Northern Ireland Culture and Politics 1960–90. Milton Keynes: Open
University Press.
Hynes, S. 1976. The Auden Generation. London: Bodley Head.
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Ingle, S. 1979. Socialist Thought in Imagination Literature. London: Macmillan.
Kundera, M. 2007. The Curtain. London: Faber and Faber.
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Ollscoll na Banriona.
Morris, J. A. 1977. Writers and Politics in Modern Britain (1880–1950). London: Hodder and
Stoughton.
Orwell, G. 1943. ‘As I Please’. Tribune, 24 Dec.
1984. Nineteen Eighty-Four with a critical introduction and annotations by Bernard Crick.
Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Roth, P. 1997. American Pastoral. London: Jonathan Cape.
2004. The Plot against America. London: Jonathan Cape.
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Saunder, M. 1982. ‘Introduction’. Parade’s End. London: Penguin Classics.
Sontag, S. 2007. At the Same Time. London: Hamish Hamilton.
Taylor, D. 2007. ‘The State We’re In’. Guardian, 7 Apr.
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Primary texts: Dates of first publication
Barker, Pat Regeneration (1992)
Burgess, Anthony Earthly Powers (1980)
Childers, Erskine The Riddle of the Sands (1902)
Cockburn, Henry Memorials of His Time (1856)
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness (1902)
Conrad, Joseph Nostromo (1904)
Conrad, Joseph The Secret Agent (1910)
Coppard, A. E. Adam and Eve and Pinch Me (1921)
Faulks, Sebastian Birdsong (1994)
Ford, Ford Madox Parade’s End 4 vols. (1924–8)
Forster, E. M. Passage to India (1924)
Golding, William Lord of the Flies (1954)
218 bernard crick
Golding, William Rites of Passage (1980)
Golding, William To the Ends of the Earth (1991)
Gibbon, Lewis Grassic A Scots Quair 3 vols. (1932–4)
Hollinghurst, Alan Line of Beauty (2004)
Huxley, Aldous Brave New World (1932)
Ishiguro, Kazuo The Remains of the Day (1989)
Le Carré, John A Perfect Spy (1986)
Le Carré, John Absolute Friends (2003)
Le Carré, John Mission Song (2006)
Le Carré, John Smiley’s People (1979)
Le Carré, John Tailor of Panama (1996)
Le Carré, John The Constant Gardener (2001)
Le Carré, John Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974)
Lee, Laurie Cider with Rosie (1959)
McEwan, Ian Amsterdam (1999)
McEwen, Ian Atonement (2001)
McEwen, Ian Saturday (2005)
Moore, Brian Lies of Silence (1999)
Morris, William News from Nowhere (1890)
Morrison, Blake South of the River (2007)
O’Hara, Andrew Our Fathers (1998)
Orwell, George Animal Farm (1945)
Orwell, George Burmese Days (1934)
Orwell, George Coming up for Air (1939)
Orwell, George Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
Orwell, George Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Powell, Anthony A Dance to the Music of Time (1951–75)
Scott, Paul The Raj Quartet (1968–74)
Snow, C. P. George Passant (1940)
Snow, C. P. The Masters (1951)
Snow, C. P. The Light and the Dark (1962)
Snow, C. P. The Corridors of Power (1964)
Snow, C. P. Strangers and Brothers (1972)
Spark, Muriel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
Swift, Graham Waterland (1983)
Wells, H. G. Kipps (1905)
Wells, H. G. Mr Polly (1910)
Williamson, Henry The Wet Flanders Plain (1929)
Williamson, Henry The Patriot’s Progress (1930)
Wilson, Robert McLiam Eureka Street (1998)
Woolf, Leonard The Village in the Jungle (1913)
p a r t ii
.................................................................................................................
I N S T I T U T IO N S
.................................................................................................................
Section Five: Democracy
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 13
.................................................................................................................
PA R L I A M E N T
.................................................................................................................
alexandra kelso
13.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
A frequent refrain in the contemporary study of British legislative politics is that
‘parliament matters’ (Judge 1993; Norton 1993; 2005). The fact that scholars of par-
liament have had to so clearly state as much is indicative of the twilight world into
which parliamentary research has at times slipped. Gone are the days of those political
writers such as Sidney Low (1906), Joseph Redlich (1908), Lawrence Lowell (1912), and
Harold Laski (1938) who ‘posed grand questions’ and explained parliament ‘within
the context of wider political forces and ideas’ (Judge 1993: 1). The behavioural revo-
lution of the 1960s relegated parliamentary analysis to the lowest division of political
science studies, and the post-parliamentary literature of the 1970s, encompassing
theories of political communities and networks, questioned the role of parliament
as a relevant political institution, and threw into doubt the merits of studying it at all.
More recently, the governance literature of the 1990s largely omitted parliament from
its analyses.
Such dismissal of parliament is both short-sighted and fundamentally flawed,
because it is only by commanding a parliamentary majority that state power can
be accessed and exercised. As Ralph Miliband (1961) acknowledged, societal change
can only be pursued and secured by parliamentary means: there is no legitimate
alternative for those who seek state transformation. However, this does not mean that
parliament’s utility extends only to its existence as a forum for legitimate government.
Such a ‘big picture’ approach, while usefully drawing our eye to the landscape on
which British politics takes place, can also have the disadvantage of blinding us to the
detail in the foreground. In this respect, parliamentary procedure is not only for the
anoraks: the fact that government itself seeks to adapt the rules of the parliamentary
222 alexandra kelso
game more often than it seeks to flaunt them is indicative of their centrality to
understanding what parliament is about and the nature of its relationship to the
executive to which it plays host. It is through parliamentary procedure that the rela-
tionship between government and parliament is mediated and constantly redefined.
Consequently, there is a need for a deeper understanding of parliament at the detailed
level of its existence, at the level where procedures, rules, and norms come into
play. Parliament is a more interesting and influential institution than its detractors
suggest, and is becoming increasingly specialized, thorough, and sophisticated in
the work it undertakes. Observers misunderstand parliament’s institutional impact
when they dismiss it as ‘weak’ and ‘irrelevant’, which are the favoured words for
such repudiation. In 1976, Anthony King sought to move discussion beyond the
simple executive–legislative dichotomy, by emphasizing the intra-party, opposition,
and non-party modes of operation which delineate identities inside parliament. The
‘multiple personality’ parliament that King described still exists today, and appreciat-
ing its multiplicities and complexities is imperative. Now, however, a similar kind
of reorientation is required, a reorientation which rejects banal statements about
parliamentary impotence, and which refocuses analysis on the significant ways in
which parliament has undergone, and continues to undergo, a process of institutional
adaptation and development which has ramifications for the role it plays within the
British political system.
13.2 Parliament and Parliamentary
Government
.............................................................................................................................................
Controversially, and unfashionably, one of the most useful ways to contextualize
the study of parliament is by way of the Westminster Model. This model has been
criticized on the basis that it fails to provide an accurate account of how politics
actually works in Britain, with sceptics instead promoting the descriptive capacity
of the governance approaches (see Rhodes 1997 for a definitive account). Yet, the
Westminster Model continues to act as a legitimizing mythology, which justifies the
style of government practised in Britain, and which, crucially, is a reflection of how
political actors themselves perceive the political system (Richards and Smith 2002:
48). The Westminster Model is indispensable because it helps us to understand how
power is legitimized. Underpinning the Westminster Model is the concept of parlia-
mentary sovereignty, a doctrine that was authoritatively defined by A.V. Dicey in 1885
as meaning that there is no higher authority than parliament, and no legal restraint
on the capacity of parliament to do whatever it wishes (Dicey 1885). Parliamentary
sovereignty is dependent on parliament being representative of the broader political
nation from which its members are drawn, thereby facilitating political accountability
parliament 223
(Gamble 1990: 406). Although parliament is legally sovereign, the political reality is
quite different. Goldsworthy (1999: 190) explains that British constitutional thought
has accommodated a parliament that is considered ‘both legally sovereign and subject
to customary restraints’. Parliament may be legally all-powerful, but popular sov-
ereignty and popular accountability nevertheless restrain what parliament can do.
In Jennings’s (1957: 8) classic example, ‘the fact that no government could secure
powers to kill all blue-eyed babies is not due to any legal limitations in the powers
of parliament but to the fact that both the government and the House of Commons
derive their authority from the people’.
Although parliamentary sovereignty is the fundamental principle of the Westmin-
ster Model and of British politics, what actually operates in practice is, of course,
executive sovereignty. The executive is sovereign at Westminster because of the single-
member plurality electoral system, which rewards the largest party with the prize of
government and access to state power far in excess of what it may proportionally
be entitled to. The winner-takes-all system ensures that parliamentary sovereignty is
utilized by the executive to deliver strong and responsible government in accordance
with the Westminster Model. Modern British parliamentary government is predi-
cated on the basis of a system of rule that is both representative and responsible (Birch
1964), facilitated by the practice of executive sovereignty and by the convention of
ministerial responsibility for and accountability to parliament for executive actions.
Parliamentary government constrains the exercise of power by ensuring that the
executive is ‘directly and constitutionally responsible to the legislature’ (Rush 2005:
3). By fusing powers in this way, and by inextricably linking executive and legislature
together, British parliamentary government means government through parliament,
not government by parliament. In theory, the ministerial responsibility convention
is the oil in the engine of parliamentary government, ensuring that ministers have
to account to parliament for what they do, and be held accountable by parliament
in turn. However, in practice, the convention has been inverted by ministers so as to
control their relationship with parliament and enable them to dictate the terms of
accountability and responsibility (Judge 1993: 152). Consequently, much depends on
ministerial integrity and government cooperation for the convention of ministerial
responsibility to parliament to work (Woodhouse 2004: 235). In the final analysis,
the convention provides ministers with significant parliamentary hegemony (Flinders
2000: 79).
If parliament facilitates executive sovereignty and ministerial dominance at West-
minster, then it is through party that strong, responsible, and accountable govern-
ment is secured. The party system ‘can best be understood in terms of its relationship
with parliament as the institutional embodiment of the principles of representation,
consent and legitimate government’ (Judge 1993: 68). Party and partisanship structure
the internal dynamics of parliament, and thereby weave the practice of strong gov-
ernment into the parliamentary fabric. The traditional two-party adversary system
at Westminster shapes the internal workings of parliament, and provides for the
‘institutionalisation of parliamentary government into government and opposition’
(Rush 2005: 23).
224 alexandra kelso
Parliament is, first and foremost, an institution of representation, rather than
an institution of democracy. The Westminster parliament was born and evolved as
a representative institution, and its role was to provide a forum for the political
nation (however it has been conceived through history) to secure a redress of their
grievances by the executive. The emphasis has always been on government rather
than parliament in the British state tradition (Judge 1993: 1). It is therefore mistaken to
claim that Westminster is the historic source of parliamentary democracy in Britain:
democracy and democratic structures have been a very modern addition to the
Westminster complexion. The key moment for the development of parliamentary
democracy did not come until 1867, when the Second Reform Act increased the size
of the electorate, and compelled the political parties to organize for an age of nascent
democratic politics. Parliament has adapted to the democratization of the British state
over time, but its continuing characteristic is as an institution of representation, not
of democracy. Parliamentary government has always been representative government,
and latterly party government, but only recently has parliamentary government also
tried to coexist alongside parliamentary democracy. The resulting tension inherent
in the distinctively different imperatives between parliamentary government and
parliamentary democracy have been a defining feature of British politics ever since.
13.3 The Roles of Parliament
.............................................................................................................................................
The fundamental role of parliament is as an institution of legitimation. Parliamentary
government is the institutional embodiment of representative government in the
British state, and is utilized to justify the use of political power. As Judge (1999: 15)
explains, ‘representative government in Britain has traditionally been conceived, and
functioned, as a means of legitimating executive power through the condition of
responsiveness’. Parliament provides legitimation to the executive because it is the
representative embodiment of the political nation, and because it performs crucial
legislative and scrutiny functions within the British political system.
The most basic tool of parliamentary deliberation—the debate—is the foundation
for all legislative and scrutiny work. Most parliamentary time is taken up with debate
of various kinds, and so many are the demands made on debate time in the House of
Commons, that a parallel chamber—Westminster Hall—has convened since 1999 in
order to meet these needs. There are, however, limitations to the debate structure, the
most commonly cited of which is that lengthy parliamentary debates are unsuitable
in the contemporary context of British politics. In this respect, the occasions when
parliamentary debates do have resonance with the public—such as in September
2002 over the decision to go to war in Iraq—are undoubtedly outweighed by the
vast majority of those about which the public hears nothing. Yet, the limitations
of the debate structure and format have in the past been catalysts for adapting
parliament 225
parliamentary procedure. In turn, the way that parliament performs its various roles
is frequently subject to examination and reform, the aim of which is to ‘improve’
how parliament functions, with competing accounts providing different definitions
of what ‘improvement’ might look like.
Crucially, arguments about how to ‘improve’ parliament are couched in an under-
standing of the very different functions performed by each of the two Houses of Par-
liament. While we can of course point to parliament as a formal political institution,
the idea of there being a holistic parliamentary identity is at best theoretical. The
House of Commons and the House of Lords are very different political creatures.
The democratization of the British state during the nineteenth century cemented the
House of Commons’ claim to be the more important of the two chambers because it
was bestowed with democratic legitimacy. The House of Lords has been able to make
no such claim. Its historical role as a hereditary chamber left it devoid of democratic
credentials. The second chamber has had a significant appointed element since the
1958 Life Peerages Act, and since the 1999 House of Lords Act, which removed the
vast bulk of the hereditary peers, its membership has been predominantly appointed.
As a consequence, while the House of Lords has legislative, scrutiny, and deliberative
functions, as does the House of Commons, it performs them in different ways and for
subtly different purposes.
13.4 Parliament and Legislation
.............................................................................................................................................
Parliament has an important legislative function, but in the context of an executive
which possesses the power of legislative initiative. Frequently described as a ‘reactive’
or ‘arena’ legislature, parliament’s legislative role involves it scrutinizing legislative
proposals made by government and assenting to them, thereby legitimating govern-
ment actions and enabling its policies to become law. Parliament’s legislative role has
always been geared towards legitimating government legislation, and has never been
about developing the capacity of parliament to legislate as an institution independent
of government (Judge 2005: 44). Between the 1997–8 and 2005–6 sessions, govern-
ment, in non-election years, 1 had an average legislative success rate of 95 per cent. By
contrast, the success rate of legislation initiated by individual MPs was considerably
lower, at just 7.5 per cent during the same years. 2
However, parliamentary assent to government legislation is not assent given in
ignorance. The legitimation process is predicated on the existence of parliamentary
1
Non-election years are excluded because, when a general election is called, all remaining legislation
falls, so to include such years distorts the figure, because the lower success rate is not only due to any
parliamentary impact or influence.
2
This figure includes all private members’ bills: Ballot Bills, Presentation Bills under Standing Order
No. 57, Ten Minute Rule Bills under Standing Order No. 23, and Lord’s Private Members’ Bills.
226 alexandra kelso
legislative procedures which expose government legislation to the oxygen of scrutiny,
to the possibility of parliamentary amendment, and, in the final analysis, to the
potential of parliament to refuse to give assent. Legislation makes its way to the statute
books through an often lengthy process, involving several different stages of debate
and examination, which afford both government and parliament the opportunity
to make changes. It is widely recognized, however, that most substantive change
to government legislation is actually the result of government ministers themselves
introducing alterations during the legislative process. Parliament has, at best, a ‘spo-
radic’ impact on government bills, and both the principle and the detail of legislation
is normally accepted (Norton 2005: 93).
Nonetheless, to then assume that parliament has a meaningless impact on gov-
ernment legislation would be mistaken. Parliament can and does affect government
legislation, and often in significant ways that are counter to what government would
have preferred. Dissension in the House of Commons does take place, and often
(Norton 1975; 1980). Analysis of legislation during the Labour parliaments of 1997–
2001 and 2001–5 suggests many ways in which parliament is able to change and
influence government bills (Cowley 2002; 2005). Parliament’s impact is most pro-
nounced in securing change, not in defeating government legislation: indeed, the
Labour government first elected in 1997 was not defeated in the House of Commons
until November 2005. The relative rarity of government legislation being defeated
by the House of Commons is not a testament to the weakness of the House, as some
critics claim, but rather a testament to the fact that its role is not to consistently defeat
government legislation in the first place. To assume that the strength of the House of
Commons is derived from its ability to defeat the government in legislative divisions
is to fundamentally misunderstand its role within the political system.
However, it is worthwhile making an important distinction here. When the House
of Commons does succeed in making significant changes, it is not necessarily the
result of the House as an institution, so much as it is the result of the government’s
own backbenchers voting against its proposals. Opposition parties, by definition and
as a consequence of their minority numbers, can only defeat government legislation
when a sufficient number of government backbenchers join them in the division
lobbies. Backbench rebellion has, in the last decade, been on the increase (Cowley
2005). Nonetheless, most government MPs, most of the time, will be in agreement
with executive proposals as a result of the obvious fact that they share the same
party outlook (Cowley 2002; 2005). However, backbench rebellion need not result
in a government defeat to have an impact, and even the mere threat of a substantial
rebellion can result in changes being made to legislation. Government legislation is
therefore most subject to change as a result of the activities of backbench members of
the governing party. Parliament remains central to facilitating these activities, which
take place in the institutional context of Westminster and the attendant procedural
context in which government must operate in order to govern.
Consequently, procedural efficiency has always been a particular concern for gov-
ernment, which has, over time, altered parliamentary procedure to make it easier to
secure its legislation. For example, legislative standing committees were cemented in
parliament 227
the early 1900s through the work of the Procedure Committee, to create a forum in
which government business would overwhelmingly take precedence (HC 89, 1906;
Seaward and Silk 2004: 158). The Procedure Committee also played a key role in
1932 (HC 129, 1932), in response to the economic catastrophe enveloping Britain and
the apparent institutional failure that accompanied it, and again between 1945 and
1946 (HC 9, 1945; HC 58, 1946; HC 189, 1946), in response to the need to rebuild
Britain after six years of war. In both instances, the government aimed to refashion
parliamentary procedure in order to minimize the energy expended on the legislative
process and maximize the speed with which its legislative proposals became law
(Kelso 2009). And in both cases, new procedural mechanisms emerged that fulfilled
these governmental aims, with the development of the guillotine—which forced an
end to standing committee proceedings regardless of whether legislation had been
fully examined—undoubtedly the most significant and contentious tool to be honed
in the post-war period (Walkland 1979: 269).
Procedure has changed to improve not only the likelihood that government legisla-
tion will be secured, but to enhance the predictability of when it will be secured (Kelso
2009). The most recent manifestation of this is the introduction of programming
motions under the Labour government from 1997, secured through the specially
appointed Modernization Committee (HC 190, 1997; HC 589, 2000; HC 382, 2001;
HC 1168, 2002; HC 1222, 2003). Programming motions are designed, in theory, to
provide for more even consideration of government legislation, and to enable the
government to know with more certainty when its bills will complete each stage of
the legislative process. However, the development of programme motions since 1997
has been controversial, prompting debate about whether they have reduced the House
of Commons’ capacity for proper scrutiny (Kelso 2007a: 149–51). In one respect, the
expansion of programming, accompanied by an increase in the use of delegated legis-
lation and statutory instruments (House of Commons Library 2007), which are often
either exempt from parliamentary scrutiny or too numerous for proper legislative
scrutiny to apply, points to the continuing and extended dominance of the executive
at Westminster. Yet, simultaneously, there have also been innovations in the way that
the Commons approaches legislative scrutiny, which require more attention than they
have received thus far. Pre-legislative scrutiny has been only partially utilized in the
Commons, but the recent expansion in its use may well yield benefits from a scrutiny
perspective. A more interesting development which will require more scholarly atten-
tion as it unfolds is that of the redesign of Commons standing committees, to enable
them to take evidence and hold hearings in the context of the bills they scrutinize.
These changes are likely, over time, to give more teeth to the legislative scrutiny
process, and perhaps enhance the Commons’ influence over government legislation,
primarily because they will lead to the sort of institutional capacity building that
parliament has so far lacked.
The House of Lords also performs a crucial legislative role, which has become more
pronounced since the 1999 House of Lords Act. The functions of the House of Lords
are intimately linked to broader debates about, and processes of, second chamber
reform. The hereditary composition of the second chamber was integral to justifying
228 alexandra kelso
the constraint of the legislative capacity of the House of Lords during the twentieth
century. Its powers to veto legislation were removed by the 1911 Parliament Act, and
replaced with a suspensory veto whereby a bill that had been passed by the Commons
in three successive sessions could receive Royal Assent without Lords approval, with
this being further reduced to just two sessions by the 1949 Parliament Act. Yet the most
important aspect of the legislative role of the House of Lords is not that it has lost its
powers of veto, but that it has, over the last sixty years, greatly consolidated its ability
to engage with useful, and consequential, legislative scrutiny (Walters 2004: 212).
The Conservative bias in the pre-1999 House of Lords led successive Labour gov-
ernments to claim the House treated Labour legislation with a hostility that was not
visited upon Conservative legislation. For example, the Labour government suffered a
total of 343 defeats on division in the House of Lords between 1974 and 1979, while the
Conservative government of 1979 to 1983 suffered just 45 defeats (House of Commons
Library 2006). As a result, the Labour Party had a long-standing commitment to
remove the hereditary peers before coming to office in 1997 (Dorey 2006). Yet, almost
a decade after the 1999 House of Lords Act removed the vast majority of the hereditary
peers, the chamber remained a largely appointed body, albeit with the Conserva-
tive bias removed. Nonetheless, the semi-reformed membership of the Lords has
had a significant legislative impact: there is emerging evidence that the remaining
appointed peers consider their chamber to be more legitimate than in the past, and
that this gives them greater latitude to challenge the government to think again about
its legislation (Russell and Sciara 2006a). In one respect, the peers are not actually
any more democratically legitimate—after all, they remain appointed, and the basis
for this perceived enhanced legitimacy is theoretically shaky (Kelso 2006). Yet, the
House of Lords has inflicted significant defeats on government legislation since 1999.
There were 245 defeats on division in the 2001–5 parliament, up from 108 in the
1997–2001 parliament, with legislative battles over terrorism being particularly hard
fought (Cowley and Stuart 2003). Since 1999, only 40 per cent of Lords defeats have
been fully reversed in the House of Commons, meaning that the second chamber is
reasonably successful in securing policy change (Russell and Sciara 2006b: 318). The
pre-reform House of Lords was always credited as subjecting government legislation
to far better scrutiny than it received in the House of Commons. The present chamber
still lays claim to this accolade, but in the context of a standard of legislative scrutiny
that is perhaps not only more rigorous, but also of greater consequence too.
13.5 Parliament and Scrutiny
.............................................................................................................................................
One of the most significant parliamentary debates heard at the start of the twenty-first
century concerns the nature and meaning of Westminster scrutiny of the executive.
Strong government in the British political system is rooted in the understanding that
parliament 229
it will also be responsible government, and submit itself to systematic parliamentary
scrutiny. Yet, as Weir and Beetham (1999: 372) note, the idea of responsible govern-
ment worked in practice ‘because governments were willing to let it work’ (emphasis
added). A key tenet of the liberal theory of the constitution is that government
ministers are answerable to parliament for the actions of their ministries (Birch 1964:
140; Judge 1993: 135). Yet the logic of the doctrine has in practice been inverted,
in order to preserve the idea of the minister as the key link in the accountability
chain, ‘precipitating a secret and closed process of decision making’ (Judge 1993: 152).
Debates concerning the role and meaning of parliamentary scrutiny of the executive
have largely been in terms of dealing with that inversion, and about attempting to
find new mechanisms and strategies designed to enable parliament to scrutinize
the actions of government and determine where responsibility lies for policy- and
decision-making.
At various points during the twentieth century, academics and parliamentarians
examined how a committee system could be designed and used to impart structure
and coherence to parliamentary scrutiny of the executive. In 1931, for example, the
House of Commons Procedure Committee took extensive evidence in the course of
its inquiry into the functioning of parliament, some of which explored the respective
merits of creating new parliamentary machinery specifically dedicated to the task
of scrutinizing the executive (HC 161, 1931). In the 1960s, the House of Commons
took action under the direction of then Leader of the House, Richard Crossman,
and instituted six committees to examine specific areas of government work. This
came on the heels of much academic complaint about the way parliament conducted
its scrutiny task, from the likes of Bromhead (1959), Crick (1964), Hanson (1964),
Ryle (1965), and Wiseman (1959). But it was not until 1979 that a fully structured
committee system was created, with individual committees organized on the basis
that they would each scrutinize the activities of single government departments.
The House of Commons departmental select committee system, recommended by
the Procedure Committee in 1978 (HC 588, 1978) and secured by the reforming
Leader of the House, Norman St John-Stevas, was a significant step forward for
the integrity of parliamentary scrutiny (Jogerst 1993). Yet, despite the move towards
scrutiny specialization, the new system lacked powers to compel ministers and their
advisers to appear before committees, and was unable to force departments to disclose
information, thus restraining parliament’s investigatory capacity (Judge 1989; 1992).
The institutional constraints placed upon the select committees at their inception
has been a rallying point for parliamentary reformers ever since. Development of the
select committee system has, for the last thirty years, been perceived as integral to
checking the strong executive that lies at the heart of the British political system, and
recommendations have come from parties and think tanks (Conservative Party 2000;
Hansard Society 2001) and from the select committees themselves (HC 300, 2000;
HC 748, 2000; HC 321, 2001; HC 224, 2001). Significant efforts to secure reform in
2002, led by yet another reform-minded Leader of the House, Robin Cook, enjoyed
partial success. Some changes, such as instituting core tasks for select committees and
paying their chairpeople, were approved by the House of Commons. Significantly,
230 alexandra kelso
proposals to remove the power of selecting committee members from the party
whips were unsuccessful. This has long been a central complaint about how select
committees operate and how they conduct their scrutiny of government. For critics,
it is a fundamental mistake to allow those who are key members of the government—
the party whips—to have the power to choose those MPs who then preside over the
scrutiny of the executive. Removal of the whips from this process would impact on
powers of patronage and the parameters of control exercised by the executive over
the legislature (Kelso 2003: 70). The executive mentality in operation at Westmin-
ster is geared towards preserving executive strength and constraining parliamentary
scrutiny, not creating conditions in which such scrutiny can be better performed. Yet,
the more subtle point is that changes to the ways that party whips engaged with the
process of choosing MPs to sit on select committees did take place within the parties
themselves at this time. In this respect, change happened at the party level, even if
it did have the impact of weakening the case for change at the parliamentary level
(Flinders 2007: 190). Once more, the complex role of party at Westminster is usefully
underlined.
It is entirely possible continually to revisit parliament’s scrutiny structures and
never be fully satisfied with how they operate. And, because of this, it is easy to
overlook the useful scrutiny work with which parliament engages, and through
which it attempts to hold government to account. The issue is one of perspective,
and of properly understanding parliament’s role within the political system. Just as
parliament’s legislative role is to examine government legislation and give assent,
rather than persistently defeat it, parliament’s scrutiny role is to subject government
policy, administration, and expenditure to examination and make recommendations
and criticisms, not to continually demand policy and administrative reversals. As the
select committee system has bedded down institutionally over the past three decades,
its ability to engage in worthwhile scrutiny that shines a spotlight on government
work has improved.
In the 2001–5 parliament, for example, the departmental select committee system
published around 530 reports scrutinizing government activities, following inquiries
which were based on around 390 separate evidence sessions with many thousands
of individuals, ranging from government ministers to agency chief executives, from
academic specialists to affected citizens. When the work of the non-departmentally
aligned select committees is included—Environmental Audit, Public Accounts, Pub-
lic Administration, and Regulatory Reform—the number of reports increases to over
840, and the number of evidence sessions to almost 550. The work rate of the select
committees has grown over the years as they have become more comfortable with the
parameters of their role, and aided by the decision in 2002 for committees to have
core tasks around which they organized their programme of work.
The sheer volume of materials emanating from the select committees is relevant in
terms of them fulfilling their task of exposing government activities to the oxygen of
publicity. The fact that select committees can hold public evidence gathering sessions
is an important part of the process of obtaining a range of views about public policy
and placing them in the public domain. In addition, select committees can, and often
parliament 231
do, return to the same topic of inquiry repeatedly if they have concerns that a policy is
not working as planned, and that government has not taken on board their concerns.
A good example of this is the Child Support Agency, created in 1991 but plagued with
problems ever since, prompting the relevant select committees to return to the issue
on several occasions (Norton 2005: 104), even after the government announced plans
finally to abolish the Agency (HC 219, 2007). The ability of the select committees to
return to key policy areas, and develop expertise through the evidence they collect, is
integral to how they conduct their scrutiny tasks.
Despite the volume of reports published, however, it is ultimately up to govern-
ment to decide whether or not to accept select committee recommendations and
advice. In the early years of the select committee system, governments paid scant
attention to what they said, and the persistent failure of government to respond
to their reports was viewed as undermining their entire existence. Yet, this too has
changed over time, if only slowly. In the 2001–5 parliament, government provided
around 320 replies to select committee reports, and the speed with which these
replies emerge has improved, largely due to the doggedness of the select committees
themselves in pursuing them.
Crucially, however, the executive undoubtedly retains the advantage with respect to
the terms in which it engages with the committees. Select committees cannot compel
ministers, civil servants, or special advisers to give evidence to them. While ministers
do not normally refuse to attend, there have been particular problems in securing
evidence and cooperation from civil servants and ministers and the attendance of
government special advisers, which is problematic for the select committees in their
task of trying to understand how decision-making works in central government and
who is in practice responsible for decisions taken. This was particularly the case in
the course of the Foreign Affairs Select Committee investigation into the decision to
go to war in Iraq. That committee did not receive the same level of cooperation from
government enjoyed by others, such as the Hutton Inquiry, which secured evidence
from individuals and the submission of papers that were refused to the Foreign
Affairs committee (HC 813, 2003; HC 440, 2004). In 2005, the Public Administration
Committee was refused its request to take evidence from the Prime Minister’s Strategy
Adviser, Lord Birt, as part of its inquiry into long-term strategy and planning in
government (HC 690, 2005).
These are by no means isolated examples. However, while highlighting the con-
straints, we must not overlook the positive developments. For example, in 2002, the
Prime Minister agreed to appear before the Liaison Select Committee (the committee
on which all the select committee chairmen sit) twice a year. This decision is unprece-
dented in the history of parliamentary scrutiny, and affords the Liaison Committee
the opportunity to scrutinize the Prime Minister for almost three hours at a time on
specific areas of government policy. There have been teething problems with this new
format, not only in terms of organization and style, but also in terms of mapping
out the kind of scrutiny with which it should engage, but, given time, this new
form of scrutiny may become a key part of parliament’s scrutiny toolbox. Another
crucial development is that, despite parliamentary complaints about lack of access to
232 alexandra kelso
information about the decision to go to war in Iraq, the fact remains that parliament
was afforded a debate and vote on that decision prior to the war. This is a significant
development, and one that has now set a precedent in terms of future parliamentary
authorization for war and the overseas engagement of military personnel, and in so
doing has cemented the role of parliament as the pre-eminent forum for debates of
national importance (Giddings 2005: 198).
Scrutiny of the executive is also an integral function of the House of Lords, and
one which, like its legislative role, has been framed in the context of the reform of
its composition. The appearance of life peers in the House after 1958 greatly aided
the work of the second chamber, by incorporating experienced individuals who
came from a range of professional backgrounds, and who brought expertise to the
job. Just as the House of Commons recognized the merits of specialization when
it came to executive scrutiny, so too did the House of Lords. Rather than replicate
the departmentally based committee system adopted in the Commons, the Lords
first focused its attention on two cross-cutting areas which the lower chamber had
traditionally neglected: European matters, and science and technology. The Lords
developed expertise in these areas, drawing on the knowledge and experience of its life
peers, and developed an approach to scrutiny that came to be greatly respected (Shell
1992). Over time, the House of Lords has so expanded its European scrutiny work that
it is now conducted through eight different committees. The second chamber has also
consolidated its work in those areas that the Commons has overlooked by establishing
select committees on the constitution, delegated powers, economic affairs, statutory
instruments, and regulators. The scrutiny work of the House of Lords derives its
authority from the expertise and professional backgrounds of those engaged with its
committees, with many of the life peers able to draw on their extensive careers outside
parliament to inform the scrutiny process. Despite continuing to attract criticism for
being unelected and undemocratic, the House of Lords nevertheless performs crucial
scrutiny functions that complement the work done by the Commons by examining
those areas for which the lower chamber fails to find time.
13.6 Parliament and Democracy
.............................................................................................................................................
It is perhaps ironic that the House of Lords is, on the one hand, condemned for its
undemocratic composition, and, on the other hand, applauded for the important
contribution it makes to the broad work of parliament. In the past four decades, the
apparent contradiction between the absence of democratic legitimacy and the abun-
dance of functional legitimacy in the House of Lords has framed the second chamber
reform debate, with the controversy revolving around the extent to which input and
output legitimacy can be better balanced. Charged with finding a new basis for the
composition of the House of Lords, MPs have been torn about how to reconcile the
parliament 233
aim of preserving the expertise found in the chamber, which enables it to be so adept
at discharging its duties, while also reconstituting it on a more democratic basis. The
common assumption is that a move towards a democratically elected second chamber
is incompatible with the aim of maintaining a chamber of expertise, because those
who possess such expertise would be unlikely to seek election to the House. In this
view, an elected second chamber would simply expand the professional political class,
and expand the power of the parties in the House of Lords, at the expense of ensuring
parliamentary functions are performed properly. These concerns are hinged around
the fundamental requirement that a reformed second chamber does not challenge
the supremacy of the first chamber, a situation which opponents of an elected second
chamber argue would arise if the House of Lords was reorganized along democratic
lines.
Since the Labour Party committed to second chamber reform in its 1997 election
manifesto, discussions have been underpinned by a professed desire to make the
chamber more democratic, more representative, and more legitimate. Yet the con-
ceptual confusion surrounding these terms has muddied the reform waters, and the
government largely failed to make a coherent case for how the chamber can simul-
taneously be made more democratic, representative, and legitimate (Kelso 2006).
A more democratic chamber is not necessarily also more representative, and vice
versa. Such difficulties underline the party political considerations associated with
second chamber reform. Opposition desires to embarrass the government were in
part responsible in February 2003 for the failure of the House of Commons to support
one of the seven reform options presented to it (McLean, Spirling, and Russell 2003),
undoubtedly aided by unease amongst MPs about what impact a democratic second
chamber would have on their own House. Perhaps surprisingly, MPs overcame these
doubts in March 2007, when they approved proposals for both a wholly elected and
an 80 per cent elected second chamber. A desire to at least attempt to move the reform
debate forward figured heavily in this outcome, given the paralysis over the issue
since the hereditary peers were expelled in 1999. Whether this decision will in fact
accelerate second chamber reform is another question altogether: the House of Lords
voted, entirely unsurprisingly, for a wholly appointed chamber on the basis that this
is the only way to preserve its functional integrity and distinctiveness. Quite how
these opposing views can be reconciled, and a specific and feasible scheme for reform
devised, remains to be seen.
The debate over whether the House of Lords should have an elected composition
is just one aspect of parliament’s adaptation to the gradual democratization of the
British state. The trustee basis of representative government, its impact in delimiting
public participation in decision-making, along with the repercussions of the winner-
takes-all electoral system, all underpin a public discourse of dissatisfaction with
how democracy works in Britain, and, by extension, exasperation with parliament’s
performance of its broad democratic roles. In the autumn 2007 Eurobarometer sur-
vey, for example, just 34 per cent of respondents said they trusted the Westminster
parliament (Eurobarometer 68, 2007). Parliament has not been without advice about
how it can better perform its democratic functions. The Power Inquiry (2006) into
234 alexandra kelso
the state of British democracy advocated a reinvigoration of parliament by creating
structures and processes which facilitated a more participatory form of democracy,
such as, for example, the ability of citizens to initiate legislation. More circumspect
reports have focused on how parliament performs specific democratic functions, such
as that of communicating parliamentary democracy to the public (Hansard Society
2005). Concerns about electoral disengagement, highlighted by the low turnout at the
2001 and 2005 general elections—to 59.4 per cent and 61.4 per cent respectively, down
from 71.4 per cent in 1997—have prompted parliament to examine how it engages
with the public. Various Commons select committees have explored the quality of
the relationship between parliament and the public, and how it might be enhanced
(HC 1065, 2002; HC 368, 2004). Recent changes derived from this exploration have
included new select committee consultation mechanisms and experiments using the
internet to facilitate engagement, which are all small adaptations that may cumula-
tively amount to important change over time (Kelso 2007b).
13.7 Conclusions
.............................................................................................................................................
The conclusion to some arguments in favour of reinvigorating politics and democracy
in Britain is that parliament needs to be more powerful in terms of how it holds the
government to account, challenges its legislative proposals, and examines its policies,
expenditure, and administration. From this perspective, there needs to be a greater
emphasis on parliamentary democracy, rather than parliamentary government. It is
easy, perhaps, to look back to some lost golden age of parliament, when its powers
were more formidable than at present. To do so, however, is to look back to a time
that never existed. There have been ebbs and flows to parliament’s relationship with
the executive, to be sure. However, parliament is presently more ‘powerful’ than it
has been for some time: it is flexing its legislative and scrutiny muscles in new and
increasingly interesting ways. Yet, in the final analysis, we simply miss the whole
point about parliament if we equate its relevance with its powers. As Judge (1993: 2)
explains, ‘the importance of parliament does not derive from its “powers” but from
the very process of representation and the legitimation of government and govern-
mental outputs flowing from that process’.
That is not to say there are not problems with how parliament fulfils its func-
tions. There are issues to do with its representational capacity, particularly if one
prioritizes the need for a legislature to be somehow microcosmically representative
of the population on whose behalf it acts. Too much legislative scrutiny falls to the
second chamber because the first chamber does not find time to do a thorough job.
Parliamentary scrutiny of administration and expenditure is improving, but prob-
lems remain, particularly with regards to executive constraints on scrutiny capacity
and capability. There are, in addition, broader issues to consider with respect to
parliament 235
parliament’s role in British politics. In particular, the idea of parliamentary sov-
ereignty has always been coloured by our understanding of the practice of executive
sovereignty, but the whole notion of sovereignty is even more deeply questioned at the
start of the twenty-first century. The meaning of national sovereignty in the context of
membership of the European Union has long exercised political and legal theorists,
but Westminster sovereignty in the context of devolution in the UK has added an
additional facet to the puzzle, a facet which prompts questioning about the long-term
role of the UK parliament. Contemporary discussions about the need to address the
consequences of asymmetric devolution are essentially questions about the continued
role of the Westminster parliament in an era of multi-level governance.
Complex issues such as these, which are the consequence of the continued develop-
ment of the British state, are not easily squared away. Nonetheless, as things presently
stand, there is no national institutional forum other than parliament from which the
executive can derive its legitimacy and through which the public can be represented.
Consequently, parliament remains integral to the structural underpinnings of the
British political system, not just because it is constantly evolving in the context of
modern representative democracy, and not just because it is progressively honing its
ability to hold the government to legislative and administrative account, but because,
in the final analysis, it alone provides legitimate access to the instruments of state
power.
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c h a p t e r 14
.................................................................................................................
CONSTITUTIONA L ISM
.................................................................................................................
adam tomkins
14.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
This chapter outlines the nature of the British constitution, explaining its unusual
‘unwritten’ form (14.2), and giving an account of its main substantive components
(14.3). It considers a range of challenges which the contemporary constitution faces
(14.4) and argues throughout that the constitution is currently undergoing a pro-
found transformation from being a largely parliamentary or political constitution
to being a mainly legal or juridical order in which the courts will play a markedly
expanded role, unprecedented in British constitutional history.
14.2 Questions of Form
.............................................................................................................................................
14.2.1 The Unwritten Constitution and Its Consequences
The British constitution is unusual. Almost every country in the world has a written
constitution: a single, codified constitutional text that is superior both to government
and to all other law. The United Kingdom is one of only a handful of countries that
are commonly said not to have a written constitution. Of the others, Israel has a series
of Basic Laws which have a quasi-constitutional status and a committee of its Knesset
(legislative assembly) is currently working on a draft constitution; and New Zealand
has a Constitution Act (1986) which outlines the functions of the main institutions
240 adam tomkins
of state. The United Kingdom has no equivalent of either Israel’s Basic Laws or New
Zealand’s Constitution Act.
It does, however, have several sources (mainly Acts of Parliament) which may be
viewed as being fundamental to the constitution. These range from the thirteenth-
century compact between King John and his Barons known as Magna Carta, the
first great attempt to limit the powers of the monarchy through the force of law
(Tomkins 2003: 40–1; Holt 1992) to the Human Rights Act 1998, branded as Britain’s
‘bill of rights’, incorporating most of the European Convention on Human Rights
into domestic UK law. The Bill of Rights 1689 (on the relationship between the
Crown and the Houses of Parliament), the Act of Settlement 1701 (ditto), the var-
ious Acts of Union (with Scotland in 1707, with Ireland in 1800), the Parliament
Act 1911 (on the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament—Commons
and Lords), the European Communities Act 1972 (on the roles played by Euro-
pean Union law within the UK), and the devolution legislation (most especially,
perhaps, the Scotland Act 1998) may likewise be branded as elemental to the
constitution.
There is, however, from a formal point of view, nothing special about any of these
Acts of Parliament. As the law currently stands, parliament could amend or repeal
any provision of any of these Acts at any time and for any reason just as it may amend
or repeal any provision of legislation dealing with any other, non-constitutional
subject. This is an aspect of what is generally (if somewhat misleadingly) known as
the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament. As it was classically expressed by A. V.
Dicey (Dicey 1885: 40), parliament may ‘make or unmake any law whatever’. At least
from a legal point of view there is nothing entrenched about the British constitution.
This, it may be thought, is one of the principal consequences of not having a binding
constitutional text—of there being no written constitution (Finer, Bogdanor, and
Rudden 1995: 40). Of course, a written constitution would not necessarily have to
be formally entrenched—it is perfectly possible to conceive of such a constitution
containing a provision to the effect that ‘Any provision of this Constitution may
be changed by simple majority vote in the House of Representatives’ or even ‘Any
provision of this Constitution may be changed by the Supreme Court’. Most of the
world’s written constitutions, however, do not contain provisions such as these, at
any rate not expressly, and are presented as if they enjoy at least some degree of
entrenchment.
That the British constitution is not legally entrenched does not mean that it is
particularly fluid or even flexible in practice. Indeed, there is much about the consti-
tutional order that has remained largely unchanged for decades, even centuries, as the
dates of the older Acts of Parliament cited above testify. The fundamental relationship
between the Crown and parliament—the most divisive secular issue of all British
politics in the seventeenth century, let us not forget—has remained constant since
the early eighteenth century (this is not the same as the Crown’s relationship with
the government of the day, which has changed significantly over the last 300 years,
as executive power has shifted from the monarchy to ministers). The relationship
between the House of Lords and the House of Commons has remained more or less
constitutionalism 241
stable since 1911 (Walters 2003) and does not appear to have been much altered by
the partial reform to the composition of the upper house effected by the House of
Lords Act 1999, even if the House of Lords has used the reforms of 1999 as a basis
for becoming more assertive as a scrutineer of the government’s legislative proposals
(Hazell 2007: 10). That Britain has a Cabinet system of government with a Prime
Minister at its head, and which is responsible to parliament, has been true since at
least the time of Pitt the Younger in the 1780s and perhaps since Walpole in the 1720s,
even if the nature of the Cabinet and its relationship with the Prime Minister have
changed since the eighteenth century (Jennings 1936; Birch 1964; Mackintosh 1977).
On the other hand, recent years have witnessed a flurry of constitutional change, as
the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have made constitutional
reform a centrepiece of their policy (British constitutionalism and New Labour is
discussed further, below).
Cabinet government, the office of Prime Minister, and the practice of ministerial
responsibility to parliament are features of the British constitution that owe little
or nothing to law, stricto sensu. They are creatures of what we call constitutional
convention (Marshall 1984). This, it may be thought, is a second consequence of
the absence of a written constitution: namely, that the constitutional order relies
as heavily on non-legal or conventional sources as it does on formal law. On
closer examination, however, it becomes clear that written constitutions only rarely
approach being complete codes and that many countries with written constitutions
rely on conventions or constitutional practice to supplement the formal text (Barendt
1998: 40).
Constitutional lawyers are generally happy to recognize that constitutional con-
ventions are as binding on constitutional actors as are constitutional laws. The dif-
ference lies not in the mandatory nature of the rules, but in the identity of the
enforcer. Laws are enforced by courts, whereas conventions are enforced politically.
Usually, this means through parliament. Thus, if (in breach of convention) the
monarch appointed as Prime Minister someone other than the leader of the polit-
ical party with majority support in the House of Commons, no one could sue the
monarch in the courts—the monarch has broken no law. But, even though it is
not illegal, such behaviour would be unconstitutional and there would surely be a
political reaction. What, precisely, that reaction would consist of is impossible to
predict, but it could plausibly range from a mere expression of parliamentary dis-
quiet to legislation abolishing the monarchy altogether, with an array of intermediate
options.
Other conventions are routinely enforced by parliament. It is a constitutional con-
vention, for example, that ministers are collectively and individually responsible to
parliament for government policy. These conventions, among other matters, require
ministers to account to parliament for the policies, decisions, and actions of their
departments. Any failure so to account will be addressed by parliament. Sometimes
the sanction will be that the minister is called to give a full account, or to correct
an inadvertent error in an earlier account, or to apologize for a mistake. On other
occasions more serious consequences follow from a breach of the conventions, the
242 adam tomkins
ultimate punishment being a forced resignation (Woodhouse 1994; Flinders 2002;
Tomkins 2003: ch 5).
14.2.2 From the Political to the Legal Constitution?
That core elements of the British constitution are policed by political institutions
such as parliament rather than by legal institutions such as the courts is one of the
most significant facets of British constitutionalism (Griffith 1979; Tomkins 2005). In
recent years it has become widely disliked, as numerous constitutional commentators
have become exasperated by what they see as the constitution being subjected to the
vagaries—and oftentimes the self-serving vagaries—of party politics (Mount 1992;
Barnett 1997; Weir and Beetham 1999). The 1990s were notorious, for example, for
ministers in John Major’s Cabinet seeking to rewrite the rules of ministerial responsi-
bility in their favour so as to avoid having to take responsibility for their mistakes or
for their failures to keep parliament properly informed of government policy (the full
story is told in Tomkins 1998: ch. 1). This led several commentators to go so far as to
take the view that ‘[t]he doctrine of ministerial responsibility has been significantly
weakened over the last ten years or so, so that it can no longer be said . . . that it is
a fundamental doctrine of the constitution’ (Jowell and Oliver 2000: viii; see also
Barendt 1998: 116). However, this was a premature obituary and, since 1997, the
practice of ministerial responsibility has recovered considerably (Woodhouse 2002;
Tomkins 2003: ch. 5).
What may be overlooked in the rush to condemn the British constitution’s reliance
on political methods of enforcement is that judicial methods of enforcement are
likewise subject to vagaries. In the British context, for example, a once vibrant
administrative law of judicial review fell almost into desuetude for a prolonged
period in the mid-twentieth century, only to be revived slowly and for the most part
uncertainly by a cadre of enthusiastic judges in the 1960s and 1980s. Only since the
mid-1990s has judicial review really come to the fore of British constitutionalism
(Jowell 2003). In the United States, to take a second example, the Supreme Court
rather suddenly relied on the commerce clause of the US constitution to strike down
Congressional legislation in US v Lopez 514 US 549 (1995) after not having previously
used that clause for this purpose since 1937. After Lopez, the Court’s new-found inter-
est in federalism became one the hallmarks of the Rehnquist Court’s constitutional
jurisprudence—not something that could have been said of the Supreme Court at
any time in the previous half century (Young 2004). Turning from political and
parliamentary means of accountability and scrutiny to legal and judicial means is
less likely to secure the results of consistent ‘constitutional justice’ (see Allan 2001)
than its advocates tend to assume (Poole 2002; Goldsworthy 2003; Tomkins 2005:
ch. 1).
Nonetheless, a move away from relying principally on political institutions and
methods of accountability, towards relying more strongly on legal institutions and
methods of accountability, is one of the hallmarks of the British constitutional
constitutionalism 243
experience in the period since the early 1990s (Tomkins 2003: ch. 1). This move can
be seen both in the behaviour of constitutional actors (especially, but not only, the
courts), as well as in the arguments of constitutional commentators (e.g. Barendt
1998; Allan 2001; Oliver 2003; Dyzenhaus 2006). This move, from a privileging of
political constitutionalism in Britain to a privileging of legal constitutionalism, will
be a central theme of this chapter. Before we go any further it may be as well to
summarize what is meant by it (with the proviso that what follows in the remainder
of this paragraph will be expanded upon as this chapter proceeds). The move from
political to legal constitutionalism involves, and may be taken as shorthand for, four
related developments:
r A denial of the potency of and a loss of faith in political accountability and
ministerial responsibility (see e.g. Jowell and Oliver 2000).
r A strengthening of the rule of law and a furthering of the constitutional roles
of the courts. This development manifests itself in a variety of ways, such as:
extending the reach of the rule of law to embrace formerly political and non-
justiciable issues (as in R v Home Secretary, ex parte Fire Brigades Union [1995]
2 AC 513; see Tomkins 2003: ch. 1; and A v Home Secretary [2005] 2 AC 68;
see Turpin and Tomkins 2007: ch. 11); creating new species of common law
constitutional rights (as in R v Home Secretary, ex parte Leech [1994] QB 198 and
R v Home Secretary, ex parte Simms [2000] 2 AC 115; see Tomkins 2003: ch. 6);
enacting new constitutional rights through legislation (as in the Human Rights
Act 1998, on which see below).
r A doubting of the continued appropriateness of the sovereignty of parliament (as
in Jackson v Attorney General [2006] 1 AC 262, on which see below).
r Leading to a general sense that there are few clear limits to the constitutional roles
of the courts (Barak 2006).
One of the consequences of the move from political to legal constitutionalism is
that the unusual nature of the British constitution, which formerly distinguished it
from the constitutional norm both elsewhere in the Commonwealth and in Europe,
is being diluted. The advance of the legal constitution is far from unique to Britain:
indeed, in many respects, Britain is playing catch-up, as it takes inspiration from
the US Supreme Court, the Supreme Court of Canada, the European Court of
Justice, and the European Court of Human Rights, among others (Beatty 2004).
Recent scholarship in comparative constitutional law shows the considerable extent
to which the globalization of juridical norms in public law is leading constitutional
and supreme courts across the world to talk more and more with each other, to cite
each other’s decisions as authorities, and often even to adopt remarkably similar
modes of reasoning and solutions to the disputes that come before them (Beatty
2004; Anderson 2005; Choudhry 2006; although cf. Lasser 2004; Goldsworthy 2006).
The juridification of constitutionalism in Britain is an experience it has in common
with countries as diverse as Canada, South Africa, Israel, Poland, Hungary, and New
Zealand, among many others (Hirschl 2004).
244 adam tomkins
14.3 Constitutional Content
.............................................................................................................................................
Defining the constitution broadly, we might say that it includes all the rules, conven-
tions, and practices that describe or regulate the organisation, powers, and operation of
government and the relations between private persons and public authorities (cf. Turpin
and Tomkins 2007: 4). Adopting such a definition, what are the core components
of the British constitution? The following six features of the constitution may be
regarded as central: (a) that the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy;
(b) the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament; (c) the doctrine of the rule of law
and its recently expanded consequences; (d) the uncertain status of the separation of
powers; (e) the doctrine of responsible government; and (f) the changing relationship
between central and devolved (regional) government. Each of these will now be
examined in turn.
14.3.1 Constitutional Monarchy
Several core features of the British constitution are very, very old. In the previous sec-
tion reference was made to Magna Carta and to the Bill of Rights of 1689, for example.
The principal concern of both these instruments, and of the political turmoil that gave
birth to them, was how the powers of the Crown could be substantively limited and
subjected to constitutional account. Powers previously possessed and, it was thought,
abused by the Crown were either taken away altogether or subjected to parliamentary
oversight. Thus, Magna Carta sought to guarantee, in a provision that still remains
law, that ‘no freeman shall be taken or imprisoned . . . or exiled . . . but by . . . the law
of the land’, as it limited the powers of the Crown to raise various forms of revenue
through taxation and other means. Likewise, the Bill of Rights outlawed what it called
‘the pretended power of suspending the laws’ and ‘the pretended power of dispensing
with the laws’ as they had been exercised by James II. To this day it is to the Bill of
Rights that we owe the fact that the government may levy no tax or charge on the
British people other than with parliamentary assent.
Today it is not the monarch him- or herself whose powers the constitution is
principally concerned to limit: it is the powers derived from the Crown and exercised
by government ministers which are the focus of attention. Herein lies the contempo-
rary constitutional significance of Britain being a monarchy: not in the powers and
influence of the Queen and her family, considerable though they remain (Bogdanor
1995), but in the powers exercised in the name of, and on behalf of, the Crown by the
government (Brazier 1997; Daintith and Page 1999). While it is clearly the case that
ministers have at their disposal a vast array of statutory powers—powers conferred
on the government by parliament in legislation—they continue to enjoy, in addition,
a range of prerogative powers, powers which parliament has not conferred through
the legislative process, but which are derived directly from the Crown. These include
the power to declare war, the power to deploy the armed forces, the power to make
treaties, powers concerned with the conduct of diplomacy, powers to appoint peers
constitutionalism 245
and to confer honours, and powers concerned with the organization of the civil
service, as well as a range of others.
Recent years have witnessed extensive parliamentary disquiet about the range and
scope of these powers and about the limited extent to which their exercise has been
subjected to adequate parliamentary oversight. In the early 1990s the focal point was
the government’s treaty-making power, a power which became particularly contro-
versial in the context of the Maastricht Treaty on European Union, divisions over
which consumed the Conservative Party for much of the decade (Rawlings 1994).
The government’s prerogative power to claim ‘public interest immunity’, a power that
enables the government to withhold evidence from civil and criminal trials where, in
the government’s view, the public interest so requires, was equally controversial in the
context of covering up the extent to which British arms manufacturers had, with the
support of the security and secret intelligence services, traded with Saddam Hussein’s
Iraq (Tomkins 1998: ch. 5). More recently it has been around the government’s power
to wage war that the deepest parliamentary concerns have crystallized—as a result, of
course, of the controversies surrounding the Iraq War (House of Lords Constitution
Committee 2006).
Within a week of becoming Prime Minister, Gordon Brown in July 2007 published
a Green Paper on constitutional reform, The Governance of Britain (Cm 7170), a high-
light of which was an immediate undertaking to qualify a number of the government’s
prerogative powers. Thus, the power to deploy the armed forces abroad will be subject
to a new parliamentary resolution (to the effect that a positive parliamentary vote will
normally be required before troops can be sent into combat overseas); the power to
ratify treaties will be placed on a statutory footing; the power to recommend to the
Queen that parliament be dissolved will be subject to a new constitutional convention
(to the effect that a positive vote in the House of Commons will normally be required
before such a recommendation may be made); and the power to request that the
Speaker should recall the House of Commons during a recess, formerly unique to
the government, will be shared with backbench MPs. As such, they are but the latest
chapter in what is Britain’s oldest constitutional story: namely, the ongoing struggle to
subject the Crown and its government to constitutional account through parliament
(Tomkins 2003: ch. 2).
None of this means that Britain will cease to be a constitutional monarchy. The
Governance of Britain stressed that the government had no intention to reform or
revise any of the prerogative powers which continue to be exercised by the monarch
herself. But, if carried out, the proposed reforms will strengthen the forces of par-
liamentary constitutionalism as they seek to scrutinize and to hold to account the
powers that the government of the day continues to derive from the Crown.
14.3.2 The Sovereignty of Parliament
Most of the time British government is characterized not in terms of conflict between
Crown and parliament but as cooperation between them. It is when cooperation
ceases that ordinary government becomes impossible, as Charles I found in 1642 and
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as James II found in 1688. What the events of the 1640s and 1680s reveal is that when
conflict between Crown and parliament replaces cooperation, parliament has the
constitutional strength to win the argument: since 1689 (indeed, since 1660) we have,
for the most part, experienced government by the Crown and its ministers on parlia-
mentary terms, and not parliamentary government on the Crown’s terms (Tomkins
2005). While the Crown has on several occasions and through various means tried to
subvert the order established in 1642, 1660, and 1688–9, it has not (yet?) been success-
ful in the long term—the eighteenth-century corruption of placemen and pensions,
for example, was not a prominent feature by the time Walter Bagehot penned the
most famous celebration of Britain’s parliamentary constitution in the 1860s (Bagehot
1867). The much more recent rising up of Labour backbenchers against numerous of
the Blair government’s policies in the 2001–5 parliament is, perhaps, another example
of parliament refusing to be cowed by the Crown’s ministers (Cowley 2005).
As regards cooperation between Crown and parliament, its most important instan-
tiation is through an Act of Parliament. An Act of Parliament is the formal agreement
of the House of Commons, the House of Lords, and the Crown to a legislative
proposal (a Bill). An Act of Parliament is the highest form of law known to the
English legal system. (Some doubts have been expressed as to whether the same is
true in Scots law, but the issue has not arisen for judicial determination and there is a
strong argument to be made that the same position holds in Scots law as in the law of
England and Wales (Tomkins 2004).) This placing of Acts of Parliament at the apex
of the legal order is what is meant by the sovereignty of parliament (Goldsworthy
1999). We saw above that Dicey stated that parliament may make or unmake any law
whatever. He went on to state that ‘no person or body is recognised by the law . . . as
having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament’ (Dicey 1885: 40).
Thus, it will be seen that it is not parliament that is sovereign under this doctrine,
but Acts of Parliament, or rather Acts of the Crown-in-Parliament. That is to say,
Acts which have been formally assented to by both parliament and the Crown, acting
together. Acts of Parliament cannot be made by parliament without the Crown, and
nor can they be made by the Crown without parliament. They can, exceptionally,
be made by the House of Commons and the Crown acting together, without the
assent of the House of Lords, but the circumstances in which this is possible, and
the procedures required to be followed in such cases, are circumscribed in legislation
(Parliament Acts 1911, 1949).
Several challenges have been made in recent years to the doctrine and practice
of the sovereignty of parliament. A number of these will be considered later in this
chapter.
14.3.3 The Rule of Law
Whereas the sovereignty of parliament is the legal doctrine that governs the relation-
ship between the courts and parliament (providing that the courts have no power
to override or set aside parliament’s legislation), the rule of law is the legal doctrine
constitutionalism 247
that governs the relationship between the courts and the government, or executive.
It provides that the government may do nothing without legal authority. The classic
exposition of this principle dates from a case decided in 1765: Entick v Carrington
(1765) 19 St Tr 1029. Entick was a pamphleteer critical of the government. Carrington
was instructed by the Earl of Halifax, one of His Majesty’s principal secretaries of
state, to enter Entick’s house, to search his house, to seize his papers, and to arrest
him. This Carrington did. Entick sued Carrington for trespass and was successful,
the court ruling that a mere warrant in the name of the secretary of state could not
excuse liability for trespass. Only a law could excuse liability, and the instructions
of a secretary of state were not law. For the trespass to have been lawful it would
have had to have been authorized by legislation. If parliament legislates to empower
a minister to issue instructions to the police, or to the security and secret intelligence
services, to the effect that an individual’s papers are to be seized, or that an individual
is to be kept under surveillance, a minister issuing such instructions will not be acting
contrary to the rule of law in the Entick v Carrington sense, as he will be acting with
legal authority. In Entick v Carrington, Halifax had no such legal authority and the
rule of law was therefore breached.
Since the middle of the nineteenth century the courts have developed a body of
legal principles that may be seen as having developed the rule of law into a more
sophisticated web of rules that the government—and public authorities generally—
must follow in their decision-making. Thus, public authorities must act fairly, they
must not be biased in their decision-making, they must afford certain parties rights
to be heard before decisions are made which affect their interests, they must not
misapply the law that regulates their discretion, they must act reasonably, and, at least
when human rights are affected by their decisions, they must act proportionately.
These rules have been developed by the courts through the case law of judicial review
such that Britain now has as modern a system of administrative law as has long
been common across continental Europe (the leading treatises on administrative
law are Craig 2003 and Wade and Forsyth 2004). Thus, to return for a moment to
Entick v Carrington, today’s parliament has passed a raft of legislation empowering
ministers to authorize the police and the security and secret intelligence services
to intercept people’s communications or to place certain persons under ‘control
orders’ (see, e.g., Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, s. 5; and Prevention of
Terrorism Act 2005, s. 2). In the exercise of these powers, both the ministers and the
police and security officers involved must act fairly, reasonably, and proportionately.
If they do not their actions may be quashed by a court on a claim for judicial
review.
The modern law of judicial review has been developed by the courts—it is an exam-
ple of the constitution evolving through the common law. More recently parliament
has also intervened in an attempt to give impetus to the rule of law, passing legislation
that further develops the ability of the courts to control government decision-making.
The most important example is the Human Rights Act 1998, considered in more detail
later in this chapter. Taken together, the law of judicial review and the Human Rights
Act play a leading role in the move from political to legal constitutionalism.
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14.3.4 The Separation of Powers
While constitutional monarchy, the sovereignty of parliament, and the rule of law
are all core components of British constitutionalism, for the separation of powers
that claim cannot be so boldly made. But what appears to be happening is that the
separation of powers is growing in constitutional significance in the United Kingdom.
It is clear that the British constitution is not based on the eighteenth-century model
of the separation of powers that, for example, the US constitution is structured
around. This model posits that the state should be divided into three powers or
‘branches’, separate but equal in terms both of function and personnel. The three
branches are the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, each of which ‘checks’
or ‘balances’ the other two (Vile 1998). Even though the British constitution is not
based on this model, much of the model is reflected in British constitutional practice
(Munro 1999: ch. 9). We do have an identifiably different legislature, executive, and
judiciary. But there are numerous overlaps between the branches that would be
unconstitutional in the United States. All government ministers are required to be
drawn from one or other of the Houses of Parliament, for example. Until the relevant
provisions of the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 come into force (in October 2009)
the highest court of appeal in the United Kingdom will remain the Appellate Com-
mittee of the House of Lords, one of the Houses of Parliament, and all the members
of that court continue simultaneously to be members of the legislature, even if they
are no longer as active in a legislative capacity as until recently they were. Once the
relevant provisions of the 2005 Act come into force the United Kingdom will have
a new Supreme Court, which will replace the Appellate Committee of the House of
Lords.
The Constitutional Reform Act 2005 is a significant measure. In particular, it con-
tains important measures concerning the independence of the judiciary. It radically
curtails the powers of the Lord Chancellor, moving that office more clearly into the
executive branch and away from the judicial, and making the Lord Chief Justice
the new head of the judiciary in England and Wales. It revises procedures governing
the appointment of judges, limiting the direct input of the government and estab-
lishing a new Judicial Appointments Commission. In all of these respects, it is clear
that one of the animating motives behind the Act was to give clearer expression in
the structure of the British constitution to the separation of powers (Windlesham
2005; 2006). In particular, the Act has sought more sharply to demarcate the judiciary
from the other two branches—the legislature and the executive. At the same time,
the courts have themselves been concerned to underscore the same demarcation.
Numerous recent House of Lords cases have emphasized the importance of having
the judiciary determine points of law, free of executive influence (for example in
the sentencing field, where the Home Secretary’s powers to influence the length of
sentence served by those imprisoned for ‘life’ have been effectively transferred to the
courts; for the case law, see Turpin and Tomkins 2007: 106–12). The thrust of the case
law, as of the 2005 Act, is once more to bolster the ongoing move from the political to
the legal in British constitutionalism.
constitutionalism 249
To the extent that the separation of powers has become recognized as a
legally enforceable principle, however, such recognition remains partial. The legisla-
tive/executive distinction remains blurred, to say the least. Bagehot famously wrote
that ‘The efficient secret of the . . . Constitution may be described as the close union,
the nearly complete fusion of the executive and legislative powers’ (Bagehot 1867).
Even if this would be unlikely now to be celebrated as unabashedly as did Bagehot,
it is difficult to argue that we have moved substantially on from the picture Bagehot
painted. When, for example, in 2006 the government introduced its Legislative and
Regulatory Reform Bill, critics objected that the Bill would transfer an unacceptable
degree of legislative power from parliament to ministers (the government sought in
the Bill to find ways to make it easier for provisions in legislation to be removed where
they were deemed to impose an unnecessary regulatory burden). During the passage
of the Bill the government was required to concede a range of restrictions, curtailing
the extent to which ministers could effectively legislate without parliament. The Bill
was passed, however, albeit in amended form, and notwithstanding the amendments
the Bill still represents a substantial increase in ministerial powers to amend and
repeal provisions of primary legislation. Were the Legislative and Regulatory Reform
Act 2006 to be challenged in court on the basis that it violates the principle of the
separation of powers, a judge would have to rule, as the law currently stands, that the
separation of powers must be read subject to the terms of the Act, and not the other
way around.
14.3.5 Responsible Government
We saw above that the relationship between the Crown and its ministers, on the one
hand, and parliament, on the other, is the central dynamic at the core of British
constitutionalism. We have also seen that, in today’s constitution, this dynamic is
institutionalized through the conventions of ministerial responsibility: all govern-
ment ministers are collectively and individually responsible to parliament for govern-
ment policy and for the policies, decisions, and actions of government departments.
Nothing needs to be added to these observations here, other than to underline their
centrality to British constitutionalism. No account of the British constitution would
be accurate, or even useful, without a full appreciation of the importance of the prac-
tice of responsible government (Birch 1964; Marshall 1984; Flinders 2002; Woodhouse
2002; Tomkins 2003: ch 5).
14.3.6 Devolution and the Union State
It used to be generally said that the United Kingdom had a unitary constitution
rather than a federal one. More recently the view has come to the fore that the
United Kingdom has a union constitution that is neither straightforwardly unitary
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nor systematically federal in character (Walker 2000; Tierney 2006). Clearly, the
United Kingdom is not a federation. The country is not divided into regions of equal
political power and none of the internal political divisions that exist within the United
Kingdom is immune from being altered or repealed by parliament: there is no system
of regional entrenchment against central (parliamentary) incursion. On the other
hand, to conceive of British government solely in terms of the central institutions of
Westminster and Whitehall, along with some moderate input from local government
councils, would be to miss what has become one of the most interesting dimensions
of British politics: namely, the ‘British question’ itself—and the divergent approaches
that are commonly taken to that question in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern
Ireland.
From a legal point of view the United Kingdom is clearly a union. The very
legislation by which the kingdom was united reveals as much: the Acts of Union with
Scotland (1707) and Ireland (1800). The United Kingdom is a union of three legal
systems—those of England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. There have
always been differences of law, including differences of constitutional law, between
these three legal systems. Scots law is different from English law as regards the
Crown, for example (Tomkins 2006), and, as we saw above, several Scots lawyers
have expressed doubts as to the applicability in Scotland of what a Lord President
of the Court of Session, no less, described as the ‘distinctively English principle’ of
the sovereignty of parliament (see Tomkins 2004: 213). The constitutional differences
between the constituent elements of the United Kingdom pre-date devolution but
they have, no doubt, been greatly augmented by devolution.
Under the various devolution statutes that have been passed since 1998 Scotland
has its own parliament and executive, Wales has its own assembly and (since 2006)
also a Welsh Assembly Government, and Northern Ireland has its own assembly and
power-sharing (i.e. cross-party) executive. In addition, since 2000 London has had
a new strategic authority (the Greater London Authority) and mayor, as well as its
range of local (‘Borough’) councils, although whether these arrangements should be
classed as either regional government or as a species of devolution is contested. The
remainder of England has no regional or devolved institutions, either legislative or
executive (a proposal to create an elected regional assembly for the North-East region
was comprehensively rejected in a referendum in 2004). (On devolution generally,
see Turpin and Tomkins 2007: ch 4; Trench 2004; 2005; and Hazell and Rawlings
2005).
Even though it is frequently referred to as a ‘settlement’, devolution is not a one-
off reform. In the famous words of Ron Davies, Secretary of State for Wales in Tony
Blair’s first Cabinet, devolution is ‘a process, not an event’ (Rawlings 2003: 10). How
settled that process turns out to be, and what the process will lead to, is far from
clear. In its first decade devolution was relatively smooth only in Scotland. In Wales,
the devolution package had to be renegotiated as dissatisfaction grew that less was
on offer (and less achievable) there than in Scotland. The result was the Government
of Wales Act 2006, which replaced the Government of Wales Act 1998 with staggered
tiers of devolution, some already in effect but others dependent on positive outcomes
constitutionalism 251
in future possible referendums. In Northern Ireland, devolution was suspended in
October 2002, not to return until the Spring of 2007. For much of the period since 1998
the politics of Northern Ireland continued to be dominated by security issues but, at
the time of writing, the agreement of the DUP and Sinn Fein to share devolved power
appears to be holding. How long these new Welsh and Northern Irish arrangements
remain in place is impossible even to guess at.
At the beginning of its second decade devolution is looking less smooth in Scot-
land. During the first two terms of the Scottish parliament (1999–2003, 2003–7) the
Labour Party was in government in London and was the lead party in the Scottish
Executive, in coalition in Edinburgh with the Liberal Democrats. This period was
marked by such a high degree of goodwill and by such a strong desire that devolution
should work and be seen to work smoothly that even the semi-formal institutions
of intergovernmental relations (such as the Joint Ministerial Committee) were not
required to meet (Trench 2005). Such devolution disputes as there were between the
British government and the Scottish Executive were resolved privately and informally.
No such dispute has yet reached the courts. Within Scotland there was a widespread
sense that, notwithstanding the shocking expense of the new Scottish parliament
building, the devolutionary scheme of the Scotland Act 1998 had successfully solved
the problems of Scottish governance which it had been designed to address (Turpin
and Tomkins 2007: ch. 4).
This changed abruptly in May 2007, when the Labour/Liberal Democrat coalition
was defeated in the Scottish parliamentary elections. As in 1999 and 2003, no one
party secured a majority of seats in the Scottish parliament but, for the first time,
the Scottish National Party (SNP) emerged in 2007 as the largest single party, albeit
by only a single seat. Since 2007 it has formed a minority administration, with Alex
Salmond as First Minister. Above all else, of course, the SNP is committed to indepen-
dence for Scotland. Within three months of taking office, the new Scottish Executive
published a discussion paper on Scotland’s constitutional future, in which options,
first, for a further devolution of legislative and executive powers and, second, for a
move towards independence were outlined (Choosing Scotland’s Future: A National
Conversation).
At the same time the Conservative opposition in Westminster has grown increas-
ingly vocal about the defects—from an English point of view—of Scottish devolution.
The principal problem as the Conservatives see it is the unfairness implicit in a system
that allows MPs from Scottish constituencies to vote on English matters when MPs
from English constituencies cannot vote on Scottish matters where they are devolved
to Holyrood. This is the famous ‘West Lothian Question’. Labour’s answer to it—
that devolution would be granted to English regions on demand, just as it had been
granted to Scotland—was effectively negatived by the 2004 referendum in north-
east England. The Conservatives have suggested that a better answer, ‘English votes
for English laws’, may be to exclude Scottish MPs from voting on purely English
matters, but both the workability and constitutional desirability of this must surely
be doubted. For one thing, discovering what a purely English matter is would not
always be straightforward; for another the majority of MPs may not support the same
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policies (or party, or even government) as the majority of MPs minus those from
Scottish constituencies.
As a result of these developments, the future of Scottish devolution—and, indeed,
the future of the Union—has become more uncertain and treacherous to predict. In
the coming years we are likely to learn considerably more about whether devolution
is the glue that holds the Union together (which was always Labour’s intention)
or whether it provides precisely the platform that the Nationalists need to make
more convincing the case for independence. We may also find out whether the
Conservatives (with precious little electoral support in Scotland and Wales) remain
a unionist party, or whether they are on the way to becoming an English national
party. Whichever way you look at it, at the time of writing, devolution (in particular,
Scottish devolution) is the great unknown in British constitutionalism.
14.4 Contemporary Challenges to
British Constitutionalism
.............................................................................................................................................
The constitutional challenges that may be posed by devolution are for the future
(albeit, perhaps, the near future). Challenges posed from other quarters are more
established. Two such are outlined in this section: ‘Europe’ and New Labour’s consti-
tutional reforms. These challenges are not to be underestimated. Indeed, we shall
see that their combined effect is to place into question every one of the six core
features of British constitutionalism outlined in the previous section (see further
below).
14.4.1 ‘Europe’
‘Europe’ refers to two separate creations: the first is the European Union (EU); the
second is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Both have had a
considerable impact on British constitutionalism, but their respective impacts vary
and should not be confused with one another. Let us start with the EU. The United
Kingdom joined what is now the EU in 1972. Britain’s membership of the EU has
had a profound impact on British government. A significant proportion of British
legislation is now enacted in consequence of European law. Much ministerial time
is taken up with European business—especially in the domains of trade, agriculture,
social policy, and, increasingly, also in security, crime, and counter-terrorism policy.
But Britain’s membership of the EU has also had a significant impact on constitu-
tional law and, in particular, on the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament. Under
EU law, clashes between national law and European law will, in general, be resolved
constitutionalism 253
in favour of the latter. The European Court of Justice made this clear in a series
of judgments handed down before the United Kingdom joined the EU (principally
Van Gend en Loos in 1963 and Costa v ENEL in 1964: see Turpin and Tomkins 2007:
ch. 5).
The sovereignty of parliament, it will be recalled, means that parliament may make
or unmake any law whatever. What if parliament now wants to make a law which is
contrary to EU law? It is clear that, were this to happen, the European Commission
would have standing to bring the United Kingdom before the European Court of
Justice and that the Court would be able to rule that the UK had violated EU law.
If the United Kingdom refused to amend or repeal its offending legislation, the UK
could be fined (Articles 226–8 EC). More interestingly for present purposes are the
possibilities that may be open to British courts in the event of litigation seeking to
challenge an Act of Parliament deemed to be contrary to EU law. Conventionally,
no such challenge could hope to succeed—parliament may pass any law whatever,
including, presumably, a law that was contrary to EU law. However, under the terms
of Britain’s entry into the EU, domestic courts were given the jurisdiction to apply
and enforce EU law (in addition to the powers to apply and enforce domestic law
which they already possessed). And, as we have seen, EU law considers that conflicts
between national and European law should generally be resolved in favour of the
latter.
One of the remarkable features of the EU’s first half-century is how rarely problems
such as these occur in practice. Across all the member states there seems to have
been an extraordinary desire among both political and legal elites to make the EU
work, and to allow it to work as smoothly as possible. Member states have not sought
to enact legislation which they know or suspect to be contrary to European law. In
part, this may be because member state governments continue to play a lead role
in the making of European law, through the legislative functions of the Council of
Ministers. In part, though, it stems from a deep political sense that it is in the national
interest for the EU to operate successfully. In the British example, there has to date
been only one case in which the UK courts were required to confront the tension
between the supremacy of EU law and the sovereignty of parliament. The case is called
Factortame.
Factortame concerned a challenge to provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act 1988
that had been designed to protect British fishing interests. Spanish-owned fishing
vessels were disadvantaged by the statutory scheme and they brought proceedings in
the domestic courts arguing that it was contrary to Community law. The Divisional
Court in London referred the case to the European Court of Justice for a preliminary
ruling on the points of Community law, that arose in the case. Meanwhile, the
applicants claimed interim relief—a remedy the effect of which would be to suspend
the operation of the relevant provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act pending the
final resolution of the case. The House of Lords initially held that the applicants could
have no such interim relief, as the remedy they sought (an interim injunction against
the Crown) was, for technical reasons, not available in English law (R v Transport
Secretary, ex parte Factortame (No 1) [1990] 2 AC 85). However, it was not their
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interests in English law, but their rights under Community law, that the applicants
were seeking to protect. The question arose, therefore, as to whether the applicants
were as a matter of Community law entitled to interim relief. This question the House
of Lords referred to the European Court of Justice. After receiving that Court’s answer,
the House of Lords ruled that the applicants were entitled, as a matter of Community
law, to a remedy the effect of which was to suspend the operation of certain provisions
of the Merchant Shipping Act. The House of Lords, exercising its jurisdiction to
apply and enforce Community law, then granted the remedy (R v Transport Secretary,
ex parte Factortame (No 2) [1991] 1 AC 603). This was the first time since the early
seventeenth century that a court in England had granted a remedy the effect of which
was to suspend part of an Act of Parliament.
Does this mean that the sovereignty of parliament is dead? Surely no: parliament
retains the power to pass legislation that would withdraw the United Kingdom from
the European Union. Short of this nuclear option, parliament also retains the power
to pass legislation that includes a provision along the following lines: ‘This Act shall
be construed and shall have effect notwithstanding any provision to the contrary in
European Union law’. Whether such a provision would be effective to guarantee that
a future House of Lords (or Supreme Court) would not be able in the context of that
legislation to repeat the result obtained by the applicants in Factortame remains to
be seen. Thus far, it has not been attempted. It is clear that such a provision would
be contrary to European law and that the Commission would sue the UK in the
European Court of Justice were such a provision to be relied upon in the UK. But
whether the UK courts would be able to overturn it in the light of the sovereignty of
parliament is one of those constitutional imponderables that we will not know the
answer to until it happens.
What is clear is that, regardless of whether the law of the sovereignty of parliament
has changed as a result of Britain’s membership of the EU, the political context
within which sovereignty operates has changed beyond recognition from the context
that prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century, when Dicey was writing (for
further argument on these matters, see Craig 1991; Tomkins 2003: ch. 4; Turpin
and Tomkins 2007: ch. 5). What is also clear is that disquiet about the doctrine
of the sovereignty of parliament is not confined to the EU context. In a House
of Lords case decided in 2005, which had nothing to do with EU law, Lord Steyn
opined for example that ‘The classic account given by Dicey of the doctrine of the
sovereignty of Parliament . . . can now be seen to be out of place in the modern
United Kingdom’ and Lord Hope stated that while our constitution is ‘dominated’
by the sovereignty of parliament, ‘parliamentary sovereignty is no longer, if ever
it was, absolute’ (Jackson v Attorney General [2006] 1 AC 262; see further Turpin
and Tomkins 2007: 66–76, 327–35). If parliament is not sovereign, we may ask, then
who is? The implication of these dicta from Jackson is that a number of judges
are preparing themselves to rewrite the law of sovereignty—so that no longer will
parliament be able to ‘make or unmake any law whatever’, but only such laws as
the courts hold to be lawful, or constitutional. The move, encountered numerous
times in this chapter, from the political constitution to the legal constitution, has
constitutionalism 255
begun to encroach, it seems, even upon a matter as fundamental as the sovereignty of
parliament.
14.4.2 New Labour and the British Constitution
The second great source of European influence on British constitutionalism is the
European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), a treaty drawn up under the aus-
pices not of the EU but of the Council of Europe (and enforced not by the European
Court of Justice in Luxembourg but by the European Court of Human Rights in
Strasbourg). While the United Kingdom has been bound by the terms of the ECHR,
as a matter of international law, since the treaty’s inception, Convention rights have
been enforceable in domestic law (i.e. in proceedings before the UK’s own courts)
only since the Human Rights Act 1998. This Act significantly enlarged the power of the
judiciary to impugn both government decisions and statutes where they are argued to
be in violation of Convention rights. While the courts cannot quash provisions of an
Act of Parliament on this ground, under the Human Rights Act, section 4, they may
make a ‘declaration of incompatibility’, a new remedy by which the court declares that
a statutory provision is incompatible with Convention rights, inviting government
and parliament to consider whether, in the light of such a judgment, the provision
should remain law. By contrast, government actions and decisions that are found to
be contrary to Convention rights may be quashed by the courts: section 6.
From the point of view of British constitutionalism, what is most significant about
the Human Rights Act is the extent to which it further underscores the shift from
political to legal constitutionalism. Under the model of the ECHR and the HRA it
is no longer principally to parliament and to political institutions that we should
look in the quest to hold the government to constitutional account, but to the courts.
Parliament continues to have a role—ministers must declare to parliament that the
Bills they propose are compatible with Convention rights (Human Rights Act 1998,
section 19) and the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which amongst other tasks
monitors legislation for human rights compliance, has played an important role in
the law-making process in recent years. But the importance of parliament’s role has
diminished in comparison with that of the courts.
A telling example comes from the counter-terrorism field. Under the model of
the Human Rights Act we must now look to the courts for an authoritative opinion
on whether the government’s counter-terrorism strategies are compatible with the
Convention rights to liberty, to a fair trial, and to freedom of expression, whereas
we would formerly have looked principally to parliament to provide a crucible in
which the policies of the government could be tested against the public interest in
informed debate and detailed select committee scrutiny. When in December 2003
a cross-party committee of parliamentarians published a report that was damning
in its criticism of numerous aspects of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act
2001, it caused barely a ripple (Privy Counsellor Review Committee 2003). But when,
twelve months later, an eight-to-one majority of the law lords granted a declaration
256 adam tomkins
that one particular aspect of the legislation was incompatible with Convention rights,
there was an enormous fuss in the media, in parliament, and in the law reviews (A v
Home Secretary [2005] 2 AC 68; see Turpin and Tomkins 2007: 762–72). Whether the
result—the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005 and its extraordinary regime of ‘control
orders’—was what the law lords had in mind as the desired outcome is a different
question. The point here is not to rehearse the various merits and demerits of the
legislative schemes, but to notice what the enormous difference in reaction between
the parliamentary report on the one hand and the law lords’ judgment on the other
suggests about how far British constitutionalism has shifted from being primarily a
political constitution to being primarily a legal one.
The Human Rights Act 1998 is one of a number of measures introduced by the
New Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown to reform the British
constitution. Along with the devolutionary arrangements made for Scotland, Wales,
and Northern Ireland (see above), the House of Lords Act 1999 (which removed
all but ninety-two of the hereditary peers from the House of Lords), the Freedom
of Information Act 2000, the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 (see above), and the
various commitments to further reform made in the 2007 Green Paper, The Gover-
nance of Britain (see above), these reforms amount to a substantial degree of rapid
constitutional change (Foley 1999; King 2001; Oliver 2003; Johnson 2004). Imme-
diately, however, two caveats must be entered: first, not everything has changed.
The powers of the monarchy, the electoral system for elections to the House of
Commons, the UK’s legal relationship with the EU (and, for that matter, with the
Commonwealth), and the relationship between central and local government are all
the same now as they were before New Labour came into office. Secondly, it would be
a serious error to imagine that the British constitution lay dormant or unchanged
in the decades before 1997. Harold Wilson’s race relations and sex discrimination
legislation; Ted Heath’s bringing the UK into the EU; and Margaret Thatcher’s and
John Major’s reforms to the civil service, privatization programmes, and array of
legislation on civil liberties all amounted to significant constitutional reform (Turpin
and Tomkins 2007: 21–4). But, as Matthew Flinders has argued, not all constitutional
change is of the same order. Flinders distinguishes between ‘cosmetic’, ‘moderate’,
and ‘fundamental’ reform (Flinders 2005: 61–2). From a constitutional point of view,
if not from a socio-economic perspective, British constitutional reform in the half-
century before 1997 was generally cosmetic or moderate (the exception being Britain’s
accession to the EU in 1972). Since 1997, by contrast, it is at least arguable that
much of what the government has sought to reform constitutionally has been more
fundamental.
This is true at least of the Human Rights Act and of the devolution legislation. As
we have seen, the shift from political to legal constitutionalism, to which the Human
Rights Act makes a substantial contribution, is the deepest structural change in British
constitutionalism in our time. It is of the same order of magnitude as the shift
from divine right to parliamentary monarchy in the seventeenth century and as that
from the parliamentary government Walter Bagehot so brilliantly captured (Bagehot
1867) to the party government of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Equally,
constitutionalism 257
the creation (or re-creation) of new sites of political and governmental authority in
Edinburgh, Cardiff, and Belfast, combined with the ways in which the proportional
electoral systems employed there have qualified the extent to which those new sites
of authority are able merely to ape the institutions of Westminster and Whitehall, is
a constitutional innovation the full consequences of which have yet to be worked out
and which, indeed, are currently unforeseeable.
In other respects, however, it may be that there is rather less to New Labour’s
constitutional reforms than its keenest advocates would have us believe. Since 1999
there has been much talk but precious little action on reforming the obviously unde-
mocratic House of Lords (Hazell 2007: 9–12); the Freedom of Information Act 2000
was a half-hearted affair and has delivered only a fraction of the ‘open government’
that had been promised in the government’s 1997 Green Paper, Your Right to Know
(Cm 3818; see Austin 2004); since 1998 there has been no movement at all on the issue
of electoral reform for elections to the House of Commons; and government attempts
to control the House of Commons have been as central to the Whips’ mission as ever,
albeit that, quite remarkably, the Commons has begun to stand up to government
pressure in a variety of ways and, moreover, with some success, both in terms of its
scrutiny of legislation (Cowley 2005) and in terms of resisting government attempts to
interfere with the composition and work of parliamentary select committees (Flinders
2007; Power 2007). For all the recent emphasis on change and ‘modernization’ there
has been a great deal of politics as usual. In a compelling analysis, Matthew Flinders
has argued that, notwithstanding the importance of a number of New Labour’s
constitutional reforms, there has been no ‘far-reaching shift in the nature of [British]
democracy’, which remains firmly majoritarian rather than consensual in character
(Flinders 2005: 63; cf. Mair 2000: 34). All of this said, however, and as our discussion
of Scottish devolution suggests, Flinders is wise to point out that even if New Labour’s
constitutional reforms have been ‘less significant than might have been expected’, they
might yet ‘set in train a critical momentum and dynamic that may . . . force at some
point an explicit reconsideration of the structure and power relationships within
Britain’ (Flinders 2005: 90).
Three further facets of New Labour’s constitutional reform policies should be
noted in conclusion. First, while constitutional reform may well be one of the princi-
pal achievements for which Tony Blair’s period as Prime Minister is remembered,
Mr Blair himself was famously uninterested in constitutional reform and had, in
terms of the way he conducted politics on a day-to-day basis, strong centralizing
and controlling instincts which ran counter to the most important constitutional
reforms his governments introduced. David Marquand coined the term ‘the Blair
paradox’ to summarize this peculiar state of affairs (e.g. Marquand 2000). It aptly
captures Mr Blair’s mixed legacy on constitutional questions. Secondly, it would be
better if we spoke in terms of New Labour’s constitutional reforms (in the plural),
rather than of constitutional reform as a single entity. This is because, as numerous
commentators have pointed out, there has been no overall plan (Foley 1999; Oliver
2003: 3; Hazell 2007: 18–19; Turpin and Tomkins 2007: 24). The various constitutional
reforms have been advocated by different interest groups, for different reasons, to
258 adam tomkins
respond to different perceived weaknesses in the old constitutional order: consider,
for example, the diverse pre-histories of devolution, human rights legislation, and
freedom of information (Foley 1999: chs. 3–4).
Finally, it should be observed that a number of New Labour’s constitutional
reforms (and a number of consequences that flow from them) are matters of appar-
ently increasing political contention. The main parties are divided, for example, on
House of Lords reform, on whether Scottish MPs in Westminster should vote on
Bills that pertain only to England and Wales, and on whether the Human Rights Act
should be replaced with a ‘British’ Bill of Rights, which draws lines between liberty
and security differently from how the European Convention on Human Rights does it.
In 2001 Mark Evans wrote that ‘Hitherto the literature on constitutionalism in Britain
has been circumscribed by the apolitical nature of its constitutional politics. For much
of this last century the UK constitution has remained apolitical’ (Evans 2001: 414).
With an SNP administration in power in Edinburgh, a Labour government in London
that is dependent for its majority on MPs representing Scottish constituencies, and a
Conservative Opposition that is increasingly vocal both about ‘English votes for Eng-
lish laws’ and about certain judicial decisions concerned with the Human Rights Act,
the picture Evans painted at the beginning of the decade may well need substantial
revision before its end.
14.5 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
If we revisit the six core features of British constitutionalism outlined above, we will
see: (a) that the centrality of the Crown/parliament dynamic is lessening in favour
of the dynamic between parliamentary government on the one hand and the courts
on the other; (b) that the doctrine of the sovereignty of parliament is under great
pressure and may be weakening; (c) that the rule of law is growing in reach and
in significance; (d) that the separation of powers is gaining greater constitutional
importance, especially in terms of demarcating the judiciary from the institutions of
parliamentary government; (e) that the focus of responsible government is shifting
from parliament to the courts of law; and (f) that the Union, especially the Union
between England and Scotland, is the great unknown, the factor with at least the
potential to be the fly in the ointment.
The present time is one of rapid and in many cases significant constitutional
change in Britain, change which in some instances the Blair/Brown New Labour gov-
ernments have either caused (devolution) or contributed to (the Human Rights Act
and the turn from political to legal constitutionalism) but which in other instances
stems from different sources not altogether within the government’s control (the
common law; the EU). This chapter commenced with the observation that the British
constitution is unusual. We live in an era of political and legal harmonization, of
constitutionalism 259
common denominators, and of a globalization that shows little respect for exception-
alism, even in matters constitutional (Goldsworthy 2003; Beatty 2004; Hirschl 2004;
Anderson 2005; Choudhry 2006). While the various continuities and ongoing tradi-
tions of the British constitution should be neither overlooked nor underestimated, the
underlying dynamic of much of the constitutional reform examined here—namely,
the turn from political to legal constitutionalism—is far from unique to the UK and
is, indeed, widely experienced throughout the common law world and elsewhere. If
current trends continue, claims as to the unusual nature of the British constitution
may not long survive.
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c h a p t e r 15
.................................................................................................................
J U D I C I A RY
.................................................................................................................
keith ewing
15.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
Taff Vale Railway Co Ltd v Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants [1901] AC
426 is one of the most famous court decisions in British legal and political history,
not least because of its decisive contribution to the formation of what is now the
Labour Party (Pelling 1965). In seeking an immediate reversal of the decision—
which sorely limited the right to strike—the TUC turned to a number of friends,
including Sir Robert Reid QC who helped draft a Bill which would deal not only
with Taff Vale, but with a number of other hostile court decisions as well. Following
the Liberal landslide in 1906, Reid was to become Lord Chancellor, and to play an
active part in the Cabinet proceedings in arguing for a legislative solution favoured
by the TUC rather than the diluted measure proposed by some of his colleagues. As
Lord Chancellor, it fell to Reid (by now Lord Loreburn) to pilot the full strength
Bill through the House of Lords, introducing it at Second Reading, and carrying it
through the later stages, in the process rejecting a number of restrictive amendments.
Within two years of enactment, however, a small dispute in South Shields left the
Court of Appeal, providing the first opportunity for the Law Lords to consider the
Trade Disputes Act 1906 (Conway v Wade [1909] AC 606). Such was the promiscuous
nature of the British political system that an unusually large Bench of seven judges
was presided over by none other than Lord Loreburn, who now had the curious task
of interpreting and applying his own Bill in a judicial forum. The other members of
the court included Lord James of Hereford, with whom Lord Loreburn had clashed
during the parliamentary debates on the Bill, Lord James apparently ‘furious’ with
the opposition in the Lords for failing more vigorously to attack it. Further conflict
was however avoided, with Lord Loreburn running up the white flag in what looks
judiciary 263
like a failure of government nerve in the face of stinging criticism of the 1906 Act by
the Court of Appeal and the legal establishment generally. Written on the white flag
were a number of hitherto unanticipated qualifications, designed to limit the Act’s
apparently unequivocal scope, qualifications which were to cause problems in the
years to follow (Ewing 2007b).
It would be hard to find a better example of judicial involvement in the political
process, or political involvement in the judicial process. In a single incident we have
all three branches of government wrapped up in one man. Yet it would also be
hard to find a better illustration of how much has changed in 100 years. The events
surrounding Conway v Wade [1909] AC 606 are a reminder of how things were, not
how things are. However, while the position has thus changed profoundly in many
different ways, and while judges are no longer as politically engaged as this episode
reveals their predecessors to have been, it does not follow that the judicial role has
ceased to have a political dimension, for one of a number of reasons. In the first
place, the judicial process may be said to be a political process because of its nature
as a deliberative exercise, which involves the making of decisions, informed in part
(sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly) by considerations of public policy, which
lead to the formulation of rules (and principles) of general application, in the course
of which—some would add—it is likely that the ‘very general ideological orientation
of judges will come into play’ (Robertson 1998: 21). In candid moments, judges
themselves will openly acknowledge that they have a ‘law making function’ (National
Westminster Bank plc v Spectrum Plus Ltd [2005] UKHL 41, at para [32]), with Lord
Goff earlier acknowledging judicially that ‘the common law is a living system of law,
reacting to new events and new ideas, and so capable of providing the citizens of
this country with a system of practical justice relevant to the times in which they
live’: Kleinwort Benson Ltd v Lincoln City Council [1999] 2 AC 349, at p 377. There is,
however, another sense in which we can refer to the ‘courts as political agencies and
judges as political actors’ (Shapiro and Stone Sweet 2002: 21). Here the focus is not
on the judicial process and its outputs, but on its political impacts and effects, as a
restraint on other branches of government. So although it may be disputed that the
legal process is a political process, there is likely to be a ready consensus around the
idea that judges place ‘limits on law-making behaviour’ (Stone Sweet 2000: 1), and
limits on the exercise of powers conferred by law.
Until recently, however, there has been less scope for British judges to behave in
these ways than for their counterparts in other jurisdictions (though as we shall see
this does not mean that there has been no such scope). Indeed, it has been suggested
that one reason why judges and courts have been so little studied by political scientists
in the United Kingdom is that they have ‘never been seen as important institutions’
(Robertson 1998: 4), perhaps wrongly perceived to have had little power. In a system of
parliamentary sovereignty the judges were firmly subordinate to the legislature, even
if by the power of interpretation they could from time to time frustrate the intention
of parliament. It is true that the common law gave the judges a great deal of rule-
making authority (Robertson 1998), but this authority and this role have gradually
diminished as more and more fields of activity in the public and private spheres are
264 keith ewing
governed by the statutes of what has been a sovereign parliament. In recent years,
however, much has changed and the role of the courts has expanded, as a result of EU
membership and the introduction of measures such as the Human Rights Act (HRA),
with British judges now having a greater opportunity to play a part in the judicializa-
tion of politics that we see elsewhere in the world (Stone Sweet 2000). This expansion
of the role of the courts and the extension of what may be referred to as judicial
power bring with it questions about the effectiveness, legitimacy, and accountability
of that power. These are the three themes that will be pursued in this chapter, as
we consider the implications of the shifting balance of the constitution described by
Tomkins (2009), away from what some refer to as the ‘political’ constitution (Griffith
1979), in the direction of what others might now refer to as the ‘legal’ constitution.
This account will address in particular the implications of the Human Rights Act 1998
and the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, but before addressing these matters, it is
necessary to say something about the evolving principles which are the foundations
of the judicial role in the British system of government. It will be argued that the
story of the ‘judicialization’ of British politics is to some extent a story of paradox and
contradiction, in which outstanding questions remain on each of the three issues of
effectiveness, legitimacy, and accountability.
15.2 Politics and the Rule of Law
.............................................................................................................................................
In an important lecture delivered in October 2007, the senior Law Lord claimed
that ‘the predominant characteristics of our constitutional settlement in the United
Kingdom today’ include ‘our commitment to the rule of law’ and our ‘recognition
of the Queen in Parliament as the supreme law-making authority in the country’
(Bingham 2007). The main point of the lecture was to address the concerns expressed
by ‘respected and authoritative voices [who] now question whether parliamentary
sovereignty can co-exist with the rule of law’, an issue that has taken a significant new
twist in recent years. One difficulty with this debate about the rule of law, however, is
the indeterminacy of the term, with Craig (2007) referring to ‘considerable diversity
of opinion as to the meaning of the rule of law’. Indeed, according to the House
of Lords Constitution Committee, ‘the rule of law remains a complex and in some
respects uncertain concept’ (House of Lords 2007). This is despite the fact that the
principle is now to be found in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, as something
the Lord Chancellor is legally obliged to uphold, though the term (and therefore the
nature of the obligation) is not defined. Traditional views of the rule of law would
emphasize requirements such as (i) the government should have legal authority for its
actions, (ii) the law should be clear, prospective, and predictable, so that citizens can
conduct their lives in accordance with the law, and (iii) violations of the law should
be determined only after a fair trial before independent judges (Raz 1977). There has,
judiciary 265
however, been a tendency in recent years to seek to inflate our understanding of the
rule of law, not just among legal scholars and philosophers (Allan 2001; Dworkin
1986), but also amongst judges and politicians. Lord Bingham, for example, spoke
of the rule of law as including core human rights (such as those to be found in the
European Convention on Human Rights) and went so far as to argue that ‘democracy
lies at the heart of the concept of the rule of law’ (Bingham 2007), without defining
what democracy means for this purpose.
The ‘concept of the rule of law’ was a source of judicial power and a source of
conflict between judges and politicians throughout the twentieth century. In the 1920s
Lord Hewart—then Lord Chief Justice—famously railed against the ‘New Despo-
tism’ of the emerging welfare state, concerned that so much statutory power was
being delegated to ministers, and that so much adjudication was being delegated to
administrative tribunals. Although contemporary scholars such as Laski (1923) and
Jennings (1932) welcomed what they saw as the administrative state and administra-
tive discretion, Hewart saw only what he pejoratively referred to as ‘administrative
law’ and ‘administrative lawlessness’. However, many public lawyers would see it as
one of the great achievements of the courts in the twentieth century that the rule
of law and administrative law have become synonyms rather than antonyms, as the
courts moved to ‘keep the powers of government within their legal bounds, so as
to protect the citizen against their abuse’ (Wade and Forsyth 2004: 5). Thus, while
‘Parliament as the legislature is sovereign’ (ibid.), there is no such thing as a statutory
power which is excluded from judicial review. Moreover, in what can be seen as the
symbiotic link between the rule of law and the sovereignty of parliament, the courts
have insisted that ministers must apply an Act of Parliament consistently with its
policy and objects, but that ‘the policy and objects of the Act must be determined
by construing the Act as a whole, and construction is always a matter of law for the
courts’: Padfield v Minister of Agriculture [1968] AC 997. However, construction is not
a science, and as Labour local authorities intermittently and the Labour government
in the 1970s were just as famously to discover, it is an activity that could be exercised
narrowly to construe powers and frustrate the ambitions of councillors and ministers
seeking to extend controversial programmes and empower regulatory bodies (Griffith
1991). Indeed, Lord Atkinson’s famous broadside against Poplarism as promoting
‘eccentric principles of socialist philanthropy’ remains one of the great lines of
twentieth-century English jurisprudence: Roberts v Hopwood [1925] AC 578 (Fennell
1986).
The other major area where the rule of law brought governments and parliament
into conflict with the judges in the twentieth century is around the question of trade
union activity. Trade unions in the United Kingdom historically had no statutory
rights, but—since 1906—relied instead on statutory immunity from common law
liability. From what Stone Sweet (2000) referred to as the ‘insular domain’ of labour
law, the immunities were no more than a legal form designed to establish a freedom,
which in other countries was established by a right, in some cases constitutionally
protected. From the ‘insular domain’ of public law, however, the immunities were
seen as being ‘in entire contradiction of those doctrines of personal freedom and
266 keith ewing
equality before the law which have hitherto been its main aim and object’ (Conway v
Wade [1908] 2 KB 845, at p 854 (Farwell LJ)). This tension between these two domains
became more acute in the 1970s when trade union immunities were restored to their
1906 position, at a time when there was some concern about the economic and polit-
ical status of trade unions and their close constitutional relations with government
(Ewing 2000a). The new immunities were strongly criticized by the Court of Appeal
in a handful of cases in which Lord Denning presided, and were the subject of very
narrow interpretations, designed to restrict their scope, in a manner which did not
sit easily with the apparent intention of parliament (Wedderburn of Charlton 1980).
According to Lord Denning, in a lecture given on the eve of the 1979 general election,
‘the greatest threat to the rule of law is posed by big trade unions’, adding that ‘one
of the biggest problems is how to restrain the misuse or abuse of [their] power’
(Denning 1983: 321). However, although the House of Lords found the same legislation
‘intrinsically repugnant to anyone who has spent his life in the practice of the law or
the administration of justice’, the sovereignty of parliament was to prevail. According
to Lord Diplock, ‘it is not for judges to invent fancied ambiguities as an excuse for
failing to give effect to its plain meaning because they themselves consider that the
consequences of doing so would be inexpedient, or even unjust or immoral’: Duport
Steels Ltd v Sirs [1980] ICR 161.
These two examples illustrate in different ways how legislation may be constrained
by judicial perceptions about the rule of law, which may operate to confine the
scope of the legislation, and with it the intention of parliament. Yet in what may be an
inevitable consequence of these developments, there has recently been a qualitative
change in the sense that the judges are now contemplating the possibility that the
rule of law may trump rather than simply mediate parliamentary sovereignty.
This means that the courts would not only ‘interpret’ legislation consistently with
the ‘rule of law’, but refuse to apply legislation that failed to comply with it, a power
which Lord Denning said he wished the courts had had at the time when his dispute
with the government over trade union law was at boiling point (Denning 1982).
This claim of the courts that the rule of law rather than the sovereignty of parliament
must take priority would greatly extend the boundaries of judicial power, all the
more so in view of the indeterminate nature and apparently unconstrained scope
of the rule of law as a constitutional principle. Nevertheless, this is a claim to be
found in the extra-judicial writings of some judges (Woolf 1995; Laws 1995; 1996),
and more significantly in the speeches of some of the Law Lords in R (Jackson)
v Attorney General [2005] UKHL 56 in which the Countryside Alliance unsuccessfully
challenged the legality of the Hunting Act 2004. The Act had reached the statute
book by invoking the Parliament Acts 1911–49, and the Alliance contended (i) that
the latter of these Acts was invalid, and (ii) that anything passed as a result of
having invoked it was also invalid. But although the action failed, the case is
notable for important statements by three different members of the House of Lords.
According to Lord Hope, ‘the rule of law enforced by the courts is the controlling
principle upon which our constitution is based’; while in the same case, Lady Hale
said that the courts will ‘treat with particular suspicion (and might even reject) any
judiciary 267
attempt to subvert the rule of law by removing governmental action affecting the right
of the individual from all judicial powers’ (though Lady Hale has since questioned
extra-judicially whether the judges really want the power to strike down legislation:
Ewing and Tham (2008)).
What thus appears to be taking place here is an attempt to shift the relationship
between the rule of law and parliamentary sovereignty, with at least some judges
asserting the superior claims of the former over the latter. Indeed, according to
Lord Hope in the Countryside Alliance case, ‘it is no longer right to say that [par-
liament’s] freedom to legislate admits of no qualification’. This challenge to the
sovereignty of parliament is very significant from a constitutional point of view, and
is potentially also very significant as a result of the relationship between the judges
and the other branches of government, not only in view of the open and indeter-
minate scope of the rule of law as a principle, but in view also of the controversial
way in which it has been applied to political circumstances and events in the past.
Nevertheless, in an influential piece supportive of these developments, it has been
argued that ‘it is no longer self evident, or judicially accepted, that a legislature in
a modern democracy should be able with impunity to violate the strictures of the
rule of law’, although it has also been acknowledged that ‘it may take some time,
provocative legislation and considerable judicial courage for the courts to assert the
primacy of the Rule of Law over Parliamentary Sovereignty’ (Jowell 2007: 23). It is
unclear what kind of legislation would provoke such a response from the courts,
though also in the Countryside Alliance case, Lord Steyn referred to ‘exceptional
circumstances involving an attempt to abolish judicial review, or the authority of
the courts’ as possibly being ‘a constitutional fundamental which even a com-
plaisant House of Commons cannot abolish’. These developments have not, how-
ever, gone unchallenged, with one academic commentator claiming forcefully that
they are ‘unargued and unsound’, ‘historically false’, and ‘jurisprudentially absurd’
(Ekins 2007). In less ‘ascerbic’ terms, but perhaps more significantly, the senior
Law Lord was heard to say extra-judicially that he could not ‘accept that [his]
colleagues’ observations are correct’, in a strong defence of the principle of par-
liamentary sovereignty, which draws heavily on the work of Goldsworthy (1999;
Bingham 2007). But it is unclear where many of the other Law Lords sit in this
debate.
15.3 The Effectiveness of
Judicial Review
.............................................................................................................................................
It is too early properly to assess the nature and implications of these very significant
developments, or the extent to which they reflect a major tilting of the balance
268 keith ewing
between the three branches of government. But a claim has been staked, at a time
when other initiatives have been taken to confirm that ‘ours is a society governed by
the rule of law’ (Irvine 2004: 324). Principal amongst these initiatives is the Human
Rights Act, though it is not to be assumed that the ‘rule of law’ was invented as
a British constitutional principle by the HRA (Tomkins 2009). Such developments
are consistent with the view that ‘[p]arliamentary supremacy, understood by most
students of European politics to be a principle of European politics, has lost its
vitality’, even if it may be premature to ‘declare it dead’ (Stone Sweet 2000: 1), at
least in the United Kingdom. In the latter jurisdiction there remains a school of
thought prepared to challenge the legitimacy of judicial review of legislation on
democratic grounds, and claim that it ‘does not comport with the respect and honour
normally accorded to ordinary men and women in the context of a theory of rights’
(Waldron 1993: 51), though Waldron has been understood recently to have introduced
an element of conditionality, at least in the context of political systems with weak and
ineffective parliamentary scrutiny (Waldron 2005). However, much of the work in
opposition to ‘rights’ rather than ‘democracy’ was developed by the left at a time of
greater ideological conflict between the main political parties (Campbell 1983), and at
a time when the judges were seen to be an obstacle to progressive legislation (a view
which Lord Denning did little to dispel during his dispute with the government about
trade union legislation in the 1970s). But much has changed, and in an era of free
markets and globalization, social democracy has been in retreat, at least in the Anglo-
Saxon world. So although a principled and persuasive republican case can still be
made against judicial supremacy (Goldsworthy 1999; Tomkins 2005; Bellamy 2007),
the political context within which opposition to judicial scrutiny was developed is
disappearing, and it may be more difficult in the current climate to sustain the
argument that the courts will frustrate progressive policies.
Thus, whereas in the past there was thus a fear by some that the courts would (and
did) frustrate the operation of social and economic rights established by parliament,
now there is a hope by others that the judges will protect established civil and political
rights. In a manner that could only have been predicted with great difficulty, these
latter rights are also being threatened by globalization, as governments seek to protect
their borders from the free movement of people (Rawlings 2005), and deal with the
consequences of what is apocalyptically dubbed the global ‘war on terror’ (Gearty
2007). So far as the effectiveness of judicial review in such circumstances is concerned,
one problem relates to the contradictory position adopted by judges who claim or
assert power (in the manner described above), when they seem simultaneously reluc-
tant to use the powers they already have. A great deal of restraint is to be seen in the
approach of the courts to the Human Rights Act in the development of what Gearty
(2004) refers to in his elegant study as ‘the principles of human rights adjudication’.
Thus, we have Lord Hope expressing the view in R v DPP, ex p Kebeline [2000] 2 AC
326, at p 381, that the courts should ‘defer, on democratic grounds, to the considered
opinion of the elected body as to where the balance is to be struck between the rights
of the individual and the needs of society’. These comments were to find an echo in the
speech of Lord Nolan in the Alconbury case where referring to the planning system
judiciary 269
he said that ‘to substitute for the Secretary of State an independent and impartial
body with no central electoral accountability would not only be a recipe for chaos: it
would be profoundly undemocratic’: R (Alconbury Developments Ltd) v Environment
Secretary [2001] UKHL 23; [2003] 2 AC 295, at para [60]. The point is also illustrated
by a second challenge by the Countryside Alliance to the Hunting Act 2004, this
time on the ground that the measures in question violated a number of Convention
rights. In rejecting these challenges, Lord Bingham said that ‘The democratic process
is liable to be subverted if, on a question of moral and political judgment, opponents
of [legislation] achieve through the courts what they could not achieve in Parliament’:
R (Countryside Alliance) v Attorney General [2007] UKHL 52.
It is perhaps inevitable that cautious principles will lead to cautious decisions
with significant implications for the relationship between the judiciary and the other
branches of government. In light of the foregoing ‘principles of adjudication’, it is thus
not surprising that one leading public lawyer should express scepticism about the
vigour with which the courts have protected human rights, claiming that ‘[d]espite
the notoriety of one or two apparently progressive decisions under the Human Rights
Act . . . a close examination of the case law reveals that little has been achieved by way
of increased judicial protection of civil liberties’ (Tomkins 2008). Although this is a
view that would be challenged by those who are less critical of the judicial role, it is
nevertheless the case that the statutory restrictions on personal and political freedom
continue to expand, with a list of measures—introduced since the Human Rights
Act was passed—including the Terrorism Act 2000, the Regulation of Investigatory
Powers Act 2000, the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, the Civil Contin-
gencies Act 2004, the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005, the Serious Organized Crime
and Police Act 2005, the Identity Cards Act 2006, and the Terrorism Act 2006, to name
but eight. Although—as Tomkins (2008) acknowledges—the judicial traffic is by no
means all one way, at the same time a disappointing litany of decisions continues
to grow, as the House of Lords (i) condemns torture but erects evidentiary barriers
that make it difficult to establish that torture has been used (A v Home Secretary (No
2) [2006] 1 All ER 575); (ii) condemns indefinite detention without trial but permits
control orders where people can be subject to house arrest for up to sixteen hours a
day (Home Secretary v JJ (FC) [2007] UKHL 45); and (iii) permits the retention of
the DNA of people who have not been convicted of any offence, at a time of growing
concern about state interference in the private lives of citizens (R(S) v South Yorkshire
Chief Constable [2004] 1 WLR 2196). These and other cases suggest that while we
have no reason in the present political climate to be over-anxious about the courts
challenging progressive legislation, we have no reason either to be over-confident that
they will defend civil and political rights from erosion.
It does not follow, however, that the executive wins all of the cases in judicial review,
even if it does win most of the cases (Steyn 2005). For evidence to the contrary it is
necessary to look no further than the momentous decision of the House of Lords in
A v Home Secretary [2005] 2 AC 68—arguably the most significant judicial decision—
at least in the field of public law—since Entick v Carrington (1765) 19 St Tr 1030. In the
A case where unusually a Bench of nine judges was assembled (though a bench of
270 keith ewing
nine was also assembled for the Jackson case as well), the House of Lords held by
a majority of 8 : 1 that legislation authorizing the indefinite detention without trial
of foreign terrorist suspects was a breach of article 5 of the European Convention
on Human Rights (ECHR), which protects the right to liberty. The House of Lords
further held that the government’s derogation from the Convention—made in order
to pass the legislation—was also unlawful, in the sense that it went beyond what was
‘strictly required by the exigencies of the situation’, as demanded by article 15 of the
ECHR. According to Lord Bingham, ‘If the threat presented to the security of the
United Kingdom by UK nationals suspected of being Al-Qaeda terrorists or their
supporters could be addressed without infringing their right to personal liberty, it
is not shown why similar measures could not adequately address the threat presented
by foreign nationals’. In so holding—and in sharp contrast to earlier cases involving
national security—Lord Bingham rejected the argument that ‘matters of the kind
in issue here fall within the discretionary area of judgment properly belonging to
the democratic organs of the state’. Thus making a declaration that the legislation
in question was incompatible with Convention rights, the House of Lords in A
also addressed questions about the democratic legitimacy of judicial activism. In a
sharp rebuff to counsel for the government who had raised these questions, Lord
Bingham said that it was ‘wrong to stigmatise judicial decision-making as in some way
undemocratic’: the courts do not have the power to strike down an Act of Parliament
leaving it to the government to decide how to proceed.
As already suggested, this was an extraordinary decision, all the more striking
for being the only occasion at the time of writing the House of Lords had declared
incompatible an Act of Parliament enacted since the HRA came into force (House of
Lords 2007). This alone may help to reinforce the view that the courts are extremely
cautious in their use of the HRA, while A also reveals other limits relating to the
process of judicial review, even when the judges are at their boldest. Thus, the A case
reveals the process to be inefficient, in the sense that the Anti-terrorism, Crime and
Security Act was passed at the end of 2001, and the decision of the House of Lords was
not reached until the end of 2004, with a number of people all the while detained in
breach of their human rights. The A case also reveals the process to be inconclusive,
in the sense that the Lords’ decision did not lead to the release of any of those who had
been detained in breach of their Convention rights. Indeed, what the affair revealed
is that the judges are playing in a game they cannot win. The detained individuals
remained in custody until new legislation—the Terrorism Act 2005—was introduced
giving the Home Secretary the power to detain many of them at home by way of
control orders, a form of de facto indefinite detention that was claimed to be worse
for some than the indefinite detention in Belmarsh and elsewhere. Although control
orders appeared not to be as intrusive as internment and are also subject to challenge
in the courts (Home Secretary v JJ (FC) [2007] UKHL 45), the government had already
moved some paces ahead of the judges by deciding that some of those subject to
control orders could be returned to indefinite detention in prison. This was done
under immigration powers, pending the deportation of the individuals concerned
to states with whom memorandums of understanding were to be concluded, the
judiciary 271
memorandums being designed to prevent the torture of the detainees once they are
retuned (Ewing 2008). It is the futility of litigation in these circumstances that rein-
forces doubts about the effectiveness of judicial review and strengthens the argument
that it is to a reform of parliamentary procedure that human rights activists should
be directing their attention (Ewing 2007b), particularly if deference to parliament is
(not improperly) to be a guiding principle of adjudication.
15.4 The Legitimacy of Judicial Review
.............................................................................................................................................
We are thus presented with the curious paradox of the judges claiming and seeking
more power over representative institutions, but often deferring to the legitimacy
of these same institutions because of their representative nature. Nevertheless, the
extension of judicial power into the political sphere—however gingerly in some
cases—has reinforced the need for legitimacy on the part of those who exer-
cise it. The issue of judicial legitimacy is most intractable in jurisdictions where
the courts (the unelected branch) have the power to strike down legislation (acts of
the elected branch) (Bellamy 2007). But although perhaps not as intractable, issues
of legitimacy are nevertheless real in other jurisdictions by virtue of the political
nature and impact of the judicial role. These issues arise in the United Kingdom where
the courts are empowered only to declare legislation incompatible with Convention
rights without striking it down, though the urgency of the issue will grow if con-
stitutional foundations change in the manner suggested by some judges in Jackson.
In the meantime, important steps in the direction of greater legitimacy are to be
found in the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, which may be said to address three
fundamental preconditions of judicial power and its extension. These are respectively
(i) merit, in the sense of professional competence and ability; (ii) independence from
the government and political parties; and (iii) the need for a body of men and women
sufficiently representative or diverse to command the respect and confidence of all
sections of the community. It is important to emphasize that none of these principles
was invented by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, any more than the rule of
law was invented by the Human Rights Act. Nevertheless, just as the latter has put
lawyers and judges into politics, so in equal measure the former has tried in different
ways to take lawyers and judges out of politics. The Constitutional Reform Act 2005
thus confirms changes to the role of the Lord Chancellor who no longer takes the
judicial oath and so no longer sits as a judge; provides for the creation of the Supreme
Court of the United Kingdom, and disqualifies senior judges from membership of
the House of Lords; and creates the new machinery for the appointment of judges
through the Judicial Appointments Commission (Windlesham 2005; Woodhouse
2007).
272 keith ewing
In terms of the government’s apparent objectives relating to enhanced legitimacy
(as set out in the Constitutional Reform Act), these have only been partially met.
Although there is no concern about judicial appointments being made on merit, the
goal of institutional independence in terms of a clear separation of function has not
been fully achieved. Thus, institutional links between the judiciary and the other
branches of government will continue to exist despite the changes introduced by
the Constitutional Reform Act 2005, and will do so because the practical benefits of
these links outweigh the challenge to principle which they present. It is admittedly a
unique feature of the British system of government (at least among major developed
democracies) that the Law Lords are also members of the legislature, and that they
took part—albeit intermittently—in the legislative business of the House. There are
good reasons why judges should not sit in legislative assemblies, not the least being
that those who make the law should not also have responsibility for interpreting it:
this is the rule of man, not the rule of law. On the other hand, however, judges are
seen to make a positive contribution to the work of the legislature, with a number of
important pieces of legislation that would otherwise be neglected being due in part
to the legislative activity of the Law Lords (Ewing 2000b; Hope 2007). It is also the
case that much of the technical scrutiny work of the House of Lords in its legislative
capacity was enhanced by the presence of the Law Lords, particularly in relation to
the scrutiny of EU business (Wakeham 2000). It is thus thought to be important that
the judiciary institutionally should continue to be represented in the House of Lords,
even if it is appropriate that serving judges individually should no longer sit in a
legislative capacity, with Supreme Court justices to be forbidden by the Constitutional
Reform Act 2005 from having a seat in the Lords. The government has consequently
given an undertaking that a new convention will be created whereby Supreme Court
justices will be made members of the House of Lords on their retirement, ensuring
that there will continue to be ongoing ‘judicial’ input in the work of the House (Hope
2007).
By some way a more contentious qualification of principle relates to the ongoing
relationship between the executive and the judiciary, which in crucial respects will be
unaffected by the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. Judges have often been called upon
to exercise various executive functions on behalf of the government. These functions
are of two kinds: the first are standing commitments to act as commissioners to super-
vise the operation of regulatory regimes (such as those dealing with the interception
of communications on the one hand, and the activities of the security services on the
other); and the second are ad hoc commitments to investigate controversial events
(such as the circumstances surrounding the death of the government scientist Dr
David Kelly in 2004: Hutton 2004; 2006), and chairing royal commissions and depart-
mental committees (Beatson 2005). Neither activity is free from difficulty, in the
sense that both draw judges individually into controversial political issues, such as the
question whether intercept evidence should be used in criminal proceedings (Thomas
2007). There is also the ‘equally serious danger’ to ‘the appearance of impartiality
when judges with inside experience of reviewing intelligence matters [obtained by
chairing committees or conducting reviews] subsequently sit to hear cases involving
judiciary 273
questions of national security’ (Lustgarten and Leigh 1994: 490). Lustgarten and Leigh
(ibid.) identified four major national security cases where senior judges involved in
the cases had been involved (sometimes quite recently) in conducting national secu-
rity work on behalf of the government, including Lord Radcliffe who had completed
a review of security procedures in the civil service, Lord Denning who had conducted
the inquiry into the Profumo affair, and Lord Diplock who had conducted a review
of telephone tapping procedures. There are no indications that the use of judges in
either of these ways will stop, and although the practice now is to use retired judges as
interception and security service commissioners, the continued use of serving judges
to conduct inquiries was signalled by the Inquiries Act 2005, albeit with greater formal
input of senior judges in the making of such appointments by ministers.
Despite these reservations, the symbolic value of removing the senior judiciary to
a new building on the other side of Parliament Square is not to be underestimated.
In addition, by making judges more visible such a move may also serve to make them
subject to greater scrutiny by the press and others, to which we return. However,
the expansion of the judicial role invites questions not just about where judges are
located or where they sit, but how they are recruited and who they are. In this
respect, the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 makes another overdue change with
the creation not only of the permanent Judicial Appointments Commission with lay
and judicial membership, but also the ad hoc Supreme Court Selection Commission,
this too with lay representation. But although these procedures dilute (they do not
remove) the role of the executive in judicial appointments, they do not fully meet
the need of the government’s third objective for what has been variously described
as a ‘representative’, ‘reflective’, or ‘diverse’ judiciary. This would perhaps matter
less if there was a ‘right answer’ to every legal question which a suitably qualified
Herculean judge could work out in every case, subject to correction by the higher
courts. But there is not, and adjudication is about experience and judgement (Judicial
Appointments Commission 2007), in a context in which the judicial role is expanding.
It is in that context in particular that the argument can be made that a diverse range
of experiences should be represented on the Bench, so that legal rules develop in
accordance with as wide a collective judicial experience as possible. This is quite apart
from any other consideration that in a democratic society no rule-making institution
should be closed to any member of the community by irrelevant or irrational or
insurmountable entry requirements. The scale of the challenge, however, is revealed
by the fact on 1 October 2005, ‘only one member of the House of Lords was female, all
the heads of division were men, only two of 33 Court of Appeal judges were female,
and all but six of the 106 High Court judges were men’ (Bradley and Ewing 2006:
388). Only one member of these three courts was a member of an ethnic minority
(ibid.).
A ‘representative’ judiciary is not necessarily the same as a ‘diverse’ judiciary, if by
representative it is meant one that has a renewable and accountable electoral mandate.
The idea of election to judicial office was decisively rejected by Laski in his pioneering
work on the judiciary (as an idea for which ‘there is nothing to be said’), mainly
because of the ‘vital fact that the qualifications for judicial office are not such as an
undifferentiated public can properly assess’ (Laski 1932: 165). However, not all political
274 keith ewing
scientists have given up on the election route, with Miliband (1994: 79) arguing that
there ‘is no good reason why electors should not be able to choose judges on the
basis of their stated attitude to . . . questions with a bearing on their function’. But
this appears by some way to be a minority position, and it is not to be overlooked
that judicial elections in those jurisdictions where they are required (as in some US
states) have encountered the same problems encountered in other elections, notably
in relation to campaign finance (Schotland 2001; Streb 2007). If by representative it
is meant that the judiciary collectively should reflect the make-up of society and its
diversity, then for reasons already considered, there is a strong case for a representative
bench. Indeed, this has been accepted as a desirable principle for the magistracy for
some time (Bradley and Ewing 2006: 388), and it has now been accepted—at least to
some extent—by the government in relation to the senior judiciary. It is not clear,
however, how the new appointment procedure will significantly affect the position,
for although the JAC is required to have regard to ‘the need to encourage diversity
in the range of persons available for selection for appointments’, this is subject to an
overriding statutory objective which is to promote selection ‘solely’ on the ground of
merit. The Act may thus have only a marginal effect if—as is likely—there are deeper
problems beyond the control of the JAC which prevent under-represented groups
from securing the necessary qualifications for appointment in the first place, whether
for reasons of poor educational opportunities, difficulty in gaining access to the legal
profession, or difficulty in prospering within it, for reasons which include its working
practices.
15.5 Judicial Review and Judicial
Accountability
.............................................................................................................................................
The government’s attempts to enhance the legitimacy of the judiciary have thus been
only partially successful, and fall short of a ‘deep clean’ separation of functions or a
‘deep clean’ reform of the appointment process (to the extent that diversity is an issue
of legitimacy). Indeed, initial press reaction to the impact of these latter procedures
has been negative and hostile, on the ground that the procedures have made no
impact on the question of diversity in appointment (Guardian, 28 January 2008),
with the first ten judges appointed under the new procedure being from the same
mould as the last ten judges appointed under the old procedure. Nevertheless, the
enhanced legitimacy which the Constitutional Reform Act both confers and presages
(albeit to a more limited extent than may be desirable) makes even more paradoxical
the general reluctance of the courts to be more assertive in the use of their powers
than has been suggested above. But as also already suggested, the exercise (or non-
exercise) of power does not only raise questions of legitimacy, the extension of power
also raises questions of accountability, even if that power is not currently being
exercised to the full. It is thus perhaps inevitable that the expansion of judicial power
judiciary 275
should give rise to emerging questions about judicial accountability, an issue that
arises in various forms. Because of the nature of the role they perform, however, it
is unlikely that judges could be made subject to the same forms of accountability as
the legislature (to the people in elections) or the executive (in the form of ministerial
responsibility to parliament). But it is arguable nevertheless that those who exercise
power over others should be subject to levels of transparency, accountability, and
scrutiny to the fullest extent consistent with their functions. There are of course a
number of accountability mechanisms which already apply to judges (Malleson 1999),
but these appear weak and relatively underdeveloped compared to the accountability
mechanisms affecting other public officials (whether elected or unelected), and at a
time of expanding judicial power it is an issue on which perhaps inadequate energy
has been expended.
So far as judges are concerned, the areas of accountability are likely to arise first at
the stage of appointment, with a possible role for parliament in the confirmation of
judicial appointments. Here the aim is to obtain information about the people who
are about to occupy high judicial office and the attitudes and experiences they are
likely to bring to their work. This was paradoxically much less of an issue in the past
than it is now, partly because judges in the past had a much higher political profile
before they were appointed. Laski has shown that ‘[o]ut of 139 judges appointed
[between 1832 and 1906], 80 were members of the House of Commons at the time
of their nomination; 11 others had been candidates for Parliament’, and that of the
80, ‘63 were appointed by their own party while in office’ (Laski 1932: 168–9). By the
late twentieth century, however, ‘being an active member of a political party seems
to be neither a qualification nor a disqualification for appointment’ (Griffith 1991:
29), with a study of the modern judiciary able to find only three judges of the High
Court or above who had been parliamentary candidates before being appointed to
the judiciary (and it seems that none had been a member of parliament) (McKay
2000). Yet, although the Ministry of Justice (2007) has raised the question of par-
liamentary confirmation hearings before at least some judicial appointments take
effect, the government’s intentions about this are said to be unclear (House of Lords
2007). There does not appear to be much appetite on the part of the judges for
such hearings (Phillips of Matravers 2007), which the House of Lords Constitution
Committee thought would be ‘an innovation with very profound implications for
the independence of the judiciary and the new judicial appointments system’ without
explaining why (House of Lords 2007). Bald claims of this nature are not a convincing
reason for refusing to adopt confirmation hearings, which were used in relation to
the appointment of Mr Justice Rothstein to the Supreme Court of Canada in 2006
(House of Lords 2007), relevant because Canada is a Westminster democracy which
by the preamble to its constitution inherited British constitutional traditions.
The second area where the issue of accountability arises is in the context of the
judicial process, that is to say in terms of the way in which courts and judges
make their decisions. So in addition to greater accountability about who occupies
judicial office, the issue here is about greater accountability in terms of the way
they operate and how decisions are made once they have taken office. It is true
276 keith ewing
that—save in exceptional circumstances—courts normally sit in public, that legal
arguments are normally presented in public, and that a reasoned decision is typ-
ically issued by each of the judges in a case. These stages, however, are only part
of the decision-making process—the first and third stages, with the crucial sec-
ond stage being hidden behind a secret veil, which is only rarely pierced (only
twice in the last ten years), and then only in relation to the House of Lords.
Between the argument and the reason is the stage at which the decision is made
once the arguments have been concluded. Questions arise here as follows: what
informs the decision of the judge or judges in a difficult case? To what extent do
the judges consult with others when drafting their judgements, and with whom
do they consult for this purpose? In the case of the Court of Appeal and the
House of Lords, how much—if any—collaboration and lobbying goes on between
judges as they prepare their decisions in cases that by definition are likely to be
controversial? Who are the key players in any such activity and why? Pioneering
insights into some of these questions were provided by Paterson (1982), who dis-
covered that the ‘Law Lords not infrequently attempt to persuade their colleagues
to share their view of the facts and the law in an appeal, particularly if its out-
come is finely balanced’. Equally valuable work more recently by Robertson (1998)
and Dickson (2007) suggests, however, that the practice may have changed since
Paterson’s research was conducted. More information is required, for although there
is unlikely to be a strong case that any part of this stage in the judicial process
should be conducted in public, there may nevertheless be an equally strong case
for a fuller account of how the decision-making process operates than is currently
available.
A third—and equally difficult—area of accountability relates to judicial perfor-
mance. At the present time judges are not required to account for their decisions,
not even in relation to leading cases, which Lord Goff has described to include ‘the
decisions which mark the principal stages in th[e] development [of the common
law]’ (Kleinwort Benson Ltd v Lincoln City Council [1999] 2 AC 349, at p 377), which
may have major implications for the rules which govern people’s lives or by which
public bodies are governed. The very idea of accountability in this sense raises ques-
tions relating to judicial independence about which lawyers are peculiarly sensitive
(Ratushny 2002), and it has been said that:
Our system has operated on the basis that judges will listen to the arguments both ways
and give a reasoned decision; they should be careful to approach issues of law with an
open mind and not allow their own prejudices to influence them. This is a counsel of
perfection, but generally it works. Accountability, up to the top level, is via appeals up
the court system. And if the government or Parliament should disagree with a legal
principle developed by the courts, then in our system it is open to them to secure the
passage of legislation to change the rule. (Oliver 2003: 542)
Although a balance has to be struck between accountability and independence, it is
not clear whether responses of this nature do full justice to the seriousness of the
judiciary 277
issues raised. It is not clear why judges—who are prepared to give public lectures—
should not be invited to give an account of their work in a parliamentary forum,
for example to explain the purpose and implications of any major changes over
the common law, including the rules by which they develop themselves to hold
government to account (Ewing 2000b). The point was well put by Bogdanor (2006),
who proposed:
that judges while not being answerable to Parliament, will nevertheless answer to
Parliament. They would as it were, be cross-examined on their lectures and articles
in law journals, on their judicial philosophy, by a Select Committee. They would be
cross examined by the representatives of the people in Parliament. Judges are in my
opinion right to publicise their views, for senior judges are teachers in the field of
human rights and civil liberties. But they should not object to discussing these views
in a parliamentary forum, in the cause of greater public understanding.
It is already the case that an intriguing relationship is evolving between the judges
and parliament, as judges accept invitations to present evidence to select committees.
This is a process which the House of Lords Constitution Committee seems prepared
to encourage, concluding that ‘select committees can play a central part in enabling
the role and proper concerns of the judiciary to be better understood by the public
at large, and in helping the judiciary to remain accountable to the people via their
representatives in Parliament’ (House of Lords 2007). Greater accountability of some
kind appears now to be accepted by the judges, albeit accountability in the ‘explana-
tory’ rather than the ‘sacrificial’ sense, recognizing also that such accountability must
not trespass on the other work the judges are employed to do or on their indepen-
dence. In the evolving constitutional landscape, there is a great deal to discuss, with
senior judges now engaged in a debate inter se about the very foundations on which
the British constitution is based, and another debate about the extent to which the
courts should defer to democratic institutions (Steyn 2005), from both of which the
people—whether directly or indirectly through their representatives in parliament—
are largely excluded. Given the remarkably wide scope of judicial power under the
HRA, the associated power of the courts to determine how far and in what circum-
stances this power will be fully exercised, and the differences between judges on how
these questions are to be approached, there is a case for more public engagement by
the judges about the exercise of public power vested in them. Although it is unclear
whether the judges are prepared to go this far, such accountability would give some
substance to ‘the idea that modern constitutionalism should be understood in terms
of a constitutional dialogue between courts, legislatures and executives’ (Hickman
2005: 306). Yet while this is ‘rapidly becoming common currency across the common
law world’ (ibid.), it is not yet clear that the dialogue metaphor—itself the subject
of refinement and revision—fully addresses the concerns of those who remain scep-
tical of the democratic foundations of the judicialization project, or indeed if it can
ever do so.
278 keith ewing
15.6 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
As we have seen, judicial power appears formally to be expanding in a number of
ways. It is notable that this should be taking place in a period when deep political
differences between the main political parties are diminishing, and more work is
required to find an explanation for this. It may, however, represent an important sym-
bol of what appears to be an ideological victory of liberalism over collectivism, and of
liberty over equality. But whatever the explanation, we see the apparent assumption
of power by the courts to determine the legal base of the British constitution and
the weight to be given to fundamental constitutional principles. Indeed, the Jackson
case raises the most fundamental question of any democracy, namely (i) who is
the guardian of the constitution; and (ii) who is to make that decision about who
is the guardian? In both cases, the choice is currently between parliament and the
courts, and in both cases the answer (and its implications) is perhaps not as clear in
2008 as it was in 1998. Secondly, there is the power to hold government to account,
with the judges having campaigned openly for the incorporation of the ECHR into
domestic law, and now better able not only to restrain executive action but also to
influence the substance of legislation as well. An important feature of this power,
however, is the ability of the judges themselves to develop their own principles of
adjudication, as well as the power to determine how these principles are to be applied
in the different categories of case coming before them. Thirdly, there is the power of
selection, with judges now much more formally engaged in the process of recruitment
to the Bench. It is true that judges sit on the various appointment commissions with
other lawyers who are not judges and non-lawyers alike. Although this will dilute the
influence of judges in recruitment and selection, the operation of these commissions
and the relative influence of judicial and other members in decision-making will be
an important subject for investigation.
With the position of the courts and judges now expanding, questions arise about
the effectiveness, legitimacy, and accountability of judicial review. So far as the effec-
tiveness of the process is concerned, the approach of the judges is contradictory, at
times deferential in its tone, and always reactive in the sense that the courts can
only operate at some paces behind the other branches of government. This raises
questions about whether more effective strategies for the protection of human rights
need to be explored given the limited institutional capacity of the courts. So far as
legitimacy is concerned, this will become a more pressing issue if the judges are to
take the step of trumping parliamentary sovereignty with the rule of law as suggested
by some members of the House of Lords in Jackson. In the meantime, much of what
the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 provides had already been implemented, to the
extent that the Lord Chancellor had already relinquished his role as Speaker of the
House of Lords and his right to take the judicial oath, while the Law Lords have
already given up sitting in the House of Lords for legislative business. Moreover,
the creation of the Judicial Appointments Commission is unlikely to make a huge
difference to the substance of judicial appointments or to ensure a significantly higher
judiciary 279
level of diversity on the Bench. Yet it is important that the courts with increased
powers (albeit powers yet to be fully utilized) are seen to be more fully representative
of the population over which they will exercise greater authority, and important also
that they should be responsive to that population (in the way suggested by Lord
Goff in relation to the common law). This is not to suggest that the independence
of the judiciary should be compromised, but to acknowledge that there is an issue of
judicial accountability, which is made more urgent by the evolving role of the courts.
As judges have become more powerful and as their independence is better protected,
channels of accountability for the exercise of that power (as opposed to questions of
conduct) have not been addressed to the same extent.
It is true that the compelling need for judicial independence creates institutional
and intellectual barriers to the idea of judicial accountability. But in a democracy
it is difficult to justify political power without political accountability, and the fact
that political power is exercised in a judicial context may only with difficulty justify
an immunity from accountability for the bearers of that power. If it is not possible
for judicial power to be used in a responsive and accountable manner, then we have
even further cause to be sceptical of the judicialization project. This presupposes—of
course—that the judicial role is political, which takes us back to where we started
at the beginning of this chapter. For while the open, universal, and unequivocal
acceptance of the judicial function as political is a striking feature of political science
scholarship (Laski 1932; Robertson 1998; Stone Sweet 2000), judges and lawyers are
more hesitant and may be unlikely to see their role in these terms, tending to argue
that the courts are the independent branch of government, and by strong implication
the apolitical branch of government (Steyn 2005). Nevertheless, it is not clear that
‘[judicial] independence necessarily involves neutrality’ and at least one school of
legal thought would argue that ‘[j]udges are part of the machinery of authority
within the State and as such cannot avoid the making of political decisions’ (Griffith
1991: 272). This is a school of thought with a long pedigree (Jennings 1936), and a
perspective that long pre-dates instruments such as the Human Rights Act. Indeed,
the incorporation of the latter makes it more difficult to deny that the judicial process
is a political one, with many of the provisions of the ECHR sounding ‘like the
statement of a political conflict, purporting to be a resolution of it’ (Griffith 1979:
16). Yet the final paradox is that while the judges are now invited more closely to
scrutinize political decisions, it is difficult to anticipate a judicial decision with more
dramatic political consequences than that delivered over 100 years ago in Taff Vale
Railway Co Ltd v Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants [1901] AC 426.
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c h a p t e r 16
.................................................................................................................
T H E PA RT Y S YS T E M
.................................................................................................................
peter mair
16.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
This chapter deals with the nature and dynamic of the British party system and
looks at how it shapes up when viewed from a comparative perspective. The British
party system is one of the oldest in the world, and at a certain level it still remains
one of the most stable and predictable party systems. At the same time, the two
individual parties that lie at the core of this system have become substantially weaker
in recent years, while the system itself faces challenges from the alternative structures
of competition in what is an increasingly multi-level polity. The British party system
is in this sense increasingly vulnerable, and possibly stands at the cusp of a dramatic
change. That said, in the British case perhaps more than in all others, any change at all
is likely to be seen as dramatic, in that the system itself has now endured far beyond
the normal life expectancy of most party systems.
One of the most obvious indicators of the enduring strength of the British party
system is its capacity to resist the entry and challenge of new political parties. This is
a problem that now besets many of the established parties in neighbouring European
polities, and in the following pages I will look briefly at this particular feature of the
British case, and at what it tells us about the character of the party system. I then
go on to look at how we might conceive of party systems more generally, and how
they might best be understood. I then come back to the British case and identify the
factors that have helped to ensure its resilience. Finally, I look at the problems that are
now beginning to face both the parties and the system and assess the scope for party
system change.
284 peter mair
16.2 The Challenge of New Parties
.............................................................................................................................................
During the 1990s, in the large majority of West European polities, new political parties
achieved a record share of the vote. These new parties did not always espouse a new
politics, as such. Some were genuinely new, of course, including some of the new left
and green parties, on the one hand, and the newly mobilized parties of the populist
right, on the other, and a number of these parties did climb to new heights in a
number of European polities. In other countries the successful formations were new
only in a chronological sense, however, being recently formed parties that mobilized
on programmes which were not very much different from some of their older and
more established competitors. This growth in new party support was part of a broader
array of political changes in the 1990s that were also visible at a number of different
levels: turnout levels in Europe fell to their lowest levels ever during the 1990s, while
levels of electoral volatility—the degree of aggregate change from one election to the
next—reached a post-war peak. 1
But even if the direction of change proved common to the large majority of
polities, the actual levels did vary from one system to the next, and it was at the
level of aggregate support for new political parties that the contrasts proved most
marked. During the 1990s, new parties won close to two-thirds of the vote in Italy.
In the Netherlands, they accounted for almost half the vote, in France for more than
40 per cent, and in Belgium and Denmark for close to 25 per cent. In the United
Kingdom, however, and quite exceptionally, they accounted for little over 2 per cent of
the vote.
So why should British politics prove so difficult for new parties to gain a foothold?
The easy answer, and most common answer to be found in the comparative literature,
points to the influence of the traditional electoral system: plurality or simple-majority
elections in single-member districts discriminate against small parties and favour
large parties, and hence they also discriminate against untried or new parties. As
Duverger (1954: 205) put it, in what has come to be regarded as almost a law-like
generalization, ‘The simple-majority single-ballot system encourages a two-party
system . . . ’. A proportional electoral system, by contrast, could be expected to favour
smaller parties and new parties, and hence the Dutch electoral system, for example, a
system that has been defined as ‘extreme’ proportional representation (Daalder 1975),
and that has just one national electoral district and an effective threshold equivalent to
the share of the vote required to win just one parliamentary seat, should place almost
no obstacles in the way of new competitors. Nor does it. Indeed, in sharp contrast to
the British system, the Dutch system is very hospitable to new political parties, and
such parties won an average of almost 46 per cent of the vote in the 1990s, a figure
twenty times that in the UK.
But while this may be the easy answer, it is not necessarily the most plausible one.
Let us stay with the Dutch–British contrast for the moment. In the Netherlands,
1
Detailed figures on many of these developments are reported in Gallagher, Laver, and Mair (2005).
the party system 285
as has been noted, the threshold for access to parliament is the equivalent of the
vote required to win just one seat in the lower chamber (Tweede Kamer). In other
words, a party can win a seat in parliament if it wins the equivalent of 1/150, or 0.67
per cent, of the total national vote. This is reckoned to be the lowest threshold in
Europe, making the Dutch parliament the easiest for a small party to enter. In the 2003
Dutch election, for example, the newly formed Party for the Animals, a small party
promoting protection of animal rights, won just less that 48,000 votes, which was the
equivalent of 0.5 per cent of the national poll, and narrowly failed to win a seat. In
2006, following a much more effective campaign, and building on the endorsement
of a number of high-profile celebrities, it polled close to 180,000 votes, 1.8 per cent of
the total, and won two seats in parliament.
The United Kingdom stands in sharp contrast to this. In the United Kingdom,
following Lijphart’s formula, the notional effective threshold can be estimated at 35
per cent, which is the middle point between 20 per cent of the constituency vote—
anything less than that and it is extremely unlikely that a party can win a seat—and 50
per cent (+1), which is the minimum figure required to guarantee winning a seat. This
effective threshold is some fifty times greater than that in the Netherlands (Lijphart
1994: 21, 25–30).
On the other hand, while the UK threshold is applicable within each single district,
the Dutch threshold applies to the country as a whole. Thus while a Dutch party must
win 0.67 per cent of the national vote in order to take a single seat, a British party need
win only 35 per cent of the constituency vote, which, given the enormous size of the
House of Commons—one of the biggest parliaments in the democratic world—is
the equivalent of 0.05 per cent of the national vote. This threshold is therefore only
a small fraction of that in the Netherlands. Other things being equal, a small party,
or a new party, should therefore find that it is actually easier to win parliamentary
representation in the UK than in the Netherlands, in that a relatively smaller share of
the (national) vote needs to be won over, albeit concentrated in a single area. In 2005,
for example, the Ulster Unionist party won a seat on the back of 127,144 votes—some
0.47 per cent of the total votes cast in the election. George Galloway’s new Respect
party won a seat with just 68,094 votes—0.25 per cent of the total. And the single
candidate standing on behalf of the campaign to save Kidderminster hospital won a
seat with just 18,739 votes—0.07 per cent of the total, which is about 10 per cent of the
very low Dutch threshold.
These figures are not really comparable, of course, and only those parties in the UK
that have a regionally concentrated or locally embedded vote can really benefit from
this fortuitous district effect. This was true for the Kidderminster hospital candidate
most obviously, but it was also true for George Galloway in Bethnal Green and for
the Ulster Unionists in Northern Ireland. In the Dutch case, the threshold might be
notionally much higher, but in principle it should be easier to meet that threshold
by gathering votes throughout the nation than by being confined to a single small
district.
But while this argument is valid, it also takes us one step beyond the electoral
system, and introduces new, party-dependent variables. This is a very important
286 peter mair
qualification, since, following this reasoning, it is not the electoral system as such
which works against small parties or new parties in the UK, but rather it is the
combined effect of the electoral system, on the one hand, and the character of the
parties involved, and the party system itself, on the other. That is, the electoral system
discriminates against new or small parties, but only when the parties involved are not
local or regional parties. Indeed, for these latter sorts of parties, the first-past-the-post
electoral system can prove advantageous.
What we see here, then, are also party system effects, in which small parties—and
new parties—are also discouraged by the constraining effect of a so-called strong or
well-structured party system. As Sartori (1986: 55) puts it, ‘the effects of electoral
systems cannot be assessed without assessing at the same time the manipulative prop-
erties of the party system as such’. And the manipulative effects in the British party
system are very clear: most of the competition revolves around two major parties that
compete in the first place to win seats in Westminster, and in the second place to
win control of government. When citizens go to the polls, therefore, they are not only
choosing among parties—in which case they might give rein to all sorts of expressive
preferences—but they are also choosing between potential governments, and this
narrows options and excludes other considerations. In this sense, a major reason
why British politics is hostile to new or small parties is because these parties don’t
count in the competition for executive office. It is for this reason that the UK is able
to maintain a very strong, well-structured, and simple party system at the national
level.
16.3 Understanding Party Systems
.............................................................................................................................................
It is probably fair to say that, within the contemporary literature, the notion of
party systems is relatively under-theorized (Wolinetz 2006; Bardi and Mair 2008).
Indeed, since the late 1970s, a period in which the literature dealing with the theory
and classification of party systems seemed to explode, there has been virtually no
further development in thinking on the subject. This waning of scholarly interest
in party systems as systems has also led to a decline in the attention being paid to
the problems of how party systems hold together, and of what makes them more
or less resilient. With less interest being devoted to party systems as such, there is
less attention being focused on the understanding of differences between ‘strong’
and ‘weak’ party systems. As indicated above, this was the distinction originally
used by Sartori in his attempt to reframe Duverger’s laws on the impact of electoral
systems on party systems. 2 It also coincides closely with Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967)
distinction between ‘frozen’ and ‘unfrozen’ party systems, and with Mainwaring and
Scully’s (1995) contrast between ‘institutionalized’ and ‘inchoate’ party systems. Each
2
See especially Sartori (1968), where he also speaks of ‘structured’ and ‘unstructured’ party systems.
the party system 287
of these approaches seeks to grade party systems in terms of their strength or their
resistance to change, whether this change be measured in electoral terms, or through
the mobilization of new parties, or whatever. Strong party systems are equivalent to
‘stable’ party systems or ‘institutionalized’ party systems or ‘frozen’ party systems; the
terms may differ, but the sense is clearly the same.
As Sartori (1976: 43–4) defined it, a party system is the system of interactions
between political parties that results from their mutual competition or cooperation.
At a minimum, he adds, this requires that the system ‘displays properties that do
not belong to a separate consideration of its component elements’—that is, the party
system is more than the sum of the parties—and that it involves ‘bounded, patterned
and self-maintaining interdependencies’. For a party system to exist, therefore, there
must be more than one party involved and the interactions between the parties must
be familiar and reasonably predictable. Parties that exist alongside one another, but
that do not interact in any structured or patterned fashion, should better be thought
of as a ‘set of parties’ rather than as a system of parties (Bardi and Mair 2008).
Moreover, given the variety of different arenas where parties compete in any given
polity—electoral, legislative, and governmental, as well as national, subnational, and
supranational—it is also probably misleading to speak of their being just one party
system in every polity. Rather, as Dunleavy (2005) has emphasized in the British case,
and as Bardi and Mair (2008) have argued more generally, different party systems can
coexist with one another and might eventually even compete with one another. This
qualification notwithstanding, the focus in this chapter will be on the Westminster
party system in particular.
Although scholars have paid relatively scant attention to how a party system might
be defined, they have made a considerable effort over the years to distinguish between
different types of party system. The most conventional approach is based simply on
the number of parties in competition, and the most common distinction involved
here, which goes back to Duverger (1954), is that between two-party systems, on the
one hand, and multi- (i.e. more than two) party systems, on the other. The British
case has always been singled out as the prototypical two-party system, and prior to
the emergence of the new democracies of southern and eastern Europe during the
‘Third Wave’ of democratization, it was also one of the very few genuine two-party
systems in the world.
The most important attempt to move away from the idea of classifying party
systems on the basis of the number of relevant parties in competition was made by
Sartori (1976: 117–323), who combined a measure of the number of parties in a polity
with a separate measure of the ideological distance that divided them. Sartori’s typol-
ogy focused explicitly on the interactions between the parties—what he called the
‘mechanics’ of the system—and he showed how the format of the system, that is, the
number of parties, contained ‘mechanical predispositions’, that is, how it could influ-
ence the ideological distance. When lots of parties were in competition, he argued,
the ideological distance could become extremely polarized. When fewer parties were
in competition, the ideological distance was quite limited. Employing both variables,
Sartori went on to identify three distinct types of party system: two-party systems,
288 peter mair
which were characterized by a limited format and a small ideological distance, and
which were typified most clearly by the UK; systems of moderate pluralism, which
were characterized by a relatively small number of parties and a limited ideological
distance (e.g. Denmark or Germany); and systems of polarized pluralism, which
were characterized by a large number of parties and a large ideological distance (e.g.
Weimar Germany or post-war Italy).
Sartori also identified a fourth type of party system, which he defined as a
‘predominant-party system’. This is a system in which one particular party wins a
winning majority of parliamentary seats over a run of three or four elections and
hence dominates the polity over an extended period. At the time Sartori was writing,
the most obvious examples of such predominant parties were Fianna Fáil in Ireland,
the Social Democrats in Sweden, the Liberal Democrats in Japan, and the Congress
Party in India. In recent years, however, it has been possible to add the UK to this list.
The Conservatives won effective majorities across a run of four elections between
1979 and 1992, and Labour has so far won effective majorities through a run of
three elections. Following Sartori’s typology, therefore, the British case has moved
from being a two-party system to being a predominant-party system, with first the
Conservatives at the helm, and then Labour. However, given that this predominant
position has transferred from one party to another, a shift which is unprecedented
in any other system, and given that it might yet move back again in the future,
the British case could also be regarded as an exceptional example of alternating
predominance. Since this pattern dates back to 1979, it has therefore now endured for
almost as long as the more traditional two-party pattern that lasted from 1945 to the
mid-1970s.
In the case of predominant-party systems, but also two-party systems and any
other competitive party system, the ‘core’ of the system (Smith 1989) is constituted
by the competition for executive office. It is this which structures the party sys-
tem in the first place, and hence helps it to become institutionalized. Two-party
systems, for example, are referred to as such not because only two parties present
themselves to the voters—indeed, this is rarely if ever the case—but rather because
only two parties matter when it comes to forming a government, be this in a pres-
idential or a parliamentary system. In multi-party systems, by contrast, there are
more than two parties that enjoy potential access to executive office. Even within
the more complex classification developed by Sartori, it is the competition for office
that proves most important. Sartori’s moderate pluralism, for example, involves
competition between alternative coalition governments, whereas polarized pluralism
involves a pattern in which a centre party or parties is more or less permanently in
office, and in which one or more extreme parties are permanently excluded from
government.
It follows from this that party systems might also be understood not just in terms
of some all-embracing classification, within which the question of the numbers
of parties in competition obviously plays an important role, but also in terms of
contrasting patterns of government formation (Mair 1997: 199–223). Three related
criteria are important here. The first concerns the pattern of alternation in government,
the party system 289
where systems in which there is a regular process of wholesale alternation, in which
incumbents are wholly replaced by former non-incumbents, may be separated from
those in which alternation is often only partial. Systems in which two alternative
parties (or coalitions) alternate with one another, such as the UK, may therefore be
distinguished from those in which one or more parties leaves office, while another
remains, albeit often with a new coalition partner, such as in Belgium. The second
criterion which is relevant here is familiarity, with systems in which government is
always contested by the same parties or sets of parties being contrasted with those
in which patterns of government formation prove more innovative or promiscuous.
The third criterion involves the degree of access of new parties to executive office. New
parties have always found it relatively easy to join innovative government coalitions
in the Netherlands, for example. In the UK, by contrast, since at least 1945, no party
other than the Conservatives or Labour has ever governed.
Putting these three criteria together allows us to locate party systems along a
notional continuum according to the degree to which the structure of competition
is open or closed. At one extreme lie the wholly closed systems, where alternation in
government is always wholesale, where government formation processes are wholly
familiar, and where new or third parties are always excluded. At the other extreme,
it is difficult to speak of a party system at all: there is no discernible pattern in how
governments alternate, the potential alternatives themselves are unfamiliar and may
never have governed before, and access to office is, in principle, open to all. To travel
from this latter extreme to the other is therefore to witness the progressive closure
of the structure of competition, which is simply another way of saying that the sheer
systemness of the party system increases. Party systems as systems are strongest and
are most institutionalized when the structure of competition is closed. They are
weakest, and almost non-existent, when this structure is wholly open. Following these
terms, we can safely state that even though the parties themselves may be weakening,
the United Kingdom at Westminster level has one of the strongest party systems in
the world.
16.4 Britain: Weak Parties
in a Strong Party System
.............................................................................................................................................
As can be seen from Table 16.1, the electoral domination of the two largest parties
has been declining somewhat erratically since the beginning of the 1970s. 3 In 1970,
Labour and Conservative together polled almost 90 per cent of the vote, a figure
3
Valuable overviews of the development of the British party system(s) since the 1970s are to be found
in the standard work by Webb (2000), and the more recent analyses by Dunleavy (2005) and Lynch and
Garner (2005). Finer (1980) remains a classic.
290 peter mair
Table 16.1 UK general election results since 1945
Conservative Labour Liberal Democrat Others Turnout
%
Vote % Seats Vote % Seats Vote % Seats Vote % Seats
1945 39.8 231 48.3 393 9.1 12 2.7 22 72.8
1950 43.5 299 46.1 315 9.1 9 1.3 2 83.9
1951 48.0 321 48.8 295 2.5 6 0.7 3 82.6
1955 49.7 345 46.4 277 2.7 6 1.1 2 76.8
1959 49.4 365 43.8 258 5.9 6 0.9 1 78.7
1964 43.4 304 44.1 317 11.2 9 1.3 0 77.1
1966 41.9 253 47.9 363 8.5 12 1.7 2 75.8
1970 46.4 330 43.0 287 7.5 6 3.1 7 72.0
1974F 37.8 297 37.1 301 19.3 14 5.8 23 78.8
1974O 35.8 277 39.2 319 18.3 13 6.7 26 72.8
1979 43.9 339 37.0 269 13.8 11 5.3 16 76.0
1983 42.4 397 27.6 209 25.4 23 4.6 21 72.7
1987 42.3 376 30.8 229 22.6 22 4.4 23 75.3
1992 41.9 336 34.4 271 17.8 20 5.8 24 77.7
1997 30.7 165 43.3 419 16.8 46 9.3 29 71.5
2001 31.7 166 40.7 412 18.3 52 9.3 28 59.4
2005 32.4 198 35.2 355 22.0 62 10.4 30 61.4
Source: Webb (2000: 6), updated with figures from the European Journal of Political Research, Political Data
Yearbook.
which crashed dramatically four years later as a result of the sudden growth of the
Liberal and Nationalist parties. After that, the big two climbed back up and then fell
again, more steadily so after 1992: the two parties polled 76.3 per cent of the vote
in that year, falling to 74 per cent in 1997, to 72.4 per cent in 2001, and to just 67.6
per cent—scarcely more than two-thirds—in 2005. Given that turnout also tended
to decline across this period, the fall from electoral grace appears even more striking
(Figure 16.1). Together, and despite their then ups and downs, the two parties won the
votes of an average of some 60 per cent of the electorate during the 1970s. During the
1980s, this figure had fallen to just less than 55 per cent, and fell even further to 43 per
cent in 2001 and to 42 per cent in 2005. In electoral terms, at least, these parties are
neither strong nor thriving.
The story is very different with respect to representation in Westminster. In the
1970s, the two parties won close to 95 per cent of the seats in parliament, and even
allowing for the recent Liberal Democrat successes, they still command just over 85
per cent of the seats. In government, of course, they share 100 per cent control, albeit
in alternation with one another (see also below). Within the electorate, in short,
and hence on the ground, the two parties have experienced a large-scale erosion of
support; within the national institutions, they remain hugely dominant, and it is
there that we find the key to the persistence and strength of the traditional British
party system (see also Blau 2008).
the party system 291
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
1970 1974(i) 1974(ii) 1979 1983 1987 1992 1997 2001 2005
Fig. 16.1 Labour and Conservative share of electorate, 1970–2005
Source: Webb (2000: 6), updated with figures from the European Journal of Political Research, Political Data Yearbook.
The United Kingdom currently maintains one of the most closed party systems
in Europe. That is, and following the criteria specified above, it is a system in which
alternation is exclusively wholesale; in which no new parties have ever gained access to
executive office at national level; and in which there has been no change in the govern-
ing formulas on offer since 1945. These figures are summarized in Table 16.2, which
also includes comparable data for the other long-standing democracies in Europe
and which serves to emphasize the outlying position of the UK. The British system
is characterized by relatively few changes in the partisan composition of government,
in that control of the executive has passed directly from one party to another on only
six occasions since 1950—Austria and Switzerland are the only polities to experience
fewer such changes of government in this fifty-year period. It is the only system which
has never experienced partial alternation in government. In the UK, exceptionally
among these democracies, governments always change in their entirety. It is, as noted
above, hostile to the entry of new parties into government, and in this it shares the
same position as Austria, Luxembourg, and Norway. Indeed, in the British case, the
only time we can record a new party in government after 1950, and hence also the only
time we can record an innovative government, is in 1951, when the Conservatives first
entered office in the period in question. But this is a new experience only in the formal
sense of the term, and results from the need to fix the comparative data within a given
time period. Even allowing for this, however, the UK again shares the lowest ranking
position with Austria and Switzerland, and it is this small group that now constitutes
the most closed of Europe’s party systems.
Yet even within this group, the United Kingdom is an extreme case. 4 Switzerland
is a closed party system by virtue of the so-called magic formula, in which the four
4
One system that is not included here, being measurable from the 1960s on, is Malta, which also
maintains a very closed party system, perhaps even more closed than the British system. There are just
two parties, Labour and Nationalist, which together account for close to 100 per cent of votes and for all
parliamentary seats and which are scarcely ever challenged by third parties. These two parties
monopolize government, and compete intensely for the votes of a fully mobilized electorate (turnout
regularly exceeds 95 per cent) while alternating with one another on the basis of very small margins of
victory (Hirczy de Miño 1995).
292 peter mair
leading parties enjoy an effectively permanent share of government, with the position
of the President of the Swiss Confederation—primus inter pares—rotating among the
four on an annual basis. It is therefore difficult to speak in terms of competition for
government in the Swiss case, and in this sense it is also difficult to compare the Swiss
party system to other European party systems. Austria is also a closed system, but
one that opened up at the turn of the new century and hence during a period that
lies just beyond that covered by these data. Throughout most of the post-war period,
there were just two governing parties, the centre-right People’s party and the centre-
left Social Democrats. Occasionally, one or other of the pair governed alone (in the
period 1966 to 1983); more often, as in 1949 to 1966, and from 1987 to 2000, they
governed together as part of a ‘grand coalition’. This pattern changed in 2000, and
the party system thereby opened somewhat, with the advent to office of a coalition
between the People’s Party and the far right Freedomites, led by Jörg Haider. 5 This
government was re-elected in 2002, and was replaced by a revived version of the
grand coalition at the beginning of 2007. In the Austrian case, in short, three parties
have been involved in the government formation process, and they have governed in
different combinations, leaving the party system more open than might be suggested
by the simple figures in Table 16.2.
The contrast between more open and more closed party systems, in which the
British case emerges as among the most closed in Europe, also pertains to the relative
stability of the systems in question, and that of the individual parties that constitute
these systems. In general terms, there are three distinct factors that promote the
stabilization of party systems. In the first place, and most obviously, a party system
is stabilized when the wider institutional order of which it is part is also stable. This
is one of the most obvious lessons that have been learned from the so-called ‘neo-
institutional’ literature. A party system, as Jepperson (1991: 151) notes of any given
institution, ‘is less likely to be vulnerable to intervention if it is more embedded in
a framework of [other] institutions’ (see Mair 2001). In the British case, of course,
this wider order has proved remarkably resilient, at least prior to the first Blair
government (Flinders 2005). Nor have there been substantial changes to the system
of elections to Westminster or to other institutional frameworks that might have a
direct bearing on how the parties compete. To be sure, and especially since 1997,
there have been relevant and substantial changes to levels other than the national—
such as the establishment of devolved government in Scotland and Wales, and the
adoption of a more proportional voting formula in both these regions as well as for
elections to the European Parliament—but these need have little direct impact on
the competition for government at Westminster, and, as noted above, it is from that
arena that the party system derives its identity. I will return to this question later in the
chapter.
The second element that stabilizes a party system and helps fix it into place is
the cleavage structure on which the parties are based, a feature that is also seen in the
5
Prior to its far-right turn under Haider, the then Freedom Party had once shared government with
the Social Democrats, from 1983 to 1987. See Müller (2000).
the party system 293
Table 16.2 Patterns of alternation in government, 1950–2000
N changes Mean N (%) govts. N (%) Total duration
in partisan level of incorporating innovative of innovative
composition alternation new govts.b governments
of govt. (%) partiesa (%)c
Austria 4 55.0 1 (25.0) 1 (25.0) 16.8
Belgium 20 39.7 4 (20.0) 9 (45.0) 36.2
Denmark 17 60.8 3 (17.6) 8 (47.1) 32.6
Finland 31 35.5 7 (22.6) 21 (67.7) 66.3
Germany 9 61.2 3 (33.3) 8 (88.9) 28.7
Iceland 14 56.6 3 (21.4) 6 (42.9) 30.8
Ireland 13 85.6 3 (23.1) 6 (46.2) 32.7
Italy 31 31.2 3 (9.7) 12 (38.7) 33.8
Luxembourg 8 50.9 1 (12.5) 3 (37.5) 25.5
Netherlands 11 46.1 3 (27.3) 7 (63.6) 37.0
Norway 12 94.9 1 (8.5) 4 (33.3) 9.9
Sweden 9 73.6 3 (33.3) 5 (55.6) 16.4
Switzerland 2 21.5 0 (0) 1 (50.0) 2.0
UK 6 100.0 1 (16.7) 1 (16.7) 6.9
a The very first change of government in the period normally implies the advent to office of a new party,
even if that party was governing prior to 1950. Since the first change of a Swiss government occurred
when the Socialist Party was dropped from the four-party coalition in 1953, hence creating an innovative
three-party coalition, while the second (and last) change occurred when the party was brought back on
board in 1959, the score in this column is exceptionally 0.
b The first new government to hold office in the period is, by definition, one that has never held office (in
the period) before, it is then also, by definition, innovative.
c Time in office as percentage of fifty-year time span. Innovative governments are deemed innovative until
they are either replaced or re-elected, whichever comes sooner.
Sources: Author’s calculations from data in Woldendorp, Keman, and Budge (2000) and Müller and Strøm
(2000); these data are also discussed in Mair (2007; 2008).
persistence of mass electoral identities. The cleavage structure is not itself part of the
party system (Smith 1989), but by helping to close the electoral market it can stabilize
the key parties in place, and this may act to stabilize the patterns of party competition
and hence the party system. Given the long-enduring class basis of British politics,
this was particularly important in the British case, although its weight has clearly
reduced in recent years. The decline in party membership, the generally lower levels of
party identification, and the erosion of party organizational embeddedness within the
wider society have all signalled a loosening of the traditional collective identities that
formally sustained both major parties in the UK. Social change has also contributed
substantially to the decline in electoral alignments, and this has helped contribute
to a more volatile and fragmented electorate, although in this regard the UK, even
in relatively recent elections, remains one of the more stable European polities.
Finally, class identities will also have been undermined by the cross-party convergence
across the mainstream since the late 1990s. The centrist and essentially non-partisan
policies pursued by the Blair government in the domestic sphere—and the return
294 peter mair
to the same centre by a Conservative Party that had failed repeatedly at the polls—
have left little room for the clustering of new or even revised competing identities,
and hence have done little to maintain two-partism as a meaningful set of political
alternatives. 6
The structure of party competition, which is the third element that stabilizes a
party system, and which also helps define the system in the first place, is therefore of
crucial importance in the British case. Indeed, it is on this anchor that British two-
party politics increasingly depends. Parties in general have performed two crucial
functions in the development of democratic systems—a representative function, on
the one hand, whereby they give voice to the citizenry, or to their particular con-
stituency among the citizenry; and a procedural or governing function, on the other,
whereby, when in office, they assume responsibility for steering the state. Voters have
also responded to parties in two ways: through an expressive vote, on the one hand,
whereby they signal to the party their preferences in terms of policy, ideology, or
culture; and through an instrumental vote, on the other hand, whereby they signal a
preference in the choice of governments (Rose and McAllister 1992: 115). Translated
into party functions and then into the patterns set by party systems, this connects
closely to a distinction once drawn by Rokkan (1970: 93): ‘In some countries elections
have had the character of an effective choice among alternative teams of governors, in
others they have simply served to express segmental loyalties and to ensure the right
of each segment to some representation, even if only a single portfolio, in a coalition
cabinet’.
One of the great strengths of the British party system over the years has been its
capacity to combine both of these functions into one, and hence both types of voting
into one. Because of the strong and relatively unidimensional cleavage structure,
voting in Britain always had a powerful expressive character. The parties differed in
terms of ideology and policy, and they represented relatively distinct groups of voters.
In addition, and because of the way competition for executive office was structured,
voting also had a highly instrumental character. In choosing the party of cleavage
preference, one also chose the government—or at least the party which would ide-
ally win untrammelled control of government. Most British voters were therefore
unlikely to be forced to choose between voting expressively and voting instrumen-
tally: two class parties and the prospect of wholesale alternation in government
fused both elements together and hence sustained a very stable and coherent party
system.
As the class cleavage has waned, however, the anchors of the British party system
have come to depend more heavily on the structure of party competition alone. In
other words, the two parties continue to dominate the competition for government
not because they represent the two most important sets of policy alternatives, or
because they offer the principle poles of ideological attraction, but simply because
they continue to be seen—by themselves and by others—as the only real options. No
6
A process which Polly Toynbee (Guardian, 12 Oct. 2007) has analogized to trends in food and music
as ‘fusion politics’. See also the insightful essay by Runciman (2006).
the party system 295
other party has governed Britain before, and hence no other party is invested with
credibly offering a strategic alternative. No coalition government has ruled Britain
since 1945, and hence no other party is seen as being in a position to win office, even
in partnership with one or other of the two main players. Each of the two parties may
offer an alternative to the other, but there is nothing in living political memory that
can offer an alternative to both. In this case, to adapt Schattschneider’s famous axiom
(1960: 66), it is the definition of the governing alternatives that proves the supreme
instrument of power, and hence it is the party system—at least in the governing
arena—that protects and promotes the position of the two leading parties, rather
than the other way around.
16.5 The Scope for Party System Change
.............................................................................................................................................
Although the party system in the UK is now so firmly ensconced that it is difficult
to see how it might be undermined, a number of factors are beginning to come
into play that might well force cracks in its foundations. These factors relate to the
three elements identified above as contributing to party system stability—the wider
institutional environment, the cleavage structure, and the structure of competition
itself—and in each case they challenge one or more of these elements. Let us begin
with the structure of competition. In principle, as long as the electoral and parlia-
mentary numbers permit, this should be the most robust component. The governing
alternatives are defined by the parties and their leaders, and as Schattschneider (1960:
60–74) also reminds us, it is usually in the interests of those who are at the core of
the main political conflict, that is, it is in the interests of both sides of the conflict,
to prevent that conflict being displaced by another. In other words, neither the
Labour nor the Conservative leaders would seem to have any interest in encouraging
others to enter the game. Both sides want British politics to continue to revolve
around the Conservative–Labour divide. On the other hand, short-term leadership
ambitions can often overrule longer-term party interests, and even in the wake of the
massive Labour victory in 1997, it seemed that Tony Blair was considering offering a
junior coalition partnership to the Liberal Democrats. In the event, the offer came
to nothing, although the idea was revived once again when Gordon Brown made
overtures to individual Liberal Democrat leaders to join his government when he
became Prime Minister in 2007. Had the Liberal Democrats joined Labour in gov-
ernment, and had Britain experienced an innovative coalition cabinet, the structure
of competition would clearly have been opened. The same result would follow any
future offer by the Conservatives to share power with the Liberal Democrats. Neither
of these shifts might be in the long-term party interest of either the Conserva-
tives or Labour, but given that predominance alternates, and that each party has
now spent long periods in quite fruitless opposition, a coalition with the Liberal
296 peter mair
45%
40%
35%
30%
25%
20%
15%
10%
5%
0%
1970 1974(i) 1974(ii) 1979 1983 1987 1992 1997 2001 2005
Fig. 16.2 Absolute difference in Labour and Conservative seat shares, 1970–2005
Source: Webb (2000: 6), updated with figures from the European Journal of Political Research, Political Data Yearbook.
Democrats might be viewed by either as offering a feasible strategy. This would
certainly break open the traditional two-party system, particularly as the system itself
is now so dependent on the patterns of competition within the national governing
arena.
The second factor which could come into play is the steadily weakening position
of the two parties themselves. As noted above, the two parties now command a
substantially reduced electorate. Both have lost substantial numbers of members, and
no longer enjoy a major presence on the ground. Levels of popular trust in parties
have sunk to record lows, and traditional mass politics has become characterized by
widespread disengagement. In an effort to maintain their position at the centre of the
political stage, the parties are obliged to fight much harder, to compete more vocif-
erously, to manage news more effectively, and to build what have become virtually
permanent electoral campaigns. All of this costs a great deal in terms of human, finan-
cial, and organizational resources, and it is precisely this which is now lacking due to
the parties’ declining membership bases and reduced popular legitimacy. The result
is that the parties often find themselves turning to large private donors, so risking
accusations of private corruption, or drawing money and resources from the state,
so risking accusations of public corruption. This weakens the parties further, and
eventually risks electoral and parliamentary meltdown. One early indication of this
problem is the evident lack of balance in the two-party system itself. This is not only
reflected in the shift from alternating government to alternating predominance, but
is also to be seen in the widening gap that separates the two parties in Westminster.
Whereas election victories in the early post-war decades were measured in scores of
seats, contemporary victories are measured in hundreds (Figure 16.2). The party that
wins, be it the Conservatives in the 1980s or Labour in the late 1990s, now often wins
big, while the party that loses now often loses very badly. Unless this will be countered
by a hung parliament, this trend will put further strain on the two-party system, since
instead of moving in parallel, the two parties are now skewing ever more widely away
from one another.
the party system 297
The third factor that is relevant here is perhaps the most telling, and has been
extensively highlighted by Dunleavy (2005). Since the constitutional reforms initi-
ated under the Blair government, party competition has taken a variety of different
forms within the different arenas of the UK polity. The Westminster arena itself
has remained effectively untouched. But devolution to Scotland and Wales, with the
granting of a powerful executive authority to the former; the restoration of devolved
government in Northern Ireland; and the adoption of a reformed and much more
proportional electoral system for European elections, has led to a fragmentation in
forms of party competition. At the European level, for example, where no real struc-
ture of competition prevails, in that there is no executive government at stake, the two
main parties polled less than 50 per cent of the vote at the most recent election of 2004,
with the traditional third-placed party, the Liberal Democrats, being outpolled by the
United Kingdom Independence Party. The British Greens also won representation in
the European Parliament in 2004, as did Scottish and Welsh Nationalists and three
Northern Irish parties. This is a European-level party system—or at least a European-
level set of parties—that bears little relation to the balance in the Westminster system.
Structures of competition also vary in the devolved parliaments, each of which differs
from Westminster in being elected through a form of proportional representation.
In Scotland, four main parties compete, with the Scottish National Party emerging
as the most successful in the 2007 election, and forming a minority single-party
government. Prior to 2007, government in Scotland took the form of a coalition
between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Four parties also compete in Wales,
and in 2007 the government was formed by a coalition of Labour and Plaid Cymru,
replacing a former coalition of Labour and the Liberal Democrats. In both polities,
therefore, there exists a mode of election and a structure of party competition which
bears little relation to those of the Westminster system. Taking Britain as a whole,
argues Dunleavy (2005: 504), there are now several ‘over-lapping party systems with
up to five or six parties serious contenders for elected office and five or six parties
with distinct ideological positions’. In Northern Ireland, meanwhile, there is a wholly
separate party system now dominated by Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist
Party, currently sharing government together, with absolutely no representation from
any of the main mainland parties. 7
In itself, such fragmentation is not exceptional. In federal and decentralized polities
more generally, there are often pronounced incongruities between the party system at
the central national level, on the one hand, and those which exist within the devolved
or regional level units, on the other (Chhibber and Kollman 2004; Thorlakson 2006;
Bardi and Mair 2008). Moreover, in many polities, this multiplicity of party systems
can be maintained without the emergence of any serious tensions. In the British case,
however, these alternative party systems may yet serve to undermine the traditional
resilience and stability of Westminster two-partism. There are two factors involved
here. The first is institutional, in that the development of alternative structures of
7
Indeed, this is one of the most evident undemocratic oddities in Europe, with the UK being the
only polity where the main contenders for government office refuse to contest elections in one of the
parts of the territory they hope to rule.
298 peter mair
competition in the different electoral arenas of the UK polity has left the Westminster
system in an increasingly isolated and necessarily self-sufficient position. In other
words, two-party politics at Westminster is no longer being reinforced or reproduced
so widely in the other institutions of the political system, and is no longer being
universally sustained by parallel patterns of competition. The two-party system now
lacks a robust institutional foundation. The second factor is electoral or behavioural,
for, as Dunleavy (2005) emphasizes, the existence of different party systems in the
other arenas, the differing range of parties in competition, and the impact of different
electoral systems in shaping voter preferences, have now combined to induce other
ways of looking at the political contest. As noted above, the stabilization and strength
of a party system has much to do with its familiarity and predictability in the eyes of
the voters. Politics is defined by the pattern of party competition, and it is defined in
a particular and often enduring way. To put it another way, one of the main reasons
why British politics continues to be about Labour versus Conservative is that it always
has been believed to be about Labour versus Conservative. There has been no other
alternative. Now that new party systems and electoral systems have developed beyond
Westminster, however, this familiarity and predictability is no longer so self-evident
or so constantly reinforced. Voters can now split their ballots between parties, even
within the same election; they can think in terms of competing coalitions and rank-
ings of preferences, and they can opt for parties other than the two major protagonists
without feeling that their votes will be wasted. In short, voters are now offered new
ways of looking at politics. These attitudes are unlikely to remain confined with the
individual arenas, and will almost certainly spill over into the Westminster system. In
this sense, albeit perhaps quite slowly and unevenly—initially, the impact is likely to
be strongest in Scotland and Wales—the behavioural foundations of the two-party
system at Westminster might also be undermined.
16.6 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
It has become increasingly evident that the foundation on which the British parties
and their system rest has become very vulnerable. The class cleavage has weak-
ened, programmatic differences have become less relevant, and only their status
as governors or potential governors remains capable of keeping the major parties
in place. In other words, the parties have been reduced to a dependence on their
own structure of competition. At the same time, the relevance of this structure of
competition is also being challenged on other grounds. The system based on the two
major parties and the alternative they offer to one another has now been overtaken in
the devolved polities of Scotland and Wales, as well as in the wider European electoral
arena. In Northern Ireland, of course, as part of a conscious strategy on the part of
the party system 299
both major parties, the mainland British party system never held sway. The result
is that the two-party system that the parties both create and depend upon is being
isolated ever more effectively within the confines of Westminster, with little purchase
beyond the core institutions. It is also an increasingly imbalanced system, with a long
stretch of alternating predominance undermining the very equilibrium that helped
to make sense of two-party competition.
On the surface, the British party system is one of the oldest, strongest, and most
stable of the party systems in Europe. In reality, it has become both vulnerable and
brittle, such that even a relatively small shock could lead to a substantial change.
Where that shock might come from is more open to question. It might be pro-
voked by further constitutional change, with a strengthening of devolution feeding
back into a change in the terms of reference for Westminster elections. It might
be provoked by a shift in the strategy of one or other of the leading protagonists,
with the loss of majority status leading to the entry of the Liberal Democrats into
government as a junior coalition partner. What looks unlikely, however, is that a
change will be provoked by a challenge from the ground up, and so far no new
party has emerged on the horizon that might credibly mount a sea-changing elec-
toral campaign. Indeed, the last time such a challenge was mounted—when the
Social Democrats came close to beating Labour in the mid-1980s—the new party
quickly collapsed into an anti-climactic merger with the Liberals. Perhaps the Liberal
Democrats themselves might yet mount such a challenge, although they have been
waiting outside the corridors of power for so long now it seems difficult to imagine
that they might eventually succeed in opening the door and coming in. But the
Liberal Democrats may not need to mount a major challenge from the ground. If they
can succeed in entering government as a non-threatening junior coalition partner,
even with their current electoral following, then they will succeed in changing the
game of British politics at its very core. The post-war British party system has always
been about the choice between Labour and the Conservatives as the only governing
options. Should this set of terms of reference change, everything else will be up for
grabs.
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Section Six: Governance
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 17
.................................................................................................................
D E L E G AT I O N
.................................................................................................................
matthew flinders
Delegation involves the (re)distribution of power within and beyond a political
system. It is therefore a central concept within political analysis. Delegation can take
many forms but this chapter focuses on functional delegation at the national level,
which commonly takes the form of arm’s-length agencies, independent administra-
tive authorities, non-majoritarian institutions—‘fringe bodies, quangos and all that’
(Chester 1979). Despite a long-standing history of delegation within the governance
of Britain the study of delegation has never formed a central component of politi-
cal studies. Indeed, delegation provides a classic example of Downs’s (1972) ‘issue-
attention cycle’ within twentieth-century British politics. During the 1950s, 1970s, and
1990s delegation and its consequences became the topic of sudden and intense polit-
ical and scholarly debate but, though still largely unresolved, the attention quickly
faded. As a result, very little is known about the institutional structure of the state
beyond ministerial departments and our understanding of what might be termed
the politics of delegation remains arguably narrow and underdeveloped, particularly
compared with the analytical frameworks, theories, and methods that have been
developed in the United States and Continental Europe. Consequently, this chapter is
focused around two core arguments:
1. In order to achieve a more balanced and sophisticated appreciation of the politics
of delegation (defined as the secondary consequences of delegating functions and
most commonly focused on the themes of control, accountability, and patron-
age) within British political studies there is a need to recognize and challenge
the normative and conceptual influences of the Westminster Model as the main
ideational framework for the study of British politics and government.
2. The dominant rationality in favour of widespread delegation portrays this
process as a neutral element of ‘good governance’. In arguing for the
304 matthew flinders
politicization of delegation this chapter seeks to reveal the underlying assump-
tions and principles beneath this process and thereby locate the logic of delega-
tion firmly within the parameters of public contestation.
The first argument is therefore concerned with illustrating how dominant ideas about
the British political system have had direct consequences for: the institutional focus
of political studies; the theories and methods used; and the interpretive values held by
scholars. The dominant ideational framework acts as a form of intellectual bounded-
rationality which has restricted analytical development and awareness. The second
argument is more concerned about what is missing from the study of delegation
within British politics. It suggests that a focus on the consequences of delegation
(i.e. the politics of delegation) has distracted scholarly attention from a number of
macro-political themes and issues of which delegation is a central element. As such, it
locates the logic of delegation within critical debates regarding depoliticization, state
capacity, and increasing levels of political apathy amongst the public and in so doing
appeals for the politicization of delegation.
This chapter is divided into four sections and begins by identifying three dominant
traditions in the study of delegation and how these traditions affect the deployment
of theories and methods. This allows an argument to be sustained regarding what has
been distinctive about how delegation has been studied in Britain. In order to explain
the origins of this distinctiveness the second section examines the historical disparity
between constitutional theory and constitutional practice. This disparity has led to
the construction of a dense labyrinthine tier of delegated governance that has evolved
through an ad hoc and unprincipled process of administrative sedimentation and
accretion. The third section delayers the British state into its constituent elements
in order to distinguish specific forms of delegation and the existence of gradations
of autonomy. Having charted the topography of the British state the chapter seeks
to present a very specific argument about both the logic of delegation and how
delegation has been studied in the fourth and final section. Whereas the vast majority
of studies have focused on the secondary consequences of delegation—what I term
the politics of delegation—in terms of the analysis of accountability frameworks,
control mechanisms, and powers of patronage this chapter concludes with a plea for
the politicization of delegation. This entails a more profound reflection on the causes
rather than the effects of delegation, an awareness that delegation is not a neutral tool
of good governance, and a desire to locate delegation back within the sphere of public
contestation.
17.1 Traditions in the Study
of Delegation
.............................................................................................................................................
In order to demonstrate the distinctiveness of a particular object, approach, or
method it is necessary to provide some reference points or markers against which
delegation 305
judgements concerning idiosyncratic qualities can be made. This section seeks to
review the wider literature on delegation and through this process identifies three
dominant approaches or traditions in the study of delegation (Table 17.1). Although
seeking to specify dominant approaches in this manner risks exaggerating the degree
of epistemological and methodological coherency that actually exists, it is possible to
argue that a constellation of values and assumptions can be identified in each case.
17.1.1 Tradition 1 (T1)
As Pollack (2002) argues American scholars have played a leading role in terms of
the theory and methods employed to understand delegation. Not only does this
reflect their long historical tradition of governing through semi-independent agencies
and the existence of robust systems of public law and legislative oversight but it
also reveals the influence of rational choice theory from the 1970s and the role it
played in popularizing specific assumptions, theories, frameworks, and methods.
By the end of the nineteenth century the topography of the American state was
littered with hybrid bodies which had been established to overcome a number of
obstacles faced by traditional public bureaucracies (see Koppell 2003). During the first
half of the twentieth century the study of delegation adopted a predominantly case
study-based methodology and frequently involved highly normative observations
regarding control and accountability (e.g. Guild 1920; Friedrich 1940; Cushman 1941;
Seidman 1952).
During the second half of the twentieth century the theories, methods, and
assumptions underpinning the study of delegation within this tradition altered signif-
icantly under the influence of public choice theory. The view of individuals as ratio-
nal, self-interested utility maximizers facilitated the construction of models, notably
principal–agent theory, from which explanations could be deduced and predictions
made of the behaviour of actors (Niskanen 1971). American scholars devised a num-
ber of methods to test hypotheses (i.e. a deductive approach) about the existence
and influence of presidential and congressional controls over the sphere of delegated
governance and it is possible to trace a flow of studies involving gradual theoretical
and methodological maturation in response to empirical research (e.g. Weingast and
Moran 1983; Moe 1987; Wood 1988; Ferejohn and Shipan 1990).
The 1990s witnessed a further step-change in the theory and study of delegation,
as the focus of analysis moved from the behaviour of agents to the delegation stage
itself where principals make strategic decisions about the need to delegate and how
to balance independence and control. This approach remained rooted in rational
choice theory and principal–agent modelling but now sought to gain an improved
insight into the conditions under which principals will delegate functions and allocate
discretion through the application of a transaction-cost analysis (i.e. the net ben-
efits of delegation minus the administrative and oversight mechanisms established
to prevent shirking) (see Huber and Shipan 2000; Epstein and O’Halloran 1999).
The transaction-cost approach to delegation was also accompanied by an increased
emphasis on the analysis of ‘hard’ data and a move away from the case study approach
306
Table 17.1 The study of delegation: three dominant traditions
Tradition T1 T2 T3
matthew flinders
Reluctant epithet ‘Americanist’ ‘Europeanist’ ‘British’
Normative foundation Rational Choice & Public Choice Theory Principal–Agent Theory (combined in recent Normative Political Theory
Principal–Agent Theory work with ‘richer’ approaches such as
historical institutionalism or institutional
isomorphism)
Ontology Foundationalist Foundationalist Anti-foundationalist (?)
Epistemology Positivist Realist Critical Realist (?)
Methodology Quantitative Blended. Statistical survey evidence Qualitative. Descriptive case studies and
complemented by case study analysis and semi-structured elite interviews. Some superficial
interview material survey evidence and analysis
Disciplinary tradition Scientific management Public law History/philosophy
Approach Deductive Deductive Inductive
Thematic priority Control Control Accountability/Patronage
Arguments for r Provides a rigorous approach with the capacity r Ability to combine structural-instrumental r Combines a detailed account of the governance of
to analyse a range of variables and their perspectives with those emphasizing cultural, delegation with the capacity to detect the nature
interrelationships across a number of actors. functional, and external factors. and importance of both formal and informal
r Tight research design. relationships.
r This style of approach is accessible to a
non-academic audience.
Arguments against r Quantitative methods and deductive approaches r Underplays political dimensions. r Little more than ‘rich description’ or political
lack the capacity or flexibility to reflect the journalism.
iterative nature of delegated relationships. r Often insular with little methodological capacity
r This style of approach is not accessible to a for comparative analysis.
non-academic audience. r Case studies offer ‘low leverage’.
r Overly concerned with formal mechanisms of r Historically unable to locate delegation within
delegation and control. broader socio-political developments.
r Data driven. r Polemic anti-delegation stance.
Example text Epstein & O’Halloran (1999) Van Thiel (2002) Barker (1982)
Example journal Constitutional Political Economy Public Administration Parliamentary Affairs
delegation 307
which was increasingly viewed as a ‘soft’ (i.e. overly descriptive and lacking in theo-
retical rigour) form of research (see Huber and Shipan 2000: 35).
Overall, T1 consists of five core elements: allegiance to a broadly positivist approach
to political analysis; a commitment to deductive logic and reasoning; a preference for
quantitative analysis and large-n surveys; a focus on formal mechanisms of delega-
tion and control; and an attempt to discourage normative democratic theory within
studies in favour of a more neutral ‘scientific’ approach to delegation.
17.1.2 Tradition 2 (T2)
Although T2 has borrowed heavily in terms of theory and methods from its colleagues
across the Atlantic, it is possible to identify three major differences in terms of
its empirical focus, epistemological basis, and research methods. Empirically this
approach is targeted on a quite different constitutional terrain as scholars within this
school are seeking to understand the nature and consequences of delegation either
within or between mainland European parliamentary democracies or inside the
evolving architecture of the European Union (EU) (e.g. Huber 2000). In essence, the
depth and precision of analysis achieved by T1 reflects the fact that it has been devel-
oped and refined around a very specific constitutional configuration and although
this may be transferable to other systems with broadly similar characteristics, such as
the institutions of the EU (Pollack 2003), its sharpness and precision are dulled by the
incorporation of a wider set of dependent variables. Moreover, many of the specific
official data-sets that made certain methodological techniques possible in the USA
are not available in other countries, thereby closing off certain analytical choices.
Second, although the scholars who operate within this approach are broadly com-
mitted to a deductive approach, accept principal–agent theory as a valuable frame
of reference, and are skilled in quantitative methodological techniques, they are less
committed to the positivist zeal which is implicitly or explicitly ingrained within T1.
Although rational choice theory is influential its application is tempered by the need
to develop theories and approaches to the study of delegation that can accommodate
institutional complexity while also reflecting the existence of informal or ‘soft’ mecha-
nisms of autonomy and control. For these reasons (and thirdly) T2 is characterized by
a pluralistic approach to methodology combining sophisticated large-n quantitative
analysis alongside a number of detailed case studies and elite interviews, which is
frequently missing from studies within T1 and T3 (Van Thiel 2001). Elgie (2006:
211) defends this methodological approach by stating ‘there are distinct advantages
to an approach that combines large-N and case studies . . . findings are likely to be
more robust if they are based on information from different types of investigation
rather than only one. It is the accumulation of evidence across the different types of
study that matters as no single piece of information proves or disproves any of the
hypotheses advanced’.
Moreover, scholars within this tradition have also sought to accommodate the
tension between breadth and depth by adopting a common and reasonably effective
308 matthew flinders
research design in which a number of country profiles are located within introductory
and concluding sections which provide and then reflect on a thematic or theoret-
ical framework of analysis (see, for example, OECD 2001; Pollitt and Talbot 2004;
Pollitt et al. 2004). In this context Thatcher and Stone Sweet’s (2003) The Poli-
tics of Delegation, Bergman, Muller, and Strom’s Delegation and Accountability in
Parliamentary Democracies (2003), and Braun and Gilardi’s (2006) Delegation in
Contemporary Democracies represent arguably the most advanced or state-of-the-
art studies within this tradition. What these studies provide is a greater level of
theoretical and methodological depth than had hitherto been present within T2.
Conceptually and methodologically this involves a willingness to adapt or comple-
ment functional principal–agent approaches with ‘richer’ explanations: ‘the politics
of delegation calls for analyses going well beyond simple functional logics, involving
how actors’ interests are defined, policy is made and enforced and the legitimacy of
government is conceived’ (Thatcher and Stone Sweet 2003: 20). Institutionally this
approach frequently utilizes the notion of ‘chains of delegation’ to fit not only within
the complexity of parliamentary democracies but also emerging models of multi-level
governance.
The advantage of T2 exists at a number of levels. From a normative perspective it
avoids the overly positivist pretensions of T1 while also rejecting the highly normative
anti-delegatory thrust of T3. Empirically it offers the capacity to achieve a detailed and
consistent comparative analysis that can reveal cross-national patterns and trajecto-
ries and methodologically its pluralistic approach sensitizes analysis to the existence
of formal and informal modes of control as well as the complex interplay between
agency, context, and structure.
17.1.3 Tradition 3 (T3)
T3 is distinctive because is has proved largely resilient to the influence of the pos-
itivist and rational choice determined approaches that have been dominant for
some time within T1 and increasingly influential in T2. In this regard it imports
its own assumptions, theories, and methods into the study of delegation which are
in themselves derived from a well-documented ‘British approach’ to the study of
politics that is imbued with an enduring ‘anti-scientific’ sentiment (Hayward, Barry,
and Brown 1999). T3 has therefore been infused from its inception by ambivalence
towards explicit deductive modelling and conceived as more of a cooperative enter-
prise between practitioners and academics characterized by: an inductive approach;
little sophisticated modelling or hypothesis generation; a preference for qualitative
methodologies (notably case studies and semi-structured elite interviews); a ten-
dency to locate analyses within normative democratic theory; and an insular, almost
parochial, focus on delegation in Britain.
The study of delegation aimed to demystify the institutions and processes of
politics and government in a manner which eschewed ‘scientific’ posturing and was
suspicious of importing theories or frameworks from overseas. This approach was
epitomized in seminal texts like Finer’s Primer of Public Administration (1950). The
delegation 309
British approach was, and to some degree remains, somewhat complacent, smug
even, in that it suggests that the British political tradition with its emphasis on
flexibility and ‘muddling through’ could placate the challenges of modern governance
in a way that other countries could not. This atheoretical descriptive-prescriptive
normatively laden approach is found within the majority of twentieth-century stud-
ies that focused on tracing the changing contours of the state (e.g. Cushman 1941;
Bunbury 1944; Anderson 1946; Street 1950; Friedman 1951; Willson 1955; Chester and
Willson 1957; Parris 1969; Jordan 1976; Chester 1979), examined the issue of con-
trol and coordination (e.g. Robson 1936; Hanson 1954; Schaffer 1956; Hanson 1969),
focused on accountability (e.g. Finer 1940; Daniel 1960; Chapman 1973; Barker 1982)
and ministerial patronage (e.g. Jennings 1938; Finer 1952; Richards 1963; Goldston
1977; Doig 1978). Of particular significance in terms of distinctiveness is T3’s highly
normative foundation. Almost without exception scholars within this tradition have
adopted an anti-delegation stance and a critical-descriptive-prescriptive style of writ-
ing in which issues are raised, examples provided, and recommendations for reform
made. Quasi-autonomous bodies are interpreted as a ‘bad’ thing. Indeed the ‘quango
debate’ has been curiously one-sided, which led Hogwood (1995: 227) to conclude ‘the
only shared value seems to be that quangos are rather shameful’.
Towards the end of the twentieth century two new strands emerged within T3.
First, the politics of delegation became a central element of the ‘governance turn’
to the degree that it was suddenly located within a concerted drive towards a more
theoretically driven and methodologically rigorous approach. Through its emphasis
on central strategic capacity, the steering of complex networks and fuzzy forms of
accountability governance theory provided a framework, discourse, and approach
to delegation which posed distinctive questions about the ‘unravelling’ of the state
(Hooghe and Marks 2003). The second strand involved a challenge to the normative
foundation of T3 and particularly its assumption that delegation and democracy were
incompatible. Indeed, according to work within this strand delegation may offer an as
yet unrealized democratic potential by opening up new arenas of democratic engage-
ment and mechanisms of accountability (see Marquand and Harden 1999). These two
strands merged to promote the study of ‘delegated’ or ‘distributed’ public governance
which were not new terms for well-trodden issues but marked a distinct approach to
the study of delegation based around a number of themes. Central among these was
an acceptance of delegation as a central feature of modern state projects, an awareness
of the role of delegation above and below the nation state and encouraging a deeper
and more analytically refined appreciation of delegation than the overly descriptive
and frequently normatively charged accounts that had dominated T3 for much of the
twentieth century (e.g. Flinders 2004).
The impact, however, of these two strands should not be exaggerated. Although
governance theory marked an influential and highly distinct alteration in understand-
ings of the state, it did not reflect an attempt to promote the theories and methods
of studying delegation that were pivotal within T1 and T2. If anything it marked a
further shift away from rational choice-inspired deductive modelling and quantitative
techniques (e.g. Bevir and Rhodes 2005). Older traditions had been adapted rather
310 matthew flinders
than repudiated. Moreover, traditions, styles, and cultures are notoriously difficult
to alter and despite the influence of governance theory and the work of proponents
advocating a less normative foundation for analyses, the 1980s and 1990s saw the
publication of a number of influential scholarly texts that were clearly written and
located squarely in the T3 tradition (e.g. Barker 1982; Weir and Hall 1994; Skelcher
1998).
As with any typological endeavour it is possible to suggest that Table 17.1 could
and/or should be further refined by the addition of more traditions or sub-strands
and yet the aim here has been to put down a number of markers or reference points
on an otherwise uncharted conceptual terrain. Clearly not all the scholars within a
specific geographic terrain are operating within the parameters of a single tradition.
The work of a number of scholars with an attachment to the London School of Eco-
nomics, notably Dunleavy (1991), Dowding (1995), and James (2003), has sought to
import elements of T1 and T2 into British political studies. The approach of Dowding
(see, for example, 2001) is noteworthy for its explicit critique of T3’s qualitative and
‘un-scientific’ approach. Conversely, several American scholars have recently pro-
duced highly influential studies of delegation which appear more closely attached
to T3 than T1 in terms of theory and methods (e.g. Carpenter 2001; Koppell 2003).
However, at a relatively broad level it is possible to justify a typology exhibiting
three specific traditions and propose a relatively clear relationship between them and
research in the USA, mainland Europe, and Britain respectively. It is in this vein
that Pollack (2002) seeks to draw out a specifically ‘Americanist’ and ‘Europeanist’
approach to the study of delegation. The critical element of this threefold typol-
ogy is its attempt to draw out a particularly distinct British tradition from that of
its European neighbours. Moreover, although it is possible to identify a degree of
convergence between T1 and T2 as the Europeanists ‘learn from the Americanists
(again)’ (see Pollack 2002), as exemplified in the work of Yesilkagit (2004), T3 appears
peculiarly resilient to external influences. The significance of these traditions in the
context of this chapter stems from the fact that dominant approaches inculcate certain
values, not just regarding the nature of knowledge in the social sciences but specific
ideas and beliefs regarding the object of analysis and how it should be studied. In
order to understand the distinctive qualities of T3 it is necessary to understand British
constitutional history and theory.
17.2 British Constitutional
History and Theory
.............................................................................................................................................
As the embryonic British state evolved from the sixteenth century onwards, the dele-
gation of functions to Crown-appointed independent boards and commissions rep-
resented the dominant administrative model as it offered a number of administrative
delegation 311
(continuity, expertise, flexibility, etc.) and political (increased sphere of patronage,
limited accountability, etc.) benefits (Willson 1955). However, during the nineteenth
century, particularly after the 1832 Reform Act, the changing constitutional relation-
ships between the Crown, executive, and parliament created an environment in which
delegation became the topic of intense controversy. The House of Commons felt
empowered by the extension of franchise and demanded an increased capacity to
scrutinize the state; while the executive sought to reduce the patronage of the Crown
and develop a more professional, efficient, and coherent public service. These polit-
ical objectives dovetailed with the writing of constitutional theorists like Bentham,
Mill, and Bagehot who were advocating the benefits of ‘single seatedness’ through
the theory of the ministerial department and convention of individual ministerial
department to parliament (see Schaffer 1956).
The very small size of departments at this time—the Home Office consisted of
just one chief clerk and ten civil servants—made the idea of enforcing the personal
responsibility of ministers for all that happened in their department a reasonable
notion. The mid to late decades of the nineteenth century were also a period that
preceded the development of professional political parties, meaning that MPs were
generally independent and the executive’s control of the procedures and timetable
of the House not yet established. As Maitland’s (1908) Constitutional History of
England recounts, this was a period in which the House of Commons really did
‘make or unmake’ departments and ministers had few opportunities to engage in
blame-games or seek the protection of a dominant and loyal party caucus. The
balance of power between the executive and parliament during the second half of
the nineteenth century meant that Bagehot’s constitutional ‘buckle’ (i.e. the theory
of the ministerial department and the convention of ministerial responsibility) was
interpreted as achieving a workable balance between representative and responsible
government (Birch 1964). Consequently, while robust public law systems were being
designed and implemented in the USA and within continental European polities, in
Britain ministerial responsibility became entrenched as the legitimating foundation
of the constitution. Bureaucratic discretion and delegation were legitimate because
they existed under the auspices of a ministerial department whose political head could
be held to account by the legislature.
However, as Parris’s Constitutional Bureaucracy (1969) illustrates, although the idea
of the ministerial department was upheld in theory it was not in practice. Irrespec-
tive of the political and scholarly discourse promoting the ministerial department,
throughout the second half of the nineteenth century functions and responsibilities
continued to be delegated to independent boards. As the responsibilities of the state
increased during the twentieth century so did the scale of delegation and the degree
to which ministerial departments became the visible tip of a huge administrative
iceberg of which by far the largest part existed below the visible waterline and par-
liamentary scrutiny. The First World War led to the creation of ten new ministerial
departments and over 160 independent boards and commissions. The Report of the
1918 [Haldane] Committee on the Machinery of Government (Cmd. 9230) canonized
the ideal of the ministerial department and stressed that it was highly undesirable to
312 matthew flinders
create independent boards beyond the departmental model ‘immune from ordinary
parliamentary criticism’ and beyond direct ministerial control, but apart from resta-
ting the constitutional theory the report did very little to dissuade ministers from
‘hiving-off ’ tasks. Street (1950: 158) noted, ‘Generally speaking . . . the sentence of the
Haldane Committee was not carried out . . . in the decades that followed when there
was a proliferation of quasi-government bodies’. A fact not overlooked by Jennings
(1938: 42):
The greatest potential danger is neither in the central government nor in local govern-
ment, but in the numerous independent statutory authorities, which are springing up
like mushrooms under recent legislation . . . [the greatest danger] lies in the development
of new governmental institutions outside the system of democratic control.
The Westminster Model (WM) was, therefore, forged during a critical period of
constitutional history in which the issue of delegation had come to the fore. As such,
it became (and to some degree still remains) the dominant ideational framework
that shapes the beliefs, assumptions, and understandings of politicians, officials,
scholars, and the public. And yet in many ways right from its nineteenth-century
origins it failed to confront the existence and implications of delegation. Instead it
sought to design a framework that could mask or obscure the existence of widespread
delegation by loosely accommodating it within the parameters of ministerial respon-
sibility. As the size, scale, and complexity of delegation increased, the constitutional
elasticity of this doctrine became increasingly stretched and the constitutional fault-
lines that had always existed became wider. The core concern of twentieth-century
British politico-administrative history has been how to accommodate an increas-
ingly long and complex chain of delegation within a credible model of ministerial
responsibility. However one consequence of this failure explicitly to acknowledge
the challenge of delegation in the nineteenth century was that the philosophy of
British public administration has never provided an explicit set of rules, procedures,
or principles concerning the delegation of functions away from ministers. In many
ways it could not, as the principles of the British constitution—outlined in political
speeches, constitutional conventions, and scholarly textbooks—clearly emphasized
the location of functions within ministerial departments. The dominant ideational
framework therefore prevented, or at least discouraged, any explicit acknowledge-
ment of the widespread use of delegation. As a result the British state evolved through
a piecemeal and largely unplanned process in which departments hived off func-
tions to quasi-autonomous bodies with little references to the broader consequences
of this process or the bureaucratic structure as a whole. The sphere of delegated
governance simply augmented through a process described as ‘incoherent arbitrari-
ness’ by Parris (1969) and ‘mad empiricism’ by Hood, Dunsire, and Thompson
(1978).
The role of ideas therefore affected the manner in which delegation was imple-
mented by the state. Delegation took place ‘off-stage’ in constitutional terms and
the obvious fact that the process, although necessary in practical terms, could not
easily be accommodated within a theory of the state focused on departments meant
delegation 313
that there were few incentives for officials or ministers to overly expose this process
to parliamentary or public attention. As a result comprehensive data on the num-
ber of delegated public bodies, their role, staff, formal organizational status, etc.
has never been maintained within the core executive. The link between consti-
tutional theory, the use of delegation, and the study of delegation therefore takes
three forms. First, delegation has not traditionally been a major topic of study
when compared to the level and extent of analyses in the USA and Continental
Europe. Second, the lack of available or reliable data restricted the capacity of those
studies that were conducted as scholars were required to undertake major scop-
ing studies in order to map out the topography of the state and identify certain
variable or reference points around which the later analysis could be based. How-
ever, the ‘incoherent arbitrariness’ that these studies tended to uncover, combined
with the intensely frustrating and time-consuming nature of research in the field,
tended to defeat even the most tenacious scholars and reduce them to making the
most tentative conclusions regarding accountability and control. Finally, the WM
also cast a more insidious and far-reaching shadow over the study of delegation
through its promotion of unrealizable constitutional expectations regarding the per-
sonal capacity of ministers plus rather narrow understandings of accountability and
legitimacy.
Indeed, the narrative and discourse of the British political tradition became shaped
by an understanding of legitimate government (i.e. ministerial departments) which
not only formed the exception rather than the rule in practical structural terms
but also failed to acknowledge that certain constitutional principles could be upheld
through a range of methods. When viewed against the specific precepts of the WM
sponsored bodies could hardly be viewed as anything but ‘illegitimate’ in democratic
terms. The dominance of this model within the study of British politics during the
twentieth century explains the normative anti-delegation foundation of the majority
of studies (T3 above). In many ways the WM provided a form of ‘bounded rationality’
which defined the parameters of ‘legitimate’ political action, thereby influencing
and restricting the interpretation of modes of governance that did not conform to
this model. This created an acute problem for forms of public governance which
embraced alternative forms of accountability (managerial, market, professional, pub-
lic, etc.) or legitimacy (expertise, experience, objectivity, professionalism, efficiency).
As the chain of delegation grew longer and more complex throughout the twentieth
century, so the capacity of the convention of ministerial responsibility to legitimate
state action became more tenuous, to the point at which the constitutional elastic-
ity of the convention appeared overstretched. However, dominant ideas, cultures,
and traditions—the ideational framework—are notoriously resistant to change; not
least because they generally support or serve to legitimate the existing distribution
of power within a polity and, as such, those benefiting from this arrangement are
unlikely to support change.
During the twentieth century, as the balance of power shifted markedly from
the legislature to the executive, the convention of ministerial responsibility became
corrupted by the ‘negative executive mentality’ from a mechanism through which
314 matthew flinders
parliament could control the executive and scrutinize the administration to a tool
through which the executive could restrict the flow of information to parliament
and legitimate the rejection of reforms designed to empower the legislature vis-à-
vis the bureaucracy. And yet the convention was always designed to act as a way
of balancing the competing demands of operational capacity, principally the ability
to focus on the core tasks without distraction, against democratic accountability. As
Bagehot (1867/1963: 190–1) emphasized:
The incessant tyranny of Parliament over the public offices is prevented and can only
be prevented by the appointment of a parliamentary head, connected by close ties with
the present Ministry and the ruling party in Parliament. The Parliamentary head is a
protecting machine.
The issue of proportionality between democratic accountability and economic effi-
ciency is clearly then a long-standing theme within the study and practice of dele-
gation. But before examining this theme in more detail, it is necessary to chart the
contours of the state and particularly the topography of delegated governance.
17.3 The Russian Doll Model
.............................................................................................................................................
As the previous section argued, although delegation is very much the rule rather
than the exception in British governance, its use has been shrouded by constitutional
mythology and an administrative culture that did little to forge coherent and trans-
parent structures. Understanding the structure of the British state in terms of what
bodies actually exist, let alone the underlying principles that shape the process of
delegation, is incredibly difficult and there exists a considerable lineage of academic,
official, and parliamentary inquiries that have largely failed in their attempts to chart
the topography of the state with any certainty (for a review see HC 209, 1999).
Unlike in the USA no comprehensive Directory of Government exists, different
departments employ different definitions, and the Cabinet Office lacks the capacity
proactively to monitor delegation across government or verify departmental returns.
The House of Commons’ Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) reports
have repeatedly called for delegation to be operationalized within a more transparent
and coherent governance framework (e.g. HC 209, 1999; HC 367, 2001; HC 165,
2003; see also HL 55, 1998). But these have received little support from an executive
that has few incentives to alter the dominant mode of governance. As noted above,
the historical lack of available data on the exact number, role, status, management,
personnel, functions, etc. of sponsored bodies meant that British scholars had little
choice but to either focus on specific case studies or dedicate the greater part of
their resources to a mapping exercise. Irrespective of the method employed, research
has also been impeded by a cultural predisposition within the civil service that is
delegation 315
Layer:
*. Core Executive
**. Ministerial Departments
1. Non-ministerial Departments Autonomy
Low
2. Executive Agencies High
3. Special Health Authorities
4. Executive Non-departmental Public Bodies Public Private
5. Public Corporations Public/Private
6. Central Bank Institutions Distinction
7. Public—Private Partnerships
Fig. 17.1 The Russian Doll Model
suspicious of external requests for information, defensive in terms of its default status,
and responds to a political dynamic which seeks to keep the ‘quango count down’.
However, Flinders (2008) provides the information through which it is possible to
delayer the British state into its component levels based upon organizational forms
that are each designed to enjoy a different level or degree of delegation. The British
state is, therefore, best characterized as a series of nested layers, like a Russian doll,
with relatively small departments at the core and a series of fairly distinct layers
working outwards.
The Russian Doll Model (RDM) is an organizing perspective that provides a
framework through which a complex set of interrelated issues or variables can be
observed and to some degree understood. Although it is sufficient here to note
the existence of these layers, instead of providing a detailed account of each one’s
specific characteristics (legal, funding, political, constitutional, etc.), it is necessary
316 matthew flinders
to comment briefly on a number of issues. In terms of the contemporary scale of
delegation the RDM suggests that the British state is in fact a delegated state. The
six layers between ministerial departments and public–private partnerships on the
boundary of the state include 339 delegated public bodies, employing over 800,000
staff with a combined annual budget in excess of £80 billion—75 per cent of which is
direct government funding (Table 17.2). Delegated governance therefore consumes
at least one-third, and probably nearer a half (see below), of central government
expenditure and employs around three-quarters of central government personnel.
However, the degree of delegation is much higher in some policy sectors. For example,
over 80 per cent of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s annual budget is
disseminated to its ‘family’ of sixty-three sponsored bodies.
One of the benefits of the Russian Doll Model is that it reflects, on a broad
basis, a number of relatively uncontroversial assumptions concerning the relationship
between organizational form and autonomy. It also allows observers to track ‘quango
drift’ (Greve, Flinders, and Van Thiel 1999) as specific functions move from the
centre outwards through a variety of organizational forms (e.g. the Forensic Science
Service). The RDM also reveals the existence of ‘double-delegation’ as sponsored
bodies delegate further specific functions and responsibilities to other bodies or enter
into complex public–private partnerships (Figure 17.2). Another advantage of viewing
the state as a series of concentric circles is that it allows us to map out jurisdictional
and definitional boundaries:
1. The official British (or minimalist) definition of a ‘quango’ refers to just Layer 4,
whereas the maximalist definition includes all layers.
2. Employees in Layers 1 and 2 are civil servants and appointments are regulated
by the Civil Service Commission.
3. The Commissioner for Public Appointments regulates ministerial appointments
to bodies in layers 3, 4, 5, and those bodies in layer 7 that are classified as within
the public sector.
Table 17.2 Delegated governance, 2007
Layer Number Staff Government Total gross
funding, £m annual expd., £m
1. Non-ministerial Departments 29 160,928 1,958 2,383
2. Executive Agencies 75 283,648 18,136 25,676
3. Special Health Authorities 12 17,951 561 2,662
4. Executive NDPBs 199 93,416 31,667 36,751
5. Public Corporations 23 270,814 4,007 19,412
6. Independent Central Bank 1 2,000 0 230
Totals 339 828,757 56,329 87,114
Note: Not including the devolved administrations.
delegation 317
4. The annual publication Public Bodies contains information on layers 3, 4, 5,
5. The Cabinet Office’s guidelines on openness relate to layers 3, 4, 5.
There are, however, three reasons why the RDM risks imposing a false sense of
rationality and coherence on an innately incoherent and irrational structure. First, the
above suggestion that the sphere of delegated governance is significantly larger than
that indicated by Table 17.2 stems from the fact that many delegated public bodies
‘simply exist’ without any formal organizational status and are therefore not included
within the various publications and databases from which this table was constructed.
This would include organizations like the Carbon Trust, Energy Savings Trust, Adven-
ture Activities Licensing Authority, and Social Care Institute for Excellence that are
sponsored by a ministerial department, receive public funding, and fulfil a public
task and yet for reasons that remain unclear they exist and operate ‘off-stage’ in
constitutional terms. The RDM therefore fails to reflect the administrative hinterland
beyond the formal layers of delegation. It was an awareness of this issue that led PASC
to recommend in July 2003 that the Cabinet Office undertake a fundamental review
of all sponsored bodies and particularly those bodies operating beyond the formal
classifications as ‘ “other bodies” in departmental corners, no doubt doing good and
necessary work, but not very transparent and accountable’ (HC 165, 2003: para. 36).
The government accepted this recommendation but over four years later the review
remains unpublished.
Another issue with the RDM is that it veils the existence of great confusion within
the layers in terms of functional distribution. There is no clear logic in terms of why
certain functions have been delegated to Layer 1 in some situations but Layer 4 in
others. The official review of Next Steps agencies in 2002 could find no rationale
within the distribution of tasks to Layers 2, 3, and 4; while research into PPPs has
highlighted a lack of consistency across departments in terms of which services are
put out to tender (Flinders 2005). There is also little consistency in terms of which
functions are delegated to Layers 1–7 as opposed to being established as indepen-
dent parliamentary bodies or independent professional self-regulatory bodies. The
government’s plans to establish the House of Lords Appointments Commission, for
example, as an independent parliamentary body modelled on the Electoral Com-
mission appears inconsistent with its rejection of parliamentary demands that the
Office of the Commissioner for Public Appointments and the Judicial Appointments
Commission also be designated parliamentary rather than governmental bodies.
Finally, the RDM suggests a hierarchical pattern in which all public bodies operate
within the parameters of a ministerial department and can therefore be captured,
however precariously, within the legitimating confines of ministerial responsibil-
ity. However in some cases delegation is based within a framework of multiple
(as opposed to individual) ministerial responsibility. The Office of Communication
(Layer 5) and Design Council (Layer 4), for example, operate under the joint respon-
sibility of the Department for Trade and Industry and Department for Culture, Media
and Sport.
318 matthew flinders
Layer:
* Core Executive
** Ministerial Departments
Non-ministerial departments ¾ 29
Executive Agencies ¾ 75
Special Health Authorities ¾ 12
Executive Non-departmental Public Bodies ¾ 199
Public Corporations ¾ 23
Central Bank Institutions ¾ 1
Fig. 17.2 From Russian Doll to spider’s web
The sphere of delegated governance is, in short, far more complex than the
RDM suggests and might more appropriately be described as involving a series of
vertical and horizontal linkages resembling a spider’s web (see Figure 17.2). Never-
theless, the RDM does demonstrate the existence of gradations of delegation each
of which raise specific questions about control, accountability, and patronage—in
short, the politics of delegation. So far this chapter has argued that the study of
delegation within British political studies is characterized by a number of features
delegation 319
which both set it apart from its American and Continental European counterparts
and have their origins in a very specific and critical debate that took place con-
cerning delegation in the nineteenth century. The outcome of this debate was a
normative theory of the state that was tied to a specific organizational form which
did much to both conceal the continuing and widespread use of delegation as a
central tool of statecraft and establish an anti-delegation perspective within political
analysis. Consequently many debates concerning delegation are couched in crude,
over-simplistic, and frequently false terms. However instead of seeking to review and
revise a number of relatively well-trodden debates about delegation in the British
context (accountability, patronage, control, etc.) the next section focuses on what is
missing from the study of delegation and argues for a shift in the analytical focus of
British scholars away from the politics of delegation and towards the politicization of
delegation.
17.4 The Politicization of Delegation
.............................................................................................................................................
The modern state could not function without delegation. The delegation of func-
tions and responsibilities to sponsored bodies operating with a significant degree
of autonomy arguably empowers governments to address a wide range of social
issues simultaneously without having to be involved with the minutiae of day-to-
day socio-political interactions. Delegation therefore provides a structural and eso-
teric capacity beyond the cognitive and physical limits of politicians. However, it
also creates a number of political dilemmas concerning internal control, external
accountability, and appointments. In terms of understanding these dilemmas the
tradition that has been prevalent within British political studies—one that tends
to eschew explicit theoretical frameworks; adopts a highly normative foundational
position; and remains tightly wedded to the precepts of the WM (Section 17.1)—
has arguably led to rather simplistic, crude, and often polemical interpretations
becoming prevalent. This chapter has sought to tease apart this issue by illustrating
the influence of the WM in terms of theories and methods (17.2), and the delayering
the British state in order to reveal the scale and complexity of delegated governance
(17.3). However, in focusing on the politics of delegation, it is possible to suggest
that scholars have overlooked the existence of a number of broader macro-political
themes which, taken together, demonstrate the need for the politicization of dele-
gation. The logic of delegation itself, rather than its consequences, needs to be the
focus of critical political analysis in order to push the process back within the sphere
of public contestation. The logic of delegation appears almost beyond dispute: it
has become an ‘essentially uncontested’ concept—to invert Gallie’s (1956) phrase—
within contemporary conceptions of good governance. Global institutions, such as
320 matthew flinders
the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, advocate large-scale delegation
and hiving-off as a central aspect of building state capacity, maximizing efficiency,
and ensuring market confidence. The ‘new governance agenda’ within the EU is also
tied to the creation of a number of quasi-autonomous agencies (see Thatcher 2002).
The logic of delegation has become so embedded that Marcussen (2006) argues in
some policy areas it has become ‘apoliticized’, as anyone challenging the notion risks
being immediately labelled irrational. And yet the benefits of delegation remain far
from uncontested. The work of Van Thiel (2004), James (2003), and McNamara
(2002), to provide just a few examples, questions the link between delegation and
superior economic outcomes. This leads Peters and Pierre (2004) to suggest that the
‘Faustian bargain’—a decline in democratic clarity in return for economic benefits—
is delivering very little.
Consequently, the politicization of delegation emphasizes the existence of contin-
gency. National politicians do enjoy choices in relation to whether to delegate specific
services, in which form delegation should take place, how a proportionate balance
should be achieved between independence and control, when to intervene, and at
what point to reinstitute direct ministerial control. These choices take on added
emphasis when it is appreciated that delegation creates its own epistemic momentum
through a process of deskilling. As the number of functions and responsibilities dele-
gated to sponsored bodies and PPPs operating at the periphery of the state increase,
so the latter undermines its own intellectual capacity; thereby creating information
asymmetries that weaken its bargaining position, reduce its holistic knowledge base
and institutional memory, which, taken together, further decreases confidence in the
direct delivery capacity of the state. As more functions ‘drift’ across the spectrum of
autonomy and PPPs become a mainstream governance tool rather than an instrument
of last resort for failing services, the intellectual evisceration of the state may become
acute. And yet there has been very little reasoned debate on this process or whether a
residual number of core functions and responsibilities should be maintained beyond
the grasp of delegatory forces (see Brown 2003). Delegation is therefore linked to
a loss of confidence in politics, the state, and the potential for collective action; as
well as the decline of the public sphere (Marquand 2004) and concern regarding the
development of ‘post-democracy’ (Crouch 2004).
Furthermore, although Ranciere (1995: 19) suggests that ‘Depoliticization is the
oldest task of politics’, the belief that numerous functions and responsibilities should
be delegated well beyond the direct control of elected politicians has become par-
ticularly influential since the election of Labour in 1997 (Burnham 2001; Buller and
Flinders 2005):
What governs our approach is a clear desire to place power where it should be: increas-
ingly not with politicians, but with those best fitted in different ways to deploy it. This
depoliticizing of key decision-making is a vital element in bringing power closer to the
people. (Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs 2003)
Depoliticization, however, represents an acutely pessimistic response to the chal-
lenges of modern British governance. It delegates power not to the people, through
delegation 321
transparent structures and procedures, but creates arenas of fugitive power oper-
ating largely beyond the realm of political deliberation. The tactics and tools of
depoliticization conspire to narrow the realm of conventional politics while locating
the drivers for this process beyond the control of national politicians (Buller and
Flinders 2006). Hay (2007) therefore isolates depoliticization as a key variable in
explaining contemporary levels of public disenchantment with politics. To call for the
politicization of delegation is therefore to work within the parameters of Habermas’s
(1996: 62) work on depoliticization and the public sphere: ‘the depoliticization of the
mass of the population and the decline of the public realm as a political institution are
components of a system of domination that tends to exclude practical questions from
public discussion’. It is repositioning the existence of choice regarding delegation, and
thereby a more optimistic view on the potentialities of collective action, within the
sphere of public contestation with which this chapter has been principally concerned.
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c h a p t e r 18
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REGULATION
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michael moran
18.1 Introduction: ‘Regulation’ and
‘British’ Regulation
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In the study and the practice of British politics ‘regulation’ is a comparatively new
term, but it describes a long-established activity. This very novelty, we shall see, is
itself illuminating about the nature of regulation in modern British politics. ‘Regu-
lation’ is defined in many ways, but at its core lies the notion that social behaviour
is governed by rules administered by an institution or institutions (Ogus 1994 for
discussion). We thus distinguish those areas of social life that are regulated from those
that are the subject of spontaneous social coordination (as in some market exchanges,
private recreations, and some personal relationships.) Like many definitions this is
serviceable but does not bear too close an interrogation. The notion that the market,
for instance, is an arena of spontaneous social organization is hard to sustain; on
the contrary, all the evidence is that functioning markets depend on the creation of
a framework of rules—of a system of regulation, in other words. But identifying
regulation in the terms defined here immediately alerts us to regulation and its
variations, and helps us begin to understand the peculiarities of ‘British’ regulation;
for different modes of regulation indeed do differentiate how different markets have
been ruled in Britain at different times.
Two important kinds of variation in regulation are immediately obvious: in the
nature of the rules, and in the nature of the power wielded by regulating institutions.
Much regulation in British politics was not recognized as such because it involved
I am grateful for the valuable comments of two anonymous referees, and of the editors, on my first
draft of this contribution.
326 michael moran
rules that were not legally enforceable—thus the rules often looked like spontaneous
manifestations of social coordination. The regulating institutions were often private
bodies, like trade associations, clubs, or corporations. If we think about this compar-
atively we are, in other words, looking at a distinctive British approach: distinctive
from the reliance on law that has characterized the United States; and on formally
organized public institutions that characterized the national systems that pioneered
the foundation of what has now become the European Union.
These historical forms in Britain were commonly labelled ‘self-regulation’. Self-
regulation legitimized the exercise of considerable social power by private interests. A
legitimizing ideology pictured self-regulation as superior to modes of regulation that
relied on the creation of legally enforceable rules administered by a public body and
backed by legal sanctions. The legitimizing ideology pictured self-regulation as more
flexible in the face of problems, and as more responsive and capable of swift adap-
tation. The ideology sanctioned the exercise of power by private interests, notably in
important markets, especially in the wake of the rise of a democratic, interventionist
state in Britain.
One way to think of this historically established system is as a variant of the strategy
of ‘depoliticization’ explored by a number of scholars (for instance Burnham 2001;
Buller and Flinders 2005; Hay 2007.) But while these scholars picture depoliticiza-
tion as a response to a great crisis of Keynesian political economy, my argument is
that alongside the ‘depoliticization’ of the 1980s and 1990s there was simultaneously
occurring a process by which hitherto depoliticized domains were being invaded by
partisan political argument and by high politics. The case studies below of financial
regulation, the government of education, and the government of medicine are offered
as exemplars of this.
This new politicization is a product of the crisis of the old dominant system of
self-regulation. For nearly a generation this dominant system of regulation has been
in turmoil and retreat, and is being replaced by systems of regulation that rely on the
command of law and on enforcement by public bodies.
The chapter is about that crisis in the historical system: about the extent to which
it has been replaced by arrangements based more on the command of law; and about
the limits that are being experienced by this command system. I show at the end that
the turn to command is in key respects both unexpected and dysfunctional; it arises
from the unavailing struggle of social actors to cope with crisis. A key implication
of the chapter is that agency has mattered less in these developments than accident,
unanticipated consequences, and blind fate.
18.2 The Crisis of Self-regulation
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Although there is a prehistory of regulation in Britain going back at least to Tudor
times (Ogus 1992), the dominant historical pattern of regulation in the United
regulation 327
Kingdom is fundamentally the product of the critical timing of the development of
industrialism, on the one hand, and of democracy on the other. Britain, famously, was
the first industrial society, and thus the first society that had to face the problems of
how to cope with the consequences of fully developed industrialism. The timing of the
industrial revolution meant that these problems were coped with in a society that had
neither a tradition of extensive state intervention in economic life, nor a democratic
political system or culture. The kind of regulation that became commonplace in
the twentieth century, and that was pioneered in the greatest modern ‘regulatory
state’, the United States—one where powerful statutory agencies regulated economic
interests under the pressures of democratic politics—was therefore in an almost literal
sense unthinkable in Britain.
The coincidence helps account for the particular shape of the British regulatory
system. The middle decades of the nineteenth century, when society had to cope with
the full brunt of industrialism, was the key epoch. There was laid down a pattern
of industrial, financial, and professional regulation that endured for much of the
twentieth century. It had three features. First, in the case of industrial regulation it
was marked by a distinctively cooperative style, which emphasized the importance
of implementing any statutory based rules with the cooperation of those affected,
especially when they were businesses (Carson 1970; 1974; 1979; Ashby and Anderson
1981). Second, in critical areas of economic regulation the state shied away from any
direct involvement at all, relying on the self-policing of markets. The most important
instances of this were in the financial markets, notably those in the City of London,
and in the new financial professions such as accounting and auditing that developed
to service these markets. The predominance of self-policing in the financial markets
reflected the longer-established power position of the City of London, dating back
even before the rise of industrialism, to the end of the seventeenth century (Moran
1986; 1991). Third, the nineteenth century saw a wave of innovation in professional
regulation, often in professions like medicine whose emergence reflected the elab-
oration of the division of labour under industrialism (Perkin 1990). The predomi-
nant form of regulation in these professions, even when there was some statutory
framework, emphasized self-policing. In a case like medicine, for instance, the state
established a framework in the 1858 Medical Act, endowing the General Medical
Council, as it became, with powers to govern the profession, but for a century it
simply took no interest in how those powers were exercised (Berlant 1975).
These three features, though not unknown in other industrial societies, never-
theless in combination marked Britain out among the leading capitalist nations.
The stress on cooperative, consensual regulation in which the adversarial rules of
law and the courts were marginalized, marked out the United Kingdom from the
United States, where there developed a culture of high legalistic adversarialism in
regulatory relationships (Vogel 1986; Kagan 2001; Kagan and Axelrad 2001). In the
larger capitalist nations of Europe the tradition of cooperative regulation was indeed
well established, but in cultures that had two distinctive features compared with
the UK: in some states, of which France is the prime example, there existed a long
tradition of centralized state-controlled and sponsored systems of regulation; in more
328 michael moran
decentralized cases, of which the Rhineland systems are good examples, there existed
traditions supporting the development of public law institutions. In the latter, self-
regulation was practised, but within a much more explicit and closely controlled legal
framework than in the case of the UK.
In short, the historically established system of regulation in the UK was condi-
tioned by three features: by the fact that it developed its predominant institutions
and cultures before the rise of democratic politics; by the fact that it appeared in
advance of any state institutions that had significant interventionist ambitions, or the
bureaucratic resources to back those ambitions; and by the fact that cooperation with,
and deference to, corporate and professional elites defined its dominant style.
The emergence of three linked political phenomena in the early decades of the
twentieth century presented a considerable challenge to these arrangements: the First
World War transformed the state, equipping it with interventionist ambitions and
resources; as a result of the War the party system consolidated into an adversarial
contest between a Conservative Party aligned to corporate and professional elites,
and a Labour Party which was more hostile to those elites; and the emergence of
an interventionist, mildly radical Labour Party was itself the product of the fuller
development of formal democracy, signified by the extension of near universal adult
suffrage in 1918. These developments were highly dangerous for the established regu-
latory system, a danger that briefly crystallized as a ‘revolutionary moment’ in 1919,
when a ripple from the great European revolutionary storm emanating from Russian
Bolshevism briefly caused a tremor in the UK.
This threat to the established regulatory order was met in two ways. First, a variety
of organizational responses sought to ensure that the institutions of self-regulation
would be protected from what was now, potentially, a threatening democratic state.
Second, this institutional protection was reinforced by ideological protection: an
ideology of regulation developed that pictured self-regulation, notably the British
variety, as uniquely well adapted to the complex tasks of control in an advanced
industrial society. To this was commonly added a picture of British ‘common sense’
and flexibility, by way of contrast with the supposedly more rigid, legalistic ways of
foreigners. The City of London was a great pioneer in this process: it reorganized
itself under the guidance of the Bank of England in the immediate aftermath of
the Great War; and it elaborated the ideology of self-regulation when faced with
challenges, on occasions like the great inquiries into its functioning, such as that
conducted by the Macmillan Committee, which reported in 1931 (Macmillan 1931;
Moran 2007). The City was a great pioneer because its huge power and prestige
allowed it to lay down the ideological template for British self-regulation. Indeed
some other key regulatory elites, such as in the accounting and auditing professions,
and key parts of the law like commercial law, were effectively part of the City’s service
sector.
Though there were incremental changes in many areas of regulation over the half-
century after the close of the Great War, the institutions of self-regulation, and the
ideology legitimizing the system, showed remarkable resilience. In areas like pro-
fessional regulation, the regulation of the university elite, or the regulation of the
regulation 329
City elite, someone who had fallen asleep in 1920 and woken in 1970 would have
recognized a remarkably similar institutional world. By contrast, a Rip Van Winkle
who fell asleep in 1970 and woke at the turn of the new millennium would have been
baffled by the extent of regulatory change. In the intervening thirty years the system of
self-regulation had been refashioned under the impact of virtually continuous crisis.
This crisis was caused by features that were engrained in the established arrange-
ments. These ingrained features can be summarized as economic, cultural, and
political.
Economically, self-regulation of markets needed some source of authority, and
since the point of self-regulation was to make it autonomous of the democratic state,
it could not borrow that authority too directly from the state. Self-regulation, to
work, needed to offer privileges to those agreeing to abide by the rules of the self-
regulatory system—and, by extension, needed sanctions against those who broke the
rules. The result was that the system of self-regulation across the British economy was
bound in with a system of cartels and restrictive practices—in service and product
markets, and in markets for professional services. Insiders benefited from the cartels
and restrictive practices; the price of benefiting was willingness to obey the rules of
the self-regulatory club.
Culturally, the creation of the hegemonic ideology of self-regulation had been a
considerable, and highly successful, exercise in mystification. But for mystification
to endure, the ideology required constant maintenance, to validate the claim that
‘flexible’ self-regulation was a superior form of control (superior for instance to
closer legal controls that would be the product of democratic politics). Self-regulation
was designed to provide protection against the institutions and cultures of liberal
democracy; but of course it could not abolish liberal democracy, and it had to live
with a certain level of scrutiny from liberal democratic institutions. A critical issue, it
turned out, was how it could manage ‘scandals’—something to which we return in a
moment.
This cultural vulnerability was obviously connected to the third ingrained feature,
the political. Surrounding self-regulation for most of the twentieth century was the
turbulence of democratic politics, a system of politics that provided obvious incen-
tives to politicians to propose the extension of democratic controls over self-regulated
domains, especially when ‘scandals’—failures in the competence of the self-regulatory
system—were revealed.
The presence of these three ingrained features meant that the system of self-
regulation, even before it entered its decades of crisis, was anything but stable. Build-
ing a mesh of cartels in a market economy was always a tricky business. Restrictive
practices and cartels were constantly being undermined by the competitive ambitions
of market actors, notably of aggressive new entrants who had not been socialized into
appropriately British ways; that was a constant story of the life of the City of London
from the 1950s to the 1970s (Kynaston 2001). Scandals were common, and could only
be contained if a convincing case could be made that they were exceptional, or if their
full magnitude could be concealed; neither task was easy in a society with a com-
paratively free media and a culture of open debate. Finally, the political project at the
330 michael moran
heart of self-regulation—to protect corporate and professional elites from democratic
control—was often threatened by the response of democratic politicians to revealed
scandals and to the costs of cartels and restrictive practices. These pressures, always
hard to control, simply became unmanageable in the closing decades of the twentieth
century, when there occurred a great crisis of self-regulation.
The symptoms of this crisis could be seen in an intensification of the problems
that, we have seen, were ingrained in the established system. In the economy, there
had been an incremental growth in the force and effectiveness of competition pol-
icy, dating back to as long ago as the passage of the Act abolishing Resale Price
Maintenance in 1964. But the dam really burst under the impact of the market
liberalization reforms of the 1980s. In the middle of the decade the single most
important instance of a self-regulatory system linked to restrictive practices, in the
financial markets of the City of London, was swept away in the trading reforms
usually summarized as the ‘Big Bang’ of 1986. The volume of scandals rose sharply
across a wide range of the most prestigious regulatory systems: the regulation of
solicitors entered a period of virtually perpetual scandal; the self-regulatory system
in medicine failed very publicly to respond, notably to well-publicized cases of mal-
treatment of patients by doctors; the Lloyds insurance market—at the core of the
City establishment—was revealed to be both crooked and imprudent (see Clarke
1981; 1986; 1990; 2000). The consequence of these scandals was that, from the 1970s
on, a key part of the self-regulatory historical compact—that the democratic state
would keep out of self-regulatory domains—was breached. Law, medicine, the City
markets, the universities: all saw state-sponsored reorganization and intervention.
The state also began actively to reshape such statutory institutions of regulation as
existed, many largely undisturbed since the nineteenth century, and to create a new
wave of bodies to regulate hitherto autonomous areas of social life. (For details, see
later.)
The collapse of cartels, the taint of scandal, and the increasing intrusion of the
democratic state are described as only symptoms here precisely because they arose
from two more fundamental factors. The first is well known. The great crisis of the
British economy in the mid-1970s, itself a product of a wider crisis of the global
capitalist economy which terminated the ‘thirty glorious years’ of economic growth,
produced a radical policy response. The most immediate manifestation was the great
Thatcherite revolution in ownership and market organization of the 1980s, which
attacked the foundations of many of the cartels that had been central to the self-
regulatory system. But as we shall see in the next section the great changes did
not stop with the end of Mrs Thatcher’s extraordinary premiership; her revolution
inaugurated a change of direction that has since continued relentlessly. The second
fundamental cause helps explain why change has indeed been so relentless, and has
happened independently of any particular human agent. As I have argued above,
the ‘traditional’ style of self-regulation fulfilled an important function—it protected
important elites from democratic institutions. The transformation of much self-
regulation in the last thirty years is a sign of the collapse of this system of protection.
How and why the collapse came about is a central theme of the next section.
regulation 331
18.3 The Transformation of
Self-regulation
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The British system of self-regulation was extraordinarily pervasive, and charting its
changes comprehensively would demand more space than is available here. I try to
convey the changes by focusing on three key cases: financial regulation; the regulation
of the school system; and the regulation of medicine. The importance of the first of
these is virtually self-evident: the regulation of the City was the paradigmatic model
for the self-regulatory system. The regulation of the school system is selected because
it shows an extraordinary surge in overt central control in an area of the welfare state
that had for most of the twentieth century simply been handed over to self-regulation
by a single profession, teachers. The regulation of doctors I choose because the pattern
of self-regulation here was both the most developed and the most influential, for
professions that organized after the doctors.
18.3.1 The Transformation of Financial Regulation
The transformation of financial regulation is traceable back to the 1970s when a
systemic crisis in banking forced abandonment of a private, informal system of pru-
dential banking regulation administered by the Bank of England, and its replacement
by a statutory system (see Moran 1986). But the really great changes took place in
two subsequent giant steps. The first occurred in the Financial Services Act 1986,
a law that was partly prompted by a series of frauds and collapses among financial
investment firms, and partly by pressures from modernizers in the state bureaucracy
and the biggest firms, who wanted more effective controls to position the City as a key
location in the global financial services industry. (Vogel 1996: 93–117 is authoritative.)
It accompanied, and was a corollary of, one of the most important state-directed
episodes in economic modernization: the ‘Big Bang’, which deregulated City markets
with the aim of securing London’s place as a leading world financial centre. The 1986
regulatory legislation which accompanied the change in market practices is significant
because it saw a large step in the direction of a hierarchical system of state-backed con-
trols, while nevertheless trying to retain the language, and some of the institutions,
of self-regulation. It systematically organized all the main markets into a hierarchy
of self-regulatory organizations (SROs). These self-regulatory organizations gained
monopoly control over the markets—that is, membership, and obedience to their
rules, was a condition of entry. In turn their own rules and internal government
were subjected to oversight by an overarching self-regulatory organization, the Secu-
rities and Investments Board, which in effect licensed the individual SROs. All this
greatly increased the degree to which the self-regulatory system was codified: the
SROs of necessity acquired rule books, and these rule books over time became more
detailed and more elaborate, and of course acquired legal force. The Securities and
Investments Board spoke the language of self-regulation, and as a gesture towards
332 michael moran
independence was constituted as a corporate body financed by a levy on the industry.
But the power it wielded over the SROs was based on statute: its own constitution was
prescribed in law, its leading officers were publicly appointed, and it was required to
report to parliament and to the central state in Whitehall. (Reid 1988 tells the whole
story.)
Scandals greatly damaged ideological mystification because they continually posed
the awkward question: if self-regulation is so superior why is it so prone to scandal?
The reforms in the City now further damaged ideological mystification because they
posed the awkward question: if flexibility is the great virtue of self-regulation why is
the self-regulation system moving so decisively in the direction of formality? Indeed,
even this remarkable advance in the direction of a state-designed hierarchy in finan-
cial self-regulation did not endure. The passage of the 1986 Financial Services Act was
followed by more than a decade of instability in financial regulation: periodic regula-
tory crises and scandals, and internal struggles within the financial services industry,
as scandal and failure pushed the regulatory authorities towards more controls, while
supporters of traditional light-touch self-regulation tried to preserve as much as
possible of the old order. That struggle has culminated for the moment in the changes
associated with the passage into law of the Financial Services and Markets Act of 2000.
The Act completes in a radical way the transformation of self-regulation begun in
1986. Some vestiges of the old forms of self-regulation, admitted, do still remain. The
new institution charged with implementing the Act, the Financial Services Authority,
is a company limited by guarantee financed by a levy on the industry, thus conferring
‘ownership’ on the regulated themselves. But this is a weak echo of the voice of the old
world of self-regulation. The Authority (originally established in advance of the law in
1997, but deriving its powers from the statute of 2000) has some claim to be the most
impressively empowered financial services regulator in any leading world financial
centre. If, for instance, we compare the system usually taken as the model of tight
legal control, the United States, we find a striking contrast: all the powers over the full
range of markets and institutions concentrated into the hands of the FSA in London
are in the case of the US dispersed among a wide range of regulatory bodies at state
and federal level. The FSA in effect licences all institutions and products, and does
so by virtue of power conferred by statute. It has thus displaced the Bank of England
from any significant role in prudential regulation of markets or institutions. Autho-
rization, standard setting, supervision, and enforcement: all come within its range.
The creation of the Authority amounts to the diffusion into the financial markets of a
major recent institutional innovation in the British system, the specialized regulatory
agency empowered by law. (Other important examples include the regulation of food
safety and the regulation of human fertility.) As a regulatory agency, the Authority
has a radically different relationship with the central state from that enjoyed by the
old institutions of City regulation and by the Bank of England. The Treasury appoints
its Board, it reports annually to the Treasury and the House of Commons, and it is
required to give evidence to the Commons’ Treasury Select Committee.
To summarize: in just about fifteen years from the middle of the 1980s self-
regulation of financial markets was transformed. There were radical changes along at
regulation 333
least three dimensions: a sharp increase in state surveillance; a growth in the volume
and complexity of rules, including legally prescribed rules; and the development
of a comprehensive hierarchy of controls operated by a single, legally empowered
regulator. That regulator in turn, equipped with great legal powers, an increasingly
assertive sense of regulatory mission, and subject to powerful popular pressures to
respond to cases of regulatory failure, is emerging as a major actor in both the
regulatory politics of the markets and the bureaucratic politics of the central state.
What is more, even this command system is not stable. The Northern Rock crisis of
2007—involving the first public run on a bank since the nineteenth century—will
certainly prompt a reconstruction of the system, and almost certainly yet another
step-change up in the system of command.
It is of course the case that the actual practice of financial regulation has not thus
far been notably draconian—the Northern Rock crisis suggests that much of the old
culture of cooperation and consensus survives. Financial regulation has certainly been
nothing like as severe as the new schools’ inspection agencies described below. In the
next main section of the chapter I explore the reasons for these limits on the fuller
development of a command regulatory system.
18.3.2 The Transformation of the Regulation of Schools
The core of the traditional system of regulation in school education lay in the school
inspection system. This is a revealing case because it shows that self-regulation could
exist even in parts of the welfare state that were overwhelmingly publicly funded. It
was a domain where a largely autonomous teaching profession, layers of government
below the level of the metropolitan, and bits of the central state itself inhabited a
‘secret garden’ of regulation. (The phrase is from Hood et al. 1999: 139.) This was a
world where the ‘British’ style of informal, cooperative regulation was deeply embed-
ded, and where the scrutinizing gaze of the state had all but disappeared: the Secretary
of State at the beginning of the present upheavals once estimated that under the old
system it would take central inspectors 200 years to complete inspection of all schools
(cited in Hood et al. 1999: 147). It was a domain where, despite the fact that the teach-
ers were a client profession of the state, they had won an operational autonomy that
compared well with the autonomy of traditionally ‘self-regulated’ liberal professions.
Much of this was turned upside down following the passage of the Education
Reform Act (1988) and the Education (Schools) Act of 1992. The formation of
OFSTED as the state body concerned with the regulation of standards in education
in 1992 heralded a significantly different regulatory approach. (Gray and Wilcox 1995:
133–48 summarize the history of this transformation.) Gone was the Arnoldian con-
ception of the schools inspector as a kind of gentle encourager of the dissemination
of high culture; in its place was a ferocious insistence on the inspector as the driver of
standards in the name of national efficiency. In OFSTED was created an institution
that in culture and working practices was far removed from the main interests that
had supported the old cooperative system. At the same time there was a marked
334 michael moran
increase in the formal organization and institutional density of the regulatory system.
In place of the fairly simple, small regulatory community that had joined an educa-
tional elite and a mandarin elite there now developed a large, overlapping, and often
competing range of regulatory bodies. In addition to OFSTED there also now existed:
individual local authorities, the kingpins of the historically displaced system, who
still nevertheless retained significant roles; a Funding Agency for Schools; a Schools
Curriculum and Assessments Authority; and several others, including ‘all purpose’
regulators like the Audit Commission and the National Audit Office who intervened
unpredictably in the regulatory system (Hood et al. 1999: 143–4). At the same time
there developed a marked shift in regulatory style, especially after the appointment of
a new Chief Inspector of Schools in 1995, towards a more adversarial and judgemental
system. This was in turn associated with a move to more explicit, quantitatively
expressed regulatory standards, notably in the use of standardized attainment tests
and targets, and a policy of ‘naming and shaming’ those who failed to meet targets.
(Pring 2001 documents this intensification.)
The return of a new Labour administration in 1997, though it ultimately displaced
some individuals, changed little. The Labour government was convinced both that
educational standards were an electorally sensitive issue, and that fostering human
capital and the skill base were the keys to international competitiveness. Thus the
pressure to achieve targets was if anything intensified.
In summary: in the space of less than a decade a cooperative, enclosed, informal
regulatory world had been broken open. Micro-management of the school system
from the centre was now so great that ministers were forming views even on such
detail as particular methods of teaching skills like reading. In the course of the 1990s
the country acquired one of the most ambitious schemes of school inspection in the
world. Wilcox and Gray’s summary catches the ambitions of all this:
the system of inspection inaugurated by the 1992 Act represented an unprecedented
attempt to apply a universal model of inspection of ambitious frequency and com-
prehensiveness, carried out by independent inspectors drawn from a wide range of
backgrounds and operating on a competitive commercial basis. We doubt if any
more ambitious programme of school-by-school evaluation and review has ever been
mounted anywhere in the world. (Wilcox and Gray 1996: 2)
18.3.3 The Regulation of Medicine
A long historical consensus about the shape and structure of self-regulation in this
domain dated back to the Medical Act of 1858, which established the ancestor of
the General Medical Council as the centrepiece of a system of autonomous self-
regulation. That consensus started to fall apart in the late 1960s. The most important
signs of this were open revolt by sections of the profession against the authority of
the General Medical Council, followed by the first extensive public inquiry ever—
by the Merrison Committee—in the early 1970s. (Stacey 1992: 29–44 for the revolt;
Merrison 1975 for the report.) Although Merrison’s language faithfully reflected the
regulation 335
ideology of club government, intoning the traditional defence of the flexibility of self-
regulation, the mere existence of the Committee was a hugely damaging development.
The hearings and the report inevitably undermined one of the key requirements of
traditional self-regulation: it converted the tacit and the private into the explicit and
the public. More damaging still, Merrison produced no stable regulatory settlement.
No new consensus capable of returning control of the regulatory institutions to the
professional elite has been possible in the intervening years. A symptom of this is that
for almost a generation now we have lived through constant reform of the structure,
powers, and culture of the General Medical Council.
One reason for this continuing instability is that there have been recurrent scandals
about the behaviour of doctors, forcing constant changes in both the content of
regulations and the structure of the GMC itself. One of the most striking features
of these scandalous cases is the gap they revealed between the conception of pro-
fessional standards that guided the General Medical Council’s own workings and
what an increasingly assertive lay public thought were appropriate standards. Thus
a number of highly publicized cases of callousness, incompetence, and neglect were
admitted by all, professionals and non-professionals alike, to be quite unacceptable—
but could not be deemed unprofessional given the GMC’s narrow conception of
professional misconduct. Here was a particularly stark instance of the encounter
between the nineteenth-century culture of self-regulation and the expectations of a
modern democratic culture. (Smith 1989 on these cases.) It graphically demonstrates
that ‘scandals’ were accidents waiting to happen in the system of self-regulation: they
grew out of the incongruence between a nineteenth-century oligarchic regulatory
culture and a modern democratic culture. There was consequently increasing leg-
islative intervention in the regulatory affairs of the profession, including intervention
to reshape the composition of the regulatory institution itself (Stacey 1992: 51–85).
Behind all this lies the collapse of the compact that doctors successfully negotiated
with the state at the foundation of the NHS, a compact memorably summarized in
Klein’s phrase ‘the politics of the double bed’: the compact assigned control of the
practice of medicine, and of the everyday allocation of resources, to medical profes-
sionals, and confined the state to the role of deciding the absolute level of resources to
be allocated to the Service (Klein 1990). It thus ‘modernized’ the nineteenth-century
bargain between the state and profession in such as a way as to protect the autonomy
of the profession. But after the great economic crisis of the 1970s, and the rise of
a state increasingly concerned to squeeze maximum efficiency out of welfare state
professionals, the Faustian character of that bargain became increasingly apparent.
Doctors found themselves the object of increasingly detailed public intervention in
their working practices. (Harrison, Hunter, and Pollitt 1990 on the growth of all this.)
Thus the particular turmoil in the regulatory institutions was compounded by a wider
breakdown of the political bargain between the profession and the state. As Salter put
it in 2001, in the wake of a spate of crises in medical authority: ‘Medical regulation,
as much as medical self-regulation, is now centre stage in the politics of the National
Health Service and the profession can expect to be subject to the full range of devices
at the disposal of this particular theatre’ (Salter 2001: 871).
336 michael moran
In summary: the regulation of the medical profession is now subjected to unprece-
dented, and growing, public debate, increasing intervention in the daily professional
activities of physicians, and increasing oversight by the central state.
18.4 The Limits of Command Regulation
.............................................................................................................................................
The shift to command regulation across the British system is in many ways a sur-
prising development. It contradicts expectations aroused by at least three distinct
points of view. First, it contradicts the everyday ‘commonsense’ picture of the last
quarter-century as an era of liberalization. Second, it flies in the face of perhaps the
commonest picture of the modern regulatory state, which pictures it as an exercise
in comparatively light-touch ‘steering’, by comparison with the more interventionist
practices of the three decades or so after the end of the Second World War. (The most
influential account is by Majone 1991; 1996; 1999.) Most serious of all, it runs counter
to the expectations generated by much of the influential modern literature on gover-
nance, which pictures command and control as too blunt an instrument to regulate
complex modern societies, and which invokes an image of ‘governance’ precisely to
suggest that there are powerful functional reasons for a shift to regulation through
more flexible means: through distributed networks and through the development of
systems of reflexive regulation, in which the emphasis is, precisely, on reflexivity in
the regulatory process (see for instance Rhodes 1997; 2006).
The importance of ‘governance’ is not an illusion. ‘Thick descriptive’ studies of
the regulation of some of the most complex social and technological processes—
for instance the regulation of safety in high-technology industrial processes—show
a recurrent pattern of reflexive regulation that departs drastically from the com-
mand system (Gunningham and Rees 1997; Gunningham, Grabosky, and Sinclair
1998; Gunningham and Johnstone 1999). More generally, the field of environmental
regulation shows a similar widespread pattern of reflexive regulation. The impact of
the European Union has been important in this process, for while it has obliged the
constitutionalization and formalization of many British self-regulatory domains, it
has also worked through the delegation of many regulatory responsibilities to the low-
est possible institutional levels—which in practice has meant the objects of regulation
themselves (Weale et al. 2000). Nor has international influence been confined to the
European Union. The globalization of economic life has re-created supranationally
many of the features of economic and professional self-regulation: two important
examples are the wide range of technical standard-setting bodies and the rise of self-
regulation in global financial markets and allied sectors, like accounting and auditing
(Braithwaite and Drahos 2000).
These developments indicate that the spread of command and control regulation
domestically in the UK is anything but a functional response to the demands of high
regulation 337
administrative or technical complexity. It is the product of a crisis of an old social
order—that order created in pre-democratic Britain, and then adapted, institution-
ally and ideologically, to meet the threat of democratic institutions. The collapse of
that regulatory order led to an era of chaotic struggle for control over regulatory
processes, virtually perpetual reconstruction of the systems that succeeded the old
order—and a set of changes driven by chaos, crisis, and fate rather than human
agency.
The history of chaos and reconstruction continues for, broadly, four reasons: the
invasion of regulatory domains by adversary politics; the struggles by the regulated to
evade and reshape regulatory controls; the limits of command regulation in coping
with complex social processes; and the inability of nationally based command systems
to control processes that, increasingly, are happening on a global scale. I examine each
of these in turn.
Traditional self-regulation provided a protection from adversary politics by
‘depoliticizing’ regulatory domains—removing them from the sphere of democratic
politics. The collapse of those insulating devices has exposed much regulation to
competitive adversarialism: politicians in government and opposition, drawn into
the details of regulation, have substantial career incentives to intervene and to micro-
manage. The process has been seen most clearly in the regulation of key domains
of the welfare state, like education and health: controls over hitherto autonomous
professions have grown as competing political parties have sought to direct pro-
fessionals to deliver performance targets whose achievement is the very centre of
the party adversarial battle. The competitive struggle in an adversarial culture helps
explain why there is so little stability in the new regulatory worlds; the investment
that ministers have in taking credit, or avoiding blame, for performance helps explain
the ubiquity of micro-management.
But the transformation of self- regulation has not been made in a consensual way.
On the contrary, the transformation of regulation among public sector elites was
done in the face of powerful opposition from those who controlled the old self-
regulatory system. The result has been to create cycles of strategic games in which
McBarnet and Whelan’s ‘creative compliance’ has been a dominant feature of the
games (McBarnet and Whelan 1991; 1999). The forms of creative compliance include
capture of the regulatory process, typified by the capture of the Research Assessment
Exercise, in the name of peer review, by academic elites in the universities; manip-
ulation of performance indicators so as serve the interests of the monitored, rather
than to measure the underlying value which the indicator was originally designed
to measure—a perennial problem in the management of the health service; or the
distortion of social processes so as to ensure compliance with the target rather than to
ensure achievement of the goal which the target is designed to reach, as when teachers
teach just to pass tests.
These problems are only exemplars of familiar ‘limits to control’ problems (Hood
1976; 1998) but they are especially acute in the UK case because of the circumstances
surrounding the reconstruction of the regulatory system; a reconstruction that was
driven by elites in the core executive responding to the great British economic
338 michael moran
crisis, and determined to reshape the institutions that were believed to be part of the
cause of the crisis. This history has guaranteed adversarialism, where the regulated
have seen the new order as one to be circumvented or subverted.
One of the puzzles of the shift to command away from the old system of self-
regulation was that it contradicted expectations from an established body of theory:
those governance theories that pictured many modern social processes as so complex
that their control could only be pursued through the creation of cooperative networks
that relied heavily on voluntary coordination and cooperation. In particular regula-
tory domains these are exemplified by control processes in some very high-technology
domains: as we noted earlier, the regulation of safety in the most advanced process
industries, and environmental regulation when applied to the most high-technology
industrial domains. The phenomenon of high complexity suggests that attempts to
impose command regulation on many social domains will simply fail.
Finally, the limits to the command system are set by external forces, and not only
those already referred to in the European Union. The globalization of economic
processes has created a world of business self-regulation that has substantially escaped
national economic controls. A key profession in the control of modern economic life,
accounting, now largely has its standards determined by the International Accounting
Standards Board, a body substantially under the control of the largest globally orga-
nized firms (Braithwaite and Drahos 2000 for the global web of regulatory bodies).
More generally, there exists a world of standard setting across a wide range of
industries that occurs in internationally organized institutions, often under industry
control.
18.5 Regulation: From a Silent to a
Contested Part of the Constitution
.............................................................................................................................................
Regulation, an activity little considered until comparatively recently, turns out to be a
clue to the history of British political development and to the state of contemporary
British government. It was, to adapt Foley’s (1989) graphic phrase, one of the silences
of the constitution: barely considered as a distinct activity because the institutions
and the ideologies of self-regulation ensured that control was organized out of demo-
cratic politics, into the hands of economic and professional elites. The function of
silence was precisely to protect key elites from democratic control. The big story
of the last three decades is the collapse of that particular constitutional settlement,
partly because successive policy failures culminated in the great crisis of the British
economy and polity in the 1970s, and partly because cultural and social changes made
it increasingly difficult to preserve an ideology that excluded democratic control from
key areas of economic and social life.
regulation 339
The collapse was followed by a decisive shift to command modes of regulation,
but there has been no new stable constitutional settlement. Instead, the UK has lived
through a period of regulatory chaos and constant institutional innovation. No new
consensus has been forged to succeed the consensus that undoubtedly existed about
the old self-regulatory system. The command revolution in regulation over the last
thirty years has for the most part been a revolution from the top, or perhaps more
accurately from the centre of the core executive, imposed on unwilling economic and
professional elites who have, in the absence of a consensus, responded with oppor-
tunistic modes of resistance and circumvention. The command revolution has been
attempted in circumstances where there are powerful functional pressures, and pow-
erful economic interests, pressing for a different regulatory style—one that stresses
flexibility, reflexiveness, and the delegation of regulatory authority to powerful private
economic interests. One of the ironies of the British regulatory revolution is that it
destroyed industrial self-regulation nationally in the very era when a new burst of
globalization reconstructed precisely such a system in the global economy.
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c h a p t e r 19
.................................................................................................................
CENTRAL STATE
.................................................................................................................
oliver james
The central state is an important topic within the study of British politics. Studying
the topic includes analysis of the resources of members of the executive, the relation-
ship between senior public servants and their political masters, and the methods for
coordinating across and between departments and other associated public bodies.
Instead of reviewing the vast body of work that now exists on the British central
state this chapter locates a discussion of these topics within a broader argument
about the theories and methods through which these themes and issues should be
studied and understood. It achieves this by seeking to draw out and consider the
contribution of the ‘interpretivist’ approach in the study of British politics. The
central argument of this chapter is that although this approach might be accepted as a
‘rhetorical device’ for provoking greater reflection about the tools of political analysis
it offers little when compared to the insights of mainstream approaches. Moreover the
unnecessarily pessimistic assumptions about the possibilities of empirical knowledge
vis-à-vis the central state stand in stark contrast to the insights and lessons of other
approaches.
In order to develop this line of argument this chapter is divided into four sec-
tions. The first section examines the conflict between interpretivists and mainstream
researchers about the purpose of research and the role of theory, method, and evi-
dence in the context of the British central state. It argues that the potential significance
of the interpretivist critique is reduced because it is directed more at quantitative
political science than the qualitative political science and political history approaches
that currently dominate mainstream research in this context. The second section
locates this debate within the context of the vaunted transition from government
to governance. In this regard the interpretivist approach arguably contributes very
little, and indeed overlaps in many places, with mainstream historical, qualitative,
or quantitative approaches. In order to drill down still further the third section
central state 343
examines recent ‘third wave’ governance-theoretic research and provides greater
precision by examining six specific research agendas in this field. These are: power
in policy-making networks; multi-level governance; core executive studies, prime
ministerial power; central departments and the administrative/politics interface; and
the central state beyond departments. The final section returns to the core argument
and locates the study of the central state within a number of broader themes and
issues.
19.1 The Politics Mainstream and its
Interpretivist Critics
.............................................................................................................................................
The debate between ‘interpretivists’, especially as reflected in the work of Bevir and
Rhodes (hereafter B&R), and different strands of what can be described as main-
stream politics research on the central state raises fundamental issues about the
purpose of research and the role of theory, method, and evidence. Discussion of
these issues can be frustrating for those seeking answers to seemingly straightforward
questions about, for example, the relationship between different departments in
making policy, the influence of the prime minister relative to other ministers, or why
ministers resign from their posts. However, the debates are unavoidable because they,
in part, determine the answers to these questions, whether answers are possible, and
even whether they are seen as appropriate questions to ask.
Contemporary mainstream research is varied but can, in broad terms, be sum-
marized as being of three main approaches: political history, and quantitative and
qualitative versions of political science. The categories are not fully mutually exclu-
sive or exhaustive of all work on the central state but the mainstream dominates
research on this topic. 1 The approaches are summarized in Table 19.1 with illustrative
examples. Contemporary political history tends to pursue understanding of specific
cases or events using an idiographic method with limited development of empirical
generalization or general theory. Political science is split between qualitative work
which tends to examine a small number of cases with little formalization of the-
ory, and quantitative political science which tends to use a large number of cases
and sometimes entails formal specification of theoretical models. Political science
tends to be interested in attempting empirical generalization and causal explanation,
1
There are also debates between interpretivism and ‘critical realist’ perspectives beyond the
mainstream (McAnulla 2006; Marsh 2008). The politics literature on the central state cannot be
comprehensively referenced in a short chapter, for specific topics: on governance see Rhodes (1997),
Richards and Smith (2002); on the core executive see Smith (1999), Marsh, Smith, and Richards (2001);
on multi-level governance see Bache and Flinders (2004); on the civil service see Dowding (1995a), Hood
and Lodge (2006); on research traditions see Bevir and Rhodes (2003). Other disciplines also address the
central state, particularly economics, history, and sociology.
344
oliver james
Table 19.1 Mainstream politics research on the central state and its interpretivist critics
Contemporary political Qualitative Quantitative Interpretivism
history political science political science (Bevir and Rhodes 2003)
Main purpose of Understanding specific Limited empirical Broad empirical Understanding the meanings,
research cases sometimes generalization, sometimes generalization, sometimes beliefs, and preferences of
including causal causal explanation, causal explanation, actors, and the relation
explanation prediction and knowledge prediction and knowledge between traditions, beliefs,
to enable intervention to enable intervention and dilemmas
Role of theory Limited role for general Explicit theory, usually Explicit theory, often formal Programmatic role of the
theory non-formal non-formal theory of tradition,
beliefs, and dilemmas
Orientation to Empirically oriented with Empirically oriented with Empirically oriented with a Anti-‘positivist’, anti-‘modern
empirical work diversity of approach, diversity of approach, often conventional approach to empirical’, rejection of
including often uses individual uses small-n studies, use of observational studies of a ‘objectified’ social facts, varied
research methods case studies with an a wide range of methods for large n and statistical methods but interpretivism in
and the role of idiographic method data collection and analysis testing of hypotheses practice involves small-n
evidence drawn from theory studies, ethnographic
techniques, and an emphasis
on first person accounts
Illustrative Hennessy (1986; 1989), Rhodes (1997), Marsh, Smith, Alt (1975), Berlinski, Derwan, Bevir and Rhodes (2003; 2006a;
examples Theakston (1997) and Richards (2001), James and Dowding (2005) 2006b). Hybrids: Richards
(2003), Bache and Flinders (2007); Clarke and Gains
(2004) (2007)
central state 345
examining the reasons why events occur, with quantitative work often being more
explicitly focused on these tasks. In a typical quantitative observational study, the
average causal effects of a set of independent variables on a dependent variable are
estimated in a model which ‘controls’ to isolate the effect of each variable of interest.
This approach, in many respects, attempts to be analogous to experimental designs
that attempt to isolate causal effects by comparing treatment and control groups,
a form of design that is difficult to implement in the central state. Quantitative
empirical research conventionally includes statistical tests of hypotheses drawn from
theory, with the tests incorporating assumptions about the data-generating process
giving rise to the observations. Political science work is sometimes engaged in the
prediction of outcomes, and knowledge about causes could in principle be used to
suggest interventions to change outcomes. 2
The interpretivist approach is suggested as having broad applicability to politics,
including the central state, and several varieties of interpretivism exist (Hay 2002:
205–6; Bevir and Rhodes 2003: 20–4; Finlayson 2004). However, the most extensive
statement of the interpretivist approach in the context of the British central state
is set out in Interpreting British Governance (Bevir and Rhodes 2003) and related
work (Bevir and Rhodes 2006a; 2006b; Rhodes 2007). The interpretivist approach
has been suggested as increasingly influential (Kerr and Kettell 2006: 13; Marsh 2008:
251) and has been adopted, at least in part, by other authors (Clarke and Gains
2007; Richards 2007). B&R state their view that ‘Interpretive approaches begin from
the insight that to understand actions, practice and institutions, we need to grasp
the relevant meanings, the beliefs and preferences of the people involved’ (Bevir
and Rhodes 2003: 1). This contention appears similar in many respects to the long-
standing tradition of hermeneutics, broadly defined as the theory of understanding
entailing interpreting texts and actions. B&R refer to this work as one of the ‘varieties
of interpretation’ (Bevir and Rhodes 2003: 20–4). Most researchers in the politics
mainstream would agree that examining beliefs and preferences is at least part of
what they do, so this aspect of B&R’s analysis does not seem particularly controversial
(Dowding 2004: 136).
A more significant dispute arising from B&R’s focus on interpreting ‘interpreta-
tions’ leads them to criticize what they see as ‘empiricist’ and ‘positivist’ approaches
used in political science. Some authors suggest that a key contribution of B&R’s
work has been to ‘highlight the inadequacy of “positivist” and “modern empiri-
cist” approaches that have dominated postwar British political science’ (McAnulla
2006: 113). Mainstream political scientists tend to want to evaluate rival accounts
by appeal to evidence that can be used to assist the process of choosing between
them. However, B&R suggest using a ‘normative standard embedded in a prac-
tice of criticising and comparing rival accounts of “agreed facts” ’ to avoid both
the pitfalls of ‘postitivism’ and the relativistic position of judging accounts merely
2
Much mainstream politics research on the central state could also be described as public
administration research because it examines organizations, especially research that is intended to
improve their design and operation which, it is suggested, should be key aims of public administration
(Evans 2006).
346 oliver james
by a standard of knowledge of what a community ‘happens to agree on’. They
claim that this standard should originate in ‘anti-foundationalism’ (Bevir and
Rhodes 2003: 39).
For many mainstream authors, particularly but not exclusively from quantitative
political science, this ‘anti-foundational’ approach does not appear to give sufficient
emphasis to the role of evaluating theory by direct appeals to evidence about the
social world. Dowding (2004: 140) insists that ‘When I engage in political science
I am attempting to discover truths about political institutions and processes. I try to
explain what is “really happening”. ’ From this perspective, it appears difficult for B&R
to be guided by normative standards in assessing evidence that stand outside of the
particular ‘community’ or ‘conversation’ that agrees the facts (Bevir and Rhodes 2003:
39). However, the political science and interpretivist positions may not be as incom-
patible as they appear on this issue. Dowding (2004: 140) suggests that B&R mislabel
the political science approach as ‘positivist’, a position which is something of a straw-
man and not subscribed to by most practitioners. This argument can be extended.
As part of a quantitative political science research programme that discovers ‘truths’
it is necessary to make statements that do not rest solely on empirical evaluation
in order to evaluate hypotheses, and this may potentially be an area of agreement.
For example, the evaluation of different theories through their rival hypotheses in a
particular empirical setting is conducted in the context of background assumptions.
If evidence comes to light that does not conform with a hypothesis, it could be that an
aspect of the associated theory is wrong or some of the background assumptions are
violated. For example a breakdown in the means of measurement could be producing
the apparently inconsistent evidence. Assumptions about measurement, and other
background assumptions, might in principle be open to empirical evaluation in a
similar way to hypotheses, but just not all at the same time. Much political science,
at least in practice if not always explicitly, recognizes these issues and is not as
vulnerable to the standard criticism of being based on simple-minded ‘positivism’
as B&R suggest.
Interpretivists further argue that political science has become too involved in
attempts to develop general theoretical models and to identify patterns across cases
that form regularities governing social life (Bevir and Rhodes 2003: 17–20). They
dislike the approach of testing general hypotheses derived from theory using multiple
cases, and attempts to undertake ‘causal’ explanation using such general theory,
which also suggests hostility to attempting prediction or intervening on the basis of
such knowledge. Instead, B&R seek to identify the conditional and volitional relation-
ships between beliefs, preferences, intention, and actions. In the context of the British
state, B&R identify ‘narratives’ of different ‘governance traditions’ at the aggregate
level. They also seek to identify the meanings of actors at the level of individuals (Bevir
and Rhodes 2003: 145–69, 170–94). The beliefs of individuals sit within the broader
traditions, defined as an initial influence on people that colours their later actions if
their agency has not led them to change it (Bevir and Rhodes 2003: 33), that are part
of their social context. Traditions are loose structures that do not necessarily limit
later actions, which partly differentiates their approach from accounts suggesting
central state 347
traditions have a greater role in constraining actions, notably Greenleaf (1983). B&R
argue that dilemmas arise for individuals or institutions when a new idea stands
in opposition to existing beliefs or practices and forces a reconsideration of these
existing beliefs and associated traditions. Dilemmas come from ideas that people hold
to be true rather than as a result of ‘allegedly objective pressures in the world’ (Bevir
and Rhodes 2003: 36).
It has been noted, as a criticism of B&R’s approach by authors of otherwise
different viewpoints, that the concept of ‘tradition’ is not easily separable from the
beliefs of actors, and is certainly not an independent variable that could be used in an
explanation of beliefs (Dowding 2004; Hay 2004; Finlayson 2004). B&R respond that
‘our interpretive approach is rooted in a philosophical analysis of the human sciences
that rejects the methodological rigour they urge on us. Our philosophical analysis
suggests that because people are not autonomous, they gain their beliefs against the
background of an inherited tradition’ (Bevir and Rhodes 2004: 159). They also note
that ‘when human sciences try to specify them [belief and tradition] they are misled
by a spurious concept of scientific rigour into adopting a form of explanation that is
inappropriate for human action’ (Bevir and Rhodes 2004: 159). Perhaps the greatest
clash is between interpretivists and quantitative political scientists that use a large
number of cases to establish associations or even average causal effects of variables
through multivariate models, often used as analogues to the idea of experiments
with controls. B&R are particularly concerned that quantitative operationalization of
variables neglects the contingent nature of relationships and risks objectification by
obscuring the different meanings that actors have in relation to an apparently simple
concept and the approach may involve the researcher imposing their definition of
meaning on subjects (Bevir and Rhodes 2004: 157).
The clash over causal explanation also occurs with qualitative political science and
political history research that engages in causal explanation. Hay (2004: 144–9) advo-
cates a social constructivist approach to examine ideas as the causes of policy-makers’
actions, giving the example of how belief in the ideas of globalization has limited
the social and economic policy ambitions of some social democratic governments.
This kind of approach might present the possibility that government policy would
be changed if the ideas about globalization were changed, other things remaining
equal. The interpretivist approach seems very pessimistic about the prospects for the
study of politics in this regard, limiting the usefulness of their approach for people
interested in questions such as how actors’ interests or ideas are causal influences on
policy outcomes, or those interested in intervention informed by systematic knowl-
edge about causal relations in the central state. This lack of ambition seems an unnec-
essary restriction of research activity to those not convinced by their philosophical
arguments.
Whilst B&R claim to be open to a variety of methods, they particularly advocate
the use of qualitative methods based on anthropological and historical approaches
including ‘thick description’ which dominate the practice of interpretivist research
by these authors. The identification of aggregates such as traditions is mainly based
on their categorization of academic and policy documents, with individuals’ beliefs
348 oliver james
established mostly by interviews, observation of action, and examination of the
statements of practitioners. However, the significance of B&R’s critique is reduced
because existing qualitative interview-based research methods have been proposed
on the grounds that they allow consideration of central state agents’ understandings
and their historical context (Marsh, Richards, and Smith 2004: 190). Biographical
methods have long been used to examine the beliefs and actions of key individ-
uals in this context (Theakston 1997). In practice, interpretivists give particular
prominence to first-person accounts in the identification of narratives, especially
through use of interview material and other statements by politicians and civil
servants. This method seems to neglect insights from the mainstream, where most
authors are concerned about error or deliberate misrepresentation by respondents.
B&R recognize these potential problems but do not widely practise techniques
that are commonly suggested for addressing them, such as systematic triangulation
of statements with action and other sources to assess consistency (Dowding and
James 2004).
19.2 Governance and Governance
Narratives
.............................................................................................................................................
Despite differences in the purpose of research and the role of theory and method,
both mainstream and interpretivist authors share an interest in the substantive topic
of governance and the central state, although much is included under this label. This
interest can be roughly characterized as occurring in three waves of research. The first
wave identified a general trend towards ‘governance’ as a critique of the traditional
‘Westminster model’ as a way of thinking about the British state (Rhodes 1997; Smith
1998; Richards and Smith 2002). The ‘Westminster model’ includes plurality rule
elections, single-party government, cabinet responsibility, executive control of the
state machine including the use of Crown powers, ministerial responsibility, a neutral
career civil service, a semi-closed elite policy system, and central state dominance in
the hierarchy of the UK administrative system. The Whitehall model refers particu-
larly to the executive and administrative elements of the broader model and reflects an
elitist conception of power, with the capacity to steer Britain’s strategic policy primar-
ily located in the upper echelons of the governmental machine. Governments’ author-
ity rests on commanding a majority in the House of Commons and the associated
capacity to pass laws following due process. The executive’s dominance is occasionally
tempered by parliament’s role in legitimating their policies with occasional rebellions
that are especially salient in the case of small government majorities and of course are
seen as having a non-activist role.
The first-wave perspective on governance was developed by one of the main
current proponents of interpretivism without any explicit mention of the later
central state 349
approach, notably in Understanding Governance (Rhodes 1997). The governance
perspective suggested the growing importance of networks of policy actors, the
role of information and persuasion as well as legislation, and the fluidity of pub-
lic/private and domestic/international boundaries. This perspective better reflected
the contemporary variation in the state’s relationship with civil society and other
state actors in different forms of network for the making and implementa-
tion of policy than did the Westminster model. The contrast between unstable,
open issue networks and more stable, closed policy communities was a particu-
lar focus of interest (see Marsh and Rhodes 1992). In general, networks reflect a
more open, interdependent governance relationship compared to the command-
and-control-oriented form of Whitehall ‘government’ in the Westminster model
(Rhodes 1997; Richards and Smith 2002). The changing nature of the state’s rela-
tions with other entities was said to involve a ‘hollowing out’ of capacity (Rhodes
1997) such that many of its activities are now only conducted jointly with pri-
vate or international actors, reducing its ability to influence outcomes, especially
in economic and industrial policy, though the increasing penetration of market
forces.
Despite the progress made in the first wave of governance research, B&R argue
that an interpretivist approach is necessary to enable the practice of ‘a shift from
government of a unitary state to governance in and by networks’ to be critically
assessed by ‘unpacking the relevant beliefs’ of people involved in this practice and
exploring ‘why they arose’ (Bevir and Rhodes 2003: 1). Other authors observe that
‘If we are in the midst of a shift from top-down “command and control” to a
looser framework of “governance”, then the time of interpretivism may well have
arrived’ (Finlayson 2004: 129). Interpretivists call for a ‘decentred’ approach ‘to
think about governance in relation to diverse narratives, traditions and dilemmas’
(Bevir and Rhodes 2003: 62). They set out their ‘governance narrative’ for the
central state including a prominent application to ‘Thatcherism’ for a period in
which much central state reform occurred. B&R identify ‘narratives of governance’,
bundling authors under the ‘narrative traditions’ of ‘Tory’, ‘Liberal’, ‘Whig’, and
‘Socialist’ which influence the narratives of Thatcherism (Bevir and Rhodes 2003:
108–18). The traditions are suggested as encountering ‘dilemmas’, forcing changes
to beliefs and reshaping of the traditions. For example, they note the dilemma
of ‘state overload’ and a tension between a Thatcherite project to impose reform
through state authority and simultaneously to increase the scope of markets in the
public services which, in some respects, reduced central state capacity (Bevir and
Rhodes 2003: 120).
However, the interpretivist account of ‘governance’ seems not to add nearly as
much to the literature compared to the first wave’s identification of the move from
government to ‘governance’. In some respects it even appears only partially con-
sistent with the stated aims of the interpretivist project. In particular, for those
concerned to avoid over-generalization, B&R’s ‘decentred’ approach in practice
appears to involve very broad-brush characterizations of traditions. B&R acknowl-
edge that the authors they survey don’t fit in single categories and that their list of
350 oliver james
traditions is not exhaustive, particularly noting the case for a ‘Marxist’ tradition
that they do not develop (Bevir and Rhodes 2003: 123 n. 1). So the practice of
interpretivist research would seem likely to alarm those anxious to elaborate fully
the beliefs and intentions of the large number of different authors writing on this
topic. B&R do not articulate criteria that would enable consensus to be built on
how far the process of adding narratives should be taken. In the extreme case, a
narrative for each author would not seem unreasonable, yet this is very far from
the approach that they adopt. B&R could be seen as being guilty of the violation
that they accuse quantitative political science of being prone to in forcing categories
on the subjects of research that those subjects would not accept or possibly even
recognize.
To take an example of B&R’s packaging of traditions, Andrew Gamble’s (1988)
influential interpretation of Thatcherism sits uneasily in the socialist tradition that
B&R describe as entailing ‘structural explanations focused on economics factors and
class with its critique of capitalism’. Gamble suggests Thatcherism as a combination
of traditional Conservative thinking and a revived neoliberalism, as reflected in the
populist project of the ‘free economy and the strong state’. Gamble’s account appears
subtle, drawing on several ‘traditions’ and not simply reflecting one of the ‘differences
in emphasis’ within the socialist tradition that B&R acknowledge (Bevir and Rhodes
2003: 115–16). Similarly, there is little explicit justification for the selection of four
specific ‘dilemmas’ of Thatcherism (welfare dependency, state overload, inflation,
globalization) for detailed attention from the long list of possible dilemmas that
might be claimed to exist. For example, an additional dilemma of technological
change might note how developments in information systems could facilitate quasi-
markets or collaborative forms of government in ‘digital-era governance’ (Dunleavy
et al. 2006), but it could also act as a spur to new forms of bureaucracy based on
standardized procedures for information gathering and processing. However, such a
dilemma, whilst seeming eminently plausible, is absent from B&R’s account. McAn-
ulla (2006: 126) makes a similar point in suggesting the irony that the dilemmas
identified by B&R in their account appear to be treated as ‘givens’, or are at least
not obviously the subject of contestation, but they are highly contested within the
literature on Thatcherism.
The second wave of governance research is a label covering a range of work, but
defined by shared characteristics of broadly agreeing with the changes described
by the label governance but criticizing some of the first-wave work. The changes
were not as marked as some of the proponents of governance suggested, notably
because the central state was fragmented historically. The initial governance perspec-
tive also neglected the significance of trends to strengthen central state structures.
The core parts of government developed new capacities for control in recent years
(Holliday 2000). The central state has retained, and at times increased, influence
over the resources of the nation, with government spending fluctuating as a pro-
portion of UK GDP between about 37 per cent and almost 50 per cent in recent
years, and currently hovering around 42 per cent. However, the influence of the
state is not confined to ownership and funding. The regulatory state using public
central state 351
authority to influence otherwise private activities has grown and changed its form
(Moran 2002). In addition, central government has increasingly been recognized
as having a regulatory means of influence over the public sector through stan-
dard setting, monitoring, and enforcement (Hood et al. 1999; Hood, James, and
Scott 2000). The most recent wave of governance research is discussed in the next
section.
19.3 Disaggregating Governance
.............................................................................................................................................
The third wave of research on governance shares the view that governance needs
to be disaggregated into specific topics and its operation is contingent on a variety
of factors, particularly policy sector, timing, and the institutions and actors of the
central state and other bodies involved. Institutions of the central state, as reason-
ably stable patterns of behaviour or formal organizations, play an important role,
and the formal institutions are summarized in Figure 19.1. Most current work is
from within mainstream politics rather than B&R’s interpretivist approach. The
literature is large and space allows only a partial analysis, so six key topics are
surveyed to illustrate the current and potential contributions of interpretivists and
mainstream approaches. The topics are: power in policy-making networks, multi-
level governance, the core executive, presidentialization of the prime ministership,
departments and politician–civil servant relationships, and the central state beyond
departments.
Boundary of core executive
European
Union
Cabinet Office and offices
Other around the Prime Minister
international -Cabinet and Cabinet committees HM Treasury
organizations -strategic units for policy
and oversight of implementation
Devolved
administrations Local
Central government departments
government
Executive Non-departmental Bodies under
agencies public bodies some ministerial control
e.g. health service, public
Organizations beyond the central state are shown without boxes, corporations
all organizations shown interact with the private sector
Fig. 19.1 The central state
352 oliver james
19.3.1 Power in Policy-making Networks
Much mainstream governance literature uses a broadly liberal democratic charac-
terization of the state that goes beyond the traditional focus on formal institutions
to locate state structures in explicit theories of political power. The concept of state
power invoked dates back at least to Weber (1948) with the view that states are human
communities that claim sovereignty, including the monopoly of the use of legitimate
physical force, within territorial boundaries (Hay and Lister 2006). The use of policy
networks including central state actors in explanations of policy outcomes has been
criticized for using networks as a metaphor for redescribing relationships rather than
explaining variation in policy outcomes using a model incorporating variation in
the structure of the networks (Dowding 1995b). A partial response to this criticism
has been the development of the resource dependence model which emphasizes
that actors in policy domains need to agree to work together because they do not
have the necessary resources to ignore others, and that bargaining relations between
them are often positive sum, providing an incentive to cooperate (Rhodes 1997). In
contrast, the ‘asymmetric power’ model gives more emphasis to the inequality of
power relations in policy-making. In particular, it notes that the central government
has influence at the centre of policy networks but is itself segmented and is uneven in
its external influence. The central state faces structured inequality of societal actors’
ability to advance their interests, exchange relationships with actors on which it
depends for information and cooperation to develop and implement policies (Smith,
Marsh, and Richards 2001).
The increased use of institutions, at least partly independent from ministers, has
been noted as involving depoliticization of some aspects of policy (Burnham 2001;
Flinders and Buller 2006; Wilks 2007). This trend remodels policy networks to reduce
the salience of links between administrators and ministers and has included greater
independence for the central bank and competition authorities. The increased use
of public boards in these bodies and more generally in the public sector, especially
modelled on private-sector corporate governance, has been described as ‘boardisa-
tion’ and is a challenge to the traditional model of ministerial responsibility (Wilks
2007). Current political science research is collecting data to assess whether and how
government ministers set policy agendas across different policy areas (Jennings and
John 2007). This work should help enable systematic analysis of whether policy-
making involves mainly closed, stable networks, perhaps now including boards, or
whether there are large discontinuities, such as associated with a new government
administration coming to power following an election and changing priorities for
the central state.
Interpretivism does not have an explicit theory of power but its implicit view
seems based on the role of traditions, which could be seen as having an influence
on beliefs and, in turn, policy outcomes. However, because agents’ actions are not
bound by traditions to any great degree, or in a way that can be studied systemat-
ically but instead only contingently, it seems difficult to reach any firm conclusions
central state 353
about the influence of particular traditions. The view of power, insofar as it rests on
traditions which don’t constrain, seems naive from a politics perspective which has
long recognized important systematic inequalities in actors’ involvement in policy-
making (Marsh 2008). Mainstream political history, which address many of the con-
cerns about generalization and the difficulties of broad theorizing raised by B&R, are
similarly more attentive to issues of power in their accounts of the central state than
are interpretivists (Hennessy 1986; 1989).
19.3.2 Multi-level Governance
The multi-level governance perspective, developed within the mainstream of political
science, places emphasis on the structure of power relations in which the central
state sits. It suggests that networks of policy-making operate with strong hierarchical
elements. The multiple levels of supranational, central state, and local and regional
state in this hierarchy are suggested as being particularly important. The European
Union increasingly involves the British central state working both in intergovern-
mental decision-making between member states and in relations with a suprana-
tional level (Bache and Flinders 2004; Flinders 2002; 2004). The process of Euro-
peanization has influenced the whole political system in which the central state is
located, influencing the politics of interest group orientation and policy development
and making it much less narrowly focused on the domestic level (Featherstone and
Radaelli 2003). This trend is apparent across the full range of policy sectors but is
particularly evident in trade, agriculture, and the environment. In some circum-
stances, the central state is increasingly bypassed with regions and devolved admin-
istrations having direct links, especially in the case of funds for regional economic
assistance. However, the structure of interaction with the EU in many areas of policy
reflects the departmental organization of Whitehall, so the earlier institutional struc-
tures have had some influence on contemporary multi-level systems (Bulmer and
Burch 1998).
Devolution has made the multi-level governance perspective even more relevant.
The British state, as the main part of the UK state incorporating Northern Ireland,
has always had historical territorial administrative structures for Wales and Scotland.
Devolution has created devolved powers for Scotland and Northern Ireland, with
Wales making secondary legislation, within a UK state exercising reserved powers.
All parts of the UK remain dependent on spending decisions made centrally but
the developed administrations have differing degrees of discretion on their use. The
formal arrangements for policy coordination across the UK include a Joint Ministerial
Committee and concordats for the UK. It is mainly on issues involving the EU that the
more formal structures are systematically used. However, this situation might alter
under governments of different parties and as the devolved administrations develop
more distinctive administrative and political trajectories (Rhodes et al. 2005). Conflict
354 oliver james
because of perceived unfairness may eventually lead to a depoliticized method for the
allocation of spending which might remove it from the direct control of central state
politicians (McLean 2005).
19.3.3 The Core Executive
Mainstream political science governance research rejects the Westminster model that
places cabinet government at the centre of the political executive. Much historical
debate concerned the relationship between Cabinet and the Prime Minister. How-
ever, the core executive (Dunleavy and Rhodes 1990; Rhodes 1995) has come to be
recognized as a better description of contemporary arrangements for central coordi-
nation of state activity, with a network of actors around the Cabinet Office, de facto
Prime Minister’s Office, and the Treasury setting strategic priorities, coordinating
and directing the broader executive system. The spending allocation process, cabinet
committee system, and policy review units are tools used by these organizations for
coordination and direction. Some definitions of the core executive include central
government departments because of their role in policy development and because
some ministers in these bodies are involved in core executive institutions, for example
sitting in cabinet (Smith 1999). However, the dominant approach is to maintain a
distinction between the ‘core’ parts of central government that are primarily strategic
and the departmental parts which tend to have more narrowly focused sector-specific
remits.
The core executive has attempted to strengthen its capacity for steering, in part
to counter the centrifugal pressures of policy-making being conducted in networks
specific to distinct policy sectors. There are increased resources in the centre of
the government machine and more regularized networks focused on the heart of
the system (Burch and Holliday 1996: 106; Hay and Richards 2000). An additional
‘tool of governance’ for core executive monitoring, direction, and coordination of
government activities is the regime of Public Service Agreement (PSA) performance
measures and targets (James 2004). The system is run by the Treasury with the
involvement of offices around the Prime Minister. Secretaries of State or other min-
isters are individually responsible for reporting performance against PSA targets, and
individual civil servants are made champions of particular targets or sets of targets.
The PSA documents are published and, as well as their use within government,
are available to enhance parliamentary and public scrutiny of government activity.
However, the targets vary in specificity, with those for foreign affairs and defence
being vague whilst those for public services are relatively precise, although, even in
this latter case, assessing performance against targets has been complicated by the
many changes to targets that have been made. There have been few consequences for
ministers who have failed to meet targets, although the resignation of the Secretary
of State for Education in 2002 was partly the result of promises she made to meet
targets that were subsequently not achieved. The core executive has further exercised
its strategic role through the coordination of policy and services using a range of tools.
central state 355
These efforts to ‘join up’ government to improve policies that cut across departmental
and other institutional boundaries have included staff transfers, joint budgets, joint
working arrangements, and joint target regimes (Flinders 2002; Richards and Smith
2002; James 2004).
In contrast to this research, the interpretivist approach appears to reject the
possibility of core executive tools of governance. Rhodes argues that ‘A decentred
approach undercuts the idea of network steering as a set of tools by which we
can manage governance. If governance is constructed differently, contingently and
continuously, we cannot have a tool kit for managing it’ (Rhodes 2007: 1257). This
statement seems to establish before research is undertaken that the tools won’t
work, whereas the mainstream research discussed above has found that the tools
work in some contexts but not in others. For example, joint targets shared by
departments to promote joined-up working have met with success where it has
been backed up with extra funding to incentivize collaboration, but has been less
successful in its absence where traditional departmental interests have acted as a
barrier.
19.3.4 Prime Minister and the Presidentialization Thesis
Mainstream research has a consensus that the power of the institution of Prime
Minister is influenced by the political, social, and economic context and its use by the
office holder. The contemporary literature developed in part as a critique of earlier
research that over-emphasizes the influence of the personality of individual Prime
Ministers. The commonly noted power resources of the institution of Prime Minister
include the ability to appoint and dismiss ministers, and power to chair cabinet
meetings, manage government business, and oversee the machinery of government.
Cabinet is generally thought of to be less influential as a collective decision-making
body than in the past and the Prime Minister’s central position on cabinet committees
and appointments to these committees are an important source of influence. The
Prime Minister is also able to use small ad hoc meetings, including bilateral meetings
with ministers, to bypass broader collective discussion. The Prime Minister’s position
as party leader is both a strength and a potential weakness because it allows control
through patronage and party machinery but also facilitates removal by means other
than a general election (Hennessy 1986; Smith 1999; Kavanagh and Seldon 2000;
Heffernan 2003).
The increased use of personal leadership, including direct appeals through the
media and the growing dominance of leaders within parties, especially at time of
election, has been termed the ‘presidentialization’ of the prime ministerial post (Foley
2000). This term affords more importance to the post than is recognized in the
Westminster model and has particularly developed because the media presentation of
central state policy has become increasingly centralized on the Prime Minister, with
systems for scheduling news releases in a coordinated manner and for responding
to incidents. However, the willingness and capacity of Prime Ministers to use their
356 oliver james
media resources in a ‘presidential’ fashion varies, perhaps reaching recent highpoints
in the case of Margaret Thatcher around the 1983 election and in the emphasis
given to Blair in Labour’s campaigning in the run-up to the 1997 election and in
the popular mandate he claimed this approach subsequently gave him personally
in government. It has been argued that Blair’s personal leadership was particularly
important to his party electorally in this period as part of the Labour Party’s project
to construct and capture the ‘centre’ ground of British politics (Hindmoor 2004:
188–200).
Beyond the use of the media, the degree of president-like influence depends
on many factors, especially Prime Ministers’ ability to control their parliamentary
majority and government ministers, especially cabinet ministers (Heffernan 2003;
2005a; 2005b). The notion of a presidential Prime Minister sits uneasily with col-
lective elements of the senior political elite which are still evident, despite full cabinet
meetings largely being symbolic affairs. In particular, the Chancellor of the Exchequer
is a post within cabinet that is well placed to challenge Prime Ministers’ authority
because of the Treasury’s important financial, economic, and public expenditure
roles, and ministers with substantial power bases in the governing party are also
influential (Heclo and Wildavsky 1974; Thain and Wright 1995; Heffernan 2005a;
2005b). Research on presidentialization from within mainstream political science
is increasingly defining presidentialization more explicitly from the framework of
comparative politics research on heads of government. To do so notes that using the
term ‘president’ in the British context can mislead as much as illuminate, and, whilst
there are similarities between Prime Ministers and Presidents as chief executives,
the different constitutional positions and roles in policy-making systems need more
careful attention (Heffernan 2005b).
Intrepretivist work on presidentialization has focused on the way practitioners
understand the relationship between the Prime Minister and other actors, identifying
‘tales’ of presidentialization when Blair was Prime Minister. They argue that presi-
dentialization tales acted as a ‘smokescreen’ because Blair was locked into a complex
pattern of domestic and international dependence reflecting contemporary gover-
nance. The views of presidentialization are themselves interpreted through different
traditions of the Westminster model, notably Tory, Whig, and Socialist (Bevir and
Rhodes 2006a). However, there seem to be multiple narratives that could be con-
structed and no way of telling why these three are to be preferred to other possibilities.
Bevir and Rhodes’s more general interest in presidentialization seems centred on
Blair’s personal control of the policy agenda and the achievement of his preferred
policy outcomes. A political science version of this project might systematically map
out what Blair wanted and how far he managed to achieve his aims across the full
range of policy sectors, with careful attention to variation across sectors. It would then
move on to identifying and assessing the barriers to him getting what he wanted. Of
course, the secrecy of the central sate is a possible obstacle to such research, although
interpretivists are more optimistic than most about the possibilities of gaining access
(Rhodes 2007: 1256).
central state 357
19.3.5 The Central Departments and Politician–Civil
Servant Relations
The mainstream notes the role of departments in networks and their particular
importance for sectoral policy-making, unless the core executive takes a particular
interest in that sector; interpretivists seem broadly to concur with this analysis.
Traditionally the relationship between the Prime Minister and ministers in cabinet
have formed the main focus of mainstream inquiry, but the activities of departmental
ministers and junior ministers has received increasing attention (Heady 1974; Rose
1987; Smith, Marsh, and Richards 2001; Dewan and Dowding 2005). Departments,
each headed by a minister, use Crown and statutory powers and operate within a
doctrine of ministerial responsibility for initiating policies and accounting for them.
The exercise of routine processes, for example statutory instruments under powers
delegated to departments, has received increasing attention (Page 2001). The differ-
ent departmental ‘cultures’ that develop over time influence the conduct of policy-
making (Smith, Marsh, and Richards 2001).
Mainstream research has long noted that individual ministerial responsibility is
a constitutional convention which, in the sense of resignation for errors made by
departments, has rarely been observed in practice. Similarly, collective ministerial
responsibility has rarely brought about resignation, although it is more influential as
an internal disciplining device to encourage commitment to shared policy goals. Most
work on ministerial resignations uses a political history approach; political science
study of ministerial tenure is relatively recent (but for an exception see Alt 1975). A
‘corrective’ effect of ministerial resignation on public support for the government
following unpopularity created by resignation issues has been found (Dewan and
Dowding 2005). There is evidence of prime ministerial ‘styles’ of firing ministers,
and ministers with an Oxbridge educational background and more senior ministers
have greater durability. In particular, ministers of cabinet rank are able to survive
longer than those outside cabinet (Berlinski, Dewan, and Dowding 2007). This work
is particularly notable because of the relative scarcity of quantitative research on
the central state. The conflict between interpretivists and the mainstream is at its
most severe over the status of this work, with interpretivists alleging the independent
variables used in such modelling are unjustified ‘objectifications’ that do not focus on
the beliefs of actors. However, it could be argued that a variable such as educational
background is a proxy for beliefs that are associated with particular backgrounds. If
such proxies were to be accepted as being of some interest, the dispute with interpre-
tivists would then seem to be about whether the relationships found in multivariate
modelling are valid. The regression coefficients reflect average effects or associations
and are generalizations about effects across cases of the kind interpretivists claim
should be avoided. However, narratives also seem to be generalizations of a kind
in the extent to which they bundle multiple authors into particular traditions. The
objections from within an interpretivist account are not however limited to these
points.
358 oliver james
Mainstream politics work has examined the relationship between the political
and administrative elites in central government, focusing on the appointment of
officials, their tenure, promotion and removal, and behaviour, including influence
over policy outcomes. These issues have often been bundled together in the topic
of whether the civil service is in some sense ‘politicized’ or whether it embod-
ies neutral competence, or ‘speaks truth to power’, in the policy-making process.
Interest has focused on how the cadre of career civil servants’ position has been
affected by increasing appointments from outside, especially in the cases of exec-
utive agency chief executives, outside entrants to policy ranks, and special advis-
ers. The consensus is that policy advice now comes from a wider range of sources
and senior civil servants are generally less influential than in the ‘village’ model
of Whitehall of thirty years ago (Heclo and Wildavsky 1974). The changes have
been described as the ‘end of the Whitehall model’ for the relationship between
senior civil servants and ministers (Campbell and Wilson 1995) or a change in the
‘public service bargain’ (Hood and Lodge 2006). In this latter perspective, civil
servants have greater incentivization through performance pay and through top
pay levels that are higher multiples of average salaries than has traditionally been
the case. The formal competencies stress capacity for both policy development and
implementation, although there has been increased emphasis on officials’ role in
‘delivery’ of policy. There has been a bifurcation in loyalty and responsibility, with
some increased emphasis on public reporting and resignation for poor performance
amongst agency chief executives but continued protection of position for the policy
elite in departments. There continues to be a ‘partnership’ bargain between politicians
and senior officials in policy-making where the longevity of civil servants and their
access to information networks can still give them great influence in the policy
process.
Interpretivism has perhaps had its widest application in relation to this topic,
where it follows in a long tradition of interview- and observation-based studies of the
senior civil service dating back to Heclo and Wildavsky (1974). Interpretivist work has
suggested the importance of policy-setting by ministers and constitutional propriety
of officials in the justifications for action offered by these actors. However, it has
also been noted that these conventions can break down at times of crisis (Richards
and Smith 2004). The governance stories offered by interpretivists similarly note the
conventions practised by elite actors in the central state, but also point out that they
don’t operate at all times (Bevir and Rhodes 2006b; Richards 2007).
19.3.6 The Central State Beyond Departments
Mainstream politics research has identified the influence of the central state well
beyond central departments in networks of government. This influence is exer-
cised through the use of executive agencies, a host of non-departmental public
bodies, and through central state steering of local government, the health service,
public corporations, devolved administrations, and a range of contractors. Closest
central state 359
to departments are executive agencies, organizational units set up over the past
two decades to have management freedoms, operating semi-detached from depart-
ments to enable them to focus on the task at hand. The agencies operate in an
accountability framework of policy aims and resources set by the department, with
a chief executive responsible for overall performance of the agency. The ideas were
influenced by an Anglo-American business corporate governance model of the
multi-divisional organization in which specialist units are given freedom to man-
age within a framework of focused accountability and budget for each unit (James
2001). The structures are supposed to enhance management capacity but main-
tain ministers’ strategic direction, and about 60 per cent of civil servants work in
agencies.
The agency creation initiative in part reflected ‘bureau-shaping’ strategies of senior
officials who sought to protect their role in policy-making by passing on responsibil-
ity for management to chief executives rather than reduce their policy role (Dun-
leavy 1991; James 2003: 41–69). The performance of services handled by individual
agencies has been improved in many cases, but agencies have increased ‘horizon-
tal’ organizational fragmentation; performance target regimes led some agencies to
focus on their own activities regardless of negative spillover effects on the broader
state system. Agency structures also contributed to ‘vertical’ fragmentation between
‘policy’ handled by departments and ‘operations’ handled by agencies, resulting in
some policies being developed with insufficient regard to issues of implementation
(James 2003: 109–24). The bureaucratic networks around agencies have come increas-
ingly to affect the way policy is developed and implemented in the central state
(Gains 2003).
The use of partly independent quasi-autonomous public bodies, or ‘distributed
public governance’, has grown in recent decades (Flinders 2004). Central state influ-
ence comes through finance, manipulation of organizational structures, and the use
of authority, often embodied in regulation. Appointments to over 70,000 posts are
under the control of central government departments (Skelcher 1998). The central
state also makes extensive use of contracts with private firms. These arrangements
have become more complex, involving relational contracting and public–private part-
nerships which have been especially used for new infrastructure projects (Grimshaw,
Vincent, and Willmott 2005). Some recent research influenced by interpretivism
has begun to examine implementation systems, but in a way which also draws
on the more mainstream governance literature on complex networks (Clarke and
Gains 2007).
The need to steer and coordinate complex networks has led central government
to develop systems of regulation for the public sector. Research on regulation of
government notes the common themes involved in audit, inspection, and oversight
of public bodies and the growth of this activity in recent years. In the early 1990s,
regulators of government spent about £770m on their own activities, with subsequent
growth bringing this total closer to £1,000m by 2000 (Hood et al. 1999: 23; Hood,
James, and Scott 2000). The growth of regulation seems to reflect a public-interest
view of regulation, with less attention paid to the counter-productive aspects of
360 oliver james
the system compared to the regulation of business where public-interest models of
regulation have long been questioned, especially the compliance costs of regulation
(Hood et al. 1999; James 2000). Associated with regulatory systems have been target
regimes, especially for public services. Recently, there is increased recognition that
these systems place burdens and can encourage ‘gaming’ behaviour by those subject
to them, and other unintended consequences (Boyne, Day, and Walker 2002; James
2004; Bevan and Hood 2006). However, central government has been reluctant to
dismantle regulatory and target systems because of the apparent capacity it provides
to exert influence far beyond Whitehall.
19.4 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
The interpretivist contribution to knowledge about the central state does not com-
pare favourably with that gained from mainstream approaches. The potential of
interpretivism is not promising either: it seems driven by a philosophical project
that has unnecessarily pessimistic conclusions for the possibility of empirical gen-
eralization and causal explanation as undertaken by the mainstream. The interpre-
tivists’ programmatic theory based on the relationship between beliefs, traditions,
and dilemmas seems unnecessarily constraining and does not adequately address the
key disciplinary interests of power, conflict, and the role of organizational structures
and networks. The ‘first-wave’ analysis of governance was initially developed without
any reference to the interpretivist approach and still sets the broad framework for
current research.
The vibrant current ‘third-wave’ research on governance is mostly within the
mainstream and has contributed knowledge about important substantive topics, as
discussed in the Section 19.3 above. The debate between the mainstream and inter-
pretivists risks crowding out discussion of important issues of theory and method.
Discussion of theory might particularly centre on how the British central state sheds
light on theory in comparative politics, and how research can be less parochial. Whilst
some authors claim the core executive in Britain is weak, compared to executives
in many other states it appears strong. There are relatively few veto-points to block
governments that want to bring about policy change (Tsebelis 2002). The discussion
of multi-level governance could similarly be situated more explicitly in comparative
work on varieties of federal system, such as whether the central state is becoming
part of a federal EU system or a multi-level system with a more complex allocation of
jurisdictions (Hooghe and Marks 2003).
In terms of method, the complementarities of quantitative and qualitative
approaches are only beginning to be fully explored, mainly because of the scarcity
of quantitative work until recently and a lack of dialogue between researchers using
different methods. Systematic gathering of data about the central state to produce
central state 361
measures for well-worn concepts is likely to be a major contribution to research in the
coming years. However, quantitative researchers require valid variables and qualita-
tive work has much to offer, and warn against, in this regard. Some of the protagonists
in the current debate about interpretivism admit to their use of ‘rhetorical devices’
with the aim of ‘provoking new ways of seeing British government’ (Rhodes 2007:
1258). In the sense of generating debate, they have been successful. We now need care-
ful development of theory and its empirical implications, and systematic collection
and analysis of evidence, rather than grand summary statements of developments or
attempts to change the whole approach to the study of the central state.
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c h a p t e r 20
.................................................................................................................
LO B B YING
.................................................................................................................
grant jordan
20.1 Governance: The Insider
Policy-making Form
.............................................................................................................................................
Thomas (in McGrath 2005: preface) suggests that ‘lobbyists work to influence
government decisions to the benefit of their group or client, usually through direct
contact with politicians and civil servants’. 1 While this accurately summarizes the
‘heroic’ self-image of the lobbyist, in ‘humdrum’ reality most lobbyists spend little
time in face-to-face contact with decision-makers: the bulk of activity involves gen-
erating press cuttings and summaries of relevant documents for clients. In offering
a low key version of lobbying, this chapter is suggesting that it has functional utility
within modern polyarchies. British lobbying is best seen as typically attempting to
modify public policy in specialist policy debates through persuasion and information
rather than pressurizing politicians (never mind doing so improperly). Indeed a
more fully developed version of the argument undermines the famous Westminster/
majoritarian model of democracy as set out by Lijphart (1984).
Of course Lijphart (1984: 16) immediately qualified his dramatic ‘top down’ image.
He said, ‘In Britain, majority rule does not entail majority tyranny’. In a further
reservation he noted, ‘the simple picture of an omnipotent one-party cabinet using
its parliamentary majority to carry out the mandate it has received from voters is,
and has always been false and misleading . . . In fact it has long been recognised that
in Britain and other democracies many organised groups compete for influence, and
1
For an account of Euro lobbying see special issue of Journal of European Public Policy, 14/3 (2007);
Mahoney (2008). The European dimension increases ‘venue shopping (Baumgartner and Jones 1993)
whereby groups can seek the most receptive channel.
366 grant jordan
that they tend to check and balance not only each other but also the political parties
and the government’. He commended the idea of ‘the illusion of governmental author-
ity’ (citing Keehn 1978). But qualifications are less potent than myths: unintentionally
Lijphart reinforced the misleading ‘pictures in our heads’ (Lippman 1922). Arguably
a proper appreciation of lobbying needs an acceptance of a complex ‘insider politics’
process where consent of affected interests is valued, interests are seen as possessing
invaluable information—and capacities for policy delivery. Lobbying in this reading
is part of a bargaining style of governance.
In rejecting the press ‘lobbyist-as-devil’ notion, this chapter connects to discussion
of a particular insider style of policy-making (Maloney, Jordan, and McLaughlin 1994;
Grant 1978; May and Nugent 1982; Page 1999; Jordan and Maloney 1997; Page 2001).
Maloney, Jordan, and McLaughlin (1994: 19) say:
The image of an insider group has to be related to the practice of policy making
being made in consultation between sections of the bureaucracy and clientelistic inter-
ests . . . On many occasions policy making civil servants are likely to be scanning the
horizon for groups who may be able to aid them in policy formulation . . . The policy
relevant group can simplify the policy making task.
Interaction of this type is the context of lobbying. In this perspective there is an
exchange-based pattern of transactions (over time 2 ) in low-publicity policy-making
venues whereby policy-makers (often officials) grant access and influence in return
for political support and policy advice. Koeppl (2001) in a survey of EU Heads and
Deputy Heads of Commission found that 73.3 per cent considered written material
from lobbyists useful, and only 17.7 per cent were ‘negative’ to lobbying; 67.5 per cent
thought strong lobbies were ‘necessary’ in Brussels.
If politics is about the public, parliament, and politicians then lobbying is demo-
cratically suspect in altering outcomes in self-regarding ways, but if instead (more
realistically) it is seen as being about civil servants, clients, consultation, and con-
sensus, then it is part of a messy pattern of information sharing. On their website
(February 2007) Citigate Public Affairs quote a British government minister: ‘If I do
something that damages your business because I didn’t know it would, that’s your
fault, not mine’. So lobbying is about making every effort to get advantage out of
government—or a least to minimize the disadvantage.
Lobbying, as used here, is a type of competitive ‘insider’ persuasion that fol-
lows certain conventions and rules. In the USA Browne (1990: 500) describes this
exchange/transactional perspective:
the services of various interest-group suppliers (and their policymaker consumers) con-
stitute worthwhile goods that are the basis for exchanges, or transactions, that facilitate
policy-making . . . organized interests . . . must have something recognizable to market
within some one or more relevant networks of decision making.
2
The time dimension constrains behaviour. Lobbying (for professionals) is iterative and therefore
reputation must be protected.
lobbying 367
This exchange is about helping policy-makers (principally officials) to get their
policies ‘right’. Truman (1951: 333) identified this ability to supply information as ‘One
important factor among the informal determinants of access’. He said, ‘Any politi-
cian . . . is obliged to make decisions that are guided in part by the relevant knowledge
that is available to him . . . Access is likely to be available to groups somewhat in
proportion to their ability to met this need’.
In contrast to the negative press interpretation, this conception of lobbying empha-
sizes trust. Finer (1958: 34) quoted the director of a national trade association claiming
that departmental recognition:
depends primarily on the statesmanlike way in which the association handles its prob-
lems and on the confidence inspired by the staff in their dealings with government
officials . . . government officials will trust the staff sufficiently to inform and consult
them on matters which are still highly confidential . . .
Berry (1984: 119–22) in the USA also related effective lobbying to reputation and
expertise. He argued, ‘Credibility Comes First . . . honesty is not so much a matter of
virtue as it is of necessity’. He continued, ‘Create a Dependency . . . The optimal role
for a lobbyist to play is that of trusted source of information whom policy makers can
call on when they need hard-to-find data’.
Lobbying in a friendly ‘reading’ is about competing supplies of arguments for
policy-makers to referee. Analogously, capitalism is defended by proponents as a
competitive process to supply goods efficiently at lowest cost, but individual cap-
italists want to suppress competition and drive prices up. So too in lobbying: for
‘sellers’ the best lobbying situation is where there is one-sided access and no counter-
argument. This is what the customer of the professional lobbyist wants, but this has
none of the system benefits that competition provides. Of course lobbyists have a
vested interest in permitting clients to assume that for money they can ‘fix’ things,
but useful lobbying is generally about ensuring arguments are considered rather than
buying decisions. Given the heightened scrutiny of lobbying, and popular suspicion,
politicians are unlikely to want to be identified with causes that cannot be reconciled
to their constituents’ interests.
The ambition of the lobbyist is thus about improving the legislative or regula-
tory environment for a policy participant. Stigler (1971) argued much regulation is
industry stimulated (as opposed to being a burden on the regulated). This leads
to a ‘standard profit-seeking model of lobbying’ (Grier, Munger, and Roberts 1994;
Hansen and Mitchell 2000) that sees the level of lobbying as a response of group size
and resource; the impact of government on the firm or group; and the concentration
of the sector. Accordingly lobbying is a predictable activity and its insider form
can also be predicted as this is the cost-effective route. While there are ‘multiple
venues’ (Baumgartner and Jones 1993), openings, and opportunity structures for
lobbyists, the payoffs at lowest cost encourage technical resolution with officials either
in Whitehall or in EU Directorates. 3 Relevant to this idea of low-cost lobbying is the
3
Burrell (in McGrath 2005: 309) notes, ‘Remember that civil servants matter . . . The sorts of issues on
which we are likely to be lobbying will be points of detail rather than of national principle, and
368 grant jordan
major theme in the literature as to whether lobbyists actually talk to sympathizers
(Bauer, Pool, and Dexter 1963) or seek to persuade opponents. In line with the
argument so far accepted conventional wisdom says, ‘The principal effect of lobbying
is not conversion but reinforcement’ (Matthews 1960: 191). In other words lobbying
is usually about the undramatic success of helping predisposed policy-makers carry
weight rather than securing dramatic policy U-turns. The ‘trick’ is not to make policy-
makers contradict their first instincts, but to portray what the lobbyist wants as
compatible with general policy. Disappointingly for cynics, the focus of most real-
life lobbying is policy improvement. Elizabeth Drew quoted a leading lobbyist in the
USA: ‘You got to understand what motivates the politician. Dummies, even in this
town, think that politicians just want to be re elected. Well [when I talk about public
policy with these legislators], I’m talking merits [of policy] with most of them’ (cited
in Mansbridge 1990: 13). Most lobbyists—successful or otherwise—are attempting to
advance their interpretation in policy debates. That these debates are often esoteric
and non-public reflects the necessary detail associated with insider policy-making
rather than some conspiratorial exclusion.
20.2 Focusing on a Definition
.............................................................................................................................................
While the Thomas definition at the head of this chapter is a good start, as with most
social science terms ‘lobbying’ lacks an agreed meaning. Gerring (2001: 38) notes the
temptation to ‘just to get on with it’ in social science, but he concludes to the contrary
that a ‘blithely empirical approach’ undermines the possibility of an accumulation of
knowledge. 4
The lack of a generally regarded definition permits substantial difference in scope
of discussion of authors. A major study by Baumgartner and colleagues looks at US
lobbying (http://lobby.la.psu.edu) (see also Baumgartner et al. 2009). They construct
a list of those active (1,264) on a random sample of 98 issues. In their research design
lobbying is not seen as confined to contract lobbyists, but captures all those engaging
in registered lobbying. (Such an approach allows generalization from typical rather
than unusually newsworthy cases.) Citizen groups were most frequently found to be
active (26 per cent), while trade and business were represented by 22 per cent of men-
tions (though a further 15 per cent of cases were businesses operating on their own
account). Professional associations were 11 per cent. Lobbying (policy influencing) is
thus wider than the activity of lobbyists (for-hire specialists).
politicians tend to rely on their officials for the detail . . . 99 times out of 100 the Minister will be
accepting the recommendation made by officials’.
4
A Special Issue of Parliamentary Affairs, 51/4 (1998), considers definitional issues and ethical and
regulatory dimensions.
lobbying 369
The full population of bodies relevant to policy change has been labelled ‘pressure
participants’ (Jordan, Halpin, and Maloney 2004) and ‘interest organizations’ (Gray
and Lowery 1996). Such labels subsume corporations, interest groups, parts of gov-
ernment, agencies, and local governments, etc. But not all of their policy-influencing
activities would (conventionally) be regarded as lobbying. A mass protest might be
counted as ‘policy-influencing’ but not necessarily as ‘lobbying’. This broad definition
of lobbyist is similar to that in the draft Report on Lobbying (2007/2115INI) published
in February 2008 by the EU Committee on Constitutional Affairs (Stubb Report). It
argued that its use:
7. Agrees with the Commission’s definition of lobbying as ‘activities carried out with the
objective of influencing the policy formulation and decision-making processes of the
European institutions . . . ;
8. Emphasises that all actors falling within that definition should be considered as lobby-
ists and treated in the same way: professional lobbyists, companies’ in-house lobbyists,
NGOs, think-tanks, trade associations, trade unions and employers’ organisations and
lawyers when their purpose is to influence policy rather than case-law; . . .
A common, but much narrower, conception of lobbying restricts the use to the
operations of for-hire, commercial, paid lobbyists who act for different clients on a
fee basis. But as indicated in Figure 20.1 below, lobbying, as understood here, is done
by a variety of pressure participants (A and B) as well as C. They also pursue a range
of strategies (D–F), with the implication that some policy activities (such as G) are
not included as lobbying.
20.3 Types of Lobbyist
.............................................................................................................................................
Various types of lobbying participant can be identified—from those acting on
their own-account, to those involved in collective action intervention, to commer-
cial/contract organizations. The first category (A) refers to organizations or even
individuals pursuing their own political ends. Included in this own-account type
would be a corporation employing specialist government affairs staff. Grantham
and Seymour-Ure (in Rush 1990) note that, ‘Many large firms . . . have their own
professional staff with specific responsibility for governmental and parliamentary
relations’. Another own-account variant is the non-corporate civil society organiza-
tion that might become active to avoid the adverse impacts of policy. Thus in 2006
the Camphill Rudolf Steiner School in Aberdeen ran a slick campaign against the
proposed Aberdeen Western Peripheral Route (WPR), and indeed they also hired a
lobbying company (DLA Piper based in Edinburgh).
Intra-government organizations can themselves be seen as engaging in own-
account lobbying. Mitchell (Jordan 1991: 3) claimed, ‘Government itself is a lobby . . . it
370 grant jordan
Means of policy modification:
<meaning shades into public relations—shades into ‘grass roots’ and protest>
Effective actors: D E F G
Framing Information Political Illegal persuasion
supply pressure Non-lobbying change
A. Own–account policy i ii iii iv non-lobbying
participants (i.e. political
pressure as ancillary activity)
a. Individual
b. Corporate (inc.
government affairs staff)
c. Civil society organization
d. ‘Governmental’
organization
B. Interest group (i.e. organized v vi vii viii non-lobbying
to exert political pressure
as a main function)
a. Self-interested sectional
grouping
b. Cause group
C. ‘Third party’/commercial/ ix x xi xii non-lobbying
for-hire/contract lobbying
consultancy
Fig. 20.1 Range of ‘lobbying’ meanings
has to persuade, lobby for its objectives’. The public sector itself recruits lobbyists: an
Ordnance Survey advertisement in January 2007 sought a Head of Public Affairs to
‘manage a team that focuses on influencing across complex executive and legislative
systems’. Therefore in some broad uses of the term lobbying, government can be seen
as the agent as well as the target.
A second broad category of lobbyists (B) are collective organizations. The Greenbelt
Alliance involved in the Aberdeen WPR battle differed from the Camphill example
in that the latter was acting on its own account (and lobbying was a subordinate
organizational goal) whereas the Alliance was set up expressly to lobby for a
multi-organizational coalition, and lobbying was its primary purpose. Grantham
and Seymour-Ure’s quotation above actually runs on, ‘Most of the larger and
better-organized charities and pressure groups, too, employ a parliamentary liaison
officer . . . as do the majority of trade associations’.
In this milieu groups develop research capacities and seek negotiating relation-
ships. For example, the Federation of Small Businesses’ website says that ‘its lobbying
arm . . . applies pressure on MPs, Government and Whitehall, lobbies politicians in
lobbying 371
their constituencies and puts the FSB viewpoint over to the media’. Relevantly for
this general argument, the chairman’s introduction made the point that ‘Lobbying is
not an exact science and sometimes it is difficult to present definitive achievements,
particularly when we are involved in the stages when Government is looking at ideas,
well ahead of the legislative process’.
The weight of press coverage connects lobbying with for-hire agencies (C), but
most lobbying is done in-house for corporations (A) or by collective groups (B). In
the USA, Heinz et al. (1993: 67) noted that for each professional in a law firm or lobby-
ing consultancy there might be a four to one preponderance towards those working
for in-house set-ups (corporate or collective body). So, in summary, lobbying in this
chapter is wider than simply ‘what paid lobbyists do’, but it does not accept that all
policy-making influences should be included under the lobbying umbrella.
Lobbying here is a broad process modifying public policy by information-based inter-
action between groups and organizations and government. This use expands ‘lobbying’
from a narrow (press) focus on misdeeds by paid (commercial) lobbyists to instead
see it as policy-influencing behaviour, and hence a key component of governance.
Lobbying is not any attempt to alter policy, but is seen as (frequently ‘information-
based’) transactions between policy-makers and affected interests. Other activities—
direct action and law breaking (even non-violent)—may seek to influence policy, but
‘lobbying’ would usually not stretch to cover such activities.
The normal currency in the lobbying process is policy relevant information.
Thus on retail shopping the British Retail Consortium data on high street sales,
or its Business Crime survey, are accepted as indispensable by policy-makers. The
policy-making units of government are usually small and not unusually the relevant
groups may have more expertise than government itself.
Most lobbying thus relates to information supply. In practice, for those involved
in lobbying it is usually necessary to talk the language of ‘public good’. Naturally
when approaching MPs or ministers, for example, companies will tend to talk about
‘jobs for constituents’ rather than ‘profits for shareholders’. The best kind of lobbying
resource might depend on the venue. Technical detail might be the best leverage with
civil servants, but arguments such as public opinion might be more effective with
politicians.
Much of the interaction between government and pressure participants is about
joint (win : win) working to remedy problems in particular policy niches (E), but
lobbying organizations might also apply political pressure (F)—especially if more
technical ‘conversations’ are failing. Or the press could be briefed; public opin-
ion mobilized, etc. (D). Changing the ‘frame’ (often through a media campaign)
has consequential policy outcomes. The rise in support among MPs for a nuclear
energy option may be linked to campaigning by the Nuclear Industry Association
(Public Affairs, 23 October 2006: 21). Successful reframing, it has to be stressed, is
an unusual political occurrence. Such ‘framing’ activities might be labelled pub-
lic relations rather than lobbying: there are permeable boundaries between the
terms.
372 grant jordan
In the literature there are discussions of ‘grass-roots lobbying’ (also ‘outside’ or
indirect lobbying) where the public (usually constituents) are mobilized to put pres-
sure on politicians to secure policy changes (see Kollman 1998). This is seen here
as at most ‘non-core’ to the phenomenon of lobbying. Nonetheless when Japanese
recording tape manufacturers wanted to stop a levy in the UK on tapes to protect
artists’ copyright, their lobbyist used two main tools. They reframed the ‘levy’ as a
‘tax’ (even less popular) and they found allies that maybe had greater priority with UK
politicians—consumers groups, educationalists, and above all the blind. The Royal
National Institute for the Blind used their members as a resource—organizing what
they termed a ‘white sticks and dogs’ lobby of Parliament—which caused disruption
as intended. As a result the Department of Trade and Industry had 5,368 representa-
tions against and 235 in favour. (Significantly the lobbyist describing this concluded
that unlike in the US this kind of grass-roots campaign was ‘the exception that proves
the rule’ (Burrell in McGrath 2005: 306).)
Insider lobbying has as its core formalized consultation between interests and
government (of course there are also multiple ad hoc contacts that are not part of
the consultative map). Critics of the practice claim consultation is simply cosmetic.
However in the broad range of public policy, party principles are a poor guide to
decision. Where government has no ideological ‘guide’, they try to massage problems
away by working out something broadly acceptable with the policy community of
affected interests. In other words the scope of policy covered by the Lijphart sort of
Westminster majoritarian characteristics is empirically limited.
This account has tried to stress that lobbying is the role of many sorts of policy
advocates—not simply the paid consultant. Lobbying now has three trade bodies 5
that represent, and to an extent self-regulate, it—but the focus on the first two at least
is the for-hire elements: Association of Professional Political Consultants (APPC),
Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), Chartered Institute for Public
Relations—Government Affairs Group (CIPR GAG). Milner (2006a; 2006b) uses
registration data with the APPC to sketch the growth and coverage of the industry in
the UK. In December 2006 it had thirty-eight member firms and claimed to represent
over 80 per cent of the for-hire sector by turnover.
The CIPR estimate that there are 48,000 individuals involved in broadly defined
PR with around 14,000 of those involved in governmental affairs (Parvin 2007: 10).
Parvin notes that, ‘The common consensus within the industry is that the in-house
sector is growing and becoming more professional’. Parvin (2007: 16) also notes that
the Trade Association Forum claims there are about 3,000 trade associations in the
UK, around 600 of whom lobby in a ‘meaningful way’. And around 100 have ‘major
full-time staff and government affairs teams’. (The Stubb report on EU lobbying (see
above) suggested, ‘At the moment it is estimated that there are about 15000 lobbyists
and 2500 lobby organisations in Brussels. Counting permanent visitors’ badges and
“express”-badges there are approximately 5000 lobbyists operating in the European
Parliament’.)
5
The Association for Scottish Public Affairs has forty-one members.
lobbying 373
20.4 The Development of
Professional Persuasion
.............................................................................................................................................
Congress attempted to regulate lobbying in the USA in 1927 (Crawford 1939: 1). How-
ever the UK discussion is comparatively recent: 6 Jordan’s (1991: 14) edited volume was
aimed ‘at stimulating more notice of the activity of commercial lobbyists in Britain’.
Grantham and Seymour-Ure 7 start their chapter (in Rush 1990: 45), ‘In the early 1970s
it was still considered vaguely unethical and probably pointless for someone wishing
to influence ministers, officials, or Members of Parliament to hire a professional
political consultant’. However, embryonic lobbying certainly existed in Britain in
the 1950s and 1960s. The Association of Professional Policy Consultants’ history of
lobbying on their website credits the first professional consultancy to Commander
Christopher Powell around 1928. Souza (1998: 248) describes Powell as essentially a
parliamentary draftsman: his niche was in large part Private (and Private Members’)
Bills where political parties had no interest and technical work was still needed.
By 1976, in connection with the nationalization of Aircraft and Shipbuilding Indus-
tries Act, the Bristol Channel Ship Repairers Ltd was able to hire International News
Service to lobby. By then—unlike Powell’s approach which was based on proce-
dural expertise—new players were literally hiring MPs. This ‘payments for questions’
stimulated controversy—peaking in the court cases in 1999 and 2000 between Neil
Hamilton MP and Mohamed Al Fayed (see below)— and the paid role of MPs
has declined in the past decade as a result of press attention. Press stories however
consistently emerge, stopping the matter disappearing off the agenda. In October
2007 the Guardian was reporting that former Labour MP Lord Hoyle was paid a
‘consultancy’ fee by Whitehall Advisers, for arranging a lobbyist’s introduction ‘to
say hello’ to the new defence minister, Lord Drayson. (See also the Sunday Times, 25
January 2009, ‘Revealed: Labour Lords Change Laws for Cash’.)
Thus despite the fact that given the ‘post-parliamentary’ nature of most
policy-making, effective lobbying tends to be with officials rather than MPs, there
is continuing ‘sensationalist’ interest in lobbying and parliament. Reflecting this
press attention, in June 2007 the Public Administration Committee of the House of
Commons launched (yet another) parliamentary inquiry (PAC 2009). The invitation
to submit evidence noted, ‘In the intervening years, lobbying has been at the centre
of political scandals. The cash for questions affair, amongst others, tarnished the
word with the stain of sleaze. The industry responded by introducing an element of
self-regulation and encouraging professionalization of its work, but lobbying is still
viewed with suspicion in some quarters’. The PAC inquiry aimed to (re-)consider top-
ics such as the need for external regulation of the industry. The Committee considered
issues such as ‘cash for access’ and the funding of All Party Groups by lobby firms.
6
US sources include Nownes (2006); Birnbaum (1993); West and Loomis (1999); Thomas (2004);
Hansen (1991); Dexter (1969).
7
They give extensive examples.
374 grant jordan
20.5 Business Bias?
.............................................................................................................................................
Much attention in the literature is paid to lobbying by business—largely on the
assumption that there is an inherent pro-business bias. But Lindblom’s (1977) cen-
tral argument was that businesses’ core power was the ability to make or withdraw
investment; this is not the sort of influence that the term ‘lobbying’ signals. While the
assumption that business power is widely accepted, Heinz et al. (1993: 381) argue that
government affairs departments are a ‘response to uncertainty’: business acting not
out of strength but vulnerability. Businesses may lobby—because they are affected
adversely by policy. Milner (2006a: 14) shows that the number of casinos lobbying in
the UK more than doubled between 2001 and 2004 (from four to ten). This was a
response to government putting supercasinos on the agenda rather than the power
of casinos in promoting the topic. Lobbying is thus often reactive: cost avoidance
response to regulation or a proposed EU Directive.
A further common assumption is that a united business community is bound to be
successful; however, Smith (2000) ingeniously shows that themes that unify business
are ideological and partisan and generate intense attention from the media and
mobilize public attention. As a consequence, perversely, a united business community
is unlikely to get its own way! West and Loomis (1999: 228) suggest that the Golden
Rule is that, ‘he who has the gold makes the rules’. But at the end of the (long) day,
‘weaker’ interests may prevail; race matters get addressed, smoking gets banned, and
car safety regulated.
20.6 Lobbying as Corruption: Or the
Corruption of Lobbying? The
Unattractive Side of UK Lobbying?
.............................................................................................................................................
Arguably the press coverage of controversies reveals the ‘corruption of lobbying’
rather than that lobbying is inherently corrupt. The UK literature mostly divides
into ‘lobbying cookbooks’ of the ‘how to do it’ type—stressing the respectability of
the practice. Such books are compatible with the insider perspective. These include
Thomson and John (2006); Moloney (1996); Miller (2000); and Connelly (1992).
Perhaps surprisingly, few follow up Eckstein (1960) to show how group/governmental
interaction produced particular outcomes (Jordan 1992).
On the other hand there are the ‘lobbyist as crook books’—books of the ‘What
They Should Not Have Been Caught Doing’ nature. While the cookbooks present
lobbying as a Democratic Contribution, the crook books record it as a Democratic
Challenge: for example, three fairly recent UK books share the title Sleaze (Leigh and
lobbying 375
Vulliamy 1997; Ridley and Doig 1995; Baston 2000). (Also see Cook 1995; Dale and
Fawkes 2006; Palast 2002). Souza’s So You Want to be a Lobbyist (1998) sounds like
the cookbook type—and has much of the content of the second type.
Under the tide of crook books, the lobbying industry/trade/profession in the UK
has a constant battle to defend its legitimacy from critics. The Directory of Political
Lobbying 2002–3 (Johnson 2002: 1) notes it contains entrants who themselves assert
‘we prefer not to think of ourselves as lobbyists’. Johnson says, ‘The associations with
“underhand” or undemocratic practices is perhaps part of the reason companies are
eschewing the title “political lobbying”. ’ Distinctions can be teased out but the terms
‘government affairs’ or ‘public affairs’ seems to be cosmetic attempts at rebranding.
Even those within the industry seem obliged to claim that they have just ‘stopped
beating their wives’. Thomson and John (2006: 1) begin their guide by conceding,
‘The lobbying industry is, to put it mildly, not viewed favourably . . . ’
Milner (2006a: 1) says, ‘whether I refer to an individual as lobbyist, political con-
sultant, public affairs practitioner, or by some other name makes no difference . . . As
a lobbyist brought up in the shadow of liberation politics, I think it is time to
reclaim the language’. This ambition has yet to succeed. The ‘tainted’ reputation of
the lobbyist is of course professionally dysfunctional. Precisely because they have
a reputation for succeeding, business lobbyists may find resistance. Parvin’s study
(2007: 24–9) found that all the lobbyists interviewed and twenty-two out of twenty-
five journalists interviewed thought lobbying was a ‘legitimate part of the political
process.’ But twenty-three of the thirty-one lobbyists and sixteen of the twenty-five
journalists thought the public did not trust lobbyists.
In the USA too the term has had adverse associations (indeed probably worse),
most spectacularly involving Jack Abramoff in 2006. As early as Trist v Child (1875)
the Supreme Court declined to oblige payment to a lobbyist on the grounds that
such a contract was contrary to ‘sound policy and good morals’. They added: ‘If
any of the great corporations of the country were to hire adventurers who make
markets of themselves in this way, to procure passage of a general law with a view
to the promotion of their private interests, the moral sense of every right minded
man would instinctively denounce the employer and the employed as steeped in
corruption and the employment as infamous’ (quoted in Crawford 1939: 2). (For the
current US position re the Lobbying Disclosure Act, 1995, and dramatic increases in
the past decade, see Petersen 2007.)
While this account seeks to downplay corruption and to stress the insider
approach, it has to be acknowledged that cases repeatedly challenge this complacency.
In 1998 Enron made three payments to the Labour Party of a total of £27,500. At the
Labour Party conference that year it sponsored a ‘gala’ dinner for £15,000 and three
weeks later a takeover bid for Wessex Water was ‘nodded through’ without reference
to the Monopolies Commission. The government abandoned a moratorium on gas-
fired power stations in time for Enron to build a plant in Teesside and then Isle of
Grain (based on extract from Wheen, 2004 edn., www.Riskoffreedom.com, 10 Jan.
2007). The issue is one of causality. Did the policy changes come because of the
funding—was it all coincidence—or did the access brought by money give the Enron
lobbyists the opportunity to make a convincing ‘public interest’ case?
376 grant jordan
20.6.1 1994: Cash for Questions
Rumours that MPs were being paid to ask questions were tested by an investiga-
tive journalist working for the Sunday Times, who found four Conservatives out of
ten agreed to a request (Cook 1995: 136; Dixon 1996: 32; Parris 1997). Also in 1994
the classic case of ‘brown envelope lobbying’ emerged. This concerned Tim Smith
and Neil Hamilton (then MPs) and the businessman Mohamed Al Fayed. Al Fayed
had two important personal agendas to pursue. One was the securing of a British
passport and another was in relation to a business battle. He thought that a paid
relationship with Members of Parliament would be of use in these projects. Hamilton
was recruited by Ian Greer Associates in 1985 (Leigh and Vulliamy 1997: 4). Fayed
was quoted by Leigh and Vulliamy (1997: 64) as saying that Greer had advised him,
‘you need to rent an MP just like you rent a London taxi’. Less than dignified though
this mercenary exploitation of parliamentary status may have been, its importance
may be overestimated. As Parris noted (1997: 367), ‘What did Fayed’s money buy? An
oddity of the whole affair is that the money was paid not to ministers, who may have
the power to change things, but to backbenchers: lobby fodder’. The money went to
neither the dignified nor the efficient.
20.6.2 1997: Ecclestone and All that
Trying to exploit the Conservative Party’s association with sleaze in March 1997,
Tony Blair asserted, ‘We have got to be whiter than white if we are to rebuild trust
in government’. By that time the Labour Party had already (January 1997) received
a £1m donation from Bernie Ecclestone, head of Formula One motor racing. On
taking office Labour proposed a ban on all sports sponsorship by tobacco companies;
but coincidentally, or otherwise, Formula One was to be temporarily exempt. The
bureaucratic argument in favour of this exemption was that Formula One could
withdraw from any country that was unsupportive. However the exception raised the
implication of a possible connection between the gift and policy—and on the advice
of the chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the money was repaid. As
Baston suggests (2000: 201), the furtive way the matter was handled made it appear
that there was something being hidden—but perhaps it was reliance on a former
Conservative donor, and the subtext that cash from unions was now less important,
that was being concealed.
20.6.3 1998: Cash for Access
Famously in June 1988 Derek Draper, former New Labour ministerial assistant, rein-
vented as a commercial lobbyist, claimed to an undercover investigative Observer
journalist, ‘There are seventeen people that count, and to say that I am intimate
with all of them is the understatement of the century . . . I can have tea with Geoffrey
lobbying 377
Robinson [Paymaster General]. I can have tea with Ed Balls [Gordon Brown’s eco-
nomic advisor.]’. Draper claimed that he secured access for Powergen to talk to the
Treasury about a previously rejected merger. Another lobbyist, Karl Milner, who had
also been a Treasury adviser to Gordon Brown, claimed to Greg Palast, ‘We have many
friends in government . . . They like to run things past us some days in advance, to
get our view, to let them know if they have anything to be worried about, maybe
suggest some changes’ (Palast 2002). Of course here may well be (understandable if
unattractive) over-claiming by the industry to attract fees.
20.6.4 1999: Devolved Draper?
Similar ‘over-claiming’ came from Kevin Reid, son of the then Scottish Secretary, Dr
John Reid. He too fell for undercover reporting and claimed, ‘Three or four of the
[Scottish Executive’s] special advisers are close personal friends of mine . . . I know
the Secretary of State very well because he’s my father . . . ’ (Schlesinger, Miller, and
Dinan 2001: 227). Schlesinger, Miller, and Dinan (2001: 228) say, ‘Beattie Media’s
consultants claimed that they could use ministers . . . to “make things easier” for their
clients’. They noted that the Scottish First Minister, Jack McConnell, had previously
been employed by Beattie Media. They remarked, ‘In one of the . . . more candid and
damaging passages in The Observer’s evidence, Alex Bass remarked, “We appointed
Jack McConnell . . . to head up our public affairs consultancy, in the certain knowledge
that Jack would get a safe seat from the Labour Party, and in the hope and expectation
that he would also get a Cabinet position . . . ” .’
It is important to underline that the British cases are not of ministers or civil
servants making decisions for personal advantage (‘Cash for Questions’ was excep-
tional, if petty). Usually in the UK questionable money goes to the party. In the USA it
is candidates that need election funding. Prudent US lobbyists will finance both major
candidates in a race (perhaps not equally) just to be sure they have backed the winner.
And the lobbyist might well not be the instigator; the candidate’s fundraiser might
be making the first call. In the UK local campaign spending is tightly regulated, so
political parties in the UK are a better target: parties, not candidates, need campaign
funds.
20.7 The Revolving Door
.............................................................................................................................................
Many lobbying firms ‘recyle’ used politicians or officials, but there is perennial
suspicion of what might be termed post-governmental employment—not simply
with lobbying consultancies, but also any interest where government experience
suggests useful access. The ‘retread’ of officials may give employing organizations
378 grant jordan
disproportionate influence. These career moves are superintended by the Standing
Advisory Committee (on Business Appointments.) The most common restriction
they impose refers to lobbying. There is usually a short period to ‘sanitize’ relations.
20.8 The Content of Lobbying
.............................................................................................................................................
Despite reservations prompted by the kind of examples reviewed above, this chapter
generally sees lobbying in positive terms and accordingly queries whether the head-
line problem cases are lobbying or whether instead they represent its abuse. ‘Rule-
breaking behaviour’ has to be distinguished from legitimate lobbying activities, but
the bulk of the existing literature focuses not on lobbying, but the perversion of it.
This is as if football reports in the press only discussed managers, agents, and financial
irregularity in transfers without actually reporting the matches.
Lobbying is often, indeed typically, about matters that are important to specific
companies or sectors, but might appear as esoteric to the broad public. A specific
example in 2004–6 was an interpretation by the Scottish Environment Protection
Authority (SEPA) that Scottish Power could not use waste-derived fuel (WDF) in
Longannet power station as this breeched the 2003 Waste Incineration Regulations
which implemented Directive 75/442/EEC (as amended) and Directive 2000/76/EC.
The core issue was whether WDF was combusted in a power station or incinerated.
To those uninvolved the distinction appears pedantic, but for Scottish Water to have
their dried by-product from screening outflows defined as a cheap fuel rather than
waste (the burning of which was tightly controlled) was economically important. To
resolve this a judicial review was instituted in 2005 against the SEPA opinion [2005
CSOH 67] and lobbying in Brussels via the ‘trade body’, Water UK, was used in 2006.
Political ideology does not help resolve such issues.
So much lobbying is about securing technical changes by arguments on their
merits. This does not mean that lobbying is thereby peripheral and minor. Freeman
(1965: 33) argued that:
Many of the decisions reached in subsystems, though they be considered minor or
detailed or insignificant . . . are collectively the stuff of which a large share of our total
public policy is made . . . their cumulative importance as well as their specific impor-
tance . . . cannot be disregarded.
The press ridiculed a rift between the EU and China over textile imports in 2006
as the ‘bra wars’. But the emergence of interests like the European Branded Footwear
Coalition showed how (apparent) minutia was vital to those with a stake. Definitional
discussions of ‘low fat’ in foodstuffs may appear abstruse, but European labelling
proposals have generated intense politics (Marketing, 24 May 2006: 17). In line with
Truman, Schlozman and Tierney (1986: 396) argue, ‘Organizations whose political
lobbying 379
ends are narrow and technical are more likely to be influential than those whose goals
are more encompassing’. But they (1986: 311) also point out, ‘such influence should
not be dismissed as negligible’.
20.9 Lobbying and Contestation: Public
Good from Self-interested Advocacy?
.............................................................................................................................................
The provision of ‘contestation’ through lobbying may contribute to worthwhile
polyarchy. Indeed is not simply associated with the self-interested. Parvin (2007:
13) cites, for example, Friends of the Earth claiming credit for helping ‘secure the
Kyoto protocol . . . [and] in getting eight Acts of Parliament passed in eight years
through an effective programme of “persuading” MPs, “convincing” Parliament and
“influencing” decisions’. Parvin (2007: 14) cites government-funded NGOs lobbying
government to change policy or lobbying in support of government objectives such
as smoking reduction.
While in 2006 the administrative support to All Party Parliamentary Groups by
lobbyists was treated as a scandal by the media, 8 Parvin shows (2007: 15) far more
APGs received support from trade organizations, charities, and not-for-profit bodies
than from private-sector lobbyists. His report said that only 20 per cent of MPs
believed ‘companies are generally more adept at lobbying than charities/pressure
groups’.
In summary there are two broad benchmarks against which lobbying may be
judged. The Ivory Tower interpretation sees policy as best made by disinterested
politicians and civil servants searching for some common good. Such a belief reflects
a long-standing suspicion of self-interest as a basis for political participation. The
lobbyist in this light is seen as distorting a high-minded search for public policy.
The second, Insider Politics approach sees public policy as emerging from untidy
pluralist interactions between governing personnel and affected interests. Accepting
the second interpretation—that the activities of lobbyists are part of a useful pattern
of group/government negotiation—substantially undermines textbook distinctions
between majoritarian and consensual democracies.
By the first benchmark lobbying is some dangerous distortion of democracy, but
in the second it becomes de facto a contribution to a sort of ersatz democracy (see
Mueller 1999). In discussing the 2006 ‘controversy’ over the funding and support of
All Party Groups in parliament by outside interests, Peter Riddell noted, ‘All party
groups are defensible . . . Naturally, also, most groups argue for more public money
or help for the interest concerned. That is the stuff of politics. Nor is there anything
8
House of Commons Committee on Standards and Privileges, Lobbying and All Party Groups, 9th
Report 2005–6, HC 1145.
380 grant jordan
inherently wrong about outside interests, whether commercial or voluntary, seeking
to influence Parliament. Lobbying has developed a pejorative image, but it is a neces-
sary, even desirable part of pluralist democracy for outside groups to argue their case’
(The Times, 13 January 2006).
So lobbying is less controversial in the UK political system if the processes are
accepted as being based on a search for consensus by policy-makers. Policy improve-
ment comes through the complaints of those losing out—and a readiness by govern-
ment to take comments on board. Austin Mitchell MP (in Jordan 1991: 3) referred
to lobbying as ‘tugs at the sleeve of power’. Lobbying in this understanding is a
(functionally useful) facet of the bargaining networks that characterize policy-making
in modern states.
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Section Seven: Territory
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 21
.................................................................................................................
D EVO LU T I O N I N
TH E UK
.................................................................................................................
charlie jeffery
21.1 Introduction: Devolution
and the Union State
.............................................................................................................................................
A decade on, devolution appears to be producing the kind of transformative impact
on UK politics that many anticipated at its launch (Hazell 1999). Arrangements for
government in the four nations remain deeply contested. In May 2007 Scotland
elected a (minority) Scottish National Party government committed in principle
to Scottish independence. In August 2007 it published a historic White Paper on
Scotland’s constitutional options, which prompted an intense cross-party debate on
additional powers the parliament might seek. In Wales the nationalist Plaid Cymru
entered government in coalition with Labour in 2007, with the two parties agreeing a
plan for a referendum on further-reaching devolution by 2011.
And by 2007, a new and vigorous debate about the government of England had also
flared up. Prompted mainly by Conservative commentators, this did not focus on the
aborted Labour agenda of English regionalization but rather perceptions of inequity
in the post-devolution Anglo-Scottish relationship. One outcome appears to be a
firming up of the Conservative Party’s commitment to reform the way Westminster
deals with English business as a consequence of devolution outside England.
Only on Northern Ireland is there broad satisfaction with the devolution arrange-
ments following the resumption of devolution after a five-year hiatus in 2007. The
curious government of opposites formed by the Democratic Unionists and Sinn
Fein has managed to relaunch devolution in a deliberately low-key manner which
has—so far at least—avoided the polarizing constitutional debates which disabled its
devolution in the uk 385
predecessors. Few would bet, though, that the government of Northern Ireland has
achieved enduring stability.
The territorial politics of post-devolution UK remain, in other words, in flux.
This contribution reviews some of the main themes in post-devolution research. It
takes its cue from a range of accounts which call attention to the historical context
within which the current reforms have unfolded (e.g. Bogdanor 2001; McLean and
McMillan 2005; Mitchell 2009). A common thread is that post-1997 dynamics are not
simply the result of a ‘process’ (Davies 1999) set off in the late 1990s. This contribution
presents devolution instead as the latest attempt—shaped by continuities extending
back over centuries—at accommodating distinctive Northern Irish, Scottish, and
Welsh political communities alongside the numerically and economically dominant
English in a single state structure.
Mitchell (2003; 2006a) in particular has drawn attention to the peculiar and persis-
tent problems of territorial politics in the UK’s ‘union state’ (Rokkan and Urwin 1982).
The UK is the product of the series of unions struck between England and the other
UK nations, each under quite different conditions over four centuries (the annexation
of Wales by England from 1536, the treaty of union of Scotland with England to
form Great Britain in 1707, and the union of Great Britain with Ireland made in
1800 and remade, with the partition of the rest from the six counties of Northern
Ireland, in 1922). Union states are not unitary; to use contemporary language, they
are asymmetrical. They allow for administrative differentiation of some matters in
some parts of the state, though typically have ‘administrative standardisation’ across
‘most of the territory’ of the state (Rokkan and Urwin 1982: 11).
By 1997 the UK union state tradition of administrative differentiation was embod-
ied in UK central government offices for Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland,
Cabinet-level departments with responsibilities for policy implementation in their
respective nations. There was no equivalent territorial department for England. The
devolution reforms transferred most of the responsibilities formerly exercised by the
territorial departments to devolved legislatures established by new electoral processes.
UK central government retained responsibility for a residual mix of UK-wide and
English functions. Beyond the introduction of a Greater London Authority with lim-
ited administrative powers, there has been no significant devolution of powers from
UK government to England-wide or English regional authorities. England remains,
by and large, a territory of ‘administrative standardisation’.
This latest iteration of the union state tradition carries forward a number of path
dependencies. Foremost is that devolution was not approached as a comprehen-
sive, integrated reform of the UK state, but as a series of disconnected responses
to changing, and different, demands about how the unions of Scotland and Wales
with England and Northern Ireland with Great Britain should be renewed. It has
been a project of the parts, not the whole, with reforms drawn up by different min-
istries, reflecting different territorial circumstances, and using different institutional
templates. This has two implications. First, the trajectories of territorial politics in
each of the four nations of the UK have been highly self-contained. Second, and
conversely, there has been little attempt to understand and manage the combination
386 charlie jeffery
of extensive devolution outside England and continued centralization within England
as an integrated system of government.
This contribution follows the logic of these features of the union state tradition.
The next section explores central themes in devolution research on the four nations
of the UK. The third section then draws out a number of overarching, UK-wide
problems which arise from the failure to conceive of devolution as an integrated set
of reforms to the UK state. The contribution argues that this disconnected approach
to the UK’s territorial constitution, while consistent with the traditions of the union
state, is inherently unstable now that the UK has several governments rather than
one, each with competing mandates. Democratic devolution opens up new potentials
for the political mobilization of territorial cleavage. The contribution concludes by
setting out a number of scenarios which may emerge as the UK grapples with this
new territorial politics.
21.2 Disconnected Devolutions: The
Dynamics of Political Change in the
Four Nations
.............................................................................................................................................
Devolution happened for different reasons in different places. In Scotland the debate
on devolution was reinvigorated by the accumulated dissatisfactions of being gov-
erned from 1979–97 by a Conservative Party which had been for decades a dwindling
force in Scotland. In Wales there was a less vigorous version of the same debate.
In Northern Ireland devolution was one component of a strategy of pacification
of conflict in a divided society. In England regional devolution was about bringing
better coordination to the delivery of central government services and (especially in
the north) boosting regional economies.
Mirroring the patchwork quality of the devolution reforms, post-devolution schol-
arship has largely been differentiated by UK nation. Though there has been some
work comparing Scotland and Wales (e.g. Taylor and Thomson 1999; Bradbury 2006a;
Wyn Jones and Scully 2006) and on Anglo-Scottish relationships (Miller 2005; Devine
2008), three- or four-nation treatments are rare. 1 Northern Ireland often gets brack-
eted out as sui generis and England for not having ‘real’ devolution. The result is a
growing stock of single-nation studies, including systematic accounts of territorial
political systems (Keating 2005; Rawlings 2003; Sandford 2005; Travers 2004; Tonge
2005), a number of edited collections (Carmichael, Knox, and Osborne 2007; Chaney,
Hall, and Pithouse 2001; Hazell 2006; Wright 2000; Tomaney and Mawson 2002;
Wilford 2001), and a burgeoning collection of contributions to scholarly journals
1
The State of the Nations series is a welcome exception: Hazell (2000; 2003); Trench (2001; 2004;
2005a).
devolution in the uk 387
and other outlets. 2 It is not feasible in this framework to give a full account of these
works. Instead the following draws out shared themes of constitutional structure and
political process in research on the four nations.
21.2.1 Evolving Constitutional Debates
21.2.1.1 Wales
A first theme concerns the durability of the institutional arrangements established
in each of the four nations. Wales has seen most change. Unlike in Scotland Welsh
devolution was not prefigured by a vigorous debate on devolution spearheaded by
a broad-based campaign. Its institutional form emerged much more as the result
of negotiations between pro- and anti-devolution factions within the Welsh Labour
Party. The result was a compromise at a low common denominator: the National
Assembly had a form of devolution based on secondary legislative empowerments
scattered over hundreds of Westminster statutes, as previously exercised by the UK
Welsh Office; and—with pointed analogies to local government practice—it had no
formal separation of government and opposition. This ‘strange anatomy’ (Rawlings
2003: 85) of Welsh devolution was difficult to understand—even for insiders—and to
operate. What followed, unsurprisingly, has been an ‘uninterrupted . . . constitutional
debate’ (Rawlings 2003: 85), involving:
r An Operational Review of the Assembly in 2001–2, which led to a de facto move
to a government–opposition model.
r A Commission on the Powers and Electoral Arrangements of the Assembly
chaired by Lord Richard from 2002 to 2004, which proposed, inter alia, a staged
move to full, primary legislative powers, with interim measures to widen the
Assembly’s autonomy under secondary legislative powers.
r A White Paper in 2005, followed by the 2006 Government of Wales Act which
significantly widened the Assembly’s secondary powers and allowed for a later
move to full legislative powers, subject to a referendum.
r A commitment by the 2007 Labour–Plaid Cymru coalition to hold a referendum
on full legislative powers by 2011.
r The establishment in 2008 of an ‘All Wales Convention’ to prepare the ground for
the proposed referendum.
This constitutional saga is indicative of the fragmented approach of the union state
to its territorial politics. The compromises in the mid-1990s were not part of any
overarching vision of how to run a devolved nation as part of a modernized union,
but rather what could be sold to a reluctant Welsh Labour Party. When played out
in practice these compromises were unsustainable. It would be difficult to find any
academic analysis which argues that the original form of Welsh devolution was fit for
2
The Economic and Social Research Council’s programme on Devolution and Constitutional
Change alone produced around 500 publications.
388 charlie jeffery
purpose. 3 Responses to the current halfway house are barely more positive (Trench
2005c; Miers, Patchett, and Rawlings 2005). All the time there has been a backdrop
of public opinion in which full legislative devolution has been more popular than
the Assembly model of secondary legislative powers (Wyn Jones and Scully 2008: 68).
Welsh devolution in other words appears hobbled by the narrowness of perspective
the Welsh Labour Party brought to the question of renewing the Welsh relationship
with the UK.
21.2.1.2 Scotland
By contrast well over a decade’s campaigning from the early 1980s produced a
template for devolution which had broad support in Scotland. Even so public opin-
ion has also consistently been behind further-reaching devolution, including more
powers to raise revenues in Scotland to fund the responsibilities of the Scottish
Parliament (Curtice 2006: 107). What Scots do not endorse is Scottish independence,
with support stable at around 30 per cent since 1999 and falling recently (Curtice
2008a: 40).
Against that background the SNP’s 2007 White Paper is intriguing. It sets out the
SNP’s preference for independence and its commitment to hold an independence
referendum by 2011. That appears unlikely given the opposition to a referendum of
Labour, the Conservatives, and the Liberal Democrats, who together hold a unionist
majority in the Scottish parliament. But the White Paper also recognizes what now
appears to be a consensus among the unionist parties (and the general public) for
further devolution within the UK (Scottish Executive 2007: 5–6). Though the unionist
parties have refused to join the ‘National Conversation’ on Scotland’s constitutional
future announced in the White Paper, they have set up their own Devolution Com-
mission to explore possible adjustments to the devolution settlement. The estab-
lishment of the Commission makes more likely some measure of further-reaching
devolution in the short term. Significantly the SNP has welcomed the Commission.
There is perhaps a sense in this, and in the general tenor of thinking in the White
Paper, of SNP recognition that independence is not an absolute and that there may
ultimately be little practical distinction between enhanced devolution within the UK
and notional independence in a British Isles/European Union setting.
21.2.1.3 Northern Ireland
In Northern Ireland there is less of an institutional dynamic at play. At heart this
reflects the intricacies of the Belfast Agreement painstakingly negotiated in 1998 and
the refusal of some of the parties to it—most importantly Sinn Fein—to revisit
it. It does not mean there is consensus on the adequacy of the Agreement as a
basis for stable government. Debate has focused on its ‘consociational’ properties.
Consociational political systems have features designed to manage conflict in divided
3
See, for example, the library of evidence submitted to the Richard Commission; at http://www.
richardcommission.gov.uk/content/template.asp?ID=/content/evidence/index.asp.
devolution in the uk 389
societies through a mix of power sharing and protections for the autonomy of distinct
communities (Lijphart 1977). Many of the features of Northern Ireland devolution
follow consociational models.
The repeated early suspensions of the Assembly then the long suspension from
2002 to 2007 were a clear enough sign that consociation in Northern Ireland was
not working. The debate is about whether there is a fix, either as recalcitrants in
power sharing come on board (as the DUP under Ian Paisley in the end did), or
through tweaking the institutions of consociation (McGarry and O’Leary 2007: 70–
8), or whether there is a more fundamental problem. Wilson (2007), for example,
has argued that the competing, ethno-national constitutional visions in Northern
Ireland (union with the UK versus the reunification of Ireland) leave little room for
the sense of shared territorial commitment, normally to a single state, that successful
consociations typically have. Without that shared commitment power-sharing rules
may run the danger of polarizing divisions rather than bridging them. The chal-
lenge for Wilson is to move ‘beyond consociationalism’ to a new, ‘post-ethnic’ or
‘cosmopolitan’ agenda that establishes a sense of shared commitment to the territory
of Northern Ireland (Wilson 2007: 26–8).
The connections these theoretical debates have with everyday concerns in North-
ern Ireland are ambiguous. There is a strong pattern of spatial division of Protestant
and Catholic communities—in housing, schooling, recreation, and so on—especially
in parts of Belfast (Shirlow and Murtagh 2006). Yet alongside that polarization of
everyday life there is also evidence of growth in (aspirations to) mixed communities. 4
There are similar ambiguities in data on constitutional preference. Given a choice in
principle, over 80 per cent of Protestants consistently prefer continued membership
of the UK, while around half of Catholics consistently prefer reunification with the
Republic of Ireland (Mac Ginty 2006: 35). At that level there is clearly no consocia-
tional commitment to a shared territory. But given the current options, in practice,
of either the Northern Ireland Assembly or Westminster having ‘most influence over
how Northern Ireland is run’ support for the Assembly far outweighs Westminster in
both communities. Devolution has also been the majority constitutional preference
in Northern Ireland from 2003 on (Mac Ginty 2006: 37–9). 5 These data suggest that a
pragmatic desire for a functioning local politics is now the cross-community default
option in Northern Ireland. There may, in that case, be a solid platform for power-
sharing devolution.
21.2.1.4 England
Questions of government structure within England remain open ended. Labour
was unable to build a general agreement on the purposes of policy on the English
4
Compare the ‘Community Relations’ sections in the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey,
e.g. for 2003 (http://www.ark.ac.uk/nilt/2003/Community_Relations/index.html) and 2006 (http://www.
ark.ac.uk/nilt/2006/Community_Relations/index.html).
5
See also http://www.ark.ac.uk/nilt/2005/Political_Attitudes/FUTURENI.html and http://www.ark.
ac.uk/nilt/2006/Political_Attitudes/FUTURENI.html for later survey waves.
390 charlie jeffery
regions (cf. Sandford 2005: 16, 98–100) nor, as a result, on the institutions needed to
carry out that policy, with some favouring beefed-up central government agencies
in the regions, and others elected regional assemblies. No single voice in govern-
ment was able to combine or prioritize these different views into an agenda shared
across government, beyond a long-standing commitment to establish a London-wide
authority. The only consistent advocate of elected regional assemblies, John Prescott,
was widely considered an ineffective minister. This gave other Whitehall depart-
ments opportunities to block significant transfers of responsibility to the regional
level. So when the Draft Regional Assemblies Bill did appear in 2004—a full seven
years after the initial manifesto commitment in 1997—it foresaw elected regional
assemblies with very modest powers largely cobbled together from different parts of
Prescott’s own department. This unconvincing institutional recipe was convincingly
rejected in the North-East as ‘just another expensive talking shop’ (Rallings and
Thrasher 2006).
But by removing elected regional government from the agenda for the foreseeable
future, the North-Easterners helped open up scope for a different English debate on
the balance of the UK constitution; that is, on the appropriate arrangements for gov-
erning the English territory as a whole. That debate intensified with the prospect of the
Scottish MP Gordon Brown becoming UK Prime Minister, which some Conservative
commentators used to revive the ‘West Lothian Question’ about inequities of repre-
sentation of the Scots and the English after devolution. Subsequently Conservative
commitment to excluding Scottish MPs from decisions on England-only business
appears to have firmed up.
As in Northern Ireland, it is not clear that the English have much connection to
these debates about new ways to govern them. A majority of the English remain happy
with the status quo of direct rule by Westminster with at most 20 per cent or so sup-
portive of regional assemblies and 20 per cent or so of a separate English parliament
(Curtice 2008b). Unlike the Scots, Welsh, and Northern Irish, the English think that
Westminster should have most influence over them. There is, though, some evidence
that concerns about Anglo-Scottish inequity have resonance. A clear majority of the
English feel that Scottish MPs should no longer be able to vote on English business
at Westminster. There are also concerns that the Scots, after devolution, have undue
advantages over the English on public spending and the economic benefits of shared
UK membership (Curtice 2006: 105–7). None of this has yet proved politically salient.
But there is clearly a correlation with Conservative concerns about the unresolved
‘English question’ which could become a basis for political mobilization of Anglo-
Scottish cleavage.
That potential illustrates one of the problems that the characteristically discon-
nected UK approach to territorial politics may bring: a policy, such as Scottish
devolution, which makes sense in its own terms, and addresses a distinctive Scottish
problem, may have a ‘displacement’ effect which challenges the legitimacy of gov-
erning arrangements in some other part of the UK (Mitchell 2006b). But equally
any change in how English business is handled at Westminster might be expected,
in turn, to raise further grievances about different statuses of membership of the UK
devolution in the uk 391
parliament. Similarly, if Scotland won fuller fiscal autonomy or some other asymmet-
ric development of devolution, the effect might be to prompt demands for emulation
in Northern Ireland or Wales. The union state tradition of disconnected rather than
overarching territorial reform might, in other words, be expected to continue to
throw up unintended spillovers that prompt further waves of reform.
21.2.2 Political Dynamics in the Four Nations
The devolution reforms were intended to enable the UK’s nations to address col-
lective problems in their own ways. Given the lack of systemic integration between
those reforms, it is no surprise that politics has become more diverse across the
four nations. Tracking and characterizing that diversity has been one of the main
preoccupations of post-devolution scholarship, with particular focal points on voting
behaviour and party systems, and policy process and outcomes.
21.2.2.1 Scotland and Wales
Devolved elections in Scotland and Wales have been a rich testing ground for the
assumption that devolved elections are ‘second order’ (Reif and Schmitt 1980); that
is, shaped by Westminster-level rather than devolved issues. The evidence so far is
mixed, though some voters appear to make systematic distinctions between electoral
arenas, not least in a trade-off which sees ‘differential voting’ as Labour voters at
Westminster elections switch to Scottish and Welsh Nationalists in devolved elections
(Wyn Jones and Scully 2006). This pattern was one of the reasons behind the entry of
the SNP and Plaid Cymru into devolved government in 2007. Another was the effect of
broadly proportional electoral systems which have limited the scope for single-party
government and made possible new minority and coalition government formations.
One result has been a more left-leaning and cooperative dynamic of party compe-
tition than at Westminster. This is one reason that policy in Scotland in particular
has diverged in places from the Westminster pattern; on a number of landmark
issues (tuition fees, proportional representation in local elections) difference from
Westminster arose from cross-party negotiations in coalition building from 1999 to
2007. Another cause of policy divergence is differences in policy process in Scotland
and Wales, though neither have fully realized the optimistic rhetoric of a ‘new politics’,
more open and inclusive than the ‘old’ politics at Westminster that accompanied
devolution (McAllister 2000; Mitchell 2000). That rhetoric was always overblown and
naive. In Wales what emerged instead was a new form of regional centralism with
a Labour-dominated Assembly appearing to privilege (Labour-dominated) public-
sector producer interests (cf. Greer 2004: 157; Morgan and Upton 2005: 79).
In Scotland the commitment to a ‘new’ politics had greater heft. It was an aspira-
tion carried through from the 1990s devolution campaign and has had direct impact
on the way the Scottish parliament works (Arter 2003), and on gender balance in the
parliament (Mackay 2004). Elsewhere on the new politics balance sheet, though, an
392 charlie jeffery
experiment with a civic forum as a platform for input by civil society organizations
into the policy process failed, with funding withdrawn in 2005. And a tendency under
Labour to nurture corporatist relationships with public-sector interests, notably in
higher education (Keating 2005: 180) and health care (Greer 2004: 72)—itself project-
ing forward pre-devolution patterns—has been confirmed under the SNP govern-
ment since 2007.
Policy processes in both Wales and Scotland are, in sum, distinctive as compared
with those at UK level. They are marked by left-leaning party competition, cross-
party cooperation, and policy communities in part opened up to new influences,
in part to capture by public-sector interests. The result has been a set of policy
outcomes which stand to the left of (both Conservative and Labour) Westminster
orthodoxy. There has been less openness to market-like principles and private finance
in the delivery of public services, and a preference for universalism. The Welsh
First Minister, Rhodri Morgan, produced the rhetorical flourish of ‘clear red water’
between Welsh and ‘new’ Labour to describe all this. Similarly, Keating (2007: 282) has
described Scotland as ‘an enclave of social democracy’. McEwen (2006) and others
(Béland and Lecours 2005) have developed terminologies of ‘welfare nationalism’.
All may well understate continuing commonalities with England. Nonetheless there
are clearly differences of emphasis in the balance of market and state in Wales and
Scotland as compared to norms at Westminster.
21.2.2.2 Northern Ireland
Little of the foregoing applies in the case of Northern Ireland. Elections and
party competition in Northern Ireland are unique. None of the Britain-wide par-
ties currently contest elections in Northern Ireland; instead there are parallel,
community-based party systems. The DUP competes with the Ulster Unionists and
other unionist splinter groups for Protestant/Unionist votes, while Sinn Fein and
the Social Democratic and Labour Party compete for Catholic/Nationalist votes.
What has been striking has been the polarization of voting behaviour within these
communities over the post-devolution era (Table 21.1).
Table 21.1 Electoral polarization in Northern Ireland, 1997–2005 (%)
Election DUP UUP SDLP Sinn Fein ‘Centrist’ ‘Polarised’
(UUP+SDLP) (DUP+SF)
Westminster 1997 13.6 32.7 24.1 16.1 56.8 29.7
NI Assembly 1998 18.0 21.3 21.9 17.6 43.2 35.6
Westminster 2001 22.5 26.8 20.9 21.7 47.7 44.2
NI Assembly 2003 25.7 22.7 16.9 23.5 39.6 49.2
Westminster 2005 33.7 17.7 17.5 24.3 35.2 58.0
NI Assembly 2007 30.1 14.9 15.2 26.2 30.1 56.3
Percentage are of first preference votes.
devolution in the uk 393
This pattern of polarization is a steady one, unaffected by whether the contest is
for the Assembly or Westminster. There is no debate in Northern Ireland about first-
and second-order elections; all elections appear to carry the same resonance, marked
by existential concerns—political violence, policing and security, fundamental con-
stitutional choices—absent elsewhere in the UK.
This polarization may appear problematic given the need under the Belfast Agree-
ment for cross-party cooperation in power-sharing government. Patterson and Kauf-
man (2007: 94) for example argue that the shift of support from moderate UUP to the
more trenchant unionism of the DUP reflects a long-term realignment of the unionist
activist base that renders the elite accommodation required for power-sharing diffi-
cult. Dowds and Linn (2005) offer a more optimistic perspective. They show that
by 2003 there had been notable shifts in the characteristics of DUP supporters, with
rising agreement that on the need for compromise and ‘a dramatic rise in support
for a system of power-sharing within Northern Ireland—from 35% to 71%’ (Dowds
and Linn (2005: 5–6). In other words it does not necessarily follow that in making
polarized choices voters expect polarized representation. The migration from the
centre to the DUP and Sinn Fein may be less about polarization than a commitment
to power sharing on condition of robust defence of community interests.
The absence of devolution over the period 2002–7 (and the stuttering progress of
devolution before 2002) means that the impact of devolution on policy process and
outcomes has so far been limited, with the partial exception of areas like equality pol-
icy and human rights which intersect with the more existential agendas of Northern
Irish politics (Dickson and Osborne 2007). Otherwise there has been a strong trend
of continuity, tempered by an incipient pattern of suspicion while devolution was in
operation that devolved ministers were favouring their own ethnic community within
briefs like health (Greer 2006: 115) and education (Osborne 2006: 71–4). Relaunched
devolution in its 2007 guise may also be open to suspicions about this kind of ethnic
patronage.
21.2.2.3 England
Even though the elected assembly track of English regionalization failed, the English
regions have seen a set of administrative reforms which have established new, or
expanded, regional governance structures over the last ten years. Sandford (2005)
argues that these disparate initiatives together have a systemic quality involving semi-
formalized networks of regional ‘stakeholders’ in local government, the private and
voluntary sectors which have carved out some scope for influencing central govern-
ment policies in the regions. Others, notably Pearce and Ayres (2006; 2007), are more
sceptical about any sense of ‘system’, noting that new regional networks compete
with more firmly established central–local policy relationships, often causing new
coordination problems. They have in practice little grip on the centre, typically acting
in response to top-down prompts rather than feeding in new ideas, and they lack the
legitimacy—and clout—that elected tiers of government can claim. More generally
there is little sense that Whitehall has real interest in differentiated policy responses in
394 charlie jeffery
the English regions; at best it sees the regional scale as a convenient one for delivering
standard policies across England (House of Commons 2003: 67).
The only exception in this is London, where the Greater London Authority is now
firmly established as a body capable of using modest powers to bring about signif-
icant change, for example in transport policy (Travers 2004: 190–1) or the vigorous
lobbying that contributed to the success of the 2012 Olympics bid. It is also a body
which appears to have the support of Londoners (Margetts and Dunleavy 2005). But
London also—perversely, for all its claims to ‘global city’ status—is one of the most
insular parts of the UK, consumed in its own specificities as an urban region. It is
not likely to act as a catalyst for reform elsewhere in England. This leaves England,
London aside, as a territory with a highly centralized system of government produc-
ing essentially uniform public policies at a time when elsewhere in the UK further-
reaching devolution reforms and growing policy divergence from England are in
prospect.
21.3 A ‘System’ of Post-devolution
Government in the UK?
.............................................................................................................................................
That mix of devolution and divergence outside England and centralization and uni-
formity in England is an uneasy one. Though it projects forward the union state
tradition—part differentiation, mainly standardization—it has added a new ingre-
dient: democratic process. Former incarnations of the union state were (excepting
Northern Ireland from 1922 to 1972) governed by a single, union-wide government
able to trade off territorial interests within a framework of collective decision-making.
Now, the new democratic processes in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have
transformed the old intra-governmental framework for accommodating different
territorial interests into a new setting. Different governments composed of different
parties can now use devolved powers to pursue different policy agendas (or, indeed,
seek further powers). Meanwhile the UK government has used its undiluted power in
England to drive on marketizing reforms in the public services, amplifying the already
centrifugal dynamic that has resulted from devolution.
What has been perhaps most remarkable about UK devolution is the absence
of thought put by government into managing that dynamic. Though devolution is
logically about enabling more difference, just how much difference is possible, or
manageable within a common state? What limits need to be set, and how might
they be policed? These questions have bothered political scientists—especially those
with interests in comparative territorial politics—since the launch of devolution, and
produced two broad and interconnected themes in research. The first has focused
on the need for some kind of renewed statement of purpose of the union, post-
devolution. A second has argued for a denser and more formal web of institutional
devolution in the uk 395
linkages between devolved and UK institutions. Both are about reconceiving the
meaning and operation of the union state in its new circumstances.
21.3.1 What is the Union For?
Though there is a sui generis tenor to much work on UK devolution, some, notably
Jeffery (2002; 2005a; 2006; Hough and Jeffery 2006), stress that the UK is by no
means alone in addressing new circumstances. Over the last thirty years there have
been extensive reforms to regional institutional structures in Belgium, Spain, and
Italy and protracted debates (though few actual reforms) on the institutional config-
uration of federalism in Canada, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. These reform
debates have articulated competing judgements about what is right and just in the
balance of meeting state-wide objectives versus territorial claims to distinctiveness
and autonomy. In Germany strong decentralist pressures from the wealthy south
have challenged, though not (yet) transformed, the legacy of post-war commitments
to state-wide ‘uniformity of living conditions’. In Canada and Belgium centrifugal
pressures based in distinctive identity (Quebec, Flanders) and declining interregional
solidarity (Alberta, Flanders) have opened up scope for the pursuit of regional objec-
tives, but are still bound by enduring state-wide commitments to Canadian ‘social
union’ and a Belgium-wide understanding of social security. In Italy, Austria, and
Switzerland themes of autonomy, identity, and desolidarization have also played into
debates on rebalancing the central state and the component units. In all of these
places, through state-wide debate, some general notion of the (changing) common
purposes of shared statehood, and a sense of the state-wide ‘rules of the game’, needed
to achieve those common purposes have emerged, even if they remain for some
contested and unsatisfactory.
That sense of a state-wide common purpose is largely absent in a post-devolution
UK marked by disconnected devolution reforms and divergent territorial politics.
That absence led Hazell and O’Leary (1999: 42) to set out a clear challenge for
the UK government on the purposes of union back in 1999: ‘The trick will be to
identify and understand what items need to be held in common throughout the
kingdom as constants of UK citizenship; and what items can be allowed to vary’.
Others since have explored similar themes. T. H. Marshall’s (1950/1992) concept
of social citizenship has become a catalyst for research on how far the supposedly
territory-blind benefits of the welfare state are compromised by, or reconcilable with,
devolution (Banting 2006; Jeffery 2006; Mitchell 2006a; Wincott 2006). Others have
used concepts of (pan-UK) ‘territorial justice’ to explore the potential roles of UK-
level government in limiting territorial economic disparities (Adams, Robinson, and
Vigor 2003: 213–19).
The UK government has not exactly risen to these challenges. Tony Blair rarely
spoke about devolution after its introduction in 1999, and never in any depth. Only
Gordon Brown, Blair’s successor as Prime Minister, has shown a sustained interest. In
part that has been interpreted as an opportunistic attempt to reaffirm his credentials
396 charlie jeffery
as a Scot to be UK Prime Minister in the post-devolution state, not least in his series
of speeches on ‘Britishness’. But his interest is in other respects an enduring one.
Brown had already posed the question of how state-wide welfare objectives could
be combined with devolution in his doctoral thesis back in 1981 (Mitchell 2006a: 163).
By 1999 Brown claimed to have the answer by emphasizing how core components of
the post-war welfare state remained ‘British’ despite devolution:
Today when people talk about the National Health Service whether in Scotland, Wales
or England people think of the British National Health Service . . . And its most powerful
driving idea is that every citizen of Britain has an equal right to treatment regardless of
wealth, position or race and, indeed, can secure treatment in any part of Britain . . . When
we pool and share our resources and when the stronger help the weak it makes us all
stronger. (Brown 1999)
Brown’s claims about the strength of common, Britain-wide beliefs—which he also
extended to education and labour market policies—are in one sense well founded.
Despite divergent post-devolution policy agendas, there are at best marginal differ-
ences in the values that the English, Northern Irish, Scots, and Welsh hold on the
balance of market and state, or on preferences on some of the headline issues which
have seen territorial policy variation since devolution like free personal care for the
elderly or tuition fees. And most people across the UK appear to dislike the idea that
policy standards might diverge from place to place as a result of devolution (Jeffery
2006: 78–80).
Yet while Brown’s claims may resonate with public opinion, they are wrong empiri-
cally and getting more wrong as time passes. In practice, because of the administrative
differentiation of the union state, health and other public policies have probably never
been delivered in ways consistent with Britain-wide uniformities of public opinion
(Wincott 2006: 176–8). The divergences of devolved governments from the policies
of the UK government acting for England have added significantly to that historical
legacy: Greer (2007: 159) concludes that devolution has ‘already had an impact on
the meaning and rights associated with citizenship in the UK’; Jeffery (2006: 90)
that social citizenship has become less UK-wide and increasingly ‘territorialised’;
and Morgan (2006: 201) that the UK ‘fails to meet . . . any . . . reasonable definition of
territorial justice’.
21.3.2 Reconfiguring the Union
The thrust of these conclusions is that the notion of ‘union’ is losing substance since
devolution. Such conclusions are not—as is sometimes suggested—arguments for a
recentralization of the UK, or for uniform, pan-UK policy provision. Rather they
point to a concern to express better and more explicitly how the balance of devolved
autonomy with continuing, pan-UK objectives is understood and achieved (Jeffery
2005b). Yet post-devolution UK lacks a framework for pursuing specific territorial
interests and reconciling them with those of the union as a whole. Analysis on what
devolution in the uk 397
the union would need in order to reconcile union and devolution has largely followed
two tracks: arrangements for financing devolved government; and intergovernmental
relations.
Work on territorial finance, though often cloaked in the rationalist language of
economics, often reflects different perspectives on the nature and desirability of union
(cf. Jeffery and Scott 2007). Proponents of a needs-based system of fiscal equaliza-
tion (Bell and Christie 2001; McLean and McMillan 2005: 237–8) generally articulate
UK-wide concerns about interregional equity. Proponents of greater devolved fiscal
autonomy (almost wholly focused on Scotland) generally have in mind some kind of
loosening of the Scottish–UK relationship (Hallward and MacDonald 2006). In Scot-
land these issues of equalization versus autonomy are central to the debates of both
the SNP’s National Conversation and the unionist parties’ Devolution Commission.
There are also stirrings of debate in Wales (about the impact of alternatives to the
current system) and Northern Ireland (about cross-border tax competition with the
Republic of Ireland). What is missing—yet entirely consistent with the fragmented
approach in the UK to managing union—is policy debate in UK government about
UK-wide objectives in the structure of territorial finance.
There is a similar picture in the field of intergovernmental relations. The system of
intergovernmental coordination that evolved in the first years of devolution was, in
essence, a simple projection forward of procedures for discussing territorial concerns
within UK government before devolution. As such it was informal, behind the scenes,
ad hoc, and normally carried out by civil servants working in a context of collegiality
and goodwill. The question persistently raised by devolution research is whether
that largely pre-devolution practice is ‘fit for purpose’ (Jeffery 2007). The general
consensus is that it is not, or more precisely that it was workable if the same party
led governments both at UK level and in Scotland and Wales, but that as soon as that
congruence was broken informality and goodwill would be insufficient. The point
was well made in the very first recommendation of the very first official inquiry on
devolution (by the House of Lords Constitution Committee, then chaired by Lord
Norton): ‘We recommend that further use be made of the formal mechanisms of
intergovernmental relations, even if they seem to many of those presently involved
as excessive . . . Such mechanisms are likely to become increasingly important when
governments of different political persuasions have to deal with each other’ (House
of Lords 2002: 5).
The 2007 elections have brought ‘governments of different persuasions’. Predictably
enough the response has been renewed arguments for beefing up current, but under-
used institutional linkages between UK and devolved governments, like the Joint
Ministerial Committee (JMC). There is a question mark, though, over whether this
kind of institutional tweaking would be sufficient. There are two concerns. First,
effective institutional coordination mechanisms arguably need a normative under-
pinning, a sense of the underlying rules of the game in balancing state-wide and
territorial interests. Yet post-devolution UK lacks a sense of what it, as a whole as well
as part by part, is for. The failure of Gordon Brown to acknowledge the contradiction
between his arguments about the benefits of sharing welfare risk on a UK-wide scale
398 charlie jeffery
and the erosion in practice of UK-wide commonalities is striking. It is indicative of a
mindset in UK central government which remains curiously unchanged since and by
devolution. That mindset sees devolution as a minor tweak to the UK constitution.
It has been entrenched by the piecemeal approach to the devolution reforms which
have fragmented any sense of a ‘bigger picture’ of reform across the UK.
21.3.3 The Problem of England
This rigidity of thinking at the centre has been facilitated, second, by the prepon-
derance of England—where indeed nothing much has changed—in the business of
Westminster and Whitehall. England is devolution’s big problem. It dominates the
perspective of the UK centre, which has so far failed not just to decentralize within
England, but also to disentangle its England-only and wider UK roles (Lodge and
Mitchell 2006: 98–102). This creates a number of problems. Because England is such
a big component of the UK (85 per cent or so of population and GDP), what happens
there can have significant spillover consequences outside England. Because England-
only and UK-wide roles are so entangled, that potential for spillover is often not
recognized (McLean and McMillan 2005: 219) and at times wilfully ignored (cf. Aron
2007). And because it is simultaneously the government for England, the UK’s gov-
ernment appears ill-suited to the arbiter role that central governments typically play
in the management of competing territorial interests. There is an obvious risk that the
UK-wide roles of government become captured by English territorial interests and as
a result sharpen incipient territorial cleavages, in particular that between England and
Scotland.
21.4 Perspectives
.............................................................................................................................................
This, needless to say, is not a promising basis for the effective accommodation of
distinctive territorial interests in different parts of the union. It is, though, a logical
outcome of a reform process since 1997 which has taken forward the union state
tradition of patchwork reform into the new territory of democratic devolution. That
patchwork approach on the one hand has failed to stabilize the constitutional struc-
ture of devolution; on the other it has opened up new territorial political processes
which have evolved discretely and are becoming increasingly diverse. The scope for
the UK centre to hold the ring is compromised by its failure to renew itself for the
post-devolution era and by its continuing preoccupation with England. As a result
(Anglo-)UK and devolved politics by and large talk past one another.
While there is general agreement that this disconnection of centre and parts could
work, more or less as a policy of benign neglect (cf. Bradbury 2006b: 579), while
Labour dominated government in Westminster, Scotland, and Cardiff, less is agreed
devolution in the uk 399
about what might unfold now that the era of ‘Labour all round’ is over. Broadly
speaking three scenarios have been identified:
1. Continuity of current arrangements, with minor incremental adaptations on the
usual disconnected, nation-by-nation pattern (Trench 2005b: 264–5).
2. A more thoroughgoing reform aimed at a more general and union-wide rebal-
ancing of the post-devolution constitution, but still with a recognizable lineage
to the reforms of 1997–9, including further-reaching autonomy in Scotland
and Wales, a fuller distinction of English and UK business in Westminster and
Whitehall, a needs-based system of fiscal equalization and some element of fiscal
autonomy for the devolved administrations, and a more systematic approach to
intergovernmental coordination (Trench 2005b: 264–8).
3. A move by Scotland to a new constitutional status, either as a special status
nation within the UK, or as an independent state outside the UK. McLean offers
two accounts of such a move (McLean 2001: 444–6). The first (his ‘Quebec
scenario’) envisages a process led, from Scotland, by an SNP continuing to push
for independence. The second (his ‘Slovak scenario’) envisages an English (most
likely Conservative) calling of the SNP’s bluff in a backlash against the apparent
privileges of the Scots in the post-devolution state.
The most likely of these scenarios is the second. A more thoroughgoing rebalancing
of the devolution arrangements appears feasible as discussions on reform in Wales
and, in particular, Scotland unfold. Though the SNP’s National Conversation and
the unionist Devolution Commission are running in parallel, and have competing
ultimate objectives of independence versus union, there is a large common ground
shared by all the significant parties in Scotland around pushing the devolution
arrangements further. Much depends, though, on the willingness in Westminster
and Whitehall, whether under Gordon Brown or perhaps, after the next UK election,
David Cameron, to accept—or, better, understand—the rationale for further reform.
The third scenario is still a distant one, though in the absence of a systematic rethink-
ing of current arrangements it may, whether through Scottish or English agency, or
simply intransigence at Westminster, zoom rapidly into focus. What is clear is that the
status quo—scenario one—is not much of an option. The scale of the dysfunctions
of the current arrangements, and their as yet unchecked centrifugal logic, suggests
that muddling through will not be enough. In one way or another the UK faces a
protracted debate about how—and whether—it can continue to accommodate its
multinational heritage within a shared state.
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c h a p t e r 22
.................................................................................................................
LO C A L I S M
.................................................................................................................
jonathan davies
We must ceaselessly remember that the monistic theory of the state was
born in an age of crisis and that each period of its revivification has syn-
chronised with some momentous event which has signalised a change in
the distribution of political power.
(Laski 1919: 563)
22.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
Political power in Britain is ‘ruthlessly centralised’ (Travers 2007). The doctrine
of parliamentary sovereignty means that, formally, local government exists on suf-
ferance and it is not entirely fanciful to suggest that it could be abolished. Nicholas
Ridley (1998), as Secretary of State for the Environment, aspired to a world of resid-
ual local authorities meeting once per year to award service contracts to business.
While promising ‘an enhanced role and new powers’ for compliant authorities, newly
elected Prime Minister Tony Blair stated that local government must ‘deliver the
policies for which this government was elected’, or he would ‘have to look to other
partners to take on your role’ (1998: 22). Both perspectives reflect the nadir or the
‘immiseration’ of British local government at the end of the twentieth century (White
2005: 76).
Many thanks to Professor David Wilson, colleagues at the Local Government Centre at Warwick, my
lead editor Matt Flinders, and anonymous referees for excellent advice on earlier drafts.
localism 405
However, recent years have seen a change of tone. Ministers argue that govern-
ment cannot micro-manage local politics. Then Secretary of State at the Depart-
ment of Communities and Local Government (DCLG), Ruth Kelly, wrote in her
preface to the 2006 Local Government White Paper that improvements to public
services since 1997 had been ‘driven largely from the centre’. However, ‘we must
have the courage at the centre to let go’ because the country faces challenges that
are too complex for ‘all solutions to be imposed’ (DCLG 2006: 4). This devolution-
ary Zeitgeist makes the ‘new localism’ a pertinent theme in contemporary political
analysis.
This chapter assesses the nature and significance of the localist turn, set in a theo-
retical and historical context. It explains two salient contradictions in New Labour’s
localism: its simultaneous appeals to market entrepreneurialism and conservative
communitarianism and the fact that despite the rhetoric of localism, political central-
ism has increased (see Davies 2008). This trend exemplifies the ‘Blair Paradox’. How
is it, asks Flinders (2005: 87), that a government ostensibly committed to devolving
power can ‘be seen, at the same time, as having a strong centralizing and controlling
approach to governing’? The answer suggested here is that both anomalies arise
from the contradictions of neoliberal governance (Harvey 2005). The coincidence
of liberalism and communitarianism and localist rhetoric and centralizing practice
is therefore no coincidence. Each entails the other. This argument contrasts with
the perspective on localism developed by Gerry Stoker (2002; 2004), which depicts
governing as a chaotic, somewhat fragile process, replete with tensions and is sceptical
towards structure-centred explanation.
The first part of the chapter focuses on conceptual issues. It begins by considering
the normative foundations of localism and centralism. It then looks at how different
conceptions of power have influenced the study of localism. The second part of the
chapter then explores the emergence of contemporary localism, before proceeding
to examine the New Labour approach since 1997. The final section explains the Blair
Paradox in terms of contradictions within neoliberalism.
22.2 Why Localism?
.............................................................................................................................................
Like much contemporary political thought, localism of a kind can be traced back
to Aristotle who, in Crick’s words, argued that: ‘if a tyrant was to be secure, he
must destroy all intermediary groups, because however unpolitical they were, it was
participation in such social groups that created mutual trust between individuals,
without which any opposition to tyranny . . . is futile’ (2002: 497). Later, Alexis de
Tocqueville (1994: 61) also argued that liberty demands the presence of intermedi-
ate groups, including municipal institutions, which ‘constitute the strength of free
nations’. These ideas inspired nineteenth-century liberal municipalists who preached
406 jonathan davies
Britain’s civic gospel (see further below). Localist principles were also salient among
the foundations of modern British conservatism. According to Edmund Burke:
. . . we begin our public affections in our families . . . We pass on to our neighborhoods,
and our habitual provincial connection. These are inns and resting places. Such divisions
of our country as have been formed by habit, and not by the sudden jerk of authority,
were so many little images of the great country in which the heart found something
which it could fill. (Cited in Carlson 2006: 1)
It was ‘through this natural chain of loyalties, resting on spontaneous, organic units
tied to place, that the good society emerged’ (ibid.). For Burke, social institutions
must be built from the bottom up and thus, famously, the ‘small platoon’ must be
the ‘pillar of the state’ (Crick 2002: 497). Gordon Brown often associates himself with
these conservative ideas (e.g. 2000):
There is a strong case for saying that in the age of enlightenment, Britain invented the
modern idea of civic society . . . eventually incorporating what Edmund Burke defined
as little platoons . . . ideas we would today recognise as being at the heart not only of the
voluntary sector but of a strong society. Call it community, call it civic patriotism, call it
the giving age, or call it the new active citizenship, call it the great British society—it is
Britain becoming Britain again.
Writing in the centre-left journal Renewal, Davies and Crabtree express misgiv-
ings about the appropriation of conservative communitarianism to the extent, they
suggest, that Labour and Conservative policies ‘often look spookily similar’ (2004:
42). However, as argued below, the way that New Labour performs the synthesis
draws attention to the limits of contemporary localism and the central contradiction
explored in this chapter: while appealing to bottom-up conceptions of community
and locality, New Labour practises authoritarian centralism, as did its Conservative
predecessors (Gamble 1994).
The persistence of centralism has prompted scholars to revisit the case for localism.
Chandler (2008: 358) develops an ethical justification premised on the notion that ‘as
individuals should be free to follow their beliefs, provided these do not harm others,
then communities with self regarding interests should also be free to pursue their
ideas’. He concludes that such a justification would ‘establish a much clearer rationale
for determining the structure and functions of differing tiers of community within
and including the state’ (2008: 370). In prescriptive vein, Copus (2006) suggests a
new constitutional settlement to enshrine the powers of local government. His model
of a federalized UK based on strong local government is thought provoking. These
developments are welcome, but require elucidation, not least in confronting the
opposing case for centralism.
The case for centralized authority can be sourced to Plato’s Republic and his
conception of the ideal city-state governed by philosophers. Platonic thinking may
be reflected in what John Stewart (2000: 95–6) calls the ‘elite contempt’ for local
government with which he charges Blair, Thatcher, and forebears back to Mill, who
despite asserting the importance of local government, commented:
localism 407
The local representative bodies and their officers are almost certain to be of a much
lower grade of intelligence and knowledge than Parliament and the national executive
(and) they are watched by, and accountable to, an inferior public opinion.
(1975: 375; cited in Chandler 2008: 360)
In contrast, journalist David Walker makes a principled case for the strong cen-
tre, arguing that ‘the case against devolving powers and responsibilities rests on a
profound commitment and its name is equity’. He warns that the price of greater
local autonomy would be ‘inequality, under provision and capriciousness’ (2002: 5).
The condition of municipal socialism, he claims, is ‘strong, redistributive central
government’ (2002: 7). He further argues that countries ‘notable for their focus upon
grants equalisation . . . their strong social democratic heritage and remarkably fair dis-
tributions’ include Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden (2002: 8). Only national
governments have the capacity to regulate markets, or direct resources from rich to
poor (2002: 9). Walker presents contemporary localism as the conceit of socialists
who, uneasy with New Labour, find themselves occupying the terrain of the right. He
urges socialists to re-embrace centralism, nevertheless conceding that target-based
performance management has gone too far.
Walker’s argument has merit, up to a point. It is true, for example, that the
typical localist, unlike advocates of states’ rights in the USA, would stop well short of
allowing localities to expel immigrants or abolish business taxes. However, he inex-
plicably dismisses the proposition that centralized decisions on tax are compatible
with devolved decisions on spending. He argues: ‘At this point in the argument some
localists turn round and demand a grants system that somehow combines equity at
the national level with freedom for local or regional spenders’, asserting that ‘True
devolution must mean devolving decisions on tax as well as spend’ (Walker 2002:
21). From the perspective of de Tocqueville or Burke, this might be true; but from
a socialist perspective, it confuses state accountability with public accountability.
Walker overlooks, for example, the fact that Denmark is not only more equitable
than Britain, but also one of the most decentralized systems in Europe (Mouritzen
2007). The Danish system is not immune from criticism; but here, equalization and
decentralization coexist. So, why is it not plausible that the centre should redistribute
resources between individuals and places and that, simultaneously, accountability for
the requisite share should reside locally where citizen-taxpayers can hold an elected
local authority accountable?
A socialist case for localism might therefore begin with three propositions. First,
neoliberalizing centralism undermines both equality and liberty. Second, the central-
ized procurement of resources under a progressive government is compatible with
devolved decisions on spending. Third, there is no prima-facie reason to believe that
local representatives are not as competent to make political decisions about localities
as are national representatives to make decisions about countries. Nevertheless, the
practical challenge for localists of any political disposition remains: how can mean-
ingful devolution occur in political conditions that seem to auger further neoliberal
centralism?
408 jonathan davies
22.3 Studying Localism:
Perspectives on Power
.............................................................................................................................................
One of the difficulties inherent in evaluating New Labour’s localist credentials lies
in establishing a common mode of assessment. A perspective on political power,
although not always explicit, invariably lies at the heart of contemporary debates.
These debates are partly about what individual scholars think the relationship is, and
should be, between centre and locality; but they are also inherently methodological
in that when trying to ascertain what the relationship is, scholars make distinctive
assumptions about power: essentially, whether the greater problem is the mobiliza-
tion and coordination of fragmented governing resources, or domination.
In UK political science, Rhodes’s (1997) view that governance by network is per-
vasive has gained the ‘semblance of orthodoxy’, constituting what Marinetto calls
the ‘Anglo-governance school’ (2003: 593). Network governance entails negotiated,
‘non-hierarchical exchanges between systems of governing at different institutional
levels’ (Pierre and Stoker 2002: 30) in a world characterized by growing complexity
and interdependence between many actors. Taking this heterarchical view of frag-
mented power draws attention to the contingently assembled and fragile nature of
governing capacity, or ‘power to’ (Stone 1989). It demands that attention be paid
to resource mobilization, coalition building, and leadership, key themes in the New
Labour agenda. It tends to promote a generative model of political interaction, where
constructive efforts can be mobilized towards a putative common, or public, interest.
This outlook does not deny the persistence of power inequalities and competing
interests but in some hands, it resonates with Talcott Parsons’s (1963) conception of
power as a positive sum game, where the total amount of power in society is increased
by cooperation, predicated on a tacit foundational consensus.
Similar assumptions underpin the government’s emphasis on building cross-sector
partnerships comprising the public, market, voluntary, and community sectors. For
Blair, there are now ‘all sorts of players on the local pitch jostling for position
where previously the council was the main game in town’ (1998: 10), necessitating
a partnership approach. The condition for effective partnership is that ideological
conflicts are subordinated and that all parties focus on the problem of mobilizing
and coordinating resources in pursuit of agreed objectives, in the process overcoming
public service fragmentation.
However, this approach is criticized by scholars who argue that concentrating
on resource mobilization and coordination elides a central problem, reflected in
contemporary central–local relations: power and wealth, have become more con-
centrated, not less (e.g. Harvey 2005). For Skelcher, Mathur, and Smith (2005:
586) ‘technical expertise is privileged’ in local governing networks ‘and decisions
proceed through a rational process little impacted by the political world’. Davies
(2007: 787) concludes that local governance is subject to a process of ‘creep-
ing managerialism’, where both local political autonomy and community voices
are increasingly sacrificed to top-down, technocratic modes of service delivery.
localism 409
Underpinning these studies is a more or less overt concern with power as domination
(Lukes 1974).
This debate, essentially a structure–agency controversy, resonates with that over
urban regime theory and the politics of its leading international proponent, Clarence
Stone (1989). Stone’s central claim, simply, is that local politics matters. Like the
Anglo-governance school, he argues that localities are politically differentiated, gov-
erning resources are dispersed, and therefore studying the production and execution
of local governance is of profound importance. However, Stone’s critics argue that
socio-economic structures play a stronger role in determining local politics than
he allows, particularly in the context of continuing socio-economic polarization
(Imbroscio 2003).
The dilemma is, as Stone puts it (2004: 39), whether one studies systems and
the reproduction of local institutions within them, or the ways in which localities
generate different governing capabilities. One way of resolving the dilemma is to
dissolve the analytical distinction between ‘power to’ and ‘power over’. Stone himself
points to such a solution, when he asserts that ‘power to’ ‘spills over into a kind of
domination’ (1989: 229). Practically, this means focusing on the conditions in which
localities mobilize and coordinate governing resources. If partnership generates new
governing capacity, to what ends is it deployed, for whom, and at the expense of what
alternative interests, agendas, and capacities? Questions posed this way put ‘power
over’ at the centre of the inquiry, but in a manner requiring local research and without
denying the possibility of local differentiation.
The argument developed below is that ‘power over’ is deeply entwined in ‘new
localist’ attempts to mobilize governing resources in the UK. However, asserting
this does not entail the claim that central governments, or for that matter global
capital, exercise perfect, unmediated control over local politics. On the contrary, it
is argued that while local authorities are politically quiescent, the fact that they are
often unable to deliver in accordance with central government objectives signifies
a failure of neoliberalism, for which the UK government has vainly attempted to
compensate with further centralizing measures. The discussion now turns to the
politics of contemporary localism, set briefly in its historical context.
22.4 Old Localism(s)
.............................................................................................................................................
What White (2005: 79) calls ‘very old localism indeed’ (also Powell 2004) originated
in the nineteenth century with the proliferation of undemocratic single-purpose
statutory authorities. However, as Stewart (2000) demonstrates, nineteenth-century
localism was visionary. The ‘civic gospel’ in Birmingham was proclaimed by the
Reverend George Dawson (cited in Stewart 2000: 28). Municipalism, he proclaimed,
would lead to:
410 jonathan davies
the discovery that perhaps a strong and able Town Council might do almost as much
to improve the conditions of life in the town as Parliament itself. I have called it a
‘discovery’, for it had all the freshness and charm—it created all the enthusiasm—of a
good discovery. One of its first effects was to invest the Council with a new attractiveness
and dignity . . . The speakers, instead of discussing small questions of administration and
of economy, dwelt with growing enthusiasm on what a great and prosperous town like
Birmingham might do for its people. They spoke of sweeping away streets in which it
was not possible to live a healthy and decent life . . . of providing gardens and parks and
music; or erecting baths and free libraries, an art gallery and a museum . . . Sometimes an
adventurous orator would excite his audience by dwelling on the glories of Florence . . . in
the middle ages, and suggest that Birmingham, too, might become the home of a noble
literature and art.
This inspiring passage, drawing inspiration from de Tocqueville’s liberal municipal-
ism, heralded the rebirth of social optimism amidst the squalor of Victorian England.
It calls local government to action, demanding political debate on a grand scale.
In today’s inestimably wealthier society, it remains a benchmark against which to
compare and contrast the scope and ambition of contemporary localism. At the
same time, it is important to understand that the civic doctrine remained ‘illusory’:
precisely because of the ‘special political rights’ accorded to property then (Palmowski
2002: 381), and forcefully asserted now under neoliberalism.
Historians disagree about the origins of contemporary centralism, but it probably
has multiple sources. Some scholars argue that the poor law of 1834 was of ‘seminal
importance’ in ‘establishing the principle of state regulation over the locality’ or
alternatively that Lloyd George’s social reforms unleashed an unprecedented level of
central involvement in local politics (Palmowski 2002: 383). However, White’s (2005)
story of the decline of local democracy pinpoints 1930 to 1948 as the heyday of localism.
He argues that ‘Whole spheres of public life were owned and managed locally that
are now seen as entirely the province of national government or the private sector’
(2005: 75), including most education services, control of the emergency services,
electricity production, and health. White argues that the present era of centralization
commenced in the late 1940s with the development of the welfare state, but gained
fresh impetus with the neoliberal ascendancy after the mid-1970s. Certainly, the period
between 1945 and 1979 appears ‘localist’ by comparison with today. Local government
was relatively free to spend and provided public services directly to citizens as part of
the post-war welfare state. Thus, the following discussion of contemporary localism
situates it in the analysis of centralizing trends since the 1970s.
22.5 The Origins of Twenty-first
Century Localism
.............................................................................................................................................
The concept of ‘new localism’ emerged in political science in the late 1980s and early
1990s alongside the ‘new urban politics’ (Goetz and Clarke 1993) in the USA and
localism 411
the post-Thatcher localist turn in the UK. US scholars at the time were beginning
to grapple with the challenge posed to localities by economic globalization and the
perceived hyper-mobility of capital. The literatures of the 1980s and 1990s depicted
increased capital mobility as forcing cities to adopt ever more entrepreneurial policies
(Hall and Hubbard 1996). The concern for American urbanists was what, if anything,
localities might do to protect redistributionist goals, given the pressure on cities
(aggravated by anti-collectivist national governments) to indulge the appetites of
footloose capital.
In the UK, however, the soubriquet ‘new localism’ was closely linked to the study of
central–local relations. It emerged in the early 1990s in response to a thaw following
the political battles of the 1980s, around municipal socialism. In 1984, the UK gov-
ernment introduced rate capping to control local spending. Some councils, notably
Lambeth, Liverpool, and Sheffield, resisted (Boddy and Fudge 1984). However, by
1986, the short-lived movement was defeated and bastions of the left, like the Greater
London Council, were on the way to abolition. For the remainder of the 1980s, local
government was excluded from key decisions, notably about development. Thus, the
concerns of the ‘new urban politics’ spread to Britain but by different means. Whereas
in the USA most city governments were disposed to pursue market-led growth any-
way (Imbroscio 2003), a prominent minority in the UK had to be forced. Throughout
the 1980s, the Tories tried to create an entrepreneurial culture in local government: by
allowing unemployment to rise, rate capping, compulsory competitive tendering for
public services, and giving business a substantial say in local development. Lawless
(1994: 1304) argued that the late 1980s represented the ‘high tide of anti-collectivism
towards the cities’.
However, by 1990, the government was calling for a ‘spirit of co-operation, of
partnership’ between central and local government and business (Lawless 1994: 1304).
This policy shift was based partly on the government’s confidence that it had quelled
the resistance of Labour local authorities. At the same time, the marginalization of
local government was also being criticized and business-led development perceived
to be failing within the Tory party itself (Le Gales and Mawson 1995: 222). The
overthrow of Mrs Thatcher and her replacement by John Major as PM in Novem-
ber 1990 created the space for a change of direction. Major reappointed Michael
Heseltine as Secretary of State at the Department of the Environment, his second
tenure there. Heseltine instigated a ‘partnership’ approach with local government.
In 1991, he introduced City Challenge, a regeneration programme calling on local
authorities and others to form partnerships and bid for funding in competition
with other partnerships. This approach, symbolizing the outbreak of peace between
central and local government, was called ‘new localism’ by Murray Stewart (1994)
and Stuart Wilks-Heeg (1996). However, Wilks-Heeg noted that while it partially
rehabilitated local government, the new localism did so ‘within a highly competitive
and managerialist framework over which central government retains considerable
control’ (1996: 1271). Contributors to the 1992–7 ESRC Local Governance Programme
took similar views (Stoker 1999; 2000). Their findings pointed to the emergence not
of the autonomous governing networks heralded by Rhodes, but the perpetuation of
hierarchical modes of governance. Morgan, Rees, and Garmise (1999: 196) memorably
412 jonathan davies
dismissed the notion that governance is increasingly about horizontal networks as a
‘fatal conceit’.
22.6 New Labour’s New Localism
.............................................................................................................................................
The new localist turn occurred when, arguably, local government was at its lowest
ebb since universal suffrage. White argues that now, ‘English local government seems
largely residual and exiguous to the central state machine’ (2005: 76). Today’s local
government is beholden to the centre for some 75 per cent of its revenues (DCLG
2007a: 3) and has limited control over the remaining 25 per cent raised through the
Council Tax. As Ruth Kelly’s foreword to the 2006 White Paper conceded, New Labour
continued the centralizing trend. The White Paper acknowledged that 80 per cent
of local government reporting was to the centre, only 20 per cent to local citizens
(DCLG 2006: 117). To ensure that local authorities prioritized national targets, New
Labour established an elaborate system of audit and inspection. The Comprehen-
sive Performance Assessment (CPA) framework, established in 2002, ranked local
authorities from ‘poor’ to ‘excellent’. Depending on its ranking, a local authority
could expect more or less coercive intervention by agents of the centre. The ‘best’
authorities would receive what the government called ‘earned autonomy’. Attaining
‘excellence’ would entitle them to ‘freedoms and flexibilities’. However, exemptions
from reporting and planning obligations were few and offered little by way of political
freedom (Ellison and Ellison 2006: 34). Reform seemed to connote slower central-
ization, not devolution. The watchword of the day, ‘earned autonomy’, was of a
piece with the centralizing dynamic of the time. Ultimately, the very concept implied
central control, turning the authority’s attention away from meeting the needs of local
citizens towards meeting the demands of government (Lowndes 2002: 140).
However, Ruth Kelly argued that there had been ‘good reason’ for New Labour’s
top-down approach (DCLG 2006: 4):
In 1997 this Government, after decades of under-investment, inherited public services
and institutions which were not always fit for purpose. We responded with massive
investment and by setting a strong direction nationally. Combined with the hard work
and commitment of local government and others, this has led to radical improvements.
But, for these improvements to continue, we must have the courage at the centre
to let go.
This passage contains several messages. First, reflecting ‘elite contempt’, it says that
in 1997 local government was anachronistic and could not be trusted to ‘modernize’
public services. Second, it hints at the government’s view that a critical, informa-
tion rich, and individualized public will not tolerate high public spending without
commensurate improvements in performance. Third, it suggests that centralism has
localism 413
worked, but has had its day. Local government is now fit for purpose and can be
trusted, indeed must be trusted, to drive improvement.
Stoker argues that New Labour now faces a choice between two modes of multi-
level governance. The first, constrained discretion, entails localized management of a
political agenda set by the centre (2005: 166), as happens now. The second model,
advocated by Stoker, sees local government as a strategic community leader with
considerable autonomy in determining goals and speaking for communities (2005:
162). Local government should be trusted with fomenting debate, encouraging the
development of shared aspirations and ensuring that resources are mobilized and
coordinated to achieve them. This approach is not unlike the ‘coordinative’ role
with which Sharpe (1970: 166) tasked local government: ‘coherently adjusting public
services and linking them to local knowledge and a participatory environment—
which could not be fulfilled simply by out-stationed field agencies’. Stoker’s (2004: 117)
definition of the new localism reflects this vision. It is ‘a strategy aimed at devolving
power and resources away from central control and towards front-line managers,
local democratic structures and local consumers and communities, within an agreed
framework of national minimum standards and policy priorities’.
However, despite its recency, the concept of ‘new localism’ remains fluid, depicted
variously in the language of ‘earned autonomy’ and ‘constrained discretion’ (Stoker
2004: 5) and more recently ‘double devolution’ and ‘place-shaping’. ‘Double devolu-
tion’ was favoured during David Miliband’s brief tenure as Secretary of State at DCLG.
He commented (Miliband 2006):
I call it ‘double devolution’—not just devolution that takes power from central gov-
ernment and gives it to local government, but power that goes from local government
down to local people, providing a critical role for individuals and neighbourhoods, often
through the voluntary sector.
For Miliband, the new localism was less about the relationship between central and
local government than that between government and citizens called upon to play an
active role in shaping the future. As Alan Milburn (2006) commented, writing in
the Guardian on the same day as Miliband’s above-quoted speech, the government
must ‘redistribute power so that responsibility for meeting the challenge of economic,
demographic, environmental, social and cultural change is shared between citizens,
states and communities’ (emphasis added). This double-edged comment highlights a
perennial question about civil renewal. How far is it about community empowerment
(enabling) or social engineering (domination)? It is argued below that in facing
the contradictions posed by neoliberal strategy, the UK government has deployed
a coercive variant of conservative communitarianism, but with limited effect.
After the appointment of Ruth Kelly in May 2006, ‘place-shaping’ superseded
‘double devolution’, forming the conceptual spine of Sir Michael Lyons’ inquiry into
the structure and functions of local government. For Lyons (2007: 3), place-shaping
is about community leadership, entailing a ‘wider strategic role for local government’
making ‘creative use of powers and influence to promote the general well-being of a
community and its citizens’.
414 jonathan davies
These discursive manoeuvres, occurring over a short timescale, may be signifi-
cant. They are suggestive of a government constantly adapting rhetoric and policy
in response to events, but in doing so attempting to navigate a consistent political
course. New Labour’s three local government white papers lend support to this
interpretation. Each reveals the paradox of a government pledging decentralization,
but continuing to centralize. To illustrate, the discussion draws on Davies (2008).
22.7 Rhetoric and Reality: Three Local
Government White Papers
.............................................................................................................................................
In 1997, New Labour proclaimed a new era for local government. It announced
a central–local partnership and established an institution of that name under the
‘Framework for Partnership’ agreement. The first White Paper (DETR 1998), warning
local government to rise to the challenge of modernization, nevertheless adopted the
tone of partnership. The Local Government Association welcomed it as a move away
from ‘a centralised and over-prescriptive approach’. Even Blair’s notorious (above-
quoted) threat to sweep aside recalcitrant local authorities did not quell optimism
that the revival of local government was imminent. With the publication of a sec-
ond White Paper (DTLR 2001), however, the Secretary of State for Transport, Local
Government and the Regions, Stephen Byers, conceded that centralizing trends had
persisted. His mea culpa reiterated the pledge made in 1998:
I want to tackle the trend towards excessive central prescription and interference, which
dominated central local relations in the 1980s and 90s. We are reversing that approach.
The White Paper marks a pronounced step away from centralisation. . . . It is truly about
local government. It is a significant shift away from local administration. Based on a
belief that we don’t need to control everything, and a recognition that local authorities
are often in the best position to respond to local needs and aspirations. (DTLR 2001b)
Reviewing this second New Labour White Paper, however, Lowndes detected the
opposite: the intensification of managerialism at the expense of local democracy, art-
fully disguised in democratic language (2002: 144) and constituting a ‘new centralism’
(2002: 136). If anything, the government’s second term was more centralizing than
the first, with the imposition of performance management mechanisms like CPA and
the seeming subordination of ‘community led’ partnerships to intensive audit and
micro-management. As Wright et al. put it in a scathing evaluation of the New Deal
for Communities regeneration programme (2006: 347), ‘if NDC is a community-
led programme, it is community led in the sense that government decides how the
community will be involved, why they will be involved, what they will do and how
they will do it’. Such is the tenor of many commentaries about partnership (e.g.
Skelcher, Mathur, and Smith 2005; Geddes 2006).
localism 415
In this light, Kelly’s introduction to the 2006 Local Government White Paper,
quoted above, provokes a sense of déjà vu and the content of the paper suggests that
it is no more devolutionary than its predecessors were. The first striking feature is
the proselytizing tone, suffused in a breathless ‘change’ narrative, interpolated with
exhortations on unexceptional local authorities to catch up with ‘the best’, who are
‘already’ doing it in response to what the government has ‘already’ done. Reflecting
the government’s globalization mania, it comments excitedly ‘the world has moved on
apace. The speed of change, often driven by global forces, can be startling . . . ’ (DCLG
2006: 154). Or, ‘such is the pace of change that we cannot afford to be complacent’
(2006: 25). In response, ‘the best’ local authorities are ‘already’ delivering transformed
services, but ‘we need to increase the pace of change’ (2006: 26). The trade-off for
fewer national targets is that ‘the pace of public service improvements will quicken’
(2006: 117) and local government will be judged on the ‘pace of improvement’ (2006:
126). Thus, the world is changing, people are changing, and local government needs
to change, emulating ‘the best’ in the sector, which is ‘already’ changing but must
nevertheless change again, change faster, and change continuously. The demand for
increasingly frantic ‘change’ is a prima-facie case of control-freakery.
The direction of ‘change’ is, in turn, heavily prescribed. Public services must be
further ‘personalized’ in an ever-wider ‘partnership’ with the private sector. Councils:
will have to challenge traditional methods of delivery, root out waste, keep all council
activity under review and work with other public bodies to share assets, systems, data,
skills and knowledge more effectively. . . . Ambitious efficiency gains will therefore be
required as part of the 2007 Comprehensive Spending Review. (DCLG 2006: 12)
Personalization or ‘choice’ is another controversial feature of government policy.
Advocates contend that it is a vehicle to deliver the services that ‘modern consumers
expect and demand’ (DCLG 2006: 22). Critics, however, see it as a synonym for
destructive competition between public services. They argue that like empowerment
‘personalization’ is a synonym for ‘responsibility’ because it demands active engage-
ment by citizens, who will be judged if their choices do not deliver the requisite out-
comes (Clarke 2005). Personalization, improvement, and efficiency are also predicates
of competitiveness. Local authorities, expected to ‘drive down costs’ as a matter of
course (DCLG 2006: 135), are urged to create new markets and expose new areas of
work to ‘competition and contestability’ (2006: 121/135). This proselytizing tone sets
the neoliberal agenda in stone. It offers no space for political difference or dissidence,
central criteria of political freedom.
The government’s response to the modest reforms proposed by the Lyons Inquiry
(2007) further illustrates its reluctance to localize. It dismissed cautiously progres-
sive proposals to extend council tax bandings together with the long awaited prop-
erty revaluation. Lyons’ recommendation that council tax capping should be abol-
ished was also dismissed. Local Government Minister at the time, Phil Woolas,
argued that the government ‘does not consider that its powers to cap council tax
increases necessarily need to be seen as weakening the freedom and accountability
of local government to its electorate’ (DCLG 2007b). Yet, capping is a powerful
416 jonathan davies
emblem of the neoliberal centralizing tradition and together with New Labour’s fetish
for markets, perhaps the most potent symbol of continuity with the Thatcher era.
Control over local spending is, as Travers (2007) argued, an issue of constitutional
importance, one upon which the political autonomy of local government depends.
Thus, while local political and managerial leaders may be equipped with a wider
range of instruments for mobilizing governing resources, the political direction and
institutional mechanisms for local governance have been further prescribed by the
three white papers. The new localism is predicated not on any commitment to
enhanced local democracy, or local political autonomy (Pratchett 2004), but on the
acknowledgement that central political and managerial control have limited effec-
tiveness. Greater flexibility is about enhancing reflexive management; the ability of
local actors to select from myriad creative governing responses of their own making
in response to local circumstances, but commensurate with the neoliberal agenda.
These are the politics of ‘constrained discretion’, the common thread running through
episodic developments in the government’s agenda.
22.8 Understanding the Blair Paradox
.............................................................................................................................................
The trends depicted above have led some scholars to impute a lack of coherence to
the government’s approach. Early on, for example, Sullivan identified the tensions
between ideas such as community leadership, improved public management, and
building social capital (2001: 1), noting that different localities used them in a variable
mix (2001: 20–1). Stoker sees manoeuvres and inconsistencies as characteristic of the
inability of central government to exercise effective control over local authorities, try
as it might. He argues that New Labour’s strategy follows from its fatalistic world-
view, seeing all systems as capricious (Stoker 2002: 419). ‘[A]t the top of New Labour
there is a widespread but not universal culture of paranoia that sees enemies all
around’ (2002: 432). Fatalism anticipates governance failure. Thus, stymied by the
rubber levers of power and recognizing that the prospect of effective control is limited,
New Labour devised a lottery approach to policy to shake up and create uncertainty
among local authorities unwilling or incapable of adapting to the modernization
agenda. This strategy, ‘incoherence with a purpose’, created instability and the impres-
sion of ‘control-freakery gone mad’ (Stoker 2004: 74–5). Although the time has come
to move beyond this approach, the upside was that uncertainty generated space and
impetus for local innovation (Stoker 2004: 69).
To a degree, Stoker’s perspective chimes with this account. The lottery approach
could explain, for example, rapid changes in governmental discourses of localism. It
also suggests reasons why a government with limited effective power continuously
churns out top-down initiatives in an almost desperate attempt to reinvigorate local
government. However, the approach developed here differs in two particulars. First,
localism 417
it argues that the capriciousness inherent in contemporary local governance is the
consequence not of complexity and differentiation, but of contradictions integral
to the neoliberal strategy pursued by New Labour. Second, apparent tensions in
government policy, specifically those between individualism and communitarianism
and centralism and localism, arise from the attempt to manage the effects of these
contradictions. Hence, it is possible to make sense of the new localism as an instance
of the Blair Paradox, through a unifying explanation centered on the dysfunctionality
of neoliberalism.
The distinctive characteristic of actually existing neoliberalism is the unintended
synthesis of liberalism and authoritarianism (Harvey 2005). The basic principle of
economic liberalism is that economic dynamism is possible only in relatively unfet-
tered markets, regulated by minimal states. However, extending the market has caused
a ‘paradoxical’ increase in state intervention (Jessop 2002: 454). Apologists, says Jes-
sop, claim that after a brief transitional period, the state will retreat to the light-touch
supervisory role. Jessop rejects this argument asserting that the strong state is, in fact,
the precondition of the ‘free’ economy (see also Gamble 1994).
Thus, neoliberalism is liberalism gone wrong. However, why should centralization
be the necessary unintended consequence of liberalization? First, liberalizing govern-
ments are faced with the continuing, if weakening, legacy of post-war ‘welfarism’,
still significantly embedded in the public and professional consciousness despite the
thirty-year long neoliberal assault (e.g. Park et al. 2003). Technocratic managerialism,
attempting to place local policy beyond politics (Skelcher, Mathur, and Smith 2005),
is one response to this continuing challenge (see also Geddes 2006). Second, they
have to manage the polarizing and exclusionary effects of liberalization marked, for
example, by ever-increasing inequality and concomitant upward pressure on public
expenditure (e.g. Dorling et al. 2007). As Harvey (2005) put it, the social instability
generated by neoliberalization is thoroughly dysfunctional for economic growth and
profitability. The rollback of socialist aspirations has not opened the door to the
spontaneous regeneration of a responsible, entrepreneurial citizenry; on the contrary,
it has created fractured, damaged, and unhappy societies. Third, neoliberal doctrine
demands that greater value be extracted from every public pound, placing down-
ward pressure on expenditure but requiring robust management to deter free riders,
driving it up again.
Each of these factors predicts centralization. To maintain social cohesion, liber-
alizing states have turned to coercive mechanisms and unifying doctrines of com-
munity and active citizenship which, in the case of New Labour, encompass appeals
to individual responsibility, family, community, and nation. In its attempt to reinvent
community, New Labour has imported Burke’s vision of ‘small platoons’ in corrupted
form, as an authoritarian injunction upon citizens ripped from their moorings by
casino capitalism. In the Burkean view, communities of this kind are ‘artificial col-
lectives’, denuding small platoons of their vitality and thus making governmental
intervention inherently self-defeating (Saunders 1993: 78). This approach portends
what Lupton and Fuller (2007) call the ‘new disempowerment’ of communities,
achieved through a ‘deep substratum of coerced co-operations and collaborations’
418 jonathan davies
(Harvey 2000: 181). Thus, neoliberalism is repressive, ‘denying the very freedoms that
it is supposed to uphold’ (Harvey 2005: 69).
In this context, the instability caused by simultaneous depoliticizing, economiz-
ing, liberalizing, and remoralizing creates frantic demand for constant ‘change’ and
‘improvement’ alongside attempts to clamp down on costs. It explains simultaneously
the breathless and moralistic tone of the White Paper, the proliferation of top-down
initiatives, and attempts to generate the reflexive, creative governance envisioned
in the new localism. It also explains rapid shifts in localist discourse and apparent
tensions between different goods; first ‘constrained discretion’ and performance,
then ‘double devolution’ and responsible communities, and now ‘place-shaping’ and
strong leadership to enforce ‘community cohesion’. This strategy is indeed philosoph-
ically incoherent. However, it is minimally incoherent in that it poses less of a direct
challenge to market individualism than, say, major tax hikes upon income and wealth
to fund redistribution.
Thus, political centralization is a corollary of New Labour politics, no less than
it was for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives and is likely to remain so until the
political economy of the UK is transformed. It is the unwanted but indispensable
governmental response to social instability unleashed by deregulation, the extension
of the market realm, rising inequality, and the consequent ‘decline of the public’
(Marquand 2004). This contradiction has manifested in the new localism from the
outset and there is no reason to think that it will soon be resolved.
22.9 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
Hazel Blears (2008), current Secretary of State at DCLG, recognizes that control-
freakery is a hard habit to break:
I want to make sure that whenever we’re confronting a new problem . . . I want to think
about what mechanisms we can put in place to make sure that our first reaction isn’t
new regulation, but to ask how we can learn from, and work with, town halls and their
partners.
Blears is sincere. However, should mechanisms be introduced, they would probably
be ineffective. New Labour’s commitment to capitalist globalization, and the conse-
quences thereof, generates tensions and contradictions apparent in the government’s
evolving and adaptable approach to localism. In the face of localist rhetoric, ongoing
centralization is the government’s response to the antinomies of liberalization. The
imposition of conservative communitarianism, one instance of ongoing centraliza-
tion, attempts to enhance public adaptability in a manner minimally compromising
to the free market agenda. To the extent that citizens remain wayward, either because
of the centrifugal effects of liberalization, or because of their political intransigence,
localism 419
it is likely that the juxtaposition of political centralization and localist rhetoric will
continue. Clarke and Newman (2007: 754) discovered that citizens tend to reject
the consumerist assumptions driving the government’s personalization agenda and
conclude that ‘passive dissent’ of this kind matters for New Labour. The New Labour
project demands that citizens and communities be active and entrepreneurial, assert-
ing that no ‘modern’ nation can thrive without them. Unless the citizenry is effectively
‘remoralized’ (Etzioni 1997), capable of adapting spontaneously to the vicissitudes
of the risk society, then further liberalization will lead to further social instability,
followed by further centralization. Elsewhere, I describe this scenario as New Labour’s
‘dialectical bind’ (Davies 2005: 327). Localism remains a neoliberal conceit.
This analysis suggests that it is possible, by conceptualizing ‘localism’ as a problem
in political economy, to develop an overarching explanation for the apparent political
incoherence in New Labour politics, thus offering a solution to the Blair Paradox.
However, the discussion poses significant research questions for scholars of localism.
First, how much localism of what kind is appropriate in pursuit of what political ends?
Scholars might do well to rethink this question in light of Dawson’s civic gospel, but
remember why it failed. Under what political circumstances, then, might modern
localists aspire to such a vision, if it is appropriate? However, the second and pivotal
question is from where the necessary political agency will come. The essence of the
argument is that localism is incompatible with neoliberalism, specifically with the
New Labour variant. This problem takes us back to the question of whether and when
distinctive local politics are feasible. Stone himself (2004: 39) acknowledged that the
challenge facing regime theorists is to demonstrate that any progressive regimes ‘can
maintain viability within the current international political economy’. Progressive
localists must demonstrate, in other words, what localities can contribute to chal-
lenging neoliberalism. If it is true that centralization is, paradoxically, a symptom
of the failure of control, then how might localities take advantage of that in order
to construct alternative modes of governing? There is significant opposition to the
neoliberal agenda at the local scale, suggesting that nascent alternatives may be found
in dissident politics. Yet, to be minimally effective, dissidents would have to be able to
exercise ‘power over’ to the extent necessary for maintaining effective barriers against
neoliberal state intervention. The fate of municipal socialism in the 1980s suggests
that such an approach in one locality, or even a significant number of localities,
would not be effective for long. Thus, if the coercive strategies of dissident movements
are to be effective locally in the long term, they will have to assert themselves on
the national and perhaps the international stages in an attempt to replace neoliberal
capitalism.
This analysis, finally, suggests that the conundrum of localism will continue to tax
us across the descriptive, explanatory, and normative domains. How much localism
do we actually have, of what kind, and why? What form of localism is appropriate?
What are the barriers to localism? Under what contemporary circumstances, if any,
does it flourish? There is sufficient scope in these questions to occupy enthusiastic
scholars, practitioners, and activists for many years. Studying localism throws up
myriad challenges; but it is richly rewarding to those who do it.
420 jonathan davies
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c h a p t e r 23
.................................................................................................................
E U RO PE A N
D EVO LU T I O N
.................................................................................................................
michael keating
23.1 Devolution as a Concept
.............................................................................................................................................
Devolution is a peculiarly British term introduced in the nineteenth century to
resolve a problem that is characteristically (but not uniquely) British. 1 This is how
to reconcile national diversity with unity, and how to grant territorial autonomy
while retaining a unitary state. The recipe, from Gladstone’s first Irish Home Rule
bill in 1886 to the Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish settlements of 1998, is to set
up self-governing bodies for the constituent nations and regions, while insisting
that the sovereignty of the Westminster parliament is unabridged. Westminster in
theory retains the right to change the settlement unilaterally and even to abolish
the devolved institutions altogether. It is this that chiefly distinguishes devolution
from federalism, in which there are constitutional limitations on both levels of
government and the centre cannot change the system without the consent of the
constituent parts. While this distinction is vital for the British political parties, which
can thus claim to be defending the unity of the state, in practice it is much less
clear. The devolved institutions were established by referendum, implying an element
of self-determination for the constituent nations of the United Kingdom, and the
constitutional conventions that limit Westminster government will likely extend to
respecting their prerogatives. While in theory not as strong as federalism, devolution
is recognized as a ‘constitutional’ matter, on a par with membership of the European
1
It is also typical of the case that in the very first sentence we encounter a terminological problem.
The state in question is the United Kingdom but, lacking an adjective for it, I have followed the
convention of using ‘British’.
424 michael keating
Union and different from local government, which can be and has been reorganized
regularly by fiat of Westminster (and now of the devolved Scottish Parliament). On
the other hand, in its weaker forms, devolution can appear as little more than an
extension of municipal local government. Rather than drawing a sharp distinction
among federalism, devolution, and local government, it makes sense to see devolution
as an intermediate form of territorial self-government, covering a fairly broad spec-
trum and overlapping with federalism at one end and municipal government at the
other.
Defined in this loose way, the term devolution can be applied more widely in
Europe to the emerging level of government between the centre and the municipal
level. Often this is referred to as the regional level, but this term is not acceptable
to stateless nations like Scotland and Wales and its meaning can vary according
to what criteria are applied. So the term ‘meso’ has been used as a more neu-
tral and encompassing term (Sharpe 1993). Such a level of government has now
emerged in all the large states of the European Union (France, Italy, Spain, the
United Kingdom, and Poland) as well as in Belgium and, in a rather attenuated
form, Hungary and the Czech Republic. Germany is excluded since it is a mature
federation in which the Länder were entrenched at the time of the constitution.
Belgium is also officially a federation, but can be included in the devolution cate-
gory since powers were transferred over time by the centre in a process that is still
evolving.
23.2 Why Devolution?
.............................................................................................................................................
Devolution is a response to the spatial rescaling of economic and social systems
(Brenner 2004; Keating 1998); to shifting responsibilities of government and the need
for new governing instruments; and to pressures for territorial autonomy. The differ-
ent forms it has taken in various countries reflect these varied influences.
One common theme concerns state modernization and development policies. In
the 1960s, European states engaged in spatial planning and regional development
policies intended to integrate national markets, encourage more even development,
and improve the performance of underdeveloped or declining regions. The logic
of such policies was economic, to stimulate depressed regions and integrate them
into the national economy so as to enhance overall performance; social, as the
spatial expression of the welfare state; and political, to boost support for the state
and for governing parties in regions where this might be problematic. The package
has subsequently been labelled ‘spatial Keynesianism’, a territorial counterpart to
the managed national economy. These policies tended to be centralized and based
on a mixture of financial incentives to investors and infrastructure provision. In
european devolution 425
order to implement regional policies and encourage more self-sustaining devel-
opment, governments also put in place planning machinery at the regional level
and systems for consultation and participation by local actors, from business,
trade unions, farmers, and local government. These forms of regional coordina-
tion and concertation were a mixed success, since the participants were caught
between their role as implementers of central policy and representatives of distinct
regional interests. They also tended to lack powers and control over resources.
At the same time, governments strengthened their own presence in the regions
with regional offices, coordination among departments, and deconcentration of
powers to field offices. The British equivalents were the Regional Economic Plan-
ning Councils and Boards set up by the Labour government in 1964 in England
and, in a slightly different way (and without the ‘regional’ title), Scotland and
Wales.
Since the 1980s, this type of centralized regional policy has given way to decentral-
ized forms, drawing on new understandings of how regional development works. In
the new thinking, what matters are not traditional factor endowments like natural
resources, or proximity to markets, but rather soft factors like research and develop-
ment, entrepreneurship, and the existence of networks of innovation. These are not
amenable to old policies such as grants and infrastructure programmes but depend
on institutional and cultural elements in the regional society (Cooke and Morgan
1998). Each region is recognized as having its own characteristics and opportunities
and regions are seen as being in competition with each other for markets, technology,
and investment. There is a confusion in some versions of this argument, since the
insistence that regions are competing is often combined with the assurance that they
can all win the competition, but there is no doubt that this has affected govern-
ments’ views on territorial government. Centralized regional policy managed from
above has declined and more responsibilities have been transferred to the regions
themselves.
Since the late 1980s, the regional level has featured in programmes for welfare
state reform (Fererra 2006; McEwen and Moreno 2005). Resources may be allo-
cated more effectively at a regional level, where local priorities can be worked out.
In a more critical vein, it has been suggested that governments have also sought
to decentralize difficult decisions about welfare state retrenchment and unpopular
service cuts in a ‘decentralization of penury’ (Mény and Wright 1985). There is some
evidence of governments transferring rationing to the regional level, for example
in the Italian health service, but there is a lot of variation across cases so that it
is difficult to make generalizations. Regional devolution may also serve reform by
breaking systems of clientelism based on the centre–locality nexus and the ability
of local politicians to extract resources from the centre. In the case of Belgium, one
motive was to end the wasteful practice of having to match every expenditure in one
part of the country with a similar programme in the other part, irrespective of need
or demand. Of course, it may also result in reproducing clientelism at the regional
level.
426 michael keating
There has been a strong push for local autonomy in the name of democratization
and pluralism. In European countries where the French Jacobin tradition is strong,
democracy was traditionally seen as requiring centralization in order that the demo-
cratic will of the people should not be frustrated by partial interests. This tradition
has been weakening over recent decades, with the rediscovery of older ideas of locality
and community. Social democratic parties, in particular, moved away from central-
ized models based on the need to control the commanding heights of the economy
and redistribute resources from the centre, rediscovering older strands of regionalism
and localism in their ideology and practice. From the 1960s, new social movements
often took up regionalism as a challenge to existing power structures and as a space
not already colonized by the old political parties.
Autonomy, however, is not of concern only to the local and regional level. Govern-
ments have a natural tendency to centralize power and functions but then discover
that centralization can be self-defeating since it overwhelms the centre with detail
and subjects it to the pressure of local demands. Better control can be achieved by
decentralizing detail and implementation, maintaining a strategic capacity at the top.
So the French decentralization process of the 1980s can be seen as much as a way
of re-establishing the autonomy of the centre from local influences as of freeing the
localities themselves. This concept of ‘central autonomy’ was captured in the British
case in the work of Jim Bulpitt (1983), who argued that state elites had managed a ‘dual
polity’ in which high politics were kept at the centre, while day-to-day management
was entrusted to local collaborators.
There is a growing recognition of cultural and national diversity, a point of
obvious relevance to the United Kingdom. Belgium has long been characterized
by a linguistic division and practices of consociationalism and power sharing at
national level. From the 1960s, this began to give way to a territorial division of
power, with the drawing of fixed territorial boundaries for the language commu-
nities (except in Brussels) and a gradual transfer of power to regional govern-
ments and communities until by 1993 the country had officially become a federation
(Brassinne 1994; Fitzmaurice 1996). In Spain, the transition to democracy called for
new approaches to the nationalities question, which was addressed through territo-
rial devolution, first to the historic nationalities of Catalonia, the Basque Country,
and Galicia, but spreading rapidly to the rest of the country (Aja 2003). Follow-
ing the Second World War, Italy gave autonomy to four special status regions, the
islands of Sicily and Sardinia and the border regions of Val d’Aosta and Trentino–
Alto Adige, to which in 1961 was added Friuli-Venezia-Giulia. France has been less
willing to concede autonomy to cultural or historical regions and even drew its
regional boundaries so as to divide historic territories or amalgamate them with
others. Brittany was truncated, Normandy divided in two, French Catalonia merged
with part of Languedoc, and the Basques not acknowledged. Only Corsica was
given special treatment, but even this was limited in comparison with the status of
Scotland and Wales after 1999. Countries in central and eastern Europe have been
very reluctant to institute regions corresponding to nationality or ethnic boundaries
european devolution 427
or historic territories like Silesia or Bohemia. The main problems of national inte-
gration there concern national minorities, who are not always territorially con-
centrated, or not in regions that would make sense from a functional point of
view.
European integration has been widely credited with stimulating regionalism, espe-
cially since the 1980s, although the matter is in practice rather complex. The European
single market has increased the competition among regions for markets, technology,
and investment, as has the opening of global markets more generally. The new models
of economic development, with their emphasis on institutions and networks, appear
to give an advantage to those regions that are better organized and hence have
stimulated the search for new forms of government. The attitude of the European
Union itself is more ambivalent. Since 1988 there has been an elaborate set of regional
development policies under the umbrella of the Structural Funds and competition
among states, regional actors, and the European Commission as to who will control
them (Hooghe and Keating 1994). The Commission’s interest, however, is limited
to ensuring that the mechanisms are in place to manage the funds and that these
respect various partnership principles. It has never, contrary to a widely held opin-
ion, stipulated that states must establish regional governments. On the contrary,
the Structural Funds are organized around functional programmes and operate at
a variety of territorial levels. Indeed in the case of the new Member States that
entered the Union in 2004, the Commission insisted that Structural Funds should be
managed by the central state and not regionalized (Keating 2003; Hughes, Sasse, and
Gordon 2004).
Europe has also had an influence on the workings of regional government once
it is established. Since many of the competences devolved to regions are shared by
the EU as well, the effect has been to recentralize power within the state as it is
central government that is represented in the Council of Ministers and the committee
structure around the Commission. In response to this, regions have sought a greater
role in EU matters (see below).
The result of these developments has been a linking of the themes of regional
devolution and regional integration as two forces that are transforming the state from
below and from above. Regionalist and minority nationalist movements have latched
on to this, seeing Europe as something that might weaken the state framework and
provide a new political and institutional space for their own aspirations (Lynch 1996;
Keating 2004). For some, like the Scottish National Party, Europe provides a new
framework for national independence, looking after some of the externalities that had
plagued independence proposals in the past. Others, like the Catalan Convergència
i Unió, many Basque nationalists, and (most of the time) Plaid Cymru, have gone
beyond this, arguing that Europe makes the traditional concept of independence
redundant. This ‘post-sovereigntist’ (Keating 2001) position has been taken up by
some minorities in central and eastern Europe as well, although the model of the
unitary nation state has a strong hold in countries that have only recently recovered
full sovereignty.
428 michael keating
23.3 Models of Devolved Government
.............................................................................................................................................
Devolution, as noted above, is a mechanism for reconciling territorial autonomy
with the unitary state. It is not a single defined form of government but covers a
range of forms between the unitary and the federal state (Mény 1982; Le Galès and
Lesquesne 1997). In some cases, there is symmetry, with all parts of the country
being treated the same, while in others special status is given to some territories.
Asymmetry is often used in unitary states to accommodate demands in one part
of the country while keeping the rest of the state together as before. Despite the
complaints made about this in the United Kingdom by anti-devolution commen-
tators, it is not an uncommon arrangement. The special status Italian regions have
existed since the 1940s and even the French have conceded a distinct law for Corsica,
albeit not without controversy. In other cases, however, the state has sought to limit
asymmetry in the interests of preserving the unity of the state, especially where the
self-governing territories are substantial in size and population and economically
important to the state. The Spanish constitution is in principle symmetrical, pro-
viding that all autonomous communities can achieve the same status, but there are
different ways of getting there, effectively preserving asymmetries for a long time.
Nationalists in Catalonia and the Basque Country have sought to maintain these
differences (the hecho diferencial) while central government has sought more uni-
formity in a tactic known as cafe para todos (coffee all round). The Basque Country
and Navarre have a very distinct fiscal regime. Belgium is in practice asymmetrical.
Power is devolved to three regions (Flanders, Wallonia, and Brussels) and to three
language communities (the Flemish, the French, and the German). In Flanders, the
regional and language institutions have been merged, with some special arrange-
ments for the Flemish speakers in Brussels, while elsewhere they have remained
separate.
The process of devolution also varies. In some cases, it is imposed from above, as
in France or Italy, where the state laid down the general scheme and the boundaries.
In Spain, on the other hand, the initiative must come from the regions themselves,
who propose boundaries and a range of powers within the limits of those provided
in the constitution. Some of these turned out to be historic regions, others were
provinces raised to the status of regions. Two paths to autonomy were laid down in
the constitution, one leading to full powers immediately while the other involved a
gradual transfer of responsibilities over a period of years. The first was intended for
the historic nationalities who were allowed to proceed down this road immediately
on the grounds that they had voted autonomy statutes under the Second Republic in
the 1930s. Other regions wishing to take this route had to go through a complicated
referendum process and the only one to succeed was Andalusia. It is also the regions
themselves who take the initiative in reforming their statutes of autonomy, and since
2005 there has been a wave of new statutes to replace those negotiated during the
transition. In Belgium the regular constitutional changes are negotiated by politi-
cal parties who nowadays are confined to the two linguistic communities so that,
european devolution 429
while the regional governments themselves are not the main protagonists, regional
interests are.
Since devolution is a general term covering a range of constitutional arrangements,
it is difficult to break it down into specific models, yet we can discern two broad
types. The first is functional devolution, which consists in setting up bodies with
specific and limited powers. Here the central state dominates and the regional level
cooperates with it and implements central policies. This is often accompanied by
forms of socio-economic representation, with the social partners (business, unions,
the voluntary sector) expected to cooperate in carrying out central strategies. One
form consists of agencies nominated by government, alongside some consultative
machinery in order to incorporate relevant social interests such as the business
community. As noted above, such arrangements were common in the 1950s and 1960s
when states were pursuing regional development policies in an essentially centralizing
framework. The most elaborate were in France, where the CODER (Commissions
de Développement Économique Régional) represented local government and the so-
called forces vives, or dynamic sectors of civil society. Complementing these were
regional prefects, responsible for coordinating the work of government departments
in the field. This model was influential in the British arrangements introduced after
1964 and was introduced into Hungary in the 1990s. After 1997 it was reintroduced
into England. It has proved unstable everywhere and has either evolved into elected
regional government (as in France and Italy) or relapsed into centralization (as in
England after 1979 and again in 2007 with the abolition of the regional assemblies).
Now that the move to regional government in England has again been halted, it is
not clear how the regional development machinery will evolve but it seems unlikely
to grow in strength.
The world of agencies, indirectly elected authorities, and partnerships of various
sorts is an example of the phenomenon known as ‘governance’—insofar as that word
has an agreed meaning. This is not the place to get into the vexed debate about
governance, but one widely shared meaning is a form of governing with no clear
hierarchy or division of roles and where policy-making takes place in networks rather
than parties, executives, and legislatures. There is surprisingly little in the literature
about the politics of such devolved ‘governance’ or about policy-making and who
wins and who loses. Discussion tends to be dominated by the language of governance,
networks, and the search for consensus, rather than the clash of interests and ideas.
One reason may be that academics follow governments’ own reasoning, when setting
up such systems and then attempting to depoliticize regional development by pre-
senting it as a technical problem and one on which distinct interests can easily agree
since the aim is positive-sum development. Yet this might often be a mere cover for
dominance by the business community together with the technical bureaucracy.
In practice, governing arrangements under functional devolution are rife with
clashes of interest, between central government and local representatives, between
business interests and social movements, and between pro-development and envi-
ronmental concerns. There is also a tension between the bottom-up impetus that
inspires the presence of local actors, and the continued retention of power in the
430 michael keating
hands of the centre. It is the inability to handle this form of conflict that has
undermined functional and non-elected forms of regional regulation, in England
and elsewhere, and prompted a move, either back to centralization as in England, or
forward to elected government. If this is so, then the general move to elected regional
councils represents a move from governance to government in its more traditional
sense.
Election brings in a wider range of social and economic interests, including
those who may challenge the business community. It politicizes policy-making and
broadens the policy agenda from questions of development in the narrow sense to
issues of distribution and who gains and who loses from any particular development
project. Even after direct election, however, regional government may remain func-
tionally limited, as in the case of France, where regions are essentially responsible
for planning and investment programming rather than for pursuing distinct public
policies. The same has largely been true of Italian regions. Polish regions, too, are
essentially functional bodies, despite being directly elected. Italian regions, directly
elected since 1970, were dominated by health spending and, until the reforms of the
1990s, had little control over its distribution, passing most of it on to the local health
agencies.
A more expansive form of devolution is both elected and multi-functional, so
amounting to regional government in the full sense. Such is the system in Spain,
Belgium, and in the devolved territories of the United Kingdom. Italy has been
moving in this direction, with the transfer of more powers to the regions and a higher
political profile for them. Such elected governments have the planning and develop-
ment role of the previous type, but add welfare state services such as education, social
services, and housing. They may also take on a wider political role in articulating local
views on national issues and innovating across policy fields. Elected status, broad
functional reach, and the general role in representing the territory bring in a wider
range of social and political interests, allowing the region to become a political arena
in its own right (Keating 1997). In its stronger forms, this can come close to a federal
system, as many observers have noted of Spain (Moreno 1997; Aja 2003). Regions
also have a key role as intermediaries, between central and local government and
between state and civil society even in cases, such as France, in which their statutory
responsibilities are limited (Négrier and Jouve 1998).
Students of federalism have recently come to make a distinction between federa-
tions in which the constituent units are merely territorial or functional, and those
in which they represent distinct historic, cultural, or national communities (Karmis
and Norman 2005). The same applies to devolved systems. This is not a legal or
strictly constitutional distinction, but it is an important political principle. Where
meso governments correspond to strong collective identities and devolution is used
to keep multinational states together, then there is a great sensitivity to symbolic
matters as well as the division of powers. The United Kingdom has in many ways
explicitly accepted that it is a multinational union, recognizing the four nations in
symbolic ways and giving each a distinct constitution. For many years, indeed, the
strongest argument advanced by opponents of devolution was precisely that the state
european devolution 431
is multinational and that therefore devolved assemblies would assume for themselves
the right of self-determination and probably secede (Dicey 1912; Wilson 1970). The
same fear is present in Spain, where parties in Madrid have generally been adamant
that there is a single Spanish nation and that the historic nationalities have no special
political status. After 2004, however, the Socialist government of José Luís Rodriguez
Zapatero has adopted the concept of the plurinational state, in which a diversity of
ways of being Spanish are recognized, so bringing Spain into line with the United
Kingdom. On the other hand, the Spanish parliament refused to accept the wording
of the revised statute of autonomy for Catalonia, stating that Catalonia was a nation.
Instead, it produced a tortuous preamble to the effect that the Catalan parliament
considered Catalonia to be a nation. A more serious dispute arose in the Basque
Country at the time of the transition over the fueros, or traditional privileges of the
Basque provinces, which Basque nationalists insist on as historic rights not owing
their existence to the constitution (Herrero de Miñon 1998). Eventually a compromise
was found, in an appendix to the constitution in which recognition is given to the his-
toric rights without accepting them as superior to the constitution itself. France has
resolutely resisted this idea and an apparently innocuous clause in Corsica’s statute of
autonomy referring to the ‘Corsican people’ was struck down by the constitutional
court.
23.4 The Division of Powers
.............................................................................................................................................
Powers are distributed between central and devolved governments in a variety of
ways. A classic distinction in federal systems, as to whether the lower units have a
general competence or merely assigned powers, arises here. French, Italian, and Polish
regions have assigned powers, hence their continuing ‘functional’ basis. In Spain,
the constitution lists powers that must be retained by the state, powers that must
be devolved to the autonomous communities, and powers that may be devolved.
There is also a confusing clause allowing other state functions to be transferred. In
Belgium, the central parliament decides which functions to transfer to the regions
and communities. Although the federal constitution supposedly leaves the state with
only assigned functions, leaving the residual powers to the lower level, it has not
been possible to realize this since it is necessary to decide for each power whether
the regions or the language communities will be the beneficiary. In Scotland and
Northern Ireland, only the reserved functions are specified, giving them a wider range
of competences than any other devolved governments in Europe, while Wales has only
specified powers.
In much of the literature, especially in Continental Europe, a distinction is made
between devolved regions with legislative powers and those that merely have admin-
istrative functions. There is some value in this distinction at the extremes, but at
432 michael keating
the margin it is often difficult to draw. So Italian regions have legislative powers
while the National Assembly for Wales until 2006 had only executive and secondary
legislative powers. Yet in Italy matters are subject to legislation that in the United
Kingdom would be dealt with by orders in council or executive action, so that it does
not follow that Italian regions had more scope than did Wales. Spanish autonomous
communities have legislative powers but they work within framework laws that limit
their policy choices, while the Scottish parliament works under no such restriction
and can repeal any law that does not fall within the reserved powers. Westminster
continues to insist on the right to legislate in Scotland within devolved fields although
there is a convention that it will seek the assent of the Scottish parliament first. If this
consent is not forthcoming, Westminster might insist on legislating anyway, but the
Scottish parliament could just repeal the law the next day. French regions do not
have legislative powers but constitutional reforms in 2004 did move some little way
in this direction. A pan-European association, the Regions with Legislative Powers,
was established in the early 2000s, in view of the negotiations on the new European
constitutional treaty, but membership was in practice more a matter of political
standing than of a rigorous distinction between regions with legislative powers and
those without.
Governments have been reluctant to concede tax-raising powers to devolved levels,
preferring to occupy the main tax fields themselves and to transfer resources down-
wards according to various formulas. They have also tended to transfer money for
specific services, often with detailed regulations on its use. Over time, however, they
have moved to block transfers and allowed regional governments to raise more of
their own revenue. This is because of the difficulties of maintaining detailed control
from the centre and a realization that they were taking the political blame for raising
taxes and allowing regions to gain the credit for providing the services. Fiscal devo-
lution can thus paradoxically strengthen the autonomy of the centre. So in all cases
there is now a mixture of locally raised taxation and transfers from the centre, based
on relative wealth so as to achieve a degree of equalization. In Spain and Belgium,
devolved authorities now have a share of national taxation in addition to a range
of smaller taxes of their own. Italian regions collect the national health service levy
which counts as own revenue. French regions do not have access to national taxation
but collect some local taxes.
There has also been pressure from below, especially from better-off regions, to
decide on levels of service and taxation and to reduce intergovernmental transfers.
Typically the wealthy regions start off by insisting that they do not want to reduce
redistribution to their poorer neighbours, merely to make it explicit and quantifiable.
The effect, however, is to politicize the issue of equalization and allow politicians
to complain about cross-subsidization and unequal burdens. This has become a
significant issue in Belgium, where Flanders complains about subsidizing Wallonia;
in Italy, where the northern regions complain about subsidizing the south; and in
Spain where Catalonia insists that its contribution to the rest of Spain is excessive. It
would be a mistake, however, to conclude that decentralization necessarily leads to a
reduction in territorial equity. Centralized systems, where resources are distributed
european devolution 433
on a functional basis, often conceal large territorial disparities, which devolution
reveals. This may then create pressure for more explicit fiscal equalization, as has
happened in the United Kingdom.
23.5 Intergovernmental Relations
.............................................................................................................................................
In any system of devolution, there is a sphere of matters reserved to the centre, a
sphere devolved to the regions, and a large area of shared and overlapping responsi-
bilities. This puts a premium on intergovernmental cooperation and all the systems
under consideration have a set of mechanisms to discuss common issues and resolve
conflicts. In Spain there are sectoral conferences over a range of matters. Italy has
a State–Regions conference. Belgium has a series of ministerial conferences and a
national conciliation committee. France does not have a similar mechanism. Liai-
son with the state is the responsibility of the regional prefects who are supposed
to be the sole channel of communication with the centre, but in practice there
are numerous links with sectoral ministries in Paris. In all cases, indeed, political
mechanisms for resolving intergovernmental disputes and coordinating policy are
more important than formal conferences. In Spain, Belgium, and to some extent
Italy 2 the political parties are the key device for coordination. In France, personal
networks, a long-standing feature of French politics, play the main role. Local and
regional politicians continue to hold national mandates and prefects will take care
to keep the main local notables on side. The technical bureaucracy, present at
all levels, also serves to sustain continuity and common ideas on problems and
policies.
Devolution, as was noted at the beginning, is a way of reconciling the unity of
the state with the transfer of powers to its component parts short of full federation.
There are various ways in which the prerogatives of the regions are safeguarded and
protected from arbitrary intervention. In Spain and Belgium the regions feature in the
constitution and their powers cannot be reduced unilaterally by central government.
There are override clauses in Spain, but these are clearly intended only for drastic
circumstances and subject to the jurisdiction of the Constitutional Court. During the
1980s there was a lot of litigation as the boundaries of devolved and reserved matters
were set, but since then disputes have tended to be resolved politically (Aja 2003).
Italian regions also feature in the constitution, although they were not actually set
up until more than twenty years later and received their powers slowly over a long
period. Efforts to entrench them more strongly in the constitution have foundered in
recent years on party politics as successive governments have rejected the proposals
introduced by their predecessors. In Belgium the regions and communities have
2
In Italy, the parties were of critical importance before the collapse of the party system in the early
1990s.
434 michael keating
strong constitutional protection, although the fact that national governments are now
made up of coalitions of regional-based parties means that they are not seriously
threatened. French regions had no constitutional status until 2004 and owed their
existence to ordinary legislation.
In all the European cases, a devolved level of regional government has been inserted
into an existing system containing central and local government. While there have
been many proposals to abolish existing tiers of provincial, departmental, or county
government, this has never happened. Consequently, devolved regions have had to
compete with existing territorial governments for political profile and functional
competences. This has seriously weakened regional governments in France and Italy,
where the prerogatives of the department/province and of the municipalities are
guaranteed by law and constitution and these serve as power bases for important
politicians. In Belgium and Spain, on the other hand, the meso level is predominant
and has become the main territorial power base.
Another key area of intergovernmental relations concerns links to European
decision-making. In the Treaty of European Union (Maastricht Treaty), regions
gained a consultative forum, the Committee of the Regions, and the right to par-
ticipate in the Council of Ministers where their own national law permits it (Jeffery
2000). In these cases, regions must speak for the state as a whole and not just for
themselves, so maintaining the unity of the state in its external dimension. French
and Polish regions have no place in determining national policy on European matters.
They are present in the Committee of the Regions but not in the Council of Ministers.
In Spain and Belgium there are provisions for regions (and Belgian communities) to
be consulted on European matters and to participate in the Council. The strongest
position is in Belgium, where regions and communities have a right to participate and
even to lead the Belgian delegation where regional or community matters are at stake.
In Spain since 2006 there is provision for regional participation in a predetermined
set of fields, but the predominant power remains with the centre, as is still the case in
the United Kingdom; a weaker arrangement exists in Italy.
23.6 The United Kingdom in Comparison
.............................................................................................................................................
The United Kingdom is an extreme example of attempts to reconcile the unitary
state with the devolution of power, with a mixture of forms of government across
the state and even within its component parts. The United Kingdom is more asym-
metrical than any of the other cases, with no effort at uniformity save the covering
clause that it is all subject to parliamentary supremacy. This reflects the weakness
in British constitutional tradition of the concept of the state and the idea that it
is a ‘union’ rather than a single entity, yet the constitutional implications of this
have never really been worked out. It is the most explicitly multinational of the
european devolution 435
devolution settlements, giving the constituent units a symbolic recognition as nations
well beyond that conceded elsewhere. Yet on the other hand, it insists that the
devolved bodies are creatures of statute, emanations of the will of parliament, and
have no entrenched or sovereign rights of their own. This creates tensions in con-
stitutional interpretation similar to those that have arisen in Spain as to whether
the rights of the nations are original or not (Keating 2001; Tierney 2004). Opinion
in Scotland continues to see Scotland as possessed of elements of sovereign rights
and the union as the result of negotiation and agreement; Westminster doctrine
disagrees.
Scotland possesses a high degree of legislative devolution with the full set of par-
liamentary, executive, and administrative institutions and a broad set of responsi-
bilities as a general-purpose government. Its relationship with the United Kingdom
is a quasi-federal one, like the Spanish autonomous communities. The same might
be said for Northern Ireland, although the provision for it to secede and join the
Republic of Ireland is unique in Europe. Wales has a system of executive devolution,
which might be compared to the weaker Spanish autonomous communities, before
the full transfer of powers. It is, like them, an evolving system in which legislative
competences are being acquired gradually. England was left with a system of func-
tional regionalism rather similar to that of the period 1964–79 or to France before the
election of regional councils in 1986. The failed devolution proposals, rejected in the
North-East in 2004, would have brought English regions more in line with post-1986
France; now it is headed to centralization.
As elsewhere, intergovernmental relations in the United Kingdom are informal,
with political channels predominating over official committees. There has, in contrast
to Spain, been very little litigation although that might change given a difference in
political control at the two levels. Fiscal powers for devolved governments are also
weak although there is a debate about this and it is likely that the United Kingdom
will follow other European states in giving more fiscal responsibility to the lower
levels.
The devolution settlement in the United Kingdom is, as Charlie Jeffery notes in
this volume, unstable. It is not unique in this. Belgium for the last thirty years
has been on a path of constitutional reform that leads to periodic adjustments
of the territorial balance. Regions in Spain are engaged in a path of competition
for more competences, so that whatever is conceded to the historic nationalities is
demanded by the others (Moreno 1997). In the United Kingdom, the English regions
have not, as many expected, reacted similarly to Scottish and Welsh devolution, but
Scotland and Wales will certainly gain more powers, so that asymmetries are likely
to increase. This makes the United Kingdom an extreme example of the spatial
rescaling that is taking place across Europe more generally, as the territorial, social,
cultural, economic, and jurisdictional boundaries of the polity correspond ever less
(Keating 2001; Bartolini 2005). The devolution formula has its limits and, at some
point, the pretence that we have a unitary state merely lending authority to devolved
governments, but retaining ultimate power and sovereignty, will be exposed as a
constitutional fiction. Reinventing the old unitary state, or even the symmetrical
436 michael keating
federation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, is unlikely to be
possible; while secession commands little support among the regions and stateless
nations of Europe. It is probable, then, that devolution will give way to a looser and
even more asymmetrical form of confederation, nested in a broader European order
(Keating 2001).
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Wilson, C. 1970. ‘Note of Dissent’. In Scotland’s Government: Report of the Scottish Constitu-
tional Committee. Edinburgh: Scottish Constitutional Committee.
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p a r t iii
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IDENTITIES
.................................................................................................................
Section Eight:
Identification
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 24
.................................................................................................................
POLITICAL
PA RTIES
.................................................................................................................
richard heffernan
The three dominant British political parties, Labour, the Conservatives, and the
Liberal Democrats, can trace their inheritance back to the latter part of the nineteenth
century and beyond. Of contemporary minor parties, setting aside the Scottish and
Welsh nationalists, only the UK Independence Party has been created in the past
ten years. Other smaller parties, among them the Greens and the far-right BNP,
lay claim to long established peripheral political traditions. Parties—and the party
system within which they operate—clearly reflect the history within which politics
has been forged. They are impacted by—and sometimes shape—the environmental
contexts within which party politics is enacted. There are four such environmental
contexts:
r the institutional environment (constitutional imperatives, the political system,
the electoral rules);
r electoral environment (party system, the electoral strength, status and standing
of parties; modes of electioneering);
r ideational environment (ideological appeal and relevance); and
r socio-economic environment (economic successes or failures; social, cultural,
and demographic changes).
These contexts frame the boundaries within which parties operate. The first envi-
ronment, the institutional, is invariably fixed. Constitutional imperatives change,
if at all, usually only at the margin. Britain’s parliamentary system has been sig-
nificantly reworked, not least in terms of European Union membership since 1973
and Scottish and Welsh devolution since 1999 but, emergent forms of multi-level
442 richard heffernan
governance notwithstanding, many features of the Westminster–Whitehall model
remain in place. The second environment, the electoral, essentially pickled in aspic by
the two-party system between 1945 and 1970, has become increasingly volatile since
1974. The last two environmental contexts, the ideational and the socio-economic,
both of which help determine the set of policy approaches considered permissible or
achievable, significantly impact all parties by affecting their programmatic objectives.
Party programmes, influenced by the ideational environment, reflect their current
ideological orientation. This orientation, while reflecting the party’s historical form
as being of either left or right, progressive or conservative, is subject to periodic
renewal, most likely in response to electoral realities and the demands imposed by
socio-economic and cultural factors.
Party actions, reflecting often complex intra- and inter-party processes, owe much
to electoral outcomes and likely electoral outcomes. These reflect the realities of the
prevailing party system. Such a party system, the ‘particular pattern of competitive
and cooperative interactions displayed by a given set of political parties’ (Webb
2000: 1), determines the given set of parties in play at any one time. Britain’s party
system, like others a product of historical processes (Lipset and Rokkan 1967; Rose
and Unwin 1970; Mair 1989), has undergone significant changes in recent years,
something reflecting long-standing electoral trends and the demise of the old left–
right programmatic differences reflected in the old Labour–Conservative dichotomy.
British parties, in keeping with counterparts elsewhere, have additionally undergone
an organizational metamorphosis in the past fifty or so years. Parties tend now to be
‘electoral professional’ (Panebianco 1988) and no longer possess a mass membership
base. Today’s ‘catch-all parties’, no longer over-dependent on certain occupational or
demographic groups, seek support from all sections of society and are increasingly
directed by a predominant party leadership. As a result, subject to the mediating
environments listed above, the party’s programmatic appeal and electioneering strat-
egy are all—now more than ever—heavily influenced by the party leadership, with
the party leader as Prime Minister or would-be Prime Minister playing a central
role.
24.1 Parties and the British
Parliamentary System
.............................................................................................................................................
British parties reflect the constitutional norms of parliamentary politics. Their modus
operandi echoes centralizing tendencies inherent within Britain’s majoritarian, uni-
tary state (Lijphart 1999) which imposes the following key imperatives:
r a unitary state which, even if it has ceded power and authority upwards, down-
wards, and outwards to the market, agencies, quangos, devolved governments,
political parties 443
and international institutions, still exerts a considerable influence over govern-
ment outputs;
r a dominant executive form, namely, so far, single-party government, something
facilitated by the single-member plurality electoral system; and
r asymmetrical executive–legislative relations where the party-led executive,
granted a workable Commons majority, can significantly lead (if never peremp-
torily command) a reactive asymmetrical bicameral legislature.
A comparison of parliamentary, unitary Britain with the presidential, federal United
States shows how institutional imperatives impact party form. In the USA the party’s
presidential candidate does not direct the policy stance on which federal legislative
candidates seek election and has no say over the local platforms offered by state
candidates. In Britain, however, it is the party leader—the Prime Minister or the
prime ministerial candidate and their staffs—who, in consultation with other key
party figures, draws up the manifesto presented to the electorate. The structures of US
parties, organized at state and federal levels, divided at the federal level into legislative
branch (therein subdivided into House and Senate) and executive branch, reflect the
horizontal and vertical separation of powers created by its presidential and federal
regime. British political parties, even when an unintended consequence of Scottish
and Welsh devolution has been to partly ‘semi-federalise’ the Scottish and Welsh
components of the national parties (Laffin and Shaw 2007), largely reflect a British
majoritarian impulse not to separate power.
In Britain electors tend to vote for a party candidate in support of the party’s
national political image, programmatic stance, and, increasingly some say, in support
of its candidate for Prime Minister. While a US President might have congressional
coat-tails—and may influence mid-term congressional elections—Senators and Con-
gressmen usually get themselves elected with only some help—usually financial—
from their state and ‘national’ party. In Britain election to the House of Commons
owes much to an MP’s party affiliation and little to an MP’s personal attributes. A
sizeable national swing, such as the one that swept away the Conservatives in 1997,
will unseat the able and the wretched MP, the loyal and the rebellious. In the USA,
election to Congress owes more to the individual attributes of the candidate, his or
her policy stances, the predilections of his or her state or district, than it does to their
party affiliation.
Single-party government, hitherto the British norm since 1945, save Labour’s
minority administrations of 1974 and 1977–9 and the whittling away of John Major’s
majority after 1993, reflects the fact that the single-member plurality system (SMPS)
invariably grants the party with the largest minority of votes a majority of Com-
mons seats. British MPs see themselves as being Labour, Conservative, or Liberal
Democrat MPs. Their service in the Commons is refracted through their party
affiliation. Loyalty to the party line, even when not particularly married to ability,
is rewarded; rebellion, even allied to ability, is not. In spite of recent fractious-
ness among Labour MPs (Cowley 2005), the parliamentary party remains the key
support mechanism for the Prime Minister and his or her government, particularly
444 richard heffernan
when the government delivers significant public goods such as electoral popularity
and political success. MPs toe the party line for a number of reasons, foremost
among them policy agreement, partisan disposition, and self-interest. The majority
party inevitably prioritizes supplying and supporting the government over trying
to check and balance it. Of course, MPs are not rubber stamps. Not all always
reply ‘how high’ when asked to jump by their party whip. Leaders have to nego-
tiate with MPs, sometimes cajole or coerce them into supporting government pol-
icy, other times plead with them to do so, and have sometimes to back down,
accept unwelcome amendments, or make concessions to win support (Cowley 2005;
Norton 2005).
It is through its parliamentary party that the British government is granted control
over the legislature. Party dependence works both ways, however, because, in addition
to being able to lead their parliamentary party, party leaders have only the leasehold
of their party leadership, not the freehold. As John Major observed, ‘Every leader is
leader only with the support of his party’ (Major 1999: 626). Both Margaret Thatcher
(peremptorily and brutally) and Tony Blair (gradually and politely) left Downing
Street when a critical mass of their MPs no longer wanted them to stay. For Prime
Ministers and their governments the party is both an exemplary resource and a
significant constraint. It can be the seed of weakness, but, for the more powerful
leader, it is more likely a source of authority. Parties, being a leadership (collegial)
resource, not only the leader’s (personalized) resource, are the tool of the leader-
ship elite as a whole. They remain ‘coalitions of the willing’ and, in partisan terms,
being opponents of their competitors, define themselves by being mechanisms to
elect a party government, not simply propel the party leader into office as Prime
Minister.
Partisanship, despite significant (sometimes stark) intra-party differences, remains
the glue binding parties together. The 1981 split within the Parliamentary Labour
Party aside, when some 10 per cent of Labour MPs defected to form the SDP (Crewe
and King 1995), British parliamentary parties, the occasional individual defection
aside, remain hardy, robust institutions. This is why the importance of the party face
in the present-day House of Commons—and in British politics more generally—
cannot be overestimated. The likelihood of a minority of MPs voting against their
party whip is growing (Cowley 2005), but, ministerial concession to and compromise
with rebels and would-be rebels aside, long a feature of the parliamentary process,
such rebels rarely defeat the government. The Blair government lost only 4 out of
3,089 divisions in ten years and even the most rebellious Labour MP still voted
with the Labour whip some 90 per cent of the time. In Britain, as elsewhere in
Europe, what is referred to as parliamentary democracy might be seen as being a
party democracy (Muller and Strom 1999). The parliamentary imperative at the heart
of the British constitution helps frame the ‘behaviour of parties, the preferences
of their leaders, and the conditions which affect the formation of governments in
politics with distinct institutional structures’ (Montero and Gunther 2002: 13), some-
thing which makes it the dominant institutional environment with which parties
engage.
political parties 445
24.2 Parties, Voters, and Elections
.............................................................................................................................................
The electoral environment, not least the party system it shapes, exerts the greatest
short-term impact on parties and distinguishes major from minor parties (Kirch-
heimer 1966; Sartori 1976; Mair 1983). Two-party alternation in government has been
the post-1945 norm but there have been ‘four different party systems during the
twentieth century, from 1906 to 1914, from 1918 to 1931, from 1935 to 1970 and from
1974 to 1997’ (Bogdanor 2004: 718). Before 1945, excepting 1906–10, 1922–3, 1924–9,
and 1935–40, coalition or minority government was the dominant pattern. After 1945,
setting aside the peculiarities of Northern Ireland, the party system has taken the
following forms:
r the 1945–70 period, the classic era of two-party majoritarianism, characterized
by the fact that Labour and the Conservatives won an average of 90.3 per cent of
the vote between them;
r the 1970–97 period, perhaps best described as the emergence of a ‘two-party-plus
others’ system as the dominance of Labour and the Conservatives was challenged
by the emergence of the third party, the Liberal Democrats (and their predecessor
parties, the Liberals and the SDP), and also by the growth of nationalist parties
in Scotland and Wales; and
r the post-1997 period, which has seen the final demise of the two-party system
and its fragmentation into a ‘three party plus others’ system and the emergence
of distinct party systems in elections to the Scottish parliament and the Welsh
and London assemblies. Whereas 96.8 per cent of voters supported either Labour
or the Conservatives on a turnout of 82.5 per cent in 1951 only 67.6 per cent of
voters did so in 2005 when turnout had fallen to 61.2 per cent. The emergence
of a multi-party system at Westminster (and, so far, a coalition government in
Whitehall) remains stymied, however, by Britain’s plurality electoral system.
This reworked party system, even when Labour and the Conservatives still seem-
ingly alternate as single-party governments, reflects far reaching changes in electoral
alignments (Ware 1996). It also reflects the emergence of what Webb describes as
‘latent moderate pluralism’ (2000). Previously electors associated themselves ‘psy-
chologically with one or other of the parties, and this identification ha[d] predictable
relationships with their perceptions, evaluations and actions’ (Campbell et al. 1960:
90; Butler and Stokes 1974). Since the 1970s, partisan dealignment meant that, as party
identification fell and issue voting increased, parties found themselves adrift from
their past electoral mooring (Denver 2004; Clarke et al. 2004). British voters now far
less identify with a party and, as witnessed in the dramatic decline in turnout from
77.7 per cent in 1992 to 59.4 per cent in 2001 (against the background of a post-war
average of 75 per cent), they are less likely to vote. Voting electors are now far more
conditional in their support. As Denver suggests, ‘the transition from an aligned and
socialised electorate to a dealigned and judgemental electorate . . . has underpinned
electoral developments in Britain over the past half century’ (Denver 2004: 124). As
446 richard heffernan
a result, parties operate within an unstable and unreliable electoral marketplace. The
Conservative share of the vote ranged between 41.4 and 49.3 and Labour’s between
49.4 and 43.9 per cent in the elections held from 1945 to 1970, but the Conservative
share was between 44.9 and 30.7 per cent and Labour’s between 44.3 and 28.3 per cent
in the elections between 1974 and 2005. Whereas a 46.4 per cent share of the vote gave
the Conservatives a Commons majority of 31 in 1970 it took only a 35.3 per cent share
to give Labour a majority of 66 in 2005.
When electoral ties of attachment become looser, electoral behaviour becomes
more volatile. Dunleavy argues that more proportional elections in London, Scotland,
Wales, and for the European parliament means voters now ‘support a multiplicity
of parties and are disillusioned with the grip of an artificially maintained “two-
party” politics’ (Dunleavy 2005: 503). As a result, he suggests, multi-party politics
in Britain and its constituent nations has now become a reality (2005; 2006). Yet,
while voters might cast their votes slightly wider than Labour, the Conservatives, and
the Liberal Democrats in second-order elections to the Scottish parliament, Welsh
assembly, and the much less important European parliament, the three major parties
still together won 90.7 per cent in 2001 and 89.7 per cent in 2005 in elections to the
House of Commons. All three parties currently hold between them 95.5 per cent of
Commons seats. Voters for the House of Commons might no longer want to vote
only Labour or Conservative (something that has been happening since 1974), but
they do not yet remotely vote in significant numbers for parties beyond the Liberal
Democrats and the SNP and Plaid Cyrmu in Scotland and Wales. At Westminster the
old two-party system no longer exists (the Liberal Democrats, while presently unable
to form a government on their own, are surely now an unshakeable electoral fixture)
but in Whitehall the two-party ‘plus others’ system presently persists. It persists,
thanks to SMPS, in terms of Commons seat share and by making it almost certain
that—short of a hung parliament—only Labour or the Conservatives can secure the
necessary sufficient support to form a single-party government. This, despite changes
in the party system beyond Westminster, is the reality with which parties presently
grapple. It will surely remain the reality until swept away in a hung parliament when
(assumedly) the Liberal Democrats can leverage electoral reform from either Labour
or the Conservatives as the price for entering a coalition.
Modern parties are presently affected by two specific electoral environmental
changes reflecting the unconditionality with which general election voters cast their
ballots:
r emergent changes in established electorates of belonging, from which parties
draw support, something reflected in declining levels of party identification; and
r the rise of judgemental voting, which obliges parties to pay ever closer atten-
tion to leaders, images, and issues. Parties have to—or perceive they have to—
compete with one another for vote, and office, by convincing an ever more
sceptical electorate that they have a more attractive set of leading politicians and
policies than their opponents (Denver 2004; Clarke et al. 2004).
Social structural change prompts changes in the electoral alignments upon which
parties draw. Such alignments have been further altered by the rise of issue-based
political parties 447
competition and changes in the value orientations of parties and their electors. Now,
in light of low turnouts and a declining vote share, parties recognize the contingent
nature of their electoral support. In such circumstances, particularly amid the rise
of issue voting (Clarke et al. 2004; Evans and Norris 1999), party competition has
become more, not less, important. As a result, party image and appeal, not least that
of its leadership, has been placed at the heart of a party’s electioneering strategy.
24.3 Party Leadership Pre-eminence as
Modern Organizational Form
.............................................................................................................................................
British parties, while unitary actors, contain sub-groups, factions, and fractions. They
have, at times quite starkly, been fractiously divided into left and right, moderates and
radicals, as evidenced by infighting within the Labour Party in 1951–5 and 1979–85 and
the Conservatives’ division over Europe in 1992–5. Parties are not always congenial
places. Churchill famously reminded an ambitious MP that in the House of Com-
mons he ‘faced his opponents on the other side of the House, but sat surrounded
by enemies on his own side’. Intra-party differences, especially when parties under-
perform or are in crisis, are the stuff of the Westminster village. Yet, irrespective of
such recurrent division, parties, perpetually divided into leaders and led, have long
been hierarchical in form, more often than not publicly united in purpose (despite
the presence of off-stage bickering), something reflecting the majoritarian British
political tradition.
A party leader, serving at the sufferance of their parliamentary party, who is able
to use their resources wisely, make concessions when necessary, and deliver the goods
the party seeks, will possess considerable authority. As McKenzie famously noted in
the 1950s, party leaders take note of the obstacle of party opinion, but the distribution
of power within parties has long been skewed in their favour. As a result, ‘Effective
decision making authority will reside with the leadership groups thrown up by the
parliamentary parties (of whom much the most important individual is the party
leader), and they will exercise this authority so long as they retain the confidence of
their parliamentary parties’ (McKenzie 1964: 635). The conundrum McKenzie drew
attention to is that parties, nominally internally democratic, are in practice run by
their parliamentary elite. All party leaders, Conservative and Labour alike, have been
perceived to dominate (if never to totally command) their parties. Today, such is
the degree of leadership predominance, the party in government (and the party
frontbench in opposition), being both forms of the ‘party in public office’, has become
ever more visible and significant.
This leadership predominance owes much, in keeping with their continental coun-
terparts, to British parties having metamorphosed from old-style pre-democratic
448 richard heffernan
‘cadre’ parties, large membership-based ‘mass bureaucratic’ parties, to today’s
‘catch-all’ ‘electoral professional’ parties (Kirchheimer 1966; Daalder and Mair 1983;
Panebianco 1988; Muller and Strom 1999). Organizational change is a one-way street;
parties first take on one form and then another. Such change, while linear, ‘is sug-
gestive: models of parties are “ideal types” that do not always neatly correspond to
real-world political parties. Instead, most parties contain a mix of characteristics of
different types, although usually one or another is sufficiently pronounced as to allow
the analyst to characterise parties as loose enough to one or the other as to be placed
within the typology’ (Montero and Gunther 2002: 21–2). Today British parties are
‘electoral professional’, elite driven, top-down organizations, best described as ‘mod-
ern cadre parties’. An electoral professional party has the following characteristics:
r professionals with expertise in electoral mobilization are in charge of election
campaigning;
r weak vertical ties to social groups and broader appeals to the ‘opinion electorate’;
r the pre-eminence of public representatives and personalized leadership;
r financing through interest groups and public funds; and
r an emphasis on issues and leadership (Panebianco 1988: 264).
Recent party reforms, including some forms of plebiscitory democracy seeking mem-
ber approval of leadership initiatives, enable parliamentary leaders to form policy,
particularly when established forms of party democracy, based on the annual confer-
ence or the party executive, are downgraded. Obviously, ‘the often disorganised and
atomised mass membership of the party . . . is likely to prove more deferential to the
party leadership and more willing to endorse its proposals. It is in this sense that the
empowerment of the party on the ground remains compatible with, and may actually
serve as a strategy for, the privileging of the party in public office’ (Katz and Mair 2002:
129). Party leaders have ‘the power of the drafter and the agenda setter, it fixes the basic
parameters of political acceptability. Wants and demands that are deemed unaccept-
able will be suppressed or deflected via the numerous gateways operated by official
gatekeepers’ (Shaw 2004: 61). Parties may thus be said to have been ‘hollowed out’ as
extra-parliamentary parties; while able to elect (or help elect) the party leader from a
shortlist presented to them by the parliamentary party when there is a vacancy, they
make little contribution to policy formation other than by occasionally endorsing—
and thereby legitimating—the agenda of the party leadership.
There is, in addition to the standing divide between the parliamentary party
and the extra-parliamentary party, division within the parliamentary party, between
senior frontbenchers, other frontbenchers, and backbenchers. Parliamentary parties,
believing that political leadership is the key ‘medium of political discourse and
information’ (Foley 2000: 230), build themselves around party leaders. In modern
politics the leader is, in Foley’s illuminating phrase, ‘stretched’ (ibid.) away from other
MPs. This usually empowers the party leader, but may also disempower him or her;
being praised in good times means he or she is disproportionately blamed in bad
times. Leadership does not, however, make the Prime Minister a ‘president’ (Foley
2000; 2004; Poguntke and Webb 2005) because, by being an authoritative Prime
political parties 449
Minister, the party leader is more influential by being a parliamentary chief executive
(Heffernan 2005). Authoritative and popular leaders (exemplified by Tony Blair at his
peak) centralize their control over ‘the location and distribution of effective decision
making authority within the party’ (Janda 1980: 108). Such changes in the party’s
organizational form, ‘motivated by the desire to enhance the policy making autonomy
of the leadership’ (Webb 2004: 29), mean that the tight control of policy formulation,
campaign strategy, and the management of finance and party administration are now
key leadership prerogatives which are (at best) only delegated to a party apparatus
which is firmly under the control of (or in sync with) the party leadership, not other
frontbench MPs (and certainly not those on the backbenches). Tony Blair and his
allies (alongside Gordon Brown and his) ran New Labour after 1994, in the words
of Blair’s strategist, Philip Gould, by replacing ‘competing existing structures with a
single chain of command leading directly to the leader of the party . . . [and by having]
one ultimate source of campaigning authority . . . the leader’ (Gould 1998: 240–2).
The centrality of the party leader–Prime Minister owes much to the ongoing
personalization of politics, something considerably reinforced by the centrality of
the news media in the practice of politics. The personalization of politics is, in
itself, nothing new. The Conservative 1945 manifesto was entitled ‘Mr Churchill’s
Declaration of Policy’ and leaders such as Churchill, not to mention Gladstone,
Disraeli, Lloyd George, and Thatcher, at times bestrode their political scene. In
contemporary politics, however, personalization has reached unimagined heights.
Party leaders, ever eager to be empowered, less constrained by the party mechanism,
use the media to agenda-set within their own parties. A leader is empowered
when the news media report him or her as successful and popular, but naturally
disempowered when reported as a failure and liability. Leaders use the news media
not only to advantage their party, but to advantage themselves, particularly by raising
their public profile and demonstrating their indispensability. This further encourages
the party’s electoral professional propensities, particularly when leader-centric
parties use the media to showcase leading politicians, and so serves to further ‘hollow
out’ the political party.
There are, naturally, intra-party limits on the degree of autonomy the party lead-
ership may command. Party disunity is largely dependent upon the ideational differ-
ences at stake, but the degree to which disunity divides the party is largely dependent
upon the leeway granted the party’s ‘dominant coalition’ (now reflecting the interest
of the leadership) to lead the party in its chosen direction. Such leeway, should the
leadership’s grip on the party be reinforced by it being popular and successful, is
forthcoming more often than not. Still, (fewer) formal and (many more) informal
limits ensure that even the most powerful party leaders merely lead, never command,
their party. Leaders are, at best, authoritative and powerful, never omnipotent. All
know they may one day be replaced. Harold Wilson, when asked who would replace
him should he be knocked down by a bus, replied ‘probably the person driving the
bus’. Margaret Thatcher was brought down in 1990 by her parliamentary party, not the
electorate. Iain Duncan Smith was unseated by a formal vote of no confidence by MPs
in 2003, and the public declaration of twenty-five Liberal Democrat MPs that they
450 richard heffernan
would not serve on a frontbench led by Charles Kennedy required Kennedy to stand
down in 2006. Even Tony Blair, who wanted to serve a full third term as Prime Min-
ister, was obliged by party MPs (largely supporters of his Chancellor, Gordon Brown)
to leave office earlier than he wished even when doing so by a timetable of his making.
The widening of the franchise to elect the party leader beyond the parliamentary
party, a reform first fought for by the extra-parliamentary Labour left, has served to
strengthen, not weaken, the party leader. Formal leadership challenges are extremely
rare, with only three in the Labour Party (two of those, in 1961 and 1988, having no
remote chance of success) and five in the Conservative Party since 1945. Leaders depart
of their own volition, usually following electoral defeat or through ill-health. The
wider electoral franchise makes it more difficult for a vote of no confidence in the
leader to be organized and it creates high nomination barriers deterring would-be
challengers. These impose high eviction costs which help make leaders more secure
in office, not less (Quinn 2005). Leaders have to be reasonably successful, be popular,
and avoid scandal to remain secure in office. They must take careful note of what
their party will tolerate and carry sufficient of their parliamentary party—and a base
within the wider party—with them. Leaders have, above all, carefully to manage
their senior parliamentary colleagues, as Tony Blair’s relationship with Gordon Brown
demonstrates (Seldon 2004; 2007; Peston 2005).
24.4 Members, Money, and Modes
of Campaigning
.............................................................................................................................................
The state regulation of British parties, previously ‘treated as if their constitutional
significance was akin to that of golf or tennis clubs’ (Bogdanor 2004: 717–18), has
increased, not decreased, in the past ten years. Parties, thanks to the Registration of
Political Parties Act 1998, and the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act
2000, are now legally obliged to be increasingly transparent, not least in terms of their
sources of funding. Such regulation is likely to increase in the future. Limits are likely
to be applied to the type of monies parties can raise (any donation over £5,000 has
now to be declared) and the ways in which they spend money. Election expenditure
is now capped at £20 million—in the campaign itself—and this rule is likely to be
tightened and could be extended to cover the period running up to an election.
24.4.1 Members
Some 98.5 per cent of the British population do not belong to a political party
(Gamble and Wright 2002: 123). Younger, better-educated citizens are less likely to
have a party attachment or to join a political party. The handful of new members
tend to be inactive and to let their membership lapse. Labour Party membership,
rising briefly under Tony Blair in 1994–7, has been falling for thirty years. From a
political parties 451
claimed membership of 265,000 in 1994 Labour membership increased to 405,000 in
1997, but then more than halved after 1997. In 2002 Labour claimed a membership
of 248,294 and 177,000 in 2007. In 2007 only 53 per cent cast a postal ballot in the
deputy leadership election and, while Labour claims some 3,006,216 levy-paying
union members and 43,405 people belonging to other affiliated organizations, less
than 300,000 participated in that election. The Conservatives had 2,805,032 members
in 1952 but only 247,394 in 2006. Where some 256,797 Conservative members cast
ballots in the leadership election in 2001, only 198,844 did so in 2005. Some 52,036
Liberal Democrat members voted in the ballot electing Ming Campbell leader in
2006, but only 41,465 cast votes in 2007 when electing Nick Clegg. Of minor British
parties the Greens claimed a membership of 7,000 and UKIP some 18,000 in 2006.
The decline in party membership owes something to the post-1960s rise of pressure
groups and the rise of social movements, new emergent forms of group-based politics
organized around identity and individualism. Such ‘new’ political issues have little
in common with the traditional left–right economic issues that previously delin-
eated the partisan boundaries between the two major parties (Inglehart 1990; Dalton
2002). Political cynicism, something encouraged by the personalization of politics,
the media’s propensity to prioritize the reportage of bad news and scandal, and by
unmet expectations by parties when in government, surely also plays some part in
falling membership.
Party leaders, while valuing party members as a source of legitimacy, financial
backing, and campaigning muscle, are seemingly resigned to membership decline.
Many would probably prefer their party to be backed by observant supporters (not
participating members, who have to be both serviced and managed) who could cheer
the leadership, be hit on for money, and be mobilized at election time. With declining
membership comes the professionalization of the party ranks. The thinning ranks of
‘amateur’ party members can be increasingly distinguished from the ‘professional’
party members; young, ambitious would-be politicians, many working as party offi-
cials, special advisers, or parliamentary staffers or else employed in think tanks,
trade unions, or the growing number of political consultancies. It is the latter who
increasingly people party structures. The professionalization of MPs, where middle-
class, university-educated career politicians carve out a niche in public life before
becoming MPs, is not only a modern fact of the parliamentary scene, but a key feature
of the modern political party.
24.4.2 Money
Party funding has long proved a thorny problem. Parliamentary salaries and
allowances, variously paid to MPs, MEPs, MSPs, and AMs, provide a considerable
indirect financial benefit to parties with elected public representatives. Officials, often
the public face of the party, are the party’s representative in the constituency as well
as the constituency’s representative in parliament. Public funding, not least the Short
money paid to opposition parties represented in parliament, has since the mid-1970s
played a key role in facilitating the work of opposition parties. With the collapse of
452 richard heffernan
their subscription-based membership base (and with expensive professional election
campaigns becoming the rule) parties have had to resort to fundraising from new
sources. For instance, of some £66 million donated to Labour between 2001 and 2005,
64 per cent was provided by trade unions, but some 25 per cent was drawn from
thirty-seven wealthy individuals. Large donations from wealthy individuals (includ-
ing Lord Sainsbury, Blair’s one-time science minister, who donated some £16 million
between 1995 and 2005) have been the mainstay of Labour’s finances since 1997. The
same is true for the Conservatives.
Fundraising has become imperative as election costs have soared, not least in terms
of the need to facilitate the permanent campaigning that parties now undertake.
Labour’s income of £26.9 million in 2003, £29.3 million in 2004, and £35.3 million in
2005 was set against expenditure of £24.3 million in 2003, £32.1 million in 2004, and
£49.8 million in the election year of 2005. Some 80 per cent of Labour’s expenditure
might have been spent on day-to-day running costs, but elections impose consider-
able financial pressures. Labour spent £10,945,119 on its 2001 election campaign and
£17,939,617 in 2005; the Conservatives spent £12,751,813 and £17,852,240 and the Liberal
Democrats £1,361,377 and £4,324,574. The present system of party funding is clearly
broken and reform, perhaps by introduction of some form of state funding, paid for
by the taxpayer, appears now to be a very real possibility.
24.4.3 Modes of Campaigning
Parties endlessly strive to secure positive public attention. Previously parties had
‘tended to have greater control over the political agenda, in that they controlled a
substantial component of the means of political communications. Nowadays, how-
ever, they are forced to confront a much greater diversity of agenda setters’ (Mair,
Muller, and Plasser 2004: 7). Such additional agenda setters, the news media and its
ever expanding ‘commentariat’, as well as social movements, interest and pressure
groups, mean parties have now to mount ‘permanent’ election campaigns particu-
larly when, in the age of devolution, they have more elections to contest than ever
before. General elections have now largely been nationalized, but local candidate-
based activism, which may make some difference to party strength, by both raising
electoral turnout and improving party performance, while in decline, still plays some
positive role in local vote gathering (Denver, Hands, and MacAlllister 2004; Pattie
and Johnston 2003). Local electioneering is, however, increasingly dominated by
the national campaign. Election campaigns, usually containing a combination of
positive and negative modes of electioneering, are almost entirely organized by a
party headquarters reporting to the leader and his or her key staffers. Such campaigns,
focused on news media-based public relations strategies, require parties to be ‘on
message’ and possess coherent, presentable policies and reliable, trustworthy leaders
(Wring 2004; Foley 2000; Norris et al. 1999; Scammell 1995).
Such a permanent election campaign requires modern electioneering to be expen-
sively fought out by communicating indirectly with electors by means of the news
political parties 453
media. Spin and marketing, pursued by a combination of public staged events (press
conferences and keynote speeches) and private events (discreet contacts between
leading politicians, their trusted proxies, and well-connected journalists and news
executives) are now the parties’ indispensable weapons. The relentless attention of
the twenty-four-hour news media spotlight, further reinforced by modern ‘catch-all’
leader-centred electioneering, is just one further phenomenon to enhance the per-
sona of the party leader. It is reinforced by leader-centric parties taking care to ensure
that a unified message, careful product development, effective communication, and
news management is made integral to everything that they do.
24.5 The Programmatic Configuration
of British Political Parties
.............................................................................................................................................
Parties are influenced by—but also influence—their socio-economic and ideational
environments. The first is the rule, the second the exception. Exceptions happen,
however, as Labour helped make the political weather after 1945 and the Conservatives
did likewise after 1979. In programmatic terms parties are often as reactive as they are
proactive. They are more likely to adopt incremental measures to crisis manage as to
pursue carefully constructed plans. They are often more shaped by the world around
them than they shape that world. As ever, while ‘prescription precedes response’
(Mair, Muller, and Plasser 2004: 9), parties ‘inherit before they choose’ and, while
making choices available to electors, they reflect (as well as sometimes shape) the
imperatives of the prevailing ‘policy Zeitgeist’.
Parties, while still possessing certain ideational proclivities, have moved away
from established points in the political spectrum. Being engaged in a catch-all quest
for votes influences the programmatic appeals parties make, reinforcing a wider
post-ideological engagement reflecting new and different electoral—and political—
demands. Labour no longer advocates Keynesian demand management and the
nationalized public corporation (such policies being, to different extents and pur-
poses, common to governments of all parties between 1945 and 1979). Instead, along-
side the Conservatives, it accepts the fact that excessive old-style statism had become
an economic and social problem (Kavanagh 1990; 1997; Gamble 1994). Following the
collapse in public support for high rates of direct personal taxation, expanded public
ownership, and the maintenance of trade union privilege, Labour, bested by the
Thatcher- and Major-led Conservatives after 1979, felt electorally obliged to abandon
such measures. As Labour’s electoral heartland shrank as male manual employment
in manufacturing industries declined, the Thatcherite Conservatives fashioned a
reliable base among skilled manual workers (the C1s and C2s) in the 1980s. This, in
addition to the successes of ‘actually existing Thatcherism’, helped prompt the internal
party reassessment that led Tony Blair, building on reforms engineered under Neil
454 richard heffernan
Kinnock, to further reformulate the Labour Party to appeal to electors to Labour’s
right after 1994.
The socio-economic left–right divide previously found at the heart of party politics
no longer has significant purchase. Parties, because they pose the same existential
threat to the other’s office-seeking ambitions, compete with each other as vigor-
ously as ever, but the programmatic divide between them is no longer that between
divergent left and right. While Labour instinctively prefers more state interven-
tion and the Conservatives less, both parties, together with the Liberal Democrats,
pursue social reforms by championing wealth creation, promoting business, and
encouraging entrepreneurship. ‘New’ Labour differs from ‘Old’ Labour in that it no
longer wants to control the market through an old-style social democratic, quasi-
corporatist state. The Cameron-led Conservatives differ from old-style Thatcherites
by aligning themselves with notions of personal identity and preference, collective
interest, and by championing public services. Labour under Blair and Brown has not
simply offered a modernized form of Thatcherism, just as the Conservatives after 1951
never became socialists. Parties continue to make a difference. Labour’s constitutional
reform agenda, including devolution for Scotland and Wales, the passing of the
Human Rights Act, and reform of the House of Lords, are obvious examples of where
a change of party government ushered in a change of direction. The minimum wage,
increasing child benefit, and the use of indirect (and direct, at least in the form of
increased National Insurance contributions) tax revenues to redistribute resources
to the working poor and fund increased expenditure on public services mark a
departure from the previous Tory agenda. Yet ideological differences between the
parties have been transformed. This is clearly demonstrated by Labour’s embrace of
the post-Thatcherite market economy since 1987. The parties are not starkly divided
on government’s role as a guardian of the public welfare. Nor do they differ radically
on the need for the state to empower, free, and liberalize the market economy (to
re-regulate it when necessary) rather than control and restrict it.
Party politics have become increasingly inclusive, not least in terms of embracing
women’s participation and representation (Childs 2004; Lovenduski 2005). Politics
more generally increasingly focuses on issues which transcend the age-old left–right
spectrum within which politics was traditionally framed. Europe, terrorism, civil lib-
erties, immigration and asylum, a liberal interventionist foreign policy, and identity
politics involving gender, racial, and sexual equality, the dominant issues of the day,
do not easily fit into the old political categories and may now be said to lack one
common and definitive party home.
24.6 Party Change Amid
Party Continuity
.............................................................................................................................................
Political parties are able, when necessary, to remodel themselves in line with chang-
ing electoral and ideational contexts. Electoral professional British parties retain
political parties 455
some element of the old, mass-party form. Such remnants, not least its parlia-
mentary party, the need to have an extra-parliamentary membership of sorts, and
an electoral base can limit the autonomy of leading cadres. Labour, for instance,
may vote-seek well beyond its traditional class base, but it retains links with the
trade unions (even if this link is not especially valued at the highest levels of the
party) and remains financially dependent on union largesse. Labour’s electoral base,
significantly broadened under Tony Blair, remains reliant on Labour heartlands.
The same can be said of the Conservatives. Labour’s DNA requires the party to
draw electoral strength from leftist, progressive voters who oppose the Conservative
Party and instinctively want Labour to push leftwards not rightwards. The opposite
still applies to the Conservatives, especially in regard to its right-leaning electoral
base.
Parties increasingly see policy competence, not political ideology, as the key to
electoral success. Today all party leaders perceive the need to be pragmatic, flexible,
and electoralist. They seek three related objectives: First, to increase their autonomy
over both the parliamentary and the extra-parliamentary party; second, to profes-
sionalize and whenever possible personalize their party’s mode of campaigning; and
third, to win elections and thereafter enact public policies. Parties have a set of stated
and identified objectives reflecting the interplay of a threefold set of party goals;
office seeking, vote seeking, and policy seeking (Muller and Strom 1999; Harmel and
Janda 1994). These three goals are obviously interrelated in that parties need votes
to secure office in order to enact policy. For Britain’s two largest parties, Labour and
the Conservatives, vote seeking is essentially the same as office seeking, while smaller
parties, including the third party, the Liberal Democrats, vote seek in Westminster
elections with little expectation, short of electoral reform or a hung parliament, of
attaining governmental office. Party goals can and do conflict with one another. This
is particularly so if, say, a policy-seeking stance is seen to damage a party’s office-
seeking objective. In which case the party will have then to alter its stance and decide
which party goal it will prioritize.
Electoral professional parties are said automatically to prioritize vote seeking
(Wolinetz 2002), but party change, when defined as an alteration in the predominant
party goal embraced by the party, is often a response to a considerable—and
repeated—exogenous shock or series of shocks (Katz and Mair 2002; Strom 1989;
1990; Muller and Strom 1999). Such shocks, political parties being at root vote or
office maximizers, are invariably electoral in form (Harmel and Janda 1982; 1994).
Thus Labour shifted programmatically leftward after 1979 in response to what it
perceived as being the policy and electoral failures of the Wilson and Callaghan
governments. Here, Labour, or at least its activists, briefly backed by affiliated trade
unions, sought to prioritize policy seeking over office seeking (or they may have
believed that only leftist policy seeking would enable Labour to successfully office-
seek). Gradually, however, after the election defeats of 1983, 1987, and 1992, Labour
became acutely aware that its policy-seeking profile (however moderated it had been
between 1983 and 1987) was a major obstacle to its electoral success; it began therefore
to prioritize office seeking over policy seeking. It therefore ‘modernized’ itself, altering
its programmatic objectives (Hay 1999; Heffernan 2001). The same phenomenon
456 richard heffernan
may be glimpsed at work today in the Conservatives’ programmatic reorienta-
tion under David Cameron in the wake of Conservative defeats in 1997, 2001,
and 2005.
Party change, then, is best measured in changing party form and function, ideol-
ogy, and strategy. It is best understood as resulting from the interrelationship of two
distinctive phenomena:
r inter-party politics, the changing ways in which the parties engage with each
other within the electoral arena and the programmatic appeals with which they
do so; and
r intra-party politics, the means over time by which the party in public office,
specifically the parliamentary leadership, has been granted ever greater privileges
over the wider party at large.
Party change is expressed in programmatic and organizational change and is usually
prompted by key changes in the electoral and ideational environments the party
inhabits. Again, as the Conservatives demonstrated after 1945, Labour dramatically—
if gradually—demonstrated after 1983, and the Conservatives, it would seem, are
presently demonstrating after 2001 and 2005, a major party that loses consecutive
elections will, eventually, alter its programmatic appeal and image—as well as choose
new leaders—to chase electoral success. Parties will inevitably prioritize office seeking
over policy seeking when past forms of policy seeking are deemed to have inhibited
successful office seeking. As argued above, electoral defeats are the most effective
external shock requiring a party response. Such electoral shocks are the catalyst for
party change, particularly when they are sharp and especially when they are repeated.
Parties, even those that famously pride electoral office, can be slow to respond or
react to unfavourable change in their electoral environment. Like the brontosaurus,
they process any external stimuli slowly. If likened to the proverbial ship, they can
take an age to alter their course. The degree to which a party can alter its predominant
goal and modernize its programmatic appeal—the ease with which it may change—is
largely dependent upon the freedom of manoeuvre its leadership, the party grouping
best placed to effect change, is granted. Electoral professional, catch-all parties are
more likely to enable British parliamentary leaders to pursue the party reforms
considered necessary.
24.7 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
The comparative literature on political parties is vast (Muller and Strom 1999; Gun-
ther, Moreno, and Linz 2002; Dalton and Wattenberg 2002). The literature on indi-
vidual British political parties is robust, specifically in terms of party case studies,
with Labour, unsurprisingly, the focus of much recent research (Russell 2005; Coates
political parties 457
2005; Quinn 2004; Cronin 2004; Wring 2004; Fielding 2002; Heffernan 2001; Shaw
1994; 2007). However, recent studies of the party role in wider analyses of election
outcomes aside (Butler and Kavanagh 1997; 2002; Kavanagh and Butler 2005; Bartle
and King 2005; King 2002; Norris 2001), the literature on comparative work across
British political parties is thinner. Webb (2000) is still the recent outstanding leader in
the field, alongside others (Ware 1996; Maor 1997), while McKenzie (1964), essentially
now a historical work, remains relevant. Comparative work beyond the case study
tends—with exceptions (Webb 2000)—to be largely confined to studies where British
parties are compared, not to each other, but to other national counterparts (Diamond
and Gunther 2001; Mair, Muller, and Plasser 2004).
Individual case study, focusing on policy and electoral politics rather than organi-
zational form, is the way research on British parties has tended to be framed. Such
studies, tending to follow the dominant party of the moment, significantly advance
our understanding of party form and function. British parties, further changes to
the party system notwithstanding, remain essential to the working of representative
democracy. The two major parties, when they form the single-party Westminster
government, are granted extraordinary powers to direct public affairs. Party leaders
in government may have to manage their MPs and ministers, note the anticipated
reaction of the electorate, suffer the critical scrutiny of the news media, and deal
with the relentless hostility of opposition leaders, but politics remains, for good
or ill, an elite-driven, party-based activity. Tony Blair claimed, when leader of the
opposition, that John Major ‘followed’ his party while he, Blair, ‘led’ his. In modern
British party politics such a model, leading from the front, running against your
party’s traditions, and being seen to take ‘tough’ decisions is considered by many
the definitive objective of party leadership. This leadership model is, in spite of
the formidable forces and structures that assail present-day political leaders, the
defining characteristic of today’s electoral professional, office-seeking British political
parties.
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c h a p t e r 25
.................................................................................................................
VOTIN G
AND IDENTITY
.................................................................................................................
charles pattie
ron johnston
Identity looms large in modern political theory and society. Individuals identify
with particular groups based on their ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, or other
markers. Translating these identities into political choices is not straightforward,
however: people sharing the same identity may draw different political conclusions
and they may hold several identities simultaneously, creating cross-cutting political
positions. These complications notwithstanding, identity politics suggests a move
away from assumptions of dispassionate rational political calculation based on inter-
ests (Kenny 2004; Parekh 2008).
What do identity politics imply for analyses of British elections and voting? Two
quite different responses are possible. The first emphasizes the emergence of a mul-
ticultural Britain in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in which the
politics of identity plays a growing role in elections. Paradoxically, however, the sec-
ond (and dominant) perspective in the empirical political science literature suggests
quite the opposite trajectory, from an electoral politics dominated by identity to one
dominated by rational action. This chapter traces that shift in academic understand-
ings of British voting.
462 charles pattie & ron johnston
25.1 Identity Voting: The Aligned
Electorate
.............................................................................................................................................
From the 1950s to the 1970s, the dominant academic paradigm on voting behav-
iour stressed the importance of electoral alignments, long-standing and stable links
between voters and parties. Voting was seen as an expressive, not a deliberative,
act. Most voters would support the same party in election after election, and hence
parties could count on a ‘normal vote’, especially when abstention rates were low, as
was the case until the 1990s. Parties mobilized as many core supporters as possible
and fought for the support of the relatively small group of uncommitted ‘floating’
voters who might decide elections by changing their preferred party between contests.
Explanations of alignment drew primarily on two different theoretical traditions:
partisan identification and social cleavages.
25.1.1 Partisan Identification
Partisan identification, pioneered in 1950s America (Campbell et al. 1960), stresses
individual voters’ psychological attachments, initially formed in childhood, as
parents socialize their children into supporting a particular party. As children
grow into adulthood, their inherited party identification strengthens over time,
forming a psychological heuristic through which they judge aspects of their
political environment. Republican identifiers will be positively predisposed to
Republican politicians, and Democrat identifiers to Democrat candidates. Voters
may occasionally deviate from their party identification with Democrat identifiers
occasionally supporting Republicans and vice-versa. But in the long term partisans
return to voting for the party they identify with.
British voters in the 1960s reported strong attachments to particular parties (Butler
and Stokes 1969). In 1964, for instance, around 95 per cent of respondents to the
British Election Study (BES) identified with a named political party: 45 per cent
identified ‘very strongly’ with it, and a further 39 per cent identified with it ‘fairly
strongly’ (Table 25.1). And they voted accordingly. The stronger their identification
with a party the more likely they were to turn out at an election: 40 per cent of
the very small group of individuals who identified with no party abstained in 1964,
compared to (for instance) just 7 per cent of very strong Conservative identifiers. And
the stronger an individual’s identification with a party, the more likely he or she was
to vote for it. Around 90 per cent of ‘very strong’ Conservative or Labour identifiers
voted for their respective party. But this dropped to two-thirds of those who were
weak Conservatives, and 60 per cent of those who were weak Labour supporters. A
similar pattern held for those who identified with the Liberals, though overall loyalty
rates for this party were lower than for the ‘big two’, not least as the Liberals fielded
candidates in only 365 of the 630 constituencies at the 1964 election: some Liberal
identifiers had no Liberal candidate to vote for in 1964.
voting and identity 463
Table 25.1 Partisan identification, 1964
Party identification % identifiers Vote 1964 (row percentages)
(column
percentages) Abstained Conservative Labour Liberal Other
Very strong Conservative 19.3 7.4 90.2 1.5 0.9 0.0
Fairly strong Conservative 16.2 12.0 82.3 2.1 3.2 0.4
Not very strong Conservative 4.2 14.9 67.6 9.5 8.1 0.0
Very strong Labour 21.8 5.8 1.3 92.1 0.3 0.6
Fairly strong Labour 16.4 6.3 2.1 88.9 2.8 0.0
Not very strong Labour 4.8 34.1 1.2 59.8 4.9 0.0
Very strong Liberal 3.8 5.9 14.7 11.8 67.6 0.0
Fairly strong Liberal 5.9 8.7 19.4 17.5 54.4 1.0
Not very strong Liberal 2.1 20.0 20.0 11.4 48.6 0.0
Very strong other 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
Fairly strong other 0.1 0.0 50.0 50.0 0.0 0.0
Not very strong other 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0
No party identification 5.4 40.2 17.2 26.4 16.1 0.0
Source: 1964 British Election Study.
25.1.2 Social Cleavages
The identities enacted in voting were not simply psychological, however. Major
social cleavages also produced long-standing patterns of party support. Lipset and
Rokkan (1967) traced the salient mid-twentieth century European political cleav-
ages to two waves of radical nineteenth-century social change. The national rev-
olution resulted in divisions between centre and periphery in the new states and
(in Catholic Europe at least) between church and state. The industrial revolution
produced divisions between agriculture and industry and between bourgeoisie and
workers. Parties crystallized around each cleavage, representing one side or the other.
Centre–periphery cleavages stimulated separatist and regionalist parties in peripheral
areas; conflicts between Christian Democrat and secularist parties represented the
church–state cleavage; peasant parties and/or parties representing the old landed
aristocracy arose from the agriculture–industry divide (e.g. Cox 1970); and the
bourgeoisie–worker divide was colonized by parties of the right and left (particularly,
in the latter case, socialist and social democratic parties). Which cleavage came to
dominate in a particular national context, Lipset and Rokkan argued, depended
on which was most active when the franchise extended to most adult males. Once
established, the major parties on either side of the cleavage became institutionalized,
allowing them to continue even if the initial tensions stimulating the cleavage had
ameliorated.
In Great Britain, the class cleavage dominated the twentieth century. The late
nineteenth-century extension of the franchise to most adult males created a large
464 charles pattie & ron johnston
new group of voters, the urban working class, and by the start of the twentieth
century, a new party, Labour, emerged from the trade union movement explicitly
to represent them. The Conservatives became the party of the middle classes and of
business interests. While around two-thirds of BES respondents in the main middle-
class groups voted Conservative in 1964, only between a quarter and a fifth of voters
in the manual working-class groups did so (Table 25.2). Conversely, while over half
of manual workers voted Labour, only about 16 per cent of the middle classes did so.
In a class-divided society, ‘class [was] the basis of British party politics; all else [was]
embellishment and detail’ (Pulzer 1967: 98).
25.1.3 The Exceptions
A fully aligned electorate, in which people always voted in line with their partisan
and/or class identities, would produce stable election results. Electoral change would
be relatively glacial, as older voters died and were replaced by the young. But this
clearly does not fit the experience of fluctuating party support over time, or the
regular turnover of governments. Even when electoral alignments are strong, some
citizens are floating voters, with weak attachments to any party, and open to being
swayed one way or the other in any given election. It is no accident that the 1950s
and 1960s in the UK were marked both by strong partisan attachments and by broad
ideological consensus between Labour and the Conservatives: with their bases secured
by voter alignment, the parties appealed to the small number of Downsian median
floating voters for the extra votes needed to win.
A significant minority of voters in 1964 chose parties other than the one they
identified with, or (even more so) might be thought of as their ‘natural’ class party
(Tables 25.1 and 25.2); such minorities were central to British election results for
much of the twentieth century. Had the class cleavage been absolute, an in-built
manual working-class majority in the electorate would have delivered Labour victory
in most elections before the 1980s (in 1964, around 60 per cent of the electorate
were in manual working-class households: Table 25.2). The electoral dilemma for the
Table 25.2 Household class and voting, 1964
Social class % in class Vote 1964 (row percentages)
(column
percentages) Abstained Conservative Labour Liberal Other
Higher managerial (A) 5.8 5.2 68.0 15.5 10.3 1.0
Intermediate managerial (B) 8.7 5.4 64.2 16.9 12.8 0.7
Clerical and supervisory (C1) 23.7 9.9 51.2 22.8 15.3 0.7
Skilled manual (C2) 37.9 12.6 25.7 54.1 7.6 0.0
Semi & unskilled manual (DE) 24.0 14.6 21.4 58.4 5.4 0.2
Source: 1964 British Election Study.
voting and identity 465
Conservatives throughout the period was how a party drawing largely on middle-
class support could win power given an electorate dominated by the manual working
class.
Clearly, the Conservatives solved their dilemma, becoming by far the most success-
ful electoral force in twentieth-century British politics (Seldon 1994). Their ability
to win support from a significant minority of working-class voters reflected partly
on support from forms of social identity other than class. In a few areas (such as
west-central Scotland and Liverpool) with large Irish Roman Catholic communities,
the politics of Irish nationalism produced a unionist backlash from working-class
Protestants, which the Conservatives capitalized on. A more widespread factor was
social deference among some working-class voters, identifying the Conservative Party
elite as a natural ruling class, notably in rural areas (McKenzie and Silver 1968; Jessop
1974; Newby 1979). But some working-class Conservatives were driven by pragmatic
evaluations, voting Conservative based on their positive evaluations of the party’s
performance in government (McKenzie and Silver 1968).
No less striking were middle-class Labour voters. Social mobility played a part: 58
per cent of the Labour-voting middle classes in the 1964 BES sample had fathers who
were manual workers, compared to just 44 per cent of all middle-class respondents,
and only 39 per cent of those who voted Conservative. For some, then, Labour voting
reflected an older identification, drawing from childhood socialization. But cross-
cutting identities were also involved. The growth of Britain’s welfare state after 1945
meant many depended on the state for either or both of major services and employ-
ment (including, within the middle class, a growing number of public-sector man-
agers and professionals). This created the basis for a new set of politicized identities
(Dunleavy 1979; Dunleavy and Husbands 1983). Those identifying (as either service
consumers or employees) with the public sector were more likely to vote Labour than
those who identified with the private sector.
These cross-cutting sectoral identities partly account for middle-class Labour vot-
ing. At the October 1974 election, for instance, BES data reveal that while 14 per
cent of private-sector professional and managerial workers voted Labour, this almost
doubled to 26 per cent among public-sector professionals. The corollary held too: 50
per cent of private sector professional and managerial workers voted Tory, compared
to just 30 per cent in the public sector. Cross-cutting sectoral cleavages appeared
as a result of variations in housing tenure; 59 per cent of manual workers who
rented their home from the public sector voted Labour in October 1974, but only
42 per cent of those who were homeowners (12 and 27 per cent respectively voted
Conservative).
Social identities influenced British voting in the 1960s and the early 1970s, there-
fore, but in complex ways. While some identities reinforced each other politically
(middle-class private-sector workers, for instance), others pulled in opposite direc-
tions (as for working-class homeowners). But economic restructuring in the 1970s
and 1980s saw the steep decline of traditional manual industrial jobs and the growth
of the white-collar service sector. In 1951 65 per cent of the working population were in
working-class jobs: by 1991, just 38 per cent were (Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 2001: 13).
466 charles pattie & ron johnston
At the same time, more Britons aspired to middle-class lifestyles and home ownership
grew rapidly in all social classes—around two-thirds of all households were owner-
occupiers in 1997. The implications were very different for Britain’s largest two parties.
For the Conservatives, embourgoisement promised electoral ascendancy (a vision
they exploited in the 1980s, through policies such as the right to buy council houses).
For Labour, the decline of the traditional working class raised the spectre of perma-
nent consignment to the electoral wilderness (Hobsbawm 1981; Franklin 1985; Crewe
1988; Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 2001). Labour’s challenge at the end of the twentieth
century was similar to that facing the Conservatives at the century’s start: extending
its appeal beyond the dwindling manual working class was central to New Labour, for
instance.
25.2 Dealignment: Away from Identity
Voting?
.............................................................................................................................................
But class and partisan alignments were not unchanging. From the mid-1970s, dealign-
ment took hold (Crewe, Särlvik, and Alt 1977; Särlvik and Crewe 1983; Franklin 1985;
Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 1985; Crewe 1986; Clarke et al. 2004; Sanders 1998). The
weakening of class alignment is illustrated by decade-on-decade trends in the Alford
index, which subtracts the percentage of non-manual workers who vote Labour from
the percentage of manual workers who do so. Where the class cleavage is absolute, all
manual workers will vote Labour, and no non-manual workers will do so, producing
an index of 100. Where there are no class differences in voting, the index is 0. The
UK’s Alford index has dropped in every decade since the 1960s (Figure 25.1). Whereas
in 1964, 63 per cent of voters voted for their ‘natural’ class party, by 2005 only 41 per
cent did so—the lowest share of any election between those dates.
Voters’ psychological identification with political parties has dropped steeply too.
Whereas in the 1960s around 45 per cent of BES respondents identified very strongly
with a political party, only 11 per cent on average did so in the 2000s (Figure 25.2). At
the same time, the proportion identifying weakly or not at all with a party increased.
Whereas in the 1960s, only around 6 per cent of voters on average identified with no
party and a further 10 per cent were weak identifiers, by the 2000s these positions
were shared by 14 per cent and 35 per cent respectively.
The origins of dealignment lie in the deep 1970s recession. Neither Labour nor
Conservative governments could resolve the crisis (King 1975). Public confidence in
political parties fell. Between 1970 and 1974, partisanship decreased abruptly in all
age cohorts, and did not subsequently recover (Abramson 1992). Subsequently, the
rebirth of the Liberal Party, the creation of the SDP in 1981, and its Alliance with
the Liberals for the 1983 and 1987 general elections provided an alternative focus for
voters relatively alienated from the two main parties (Crewe and King 1995; Rose and
45
40
35
Average Alford Index
30
25
20
15
10
0
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s
Decade
Fig. 25.1 Declining class voting, 1960s-2000s
Source: British Election Studies 1964–2005.
Very strong
50
Fairly strong
Not very strong
45
No party ID
40
35
30
Average %
25
20
15
10
0
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s
Decade
Fig. 25.2 Weakening partisanship, 1960s-2000s
Source: British Election Studies 1964–2005.
468 charles pattie & ron johnston
McAllister 1986; Johnston and Pattie 1988), although relatively few developed a long-
term strong commitment to that new axis in British politics.
But dealignment was a political earthquake waiting to happen. The faultlines were
already apparent in the mid-1960s, although their full significance took longer to
emerge. A striking generational shift in political attitudes had occurred among skilled
manual workers (Goldthorpe et al. 1968). Although most manual workers supported
Labour, the reasons for that support varied. Older workers, who could remember
the 1930s economic depression, voted Labour from class sentiment: the Tories were
the bosses’ party, Labour the workers’. Their children, who had grown up in post-
war affluence (and who had not yet experienced the 1970s economic downturn), also
supported Labour, but on instrumental, not solidaristic, grounds. Their support was
premised on Labour’s promised ability to improve living standards. As long as Labour
delivered prosperity, they would back it. If it failed, their support was no longer
guaranteed. Ten years later, skilled manual workers in the South-East swung behind
Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives in the 1979 election, largely as a reaction to the
1974–9 Labour government’s failures.
25.3 The Valence Revolution: From
Identity to Evaluation
.............................................................................................................................................
If voters are no longer moved by their social and political identities, how do they
actually decide? One answer, already apparent in Goldthorpe et al.’s work, is provided
by a focus on valence issues, those on which most voters—and most parties—agree.
Most wish to see rising living standards; most want peace and security; and so on.
Valence issues can influence electoral choice, especially where parties are perceived
to differ substantially in their abilities to deliver what all see as desirable. No one
wants crime to rise, for instance. But if crime is seen as an important issue by the
electorate, and if one party has the edge over its rivals in public perceptions of its
ability to fight crime, that party stands to gain. Where electoral choice is dominated
by valence issues, voters evaluate parties on the basis of their performance, not their
ideology. In recognition of this, New Labour emphasized pragmatism and delivery
above ideological purity: to quote Tony Blair in Labour’s 1997 election manifesto,
‘what counts is what works’ (Giddens 1998; Gamble 2005).
The valence approach radically reconceptualizes party identification, seeing it not
as long-term psychological attachment to a party, but as a running tally of gov-
ernment performance (Fiorina 1981). Looking back over a government’s record in
office, voters steadily update their impressions of it. Perceived successes increase the
government’s stock, while perceived failures weaken it. The same logic extends to
other parties, depending on their ability to project themselves as fit for office. Far
voting and identity 469
from representing a stable long-term outlook, party identification should move in
keeping with the ups and downs of the political business cycle.
Empirical evidence backs this up. Many studies use the economy as a shorthand
measure for government performance (Lewis-Beck 1988; Lewis-Beck and Paldam
2000). Most voters have neither time nor expertise to monitor all the different fields
of government activity and hence will not update their running evaluations of gov-
ernment performance in the light of each twist and turn of public policy. However,
all are affected by the state of the economy and most hold the government at least
partly responsible for it; indeed more tend to blame governments for poor economic
performance than credit them when things are going well (Alt 1979; Brug, Eijk, and
Franklin 2007).
These feelings influence party support (MacKuen, Erikson, and Stimson 1989;
1992; Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 1998; 2000). The worse voters feel the econ-
omy performed in the past, or the more pessimistic they are about its future
prospects, the lower is partisan identification with the main party of government, and
the higher identification with the opposition. Conversely, the more positive voters
are about past economic performance, or the more optimistic they are about the
future, the higher their identification with the government, and the lower that with
the opposition.
Party support in Britain is influenced by such valence issues. As early as the
late 1960s, analyses of monthly trends in government support found that it tracked
changes in the economy (Goodhart and Bansali 1970): as unemployment and/or
inflation rose, the government’s support dropped (and as they fell support increased).
More recent analyses have examined voters’ economic perceptions. The best-known
example is the ‘Essex model’, which analyses monthly trends in government popu-
larity as a two-step process (Sanders, Ward, and Marsh 1987). First, economic condi-
tions (unemployment rates, inflation rates, and so on) influence voters’ expectations
about the future. If the economy is doing well, voters become more optimistic about
their own future financial prospects; when it is doing badly, they become more
pessimistic. The second stage is to model monthly trends in government popularity.
In the ‘classic’ Essex model, this is a function of just two factors: the government’s
popularity in the preceding month (sudden changes in government popularity are
rare); and aggregate personal economic expectations (the more optimistic voters feel
about how affluent they will be in the future, the more support the government
gets).
The model was first used to claim that Mrs Thatcher’s landslide re-election in
1983 was caused not by victory in the Falklands but by economic recovery after
the deep recession of the early 1980s (Sanders, Ward, and Marsh 1987; though see
e.g. Clarke, Mishler, and Whiteley 1990). A notable success for the model was its
use to predict accurately the outcome of the 1992 election eighteen months before
the event. That contest was widely expected to be very close. But, as Sanders (1991)
predicted, the government won re-election on a barely changed vote share (albeit with
a substantially reduced parliamentary majority) thanks to policies aimed at economic
recovery introduced sufficiently in advance of the election.
470 charles pattie & ron johnston
Economic voting has become a new orthodoxy in British voting studies and in
British party thinking alike. Ironically, however, in some respects the 1992 election
represented a high-water mark for straightforward applications of the theory in
the UK. Strikingly, the Conservatives, having won re-election in 1992 as Britain
emerged from a recession, went on to their worst election defeat of modern times
in 1997, even though the economy was relatively strong (and had been for several
years). The Labour government elected in 1997 was re-elected twice in part on its
economic record, having presided over one of the longest periods of continued eco-
nomic growth in recent British history. And yet, throughout the period between 1997
and 2005 (and in sharp contradistinction to the years of Conservative government
between 1979 and 1997), monthly trends in government popularity did not track
personal economic expectations at all (Sanders 2005). The core relationship which
underpinned the Essex model in the 1980s and early 1990s broke down over the
subsequent decade.
But valence is not restricted simply to economic performance. For instance, the
attribution of responsibility is important. Voters may feel the economy is strong,
but judge that this is despite the government’s policies, rather than because of them.
Linked to this, a reputation for competence is a valuable political asset; a reputation
for incompetence is a fast track to defeat. The Conservatives lost in 1997 despite an
economic boom because the 1992 ERM crisis badly damaged public perceptions of
their economic competence. Up until late 1992, the Conservatives invariably out-
polled Labour as the party most likely to handle the economy well. The party had
recently taken Britain into the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), arguing
this was essential for the future economic well-being of the country. But in September
1992, market pressure forced the government to abandon ERM membership, a dra-
matic policy failure. The Conservatives lost their long-established lead on economic
competence, and hence the 1997 election (Sanders 1999). Labour picked up this acco-
lade and its ownership of the issue was strengthened first by Tony Blair’s New Labour
project and then, a fortiori, after 1997 by Gordon Brown’s reputation as a competent
Chancellor presiding over a prolonged economic boom (Clarke et al. 2004; Sanders
2006).
Similarly, perceptions of party leaders have come under renewed scrutiny (e.g.
Bartle and Crewe 2002; Clarke and Stewart 1992; 1995; Clarke, Stewart, and White-
ley 1997; 1998; Clarke et al. 2004). Leadership is a valence issue in that few if
any would wish to elect a Prime Minister with no leadership skills. Perceptions
of leadership competence have independent effects on party choice, even after
controlling for factors such as underlying party identification and evaluations of
the economy. Leaders matter, and can be an electoral asset for their party (as
Blair was for Labour in 1997) or a liability (as, arguably, Gordon Brown rapidly
became in early 2008). Other valence issues of importance in influencing party
choice include voters’ evaluations of competence in handling major public ser-
vices such as the NHS and education, benefits such as pensions, and public
problems such as crime and security (Clarke et al. 2004; Johnston and Pattie
2001).
voting and identity 471
Table 25.3 Modelling voting at the 2005 general election: multinomial logit
Vote (versus voted Labour) Chi-squarea
Conservative Liberal Democrat Other
Constant 0.54 0.80 2.10
Identity and demographics
Respondent age group 0.22∗∗ 0.15∗∗ 0.15∗ 17.95
∗∗
Respondent class −0.22 −0.11∗ 0.03 17.47
Respondent education 0.05 0.08 −0.02 1.17
Respondent gender −0.26 −0.27 −0.79∗∗ 10.22
Respondent party identification (comparison = other party ID) 488.66
No party ID 0.19 −0.40 −2.33∗∗
Labour identifier −1.94∗∗ −2.02∗∗ −3.22∗∗
∗∗
Conservative identifier 2.03 −0.53 −1.68∗∗
Lib Dem identifier −0.38 0.82∗ −1.75∗∗
Political ideology
Tax and spend scale −0.11∗ 0.04 −0.08 10.14
Left–right scale 0.21∗∗ 0.02 0.11 11.89
Valence issues
Personal economic expectations −0.55∗∗ −0.15 −0.11 20.08
Feelings about Tony Blair −0.42∗∗ −0.37∗∗ −0.42∗∗ 169.24
∗∗
Feelings about Michael Howard 0.37 0.01 0.03 58.15
Feelings about Charles Kennedy 0.03 0.23∗∗ 0.07 30.38
Model improvement 1902.48
Model significance 0.00
% correctly classified 74.6
Nagelkerke R 2 0.74
N 1757
∗ Significant at p = 0.05; ∗∗ significant at p = 0.01.
a This column gives the difference in −2 log likelihood between the final model and a model omitting the
indicated variable.
Source: 2005 British Election Study.
How do identity and valence issues stack up as explanations of contemporary
voting? We illustrate this in a multinomial logit model of voting at the 2005 general
election, controlling for a range of demographic, identity-based, ideological, and
valence measures (Table 25.3). Data are drawn from the 2005 BES panel survey, which
interviewed a national sample of voters around a month before the election took
place, reinterviewing them immediately after the election. The independent variables
in the model are all taken from the pre-election wave of interviews, and hence are
not contaminated by voters’ knowledge of the election results, and are less likely than
are measures derived from post-election surveys to be affected by their eventual vote
choices. The demographic and identity measures are:
r Age, coded into 7 age bands: 18–24-year-olds; 25–34-year-olds; 35–44-year-olds;
45–54-year-olds; 55–9-year-olds; 60–4-year-olds; and those aged 65 or over. The
higher the score, the older the individual;
472 charles pattie & ron johnston
r Class: professionals and managers coded 1; skilled non-manual workers 2; the
self-employed 3; manual workers in supervisory roles 4; manual workers 5; and
others 6;
r Highest educational qualification: those with no formal qualifications are coded
1; school-leaving qualifications are coded 2; post-school qualifications short of
degree level are coded 3; and university-level qualifications are coded 4;
r Gender, coded 1 for women, 0 for men; and
r Party identification, coded 0 for those who identify with no party, 1 for Labour
identifiers, 2 for Conservatives, 3 for Liberal Democrats, and 4 for those who
identify with some other party.
Political ideology is measured using responses to two scales:
r Tax–spend: an 11-point scale, ranging from those whose preference is to cut taxes,
even if this means cutting public spending (coded 0) to those who want to raise
public spending, even if this means raising taxes (coded 10); and
r Left–right: another 11 point scale, this time anchored at one end by those who
self-identify with the left of the political spectrum (coded 0) and at the other
with those who identify with the right (coded 10).
Four valence issues are included, one reflecting economic evaluations and the others
evaluations of the party leaders. They are:
r Personal economic expectations, ranging from those who expected, on the eve of
the 2005 general election, that their personal economic circumstances would get
much worse over the next year (coded 1) to those who felt they would get much
better (coded 5); and
r Three variables measuring feelings towards the three main party leaders in 2005:
Tony Blair for Labour; Michael Howard for the Conservatives; and Charles
Kennedy for the Liberal Democrats. Each is coded on an 11-point scale, where
0 indicates that the respondent strongly dislikes that particular leader and 10
indicates that they strongly like them.
The model contrasts voters for the Conservatives, Liberal Democrats, and other
parties (primarily the Scottish and Welsh nationalists but also minor parties) against
those who voted Labour. Identity, ideology, and valence all affect vote choice. Con-
servative and Liberal Democrat voters in 2005 were rather older than Labour voters
(as were voters for other parties), and less likely to be working class. Prior party
identification was important: compared to those with no party identification, Labour
identifiers were much less likely to vote for other parties than they were to vote
Labour; Conservative identifiers were much more likely to vote Conservative (but
less likely to vote ‘other’) than they were to vote Labour; and Liberal Democrat
identifiers were more likely to vote Lib Dem, and less likely to vote ‘other’ than to vote
Labour. Left–right ideology differentiated between Labour and Conservative voters:
the latter were more likely to favour tax cuts and place themselves on the right of the
political spectrum than were Labour voters. Valence also mattered. Choice between
the two most likely parties of government, Labour and Conservative, was influenced
voting and identity 473
by personal economic expectations: the better-off individuals expected to be in the
future the less likely they were to vote for the Conservative opposition rather than
for the incumbent Labour government. Party leader evaluations mattered too. The
more negative voters felt about Tony Blair, other things being equal, the less likely
they were to vote Labour rather than to vote for another party. The more positive
people felt about Michael Howard, the more likely they were to vote Conservative
rather than Labour, with positive feelings about Charles Kennedy raising the chances
of voting Liberal Democrat rather than Labour.
Party identification was the single most important factor in accounting for vote
choice, though the next most important was the valence measures (Table 25.3, final
column). Political identity still matters. However, if (as Fiorina and others suggest)
party identification is a running tally of party performance evaluations, then it is
a summary of valence, not a measure of long-term identity. To find out, we model
pre-election party identifications as a function of the other variables employed in the
analysis of 2005 vote choice.
Table 25.4 Modelling party identification at the 2005 general election:
multinomial logit
Party identification (versus no party ID) Chi-squarea
Labour Conservative Liberal Other
Democrat
Constant −3.12 −4.59 −5.29 −0.84
Identity and demographics
Respondent age group 0.16∗∗ 0.11∗∗ 0.14∗∗ 0.08 20.38
Respondent class 0.07 −0.17∗∗ 0.03 −0.04 27.60
Respondent education 0.06 −0.01 0.10 0.03 1.81
Respondent gender −0.13 −0.02 −0.10 −0.21 1.60
Political ideology
Tax and spend scale 0.21∗∗ 0.01 0.17∗∗ 0.10 47.74
Left-right scale −1.04∗ 0.53∗∗ −0.08 −0.24∗∗ 212.48
Valence issues
Personal economic expectations 0.21∗ 0.16 0.10 −0.11 11.44
Feelings about Tony Blair 0.42∗∗ −0.15∗∗ 0.02 −0.01 477.55
Feelings about Michael Howard −0.16∗∗ 0.54∗∗ 0.05 −0.01 338.06
Feelings about Charles Kennedy −0.04 −0.13∗∗ 0.51∗∗ 0.19∗∗ 231.81
Model improvement 1892.02
Model significance 0.00
% correctly classified 60.8
Nagelkerke R 2 0.60
N 2260
∗ Significant at p = 0.05; ∗∗ significant at p = 0.01.
a This column gives the difference in −2 log likelihood between the final model and a model omitting the
indicated variable.
Source: 2005 British Election Study.
474 charles pattie & ron johnston
The likelihood of identifying with a major party increased with age, the only
demographic factor to have a general effect (Table 25.4). There was a class dimension
in identification with the Conservatives: the more working class a person, the less
likely he or she was to identify with the Conservatives in 2005 compared to iden-
tifying with no party at all. But this does not suggest a return of class voting: no
equivalent effect was found for Labour identification. That aside, the main factors
underlying respondents’ party identifications were ideological and valence based.
The relative ideological positions of voters for each party match the parties’ own
relative positions (Budge 1999). The more left-wing an individual on each of the
ideology scales, the more likely he or she was to identify with Labour. Conservative
identifiers were relatively right-wing on the left–right self-placement scale (those
identifying with the minor parties were relatively to the left on this scale), and Liberal
Democrat identifiers were relatively to the left on the tax and spend scale. Turning to
valence measures, the more confident respondents felt about their personal economic
prospects in the future, the more likely they were to identify with Labour (though this
had no bearing on identification with other parties). And positive feelings towards
a party leader resulted in a greater probability of identifying with his party, and a
lesser probability of identifying with his rivals’ parties. The final column in the table
shows that by far the major factors underlying party identification were political
ideology and feelings towards the party leaders. Partisanship is influenced by valence
issues.
25.4 Electoral Participation
.............................................................................................................................................
The rise of valence as an explanation of voting in Britain has coincided with the
growth of concern over falling electoral turnout. Whereas in the 1950s, around 80 per
cent of British voters regularly took part in general elections, only around 60 per cent
did so in the 2000s, raising anxieties over the representativeness of election results. To
some extent, the shift from identity to valence politics outlined above is implicated in
turnout decline. As we have seen, turnout is highest among those with the strongest
party identifications. Even in 2005, only 9 per cent of very strong identifiers abstained,
compared to 42 per cent of those with no partisan identification, figures very similar
to those quoted above for 1964. But, of course, far fewer voters were strong partisans,
and far more were non-partisan at the later election than the earlier. As fewer voters
over time identify strongly with political parties, and more identify with no party at
all, electoral participation falls (Heath 2007).
Political failure in the 1970s was one of the triggers of partisan dealignment. Similar
concerns regarding growing public disenchantment with politics are now widespread
(e.g. Mulgan 1994; Stoker 2006; Hay 2007). So has the shift from identity to valence
politics been inimical for electoral participation? The picture is somewhat more
voting and identity 475
90
85
80
75
% turnout
70
65
60
55
50
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
19
20
20
45
50
51
55
59
64
66
70
74
74
79
83
87
92
97
01
05
Election year
Fig. 25.3 Turnout at British general elections since 1945
complex than this suggests, however: there is both good and bad news for those
concerned by rising abstention.
First, the good news: it is too often forgotten that abstention was relatively low at
most post-war British general elections (Figure 25.3). It was only in 2001 and 2005 that
turnout fell below the normal post-war range. One of the best predictors of electoral
turnout between the 1950s and late 1990s was the closeness of the election: the tighter
the contest, the higher the turnout (Heath and Taylor 1999; Pattie and Johnston 2001).
Even the low turnout of 1997, much commented on at the time, was completely
explicable when the size of Labour’s pre-election lead over the Conservatives and the
perceived ideological closeness of the two main parties at that election are taken into
account. The decline of identity politics and the rise of valence pre-date by some
decades the rapid rise in abstention since 1997.
Furthermore, the relationship between competitiveness and turnout (also observ-
able at the level of individual constituencies: Denver and Hands 1997; Johnston and
Pattie 2006) implies that the rational, evaluative mindset at the heart of valence
politics can actually encourage participation. Electors are more likely to vote when
their participation is more likely to make a difference than when the result is a
certainty. A Labour victory was almost guaranteed at each British general election
between 1997 and 2005, hardly conditions conducive to high turnouts. From this per-
spective, a return to more competitive elections should generate a rise in turnout—
especially if the major parties are perceived as offering distinctive programmes. In
any case, the evidence on growing political disenchantment is ambiguous. Politicians
are distrusted and disliked but levels of public interest in politics have not changed
dramatically for decades (Clarke et al. 2004).
There is bad news too, however. Abstention is not randomly distributed across
the electorate: non-voters are not only less likely to be strong partisans than voters,
476 charles pattie & ron johnston
they are also more likely to be younger, poorer, and less well educated (Denver 1995;
Pattie and Johnston 2001; Clarke et al. 2004). Abstention becomes an ingrained habit
too: the more elections individuals abstain from, the more likely they are to abstain
again in future contests (Franklin 2004). Rising abstention among younger voters at
recent elections suggests fewer electors in future will have the voting habit, hardly an
encouraging sign.
25.5 And Yet
.............................................................................................................................................
British electoral behaviour is now influenced much more by valence issues than by
class and partisan identity, therefore. Valence matters: what counts is what works
(or at least, what is perceived to work). However, this is not quite the last word.
Recent research has questioned valence politics. Evans and Andersen (2006) argue
voters view the economy through the lens of their party preferences, not vice versa.
If I support the party in power, I am more likely to think the economy is performing
well: if I don’t approve of the governing party, however, I am more likely to think
the economy is performing badly. Their analysis of BES panel data between 1992
and 1997 demonstrates that once prior support for the (incumbent) Conservatives
is taken into account, economic evaluations played no role in explaining party
choice.
If true, this reinstates the importance of political identity and suggests the effects
of valence issues are overstated. However, trends in economic evaluations follow
trends in the real economy in sensible ways, irrespective of party support (Lewis-
Beck 2006). While some voters do evaluate valence issues in the light of their party
preferences, others do not—and it is these swing voters who have the potential to
shape election results. Comparative research on economic voting in Europe suggests
that economic conditions affect elections through their impacts on party preferences,
and in particular on the likelihood of individuals voting for particular parties (Brug,
Eijk, and Franklin 2007). A worsening economy may make voters a little less likely
to vote for one party and a little more likely to vote for another—but if that pushes
enough voters from one camp to the other, it will affect the election result, even if
most voters stay with their original preference. Valence still matters.
A further complication lies in the conceptualization of identity. The discus-
sion so far has examined class and partisanship. However, the impetus for the
recent upsurge of interest in identity politics comes from the recognition that
Britain is a multicultural society (Kenny 2004; Parekh 2008). What are the electoral
implications?
Surveys from the 1970s to the 1990s routinely showed that between around 70 per
cent and 85 per cent of Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) voters supported Labour
(Saggar 1998). Ironically, this fact, and the assumption that BME voters tend to be
voting and identity 477
most concentrated in safe Labour seats, has limited academic (and political party)
interest in their party choices. The accepted wisdom has been that the BME vote is
unlikely to change and hence of little interest. Where the parties have, in the past,
taken an interest, they have tended to assume BME voters are interested primarily in
terms of racism and race relations (Saggar 1998: 27).
However, these are serious misjudgements. First, much of the reason for
Labour’s success here reflects the socio-economic marginalization of many in BME
communities—Labour’s traditional role as the party of the economic underdog
assists it. But more importantly, treating the BME vote as a fixed bloc underes-
timates the diversity of interests and ideals within the BME ‘community’. A very
clear indication of this came in the 2007 general election, when Labour saw its
vote fall dramatically in previous strongholds with relatively large proportions of
Muslim voters, in most places largely as a consequence of the Liberal Democrats’
campaign against the government’s controversial stance on the Iraq War (Norris
and Wlezien 2005). Perhaps the most dramatic example was in Bethnal Green and
Bow, however; in a seat with many voters of Bengali Muslim origin, the incumbent
Labour MP was defeated by the anti-Iraq War Respect Party candidate, George
Galloway.
Does BME voting mark a return of identity politics in the electoral arena? The jury
remains out on the wider case of BME support for Labour. As noted above, some
of the reasons for this support rest on social and economic factors, not identity. The
recent defection of Muslim voters from Labour is more complex, however. It seems
clear that individuals’ Muslim identifications were important: the war in Iraq was all
too readily presented as a war against Islam. However, there is also a valence perspec-
tive. Iraq represents one of the most controversial, and arguably least successful, post-
war British foreign policy initiatives. What could be more ‘valence’ than to punish a
government for such a (perceived) failure?
25.6 Identity and Voting Within the UK
.............................................................................................................................................
Throughout this chapter we have discussed the British electorate as a whole. Over
recent decades, however, the sense of British identity has declined, particularly among
younger generations, and is being replaced by stronger identification with the con-
stituent nations of the UK (Tilley and Heath 2007). This has contributed to cleavages
around national identity in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
One of those cleavage systems is longer established than the others. Since the
creation of Northern Ireland in 1922, voting at all elections there—including UK
general elections as well those as to the devolved Assembly—has been based on the
province’s main identity divide, between parties which strongly advocate retention
of the union of Northern Ireland with Great Britain (most importantly the Ulster
478 charles pattie & ron johnston
Unionist and Democratic Unionist parties) and those (notably the Social Democratic
and Labour Party and Sinn Féin) which advocate union of Northern Ireland with
the Republic of Ireland. This cleavage is very strongly associated with Northern
Ireland’s major religious divide: Protestants overwhelmingly support the unionist
parties whereas Roman Catholics similarly are associated with the nationalist and
republican parties (Tonge 2005).
The 1970s saw a resurgence of nationalist sentiment in Scotland and Wales. Both
the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Plaid Cymru have sought to mobilize support
throughout their relevant country, but have had more success with some groups
and in some areas than others. Reflecting the importance of language for Welsh
nationalism, Plaid Cymru have found most support among Welsh-speaking voters
in north-west Wales but has struggled in largely monoglot English-speaking South
Wales, where Labour traditionally dominates (Balsom, Madgwick, and Van Echelon
1983; Wyn Jones, Scully, and Tristran 2002). However, following devolution, Plaid
made some inroads into those South Wales Labour heartlands in Assembly elections,
appealing increasingly to voters disaffected with New Labour (Wyn Jones and Scully
2006). At the 2007 Assembly election, Plaid came a strong second to Labour in such
iconic Labour seats as Caerphilly, Rhondda, Cynon Valley, and Neath.
Unlike Wales, Scotland enjoyed a significant degree of autonomy within the United
Kingdom since Union in 1707. That notwithstanding, for much of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries most Scots supported the Union and Scottish independence
was the preserve of the political fringes (Colley 1992; Bennie, Brand, and Mitchell
1997). But from the late 1960s onwards, however, electoral support for the SNP grew
significantly, following economic decline and the discovery of significant oil reserves
in the North Sea. The former helped weaken support for the Union while the latter
provided the promise of an economically viable independent Scotland. By the 1974
elections, around a quarter of Scottish voters supported the SNP.
National identity is associated with party choice in Scotland and Wales—though it
is complicated somewhat by the many-faceted nature of identity (Bennie, Brand, and
Mitchell 1997; Brown et al. 1999; Paterson et al. 2001). There is no simple binary divide
in Scotland between those who consider themselves Scots and those who identify with
Britain: most Scots feel both British and Scottish. While a quarter of respondents to
the 2007 Scottish Election Study felt completely Scottish, over 60 per cent felt both
Scottish and British; 7 per cent felt completely British (the remainder had some other
national identity: Table 25.5). Voting in the 2007 Scottish parliament election (as in
previous elections in Scotland) followed national identity. Whereas half of those who
felt wholly Scottish voted SNP, only 7 per cent of those who felt wholly British did so.
The groups most likely to vote Labour, meanwhile, were those who felt both British
and Scottish. And the more British (and hence less Scottish) voters felt, the more
likely they were to vote Conservative.
As with BME voting, however, voting in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland
is not just about identity. Valence matters too. For instance, a substantial surge in
support for the SNP at the 2007 Scottish parliament election ended Labour’s long
dominance of Scottish politics. The SNP emerged (narrowly) as the largest party
voting and identity 479
Table 25.5 National identity and the regional vote at the 2007 Scottish parliament
election
% national identity % regional vote (row percentages)
(column
percentages) Abstain Conservative Labour Lib Dem SNP Other
Scottish not British 25.1 19.6 1.6 12.1 4.0 50.8 11.8
More Scottish than British 30.0 22.0 5.9 18.0 8.4 29.3 16.4
Equally British and Scottish 25.9 17.5 15.3 25.7 12.7 15.1 13.8
More British than Scottish 5.4 25.0 25.0 23.8 8.8 5.0 12.5
British not Scottish 7.4 24.1 22.2 10.2 18.5 7.4 17.6
Other 6.4 27.4 16.8 10.5 9.5 14.7 21.1
Source: 2007 Scottish Election Study.
in Holyrood, with a third of the vote and forty-seven MSPs. However, this did not
mark a sudden increase in the proportion of the electorate espousing a Scottish
identity: the proportions in 2007 were very similar to responses ten years earlier, when
the SNP won only 22 per cent of the Scottish vote in the 1997 UK general election. But
a major contributor to the SNP surge was growing dissatisfaction with the record
of the Labour-controlled Scottish Executive (Johns et al. 2009). The new SNP-led
Executive will, in its turn, undoubtedly be judged on its performance.
25.7 Conclusions
.............................................................................................................................................
British voting studies have moved against the grain, leaving behind an interest in
identity as other areas of politics embrace it. The cases of BME and nationalist voting
notwithstanding, the new accepted wisdom in the field is that identity is now much
less important than evaluations of government performance. Indeed, valence issues
have always (or at least as far back as good survey evidence will stretch—to the early
1960s) been important in UK elections (Clarke et al. 2004). Voters weigh up what they
see before them and vote, or abstain, accordingly. Delivery and success are rewarded;
failure is punished. To that extent, British elections still fulfil the role implied for them
in standard democratic theory: they hold Britain’s governments to account.
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c h a p t e r 26
.................................................................................................................
ETHNICITY AND
RELIGION
.................................................................................................................
tariq modood
The settlement in Britain of new population groups from outside Europe (principally
from the Caribbean, South Asia, and Africa) has made manifest certain kinds of
racisms in Britain, and anti-discrimination laws and policies began to be put into
place from the 1960s. These laws and policies, initially influenced by contemporary
thinking and practice in relation to anti-black racism in the US, assumed till recently
that the dominant post-immigration issue was ‘colour-racism’ (Rex and Moore 1967;
CCCS 1982; Sivanandan 1985; Gilroy 1987). This perspective was epigrammatically
expressed by the writer Salman Rushdie: ‘Britain is now two entirely different worlds
and the one you inherit is determined by the colour of your skin’ (Rushdie 1982). An
alternative view would be that the new populations are best understood as a racialized
ethno-religious diversity, though this has only become apparent as the settlements
have matured and the minorities have become political actors. The accounting of
this perspectival change, and the understanding of ethno-religious minority pol-
itics today, requires reviewing the breaking-up of the assumptions of the earlier
period.
Till late 2003, it was lawful, except in Northern Ireland, to discriminate against reli-
gious minorities unless they were recognized as ethnic groups within the meaning of
the law. The latter was the case with Jews and Sikhs but the courts did not accept that
Muslims are an ethnic group and so it was possible, for example, to deny a Muslim
a job qua Muslim. In such a circumstance, Muslims only had some limited indirect
legal protection qua members of ethnic groups such as Pakistanis, Arabs, and so on.
It was only in 2003, nearly four decades since legislation on ‘race’, that an offence of
religious discrimination was created, though even then it was confined to employ-
ment until 2007. Even before issues of international terrorism and foreign affairs
ethnicity and religion 485
intruded into domestic matters, religion in the form of Muslim politics was becoming
central to minority–majority relations. No mainstream politician ever desired, let
alone anticipated, this. So, how has it happened? While initially unremarked upon,
the long-standing exclusive focus on race and ethnicity, and the exclusion of Muslims
but not Jews and Sikhs, came to be a source of resentment amongst some Muslims.
At the same time the analyses, campaigns, policies, and legislation associated with
racial and ethnic equality and diversity were the principal source of precedence and
legitimacy as Muslim activists began to make political claims upon British society
and the polity. In short, one of the principal ways of seeing the emergence and
development of ethno-religious equality is in terms of a grievance of exclusion from
the existing equality framework and its utilization in order to extend it to address the
felt exclusion and to develop and seek public recognition for a minority subjectivity
ignored by liberal legislators.
26.1 The Rise and Fall of
Political Blackness
.............................................................................................................................................
The initial development of anti-racism in Britain followed the American pattern,
and indeed was directly influenced by American personalities and events. Just as in
the USA the colour-blind humanism of Martin Luther King Jnr. came to be mixed
with an emphasis on black pride, black autonomy, and black nationalism as typified
by Malcolm X, so also in the UK (both these inspirational leaders visited Britain).
The minorities’ politics, the cutting-edge anti-racism that developed in Britain in the
1970s and early 1980s, first in radical activism and ultra-left corpuscles then, following
the Brixton riots of 1981, in some local government, trade unions, radical public-
sector professional associations, and the Labour Party, was based on a concept of
political blackness. The British population was divided into two groups, black and
white. The former consisted of all those people who were potential victims of colour
racism, though in both theory and practice they were assumed disproportionately to
have the characteristics of the African-Caribbean population (Modood 1994). Thus
a fundamental problem for political blackness came from an internal ambivalence,
namely whether blackness as a political identity was sufficiently distinct from and
could mobilize without blackness as an ethnic pride movement of people of African
descent. This black identity movement, in a growing climate of opinion favourable
to identity politics of various kinds, was successful in shifting the terms of the debate
from colour-blind individualistic assimilation to questions about how white British
society had to change to accommodate new groups. But its success in imposing or
making a singular identity upon or out of a (unlike black America or South Africa)
diverse ethnic minority population was temporary or illusory. What it did was pave
486 tariq modood
the way to a plural ethnic assertiveness, as South Asian groups, including Muslims,
borrowed the logic of ethnic pride and tried to catch up with the success of a newly
legitimized black public identity. Indeed, it is best to see this development of racial
explicitness and positive blackness as part of a wider socio-political climate which
is not confined to race and culture or non-white minorities. Feminism, gay pride,
Quebecois nationalism, and the revival of Scottishness are some prominent examples
of these new identity movements which have come to be an important feature in
many countries, especially those in which class politics has declined.
This political movement has played an important part in opening up the question
of ‘race’ in Britain and has come to define the identity of many people (especially
at its height in the mid to late 1980s). Whether at any point this political iden-
tity was embraced by the majority of South Asians or Muslims is an open ques-
tion (I personally think not: Modood 1994). Two things however are clear. Firstly,
this identity was embraced by some Asian political activists in the 1980s, especially
those whose activism was concerned with mainstream British society rather than
the organization of communities of Asian descent. Secondly, from the late 1980s
onwards, if not earlier, most Asians were emphasizing a more particular ethnic or
religious identity rather than this all-inclusive non-whiteness. Several factors were
at play here. For example, time, numbers, and confidence. As the Asian communi-
ties became more settled and thought of themselves less as sojourners, as they put
down familial and community roots, and as some Asian groups, especially African
Asians, began to acquire a prosperity and respectability that most Asians sought,
they began to express their ‘own’ identities rather than the borrowed identity of
blackness, with its inescapable African-Caribbean resonances. Movements outside
the UK were relevant (for example, the Sikh battle for Khalistan, the growth of
Hindu cultural nationalism, the rise of Islamism in various parts of the world).
Additionally, a certain multicultural climate played an important part in encouraging
people to define and publicly project themselves in terms of authenticity, ‘difference’,
and victimhood and gave them the confidence to reject opposing arguments (such as
that newly settled groups should be seen and not heard; that when in Rome do as the
Romans do).
A key measure/indicator of racial discrimination and inequality has been numer-
ical under-representation in prestigious jobs, public office, etc. Hence people have
had to be (self-)classified and counted, and so group labels, and arguments about
which labels are authentic, have become a common feature of certain political dis-
courses. Over the years it has also become apparent that by these inequality measures
it is Asian Muslims, and not African-Caribbeans, as policy-makers had originally
expected, who have emerged as the most disadvantaged and poorest groups in the
country (Modood et al. 1997). To many Muslim activists the misplacing of Muslims
into ‘race’ categories and the belatedness with which the severe disadvantages of the
Pakistanis and Bangladeshis came to be recognized by policy-makers meant, at best,
that race relations were an inappropriate policy niche for Muslims (UKACIA 1993)
and, at worst, that it was seen as a conspiracy to prevent the emergence of a specifically
Muslim socio-political formation (Muslim Parliament 1992).
ethnicity and religion 487
26.2 Out of Race: Ethnicity
and Muslim Honour
.............................................................................................................................................
So, in relation to both identity issues and socio-economic disadvantage, a white–
black analysis of Britain was becoming unsatisfactory and being challenged by some
of those for whom the designation ‘black’ was meant to be self-illuminating and
emancipatory. Indeed, political blackness was unravelling at a grass-roots level at the
very time that it was becoming hegemonic as a race relations discourse in British
public life (the 1980s; see Modood 1994). 1 Two important events also show the ways
in which practical action in relation to ‘colour’ was being ethno-religionized.
One was a religion-based political campaign which ran alongside, perhaps even
preceded, political blackness and which had a significant effect in shaping the practice
of racial equality. In the 1960s on a number of occasions Sikhs found themselves
in conflict with employers, such as bus companies, who disallowed the wearing of
the turban as contravening uniform requirements (Singh 2005). Sikhs responded by
organizing strikes, demonstrations, street processions, appealing to their MPs, and so
on and the general pattern of resolutions consisted of employers allowing the turban
but within stipulated uniform colour schemes. Sikhs also fought a national campaign
against section 32 of the Road Traffic Act (1972), which enforced the requirement of
protective head gear when travelling on a motor-cycle. They achieved an amendment
in the Motor-Cycle Crash Helmets (Religious Exemption) Act (1976) which declared
that it ‘shall not apply to followers of the Sikh religion while he is wearing a turban’
(quoted in Poulter 1998: 297). An interesting feature of these campaigns was that they
were mainly Sikh-only affairs: Sikhs did not attempt to mobilize other minorities
and the campaigns were not integrated into a general anti-discrimination struggle.
Moreover, the concessions that the Sikhs were granted were understood in terms
of respect for religious conscience or duty. However, their most important victory
intersected with the evolving racial equality framework. The 1976 Race Relations
Act, borrowing from American legislation, widened the concept of discrimination by
introducing the concept of ‘indirect discrimination’, while at the same time defining
a ‘racial group’ by reference to ‘colour, race, nationality or ethnic or national origins’.
When a Sikh schoolboy was sent home by his headmaster for refusing to conform
to the school uniform regulations by not taking off his turban, a case of racial
discrimination was filed. The dispute went all the way to the House of Lords, who
decided that racial discrimination had taken place. The school’s uniform policy made
no reference to any racial groups but it indirectly, even if unintentionally, had a greater
adverse impact on Sikhs than on other groups and so was indirect discrimination
if it could be shown that Sikhs were a racial group. The Lords recognized that
1
The single most notable achievement for political blackness and its high-water mark was getting five
Black Sections candidates selected for safe or winnable Labour seats in 1986–7, four of whom got elected
as MPs in the general election of 1987. On an alternative reading the arrival of political blackness in local
government and Westminster marked its ‘degradation’ and an ‘end of anti-racism’ (Sivanandan 1985;
Gilroy 1990; Ali 1991; and James Hampshire, this volume).
488 tariq modood
the Sikhs were a religious group but argued they were also an ‘ethnic group’ and
therefore a racial group in law (Mandala v Lee, 1982). In their opinion there were
two essential characteristics of an ethnic group: a long shared history and a cultural
tradition of one’s own. Arguing however that other characteristics were also relevant,
they included: a common geographical origin, or descent from a small number of
common ancestors; a common language; a common literature; a common religion;
being either a minority or a majority within a larger community. Interestingly, no
other religious group has subsequently been recognized as an ethnic group (Muslims
and Rastafarians have failed the legal test), and Jews have never had to prove that they
are a race, the idea being taken to be self-evident by parliament, the courts, and public
opinion. Nevertheless, in this landmark judgment the legal idea of racial equality was
extended into the domain of the rights of ethno-religious groups.
Another notable conflict in which racial equality, ethnicity, and religion came to
be combined and set an important precedent was ‘the Honeyford Affair’ (Halstead
1988). Ray Honeyford was headteacher of a Bradford local authority school in which
the majority of pupils were of Pakistani descent and Muslim. In a series of articles
in 1983–4 in a national right-wing journal, the Salisbury Review, he argued that the
education of children such as those in his school was being retarded by the cultural
and religious practices of their parents, which prevented Pakistani ethnicity children,
especially girls, from gaining rapid proficiency in English, from participating in the
full curriculum (e.g. in sport, dance, and drama), from socializing with whites, and
from succeeding fully in British education and society. He was particularly critical of
what he said was the widespread practice of Pakistani parents taking or sending their
children to Pakistan for weeks or months at a time, disregarding the duty to observe
the school calendar. These comments—many of which were indeed the concerns
of educationalists—were presented in an extremely critical, generalizing way that
portrayed Pakistani working-class culture and aspects of Islam in a negative way and
were augmented by comments about Pakistan as ‘obstinately backward’, plagued by
‘corruption at every level’, and the ‘heroin capital of the world’ (Honeyford 1984).
The articles were judged as racist by white anti-racists, locally and nationally, and
some secular Asian activists, who initiated a call for Honeyford’s resignation, which
soon came to be supported by most of the parents and the leading local Muslim
organizations, including the Bradford Council of Mosques. The Bradford Pakistani
community were stirred up by so much public airing of unflattering comments about
them, exacerbated by the distribution of Urdu translations of Honeyford’s views
by his opponents (Samad 1992: 513). This community, largely of peasant Kashmiri
background, culturally conservative, and obedient to their clan and religious leaders,
began to stand up for itself against what it perceived to be insults to its culture and
to its religious restrictions, especially as they applied to gender and sexuality. Left-
wing anti-racists therefore came to mobilize conservative Pakistanis on the issue of
community honour and in due course the alliance was successful and Honeyford was
pressured into early retirement. The wider and longer-term effect of the alliance and
of other local developments of the time was to develop the Pakistani community,
especially the mosque leadership, as a political force in Bradford, at the expense of
ethnicity and religion 489
white anti-racists and others rooted in a secular, multi-ethnic coalition, as the former
considerably outnumbered the latter (Samad 1992).
Both the turban campaigns, conducted through self-organizations and outside the
frame of ‘race’ but concluding with significant effect upon the meaning of racial
equality, and the defence of Pakistani community honour, initially roused by anti-
racists but leading to the empowerment and emboldening of an ethno-religious
leadership, were, then, actions which showed that Asian religious communities were
emerging as political actors within the race landscape and were capable of winning
battles. The single event that most dramatically illustrated the emergence of these
new forms of ethno-religious actors—with again Bradford a scene of action, and
damaged honour a cause of mobilization—was the battle over the novel, The Satanic
Verses (SV), that broke out in 1988–9, with Muslims protesting its portrayal of the
Prophet Muhammad and other revered figures. This time the secular anti-racists
were virtually absent from the conflict, for while many were sensible to the racial
stereotyping and divisions it was causing, they were unhappy that it was fuelled by
religious anger. Above all they saw it as a case in which freedom of speech should
not be compromised, but reluctant to join in the chorus against Muslims they mainly
kept a low profile. On the Muslim side, however, it generated an impassioned activism
and mobilization on a scale greater than any previous national campaign against
racism (Modood 1990; 2005). Many ‘lapsed’ or ‘passive’ Muslims (Muslims, especially,
the non-religious, for whom hitherto their Muslim background was not particularly
important) (re)discovered a new community solidarity and public identity. This is
movingly described by the author Rana Kabbani, whose Letter to Christendom begins
with a description of herself as ‘a woman who had been a sort of underground Muslim
before she was forced into the open by the Salman Rushdie affair’ (Kabbani 1989: ix).
What was striking was that when the public rage against Muslims was at its most
intense, Muslims neither sought nor were offered any special solidarity by any non-
white minority (even less so than was the case with the Sikh campaigns). It was in fact
some white liberal Anglicans that tried to moderate the hostility against the angry
Muslims, and it was inter-faith forums rather than political-black organizations that
tried to create space where Muslims could state their case without being vilified. 2
Political blackness—seen up to then as the key formation in the politics of post-
immigration ethnicity—was seen as irrelevant to an issue which many Muslims
insisted was fundamental to defining the kind of ‘respect’ or ‘civility’ appropriate
to a peaceful multicultural society, that is to say, to the political constitution of
‘difference’ in Britain (Modood 2005). The SV affair, then, divided anti-racists and
egalitarians, giving rise to organizations like Women Against Fundamentalists, an
offshoot of Southall Black Sisters, who turned up at Muslim demonstrations to
publicly express their support for Rushdie. Other egalitarians tried to assimilate
Muslim concerns into the equality movement and to some extent this division has
2
The large Fourth Survey found that nominal Christians and those without a religion were more
likely to say they were prejudiced against Muslims than those Christians who said their religion was of
importance to them (Modood et al. 1997: 134).
490 tariq modood
since become a feature within the broad politics of ‘multiculturalism’ in Britain (for
an attempt at reconciliation, see Phillips 2007).
26.3 Primary Identities
.............................................................................................................................................
This politics, which has meant not just a recognition of a new religious diversity in
Britain but a new or renewed policy importance for religion, is based on a sociological
fact. Namely, the religion of one’s family is the most important source of self-identity
amongst South Asian origin people, especially Muslims. The Fourth National Survey
of Ethnic Minorities, a large, nationally representative survey conducted in 1994,
found that rather than skin colour, which was prominent in the self-descriptions
of Caribbeans, it was religion that was prominent in the self-descriptions of South
Asians (Modood et al. 1997). This owes as much to a sense of community as to
personal faith, but the identification and prioritization of religion is far from just
a nominal one. Very few South Asians marry across religious boundaries (indeed the
2001 Census records only 5 per cent of them as even having married someone outside
the Asian group, the lowest intermarriage figure of all ethnic groups: ONS 2005).
Moreover, most South Asians expect that their children will be inducted into their
religion. When a third of Britons were saying they do not have a religion, nearly all
South Asians said they have one, and 90 per cent said that religion was of personal
importance to them (compared to 13 per cent of whites). While about a quarter
of whites attended a place of worship once a month or more, over half of Hindus
and seven out of ten Sikhs did so once a month or more, and nearly two-thirds of
Muslims attended at least once a week (much higher amongst men than women,
for whom congregational worship is not a duty). Even among the young expressions
of commitment were exceptionally high: more than a third of Indians and African
Asians, and two-thirds of Pakistani and Bangladeshi 16–34-year-olds said that religion
was very important, to how they led their lives compared to 5 per cent of whites
(though nearly a fifth of Caribbeans took this view). An analysis by logistic regression
showed that the longer an individual was resident in Britain (as a proportion of their
life) the less likely they were to think religion was very important but the older they
were the more likely; yet for all ethnic minority groups the young were less likely to
think religion was very important to them (Modood et al. 1997: 305–8). There is some
evidence to suggest that a decade later this may no longer be the case, at least for
young Muslims. A Channel 4 GfK NOP survey done in Spring 2006 found that 79
per cent of Muslim 16–34-year-olds said that religion was very important to the way
they lived their life, slightly more than their elders; and on a number of questions
the young were tending to be more ‘Islamic’ or more ‘radical’ than their elders (GfK
NOP 2006; see also Mirza, Senthilkumaran, and Ja’far 2007, where this generational
contrast is even stronger).
ethnicity and religion 491
There are two important points to make here about these identities, especially
Muslim. Firstly, they cannot be characterized as belonging to private life and irrel-
evant to public policies and resources. For example, half of the Muslims interviewed
in the Fourth Survey said that there should be state funding for Muslim schools.
Secondly, religious and ethnic identities were not simply an expression of behaviour,
of participation in distinctive cultural practices. For, across the generations and in
relation to time spent in Britain, there was a noticeable decline in participation in the
cultural practices (language, dress, attendance at place of worship, and so on) that
go with a particular identity. Yet the decrease in self-identification with a group label
(black, Muslim, etc.) was relatively small. That is to say, there are, for example, people
in Britain who say of themselves that they are Sikh or Muslim but who may not be at
all religious. So, if there is a sense in which ‘race’ and ethnicity has been ‘religionized’,
it is also the case that for some religion has been ethnicized.
In one sense, there is nothing new or peculiar about the above identifica-
tion/behaviour distinction (it is common in South Asia and many other parts of the
world). In another sense, it marks a new conception of ethno-religious identities.
For what we are not talking about are passive or fading identities. That would be to
overlook the pride with which they may be asserted, the intensity with which they
may be debated, and their capacity to generate community activism and political
campaigns. People may still feel passionate about the public recognition and resourc-
ing of aspects of their community identity, even though as individuals they may not
wish that resource for themselves. So, for example, the demand for public funding of
Muslim schools has been a source of Muslim grievance, with some non-religious as
well as religious Muslims highlighting the injustice of a system that funds Christian
and Jewish, but not Muslim, schools. Yet in the Fourth Survey only half of those
Muslims who supported funding of Muslim schools said that if they had the choice
they would prefer to send their own child to a Muslim school; once again, the young
were not much less likely to want the funding but were much less likely to want to
take up the option for their own (future) children (though young Muslims preferring
the option has increased considerably over time; see GfK 2006). Muslim purists might
disparage these ambivalences but in fact the success of some Muslim campaigns has
partly depended on the political support of the non-fully-religious Muslims, on the
extensive as well as the intensive mobilization of the Muslim community. Hence,
it would be wrong to think of the non-fully-religious Muslims as only token or
‘symbolic’ Muslims (Rex 1996: para. 4.13).
26.4 Expanding Racial Equality to
Include Religious Equality
.............................................................................................................................................
With the emergence of Muslim political agency through the SV affair, the
lead national moderate organization, UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs
492 tariq modood
(UKACIA), which later broadened out into the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB,
founded in 1998), emerged as the most representative, or at least the most effective,
grouping of mainstream Muslim organizations and came to be accepted as such by
the government and other bodies. It became the chosen interlocutor and as domestic
and international crises affecting British Muslims became more frequent and rose up
the political agenda it came to have more regular access to senior, up to the very top,
policy-makers across Whitehall than any other organization representing a minority,
religious, ethnic, or racial, singly or collectively. The MCB’s pre-eminence began to
suffer from the mid-2000s, as it grew increasingly critical of the invasion of Iraq
and of the so-called ‘war on terror’. The government started accusing it of failing to
clearly and decisively reject extremism and sought alternative Muslim interlocutors. 3
From the early 1990s to that point, UKACIA/MCB lobbied primarily on four issues
(UKACIA 1993 and MCB website). The first was mobilizing and getting a Muslim
religious community voice, not subsumed under an Asian or black one, heard in
the corridors of national and local power, and that UKACIA/MCB should be the
voice of that community. Secondly, getting legislation on religious discrimination
and incitement to religious hatred. Thirdly, getting socio-economic policies targeted
on the severe disadvantage of Bangladeshis, Pakistanis, and other Muslim groups.
Finally, getting the state to recognize and resource some Islamic schools.
The legal system, we have noted, left Muslims particularly vulnerable because,
while discrimination against yarmulke-wearing Jews and turban-wearing Sikhs was
deemed to be unlawful racial discrimination, Muslims, unlike these other faith com-
munities, were not deemed to be a racial or ethnic group. Nor were they protected
by the legislation against religious discrimination that did exist in one part of the
UK: being explicitly designed to protect Catholics, it covers only Northern Ireland.
Similarly, incitement to religious hatred was unlawful only in Northern Ireland, while
the offence of incitement to racial hatred, which extended protection to certain forms
of anti-Jewish literature, did not apply to anti-Muslim literature. After some years of
arguing that there was insufficient evidence of religious discrimination, the hand of
the British government was forced by Article 13 of the EU Amsterdam Treaty (1999),
which includes religious discrimination in the list of the forms of discrimination that
all member states are expected to eliminate. Accordingly, the British government, fol-
lowing a European Commission directive that it played a key role in drafting and that
many member states have been slow to implement, outlawed religious discrimination
in employment, with effect from December 2003. This however, was only a partial
‘catching-up’ with the existing anti-discrimination provisions in relation to race and
gender. While religious discrimination was extended to cover the provision of goods
and services in 2007, there is still no duty upon the public sector to take proactive
steps to promote religious equality as was created in respect of racial equality by the
Race Relations Act (Amendment) Act 2000 and as also exists in relation to gender
3
The government played an active role in encouraging the formation and promotion of alternative
national Muslim organizations on the grounds that they were more moderate and representative,
especially the Sufi Muslim Council and the British Muslim Forum. With the realization that no single
Muslim organization was fully reflective of non-jihadi Muslims, the government seems to have
readmitted the MCB back into the fold but now only as part of a plurality.
ethnicity and religion 493
and disability. Moreover, the government seems unwilling to remedy this within a
proposed Single Equalities Act, which is meant to bring together, and at least to some
extent ‘equalize’, the various and differential anti-discrimination legislation that the
recent Commission on Equalities and Human Rights has been created to implement.
Muslims, at the time of the SV affair, having failed to get the courts to interpret the
existing statute on blasphemy to cover offences beyond what Christians hold sacred,
came to demand an offence of incitement to religious hatred, mirroring the existing
one of incitement to racial hatred. The government inserted such a clause in the
post-9/11 security legislation in order to conciliate Muslims, who among others were
opposed to the new powers of surveillance, arrest, and detention. As it happened,
most of the latter was made law, but the provision on incitement to religious hatred
was defeated in parliament. The government continued to have difficulties getting
support for such legislation, not least from their own supporters, inside parliament
and outside it, where it especially provoked resistance from comedians, intellectuals,
and secularists, who feared that satire and criticism of religion was at risk, being
mindful of not just Muslim campaigns but a recent case in Birmingham where
Sikh protests against the play Bezhti had led to some violence and the cessation of
further performances (on the latter, Grillo 2007; more generally Meer 2008: 71–80).
Finally, parliament passed a bill in early 2006 to protect against incitement to religious
hatred. Yet it was only passed after members of both houses of parliament, supported
by much of the liberal intelligentsia, forced the government to accept amendments
that weakened its initial proposals. Unlike the incitement to religious hatred offence
in Northern Ireland, and the incitement to racial hatred offence in the UK, mere
offensiveness was not an offence, and moreover the incitement must require the
intention to stir up hatred. Nevertheless, a controversy shortly after this bill was passed
showed that the media was coming voluntarily to restrain itself. This was the case
of the Danish Muhammad cartoons, the cartoons being reprinted in several leading
European newspapers but not by any major organ in Britain, suggesting there was
a greater understanding in Britain about anti-Muslim racism and about not giving
gratuitous offence to Muslims than in some other European countries (for a debate
reflecting several sides of the issue and how they have divided liberals, see Modood
et al. 2006).
There is no prospect at present of religious equality catching up with the impor-
tance that employers and other organizations give to sex or race. A potentially signif-
icant victory, however, was made when the government agreed to include a religion
question in the 2001 Census. This was the first time this question had been included
since the inception of the Census in 1851 and was largely unpopular outside the
politically active religionists, among whom Muslims were foremost. Nevertheless, it
has the potential to pave the way for widespread ‘religious monitoring’ in the way that
the inclusion of an ethnic question in 1991 had led to the more routine use of ‘ethnic
monitoring’.
In relation to the severity of the disadvantages suffered by Pakistanis and
Bangladeshis, the evidence was so overwhelming (the key study was Modood et al.
1997) that the government, especially New Labour, came quickly to accept it and the
need to act in relation to it. Most of this was done within the government’s general
494 tariq modood
socio-economic policies, e.g. the improvements in the household incomes of the
working poor and of poor families with children have been particularly beneficial
to deprived communities like the Asian Muslims. Moreover, on most measures of
socio-economic disadvantage the government collected and analysed data by ethnic
group, and not just by using the undifferentiated ‘Asian’ figure but by disaggregating
Indians (who are relatively well off) from the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. On some
occasions the government came explicitly to target resources and effort at specific
ethnic groups. When this was done, for example, in relation to improving educational
attainment levels, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis were invariably selected.
Turning to the issue of faith schools, in England over a third of state-maintained
primary and a sixth of secondary schools are in fact run by a religious group, though
all have had to deliver a centrally determined national curriculum since it was intro-
duced in the 1980s. Some Muslims have been campaigning for certain private Muslim
schools to be incorporated into the state sector on the same basis as enjoyed by
thousands of Anglican and Catholic schools and some Methodist and Jewish schools.
Initially, neither multiculturalists (Swann 1985) nor the Conservative governments
were supportive, but New Labour reversed this policy shortly after coming to power
and to date eight Muslim schools exist within the state sector (as well as a Sikh and a
Seventh Day Adventist school). Some secularists are unhappy about this (and public
opinion since 9/11 has shifted in their direction as a consequence of anxiety about
Muslim segregation and extremism). 4 As it is politically difficult to fund religious
schools in general and simply deny funding to Muslim schools, some who accept the
argument for treating all religions equally believe this should be achieved by the state
withdrawing its funding from all religious schools. Most Muslim spokepersons reject
this form of equality in which the privileged lose something but the underprivileged
gain nothing. More specifically, the issue between ‘equalizing upwards’ and ‘equal-
izing downwards’ here is about the legitimacy of religion as a public institutional
presence, something clearly important to most Muslims.
These policy demands no doubt seem odd within the terms of, say, the French
or US ‘wall of separation’. But it is clear that they virtually mirror existing
anti-discrimination policy provisions in the UK. In any case, it is important to be
clear that in the French case, the issue is not simply secularism but a minority-
blindness that repudiates ‘race’ and ethnicity, no less than religion (Scott 2007). The
giving up of pre-French identities and assimilation into French culture is thought
to go hand in hand with the acceptance of French citizenship. If for some reason
assimilation is not fully embraced—perhaps because some people want to retain
pride in their Algerian ancestry, or want to maintain ethnic solidarity in the face of
current stigmatization and discrimination—then their claim to be French and equal
citizens is jeopardized. In any case, the French approach of ignoring racial, ethnic,
and religious identities does not mean that they, or the related problems of exclusion,
alienation, and fragmentation, vanish.
For any strong secularist, the single most important issue is to maintain a
gap between the state and organized religion. Certainly, this is how secularism is
4
On the lack of association between Muslim state schools and extremism, see Meer (2007).
ethnicity and religion 495
understood in the USA, where churches can be very powerful political actors but
the constitution has a strong ‘no establishment clause’. By this measure, it is not at
all clear that France is developing a less secularist position than Britain. Britain has
two ‘established’ churches, the Church of Scotland and the Church of England, but
it is the latter that most people have in mind when they speak of ‘establishment’.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s some secular progressives began to argue that the
emergence of a multi-faith society meant it was no longer appropriate for the state to
privilege one faith, and the Church of England ought to be disestablished (the Liberal
Democrats passed such a motion at their 1990 conference; see also WAF 1990 and
IPPR 1991). Few members of religious minorities initially joined this discussion and
so the secular multiculturalists were taken to be speaking for the marginal religious
minorities. Yet, when the latter did join this debate, spokespersons of a number of
non-Christian religious minorities actually argued for the importance of maintaining
a symbolic and substantive link between religion and the state (Modood et al. 1997).
Indeed, somewhat surprisingly, religious minorities, including Muslims who, as we
have seen, have been very assertive across a broad front, have not challenged the
Anglican privileges or ‘establishment’ or even the conception that Britain is/ought
to be a Christian country (Modood et al. 1997). The minorities seem to prefer an
incremental pluralization of the religion–state linkages, rather than their abolition.
This is what is implicit in the demand for including Muslim and Sikh schools within
the state sector. It is also echoed in the recommendations of the Royal Commission
on the Reform of the House of Lords (2000). It argued that the number of Anglican
bishops in the Lords should be reduced from twenty-six to sixteen and that they
should be joined by five representatives of other Christian denominations in England,
five seats should be allocated to other Christian denominations in the rest of the
UK, and a further five should be used to include the presence of non-Christians.
These recommendations have not been accepted but it is interesting that governments
have felt the need to create multi-faith consultative bodies. The Conservatives created
an Inner Cities Religious Council in 1992, chaired by a junior minister, which was
replaced in 2006 by a body with a much broader remit, the Faith Communities
Consultative Council. Moreover, the new Department of Communities and Local
Governments, which is represented in the Cabinet, has a division devoted to faith
communities. It is notable that most of the Muslim goals described in this section
have had formal inter-faith support and sometimes would not have been possible
without active cross-faith support (e.g. the religion question in the Census; see Sherrif
2003). 5
In having an active policy of deepening state–religion linkages Britain is not
unusual. Most West European countries are accommodating religious minorities or
5
Other than Muslims themselves, a leading actor in bringing Muslim concerns and racial equality
thinking into contact with each other has been the Runnymede Trust, recognizing Islamophobia as one
of the chief forms of racism today when it set up its Commission on Islamophobia (Runnymede Trust
1997; 2004). Talk of Muslim identity used to be rejected by racial egalitarians as an irrelevance (‘religious
not political’) and as divisive, but in the last few years Muslim organizations like the Muslim Council of
Britain (MCB) and Forum Against Islamophobia and Racism (FAIR) have co-organized events and
demonstrations with groups such as the National Assembly of Black People, and are often supported by
the Commission for Racial Equality, and especially the Mayor of London.
496 tariq modood
at least Muslims; from an EU perspective the British focus on religion/Muslims is
normal; it is the focus on American-style race that is peculiar (this is partly because
most ‘non-whites’ in Continental Europe are Muslims and mainly from places where
the idea of ‘blackness’ was not prominent). As early as 1974 the Belgian state decided
to include Islam within its Council of Religions as a full member, and Muslims in
the Netherlands have long had state-funded religious schools and television channels
as a progressive step in that country’s traditional way of institutionally dealing with
organized religion, namely ‘pillarization’. 6 Similarly, a ‘Muslim community’ is becom-
ing recognized by public authorities in Germany by appealing to the historic German
idea of a ‘religious society’ (Religionsgesellschaft) and initiating the ‘Islam Conference’,
a regular governmental dialogue with Muslims led by the Interior Minister. Again, a
series of French Interior Ministers have taken a number of steps to ‘normalize’ Islam
in France by creating an official French Islam under the authority of the state in ways
that make it identical to other faiths. Those who think that French laïcité consists of a
wall of separation between the state and church are badly mistaken. The French state
has formal institutional and financial connections with the Catholic and Protestant
churches, the Jewish Consistory, and now a Council of the Muslim Faith (Bowen
2007; for more on various European cases see Modood and Kastoryano 2006 and
Cesari 2004).
The British approach has in some ways been less statist and corporatist in its
accommodation of Islam and the other newly present faiths than its continental
neighbours. It has also been more liberal. This can be illustrated by reference to one
of the most illiberal cases, the French ban on the wearing of the Muslim headscarf, the
hijab (and other ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols) in French state schools in February
2005. This was shortly followed by a proposed ban in the Netherlands; admittedly
it releated to the more controversial face-veil, the niqab, but this time it applied to
all public places. In contrast, the hijab hardly attracts any controversy in Britain.
The niqab has been an object of a fierce and intense debate, launched by the senior
governmental figure, Jack Straw MP, but he was careful to insist that he was not
advocating the use of the law but was voluntarily requesting that Muslim women
remove the niqab when speaking to him at his surgery (Straw 2006).
In certain ways the minority politics described in this chapter has been joined by
foreign policy and security concerns from around the time of the terrorist attacks
of 9/11, and especially after the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the London bombings
of 7/7. 7 But that the Muslim equality agenda has got as far as it has is because of
the liberal and pragmatic political culture of this country on matters of religion, as
opposed to a more thoroughgoing secularism that requires the state to control reli-
gion. A more fundamental ideological reason is that Muslims utilized and extended
6
This principle that recognized that Protestants and Catholics had a right to state resources and some
publicly funded autonomous institutions officially ended in 1960. It is, however, still considered a
‘relevant framework for the development of a model that grants certain collective rights to religious
groups’ (Sunier and von Luijeren 2002) in such matters as state funding of Islamic schools. So, the
accommodation of Muslims is being achieved through a combination of mild pillarization and Dutch
minority policies.
7
Though this has certainly not led to the ‘death’ of multiculturalism that so many have discerned in
the events following 9/11 and 7/7 (Modood 2007; Meer and Modood 2009).
ethnicity and religion 497
previously existing arguments and policies in relation to racial and multicultural
equality. By emphasizing discrimination in educational and economic opportunities,
political representation and the media, and ‘Muslim-blindness’ in the provision of
health, care, and social services, and arguing for remedies which mirror existing
legislation and policies in relation to sexual and racial equality, most politically active
Muslims in respect of domestic issues have, at least in the period discussed in this
chapter, adjusted to and become part of British political culture in general and British
multiculturalist politics in particular. Indeed, it could be said that they achieved a sig-
nificant measure of political integration. Most of this progress has taken place under
a Labour administration. Cynics have argued that the success of the Muslim agenda
is because the government has had to placate Muslim anti-Iraq War anger. A more
long-term analysis, as offered here, shows that Labour’s attentiveness to that agenda
precedes the war or even 9/11. As part of its effort to advance racial and religious
equality, the government has consciously, although sometimes grudgingly, pursued
policies that did not exist before 1997—such as the funding of Muslim schools, the
creation of Muslim peers, legislation to prevent religious discrimination and hatred,
and the introduction of the religion question in the 2001 Census. It is true that many
Muslim activists have walked away from the Labour Party and many more others feel
betrayed by the Iraq War and feel victimized by the anti-terrorism measures, and so
have worked, for example, in the 2005 general election, to punish the party. Yet in
the long term I expect Asian Muslims, like Irish Catholics before them, to become
integral to a working-class party; it will be upwardly mobile groups such as Hindus
who will disperse across parties, as Jews have done.
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Section Nine: National
Identities
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 27
.................................................................................................................
ENGLAND
.................................................................................................................
julia stapleton
A key difficulty in interpreting England and Englishness is the subconscious level of
national life—both British and English—they appear to have occupied, until recently
at least. Alone among nations, England has conspicuously lacked any literary and
political ‘fathers’ and an organized democratic movement to pursue national goals.
While there is a long tradition of commentary on all things English by foreign
observers, the English people have shown little interest in themselves as a collec-
tivity, still less in overt displays of their nationhood. As G. K. Chesterton wrote in
1935, the English have never been among the ‘singing or marching’ nations, their
national identity being far more reclusive (Chesterton 1935: 206). This was once
the occasion of quiet pride, malcontents such as Chesterton apart, which the Eng-
lish enjoyed relatively free of challenge (Barker 1928: 194; Dicey 1905: 463; Chester-
ton 1907). However, with the decline of empire after the Second World War and
the future of the United Kingdom in increasing question, the unobtrusiveness of
English nationhood has become the focus of much hostility. England has been
castigated for its failure to follow a ‘normal’, essentially egalitarian path of nation
building; it has served the needs of a British ‘imperialist’ state instead and has still
to accomplish a full transition to ‘postcolonial’ status (Nairn 1977; Haseler 1996;
Gardiner 2004).
Against the critics, this chapter emphasizes the complex and shifting nature of
England and Englishness as powerful and not always unarticulated focuses of loy-
alty, attachment, and shared identity. Not least, this is due to England’s historic
entanglements with, but also distance from, empire, the United Kingdom, and, most
recently, devolved nations within the latter. The chapter begins by analysing different
I am most grateful to Arthur Aughey for sharing his expertise and providing helpful comments on
earlier drafts of this chapter.
502 julia stapleton
interpretations of England’s position within the wider unit of Britain from which all
these other entanglements flowed. Further, it addresses the ‘civilizational perspective’
on English national character in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that inhib-
ited the development of a sense of innate English difference from other European
nations. The second section explores the deep well of patriotism that ‘England’ has
engendered since at least the mid-nineteenth century, but still firmly within the ‘civ-
ilizational perspective’. It illustrates this pivotal form of national consciousness and
identity in the Edwardian writings of G. K. Chesterton. The third section considers
the English shadow that was cast across understandings of Britain in the inter-war
period, but also continuing contestation of England itself among popular writers on
both the left and the right. The fourth section situates Enoch Powell’s conception of
Englishness in the wake of mass immigration within well-established traditions of
English Conservatism, liberalism, and patriotism. The fifth section analyses recent
charges of shallowness, bigotry, and insularity levelled against the English people as
the cracks in their imperialist and British façade have become increasingly appar-
ent. In response, the chapter emphasizes a national culture rich in appreciation of
the value of ‘conversation’ in both politics and society across national and other
divides. As the chapter concludes, this is a quality that has underpinned England’s
central British role, without which both Englishness and the United Kingdom are
inconceivable.
27.1 The Place of England and ‘the
English People’ Before 1900
.............................................................................................................................................
At the outset, it is necessary to clarify the place of England within the wider British
state: the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, or Northern Ireland after
1922. While the other component nations generally maintained dual national iden-
tities when they were absorbed into Britain, albeit with considerable cross-currents
well into the twentieth century, the English were far more self-effacing. They regarded
themselves—in public, at least—as primarily British. Indeed, invisibility was the price
that had to be paid for ascendancy in terms of population, wealth, and power within
the Union and empire more widely (Crick 1991: 92; Kumar 2003: 36–7).
However, ‘silence’ in these circumstances in no way spelt absence. The iden-
tity of England may have been vigorously contested on behalf of different classes,
religions, and regions but until recently an overarching identity with England was
largely taken for granted, and not just in the modern period. As a recent com-
mentator, Robert Colls, has suggested English identities long pre-dated the eclipse
of empire since the late nineteenth century (Colls 2005). This Krishan Kumar con-
siders ‘the moment’ of English nationalism, when the cover of its ‘missionary’
england 503
nature was blown (Kumar 2003). At the same time, while the ‘consciousness’ of
Britain was English, and readily accepted as such among England’s partners in
the Union (Grainger 1986: 53), this was not a reflection of English dominance;
rather, as Arthur Aughey has maintained, it reflected English humility in sacri-
ficing its nationality to the interests of a wider whole. England was primus inter
pares, the key force for integration within Britain before the experience of ‘dis-
integration’ in the post-war period. This role cohered around the ‘English ideol-
ogy’ of liberty that flowed through the channels of English culture and politics in
the nineteenth century and cut across the Whig–Tory divide (Aughey 2006: 47–8).
While soiled at times by ‘colonialist’ attitudes such as those of Lord Salisbury in
relation to the ‘Hottentot’ Irish, these could not be described as characteristically
English.
Integral to the self-abnegation underlying the English ideology was the ‘civiliza-
tional’ perspective that ruled out any conception of nationhood, particularly Eng-
lish nationhood, in terms of innate racial difference. This had deep roots in late
eighteenth-century patriotism. In a path-breaking study, Peter Mandler has argued
that patriotism in this period took ‘resonant symbols of state and majesty’ for its
focus in the war with France, not images of a distinctive people. This was true of
both loyalist and oppositional propaganda (Mandler 2006: 16). The famed ‘John
Bull’ of the 1790s was more in evidence at the level of foreign commentary on the
English, at least in the hearty, freedom-loving form of this figure (Langford 2000: 11).
In Radical propaganda of the time, much concern is evinced instead for the ‘active
population of the island’, the ‘general interest’ that suffered by war, and the gaining
of due representation of ‘the people’ in the councils of state (Robinson 1798: 241). It
could not be otherwise given the continuing and dominant sense of ‘heterogeneity’
celebrated in Defoe’s famous poem of 1700, ‘The True-Born Englishman’ (1865).
This was a figure bred ‘mongrel-like’ from Scots, Picts, Britons, Romans, and Danes.
Unquestionably, England stood for ‘Britain’ among both the inhabitants of, and the
visitors to, the British Isles, although the English have always been loath to lose
themselves entirely in a British identity (Langford 2000: 13; Chesterton 1918; Baldwin
1926: 1).
As confidence among elites in the political capacities of the people rose after 1832,
the idea of an English ‘national character’ that would lay the basis of a sense of
shared nationhood came into its own. Even then, however, national loyalty and pride
remained firmly fixed on the institutions of church and state, thereby dampening
down the fires of nationalist—interpreted as democratic—passion that would lead
to a steep civilizational descent (Mandler 2006: 21–6, 52–3). Most significantly, the
concept of English national character was freely deployed by the Radical opposition
to further the universalist (certainly British) ideals of freedom, constitutionalism, and
humanity in the reform of parliament, the slave trade, factory law, and the removal
of religious disabilities (Cunningham 1981). This was consistent with the lack of any
sense of national myth or legend relating to a homogeneous people and agreement
on a national history (Hilton 2006: 482–7). The civilizational line of thought posited
England as exceptional and exemplary, highly distinctive in its successful path of
504 julia stapleton
political and economic development but by that very fact a model for other nations
to emulate (Aughey 2007: ch. 2).
27.2 English Patriotism in late
Victorian and Edwardian Britain:
G. K. Chesterton
.............................................................................................................................................
Much of England, ‘civilizational’ style, cohered around a Protestantism that coloured
considerably the terms in which an exemplary ‘national character’ was drawn.
Nowhere is this better expressed than in Thomas Jones Barker’s engraving, The Bible:
The Secret of England’s Greatness (1864), in which Queen Victoria presents a copy of
the bible to one of her African subjects. But while the Protestant religion had been
a seminal bond of ‘Britishness’ following the Act of Union with Scotland in 1707,
it developed its own, peculiarly English inflections in the course of the nineteenth
century (Mandler 2006: 33–4; Walton 2002: 520). This was evident in the competing
claims that Anglicanism and Nonconformism made on an English ‘national tradition’
after 1850 in their search for cultural legitimacy beyond associations with the state
(Burns 2006; Leighton 2008). At the same time, English identity crystallized in the
English language and an evolving conception of ‘national literature’ (Collini 1991:
354).
The convergence of religion, language, and literature in defining a national culture
specific to England towards the end of the nineteenth century mirrored the devel-
opment of new and more resonant invocations of English nationhood than that of
a shared national character. These centred on the notion of an English ‘soul’ and
‘spirit’, engendering a strong sense of national pride and belonging among its people.
They are consistent with a new understanding of the English as a ‘breed’. They are
certainly evident in the imperialist poetry and prose of the fin de siècle, for example
that of W. E. Henley and Rudyard Kipling (Henley 1896; Kipling 1896: 53; 1920).
But they could also be wielded against imperialism, not least by the socialist left. Its
rousing song, ‘England Arise’, was composed in 1886 by the writer and poet Edward
Carpenter to project a purer, non-imperialist ideal of ‘Britain’, at the level of conquest
and subjugation at any rate (Geoghegan 2003: 510–11, 515, 519).
As Paul Readman has shown, the national self-consciousness of the English at
the turn of the twentieth century was especially enhanced by increasing interest in,
and celebration of, a specifically English past at a popular, local level. Here, also,
a sense of detachment from empire was evident. It found expression in centenary
celebrations—particularly the millenary of Alfred the Great in 1901—pageantry,
tourism, and the preservationist movement (Readman 2005; 2001b). Moreover, while
stopping well short of political nationalism, a firm sense of English national identity
england 505
and its imperatives influenced party politics in Edwardian Britain (Readman 2001a;
2001c). The permutations of this movement and its legacy are especially apparent if
we consider one of its most articulate spokesmen, the poet, journalist, and literary
critic, G. K. Chesterton.
Born in 1874, Chesterton embraced patriotism as the handmaid of Liberalism and
literature, although untainted by imperialist ambitions. As a keen opponent of the
Boer War, he affirmed the ‘sanctity’ of the individual and individual things, nations
included (Chesterton 1905: 56, 61). This was a far cry from the old, ‘thin’ language
of ‘national character’, not least in opposing the political establishment. His alter-
native set an especially high premium on small nations, the victims of imperialism,
chief among which he counted Ireland, the Boer nation, and England. Condemning
the ‘deaf and raucous Jingoism’ that passed for patriotism in the aftermath of the
Boer War, Chesterton emphasized how a military and economic preoccupation with
colonies had obscured the more vital spiritual achievements in the empire’s ‘head
and heart’ (Chesterton 1901: 167). Not surprisingly, he mocked the sham patriotism
of ‘Empire Day’. This was inaugurated in 1904 as a result of the efforts of Lord
Meath to raise the imperial consciousness of the nation’s youth in particular. Empire
Day amounted, in Chesterton’s view, merely to a ‘jerry-built jubilee’ (Chesterton
1908).
What did ‘Britain’ mean to Chesterton as a prominent ‘Little Englander’? In one
of his weekly columns for the Illustrated London News he referred to Britain merely
as a ‘group’ of nations. England was clearly the dominant player within this group,
although it had paid a heavy price in terms of the obscurity it had been made to
endure as a result. The Scots had played a lesser although still significant role in
maintaining the Union, and he paid full tribute to the strengths of their culture
(Chesterton 1918). For Ireland, Chesterton had nothing but sympathy as the sharp
end of English imperialism (Chesterton 1904). For Wales, by contrast, Chesterton
expressed only blank incomprehension, an attitude he thought was typical of the
English generally (Chesterton 1911). Still, for all his regret about the suppression of
its identity, Chesterton was no advocate of national self-determination for England
(Chesterton 1910; 1918).
Despite Chesterton’s rejection of empire, recent critics have perceived in his con-
ception of the English nation only a groundswell of resistance to the forces of progress
(Wright 2005). However, in doing so, they have missed his modernism and radical-
ism, not least in identifying the ‘true’ English people of the twentieth century. For
Chesterton, as for E. M. Forster, these were no longer the upper middle classes who for
too long had created a false image of the English, especially abroad, as cold, taciturn,
and cosmopolitan in all their tastes and interests (Stapleton 2006: 346–7; Baldick
2004: 318). The English were epitomized instead in an array of menial but non-
industrial and mainly urban occupations: cabmen, railway porters, navvies, dustmen,
and crossing-sweepers (Chesterton 1910). These were the heirs of an older, essentially
oppressed England that he immortalized in his poem, ‘The Secret People’, of 1907
(Chesterton 1907). The revolutionary hopes he entertained of his fellow countrymen
there is hard to square with a softer paean he wrote a year later (Chesterton 1908).
506 julia stapleton
He referred to the ‘profoundly poetical character of the English, that quality of mixed
feelings and emotional hesitation which makes the cloudy pictures of Constable or the
vague rhythms of Keats’. But this very different register retained in full the political
motive of the poem. With so sensitive a side to the national character, imperialism
could not be other than alien to the English people now, as in the time of Alfred
the Great. The British Empire was the product instead of plutocratic influences that
had become the bane of England, an echo of the American dichotomy between
Main Street and Wall Street (Chesterton 1910). Chief among these influences was the
Jewish financier and businessman. Chesterton proceeded to tighten the boundaries
of English belonging in ways that excluded the Jews. In doing so he was by no means
exceptional among his contemporaries; anti-Semitism was rife on the Edwardian left
(Geogehegan 2003: 522; Walton 2002: 525) as well as being a key force in the emergence
of a radical right in these years (Villis 2006). Moreover, he disclaimed all belief in
the ‘majority of Jews’ being ‘tyrants’ and ‘traitors’ (Chesterton 1911), even though his
language at times suggested otherwise.
27.3 Inter-war Reflections on England
and England-Britain
.............................................................................................................................................
Patriotism in England was at a low ebb in the immediate aftermath of the First World
War, discredited by its association with militarism, chauvinism, and the carnage of the
trenches (Grainger 1986: 329–61). Instead, this period witnessed concerted attempts to
popularize the notion of citizenship—with Britain as its focus—through a variety of
campaign groups which enjoyed elite support (Stapleton 2005a: 162–9). While shrill
imperialist enthusiasms receded, the Unionist cause bore up well in the face of both
world wars, the development of business and trade union networks, and common
cultural institutions such as the British Broadcasting Corporation (Ward 2005). The
classicist and Liberal Ernest Barker was typical of this movement, the author of a
spate of books and articles on themes such as ‘national character’, nationality, and
democracy, education, and citizenship. The concept of ‘civic nationalism’ is integral
to Barker’s view of Britain as an inclusive nation rooted in contract and the ideal
of ‘neighbourliness’ rather than ‘thick’ ethnic ties (Stapleton 1994: ch. 4; Kearney
2000: 22). Like the Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, he was at pains to
emphasize the Union as a partnership of equal nations, even if for Barker, at any rate,
recognition of Ulster proved more problematic, certainly in the days of the debate
over Home Rule (Barker 1928: 131; Baldwin 1926: 237–58; Barker 1913; Ward Smith
2001).
Yet Barker—again like Baldwin—could never disguise his English identity and
sympathies. His ‘civic’ ideal of Britain as a ‘quasi-nation’—unlike, for example,
england 507
Austro-Hungary—was made very largely in an image of English nationhood as both
solid and yet unusually capacious (Barker 1928: 131; Stapleton 1994: 120–5, ch. 7;
Williamson 1999: 251). His homage to England in the afterglow of victory in the
Second World War represented English national consciousness at its most intense,
reflective, and proud. He wrote of the flexibility and adaptability of the English, who
never indulged in the kind of Weltschmerz to which other nations were prone (Barker
1947: 558). So exalted a view of the English was unlikely to escape Scottish censorship
even in its pre-nationalist days (Mandler 2006: 205).
The inter-war projection of Britain as largely English emphasized that England
itself was by no means a lost cause beyond its Edwardian prime. In the 1930s English
patriotism was championed in the journalistic writings and popular histories of
Arthur Bryant (Stapleton 2005b); also in the work of the equally popular chronicler of
‘the King’s England’, Arthur Mee (Smith 1986). The celebration by these writers of an
England rich in character and history was rooted in a wider interest in the landscape,
increasingly accessible with the advent of mass motoring. This was in no way anti-
modern, its central concern being the maintenance of order against development
that was ‘unplanned’ (Daniels 1993: 220). Moreover, the inter-war imagination readily
embraced the north as well as the late Victorian and Edwardian idyll of ‘the south
country’ (Howkins 1986) as unimpeachably English. J. B. Priestley immortalized the
music-hall culture of northern English towns as the quintessence of Englishness in
his English Journey of 1932 (Waters 1994). This work had many commonalities with
Orwell’s famous essay, The Lion and the Unicorn (1941). Here, Orwell outlined a ‘New
England’ emerging in the centres of light industry which would preserve all that was
best in the old (Clarke 2006: 104). Both Priestley and Orwell offset the Marxist, inter-
nationalist left which regarded nationalism and patriotism—relating to their own
country, at least—as forces of reaction rather than progress (Grainger 1986: 338–9).
27.4 Englishness on the Defensive
.............................................................................................................................................
However, such socialist champions of England and Englishness were more influen-
tial outside than within the left in British politics and culture (Forster 1950). The
distancing of the left from Orwell, at least, was true even of those who were to
develop an interest in the ‘peculiarities of the English’ for their own purposes after the
Second World War, in defiance of the greater New Left, for example E. P. Thompson
(Thompson 1965: 22; Kenny 1995: 181). Beyond Thompson, the antagonism of the
intellectual left towards all things English acquired new force in the post-war era. In
the late 1970s the Scottish nationalist writer, Tom Nairn, forecast ‘the break-up of
Britain’, an outcome that was delayed only by the tardiness of the English in recog-
nizing their separate nationhood. Lacking the ‘mature’ national consciousness of the
French in 1789, England merely shored up a creaking ancien régime centred on Britain.
508 julia stapleton
Nairn’s main target was Enoch Powell, whose staunch defence of an Anglocentric ideal
of Britain in the face of mass immigration he regarded as ‘destiny-fantasy’ propelled
by ‘domestic racism’. Nairn likened Powell’s views to a ‘stale fungus’, the legacy of
a ruling class that had lost its grip on ‘social realities’ (Nairn 1977: 287); that is, the
‘materialist’ course of history.
However, Nairn missed the particular idiom in which Powell was seeking to address
the upsurge of English nationalism in the face of mass immigration. Recent research
has shown that this long pre-dated his views on English national identity in the 1960s.
It was rooted in the integral links he drew between democracy, the free market, and
a homogeneous national culture while he was still an imperialist contemplating the
problems of Indian self-government in the 1940s (Brooke 2007). Nairn also missed
the oppositional character of the Conservatism Powell deployed in the immigration
debate, notwithstanding his liberal cast of mind; it leant back towards Bolingbroke
(Foote 2006: ch. 6) and had clear echoes, too, of Disraeli, or rather the ‘Disraeli
myth’. The latter invoked a unique bond between the Tory party and the English-
British people as a whole. The people were the guardians of the rights enshrined in
the constitution, rights that were emphatically individual not communal. They had
the greatest vested interests in the upholding of these rights, which the Tory party
alone served and ignored at its peril (Powell 1966).
Roger Scruton has argued that Powell’s mistake lay not in misjudging the scale
and impact of immigration but rather the emotional receptiveness of his fellow
compatriots to another myth: that of an ancient and heroic national past centred
on England, one that was bathed in a warm Arthurian glow (Powell 1969: 254–7).
But was Powell speaking ‘into a [nationalist] void’ that would inevitably be filled by
racism and xenophobia (Scruton 2006b)? This seems somewhat exaggerated, even if
a patriotism focused on England as well as England-Britain, and reinforced through
literature and history of the kind that has been explored above, was losing momentum
in the 1960s, especially among elites (Stapleton 2005b: ch.13).
27.5 England as a ‘Modern’ Nation
.............................................................................................................................................
The precise character of English nationalism in this assumed climate of ‘absence’ has
continued to exercise a range of commentators. This is particularly so in the last
decade when the question of England and Englishness has moved to the forefront of
debate. With the implosion of empire, economic decline, a crumbling British façade
in the wake of devolution, and associated concerns about England’s ‘democratic
deficit’, the English have come under increasing pressure to define, or rather redefine,
themselves. There is widespread anxiety about ‘who’ exactly the English people now
are and in particular what has become of their self-restraint. Was it perhaps the
case, wondered Jeremy Paxman, that the vehemence of English nationalism on the
england 509
football terraces in recent years and general loss of decorum in other ways is linked
to the decline of well-established, distinctively English codes of conduct? He replied
in the negative. ‘England enters the third millennium not in a dark suit but in an
exuberant variety of guises, owing everything and nothing to the past’ (Paxman 1998:
255). There, the rough and smooth combined freely, as in the present.
This assurance notwithstanding, Europe is widely regarded as the best context
within which the English may rediscover themselves, their ‘best selves’, that is. It has
been argued that constructive engagement with Europe would help them to overcome
their inveterate Euroscepticism (Smith 2006) and bigotry (Brown 2001; 2005). They
would become less insular and menacing as a result (Ascherson 2000), less prey to
exploitation by the extreme right. Positive attitudes to Europe would also enable
the English to rise above what is perceived as the ‘ethnic’ and class-based nature
of their nationalism hitherto in favour of a new (or is it not an old?) and more
inclusive ‘civic’ variety (Lee 2006: 59). The idea that English sympathies should be
cultivated simultaneously with those of Europe unites such disparate commentators
as Stephen Haseler, Edwin Jones, and Mark Leonard. Their common assumption is
that Europe offers England the only prospect of cultural, spiritual, and institutional
renewal (Aughey 2007: ch. 9).
Even when Europe is rejected as the new framework for an England increasingly
deprived of its former British trappings, the emphasis on the need for English identity
to change, and change radically, remains. Thus, at the time of the millennium, the
historian David Starkey urged England to look outward rather than inward, forward
rather than backward, for its new sense of identity—in short, to economic and cul-
tural success in a global world. He views Englishness, old style, as essentially a minor-
ity identity, the flag of St George sported only by ‘taxis and the white-van-driving
classes’ (Starkey 1999).
Common to many such writers is a belief that England, appropriately reimagined,
holds the key to a new, ‘post-nationalist’ era (Starkey 1999) or alternatively the
‘nationalism of the future’. For Paxman, this would be ‘modest, individualistic, ironic,
solipsistic, concerned as much with cities and regions as with counties and countries’;
in other words, all the separate ingredients of Englishness but without its aggregate
weight crystallized in the state, ‘anthems and flags’ (Paxman 1998: 265–60). Kumar,
too, is anxious that England should avoid regressing to old-fashioned nationalism.
Like others, he looks optimistically to wider organizations like the European Union, as
‘but one theatre in which the nations’, England especially, ‘can suppress their rivalries
and antagonisms for the greater good of all’ (Kumar 2006: 10).
Evident in all these perspectives is a concern that the English people should travel
as lightly as possible on the identity front lest the old superiority complex resurface
in new, more popular and virulent forms. However, bids to attenuate the sense of
English nationhood have not passed unchallenged, not least by those who emphasize
diversity rather than homogeneity as the hallmark of Englishness. This note has been
struck recently by a historian on the left, Robert Colls. In The Identity of England
he emphasizes the multi-layered and dynamic nature of English national identity in
the past. In his view, the identity of England was never an exclusively ‘top-down’
510 julia stapleton
affair; it was crafted instead by a mass of ordinary people besides, at different times
and in different forms at any one time, often in defiance of elites. The pluralistic
nature of England reflected in its range of identities augured well for the adaptation
necessitated by recent political and cultural change. However, the erosion of the old
primus inter pares—Crown-in-Parliament—remains for Colls a clear challenge to the
maintenance of Englishness in all its diversity. The ‘conversation’ and ‘trust’ once
fostered by a polity of this nature were mainstays of English nationhood, old style,
and key to an overarching sense of unity-in-difference. The recovery of a working
partnership between state and nation offers for Colls the only prospect of democratic
inclusion in a globalized world (Colls 2002: conclusion).
The ‘national’ character of English liberty and its centrality to English nation-
hood has also been invoked on the right. Roger Scruton has done so against wide-
spread criticism of the sea of English flags on display at home and abroad in two
World Cups as evidence of the shallowness of English nationalism. For Scruton,
sport provides an outlet for legitimate national emotions that have been denied
any other expression in multicultural Britain (Scruton 2004). What Scruton has
termed the ‘forbidding of England’, or ‘oikophobia’, is simply the outcome of a
perverse antipathy to national success on the part of elites, both political and intel-
lectual, not least the success of England in securing widespread loyalty and allegiance
(Scruton 2006a: 36). He emphasizes the role of England as the cultural and ethical
backbone of Britain, the ‘soul’ inside Britain’s ‘body’ (Scruton 2001: 73; 2006a: 21).
The implication is clear that the Union was made possible by the essentially Eng-
lish form of ‘corporateness’ whereby strangers learned to live with other strangers
without violating their freedom and integrity. This form of incorporation furnished
a sense of identity and restraint that underlay the permanence and stability of
Britain.
For Scruton, England is a seamless national whole in which the character of its
people, language, culture, institutions, climate, and landscape were interpenetrated
by the same values and ethos. These were further underwritten by the English church
(Scruton 2001: 85). Order, unity, accommodation, and settlement were the watch-
words of English national life, no matter how much driven by an ultimate concern
on the part of its members to keep themselves to themselves. In this analysis of the
English psyche, Scruton echoed the work of the conservative philosopher, Michael
Oakeshott. Famously, Oakeshott cited Schopenhauer’s fable of the porcupines in
articulating what was evidently for him a uniquely English way of avoiding the
claustrophobia engendered by ‘communities’. It did so while maximizing human
interaction and enjoyment of the individuality of others (Eccleshall 1992: 182, 184;
Oakeshott 1947: 489–90). Scruton also echoed the work of foreign commentators,
similarly impressed by the tendency among the English for ‘social feelings’ to take the
form, ‘not so much of respect for the community, as of respect for the individuality of
others’ (Dibelius 1922: 147). Integration through ‘conversation’ between the members
of society is once again the key to understanding Englishness; its influence has been
identified in literary genres such as the eighteenth-century essay (Ackroyd 2002: 317–
18) as well as in political institutions.
england 511
Conceiving experience, character, and habitat as integral to a common Englishness,
Scruton nonetheless sought to legitimize a particular version of English identity: one
that privileged the landed estates and hereditary titles now all but abolished in the
wake of New Labour. Corrupted by prosperity, modern England had become plagued
by sexual and other forms of deviancy, leaving traditional values such as patriotism
and liberty, and ‘the land’ on which they drew, at a large discount (Scruton 2001: 247).
In one respect, his English perspective touches that of radicals such as Richard Weight;
both offer anti-establishment views of England as existing in an advanced state of
neglect among elites who should have known better. For Weight this was to discount
a vibrant popular culture, one which was by no means insular. His concern is to release
England from the suffocating effects of ‘Britain’ and Britishness, but without giving
up on the United Kingdom entirely. His assumption is that only the left could have
drawn out a ‘democratic narrative’ of (English) nationalism in readiness for a post-
Union world; sadly, the historic opportunity was missed (Weight 2002: 726).
Not all apostles of Conservative Englishness have been driven to such extremes
of anxiety as Scruton. Simon Heffer, for example, like Weight, sees more resilience
in England thus despoiled, and more potential for a future that would reflect its
own inner light. But—unlike Weight—it would be outside Europe, outside Britain,
and beyond the destructive reach of multiculturalism (Heffer 1999). Nevertheless,
both paradigms of Conservative Englishness—and radical Englishness—are distinct
from responses to English nationhood among a section of the contemporary left
which elevates common citizenship above nationhood. This seeks to substitute rights
and duties enshrined in new constitutional documents for inherited sympathies and
outlooks, and against the background of a ‘standardized’ account of national history
around which all the different communities in Britain might rally (Colley 2006).
While some in this camp are uneasy about the loss of a once powerful connection
between rights, benefits, duties, and national societies, they retain an emphasis on
contract rather than sentiment as the basis of a renewed sense of British citizenship,
one that is noticeably free of its erstwhile English core (Goodhart 2006).
In the search for rational rather than emotional bases of loyalty in rather than to
England-Britain, regions have assumed a new importance. Both the Labour govern-
ment in its 2002 White Paper, Your Region, Your Choice, and the European Union
following the Maastricht Treaty have attempted to break up old national boundaries
and allegiances by creating new administrative areas (Johnston 2002; Copping and
Kite 2006; Aughey 2007: ch. 8). For Labour, ‘Regional Assemblies’ and concomitant
bureaucracies have been advanced as a solution to the ‘English problem’ in the wake
of devolution, with a good deal of support from opponents of the perceived power
wielded in the United Kingdom by ‘monocultural’, Anglo-British England (Bryant
2006: 232). However, the policy has encountered considerable obstacles, not least the
rejection by electorates of proposals to regionalize local government through the cre-
ation of a new super-tier. The ‘cussedness’ of the English has been much in evidence
in resisting such change. But so, too, has attachment to something regarded as ‘real’
and fundamental—English nationhood. This is in the face of persistent attempts to
divide, weaken, and deprive it of an effective voice (Heffer 2006).
512 julia stapleton
27.6 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
Ultimately, the issue of the future of England and Englishness falls on sympathies,
allegiances, and identities which have hardened in a cultural and political environ-
ment increasingly hostile to their expression, certainly in forms which miss the ‘egal-
itarian’ mark. As a result of devolution, in particular, there has been a considerable
decline among the English of a primary British identity and a corresponding increase
in primary English identities. According to the British Social Attitudes (January 2007)
report, 63 per cent of English correspondents identified with Britain in 1992 but just
48 per cent do so now; and while 31 per cent claimed an English identity in 1992,
40 per cent did so fifteen years later (Heath, Martin, and Elgenius 2007: 11). This
enhanced affiliation with England is reflected in substantial opposition to Scottish
MPs voting on English and Welsh legislation at Westminster: 62 per cent according to
an ICM poll in December 2007, although this figure seems stable (Curtice 2007). The
travails of devolution have generated new English lobby groups such as the English
Democrats and Campaign for an English Parliament. Both are at pains to dissociate
themselves from racism and focus instead on the enhancement of democratic rights
in Britain, although insisting on England’s separate national identity.
The British Social Attitudes report (2007) also reveals that England, like Britain, fails
to engender any sense of community among those who identify with these nations
comparable to that of Scotland and Wales, or even Europe (Heath, Martin, and
Elgenius 2007: 16). However, as we have seen, the homogeneity of the English nation
is often projected in terms of a desire for liberty that seeks to maximize the distance
between individuals, at a public level at least. This perspective does not ‘exclude’ other
loyalties and identities but values the conditions—conversational in character—in
which they can be accommodated, subject to acceptance of the conditions themselves.
Rarely has Englishness been articulated in the triumphalist terms of a master race; and
only then as a call to vigilance, an expression of insecurity rather than complacency
(Kipling 1920). When English voices have shown leanings towards exclusion of one
kind or another, they have been brought up short. Chesterton faced a barracking by
critics who found his anti-Semitism unworthy both of his own values, and those of
England more widely (Anon. 1936: 894).
We have seen that Englishness has served different causes—political, cultural, and
religious—at different times and in different contexts. However, it has retained a clear
centre of cultural gravity, not least in a unifying patriotism which—at its height in
the Second World War, and despite inevitable fissures—few other nations could rival
(Stapleton 2001: 197, 201 n. 39; Rose 2003). The continuing power of English patriotism
to move and inspire at higher levels than mere bigotry and racism is evident, not
just in sporting events such as the Ashes in 2005 but in literature (Ackroyd 2002)
and popular culture, too (Ashley 2006; Bragg 2006). Whether the sense of English
nationhood can provide the basis for a sovereign English state in the event of Scottish
independence and the disintegration of the Union is uncertain. This is especially so
given that for the English—no less than the Scots—the Union is ‘a part of what they
england 513
have been and are’ (Pocock 2000: 48). Equally uncertain is the likelihood that either
the weaker or the stronger identities now being proposed for the English people can
match the levels of responsiveness that England-in-Britain elicited in the past, and
continues to command in the present (Curtice 2007).
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c h a p t e r 28
.................................................................................................................
IRELAND
.................................................................................................................
richard english
28.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
The clash of rival Irish national identities has been one of the most significant features
of UK history, embodying vital dynamics of modern world politics: contested state
legitimacy; the clash between state and nation amid rival national identities; the
intersection of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism; and the use of political violence
to pursue competing nationalist goals. This chapter will begin by defining some
crucial terms. It will then discuss rival Irish national identities within the modern
UK, organized rival nationalisms in Northern Ireland, and some related complexities
of British national identity.
28.2 Definitions
.............................................................................................................................................
The terms ‘nation’, ‘national identity’, and ‘nationalism’ all require precise definition.
Drawing on the work of Anthony Smith, a nation will here be defined as ‘a named
human population sharing an historic territory, common myths and historical mem-
ories, a mass, public culture, a common economy and common legal rights and duties
for all members’; and the fundamental features of national identity will be taken as:
1. a historic territory, or homeland;
2. common myths and historical memories;
3. a common, mass public culture;
518 richard english
4. common legal rights and duties for all members; and
5. a common economy with territorial mobility for members (Smith 1991: 14).
In line with my own research findings (English 2006), nationalism will be defined
as involving a particular interweaving of the politics of community, struggle, and
power. At root, community suits human nature and our deepest human instincts:
we want survival, self-protection, safety, and security and we possess a group instinct;
social by nature, we want to belong to a stable, coherent, and effective community
which will meet psychological needs (regarding purpose, self-esteem, meaning) as
well as material and practical ones. The shared features of nationalist community
(drawn variously from territory, people, descent, culture, history, ethical superiority,
and exclusivism) are important here as possible means of communication. And such
national community offers rewards that are more capacious and powerful than those
offered by rival versions of group identity.
This community identification is only part of the nationalist story and explanation:
collective struggle is also vital, whether for national sovereignty, unity, independence,
material benefits, cultural status, or group and individual advancement. Each of these
goals possesses its obvious appeal, but there can be allure also in the rewards of
struggle as such. And this collective mobilization turns on questions of power: power
as a goal (the establishment, legitimation, possession, and consolidation of power,
often in the form of a nation-based, sovereign, and self-determining state), and also
power as something by means of which you secure and guarantee the goods which
you pursue as a nationalist.
28.3 Rival Irish National Identities
within the Modern UK
.............................................................................................................................................
Irish national identities have expressed themselves meaningfully in modern Britain
in a range of ways, some of them comfortable within that setting, others sharply at
odds with it (Hickman 2000). But the weightiest Irish national identities within recent
UK politics have unquestionably been expressed within Northern Ireland. This was
particularly true during the post-1960s Ulster conflict, the story of which has been
told frequently (Tonge 2006; English 2004; Wood 2006). The politics of identity have
become variously salient in recent decades in democratic societies (Kenny 2004); in
Northern Ireland it is emphatically national identities which have been the vitally
determining ones.
The contested nature of national identity remains abundantly clear in contempo-
rary Northern Ireland. Asked about nationality in the early twenty-first century (and
allowed to select as many or as few labels as applied), Northern Irish responses were
as follows: 45 per cent British; 30 per cent Irish; 27 per cent Northern Irish; 9 per cent
ireland 519
Ulster; 11 per cent choosing other labels (Gilland and Kennedy 2003: 99). And divided
national allegiances were clear too in the period immediately preceding the onset of
late twentieth-century political violence. Richard Rose’s important 1968 questionnaire
survey valuably examined attitudes under the old Stormont Belfast regime. Regarding
national identities, Rose (1971: 208) found a profound overlap between religious and
national allegiance, as the following figures demonstrate:
Protestants: 39 per cent British, 32 per cent Ulster, 20 per cent Irish;
Catholics: 76 per cent Irish, 15 per cent British, 5 per cent Ulster.
Two important points might be noted, however, concerning these pre-Troubles per-
centages. First, the number of Northern Irish Protestants at that stage happy to
describe themselves as Irish (20 per cent) was comparatively high. This situation
changed during the subsequent conflict, as the concept of Irishness became more
clearly and frequently defined in terms of Irish nationalism and Irish republicanism.
In the era of Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) violence in pursuit of a non-
British, independent, Gaelic Ireland, favoured almost exclusively by Irish Catholics, it
became more difficult for Ulster Protestants to entertain an Irish self-image. By 1986
only 3 per cent of Northern Irish Protestants described themselves as Irish, and this
figure remained stable through to the end of the century (English 2006: 396).
Second, there were important complexities behind the stark figures of 1960s
declared national identity. When asked, for example, whether people in England, or
people in the Republic of Ireland (or people in Northern Ireland from the opposite
religious group), were ‘much different’ or ‘about the same’ as people in Northern
Ireland (or people in Northern Ireland from one’s own religious group) the answers
were revealing. Rose’s survey found that, among Northern Irish Protestants, 29 per
cent thought English people about the same, 45 per cent thought people from the
Republic of Ireland about the same, while far more—67 per cent—thought Northern
Irish Catholics to be about the same. Among Catholics a similar pattern emerged:
30 per cent thought English people to be about the same, 44 per cent thought this
of people from the Republic of Ireland, while 81 per cent thought Northern Irish
Protestants to be about the same (Rose 1971: 214, 486, 496). Even at the dawn of
the Troubles, therefore, each religious group (Catholic and Protestant) thought the
other Northern Irish group to be much closer in similarity to itself than were the
populations of either England or the Republic of Ireland. A very striking feature of
Northern Irish identity was then, as it has remained, its distinctiveness within either
a UK or an all-Ireland framework of identity.
Richard Rose did note that, ‘A resident of Ulster has a wealth of identities to
choose from’ (Rose 1971: 205), and in more recent times some have even pointed
to a supposed erosion of the dominance of national identity among the vari-
ous options available in Northern Ireland. It has, for example, been claimed that
national identities in Northern Ireland have become subverted by European (espe-
cially European Union) developments and by other transnational (economic, social,
political, cultural) challenges to the dominance of the nation state and its associated
sovereignty (McCall 1999). Certainly, the accession of the UK and the Republic
520 richard english
of Ireland to the then European Economic Community in 1973 did set in train
developments of great significance—politically, economically, and culturally. But it
would be unwise to overstate the subversive effect of European identity on and in
Northern Ireland. Asked their views in 2002, even on something as mechanical as
the effect of participation in the EU, only 48 per cent of people in Northern Ire-
land endorsed the quite modest view that ‘Participation has been useful’ (McGowan
and O’Connor 2004: 35). In Northern Ireland, identity has largely been defined
within the rival national blocs, and the enduringly dominant self-image of most
Northern Irish people has been that associated with their respective, rival national
identities.
Irish nationalist identity in Northern Ireland has been complicated by its rela-
tionship to two states: the UK (within which northern nationalists have existed,
but from which many have withheld loyalty and allegiance), and the neighbouring
Republic of Ireland (to which many nationalists would have preferred the north
to be united, in an independent Irish republic). Thus, from the outset of North-
ern Ireland in the 1920s, northern nationalism involved the sustenance of an alter-
native politics and culture: a national identity durably at odds with the formal
identity of the state. This involved a sense of territory, properly (in nationalist
eyes) extending beyond the boundaries of Northern Ireland itself. In the words of
Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams, ‘Ireland is historically, culturally and geographically one
single unit. The partition of Ireland . . . divides Ireland into two artificial statelets’
(Adams 1986: 88). This was a view long held by Irish nationalists north and south,
and it was a position reinforced by the various pillars of national identity for
northern nationalists: Catholic hierarchy, nationalist newspapers, and nationalist
politicians.
Northern nationalists shared powerful myths and memories: of their own position
as an Irish Catholic minority within a British and Protestant state; of long-term
nationalist victimhood at the hands of England or Britain over the centuries; of
historical heroes and villains and iconic moments of past national identity. There was
a strong and shared mass public culture, focusing partly on the Catholic Church and
faith. Denominational organization, belief, and practice offered undoubted rewards
tied to Irish national identity as, without state power, the Catholic nationalist com-
munity witnessed a powerful interweaving of national identity with confessional alle-
giance. The northern nationalist press was full of Catholic Church matters, and the
idea that Catholicism was central to Irish national identity long remained axiomatic
(Elliott 2000: 450).
Catholicism was accompanied by other cultural inheritances and practices, Gaelic
sport and music among them, and the sense of shared and compelling duty to
such cultural traditions was pronounced (English 2006: 358–9). Shared duties of a
different kind were assumed in the northern nationalist pursuit of communal redress
of grievance: in campaigning for civil rights in the 1960s, national rights during
the Troubles, and the politics of equality during the peace process. Taken together,
these various elements constituted an alternative Irish nationalist political culture
in Northern Ireland from the outset of the state: here was an effective counter-life
ireland 521
within the UK, embodied in an Irish nationalist community possessing a distinctive
structure and national identity of its own.
Some of this remained relatively constant, an example being the cross-class aspect
of such confessionally based national culture. There was, and remains, far more
of a shared political identity between Catholic nationalists of various classes than
between, for example, the Catholic-nationalist and Protestant-unionist working
classes in Northern Ireland. But some aspects of this national identity have proved
more fluid. It was long merely assumed by Irish nationalists that the Irish nation was
coextensive with the island of Ireland, and that unionists were Irish people existing
in a state of false consciousness which would evaporate once Britain decided to
withdraw from Ireland. But even members of the Provisional republican movement
have now publicly conceded that this view was inadequate (English 2004: 312–13).
And the political context has changed for nationalists also. The 1985 Anglo-Irish
Agreement between the UK and Ireland gave institutional blessing, for example, to
the legitimacy of Irish national identity within the UK, and recognized the need for an
Irish dimension which incorporated a role for the Republic of Ireland in the politics
and culture of the north.
It would be wrong to see Irish national identity and British unionist identity
in Northern Ireland as mirror images of one another. They are not. Whether one
examines churches, schools, paramilitary groups, political parties, or even the two
states with a role in Ulster, it is the asymmetry which is striking. But there has
existed, in competition with northern nationalist identity, a unionist British identity
representative of the majority of the people in Northern Ireland. It too has had a
notion of territory, involving for some a marked attachment to the north-east of
Ireland itself, and for all a strong sense that the appropriate unit of attachment was
the UK rather than an all-island, non-British identity. Unionists had a long, his-
toric commitment to their territory; they also shared common myths and historical
memories, including the shared sense of vulnerability to Irish nationalist subversion
and attack, and also a positive identification with the manifold achievements of
British culture, of economic, scientific, and other intellectual accomplishment, and
of the contribution of Ulster unionists and Protestants to these historical riches.
British national identity among unionists had its mass public culture, too: Protestant
churches provided one means of achieving this, as did the monarchy, the Orange
Order, various sporting allegiances, and a wide range of civil society mechanisms.
Duties were profound: of loyalty to the state, to other members of the community,
and to the law and order needed (and often threatened) in Northern Ireland since
the 1920s.
Ulster unionist British identity derived cohesion from its recognition of the
dangers posed by Irish nationalist assertion, whether in the form of the growing
minority of nationalists within Northern Ireland itself, or in terms of the Irish
nationalist state to the south (which long claimed jurisdiction over the six counties
of Northern Ireland). Unionist identities have often been characterized as incoher-
ent, owing to their various layers. But there is nothing inherently peculiar about
layered identity as such, and during the early years of Northern Ireland’s existence,
522 richard english
unionists could understandably see themselves as simultaneously Northern Irish,
British, Irish, and Imperial. The last two of these layers have now been lost (Irish-
ness effectively having been assumed by nationalists, and the empire having died).
But the concentric circles of contemporary unionist identity (for some Northern
Ireland, Britain/UK, Europe) need not be mutually incompatible. Moreover, some
unionists have identified their own national culture with an Anglo-American,
liberal-democratic tradition (McCartney 2001; Trimble 2001), pointing towards fea-
tures of unionist identity which should, at least, be recognizably valid to many
observers.
Some other key points might be made regarding unionist national identity. One
concerns the resilience of Britishness, despite the politics of decline. The extent and
the avoidability of British decline have often been exaggerated (English and Kenny
2000), but there is no doubt that relative British decline has been a defining feature
of modern UK politics. This has had an eroding effect on aspects of Ulster unionist
Britishness: as noted, the empire has passed away; Protestantism has become less cen-
tral to contemporary British life than many Northern Irish unionists would like; the
monarchy has been transformed; and the death of industrial power has diminished
the economic weight of unionist Ulster. Yet British national identity among Ulster
Protestants remains extraordinarily resilient despite all this, and the commitment to
retaining the union of Northern Ireland and Great Britain remains almost unani-
mous among Ulster Protestants. It is not that all Catholics oppose the union, recent
evidence suggesting that 33 per cent of Northern Irish Catholics favour its retention
(Irwin 2002: 202). But the unanimity of Protestant opinion on the subject does point
again to the profound overlap in Northern Ireland between confessional background
and political identity (English 2006: 555).
That religion is important to Ulster unionist national identity is unarguable (Bruce
1994: 18, 30), but other aspects of that identity might be more open to debate.
The frequent suggestion of triumphalist superiority within unionist culture (often
enough associated with the Northern Irish politics of parades) (Bryan 2000; Kauf-
mann 2007) might perhaps better be read as the swagger born of constant insecurity.
This certainly emerges from some important studies of loyalism (Nelson 1984; Bruce
1994). And the notion of monolithic unionist identity should also be questioned.
Scholars have long noted divisions within the unionist community over identity, such
work dating back at least as far as Jennifer Todd’s 1987 argument that there existed
two main ideological traditions within Northern Irish unionism: Ulster loyalism
(primarily attached to a northern Protestant community, secondarily attached to
the British state, and seeing religion and politics as inextricably linked); and Ulster
British ideology (primarily attached to the community of Greater Britain, secondarily
defined by a Northern Irish regional patriotism, and characterized by liberal political
values) (Todd 1987). Some would question the durability of this dichotomous reading
(Farrington 2006), pointing out that many actually existing unionists would seem to
have lived in both camps. But, as intra-unionist divisions during the peace process
period have demonstrated, unionist political identity has been fissiparous rather than
monolithic.
ireland 523
28.4 Organized Rival Nationalisms in
Northern Ireland
.............................................................................................................................................
The most forceful expression of rival Northern Irish national identities has been
found in the respective organized nationalisms of nationalists and unionists. Some
would dispute the treatment of unionism under the label of nationalism at all, but
it seems to me that we can valuably analyse the dynamics of Northern Irish unionist
politics through the lenses of our reading of the phenomenon of nationalism.
Unionists in Northern Ireland have been preoccupied with questions of survival,
self-protection, safety, and security, having been under actual threat since the revolu-
tionary period from which Northern Ireland was born, through to the recent Trou-
bles. Within this context, the importance of communal organization and strength has
been clear, as have various bases of coherent, durable group identity and organization.
Unionist politics have focused on the various component parts so often found in
nationalist movements: territory, people, shared descent and culture and history,
and a belief in the distinctive value of one’s own community and the boundaries
which mark it out from its competitors. Unionists have been involved in repeated,
organized struggle: to avoid Irish Home Rule in the era prior to the foundation
of Northern Ireland; to defend the existence and identity of their Northern Irish
state and government between 1921 and the introduction of Direct Rule from West-
minster in 1972; and to protect life and unionist interests against republican and
nationalist assault during the bloody decades of the late twentieth century. The
attempt to guarantee the future of the union with Great Britain reflected a com-
plex theme so often central to organized nationalist struggle: the focus on national
sovereignty, on the unity held necessary to achieve this, on the freedom which this
sovereignty involves, and on the material benefits to be derived from such freedom.
All of these elements were to be found in the organized politics of Northern Irish
unionists.
And crucial to all of this was the question of power. If a nation-based state was
one which reflected your own national identity, culture, and community, then your
interests were held to be safer. Hence the unionist zeal to preserve their own govern-
ment in Belfast, for one of the paradoxes of modern unionism has been its mistrust of
London governments. The most famous of all latter-day unionists, the resolutely anti-
republican Ian Paisley, even admitted in the 1990s ‘something that is very repugnant
to me, but it’s become a reality, that people have more faith in the statements of the
IRA than they have in the statements of the British government’ (quoted in English
2004: 268).
The unionist approach towards the battles of national identity has been a some-
what defensive one, in a context in which threatened and actual change have tended to
move history in an Irish nationalist rather than an Ulster unionist direction. How has
this worked in practice? During recent decades unionist Ulster has overwhelmingly
expressed itself in formal-political terms through two main parties, the Democratic
Unionist party (DUP) and the Ulster Unionist party (UUP). The latter, known for
524 richard english
many years as the Official Unionist party, provided the governing party of Northern
Ireland between 1921 and 1972 (Walker 2004). During these years the party was deeply
committed both to retaining the union between Northern Ireland and Great Britain
and also to defending the existence and powers of the Belfast parliament. The UUP
has, since the 1960s, been at times sharply divided between more reformist and
more conservatively traditional wings: this was evident in rival responses within the
party to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, to the 1973–4 experiment in power
sharing with northern nationalists, and, more recently, to the 1998 Belfast Agreement.
Traditionally, the UUP was the larger and more popular of the two main unionist
parties. But its position has slipped dramatically in recent years, as is evident from
its performance in UK general elections from 1983, 1992, 2001, and 2005: in 1983 the
UUP won 34 per cent of the vote and eleven seats; in 1992 it obtained 35 per cent of
the vote and nine seats; in 2001 it managed 27 per cent of the vote and seven seats;
but in 2005 it won 18 per cent of the vote and only one seat. The party endorsed
the 1998 Belfast Agreement, and when unionist opinion turned against that deal
in subsequent years—with unionists thinking its implementation heavily to have
favoured Irish nationalists—the UUP paid an electoral price, being eclipsed by the
long-anti-Agreement DUP.
The UUP had throughout its political life focused on maintaining UK sovereignty
over Northern Ireland. As such, it had deeply opposed the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agree-
ment which introduced a formal role for the Republic of Ireland in the affairs of
the north: though happy enough at the prospect of economic cooperation with the
Republic, the party held that there was no proper political role for Dublin in the
politics of Northern Ireland. Indeed, much UUP opinion in the later 1980s had
favoured full integration into the UK, namely the integration of Northern Ireland
into the UK on exactly the same basis as any other part of the state.
In the 1990s peace process, elements within the party eventually came to accept
that some north–south, cross-border Irish dimension would be required as part of
a successful deal ending the Ulster conflict. But well into the 1990s there remained a
hostility towards a Dublin role in Northern Irish political decision-making. Under
the leadership of David Trimble in the 1990s (Godson 2004), the party played a
major part in negotiating and supporting the Good Friday Agreement. This marked
a recognition of some key realities in Northern Ireland’s organized war of national
identities: neither the Protestant nor the Catholic community could expect to enjoy
a large enough majority to enable it to win the war of rival nationalisms (the 2001
Northern Ireland Census showed a population comprising 53 per cent Protestant,
44 per cent Catholic, 3 per cent other) (English 2004: 389). Moreover, some form
of power-sharing arrangement had long been seen by London as the proper basis
for devolved power in Belfast and so a compromise—such as that of 1998—made
much sense. For when Direct Rule had been introduced in 1972, the UUP had been
diminished in importance from a governing party to a significant but ultimately
powerless party of protest; the realities of power now necessitated a different kind
of struggle.
Eventually, this seemed the case even to the most famously anti-republican
unionist of all, Ian Paisley, whose DUP in 2007 participated in a power-sharing
ireland 525
government with their Sinn Fein enemies. By that stage the DUP had emerged as the
dominant party of Northern Irish unionism, but this process had taken a very long
time in coming to fruition. The DUP had been founded in 1971 by Revd Ian Paisley
and Desmond Boal, the two men sharing a hostility towards the reformist instincts
of some Ulster unionists at that time. The party, which Paisley himself led from the
outset, was to represent a non-violent but hardline unionism: it was long opposed
to any concessions to republican or nationalist constitutional demands, and it was
staunchly keen to defend the union with Great Britain. The DUP’s sense of struggle
has been sharp, and it traditionally called for an uncompromisingly hard line against
the IRA, towards whom it held successive London governments to have been far too
lenient.
Paisley’s party, rather than paramilitary-related loyalist political parties, was the
means of organized expression for hardline unionist electoral instinct. The DUP
sustainedly obtained electoral success: in the 1979 UK general election it won 10 per
cent of the vote; in the 1983 UK general election it obtained 20 per cent of the vote; and
by the time of the 2005 UK general election—when the DUP’s popularity had risen as
unionist hostility to the Good Friday Agreement had grown—the party’s success was
even more marked, with the DUP winning 34 per cent of the vote and establishing
itself as the dominant Northern Irish unionist party.
Issues of power were central to this brand of unionism, hence the party’s long
hostility towards power sharing with Irish nationalists. But culture also played a
significant role, especially in the form of religion. Ian Paisley’s Free Presbyterian
Church (which he had founded in 1951) has by no means been coextensive with his
political party (the latter drawing on a far larger constituency), but there has been a
strongly Protestant dimension to some of Paisley’s arguments and stances. Though
often helpful to Catholic constituents, Paisley himself has at times been publicly
hostile towards the Roman Catholic Church and sceptical about Protestant–Catholic
ecumenism. For him, unionist struggle has been, in part, about defending a politics
interwoven with Protestant conviction and adherence.
Organized unionist politics have been represented by these two constitutional
political parties, but also by violent loyalist paramilitaries whom those parties have
long condemned. Groups such as the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the
Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) have carried out high levels of fatal violence in pursuit
of their own brand of unionist struggle. Violence has been held by them to offer a
necessary response to IRA and other republican violence, and to what loyalists have
perceived as the inadequate response of the state in dealing with that republican
threat. Paradoxically, therefore, loyalist paramilitaries have, in supposed defence of
the UK state, challenged that state’s Weberian claim to a monopoly of legitimate
violence within its boundaries, precisely because they have held the state not to
have used that monopoly effectively enough against the state’s republican enemies.
Between 1966 and 2001 loyalist paramilitaries killed 1,071 people in the Northern Ire-
land Troubles (Irish republicans killing 2,148 people in the same period, and security
forces killing 365) (McKittrick et al. 2001: 1496).
Organized Irish nationalism took a different form from that of unionism, the
central dichotomy between its own rival wings being between two well-supported
526 richard english
groups, one of which eschewed and the other of which long pursued political vio-
lence. The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP)—Irish nationalist, pro-
European, and constitutionalist in outlook—was founded in 1970 to further the cause
of a united Ireland by consent. It favoured the ending of Irish partition but on the
basis of persuading (rather than violently coercing) a majority of people in Northern
Ireland to take this path. It should be stressed that, despite frequent assumption that
Northern Ireland demonstrates the victory of extremism over moderation, it was this
moderate, constitutional nationalist party which repeatedly gained majority support
among Irish nationalists while the IRA was engaged in violent conflict. In pre-
ceasefire Northern Ireland, the constitutional-nationalist SDLP clearly and repeatedly
defeated the IRA’s political party, Sinn Fein, at the polls (English 2006: 383):
General Election 1983 SDLP 17.9 per cent SF 13.4 per cent
General Election 1987 SDLP 21.1 per cent SF 11.4 per cent
General Election 1992 SDLP 23.5 per cent SF 10.0 per cent
District Council Elections 1985 SDLP 17.8 per cent SF 11.8 per cent
District Council Elections 1989 SDLP 21.0 per cent SF 11.2 per cent
The SDLP have focused on self-determination as a nationalist right, on power as
something to which Irish nationalists in the north should have access, on the pursuit
of material advantage for the nationalist community, and on pursuing an ultimate
goal of independent, united Irish sovereign statehood. In terms of method, they long
argued that there was no justification for IRA violence, and that such violence merely
accentuated divisions in Ireland. There was much friction with the IRA: a reflection
of the intra-communal tension which often developed in Northern Ireland but which
has been obscured by the inter-communal conflict. In essence, the party’s policy has
involved achieving a united Ireland through peaceful, consensual means, although by
no means all party members actually favour a united Ireland, and the party has at
times espoused joint authority.
The SDLP endorsed the 1998 Good Friday Agreement as a valid resolution of the
conflicting interests of the north’s competing national traditions. Indeed, much of
what the 1998 deal actually involved (power sharing with a north–south dimension;
respect for two national traditions; shared access by both communities to decision-
making and power, for example) had been SDLP policy for many years (Murray and
Tonge 2005; Aughey 2005: 30). The party had long espoused the politics of power
sharing and the involvement of the London and Dublin governments in Northern
Ireland solutions.
Culture too played its part in this organized nationalist story. Though stressing
peaceful means and a respect for different traditions (unionist as well as nationalist),
the SDLP’s support base was always overwhelmingly Catholic. A figure such as John
Hume (one of the party’s founder members in 1970, and its leader from 1979 onwards)
repeatedly appealed to Protestants for a shared approach to Northern Ireland, but
remained for most Protestants a figure whose politics held no significant appeal
at all.
ireland 527
He was, however, less despised by Ulster Protestants than were his intra-communal
rivals: the Provisional republican movement. The Provisional IRA was founded at the
end of 1969 as a break-away faction splitting from the existing IRA. The Provisionals
had emerged for a number of interwoven reasons, including a perceived need for
the defence of northern Catholic communities under attack in the 1969 sectarian
crisis, together with a sense that the existing IRA was focusing too much on left-
leaning and quasi-parliamentary politics, rather than on issues such as defence or
more militarily-inclined republicanism. From its early days, the new IRA’s own ver-
sion of organized nationalist struggle involved attempted defence, retaliation, and
an offensive campaign of violence aimed at undermining and ultimately destroying
the Northern Ireland state. The IRA held the north to be irredeemably sectarian and
undemocratic; they held that reform of Northern Ireland was futile, and that the only
solution to this discriminatory unionist state was its abolition, to be brought about
through their own campaign of violence.
That campaign was lengthy, the IRA killing 1,778 people between 1969 and 2000,
and as such killing more people than any other group in the Northern Ireland conflict
(English 2004: 379). They initially had an expectation of comparatively early victory,
and then (from the mid-1970s onwards) saw their struggle as involving a longer
nationalist war which would, they anticipated, ultimately break the will of the London
government and lead the latter to withdraw from Ireland. IRA thinking was well
encapsulated in repeated declarations of the purpose of their violence, as with the
following from 1989: ‘The IRA strategy is very clear. At some point in the future, due
to the pressure of the continuing and sustained armed struggle, the will of the British
government to remain in this country will be broken. That is the objective of the
armed struggle’ (quoted in English 2004: 263).
In practice, the IRA was unable to defend Catholic communities or to force
British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. But it long argued the need for Irish self-
determination, and became such a major factor in the conflict that its political wing—
Sinn Fein—had to play a significant role in any proposed solution. During the 1990s
the IRA shifted its mode of struggle considerably. It embarked on ceasefires (in 1994
and then again from 1997 onwards), engaged in dialogue with the Dublin and London
regimes, and ultimately decommissioned its weapons and brought an end to its war.
By the early twenty-first century it was Sinn Fein, rather than the IRA, which had
become the dominant partner in the Provisional republican marriage.
Why did the Provisional movement change from war to peace? First, it came to
recognize that its violence was producing not victory, but merely a bloody stalemate;
second, it recognized that the politics of ceasefire and peace process would produce
definite and more positive results (a higher vote for Sinn Fein, prisoner release, the
reform of the north of Ireland); third, it recognized some realities long denied by
its traditional thinking (that Northern Ireland rested on economic subvention from
Britain and that immediate British withdrawal was therefore not feasible; that the
IRA’s reading of unionism had underestimated unionists’ resolve and their durable
centrality to the Northern Irish situation; that the Republic of Ireland was a state
legitimate in its own right and far from zealous for a united Ireland).
528 richard english
Thus the IRA eventually retired from the political stage. Some republican aims and
elements remained constant: an ultimate goal of a united, independent, sovereign
Ireland; a commitment to Irish self-determination; and a Catholic-nationalist base
in the north. But much had also changed: the politics of armed struggle had ended;
compromise with a British Northern Ireland appeared to offer the best way forward
for northern nationalists; and a reformed north in which republicans shared power
seemed appropriate.
So while republicans still contested the ultimate legitimacy of the British state in
Northern Ireland, they effectively came to acknowledge that the UK would continue
to operate in the north for the medium-term future. There were certainly gains
in shifting from violent to more constitutional forms of nationalist struggle. With
the IRA’s 1994 and 1997 ceasefires, and the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and its
gradual, jagged implementation, Sinn Fein became not only the dominant wing of
the republican movement, but also the dominant voice in northern nationalism. In
the 2001 UK general election the SDLP was overtaken by Sinn Fein, with the latter
winning four seats to the SDLP’s three; in the UK general election of 2005 this process
was reinforced, Sinn Fein winning five seats and the SDLP three.
Ironically, therefore, a party which had long denounced parliamentary politics,
political compromise (such as power sharing within Northern Ireland), reform rather
than the destruction of the Northern Ireland state, and the rights of unionists to
remain in the UK, came to dominate northern nationalism on the basis of espousing
these views (Murray and Tonge 2005: 239). Sinn Fein might still hold to its ultimate
preference for a sovereign and independent united Ireland, but this has become
relegated to the long term in practice, and the party became keen to build its support
and power base within the two separate Irish states, north and south, and to work
in less obviously hostile relation to London or Dublin regimes. A form of political
pragmatism has, with Sinn Fein, apparently won out, as intransigent purism waned
(Rafter 2005).
The republican movement had therefore evolved dramatically. But throughout
these differing phases, the politics of nationalism could be discerned in ways that
explain the allure of the movement. Issues of nationalist survival, self-protection,
safety, and security were, for example, to the fore at the very birth of the Provisionals
in 1969, when one of the impulses behind the new movement lay in its supposed
capacity to offer defence when Catholic communities were under loyalist attack.
Republicans’ sense of durable, coherent community (with a strong sense of inherited
and justifying history, or of shared cultures of Gaelicism and Catholicism), offered
routes to comforting and effective self-image and national identity. A muscular move-
ment offered leverage in gaining attention for one’s grievances, and both the IRA
and Sinn Fein have constantly pressed for communal advantage in terms of national
recognition for their community and in terms of material economic advantage and
advancement. Struggle was shaped to suit a form apparently most effective at any
given point: where the early Provisionals saw themselves fitting into a late 1960s and
early 1970s Zeitgeist of anti-imperial, colonial-liberationist campaigns, the latter-day
ireland 529
Sinn Fein recognized the futility of ongoing paramilitary stalemate and the value
instead of a politics of constitutional progress and struggle.
Power was vital, both as a method (the Provisionals consciously used their violent
power in order to maximize their leverage) and as the goal to be pursued: ideally, a
sovereign and independent Irish national state run by people who shared republicans’
national identity and culture. The foundation for this was the Provisionals’ case
for the right of Irish national self-determination. This remained a key component
of their nationalist argument; it also points towards one of the crucial ways in
which rival Irish nationalisms have exemplified the complexities of British national
identity.
28.5 The Complexities of British
National Identity
.............................................................................................................................................
Behind nationalist enthusiasm for one’s own national freedom lies the assump-
tion of an international order modelled according to the universal principle of
national self-determination. Indeed, nationalism has arguably been a doctrine of
self-determination (the power of a people to determine its own politics and govern-
ment) as much as it has been anything else. Nationalists have defended the right of
national majorities within a territory collectively to decide their own political lives
and, in doing so, to enjoy freedom from outside control or domination. And both
Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists have argued that self-determination supports
their case. Traditionally, nationalists have claimed that the unit of self-determination
should be the people of Ireland as a single unit, and that this group would favour an
independent and united Ireland. Unionists, by contrast, have held that the six-county
state of Northern Ireland (or, at times, the UK as a whole) should be the unit. Here
we face the paradox of self-determination: the places in which the idea seems most
urgently required as the key to unlocking a national problem have often tended to
be the very places in which there is least agreement about which ‘self ’ should do the
‘determining’. Predictably, each side tends to prefer a ‘self ’ which will ‘determine’ in
its own favour.
The UK’s contested legitimacy in Northern Ireland provides here a version of the
wider problems currently faced in the United Kingdom regarding self-determination,
legitimacy, and separatism. Those nationalists (whether Scottish, Welsh, English, or
Irish) who argue for the separation of their own nation from the UK state face the
clash between perceived historic rights to self-determination and the complexities of
actually-existing opinion and of pragmatic politics and economics. In each of the
four constituent parts of the UK there are voices calling for separatism, and there are
530 richard english
those on both left and right who consider the dissolution of the UK to be inevitable.
But Northern Ireland—for all of its distinctive recent bloodiness—perhaps highlights
some broader UK patterns here.
First, although the UK state embodies a less emotionally alluring or fashionable
cause than do its centrifugal nationalisms, the reality of popular opinion in Northern
Ireland (and perhaps in the other component parts of the UK as well, were a realistic
end to the union actually in prospect) favours the UK rather than separatism. This is
backed up (in Northern Ireland as in Scotland and Wales) by the further current real-
ity that independence probably lacks economic feasibility. And there does seem to be
scope—even in as sharply contested a setting as the north of Ireland—for reconceiv-
ing self-determination in ways more subtle and flexible than an automatic recourse
to nation-state independence. Here, the Northern Ireland peace process and the 1998
Belfast Agreement perhaps point the way forward regarding other UK devolutionary
or separatist challenges. In Ulster, self-determination still lies at the heart of political
argument, and its centrality to politics has helped keep Irish nationalists within that
process. But self-determination has been doubly reimagined in the Northern Irish
context, altering it from its traditional Irish nationalist notion of an all-island vote in
favour of Irish unity and independence from Britain. Self-determination is now exer-
cised in the two parts of Ireland, simultaneously but separately, as in the referendums
on the Good Friday Agreement in 1998; and the new political structures within the
north allow for self-determination in the form of communal-national will on either
side within a divided polity: there is emerging in Northern Ireland an effective right
of communal veto (for either national group, Irish nationalist or British unionist)
over certain political or cultural developments. This has reinforced the situation in
which many Irish nationalists in the north have been prepared to accept something
far short of sovereign independence from Britain. Their national identity is built into
state structures, and their community has protective rights of veto.
This relates to another point: the assumption that Northern Ireland’s departure
from the UK is somehow inevitable at some stage in the future rests on a related
assumption that a united, independent Ireland is a viable prospect. This may be so.
But there are reasons for doubting it at present, and for thinking that Irish national
identity and British unionist identity might coexist within a UK setting for some while
to come. As noted, there existed at the most recent Northern Ireland Census (2001)
a majority of people from a Protestant background, the vast majority of whom are
unionist in sympathy. Even if one assumed (and one should not) that the 3 per cent
designating themselves ‘other’ were all Catholic, there would still exist some ground
to catch up before Catholics constituted a majority of the population of Northern
Ireland. Moreover, Protestant hostility towards a united Ireland is more pervasive
and intense than is Catholic enthusiasm for such an outcome. In the early twenty-
first century, it remains the case that the percentage of Northern Irish Protestants
preferring political unification with the rest of Ireland (5 per cent) is far lower than
the percentage of Catholics preferring to remain in the UK (21 per cent), and that
the percentage of Protestants committed to remaining in the UK (82 per cent) is far
higher than the percentage of Catholics committed to unification with the rest of
ireland 531
Ireland (49 per cent). In the early years of the twenty-first century only 24 per cent of
Northern Ireland’s population actually support Irish unity (Tonge 2006: 7). Tellingly,
recent research suggests that only 50 per cent of even SDLP members themselves state
that a united Ireland would be the best solution to the Northern Ireland problem
(Murray and Tonge 2005: 204). So there would need to be a huge Catholic majority
before a northern majority favoured a united Ireland. Moreover, for a variety of
economic, cultural, and political reasons, there is no practical enthusiasm in the
Republic of Ireland for Irish unity (English 2004: 361–3; 2006: 421–3).
Again, our sense of how benign a phenomenon British national identity is will
depend on whether we address it within a UK or a purely British framework. Contrary
to some arguments about the supposedly benign quality of nationality and nation-
alism, it might be argued that the Irish–British relationship as painfully embodied
in Northern Ireland—a subject usually ignored in such arguments—demonstrates
some of the troubling features of nationality and nationalism on all sides: the painful
tension between nation and state; the problem of disaffected and non-accommodated
minorities within the UK; the durable importance of religion as a distinguishing
marker within national identity; and the possibilities for political violence as an
expression of national identity and aspiration.
It might, for example, seem strange for a scholar as rigorous and intelligent as
David Miller to stress the beneficent aspects of nationality, and then refuse engage-
ment with that part of the UK in which it has displayed its most cruel nature (Miller
1995: 173). There are glancing references to Northern Ireland in a later, equally valuable
work by the same author (Miller 2000), but again there is no attempt here to consider
in any detail the problems raised by the Ulster conflict for Miller’s philosophical
defence of nationality. The word ‘crisis’ has very often been deployed in relation to
aspects of modern British experience (in the literature on decline, for example). But
one of the most central crises of the UK state has involved that part of the UK not in
Britain: here—in Northern Ireland—there has long been something like a civil war,
and its causes and dynamics exemplify the darker side of the complex phenomenon
of British national identity and its difficult legacies.
Yet again, in the post-9/11 terrorist crisis, the question of ethno-religious identity
and political violence has become awkwardly salient in Britain, with much argument
regarding Islam, Islamism, and the British state. One feature of this debate has been
its apparent amnesia regarding what we know from the UK’s experience of ethno-
religious national identity and political violence in Northern Ireland. Indeed, the
narrative of post-9/11 UK responses to jihadism has a depressingly familiar sound
to anyone who knows the politics of Northern Ireland and the eruption of violence
there in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It is clear that some lessons have not been
well learned. In the post-9/11 crisis, rushed legislation has undermined important
civil liberties without obviously preventing the likelihood of further attacks on the
west (Dworkin 2003); imprisonment or internment have been further marred by
allegations of mistreatment (including those in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib),
thereby offering a propaganda victory to opponents of the UK and USA; there have
been instances (including one in London) in which the wrong person was targeted
532 richard english
and killed; and there has been a formal military deployment to respond in war-
mode to a terrorist challenge, without adequate development of accurate and precise
counter-terrorist intelligence or planning.
In all of this there are echoes of the less successful features of UK response to the
IRA threat, and we could and should have learned these lessons in ways that would
have offset some damaging post-9/11 policies. In Britain during the 1970s anti-terror
legislation was rushed through parliament in the wake of IRA bombs in England; it
did not prove especially helpful in combating the IRA, but it did seem at times to make
the state look repressive. Internment of many of the wrong people in the early 1970s in
Northern Ireland helped to deepen support for the IRA among nationalist communi-
ties there, as did mistreatment of prisoners while in custody. Shoot-to-kill allegations
in the 1980s—though comparatively rare in number—handed propaganda advantage
to the far more murderous opponents of the state. And throughout the Northern
Ireland conflict the deployment of formal British Army soldiership was of less value
than was the acquisition and preventative deployment of intelligence information in
fighting the IRA—a lesson only slowly learned in Northern Ireland, but absolutely
central in the fight against terrorism. Conventional military approaches are of far
less value in combating the terror threat than are data acquired quietly through
intelligence agents and informers within militant groups themselves and their host
communities. The latter allowed for the placing of a ceiling on the level of effective
IRA operations; and yet the evidence of the Iraq War episode is that insufficient
attention has—even after 9/11—been paid to intelligence acquisition, and that more
emphasis has been placed on the deployment of formal military power.
And the UK’s experience in Northern Ireland demonstrated perhaps the key les-
son in dealing with non-state violence: the necessity of avoiding actions or poli-
cies around which resistance can mobilize through the mechanism of victimhood.
(And the implications of this lesson for the delicate handling of the inter-ethnic
dimensions of contemporary British national identity should be very clear.) The
1976–81 Northern Irish war of the prisons allowed the IRA to present itself as
the victim—turning a lethal set of prisoners into vulnerable prison-protesters and
hunger-strikers in the eyes of world opinion. An avoidable prison stand-off thus
injected life into what had—in the mid-1970s—been a rather flagging Irish republican
movement.
Overall, one of the most telling lessons from the painful experience of contested
national identities in modern Ulster has been that political violence tends to make
such problems more famous and more urgent of resolution, while making that res-
olution itself far more difficult. In Northern Ireland, two communities neighboured
one another largely in cold mistrust from the 1920s until the 1960s. The post-1960s
violence then rendered trust, compromise, and magnanimity far more difficult still
to achieve, and it is tempting to see the political violence of late twentieth-century
Northern Ireland less as a necessary means to achieving progress, than as a symptom
of that myopic vision (on all sides) which encouraged the futile pursuit of military
victory rather than the achievement of messy compromise. Here again there are Ulster
pre-echoes for the problems of contemporary British national identity as it relates to
ireland 533
the wider international crisis of war and terror. For many and for a long time, political
violence was seen in Northern Ireland as offering a means of effecting desirable and
necessary change: Irish republicans saw their violence as necessary both to the defence
of their community and to the achievement of national liberation; Ulster loyalists
considered their violence necessary as a defence against Irish nationalism and as
a means of strengthening their place within the UK; the state itself initially relied
heavily on military might in its attempt to defeat terrorism and disorder. Yet violence
failed to meet the challenge of achieving legitimate accommodation between groups
possessing durable but rival national identities. We now know the hideous personal
cost of this in Northern Ireland (McKittrick et al. 2001; Myers 2006), and the ultimate
futility of conflicts such as that fought out over national identity in late twentieth-
century Ulster. Whether we apply these lessons in other arenas of British politics
remains to be seen.
References
Adams, G. 1986. The Politics of Irish Freedom. Dingle: Brandon.
Aughey, A. 2005. The Politics of Northern Ireland: Beyond the Belfast Agreement. London:
Routledge.
Bruce, S. 1994. The Edge of the Union: The Ulster Loyalist Political Vision. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Bryan, D. 2000. Orange Parades: The Politics of Ritual, Tradition and Control. London: Pluto
Press.
Dworkin, R. 2003. ‘Terror and the Attack on Civil Liberties’. New York Review of Books, 6 Nov.
Elliott, M. 2000. The Catholics of Ulster: A History. London: Allen Lane.
English, R. 2004. Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA. London: Pan Macmillan (1st pub.
2003).
2006. Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland. London: Pan Macmillan.
and Kenny, M. (eds.) 2000. Rethinking British Decline. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Farrington, C. 2006. Ulster Unionism and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. Basingstoke:
Palgrave.
Gilland, K., and Kennedy, F. (eds.) 2003. ‘Data Yearbook 2002’. Irish Political Studies, 17:
1–108.
Godson, D. 2004. Himself Alone: David Trimble and the Ordeal of Unionism. London:
HarperCollins.
Hickman, M. 2000. ‘A New England through Irish Eyes?’ Pp. 96–110 in S. Chen and T. Wright
(eds.), The English Question. London: Fabian Society.
Irwin, C. 2002. The People’s Peace Process in Northern Ireland. Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Kaufmann, E. P. 2007. The Orange Order: A Contemporary Northern Irish History. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kenny, M. 2004. The Politics of Identity. Cambridge: Polity.
McCall, C. 1999. Identity in Northern Ireland: Communities, Politics and Change. Basingstoke:
Macmillan.
McCartney, R. 2001. Reflections on Liberty, Democracy and the Union. Dublin: Maunsel.
534 richard english
McGowan, L., and O’Connor, J. S. 2004. ‘Exploring Eurovisions: Awareness and Knowledge
of the European Union in Northern Ireland’. Irish Political Studies, 19/2: 21–42.
McKittrick, D., Kelters, S., Feeney, B., and Thornton, C. 2001. Lost Lives: The Stories of the
Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles. Edinburgh:
Mainstream (1st pub. 1999).
Miller, D. 1995. On Nationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2000. Citizenship and National Identity. Cambridge: Polity.
Murray, G., and Tonge, J. 2005. Sinn Fein and the SDLP: From Alienation to Participation.
Dublin: O’Brien Press.
Myers, K. 2006. Watching the Door: A Memoir 1971–1978. Dublin: Lilliput.
Nelson, S. 1984. Ulster’s Uncertain Defenders: Loyalists and the Northern Ireland Conflict.
Belfast: Appletree Press.
Rafter, K. 2005. Sinn Fein 1905–2005: In the Shadow of Gunmen. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan.
Rose, R. 1971. Governing without Consensus: An Irish Perspective. London: Faber and Faber.
Smith, A. D. 1991. National Identity. London: Penguin.
Todd, J. 1987. ‘Two Traditions in Unionist Political Culture’. Irish Political Studies, 2: 1–26.
Tonge, J. 2006. Northern Ireland. Cambridge: Polity.
Trimble, D. 2001. To Raise up a New Northern Ireland: Articles and Speeches 1998–2000. Belfast:
Belfast Press.
Walker, G. S. 2004. A History of the Ulster Unionist Party: Protest, Pragmatism and Pessimism.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Wood, I. S. 2006. Crimes of Loyalty: A History of the UDA. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press.
c h a p t e r 29
.................................................................................................................
SCOTLAND
A N D WA L E S
.................................................................................................................
christopher harvie
29.1 Introduction: Statistics
and Stories
.............................................................................................................................................
‘Scotland feels more like a different country,’ wrote Andrew Marr in his History of
Modern Britain, ‘and London now seems a lot more than 400 miles from Edinburgh’.
Devolution, he concluded, did not seem to have renewed the Union, although it
hadn’t taken an axe to it, ‘It is more like two pieces of pizza being gently pulled
apart, still together but now connected only by strings of molten cheese’ (Marr 2007:
527). 1 The simile is vivid, though it fitted no political science template, save perhaps
the tendency to sell policies by stories rather than by statistics. This had intruded
itself after the tide had gone out on ‘great power’ inquests such as Arthur Koestler’s
Suicide of a Nation (1961) or Martin Wiener’s English Culture and the Decline of the
Industrial Spirit (1981). Alan Milward had been more reassuring about the resilience
of the greater European states in his European Rescue of the Nation-State (1992), but
was Britain numbered with the chosen?
Marr was a competent historian, and a Scot with a humanist education and a
keen knowledge of poetry, which he shared with the Scottish First Minister, Alex
Salmond, who concluded his inaugural campaign speech with a vivid line from Hugh
MacDiarmid, ‘The present’s theirs, But the past an’ future’s oors’.
Such autonomy had impressed itself on a similar figure in Wales, R. S. Thomas:
1
For an extended treatment of the historical background, see Harvie (2008).
536 christopher harvie
And all the time in Wales, as in Scotland, the essential spirit of our people, ‘a spirit
profoundly alien to England’ hides itself far down in the depths of the personality,
overlaid by generations of alien influence, productive of those inhibitions so common
in our folk, yet waiting, waiting for the leaders who are great and fearless enough to
awaken it to that ‘enlargement of national consciousness . . . ’ (Thomas 1946: 102)
This chapter was written by a Nationalist in the Scottish parliament, and revised while
keeping a minority government in office. In Wales the upheaval took longer to show,
but even a National Assembly ‘grand coalition’ of Labour and Plaid Cymru failed on
1 May 2008 to secure Labour authority in more than four local authorities. This piece
may bear out Heisenberg’s thesis that the researcher becomes part of his research
and maybe tries to make the topic over-exciting. But though devolution may have
spawned an academic cottage industry, the number of academics—latter-day Bryces,
Crossmans, or Mackintoshes—in the various chambers is very few.
This is unusual in nationalist politics where, A. J. P. Taylor reminded readers of his
Habsburg Monarchy (1947), ‘Intellectuals had to create their own nationality . . . led by
writers, principally poets and historians’. A professor compiling a linguistic dictionary
was more dangerous than meetings passing resolutions. The same Taylor tended to
deprecate the other nations in these islands, maybe reinforced by the two figures who
brooded over his own career, David Lloyd George and Lord Beaverbrook. They were
respectively Welsh and Scots, and sought their destinies in the world-metropolis of
London. Lloyd George’s masterstroke was to turn the UK’s pacific industrial provinces
into the world-arsenal which destroyed by attrition the military-industrial complexes
of the Central Powers. The consequences haunted Britain thereafter, raising the cur-
tain on the movements and events that take the stage in this chapter (Taylor 1976;
1965).
Contemporary arguments about academic—and other—studies of identity issues
in Scotland and Wales have to be measured against the history. This doesn’t just
involve (1) political science, media, and cultural studies, their concerns and method-
ologies: a post-1945 development dependent on opinion polling and the resulting
data; but (2) historians assessing the longue durée of government, economy, and cul-
ture in both countries since (3) the mages, improvers, and historians of the Enlight-
enment (from ‘Ossian’ MacPherson and Iolo Morganwg on the mystic/fantasy side to
the ‘steam intellects’ of Robert Owen and James and John Stuart Mill) and the—
notable but less discussed—sociologists, jurists, and anthropologists of the post-
Darwinian period, from J. G. Frazer via Ernest Jones to R. D. Laing and Raymond
Williams. 2
Particularly important were the two ‘war-formed’ generations (4) who coped with
the critical economic depression of 1920–39 through ‘administrative devolution’. The
experience of articulate politicians, along with public servants and journalists (the
likes of Tom Johnston, Walter Elliot, Alec Cairncross, James Griffiths, Thomas Jones)
has still to be properly assessed, as has the epoch’s ‘ideal-typical’ presentation in the
extended metafiction of such as Lewis Grassic Gibbon (1932–4), Alasdair Gray (1982),
Richard Hughes (1961; 1973), and Emyr Humphreys (1974–86).
2
See the essays in Brown (1996).
scotland and wales 537
This ought to enable us to assess the durability of the 1997–9 settlement (5) in the
‘settling in’ of the new arrangements, the incidental but radical change brought about
(through PR and enhanced women’s representation); the absence of the ethos of
‘cooperative federalism’ within British politics; and the effect of the recent dominance
of Scots in Westminster politics on British identity when countered by an emergent
but inchoate Englishness. Fitting it into a theoretical typology is another matter.
The Scots and Welsh experience provides a territorial epitome of many of the
topics discussed elsewhere in the Handbook. How stable is it, in mid-2009? Hence the
above framework matters, as does the writer as activist. A debt to the Czech historian
Miroslav Hroch (1985) will be noted. His revisionist-Marxist account (a product of
the Prague Spring of 1968) of the typology of nationalist movements in the transition
to modernity stressed the convergent development of activists derived from academia
and culture, concerned with institutions and ethos, and their influence on popular
and economic-interventionist movements, moving from discourse to propaganda to
mass political organization. Hroch deeply influenced a European Science Foundation
inquiry into minority nationalism and ethnic groups, 1850–1940 (Wales figured; Scot-
land did not), but it was notably remote from political science concerns (Thompson
1991–2).
29.2 The Academic Frame
.............................................................................................................................................
The distinctiveness that sustained Scottish identity during the Union—culture,
dialect, Calvinist religion, education, distinctive media—faces eclipse just as national
independence plants itself on the agenda. Welsh acceptance of the National Assem-
bly, after a hairsbreadth result in 1997, may not be enough to save the language.
The pillars of Welsh nationality in the 1970s—coal and steel, nonconformity, even
rugby—have fallen. Ten per cent of the Scots population were born in England, as
were almost 25 per cent of Welsh residents. A Scot is Prime Minister, a Welshman
Archbishop of Canterbury. Identity is ‘complex and difficult’ as Raymond Williams,
theorist of Anglophone culture and member of the Blaid, would say: denser, more
layered, and contradictory than much opinion poll data: often unforthcoming about
priorities, not just the ranking of issues, but their involvement with non-political
choices, propensity to vote or take civic action, deference to particular authori-
ties. But in both countries the praxis of politics increasingly conditions cultural
identity.
This first section foregrounds academic interpretation, but also argues that much
of it rests on shaky foundations. Robert Hazell’s Constitutional Futures: A History
of the Next Ten Years (1999) from the influential Constitution Unit, centred on
devolution, but cited only two histories: Taylor’s English History and Linda Colley’s
Britons: Forging the Nation, 1688–1837 (1992); both stimulating but under the long
Anglo-British shadow cast by the great power epoch. Keith Stringer and Sandy Grant’s
538 christopher harvie
symposium Uniting the Kingdom (1993) which stressed the mutability of intra-British
relationships and the variables that determined this didn’t figure (Wiener 1981).
History in the Victorian Scots universities, however, was Anglo-British-diplomatic.
Scottish politics per se was not part of their traditional ‘philosophical first year’,
although George Davie argued in his Democratic Intellect of 1961 that for the Scot
as citizen and migrant, philosophy was as important as the farmer’s manual of
husbandry or the engineer’s micrometer. Its ending in the 1960s, ironically, made
space for the empirical political discourse which drove autonomy forward. Though
Scottish ‘philosophy’, distinct from the elitism of Oxford and Cambridge, essentially
combined flexible modernist theology and logic with an opening to the nascent social
sciences. In the hands of gifted Oxbridge-Scot popular educators like James Bryce,
John Buchan, and A. D. Lindsay it fed both into the English civic university tradition
and into various governmental and academic initiatives of ‘Scottish administrative
devolution’ 1886–1999 (Mitchell 2003). Propelled by a ‘civic gospel’ in the pre-1914
period when Scots (or Welsh) entrepreneurs would swallow being called ‘English’
when abroad when there was a bargain to be struck, this became ‘national’ in response
to the post-1921 crisis and the ‘middle opinion’ groups—the Scottish National Devel-
opment Council, and so on—responding to it. 3
This institution-building affected the infant social sciences. In applied economics
James Bowie, the pioneer of human resource management, founded the Dundee
School of Economics and wrote the first economic case for devolution, The Future
of Scotland, in 1939. Alec Cairncross edited a comprehensive survey of the Scottish
economy in 1953 and became adviser to Harold Macmillan in his regional devel-
opment phase, 1957–63. Social geography’s origins lay with Patrick Geddes and his
disciples J. A. Herbertson and Fraser Darling, while social anthropology produced
the community studies of James Littlejohn and Ronald Frankenberg. Associated with
these were agricultural science under the nutritionist and first head of the World
Health Organization Sir John Boyd Orr and regional planning, with pioneer work
from the 1940s on by Frank Tindall and Percy Johnson-Marshall, and local electoral
studies by R. B. MacCallum, G. S. Pryde, and S. B. Chrimes. Some of these were
connected with the Third Statistical Account of Scotland, 1950–92, started by the Social
Service Council, but lack of resources after the late 1950s slump meant that the
detailed work of the early volumes, J. B. Cunnison and J. B. S. Gilfillan’s Glasgow
of 1958 in particular, tailed off badly (Meller 1990).
This had Welsh parallels and precedents, since Glasgow was as influential on Wales
as Oxford or the National University until 1914. Sir Henry Jones, the Welsh Hegelian
who was Professor of Philosophy at Glasgow, 1894–1922, ‘unmistakably the dominant
force in the speculative life both of the West of Scotland and of Wales’, attracted
R. H. Tawney and Thomas Jones as disciples, and influenced Tom Johnston. Tawney’s
influence on the English left was diffuse, but Tom Jones left his mark on as many
Welsh institutions as he could, such as the university involvement in the problems
of the mining valleys and regional economic surveys, notably by Hilary Marquand
3
For background see Finlay (2004).
scotland and wales 539
(A Plan for Wales) in 1931–7, followed by more theoretical treatments by Brinley
Jones and L. J. Williams. Patrick Geddes coined ‘Walestown’ to describe the urban—
though debateably civic—mining valleys, and was invoked in human geography by
H. J. Fleure in Aberystwyth, Emrys Evans, and the social anthropologists Alwyn Rees
and Iorwerth C. Peate. There were parallel agricultural advances to those in Scotland,
associated with Sir George Stapledon at Aberystwyth and an overall interest in con-
servation and regional planning involving Edgar Chappell and Clough Williams-Ellis
as well as the obligatory Thomas Jones. 4
Biographies matter because personal networks, not regional government, had to
cope with economic crisis. ‘Recovery’ meant the restoration through rearmament of
the heavy-industrial status quo. Only in 1939 was the Scottish Office physically located
in Scotland, and only in 1964 was it partnered by a Welsh Office. The period around
1960, combining drastic shrinkage of traditional industries with limited light and
service industry and educational expansion, was also marked by a British distrust of
the metropolitan ‘establishment’, from Beyond the Fringe and Private Eye to the tech-
nocracy of C. P. Snow and Arthur Koestler. This meant that much of the investment
in new cultural forms was spun out from the involvement and interest of incomers
in recent Scottish or Welsh politics and history which stemmed from Robbins-era
university expansion. See the cultural activities of two English settlers: the historian
T. C. Smout in Scotland and the art historian Peter Lord in Wales. 5
Postgraduate study drew on the old English universities, which led after the reforms
of the 1870s in research and political influence. But Oxford had traditional links
both with Scotland and with Wales, through Balliol and Jesus Colleges. Diceyite
parliamentary-sovereignty dogmatism, which underlay assumptions about British
political homogeneity, was queried by James Bryce’s proto-pluralist ideas, further
developed by the likes of the young Harold Laski and A. D. Lindsay in the 1900s,
and carried into the present by such Balliol dissenters as Neil MacCormick, John
Mackintosh, Arthur Marwick, and Tom Nairn. But Scotland also owed much to
Cambridge. Pupils of Peter Laslett and George Kitson Clark such as Smout, Harry
Hanham, and Geoffrey Best, contesting the Diceyite tradition and influenced by
pluralist ideas, explored middle-class politics and Scottish ‘notions’ in urban and
central administration that favoured autonomous styles.
This paralleled Neo-Marxian ideas in the hands of V. G. Kiernan at Edinburgh and
the influence of the Italian radical Antonio Gramsci (Sardinian as well as Communist)
on such ‘people’s remembrancers’ as Hamish Henderson in Scotland and Gwyn Alf
Williams in Wales, who advanced complex ideas of cultural hegemony against both
Conservative Unionism and the dogmatic ‘industrial history’ of Clydeside or Valleys
Communism (Gramsci 1971). There were paradoxes here, between a concern with
central British institutions—Mackintosh on Cabinet government, Marwick on class
and wartime administration, Angus Calder on imperialism—and a growing discourse
4
The information in this section draws heavily on the entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography, 2004, www.oxforddnb.com.
5
Smout (1969) and Lord (2003; 1999a; 1999b). Both are projects without which the national history
would be distorted.
540 christopher harvie
about traditional autonomy and its recovery, which paralleled the European regional
revival. Some of this was encapsulated in Gordon Brown’s Red Paper on Scotland, 1975,
influencing practically everyone except (it seemed) the editor.
In Wales the dominance of David Lloyd George and Aneurin Bevan led such politi-
cized scholars as Kenneth O. Morgan and Dai Smith to explore the divided polity in
which both dealt—Y Fro Gymraeg and ‘American South Wales’ and deep involvement
in the ‘high politics’ of Fleet Street and Westminster. This met with Wales’s greater
openness to ‘small is beautiful’ and ecological ideas—from E. F. Schumacher (1973)
and Leopold Kohr (1940)—and their incorporation into the programme of Plaid
Cymru in the 1950s and 1960s.
Another factor present in both countries was the influence of their ‘Diasporas’,
particularly on a democracy which met with frustration at home: the migration of
such figures as Geddes and his disciples; Welsh trade unionists like Billy Hughes in
Australia and John Llewellyn Lewis in the USA; the influence of Scottish elites in
the ‘old commonwealth’—Andrew Fisher, MacKenzie King—and in the creation of
the ‘new’—Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda—was considerable. Besides the influence
of colonial self-government on the Home Rule Scottish Covenant movement (1948–
51) much cash came back to both countries as academic endowment: from the Dick
Bequest to Andrew Carnegie. The ‘frontier’ side of the Scots-Irish settler tradition,
notably in Ulster, quoted by devolutionists in the 1940s, was downplayed by a Labour
Party seeking Catholic votes.
29.3 ‘The Real Foundations’
.............................................................................................................................................
The Marxist scholar David Craig used his Scottish Literature and the Scottish People
(1961) to denounce nationalism as a parochial sort of arrested development. His later
book, The Real Foundations (1973), dwelt on base–superstructure relations in indus-
trial society. The cognate concept of ‘from status to contract’ had been promulgated
by the Scots jurist Sir Henry Maine in the 1860s, the same decade as the ‘nationalizing’
manifesto of Essays on Reform (1867)—involving James Bryce, A. V. Dicey, Leslie
Stephen, and Frederic Harrison. J. S. Mill and H. T. Buckle criticized the deductive
metaphysic of the Scots Enlightenment, while Matthew Arnold and Walter Bagehot
encapsulated the manoeuvrable qualities of the Anglo-British state in Culture and
Anarchy and The English Constitution.
Interpreted from London, this gave an exaggerated picture of British integration,
influenced by paradigms of ‘national unity’ from a rather exceptional decade which
saw the violent unification of Italy, Germany, and the United States. Yet the Scots’
continuing distinctiveness had precedents in the contractual quality of Scottish con-
stitutional and religious theory, going back to the success of the country’s early-
medieval elite in holding together five different ethnic/linguistic groups: Scots, Picts,
scotland and wales 541
Britons, Angles, and Norse. It fed into the Enlightenment ‘stadial’ sociology of Adam
Ferguson (hunter-pastoralist-farmer-merchant) and his ‘notions’ of social bands and
in-groups and out-groups whose influence on Germany would return via Schiller to
Carlyle and the ‘English social critical tradition’ of F. R. Leavis and Raymond Williams
(Oz-Salzberger 1995).
The autonomy of industrial Scotland during the Union existed by virtue of the
culture of contract. Distinctive manufacturing and trading patterns, dominant in
particular global sectors, were while things went well resistant to takeover. The
Glasgow Herald Review of Trade and Industry was before 1914 a world authority on
shipbuilding, while the Glasgow stock exchange set the world price for iron. Typical
‘capitalist-rational’ bodies, unbound by nationality, were investment trusts, produc-
tion and trade cartels, shipping conferences, trading banks. These paralleled powerful
local corporations, including urban improvement trusts, chambers of commerce,
employers’ associations, port authorities, railways, and banks, which shared regional
self-government with the traditional ‘estates’ of law, education, local government, and
religion.
Demonstrations of nationality of a harmless and heartwarming sort (religion was
avoided as being too conflict ridden, protestant harrying protestant) were used to glue
this emotionally together: historical and regional associations and ceremonies, and
ritualized conflicts, notably over religious patronage and land-ownership, lastingly in
games and sports: characterized by Tom Nairn as ‘the great Tartan monster’ and by
the present writer as the balance of ‘Red’ and ‘Black’ Scotland. Contractual facility
still showed itself as late as 1918 in the Scots Liberal elite’s ‘incorporation’ of the Irish
immigrant community through the creation of a separate Catholic schools system: a
clever move which cut off the prospects of Sinn Fein, then sweeping Ireland.
A similar divide in Wales was de facto linguistic: economic man’s language
was English, God’s was Welsh. Overemphasis on the former led to Michael
Hechter’s economistic centre–periphery model of 1975, but the latter was actually
enhanced by the industrial experience, and structured in its own favour by the
London Welsh. Welsh industry was, however, predominantly extractive, and its
politics and sociology—littoral trading-cities and mining-settlements—was closer
say to South America than to Scotland. Much of the Welsh commercial elite—
the Douglas-Pennants, David Davieses, J. A. Thomases, Butes, Bruces, Robertsons,
MacLarens, Cawdors—had also extensive Scots interests, and through the linguistic
establishment, Cymmrodorion Society, and crachach (the Welsh-speaking Cardiff
cultural-bureacratic elite) an interest in cultural nationalism (Hume and Rees Pryce
1986).
Military romanticism on the Tory side, Liberal-imperial democracy on the left:
both used the history of a very articulate country to place Scotland favourably in
the Union, through the assistance of two groups who bridged Gramsci’s ‘organic’ and
‘traditional’ intellectuals: teachers and journalists. Growing migration, tourism,
and cheap literature made for a diffusion of its image as simultaneously industr-
ial and historical-touristic: something pioneered on a smaller scale by Wales in the
late eighteenth century and then massively expanded in Scotland through rail and
542 christopher harvie
steamer connections and the patronage of the royal family. The Scots’ privileges led
to the English ressentiments Julia Stapleton observes in the period of Chesterton and
Belloc.
This cultural and industrial investment was cashed in during the First World War.
Lloyd George rose on the brief but devastating tide of Welsh militarism. West-central
Scotland, a massive industrial region of coal and ship and railway building (almost
wholly catering for civilian customers), was transformed into the Clyde Munitions
District, and shifted from peace to war production, 1915–21. It arguably proved deci-
sive in the crisis year of 1917, but the simultaneous collapse of the economy, the Irish
Union, and Liberal politics in 1919–22 had two effects.
The pattern of geographical diffusion evident under administrative devolution had
hinged on the ‘floating commonwealth’ of the ports and industrial basins of the
western littoral. In the 1920s its agenda was formed by precipitate industrial rundown
(20 per cent of Scottish workers were unemployed after 1920, 10 per cent emigrated;
in the Welsh mining valleys the situation was worse) but also afforded entry to Irish
nationalism and Catholic doctrines of subsidiarity, though these were not necessarily
co-terminous. These factors both fitted into and contested F. A. Schumpeter’s model
of ‘creatively chaotic’ capitalism and gifted management on the part of the British
elite. The mittelstand element of Scottish entrepreneurialism—in the Victorian period
the sponsor of much academic activity—was lamed and replaced by literal migration,
notably to the English Midlands and to the security of large ‘British’ concerns: the
‘grouped’ railways, ICI (then the paradigm of a Britain-wide company), the banks,
the trade union and cooperative movements, and in due course the expansion of the
Welfare State, central and local.
This would be countered by the emergence in the mid-1960s of nationalist chal-
lenges in both countries: reactions to the weakening of the manufacturing order,
unsophisticated ‘British homogeneity’ dogma, and excessive Oxbridge-driven cen-
tralism within Labour. Academic change, in two disproportionately étatiste political
societies, fed into the civil service, journalism, and the expanding world of regional
television, sprung from its BBC shackles by the setting up of the commercial channels
in 1955. Such a dialogue/debate wasn’t subsequently to be dislodged.
The 1920s weakened the economic-political-religious linkage that had kept an
informally quasi-federal Britain together, and broadly left-of-centre. Without the
Irish, the centre-left with its vague programme of home rule vanished. Labour ticked
the home-rule box but left it at that. Its political-nationalist successors—Plaid Cymru
was founded in 1925, the National party of Scotland in 1928—remained weak, move-
ments rather than parties. They shared their impetus with non-party nationality
during the 1930s until the ‘second wind’ fostered by rearmament and the wartime
destruction of competitors revived the old order—and indeed kept it going until the
1960s.
Subsequently, industrial traumas were to undermine the strength in both countries
of the Labour movement; particularly the collapse of the heavy industries, hammered
by a first wave of closures involving ships, railways, and coal around 1960, and
reaching its last act with the miners’ strike of 1984–5.
scotland and wales 543
The Scottish route out was the more complex, as North Sea oil effectively revived
and then ‘offshored’ much heavy industry, while notions of planned industrial recov-
ery through an Oil Fund were replaced by a privileged public sector financed through
the Barnett Formula. Both brought about a pragmatic anti-Tory ‘national left’ rooted
in education and the public sector, with a goal of political autonomy, radicalized by
the aforementioned university activism, and for the first time foregrounding women.
A new and realistic mapping in Wales was evident in Denis Balsom’s ‘Three Wales
Model’ (1981), a reaction to the devolution debacle of 1979, which placed in autono-
mist hands the same sort of pragmatic approaches later claimed at a British level by
New Labour (Harvie 1993b; Balsom, in Osmond 1981).
In 1986 the GDP of the Republic of Ireland was still under two-thirds of that
of the UK, and in 1990 its record since independence was subjected to ruthless
comparisons with other nations of similar size at the hands of Professor Joseph Lee,
a contemporary historian who was also a European specialist and, as a Senator for
the Universities, a politician. This sort of effective synthesis helped clear the ground
for the remarkable recovery of Ireland in the 1990s. This was not to be separated
from demographic good fortune—old-style Catholic piety producing large families,
followed by a fall to European level, leaving in Lee’s words ‘lots of well-educated
youngsters who won’t fall ill for thirty years’. The transfer pricing of multinationals,
allocating profit-centres to nations with low corporation tax, also helped, as did the
turmoils of the once-dominant Catholic Church, and the feminist movement which
gave the country in Mary Robinson an intelligent reformist President who was also
high profile. Until the 2009 crash it also gave a new non-English paradigm—‘the arc
of prosperity’—to the Scots and the Welsh (Day and Rees 1991).
29.4 The Fate of the Cultures
.............................................................................................................................................
National definition also involved an exploration and retelling of the past, whose
importance increased as protestant religious affiliation declined after the First World
War, hit by secularist growth, economic depression, and demographic change. One
factor common to both countries was the dominance in the nationalist story of a
charismatic individual bridging academic and cultural/linguistic life, a role which
went back to the fantasy folklore of James ‘Ossian’ MacPherson and Iolo Morganwg
in the eighteenth century. This had vividly real consequences, through Johan Got-
tfried Herder and his equation of culture and identity with language, for European
nationality. It also repeated itself in the contested period after the industrial driver
lost momentum in the 1920s (Hobsbawm 1984).
By then cue and style could be taken from the Irish literary revival by Christopher
Murray Grieve ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ (1892–1978) in Scotland and John Saunders Lewis
(1895–1985) in Wales. Both were founder-members of their respective nationalist
544 christopher harvie
parties, whose intellectual impact was considerable if unstraightforward (MacDi-
armid borrowed eclectically from left and right; Lewis emphatically from the French
Catholic/monarchist tradition). Neither fitted into the regional political establish-
ment (see below) yet so substantial was their intellectual legacy that it continued to
work away in academic/cultural life and such institutions as regional broadcasting,
journalism, publishing, and the theatre. MacDiarmid wrote in 1928 that his work
would take more than a generation to bear fruit, which turned out pretty accurate.
This was only partly due to his huge (and variable) output as a poet. He was also
determined to play the role of national culture critic, along the lines of the Goncourt
brothers in France or Georg Brandes in Scandinavia, in his Contemporary Scottish
Studies, (1926) aimed at the teaching profession: a crash course in the modern move-
ment in which few of the comfortable certainties of old-style commercial nationalism
survived.
Wales had a similar revival but it was more deeply divided between the Dragon’s
two tongues, and hampered by the conservatism that Saunders Lewis represented.
The contested society of the valleys and the cosmopolitan society of the southern
port-cities—Eric Linklater, Roald Dahl, and Howard Spring were all born near
Cardiff—had little in common with the highly structured Cymric world of the
Eisteddfod and the waning support it got from a shrinking nonconformity (Smith
1993). The great success was the individual voice and persona of Dylan Thomas,
like his contemporary the novelist Gwyn Thomas possessed of a uniquely resonant
English which probably arose from being a first-generation speaker; but one who
nevertheless projected some of the values of the country—greenish, childlike, radical
in an unspecific way—worldwide. That the American radical folk singer Bob Zim-
merman followed Welsh practice in taking Dylan as his bardic name emphasizes
the facility both countries had in connecting the global icon—Burton, Connery,
Rowling—with the local.
Plaid Cymru’s ‘second wind’ could be said to begin with Lewis’s radio broadcast
‘Tynged y’r Iaith’ (‘The Fate of the Language’) in 1962 even though it was explicitly a
rejection of the Blaid’s parliamentary politics. The year 1961 saw the publication of The
Democratic Intellect by George Elder Davie, MacDiarmid’s friend and disciple, which
argued that the concerns of the Scottish enlightenment continued into the nine-
teenth century and the Scots university establishment, influencing such un-British
regionalist thinkers as J. H. Lorimer and Patrick Geddes and, through them, the
writers of MacDiarmid’s Scottish renaissance. This contribution, coinciding with
fundamental economic crisis in the heavy industries, meant that the study of political
behaviour inevitably broadened into intellectual, art, and cultural history and social
critiques (Humphreys 1983).
The cultural-touristic identity of both countries had already been altered by the
relative decline of manufacture in the inter-war years, which placed a premium on
the marketing of distinctiveness—from climbing and golf courses to the Edinburgh
Festival. In a sense there was a race between the centre, with its ability to integrate
regional elites, demonstrated by T. S. Eliot’s Notes towards the Definition of Culture,
1954, and the nationalists. But the centre was at the mercy of government or the
scotland and wales 545
transnational commercial players in Anglophone culture. Backed up with their own
political centres, could the ‘niche markets’ of Wales or Scotland be the more resilient?
And did the London centre know, or want to know, what was going on?
29.5 Containment and Experiment
.............................................................................................................................................
The economic and nationalist challenges had since the 1920s generated establishment
responses which were sympathetic, politically diversionary, but cumulatively devolu-
tionist: see the careers of such Tory intellectuals as John Buchan and Walter Elliot.
The former, after rekindling Ramsay MacDonald’s home rule enthusiasm, ended
with a passion for a democratic multiracial Canada; the latter while Secretary of
State organized the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938 and the Scottish Economic
Committee and coined ‘the democratic intellect’ concept, which George Davie elab-
orated. The Tories drew on the tradition of self-government within the empire, and
many of the two million signatories of the Scottish Covenant, 1950, must also have
helped them to their biggest-ever Scottish vote in 1955. Their fumbling approach
to the heavy industrial slump initially helped Labour, but by 1967 it had to face
the challenge of a revived SNP. Also supposed to kick nationalism (at this stage
backed by Edward Heath, drawing on such traditions and his own Europhilia) into
touch was Harold Wilson’s Crowther/ Kilbrandon commission, 1968, but it stimu-
lated academic research and commitment, and created political aftershocks when its
report in autumn 1973 coincided with a fresh SNP wave, this time powered by oil.
This in turn fed the ‘devolutionist response’, Gordon Brown’s Red Paper, 1975, and
further academic discourse, funded through the North Sea Oil Panel of the SSRC
under Lord Runciman. Arguably the dominance of the ‘Scottish question’ in the
1970s was Hroch’s ‘incremental nationalism’, obscured an evolving but still inchoate
‘Englishness’ which initially expressed itself in hostility to the EU and a suspicion
of multiculturalism. Scotland was in fact more hostile than England to entry to the
European Community in the 1975 referendum (though this was carried against the
opposition of the SNP and Labour parties, a fact which gave hope to opponents
of devolution). But both there and in Wales the idea of ‘independence in Europe’
was subsequently to gain momentum, because of the expansion of the EU’s regional
programmes and the evident dislike of Mrs Thatcher and her backers in the press for
the European project (Harvie 1993a; Lynch 1996).
Such initiatives meant that, although devolution and the SNP were divided and
defeated in 1979, recovery was fairly rapid. Other collaborative projects were coming
on stream—large-scale research ventures like the New History of Scotland, the History
of Scottish Literature, etc., as well as political/cultural enterprises as varied as the
campaign to save the Royal Bank from takeover (1981) and for the Scottish Poetry
Library (1983). This was paralleled in Wales by an even more energetic campaign
546 christopher harvie
(1981–3) to secure the Welsh television channel S4C, which did much to help the
autonomy cause to recover from the pit of 1979, and to raise Plaid Cymru’s morale
sufficiently for it to benefit from the changed political scene after the miners’ strike.
Academic–media collaboration, as yet unexplored, underlay multi-media projects
like ITV’s Divided Kingdom (1983), The Dragon has two Tongues (1985), and the BBC’s
ambitious Scotland 2000 project in 1986–7. (Compare with Metromedia’s bestseller
obsession—Schama, Starkey, Ferguson, etc.—in the new century). In Scotland an
intellectual ressentiment encouraged tactical voting at the 1987 elections, reducing
Tory MPs from twenty-two to ten, and not long after that came the publication of
Scotland’s Claim of Right by bien-pensant Lib-Lab devolutionists, and the movement
for a Scottish Constitutional Convention. This was boosted in November 1988 by a
spectacular by-election victory for the SNP’s Jim Sillars at Glasgow Govan, although
the SNP itself was not represented in the Convention.
The Convention, under the chair of an ecumenical clergyman Canon Kenyon
Wright and meeting in the Kirk’s Assembly Hall (arguably the churches sought to
recover in politics the influence they had been losing since the 1960s), sat from 1989
to 1993, and out of it came the country’s Perestroika in the form of the proportional
representation system of the proposed parliament. The London-based Charter 88 was
both inspired by and associated with this, and was paralleled by the ‘anti-quango’
campaign in Wales (where Conservative support was so low that ministerial appoint-
ments went to English MPs and public patronage to tax exiles). In England, however,
schemes for democratic regionalism went no further, while Linda Colley’s gutsy but
dogmatic Britons (1992) became an instrument of Gordon Brown’s ‘Bard of Britain’
neo-centralism.
A more visceral explanation—see the silly pages at the end of Simon Schama’s soi-
disant History of Britain, volume iii: ‘Why should post-imperial Britain not resemble
the happy patchwork of nations which is post-communist Yugoslavia?’ 6 —would see
nationalist echoes of a cruder sort in the Scottish reception of Mel Gibson’s film
Braveheart in 1986, Hollywood’s take on William Wallace. In fact this hokum divided
the ‘national left’ and had no influence on the 1997 election, though the Tartan
Army’s ludic parody of ‘Mad Mac’—face-painting and orange wigs—helped make
the World Cup competition held in France in 1998 a carnival rather than a confronta-
tion. The episode might however concentrate the academic mind on the effect of
right-wing Australian ressentiments on metropolitan Britishness. Rupert Murdoch
was the grandson of the Aberdeenshire-born founder of the Free Church of Aus-
tralia. His papers had backed the SNP in the 1992 election; their change almost in
mid-sentence to back New Labour in 1997 could have come straight out of George
Orwell’s 1984. The Sun King’s strings were false when Holyrood 2007 came round: the
melodramatic unionism of the Scottish Sun being countered by Murdoch’s ‘serious’
Sunday Times espousing the SNP.
6
Schama (2002: 550). Davies (1999) took the break-up line of Nairn, but its arguments stopped at the
anecdotal.
scotland and wales 547
29.6 Post-Devolution
.............................................................................................................................................
The study of how institutional change ‘beds itself in’ ought to occupy political sci-
entists more than it has done. Adaptation may simply need time. Sir Robert Calder-
wood, Chief Executive of Strathclyde Region, reckoned it took from 1974 to 1984 for
the Region to ‘find itself ’ in terms of its tasks, relations with subordinate District
Councils, and ésprit de corps. Yet the wartime munitions programme, the Open
University, and indeed the securing of North Sea oil through a massive production-
platform and pipe-laying programme after 1970 were effective because rapid. These,
however, occurred in a country with a substantial and sophisticated manufacturing
sector, which had dwindled to near-insignificance by 2007.
The actuality of the new assemblies seemed to prove Calderwood’s point—not least
because the Holyrood building, four years late and four times over budget, cast a long
and gloomy shadow. Factors such as cabinet politics, ministry development, individ-
ual influence, relations with local government, etc. are only now, into the third term,
being adequately studied, and starting to evict an obsession with opinion polling. On
the other hand, some of the incidental consequences of devolution have themselves
been important. While only six Welsh women were elected to Westminster in the
eighty years from 1918 to 1997, the Assembly gained them equal representation, against
about 40 per cent representation in Scotland. This has both influenced legislation
(see free home-care, smoking bans, anti-drink campaigns) and fed through to the
cultural/academic milieu. Perhaps excessively. With kilted ‘Bravehearts’ continuously
subject to the attentions of health and safety rather than the stimulus of innovation
and risk-taking, was a nanny state wearing the trousers?
In 2007, perhaps, buildings, symbolism, and function seemed to have reached a
fruitful equilibrium at Holyrood and Cardiff Bay, at the iconic centre of explicit cul-
tural capitals which have European roles denied to English provincial cities (Rawlings
2002). But the ‘Guggenheim effect’ which had brought fame to Bilbao through Frank
Gehry’s museum proved temporary, and in Glasgow poverty and dereliction required
an infrastructure far better funded than what was on offer. Even after ten billions had
been spent on the West Coast Railway, and air travel was environmentally suspect,
Glasgow remained at least five hours distant from London, twice the time it took
a TGV train to connect Paris with Strasbourg. This reflected growing political dis-
junction. Under First Ministers Donald Dewar, Henry McLeish, and Jack McConnell,
there was a continuum of party legitimacy from Downing Street to Holyrood to most
of the main Scottish local authorities. But the Lib-Lab coalition could only survive by
passing proportional representation for local government, and the elections of 3 May
2007 saw Labour lose control of all but two Scottish councils.
The relations of the devolved governments and the Union state were linked to this,
and also raise the peculiar nature of responsibilities within the Cabinet that carried
devolution. Post-Granita (the de facto dyarchy, fashioned by Blair and Brown after
John Smith’s death, which ran Labour 1994–2007) devolution initially appeared to be
a ‘Tony-and-Gordon thing’, with a strong role being played by the Prime Minister’s
548 christopher harvie
ally Lord Chancellor Irvine, and the English provinces being represented by the sup-
posed bluff good sense of John Prescott. Blair first mishandled Wales, imposing Alun
Michael as First Minister in 1999 and seeing him all but defeated in the first election,
and then removed in favour of Rhodri Morgan. Prescott then quickly deflated, along
with his would-be super-ministry. Gordon Brown had responsibility for Scotland but
his relations with First Minister McConnell were poor. If it took him three weeks to
contact First Minister Salmond, McConnell admitted that he and the Chancellor had
never exchanged a word during his first year in office. 7
Despite the didactic efforts of the Constitution Unit at University College Lon-
don, there was no British evolution towards a cooperative-federalist settlement on
Bundesrepublik lines. (Do politicians, devolved or Westminster, ever read academic
studies of themselves, as opposed to the ‘docusoaps’ of memoirs or the press?) Apart
from Northern Ireland, the territorial ministers survived as titles, like the smile of
the Cheshire Cat, but their authority quickly dwindled to insignificance. It might
have sustained itself, had there been a concerted effort at English regional self-
government plus a revival of regional planning of industry. But the first vanished in
the defeat of a North of England Assembly in November 2004, and the second never
seriously challenged the housing-retail driver, the persistent rhetoric of ‘enterprise’
being in actuality based on the Chancellor’s encouragement of consumer debt. There
might have been a common discourse of pluralism and decentralization, of the sort
once boosted by Charter 88. Instead, interest in any sort of ‘British’ reform fell
away, and it seemed that even the normal ‘national conversation’ had fallen to a
murmur.
This may be a result of two things. First, the changes in technology and control
of the British media which mean that regional versions of ‘British’ papers contain
material, less than 10 per cent of which finds its way to London readers, and the break-
down of the ‘regional’ structure of ITV; the result being concentration of authority
in London, under the aegis of Ofcom as well as the centralism of the BBC. Second,
there was the non-functioning of much of the Anglo-Irish Good Friday Agreement,
which might have, in the ‘Council of the Isles’, produced a quasi-federal forum, with
longer-lasting and more resilient conferences of ministers and senior civil servants
generating both resilient layers of transactions and obligations, and an expert group
skilled in navigating them (Blain and Hutchison 2008). Critics of the German state
have seen this regional-diplomatic level, clustering round Land cabinets and their
Berlin or Brussels Vertretungen (High Commissions), taking power away from the
Land MPs. Instead, what Larry Eliott has christened ‘the United Kingdom of London’,
has been rapidly evolving its financial interests since the ‘Big Bang’ of 1986, showing
far more interest in international partnerships with cognate centres than in any
sort of regional links. What goes for the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank
of England also goes for Ofcom. The inevitable result has been a steady alienation
7
These have been charted since 2000 by the annual volumes published by the Constitution Unit as
The State of the Nations (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2000–); parallel series of analyses can be found in
the quarterly Scottish Affairs (1993–) (succeeding The Yearbook of Scottish Politics, 1976–92) and
Contemporary Wales, while the Scottish Parliament has its own in-house review, Holyrood.
scotland and wales 549
from Westminster in Scotland and Wales despite the initial difficulties of the new
parliament and assembly (Elliott 2007).
Paradoxically, there was an accession of power to a Westminster-Scottish elite
whose role since 1990 in Conservative as well as Labour cabinets was much greater
than it had been in earlier years. Was this because MSPs, coping with the daily grind of
court cases and school and housing problems, made their constituency burden easier?
Or because the traditional Conservative elite had deserted politics for the far richer
pickings of the City? At the time of revising, Spring 2009, the oscillations of power
relationships in London and the mounting problems of the British economy, deeply
dependent on the housing boom and its role as a driver of economic growth based
on retail and somewhat opaque financial services, made the future exceptionally
difficult to predict. First Minister Alex Salmond, as the former oil economist of the
Royal Bank of Scotland (briefly one of Europe’s biggest), was acutely aware that the
price of oil in 1999—the peak year of UK North Sea production—had by spring
2008 climbed almost twelvefold, and that this resource was necessary to enable the
country’s endowment of renewable energy to be tapped.
The Nationalist minority government in Holyrood enjoyed as much as 48 per
cent support in the polls by then, although backing for its key aim of independence
remained lower. To Salmond this was not a disabling contradiction, given the unpop-
ularity in Scotland of both Westminster parties, and the absence of constitutional
alternatives which had long-term credibility. He believed that Scotland could offer
Europe a package of alternative energy resources, based on wind, tide, and wave
energy, and the use of the North Sea’s oil network to bury much Europe’s carbon
dioxide—at a price. This could only be gained by an accession of authority to Holy-
rood which amounted to autonomy sufficient to use the remaining oil resources to
be used as collateral, and his strategy was to raise the country and his government’s
profile to a point where this seemed more plausible than any alternative. Good rela-
tions with the monarchy, which was persuaded that the ci-devant republican Salmond
was the very model of a modern Commonwealth premier, a high-quality Council of
Economic Advisers mandated to judge performance independently, and the rise of the
country’s main financial institution, the Royal Bank, to European dominance were
important picture cards. But the RBS’s eclipse would be as rapid as that of Labour
under Gordon Brown.
The Cabinet’s Scots could not survive Labour’s loss of power. But there was little
sign of any compensating Conservative recovery in Scotland. If relations between
Holyrood and New Labour were bound to be difficult, the austerities of Chancellor
Darling’s Consolidated Spending Review implying little growth in the block grant—
Andrew Marr’s molten strands of cheese being relentlessly stretched—a Tory govern-
ment in Downing Street and without support in Scotland or any real knowledge of
the place could quickly find them impossible. 8
To return to where we started. Change—both in events and in the institutions
which interpret them—tends to be incremental, or the reflex of long cycles, such
8
For a check-list of these see Hassan (2005); Brown (2007); Milward (1992).
550 christopher harvie
as the recurrent patterns of integration and individuation within the nations of the
British islands detected in Stringer and Grant’s 1993 symposium. This has gener-
ally gone unobserved by the centre, where ‘high politics’ tends to occlude regional
concerns, but can be punctuated by moments in which a new situation announces
itself uncompromisingly and counsels drastic (though not always reasoned) action.
Changes in direction then become stark and unavoidable, though what distinguishes
history from the social sciences is what long ago Dicey called the cross-currents and
counter-currents of different social forces, and the ability of adaptive individuals in
certain circumstances to juggle with them and alter seemingly inevitable outcomes.
If national identity becomes concentrated on political institutions, however, such
conflicts are likely to be much more explicit.
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Marr, A. 2007. A History of Modern Britain. London: BBC/Macmillan.
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Section Ten: Location
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 30
.................................................................................................................
T H E E U RO PE A N
UNION
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jim buller
30.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
Traditionally, it has been popular to view Britain as an ‘awkward’ or ‘semi-
detached’ partner in Europe (Charlton 1983; Radice 1992; Denman 1996; George
1998; Young 1998; Gowland and Turner 2000; see also Daddow 2004: 58–113). 1 This
reputation in part derives from its negative diplomatic style. Since the European
integration process took off in the 1950s, successive governments have continually
shown themselves to be inept at playing the ‘Community game’. In particular, they
have failed to understand that decision-making in Brussels can often be a positive-
sum exercise, whereby alliances must be forged and side payments made in order
for objectives to be achieved. But semi-detachment is also related to genuine and
persistent disagreements over policy substance. The first decade of membership was
dominated by a dispute over Britain’s contributions to the European budget. Later
in the 1980s, Thatcher’s more general fears about an emerging federal super-state
meant that ministers often found themselves in a minority of one in the EU. Finally,
‘awkwardness’ is attributed to the repeated failure of British politicians to develop a
pro-European discourse when talking about this issue at the domestic level. With no
counter-narrative to challenge them, Euro-sceptics have won the battle of political
ideas, thus further reinforcing this negative stance.
1
The author would like to thank participants at a Politics Department seminar, University of York
(14 June 2007), as well as an anonymous referee for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
The usual disclaimers apply.
554 jim buller
However, a superficial survey of Britain’s relations with the EU since 1997 suggests
that change has taken place in this policy sphere. For example, the Blair govern-
ment has consistently deployed a more cooperative diplomatic style at the European
level. The discussion below will detail instances where negotiators have forged a
range of alliances with different countries over separate issues; even working with
France and Germany to drive forward certain initiatives. Furthermore, since 1997,
Britain has continually had a constructive impact on the substance of EU policy.
One example of such influence is in the area of foreign and security affairs, whereby
the Blair government played a leading role in bringing about the creation of an
EU Rapid Reaction Force. However, the role of British diplomats in supply-side
economic policy, and even institutional questions arising from the Constitutional
Convention, will also be given attention below. One indication of such change is
the fact that scholarship in recent years has begun to focus on the impact of the
EU on British politics and policy. Indeed, a number of studies have concluded that
Whitehall has comfortably adjusted its policies and decision-making practices to EU
requirements. This ‘Europeanization’ process (as it has been called) is the subject of
a separate chapter in this volume, and will not be given detailed treatment here (for
a comprehensive introduction, see Bache and Jordan 2006; and Featherstone, this
volume).
The purpose of this chapter is to both chart and begin to account for this changing
relationship between the British government and the EU. Such a task requires three
preliminary theoretical observations. The first is that much of the existing literature
has focused on continuity rather than change and, as such, appears to be of little help.
As already noted, Britain has traditionally been perceived as an ‘awkward’ partner,
and a consistent one at that. While a range of factors are thought to contribute to
this persistent semi-detachment, some writers have invoked a ‘new institutionalist’
approach to focus on the constraining impact of Britain’s particular institutional
setup (see for example Bulmer 1992; George 1992; Armstrong and Bulmer 1996;
Dearlove and Saunders 2000: 739–49). Looking particularly at political institutions,
these scholars have noted how party divisions and the adversarial political culture
within Westminster frustrate the possibility for a more pro-European consensus
(Ashford 1992; Wallace 1996; 1997; Aspinwall 2000; 2004; Usherwood 2002). The
chance of such collaboration is not helped by the continued Euro-sceptical stance of
the British electorate, fuelled by an increasingly Euro-phobic press. Most significantly
perhaps is the symbolic importance of sovereignty, which in turn is linked to the cen-
tralized nature of the British state (Wallace 1986; Wilks 1996). Even if policy-makers
wanted to adopt a more communautaire stance towards the EU, this institutional
terrain frustrates them from doing so.
Second, if this focus on the constraining properties of institutions has elicited an
emphasis on continuity (i.e. ‘awkwardness’) it seems reasonable to suggest that our
account of change should bring a notion of agency to the fore. While political actors
operate within an institutional environment that will constrain their behaviour at any
one moment, there may be occasions where human beings enjoy relative autonomy
the european union 555
from such structures. Acting purposively, not only will they reproduce the structures
that surround them, in certain circumstances they may be able to redefine and reform
that context in such a way as to make it easier for them to realize their objectives in
the future (on the structure–agency debate, see Hay 2002: 89–134; McAnulla 2002).
It should be said that this theoretical position is not necessarily inconsistent with
the new institutionalist approach noted above. However, the possibility that British
policy-makers may enjoy space at the domestic level to pursue a more pro-European
approach is not one that is discussed frequently in the literature on Britain’s relations
with the EU. Neither is the feasibility that changes in EU institutions may pro-
vide opportunities for British diplomats to achieve their objectives in the European
arena.
Finally, it is important to clarify the concept of change as it is understood in this
chapter. As Hay has argued, change implies ‘contrast between states or moments
of a common system, institution, relationship entity . . . ’ (Hay 1999a: 26) (author’s
emphasis). To define change in this way is to raise a paradox. Change implies some
element of continuity as opposed to the complete transformation of an object, which
represents discontinuity (see also Hay 2002: 135–67). Applying Hay’s definition to
the developments summarized above, it is not being claimed that a transformation
has taken place in all elements of Britain’s relations with the EU. However, certain
shifts can be detected and these have occurred alongside enduring continuities.
Since 1997, Whitehall has adopted a more creative political style that has influenced
the substance of negotiation in some, but not all, policy areas. But to say that
British statesmen are more comfortable in Europe these days is not to imply that
the European issue fits more easily into the broader contours of the British polity.
As we shall see, the British party system remains as allergic as ever to all matters
European.
To fully understand the nature of this change in the British government’s relations
with the EU, this chapter employs a temporal perspective. It begins by exploring the
reason for Britain’s awkwardness, concentrating on the period 1987–97. It asserts that
this diplomatic tendency cannot just be explained by the constraining properties
of Britain’s political institutions. Instead, awkwardness at this time was the result
of a complex, dialectical relationship between institutions and agency over different
territorial levels. More precisely, (a) a renewed process of integration at the European
level helped to (b) generate critical narratives about the EU and its relationship to
the British political system. Held by an increasingly vocal set of agents (Conservative
Euro-sceptics) these narratives (c) in turn constrained the scope of British foreign
policy, helping to produce a heightened sense of awkwardness or semi-detachment
under the Major government. The final section of this chapter argues that change
after 1997 was the result of a similar interplay of factors, only in reverse. Structural
developments at the global level impacted on EU institutions in a way that created
opportunities for Whitehall to pursue a more positive statecraft. At the same time,
New Labour has been aided in this goal by a more favourable domestic political
context.
556 jim buller
30.2 Britain as an Awkward
Partner, 1987–97
.............................................................................................................................................
30.2.1 Global Structural Change and the Renewed Process of
European Integration
Any understanding of political change needs to be grounded in some kind of his-
torical perspective. That said, the choice of 1987 as the initial temporal base point
employed here requires some justification. While Britain has always had a reputation
for being a semi-detached partner in the EU, constraints of space dictate a more
contemporary focus. Moreover, as Bulpitt (1996: 243–4) has argued, the nature of
this domestic–European connection changed significantly from the second half of
the 1980s onwards. If British politicians had been ‘awkward’ before 1987, it was often
because they found such a tactic convenient for domestic political purposes. Mrs
Thatcher’s stance over Britain’s budgetary contribution in the first half of the 1980s
can be viewed in this light. After 1987, Conservative leaders became ‘awkward’ not
because of the (perceived) electoral advantages, but because they became increasingly
worried that developments at the European (and global) level would impact adversely
on national politics.
Indeed, one could go further and suggest that 1987–97 represents a period of
heightened awkwardness in Britain’s relations with the EU. In this context, one could
point to Mrs Thatcher’s intensifying Euro-phobia: an attitude which troubled enough
Conservative MPs that it was thought to be one of the reasons why she had to go
as leader in November 1990. Despite his pledge to put Britain ‘at the very heart
of Europe’, Major’s opt-out of the Social Chapter and the Single Currency project
at Maastricht confirmed this impression of semi-detachment. A number of highly
publicized rows over the appointment of a successor to Jacques Delors as President
of the European Commission again saw Britain in a minority of one. Indeed, British
complaints in 1996 that other EU member states had used the BSE issue to institute
protectionist measures against British beef saw Major go one further than Thatcher:
he pursued a policy of ‘non-cooperation’ on all questions requiring a unanimous vote
in the Council of Ministers until the ban was lifted (Seldon 1997: 639–53).
As noted above, any understanding of awkwardness must take into account the
complex relationship between institutions and human agency as it develops across
different territorial levels. The first task in this context is to delineate the structural
changes that helped to generate a renewed process of European integration which
began to impact on British politics from the second half of the 1980s onwards. It is
ironic that origins of this process can be in part traced back to a treaty amendment
signed and publicly promoted by Mrs Thatcher herself. The agreement in question
was the Single European Act (SEA) (1987) and it gained British support in the mid-
1980s largely because it had, as its centrepiece, a programme to remove all non-tariff
barriers to the free movement of goods, services, capital, and labour by December
the european union 557
1992. It was perceived in London that this Single Market project would complement
the range of neoliberal economic reforms that were being pursued at the domestic
level at this time. To achieve this objective, the British delegation had to offer a range
of concessions or ‘side-payments’. One of these was the inclusion of Article 20 of the
SEA which, for the first time, explicitly committed member states to work for the
goal of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The Thatcher government also had
to accept the extension of qualified majority voting (QMV) in all areas pertaining to
the completion of the Single Market, including health and safety matters as set out in
Article 118a. Thatcher in particular was nervous about offering these concessions, but
in the end she accepted the erosion of political sovereignty in the name of free market
economics (Buller 2000: 68–118).
Not surprisingly, it was a matter of some controversy within the Conservative
Party when the European Commission under Jacques Delors attempted to use the
momentum generated by the SEA to propose Economic and Monetary Union (EMU)
as the next big Community project. Utilizing tactics often referred to as ‘spillover’,
Delors argued that the Single Market would be incomplete without a Single Currency
(the logical endpoint of EMU), and that both the Preamble and Article 20 of the
SEA gave the EC legislative authority to develop such a policy. By April 1989, a
committee of central bankers headed by Delors had produced a three-stage plan for
the eventual realization of EMU (Padoa-Schioppa et al. 1987; Thompson 1996: 108–
47). This episode served to heighten the tension and acrimony that was building in
Whitehall at this time. Mrs Thatcher suggested that she had been tricked into signing
the SEA by a Euro-phile Foreign Office, a charge that officials in King Charles Street
furiously denied (compare, for example, Lawson 1992: 888–916; Thatcher 1993: 688–
726, 740–2; Howe 1994: 533–41, 573–86).
Just as contentious was an attempt by Delors to exploit this more favourable
structural context to develop a ‘social dimension’ to complement the Single Market
project. One initiative encouraged by the Commission in this context was the Social
Charter, which set out a range of new minimum rights to be enjoyed by all employees
in the EC relating to: trade union organization and collective bargaining; training;
information and worker consultation; health and safety; and social security (Grahl
and Teague 1990: 209–13). Underpinning this Charter was a broader recognition that
the route to a competitive economy was investment in human capital, not simply
driving down wages in a ‘race to the bottom’. As a way of complementing this
goal, Delors also attempted to revive the idea of a ‘social dialogue’, a Community
concept going back to at least the 1960s. The ‘social dialogue’ represented the idea
that the ‘social partners’ (Union des Confederations de l’Industrie et des Employeurs
d’Europe and the European Trade Union Congress) would be given an institutional
place within Europe’s decision-making framework from which they could drive this
social policy agenda forward (Wise and Gibb 1993). The Conservatives responded to
both initiatives with horror. Having spent the first half of the 1980s ‘rolling back’ the
powers of the British trade unions, they were in no mood to accept a decision-making
mechanism that would allow for renewed worker influence through a European back
door (Bale and Buller 1996).
558 jim buller
By the early 1990s, not only was this integration process an unwelcome shock, it
appeared to be irreversible. One reason momentum was so powerful at this time was
because it was underpinned by a set of related structural developments at the global
level. For example, international financial forces impacted on the European Exchange
Rate Mechanism (ERM) (set up in 1979) in a way that reinforced the case for a
Single Currency. By the mid-1980s, the Deutschmark had come to dominate the ERM
on account of the size and wealth of the German economy. As a result, when the
international community agreed to work together in 1986 to manage a devaluation of
the dollar (as a result of the Plaza Agreement) this concerted action had the effect
of putting upward pressure on the DM. The rising value of the DM in turn had
the effect of dragging other European currencies up with it via their connections
through the parity grid. Faced with the choice of accepting a significant tightening of
monetary policy or rejecting its European obligations, the French government chose
the latter course, allowing the franc to fall through the floor of its ERM band. A post-
mortem on the crisis carried out in Paris reached two conclusions. First, German (and
especially Bundesbank) influence over European monetary policy was too powerful
and had to be curbed. Second, the method by which such an objective should be
achieved was a furthering of European integration in the area of monetary policy. In
January 1988, French finance minister Balladur called for a ‘monetary construction
of Europe’ and, more particularly, for the establishment of a supranational European
Central Bank (Dyson and Featherstone 1999: 156–72, 320–6).
Certain shifts in the geopolitical structural environment buttressed this momen-
tum towards EU integration. First, the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and
the collapse of Soviet Communism heralded the possibility of Germany loosening
its ties with the EU and turning its attention eastwards. While the cold war may
have been a source of much tension in Western Europe, its structures did have the
advantage of providing an environment which helped diffuse concerns about renewed
German influence in central Europe. Second, the reunification of Germany in 1990,
and the style in which this decision was made, did nothing to alleviate these fears.
Helmut Kohl announced with no advanced consultation that East and West Germany
would be reunited and put forward a ten-point plan for realizing this goal (Sandholtz
1993; but also Moravcsik 1998: 379–417). President Mitterrand’s first reaction was to
visit East Germany and the Soviet Union to make speeches warning about the pace
of reunification and the threat this development posed to the balance of power in
Europe. In this context, the attraction of further European integration was again that
it might constrain this ‘German Gulliver’. This integration process culminated in the
signing of the Treaty of European Union at Maastricht in December 1991.
30.2.2 Institutions, Narratives, and the Constraining
Impact of Agency on British Statecraft Towards
the European Union
Britain’s heightened awkwardness during this period cannot just be explained by
pointing to the constraining impact of Britain’s institutions in the context of the
the european union 559
European integration process. From Major’s point of view, what was just as restricting
was an increasingly vocal set of political agents (Conservative Euro-sceptics) and
the narratives they deployed about this integration process and its relationship to
the British political system (Buller 2006). It is of course dangerous to make gen-
eralizations about Conservative Euro-sceptic opinion in the 1990s. To do so risks
oversimplifying the complex set of motives, concerns, and arguments held by dif-
ferent factions within this group (see, for example, Spicer 1992; Baker, Gamble, and
Ludlam 1994; Sowemimo 1996; Forster 2002). However, one belief that Euro-sceptics
increasingly came to share (and which differed from earlier periods) was that the
EU had become a ‘Euro-ratchet’ (Bulpitt 1992). In particular, the renewed phase of
European integration noted above meant that the institutional terrain of this regional
organization was now inexorably biased against the interests of Britain (and the
Conservative Party). Indeed, for Euro-sceptics, a powerful Franco-German axis, allied
with resurgent Community institutions, made redundant any diplomatic efforts by
Britain to frustrate this process.
Various incidents during this period confirmed the veracity of these arguments
as far as Euro-sceptics were concerned. For example, one could point to the failed
attempt by the Thatcher government to prevent EMU by introducing both the Com-
peting Currencies and Hard Ecu Plans. Both British schemes sketched out a more
gradual, evolutionary process whereby the Single Currency might eventually emerge
as a result of market forces. It was however, the qualified and conditional nature
of these proposals which led to their swift rejection by the Commission and other
member states (Lawson 1992: 939–42; Stephens 1996: 161–2). More significant perhaps
was the Euro-sceptics’ perception of events leading to the introduction of the Working
Time Directive. When the Commission initially tabled this legislation providing for
a maximum forty-eight-hour week, it did so under Article 118a of the SEA, which as
already noted related to health and safety matters. While British negotiators contested
whether working hours counted as an issue of health and safety, the advantage for
Brussels was that all legislation pertaining to Article 118a was subject to qualified
majority voting. By June 1993, all attempts by the Major government to veto the
Commission’s proposals were circumvented, and they passed into law. The Major
government took the Commission to the European Court of Justice, arguing that
the meaning of Article 118a had been misinterpreted. In November 1996, the Court
rejected British claims and allowed the legislation to stand. The story of the Working
Time Directive became something of a cause célèbre for the sceptics, confirming in
their mind that the EC was biased against Britain.
At the same time, Euro-sceptics warned that the impact of this ‘Euro-ratchet’ on
Britain’s political institutions would be disastrous. One popular narrative at this time
pointed to the possible deleterious consequences of European integration for British
parliamentary sovereignty. For the Euro-sceptics, parliament was both the body that
held the executive to account and the arena where the views of the electorate were
represented. At the same time, as more and more power over policy was passed up to
EC institutions, MPs would find themselves increasingly unable to play this dual role.
Such a development was dangerous in itself, but also because of the dominant place
that parliament occupied with the British polity more generally. British government
560 jim buller
was parliamentary government; Westminster was the institution that accorded legit-
imacy to what was otherwise a comparatively centralized system of rule. In other
words, to ride roughshod over MPs risked undermining the institutional basis of the
whole political class (see for example Portillo 1998; Forster 2002).
When we reconstruct the discourse of the Conservative Euro-sceptics in this way,
it becomes easier to understand (although not necessarily to accept) why any sign
of concessions to Europe on the part of the Major leadership was met with ever
louder displays of hostility and indiscipline. It was not just that Euro-sceptics thought
this more cooperative diplomacy was mistaken. The desire to put Britain ‘at the
very heart of Europe’ was positively dangerous, and could only mean further pain
for the Conservative Party as it became further stretched out on this rack. Indeed,
some Euro-sceptics began to suspect that Major was deliberately failing to confront
this ‘Euro-ratchet’ in the hope that Britain would be dragged along surreptitiously.
Major’s failure to rule out Single Currency membership for the lifetime of the next
parliament was viewed in this light. Euro-sceptics suspected a secret plot to abolish
sterling ‘by stealth’. However, the defining moment in this context appears to have
been Major’s refusal to use Denmark’s rejection of the Maastricht Treaty in June 1992
to halt the ratification process in Britain. In the words of one leading Euro-sceptic: ‘it
was then that we realised that Major was not one of us’ (quoted in Seldon 1997: 294).
Of course, it must not be forgotten that what enhanced the influence of the Euro-
sceptics at this time was the material reality of the changing parliamentary situation
facing the Conservative Party more generally. The Major government began the
1992–7 parliament with a majority of twenty-one, only to see it reduced to nothing
after a string of by-election defeats and defections by Tory MPs to other parties.
The emergence of the Referendum Party further strengthened the position of the
Euro-sceptics, although its impact at the 1997 election was not as significant as some
commentators had expected (Hurd 1997). Interestingly Major sanctioned a series
of ever more draconian methods of party management at this time, which only
ended up generating perverse results. A decision to withdraw the whip from eight
Conservative rebels after they failed to support the government during the passage of
the 1995 European Finance Bill only served to wipe out Major’s dwindling majority,
necessitating an embarrassing reversal months later (Seldon 1997: 511). To conclude,
awkward diplomacy during this period reflected a complicated interplay of both
institutional and agential factors.
30.3 The ‘Normal’ Partner: New Labour
and the European Union, 1997–2009
.............................................................................................................................................
The rest of this chapter attempts to document and account for a number of gradual
changes that have taken place in Britain’s relations with the EU over the last decade
the european union 561
or so. It detects a more positive rhetoric (when Labour wants to discuss this policy
sphere) and a constructive diplomatic style in negotiations with European partners.
At the same time, it asserts that Britain has made a constructive input into the
substance of policy in certain areas. As noted earlier, the case for change should not
be exaggerated. Whitehall remains isolated from the main body of European opinion
on issues such as the Single Currency, border controls, and the Charter of Funda-
mental Rights (see below). That said, Britain appears to be developing into a ‘normal’
member of the EU, cooperating successfully in some areas, while fighting its corner
on others. Again, an emphasis on the dynamic relationship between institutions
and agency over different territorial levels will be employed to help understand this
change. This section begins by detailing alterations to the international and European
context that have benefited British diplomacy since 1997.
30.3.1 Global Structural Change and the Weakening of EU
Integrationist Pressure
If the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union contributed to
pressure for further European integration, these structural developments also set
off separate changes that were to have an arguably contradictory impact on the EU
from the mid-1990s onwards. The most important development in this context was
the enlargement of the EU from the twelve countries represented at Maastricht, to
twenty-seven countries in January 2007. Free from the shackles of Communist rule,
a number of states in central and eastern Europe began to lodge applications for
membership in the anticipation of receiving a number of economic, political, and
military benefits (Croft et al. 1999; Fierke and Weiner 1999; Curzon Price and Landau
1999). Although the EU had long articulated a pledge to overcome the ‘unnatural’
division of the European continent, this pressure for enlargement was met with a
mixture of ambivalence and anxiety (Kramer 1993; Friis and Murphy 1999). Applicant
states exhibited wide disparities in terms of economic and political development.
A number of long-standing national and ethnic rivalries were beginning to emerge
as the repressive apparatus of Soviet Communism was gradually removed. Ulti-
mately, enlargement posed fundamental questions concerning the EU’s institutions
and processes. How, for example, would the Commission and Council of Ministers
operate with approximately double the number of states now participating in Union
business?
These questions have given rise to a protracted debate over the future institutional
structure of the EU, producing an evolving configuration of intergovernmental
bargaining at the EU level that has helped to mitigate images of British semi-
detachment. Instead, arguments concerning these institutional questions have often
revolved around a big-state–small-state split. For large countries, enlargement raised
the prospect of a substantial increase in the number of small countries within the
EU and, with it, the possibility that those smaller countries would combine together
562 jim buller
to outvote their larger counterparts on legislation decided by QMV. As a result,
bigger states spent the 1990s lobbying for extra representation in the Council of
Ministers, as well as a demographic criterion to take the population of each country
into account. These proposals caused general anxiety in the capitals of the smaller
states, especially when they were accompanied by suggestions for reform of the
Commission. France led the way in warning that an enlarged Commission would
be over-bureaucratic and unworkable and called on the EU to review whether per-
manent representation for each government at Brussels was now desirable. Small
states opposed these assertions, viewing their permanent representation on the Com-
mission as insurance against domination by the large states. For the most part,
Britain has remained relaxed during these discussions, and certainly not in a minority
of one.
As well as enlargement, the increased globalization of the international economy is
arguably another structural change at the international level that has provided addi-
tional opportunities as well as constraints for British policy-makers in Europe. It is
true that this new global economy is said to be continually challenging the capacity of
nation states to implement a variety of policy goals. Commentators have highlighted
how discretionary and interventionist strategies of economic management have been
undermined by the global flows of trade and production and finance. However, it
should be noted that the ‘material reality’ of globalization is a matter of fierce debate
among academics and politicians alike, with some ‘sceptics’ doubting the novelty of
these developments (see, for example, Held and McGrew 2007). Of particular interest
here is the work of some political scientists who have argued that narratives about
globalization have had just as important an impact on British politics as the reality
of this process. For example, Colin Hay and Matthew Watson have asserted that New
Labour has utilized arguments about the constraining nature of this international
environment in part to ‘lock in’ supporters to the neoliberal principles and policies
considered crucial for winning elections (Hay and Watson 1999; Hay 1999b; 2001).
The discussion below will investigate whether British negotiators have successfully
deployed a similar discourse about globalization to change the climate of ideas in
Europe.
If a combination of developments at the global and European levels has created
some space for more a positive diplomatic approach towards the EU, the Blair govern-
ment certainly arrived in office promising a more pro-European statecraft. A central
feature of this more communautaire discourse was acceptance of the globalization
thesis sketched out above. Because of these global economic developments, Britain
now inhabited a new international community where states were mutually dependent
on each other and national objectives were largely determined by intergovernmental
collaboration. Understood in these terms, EU membership was something not only
to be welcomed, but positively embraced. Blair went further in asserting that a self-
confident Britain under a united Labour Party would play a new leadership role in
Europe by constructing alliances and forging joint solutions to common problems
(see, for example, Giddens 2006; 2007). It is not clear at this time whether this positive
message reflected an appreciation that the changing external context (noted above)
the european union 563
might provide opportunities for more creative diplomacy. Rather, what distinguished
Blair’s views in early interviews was a belief that institutions and structures did not
matter. To achieve one’s goals, all that was needed was a clear vision and the requisite
political will to drive them through (Young 1997).
There is also evidence to suggest that the Blair government has delivered on this
more positive message, at least in certain areas. Take for example, the sphere of
foreign and security policy. After years of opposing such a move, British negotiators
in 1998 agreed to the abolition of the Western European Union (WEU) as a way
of strengthening European political cooperation in this domain. While the WEU’s
military functions were transferred to NATO, its political role was shifted to the
EU, thus enhancing the authority of the newly created post of High Representative.
Ministers followed up this concession by playing a formative role in the creation
of the European Rapid Reaction Force of 60,000 troops, with a remit to engage in
peacekeeping and humanitarian missions (White 2001). It is of course true that Blair’s
support for the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq (2003) represents a powerful
exception to this argument. But what is interesting is how the political fallout from
this episode appears already to have disappeared. Despite opposing this action at the
time, France and Germany have since joined together with Britain in heading up an
EU mission to persuade Iran to halt its uranium enrichment programme. It is worth
noting in this context that there is no constitutional provision for such an alliance.
Under EU rules, the usual practice is for the current Troika to respond to pressing
external issues (Smith 2005).
Similar comments could be made in the area of supply-side economic policy. Since
1997, the Blair government has tried to use arguments about globalization to develop a
narrative stressing how important it is for the EU to complete the Single Market pro-
gramme. According to this argument, the EU (like Britain) now faces the challenge of
an increasingly competitive global economy, where patterns of trade and production
are shifting towards developing countries such as China and India. If Europe is to
succeed against this backdrop, it has no alternative but to: continue to ensure that
it promotes flexibility and competitiveness in product, capital, and labour markets
through the completion of the Single Market; work for the continued liberalization
of international trade; implement reform of the Common Agricultural Policy and
restructure the priorities of the EU budget towards research and development, skills,
and training; become an outward looking ‘Global Europe’ of independent nation
states, cooperating where necessary to confront these challenges head on. Britain,
whose economy is described as already possessing many of these traits, is presented
as the member state ideally placed to lead the way on these reforms (see, for example,
Brown 2005a; 2005b).
There is evidence that these arguments have had some success influencing the
substance of policy in this area, although resistance to this Anglo-Saxon message
remains. In 1998 Blair was able to announce at the Cardiff European Council that
the British Presidency had negotiated a set of guidelines aimed at promoting a skilled,
trained, and adaptable workforce. Heads of government also agreed to set up national
action plans to put these guidelines into effect. Labour kept up this pressure in its
564 jim buller
first term by signing bilateral agreements with Spain and Italy to push for further
reforms in this area. These efforts seemed to bear fruit at the Lisbon Summit, where
member states promised to transform Europe into the most competitive and dynamic
economy in the world by 2010. Although progress towards this goal has been disap-
pointing, British negotiators can at least point to the conversion of the European
Commission to its discourse. A recent initiative by Verheugen (Enterprise Commis-
sioner) to cut back unnecessary regulations on European business can be seen in
this light (http://europa.eu.int/growthandjobs; Parker and Buck 2005). Agreement
on both the Services Directive and the Takeover Directive (both in 2006) would be
another example, although both measures were significantly watered down by other
member states (Buck 2006a; 2006b).
Finally, the protracted and sometimes acrimonious debate at the EU level over
institutional reform has allowed Britain to take advantage of a more fluid pattern
of inter-state politics to play a more constructive role in negotiations over the Con-
stitutional Treaty. For example, the Blair government took the lead in proposing
reforms strengthening the presidency of the European Council. Currently, the chair
of this body has rotated between countries every six months. Under the Constitu-
tional Treaty, future presidents of the European Council will be elected for a two-
and-a-half-year term, renewable once. The UK delegation made a similar positive
contribution to reforms concerning the presidency of the Council of Ministers. In
this case, the Constitutional Treaty also provides for the abolition of the current
six-month rotating chair, and replaces it with a system whereby a team of three
countries holds the presidency for eighteen months (Duff 2005: 22, 85). It could
be added that British negotiators consistently supported suggestions giving national
parliaments the right to raise a reasoned objection to any draft EU law within an
eight-week period, although it should be noted that EU institutions are not obligated
to respond to these concerns by changing their proposals during the decision-making
process.
Of course, when the Labour government was uncomfortable about certain provi-
sions in the Constitutional Treaty, it secured the usual range of vetoes and deroga-
tions. For example, unanimity was preserved in areas of taxation, social security, and
EU budgetary arrangements, whereas Britain has retained its opt-out in areas relating
to criminal and justice matters. Furthermore, government lawyers are confident they
have secured a form of wording ensuring the Charter of Fundamental Rights can
never be utilized to overturn Britain’s industrial relations legislation (see also Cm.
6309 2004; Magnette and Nicolaidis 2004; Norman 2005; Church and Phinnemore
2006), although doubts remain about such claims. In June 2005, the Constitutional
Treaty was rejected by France and the Netherlands after both governments conducted
referendums on this document. The treaty then lay dormant until the summer of
2007 when it was resurrected and renegotiated to become the Lisbon or Reform
Treaty. This document was signed by all twenty-seven member states in December
2007.
In summary, Britain has gradually become a more ‘normal’ member of the EU.
This change can be explained in part by charting how related structural developments
the european union 565
at the global and European level have created opportunities for a more positive
diplomatic approach. However, in developing this more pro-European foreign pol-
icy, the Blair and Brown governments have also benefited from a more favourable
domestic political context. In particular, the public splits and rows over Europe have,
for the moment, disappeared. To make this point is not to suggest these divisions and
problems have been resolved. Nor is it to imply that the more cooperative approach
detailed above has reversed decades of Euro-scepticism at the domestic level. Instead,
what we have witnessed since the mid-1990s is a depoliticization of the European
question: a process that again can be accounted for by a mixture of structural and
agential factors (see also Oppermann 2008).
30.3.2 The Depoliticization of the European Issue in
British Politics
The depoliticization of Europe at the domestic level reflects in part a conscious
strategy by political agents at the top of the Blair government. An early example is
the way the Single Currency question was handled by Brown as Chancellor of the
Exchequer. Through this period, the Treasury argued that entry into the eurozone
had to be shown to be clearly and unambiguously in the material interests of the
British economy (Balls 2002; Cm. 5776 2003), while at the same time accepting
there were no constitutional barriers to Euro membership. To this end, the Treasury
developed five economic tests against which any assessment will be judged, with
Brown himself as the final arbiter. Many commentators (not to mention Cabinet
ministers) now accept that these tests are too broad to produce an incontrovertible
verdict on membership (Rollo 2002). This of course is precisely the point: the tests
convey an image of academic rigour while at the same time allowing the govern-
ment (or more accurately the Treasury) to put off what will ultimately be a con-
tentious political decision. Of course, it helps that these actions (or non-actions) are
commensurate with Britain’s institutional terrain as described at the beginning of
this chapter. For example, since 1997, MORI has consistently recorded that approx-
imately two-thirds of the British electorate is against joining the Single Currency
(www.ipsos-mori.com).
Since becoming Prime Minster, Brown has employed similar tactics in his handling
of the Constitutional/Reform Treaty issue. Stepping over the threshold of Number
10 in July 2007, Brown inherited from Blair a troublesome manifesto commitment
to provide a referendum on the Constitutional Treaty. However, Brown used this
renegotiation process over the summer and autumn of 2007 to argue that the newly
labelled Reform Treaty is substantially different from the Constitutional Treaty. As
a result, Labour’s election pledge can be dropped, leaving this amended docu-
ment to be ratified via the usual parliamentary methods. It should be said that
no government publication has attempted to set out in any detail how these two
documents differ, making it difficult to verify the claim that a referendum is now
566 jim buller
no longer needed (see, for example, Cm. 7174 2007). One attempt by the European
Scrutiny Committee to conduct such an exercise accepts that a number of symbolic
changes have taken place. Gone is any reference to the ‘constitutional concept’, while
reference to the EU flag and anthem have also been exorcized. That said, the conclu-
sion of the committee is: ‘Taken as a whole, the Reform Treaty produces a general
framework which is substantially equivalent to the Constitutional Treaty’ (HC 1014
2007: 16).
That Brown has been able to get away with these tactics rests in part on a more
favourable domestic institutional context, thus taking our discussion full circle. As
noted above, the Major government’s ever decreasing parliamentary majority boosted
the influence of the Euro-sceptics in the 1990s. Since 1997, Blair and Brown have
enjoyed the sort of parliamentary majorities that Major could only dream about.
With its current majority of sixty-six Labour (helped by the support of the Liberal
Democrats) has been able to secure ratification of the Reform Treaty through both
Houses of Parliament. However, it is not clear at the time of writing how much
political pressure Labour would be under, even if its majority were much smaller.
While the Conservatives have been critical of Brown’s U-turn, Cameron appears
wary of pushing this issue too hard. A demand by Euro-sceptics for a referendum
on the Reform Treaty irrespective of the outcome of the parliamentary vote has yet
to become official party policy. Cameron is said to be worried that the Conservatives
may once again give the appearance of being obsessed by this issue; an obsession that
has only damaged their electoral fortunes in the recent past (Eaglesham 2007). At
present, a cross-party consensus not to talk about the European question now seems
to exist in British politics.
30.4 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
It has been argued in this chapter that a subtle change has taken place in the British
government’s relations with the EU, and that this trend is the result of a complex
interplay of institutional and agential factors. The twin pressures of enlargement and
globalization have helped to shift the pattern of intergovernmental politics in the EU
in such a way that British policy-makers may currently have as good an opportunity
as any to play the sort of leadership role that Whitehall has sporadically promised,
but failed to deliver on. It is perhaps typical then that faced with such a favourable
external context, Britain (in the shape of Gordon Brown) appears to be turning its
back on Europe once again. We have already mentioned Brown’s formative role in
keeping sterling out of the Single Currency since 1997. Whereas Blair employed three
aides to advise him on EU matters, Brown now has one foreign policy adviser, who
presumably divides his time between Europe and other aspects of external affairs.
However, it is Brown’s conscious decision to turn up three hours late for the signing of
the european union 567
the Reform Treaty that most graphically symbolizes a new sense of semi-detachment
in Britain. That said, if there is one message from this chapter, the foreign policy of
any one country cannot be reduced to the beliefs and action of one person. Whether
this diplomatic style continues under a Brown government remains to be seen (see
also O’Donnell and Whitman 2007).
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c h a p t e r 31
.................................................................................................................
B R I TA I N A N D
AMERICA
.................................................................................................................
andrew gamble
America in all its different forms has been a powerful shaper of British politics since
its creation more than 200 years ago. As the world’s leading power the United States
has had special relationships with many countries, but there have been a number
of specific aspects of its relationship with Britain which have given the relationship
a peculiar intensity. After the end of the Second World War the intensity might
have been expected to fade, but following a difficult period in the 1960s and 1970s
it appeared to strengthen once again. The climax of this phase was reached when
Britain emerged as the leading member of the coalition of the willing formed to
conduct liberal wars of intervention after 9/11 in Afghanistan and Iraq (Kampfner
2003; Riddell 2003). Continuing evidence of the closeness of the military and strategic
relationships abounds. In March 2007 the Labour government won a vote in the
House of Commons to update the Trident missiles and the submarines that carry
them at a cost of £20 billion, and later that year it was announced that the RAF base
at Menwith Hill which is operated by the Information Operations Squadron of the
US Air Force would be adapted to house the communications equipment for a new
US missile system designed to intercept hostile missiles.
The relationship has not always been so close. In the first hundred years after the
American revolutionary war which prised the colonies loose from Britain, there was
considerable hostility, fuelled by Britain’s extensive interests in the western hemi-
sphere and the large reserves of anti-British feeling among many Americans as well
as new immigrants, particularly those from Ireland. Britain continued to be seen by
many Americans as the antithesis of the ideals of the Republic—it was monarchical,
aristocratic, imperial, hierarchical, traditional and privileged, anti-egalitarian, and
572 andrew gamble
anti-democratic. There was widespread distrust of Britain’s intentions and of its
worldwide power. The feelings were reciprocated. British governing circles were often
contemptuous towards the Americans, and the vulgarity of their new egalitarian
social order. There was widespread sympathy for the Confederates in the American
civil war, partly because they were landowners and the nearest thing to an aristocracy
the United States possessed, and partly because many in the British political class did
not want to see the United States emerge as a strong federal Union.
In the last hundred years, however, and particularly after the United States entered
the Second World War on Britain’s side in 1941, the relationship between the two
countries has been close. Winston Churchill who had worked tirelessly to bring the
alliance about described it in 1946 as a special relationship. By the term ‘special rela-
tionship’ Churchill meant more than just a close military alliance. The two countries
also shared common ideals, common language, common institutions, and common
racial stock. Churchill had long been an advocate for greater unity between the
English-speaking peoples and for an understanding between the main representatives
of the Anglo-Saxon race (Churchill 1956). Many of the believers in Anglo-Saxondom
looked forward to the day when the two nations would be reunited as one. In his Ful-
ton speech in 1946 Churchill even predicted the achievement of common citizenship
between the two nations.
Churchill’s idea of the special relationship became part of his broader conception
of the role of Britain in the world (Churchill 1948). He pictured Britain in several post-
war speeches as being at the centre of three circles—the British Empire and Com-
monwealth, the English-speaking countries, and united Europe. Britain was involved
in all of them, but not defined by any single one. Churchill saw the relationship
with America as the priority for Britain in military and strategic terms. The Empire
and Commonwealth still inspired greater emotion and affection, but Churchill could
already see in 1946 that the Empire was increasingly a matter of the heart rather than
the head. Europe was a lower priority, impossible to ignore because it was such a close
neighbour, and always a potential threat to Britain’s peace and stability, but not a part
of an imagined English space in the way that America and the Empire were.
Churchill’s bold assertions have met with some scepticism, particularly the idea
that there is a continuing special relationship between Britain and the United
States. Critics have argued that it was always given much greater importance on
the British side than on the American (Watt 1984; Dumbrell 2001; Louis and Bull
1986). Churchill’s notion that Britain’s role in the world is defined by being at the
centre of three circles has also been questioned. This formulation has often been
viewed as a delaying tactic, avoiding the need to make difficult decisions about where
Britain’s priorities lay in the post-war world. Pretending to be important in all three
circles meant pretending to an influence and an importance which was no longer
possible. On this reading the three circles was a face-saving formula which prevented
a hard look at Britain’s real position, as Dean Acheson was to point out in December
1962.
Yet despite such criticisms, and despite the marked decline in Britain’s capacity
and reach in the global system over the last sixty years, Churchill’s formulations still
britain and america 573
point to something important in Britain’s relations with the rest of the world. The
notions of a special relationship with the United States, and of the three circles of
British influence and interest, refuse to disappear. They are periodically revived, and
continue to frame debates about identity, foreign policy, and political economy. One
of the most recent examples of the perennial strength of these notions in British
thinking was Tony Blair’s characterization of Britain during the Iraq war as a bridge
between Europe and America (Blair 2004). His critics responded by accusing him
of having become George Bush’s poodle. This preoccupation with America in the
British political imagination, both positive and negative, is a sign that the relationship
between Britain and the United States is much more than the relationship between
two independent and powerful nation states. This is what Churchill understood. To
grasp the broader context of the relationship between these states it is necessary to
understand how it fits within larger conceptions such as Anglo-America and the
Anglosphere.
This chapter argues that the impact of Anglo-America on Britain and British poli-
tics has been profound and persistent, and that it is best understood as a transnational
political space, an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1991) encompassing both ideals
and interests, which has been constructed and sustained through various narratives
and embodied in particular institutions. Such transnational political spaces are a key
feature of our world, although often less studied than either nation states or the global
economy. Such spaces arise particularly around powerful states, but they exist to some
extent for all states, since no state is entirely self-contained. Some states because of
their history (Britain is an obvious example) are involved in many such transnational
spaces, some of them overlapping. For Britain the three most important have been
the Empire (with its many subdivisions), Europe, and Anglo-America. Such spaces
and the communities of interest and ideals to which they give rise can be a potent
source of political identity and political projects. They have certainly been so in the
case of Britain and America.
This chapter first outlines the historical development of Anglo-America and
reviews different theoretical perspectives for understanding it. It then analyses three
key aspects of the relationship—strategic, economic, and ideological—and shows
how they have come to define Anglo-America.
31.1 History
.............................................................................................................................................
Britain and the United States constitute two of the most important states within the
transnational space of Anglo-America and their relationship has been pivotal to its
development, ever since the thirteen colonies successfully threw off British rule at
the end of the eighteenth century. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 plunged
Britain into a second civil war, which rehearsed many of the arguments of the first, 140
574 andrew gamble
years earlier, and ended with formal separation of the American colonies from Britain
and the creation of a new state, the United States. During the nineteenth century
relationships between the two states gradually improved, particularly as there were
many common economic interests. British capital poured into the United States to
fund the development of its agriculture and its infrastructure, especially its railways
(Hobsbawm 1969). The cultural ties between the two states remained close, but the
growing power of the United States alarmed British governments. The consolidation
of a more centralized federal union across the whole of the North American land mass
was opposed by Britain, and this partly explains why Britain maintained a policy of
neutrality in the conflict, and was prepared to supply arms to the Confederacy. British
radicals, notably Cobden and sections of the working class, gave strong support to the
federal government because it was opposed to slavery (Mahin 1999).
In the nineteenth century there was no ‘special’ relationship between Britain and
the United States. That was only to develop after 1880 and particularly in the twentieth
century with the emergence of the United States as the world’s leading industrial,
commercial, financial, and subsequently military power. Britain’s position of hege-
mony in the global order was challenged by the rise of Germany and the United States
and forced a major strategic readjustment (Friedberg 1988). The history of the special
relationship in the twentieth century is about how that readjustment was made and its
consequences. Britain concluded that it could not fight both Germany and America,
and also that it could not defeat Germany without the help of the United States.
In the course of defeating Germany, however, it became apparent that the British
Empire was no longer sustainable on the old basis. Britain no longer had the capacity
to sustain its hegemonic role (Barnett 1972; Kindleberger 1973).
Harold Macmillan remarked during the Second World War that Britain was
increasingly compelled to play Greece to America’s Rome, but as Christopher
Hitchens has pointed out, the real relationship was between two Romes—a declining
Rome, and a rising Rome (Hitchens 2004). The accommodation that was reached
between them was the heart of the special relationship; Britain would acquiesce in the
rise of the United States and would encourage the United States to take over its hege-
monic role in order to preserve the liberal global order, a fundamental British interest.
This peaceful replacement of one hegemonic power by another was unprecedented,
and was not accomplished without considerable friction and misunderstandings, but
there was no war. Instead Britain became the foremost ally of the United States (Watt
1984).
The process by which Britain surrendered hegemony and the United States
assumed it was far from smooth, and was facilitated by the circumstances of the two
world wars, which forced Britain to become financially dependent upon the United
States. Following the Venezuela incident in 1898 when the United States invoked
the Monroe Doctrine to claim that Venezuela lay within its sphere of influence, the
British chiefs of staff concluded that Britain did not have the capacity to wage a
war simultaneously on the eastern seaboard of the United States and in Europe. The
inevitable conclusion was that American power had to be appeased, and if possible
co-opted (Adams 2005). Although both nations drew up contingency plans for war
britain and america 575
with the other, they were never tested. A variety of factors ensured that when the
United States became involved as a great power it would be in alliance with Britain
rather than opposed to it, but it would be an alliance on American terms.
One important factor in this outcome was that it had long been the settled purpose
of influential sections of the political elite in both Britain and the United States.
The idea of a Greater Britain (Dilke 1868), of uniting all the disparate sections of
English-speaking peoples into a grand confederation, had become popular in the late
nineteenth century. Anglo-America was an imagined community with both cultural
and racial roots, and cooperation between its leading states was promoted as a matter
of prudence in an increasingly threatening and hostile world (Bell 2007). There were
dissenters to this vision of Anglo-America. Many British Conservatives wanted above
all to sustain the British Empire and feared that alliance with the United States
would require the dismantling of that empire; while many Americans were totally
opposed to the maintenance of the British Empire and resolutely opposed their
government becoming a support for it. The strength of feeling in the United States
against being drawn into the quarrels and wars of the old world was responsible for
the initial reluctance of the United States government to become involved in either
world war.
America’s entry in each case proved decisive to the eventual outcome of both wars,
but after the First World War the United States was not yet ready to undertake world
leadership by organizing its own hegemony (Kindleberger 1973). Instead Britain, as
the former hegemon, attempted to reassemble the elements of its former commer-
cial, industrial, financial, and naval supremacy. It failed. Naval supremacy was given
up following American insistence at the Washington Naval Conference that Britain
should accept parity of its fleet with that of the United States. Financial supremacy
was lost following the restoration then final collapse of the gold standard in 1931.
Industrial supremacy had been severely eroded before 1914, and while the extent of
British industrial decline has been exaggerated, since Britain remained a leader in
several key technologies and industries in the military field (Edgerton 2006), it could
not recover its former position. Britain retained control of its empire, but by 1939 it
was ill-prepared for another major military struggle, and in the early years of the war
was close to being overwhelmed.
The entry of the United States into the war in 1941 transformed the prospects for
Britain’s survival. But it was clear from the outset that this survival was to be on
American terms. The close alliance that was forged after 1941 between Britain and
the United States saw close collaboration particularly between the military and intel-
ligence establishments of both states, and this continued into the post-war period,
and is still in important respects intact today. But the United States fiercely resisted
moves by Britain which it judged were aimed mainly at restoring its imperial power,
and it also exerted severe financial pressure on Britain, which limited the capacity
of Britain to preserve its imperial position after 1945 even had it had the political
will to do so. The withdrawal from empire might have been faster than it was had
it not been for the advent of the cold war, which persuaded the Americans, now
ready and eager to exercise a global hegemonic role, that there should not be a too
576 andrew gamble
precipitate withdrawal by Britain from areas which were vulnerable to communist
insurgents.
Nevertheless it was clear that after 1945 Britain could no longer claim to be
the equal of the United States, although it remained the most important military
power in the Western alliance, and until the 1950s the most important economic
power as well. The new relationship was symbolically illustrated by the ill-fated Suez
invasion of 1956 (Thomas 1970), when the Anglo-French invasion force was first
halted, and then withdrawn, having achieved its military objectives, by the use of
American financial pressure. Britain did not act independently of the Americans
in a major military enterprise again. The Falklands War in 1982 was heavily depen-
dent on American logistical support, and it was highly exceptional. Everywhere else
British forces were withdrawn and colonies given their independence. By the time
of the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997 the British Empire had been reduced
to a few isolated far-flung islands like the Falklands and old fortress colonies like
Gibraltar.
Through this period from 1945 to 1990 the special relationship waned, especially
after 1956, but it still possessed a reality through the extensive defence and intelli-
gence collaboration between the two states. These were two extremely well-developed
Anglo-American communities. It also could be revived from time to time as in the
1980s when Britain under Margaret Thatcher proved the most reliable of all the NATO
allies for the United States during the new cold war. But Britain’s overall importance
as a global power was much less in 1980 than it had been in 1950. It was only one of
many allies of the United States, and ties of culture and race were not sufficient to
outweigh hard-headed calculations of national interest. Many concluded as a result
that the special relationship was now a fiction, perhaps had always been a fiction, a
rhetorical device invented by Churchill and used by his successors to disguise the fact
of Britain’s displacement as a great power.
31.2 Theory
.............................................................................................................................................
There have been many explanations in political science and international relations
as to why such a close relationship between Britain and America was forged and
why it has persisted. From a realist perspective, particularly a Marxist one, it looks
counter-intuitive. The abandonment of British power and the British Empire without
a serious fight and Britain’s apparent voluntary subordination to the United States in
the twentieth century does not fit easily with realist assumptions about the nature
of power and the international system. Britain did after all contest German claims
and German ambitions, but American claims and American ambitions, although just
as far-reaching, and certainly detrimental to many British interests, were not treated
in the same way. Trotsky’s prediction in 1926 that the next imperialist war would be
britain and america 577
between Britain and the United States proved incorrect, although plausible at the time
it was made (Trotsky 1926).
The argument that the two states did not go to war because they shared common
interests and common values has to be part of the answer, but it ignores the very
sharp conflicts that did occur. There was nothing inevitable about the participation
of the United States in the Second World War, and powerful reasons why it should not
engage. There were serious disagreements between the two states during the Second
World War and after it, the Washington Loan Agreements and the Suez episode being
just two examples. The interests of the two states were often divergent (Burnham
1989), and the appeal to common values was not sufficient to heal the rifts.
Liberal realist explanations acknowledge this by giving priority to British security
interests in the formation of British state policy (Dumbrell 2001; Dobson 1995). The
awareness in the British political class from the beginning of the twentieth century
that Britain lacked the capacity to sustain indefinitely its world role and its power
meant that the British were continually on the defensive, looking for ways either
to contain or to co-opt the rising powers which threatened their interests. This
acceptance of the inevitability of the decline in British power informed many of the
judgements that were made, and in this context both the appeasement of Germany
in the 1930s and the attempt to enlist the United States as an ally during the Second
World War and afterwards made perfect sense. In the post-war world the alliance
with the United States commanded support in all parties because it was regarded as
necessary to secure essential British interests, which included containing the USSR,
maintaining peace and stability, and rebuilding a liberal economic order. None of
these tasks could have been accomplished by Britain on its own, so from this per-
spective the embrace of America was perfectly rational on grounds of British national
security.
A second perspective offers a structuralist account of the nature of the international
state system and the international economy after 1945. The position of superior-
ity which the United States enjoyed gave it a position of unchallenged hegemony
(Wallerstein 1996; Gilpin 1987). It had commanding leads in production, finance,
and trade, as well as in military capacity. This structural dominance of the United
States narrowed the options for all other states. Only the USSR was in a position
to challenge the US hegemony rather than accept it, and organize its own sphere of
influence in opposition to it. All other states, apart from those which chose to join
the Soviet sphere or were forced into it, had to decide what their relationship to the
United States should be, the terms on which they could join the American alliance,
and what degree of protection and what concessions they could expect. Other writers
from this perspective have also pointed to how the US hegemony came to be sustained
by common agreement between the political elites in many different states. Kees van
der Pijl has argued that this had led to the creation of a transnational political class,
with common interests in the preservation of the liberal world order under American
leadership, which transcended domestic politics (Van der Pijl 1984).
A third perspective has developed constructivist accounts of how particular dis-
courses have been used to construct entities such as the West and the Anglosphere
578 andrew gamble
which permit the subordination of the interests of other nations to the United States
(Coker 1997). The British willingness to accept American leadership was made palat-
able by these discourses of common values and shared purpose. The importance of
some of these discourses is undeniable, not least in isolating elements within both
main political parties in Britain which might have pressed for a more independent
British policy. This was true of the Imperialist wing of the Conservative Party, and the
socialist wing of the Labour Party. In both cases the discourse of Atlanticism came
to dominate the perspective of the party leaderships. Attempts to cast the United
States as the other, the enemy of British identity and interests, have at times been
made (Pelling 1956), and continue to be made (Heffer 1998; Benn 2003), but have
failed to capture lasting support in the British political class. In British political
discourse it is Europe which has much more frequently occupied the position of
the other, while positive images of the United States have generally predominated
over negative ones. There has always been a persistent current of anti-Americanism,
which at times has increased sharply, but the ability of the United States to reinvent
itself, and to reassert its moral leadership, has always been high. The association
of the United States with great causes such as modernity and progress, freedom,
and prosperity has been an important aspect of the voluntary acceptance of US
leadership.
31.3 The Strategic Relationship
.............................................................................................................................................
These three perspectives throw light on the distinct but overlapping relationships—
strategic, economic, and ideological—which make up Anglo-America. Security
remains at the heart of the relationship between Britain and the United States. In
the period since the fall of Communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and
the reunification of Germany there was much talk of a new world order, brought
about by the disappearance of the bipolar world which had hitherto existed. The
undisputed military predominance of the United States now seemed to make irrel-
evant any further talk of a special relationship between Britain and the United States,
and even inspired speculation that NATO itself might no longer be needed. Both the
Bush (senior) and Clinton administrations regarded NATO as playing an important
role in maintaining world order, as was shown in the first war against Iraq and the
intervention in the Balkans. The close understanding between the British and the
Americans was an important factor in both interventions, and Britain demonstrated
once again that it was prepared to commit its forces to American missions to an
extent which was either not true or not possible for other allies of the United States
(Dumbrell 2001).
In that sense the end of the cold war changed little as far as Britain was con-
cerned. British governments in the 1990s remained strongly committed to NATO and
britain and america 579
therefore to the United States continuing to be the heart of security arrangements
in Europe. A senior Labour Cabinet minister, George Robertson, Secretary of State
for Defence in the Labour government elected in 1997, moved to be NATO Secretary-
General, a sign of the continuing importance of NATO for Britain. The bipartisan
support for NATO and the United States as the cornerstone of Britain’s defence had
been a fixed point of British politics since the 1940s, when the Labour government of
Clement Attlee had helped establish NATO. The commitment was briefly called into
question, firstly in 1960 when the Labour conference passed a unilateralist motion
and then again in the 1980s when Labour moved closer to a unilateralist position
in its 1983 manifesto. The 1960 vote was reversed the following year, and after 1983,
under first Neil Kinnock (a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament)
and then John Smith and Tony Blair, the Labour Party moved back firmly to its
traditional position on the Atlantic Alliance. The support of John Major for the
action against Iraq in 1991 and of Tony Blair for the intervention in Kosovo in 1999
were unconditional. Indeed in both cases the British tended to be hawks in the
coalition, pressing for tougher action than some in the US administration wanted.
The same pattern was evident in the intervention in Afghanistan in 2002 (Kampfner
2003).
Ever since the arrival of the wartime US armies in Britain to prepare for the opening
of the second front against Hitler, Britain has also been willing to provide military
bases for the Americans. In the last sixty years the United States has not annexed
territory as Britain did in building its empire; instead it has established military
bases on the sovereign territory of other countries. The novelty of this procedure,
particularly so far as leading military powers such as Britain are concerned, is one of
the most striking aspects of the exercise of US hegemony in the post-war period.
There have been occasional frictions at times over the existence and use of these
bases, including in the 1980s the siting of Cruise and Pershing missiles at Greenham
Common and the bombing of Libya from American bases in the UK in 1986, but only
very rarely have the Americans been obliged to give up a base, or found that their
operational freedom has been affected by the existence of these bases in territory over
which they do not enjoy formal sovereignty. It has provided them with a number of
‘unsinkable aircraft carriers’ around the world (Campbell 1984).
The military and intelligence establishments in Britain and America remain very
close, there is routine exchange of information, and there have been some notable
military collaborations, most recently in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. It remains
true that this is not a relationship of equals, since by far the greater part of the
equipment and the personnel in these conflicts was provided by the United States.
Nevertheless the British contribution was particularly important symbolically as far
as the Americans were concerned. As a result, to many outsiders Britain and the
United States are so closely identified in security matters that they seem almost always
to be following the same policy. Anglo-America, or Anglo-Saxondom in the old
parlance, here appears indivisible.
With the election of George W. Bush in 2000, the United States appeared deter-
mined to pursue a unilateral course in pursuit of US interests, whatever the cost
580 andrew gamble
to multilateral treaties and arrangements. This American desire to be much more
assertive in imposing solutions, and much less ready to accept concessions in order
to get agreement, risked a sharp deterioration in relations not only with Russia and
China, but also with the EU and with Japan. Ideologues of the new path justified it
in terms of the superiority of the US system and its model of capitalism, and were
critical of the shortcomings of other states. The new aggressive tone of US diplomacy
posed difficult problems for Britain, because it raised once more in acute form the
strategic dilemma of whether Britain should make Europe or Anglo-America its
priority (Gamble 2003).
All this was transformed by the events of 9/11 and their aftermath. The pull of
Anglo-America was once again amply confirmed, with Britain once more confirmed
as the United States’ most reliable ally. Tony Blair in particular played a leading role in
helping to organize the international coalition for action against terrorism (Diamond
2008). The renewed closeness between Britain and the United States was affirmed in
many different ways—Tony Blair acquiring a stature and recognition in the United
States which only Thatcher and Churchill had enjoyed before him (Seldon 2007). The
crowning symbol of this was the invitation he received to address a joint session of
Congress in 2003, a sign of the status he had achieved for Americans. 9/11 showed
not only that the heart of the old special relationship in the military and intelligence
fields was still intact, but also that Anglo-America remained a key point of reference
and determinant of identity for a large section of the political class, not only in
Britain but also in the United States, to an extent which is not matched by any other
country.
31.4 The Economic Relationship
.............................................................................................................................................
At the heart of the economic relationship between Britain and America has been
cooperation in promoting a global liberal economic order, and conflict over particu-
lar economic interests. The former has taken different forms in the last 200 years, but
its most recent manifestation is globalization. From its inception globalization has
been predominantly an Anglo-American discourse and an Anglo-American project
(Hay and Marsh 1999). It originated in the 1970s following the collapse of the Bret-
ton Woods system. Monetarism emerged as the preferred solution to the problems
of accelerating inflation and deepening recession, and was enforced through the
international agencies of the global order, particularly the IMF, and backed by the
financial markets (Clarke 1987; Glyn 2006; Harvey 2005). Monetarism was not a
policy solution that was home-grown in particular countries. It was adopted first
by the international agencies and became the new consensus for the governance of
the global economy, becoming known as in the 1980s as the Washington Consensus.
More recently it has been referred to as disciplinary neoliberalism (Gill 1998), an
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international framework of rules and institutions beyond the reach of democratic
accountability, accepted and adopted by national governments with varying degrees
of ideological enthusiasm.
The Reagan/Thatcher partnership consolidated the hold of the new consensus
and made it the new common sense throughout Anglo-America. It drew further
strength with the collapse of Communism in Europe at the end of the 1980s and the
claim that there were no longer any viable alternatives to the liberal capitalist model
(Fukuyama 1992). The discourse of globalization has enlarged this idea, implying in
some of its more extreme formulations that transnational financial and trade flows
have completely overwhelmed all forms of regulation based on territorial order, and
that as a result all national governments are obliged to adjust their institutions and
policies to those prescribed as the international norm (Ohmae 1995).
There has been resistance to these ideas within Anglo-America itself as well as from
many states outside it, but it has not prevented the consolidation of neoliberalism as
the dominant framework for discussion of global governance (Wolf 2005). It is not a
monolithic doctrine, and there are important variations within it, as there were with
earlier dominant discourses; these included the rather ill-named ‘post-Washington
consensus’ of the 1990s and the Third Way pursued by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
But underpinning all such variations has been an acceptance of the necessity and
inevitability of globalization, and the need for appropriate forms of national and
international governance to ensure that globalization is allowed to develop unhin-
dered.
Despite the ideological certainties of Thatcher and Reagan, the 1980s were a dif-
ficult time for Anglo-America because of the continuing weakness of Britain and
the challenges to United States hegemony. One particular form this took was the
elaboration of arguments about the developmental state and models of capitalism
which pointed to deep-rooted problems in the organization of the Anglo-American
model of capitalism and argued that it was being outcompeted by other models,
particularly those of Germany, Sweden, and Japan (Coates 2000; Albert 1991).
The basis of this Anglo-American model are the common ideals on liberty of the
individual within a framework of the rule of law, which encouraged the development
of capitalist enterprise which was fundamentally individualist and at arm’s length
from government. Although many historical details of this characterization could be
challenged, it has helped sustain the dominant Anglo-American preference for the
primacy of the market and civil society over the state, and the restriction of the role
of the state to an enabling one—removing the barriers to free market exchange and
sustaining the institutions which could define and defend individual property rights
(Hall and Soskice 2001). Many of the characteristics of the Anglo-American model
have stemmed from this approach, in particular its voluntarism and short-termism,
as well as the character of its welfare system (Esping-Andersen 1990) and corporate
governance (Parkinson, Gamble, and Kelly 2000), and the relative importance of its
financial institutions, particularly its stock markets (Hutton 1995).
In the post-1945 global economy different models of capitalism flourished, and
different ways of involving the state in the economy. Germany, France, Scandinavia,
582 andrew gamble
and Japan all had markedly different institutions to those of Britain and America,
and all involved a very different role for the state in defining and promoting the
public interest as far as the economy was concerned. Criticism of the Anglo-American
model and its shortcomings reached a crescendo in the 1970s and 1980s with the well-
publicized difficulties of the British economy in comparison to its main competitors
and with the apparent strains within the United States, which led some observers to
predict that the United States would be overtaken by the economies of East Asia. The
hegemony of Anglo-America might still be pre-eminent in the security field, but it
appeared to be under considerable challenge in the economic. Its model was regarded
as obsolescent, in danger of being outcompeted (Kennedy 1986).
Many of these conclusions can be seen to have been premature. The resurgence of
the American economy and to a lesser extent of the British economy in the 1990s was
treated as vindication of the Anglo-American model, and of its particular suitability
to the conditions of globalization. Those European and East Asian economies which
did relatively less well in the 1990s boom were described as sclerotic and inflexible,
unable and unwilling to restructure themselves to meet the challenges of the new
global economy. This turn of events made Britain and America the leading pros-
elytizers for globalization, and allowed the British to postpone fuller participation
in European integration. The renewed success of the Anglo-American model of
capitalism was used by Euro-sceptics to celebrate British links to America, and warn
how these could be imperilled by absorption into Europe (Redwood 2001; Holmes
1996).
The globalization discourse in the 1990s became very much an Anglo-American
discourse, which was consciously used as a weapon against the opponents of Anglo-
America as well as a means of enforcing order through the global economy. It became
a new means of hegemonic control. It took some time to emerge and be effective,
but the foundations were already laid by the mid-1970s following the collapse of
the Bretton Woods system. The new doctrines, such as monetarism, that guided the
practices of the international institutions were designed to re-establish the conditions
of international financial stability, at whatever cost to domestic spending programmes
and domestic employment. The development of neoliberalism as a set of doctrines
and discourses took place first of all in the United States and was then imposed or
accepted throughout the global economy (Turner 2008; Gray 1998; Harvey 2005).
Sometimes the adjustments were painful, as in Britain, in France, in Sweden, and
most recently in East Asia. What was striking however in Britain was that having
once succumbed to the medicine that was prescribed, the British political class, first
Conservative and latterly Labour, became enthusiasts and proselytizers for the new
dispensation. Denis Healey, Labour Chancellor in the 1970s, was described as an
unbelieving monetarist when he took the first decisive steps to create a monetarist
policy regime in the UK, imposing cash limits on public spending and monetary
targets. There was nothing unbelieving however about the regime that followed
(Maynard 1988; Young 1989).
British politicians became evangelists for neoliberal economic policies and for
the superiority of the Anglo-American model. The belief in flexible labour markets,
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deregulation of business, privatization, low taxes, and minimal state involvement
became articles of faith which were pressed on Britain’s European partners as offering
the best way to create a prosperous and competitive economy. The globalization
narrative was used to argue that there was no alternative to the adoption of neoliberal
economic policies and the Anglo-American model. Resistance to globalization was
futile, it was claimed, because national governments no longer had the power to
control global economic forces. States had to either work with globalization or be
overwhelmed by it (Hay 1999). All this was to change in 2008.
31.5 The Ideological Relationship
.............................................................................................................................................
The ideological relationship is the least tangible of the three relationships which
help define Anglo-America but it pervades everything, since it provides the dis-
courses which construct all three relationships. Anglo-America is an old ideological
community, rooted in both the common language, institutions, and culture, and
also in the great conflicts and schisms which shook England, Scotland, Wales, and
Ireland in the seventeenth century, and prised the American colonies away from
Britain in the eighteenth. The War of Revolution was a civil war within Anglo-
America, with substantial minorities in both America and Britain supporting the
Revolution or the King. The colonists wished to assert the rights of freeborn Eng-
lishmen in America just as radicals like Tom Paine had wanted to do in England
(Keane 1995). He found America much more fertile ground. But the ideological
argument was the same. For the radicals, George III was a tyrant wherever he ruled,
and the overthrow of hereditary title and royal authority in America completed
the work which the rebels against Charles I a century before had begun but not
finished.
Although the political institutions and traditions of the two countries diverged
after independence, a strong English influence remained, both on the institutions
themselves and on what later became known as the American Creed (Myrdal 1962;
Lieven 2005). The Constitutional Convention sought to draw up a constitution which
would reflect the best English practice but avoid its mistakes, and put in safeguards
to prevent abuses. It reflected a shared understanding about the nature of politics
and the possibilities and limitations of political institutions. The contrast between
the parliamentary and presidential systems sometimes hides the common core from
which both spring. The President was intended to perform the role of the King in
the English constitution, but was hedged around with formal checks and balances
so that he could not abuse his position. The history of the American presidency has
been in part its attempt to escape from those constraints, while in Britain the Crown
has gradually shed its power and been confined to a largely dignified role in the
constitution, its powers being usurped by that second monarch in the British system,
584 andrew gamble
the Prime Minister. Many incumbents of that office, however, constantly dream of
converting their role into a presidency, which helps explain the popularity of The
West Wing for so many of the inhabitants of the Westminster Village.
What this example illustrates is that both countries have been models for each
other at different times in their development. The United States has increasingly
moved away from its English roots, and its identity has become much more com-
plex. When Anglo-America is narrowly defined as that part of America which
can trace British descent, it is a rapidly shrinking part of the whole (Kaufmann
2004), and some have voiced concern about the loss of a core part of American
identity (Huntington 2004). For Britain however the images of America increased
their hold through the twentieth century and show no sign of fading. American
models in culture, economics, politics, and science still exert a fascination over
the British political class and over British citizens which is not equalled by any
other country. Like other nations the British exhibit a love–hate attitude towards
the Americans, often finding in the country the things they most love as well as
the things they most hate. But in the British case there is a particular intensity
because of the shared language and the shared political institutions and ideological
discourse.
Many of the debates in Anglo-America have always been transatlantic debates.
Several prominent commentators in the UK, including Irwin Stelzer, are American,
and several in the USA, including Christopher Hitchens, are British. There is a
great deal of contact between think-tanks in the two countries, between publishers,
and between journals. American themes are very quickly picked up and debated
in Britain, and there is a fascination with American politics and the American
political process. The attention given by the British media and by British politi-
cians to American politics and American political leaders far outweighs the atten-
tion given to elections anywhere else. It has also been the case that the political
cycles in the two countries have often, though not always, matched Republicans
with Conservatives and Democrats with Labour, leading to some famous pairings,
including Attlee/Truman; Macmillan/Eisenhower; Wilson/Johnson; Heath/Nixon;
Callaghan/Carter; Thatcher/Reagan; and Blair/Clinton.
Images of America, both positive and negative, have shaped British political debate
throughout the period since 1945. America has been the leading pole of attrac-
tion and repulsion in British politics, and has greatly influenced the way all issues,
including Europe, have been discussed. For both right and left in British politics
America has been something to be copied and something to be avoided. British
politicians have used different images of America to sharpen their arguments and to
define their own political identities. Four images of particular importance have been
American democracy, American civil society, American capitalism, and American
power.
Positive images of America as a democracy focus on its liberalism, the depth of
its civil liberty, its self-acting citizens, the richness of the associational life of its
civil society, the decentralized and accountable nature of power, the rule of law, and
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egalitarianism. Negative images of America as a democracy by contrast emphasize its
elitism, the degree of non-participation by particular groups in politics, the exclusion
of so many from decision-making, the power of lobbies and special interests, the
influence of wealth, the biases of the media, and the resulting narrowness of political
debate and political alternatives.
Positive images of America as a civil society stress the opportunities it makes
available to all Americans. This is the American Dream, the society of mobility,
individuality, openness, and inclusion, the society where everything is possible,
where hard work brings reward, and where every citizen can aspire to any posi-
tion in the society. Negative images of America as a civil society emphasize its
conversion into a mass society, characterized by immobility and conformity. Here
individualization means atomization and the driving down of standards to a basic
minimum.
Positive images of America as a capitalist society celebrate it as the champion
of free enterprise, prizing entrepreneurship, voluntary exchange, flexibility, mobil-
ity, private property rights, and individual initiative. Everyone has the potential
to be a capitalist and a property owner, ensuring their own financial security.
The negative image of America as a capitalist society emphasizes instead the con-
centration and centralization of economic power in the hands of the large cor-
porations, the entrenched inequalities in the distribution of power and wealth,
the national and global exploitation of labour, and the commodification of social
relations.
Positive images of America as a great power treat it as the leader of the free
world, an anti-imperialist, anti-colonial power, the opponent of the imperialism and
colonialism of the European powers, the leader of an alliance of democracies to
promote national self-determination, democracy, and peace, against powers that seek
the destruction of those values, which have included Imperial and Nazi Germany,
Soviet Russia, and now radical Islam. The negative image of America as a great
power is as a new empire, imposing a world order which disregards international
law when it suits American interests to do so, seeking to preserve American primacy
with policies which maintain the hugely unequal global distribution of power and
wealth.
Enduring themes in Anglo-American ideological discourse with special current
resonance have been ideas of nationhood, citizenship, and constitutional govern-
ment. There have been lively debates over Britishness, multiculturalism, immigration,
and constitutional reform in recent decades, and America has again provided positive
and negative images and models. Discussion has focused in particular on whether US
civic patriotism provides a model for a more active kind of British citizenship, on
whether the US experience of migration and integration has lessons for Britain, and
whether Britain needs a written constitution and a more formal separation of powers
between executive, legislature, and judiciary. Images of America have been deployed
on both sides of the argument (Kenny 2004; Johnson 2004; Barnett 1997; Hansen
2000).
586 andrew gamble
31.6 Conclusion: Britain, America,
and Europe
.............................................................................................................................................
Anglo-America is not the only transnational space in which Britain is involved.
Europe has become increasingly important in recent decades. The British have been
notoriously reluctant to make a wholehearted commitment to EU membership
(Young 1998), although the Americans have often pressed them to do so. The transna-
tional spaces of empire and of Anglo-America have been the imagined communities
to which the British have clung, while Europe has supplied a long line of hostile others
(Catholic Spain, Bourbon and Napoleonic France, and Imperial and Nazi Germany)
against which British identity has been defined.
Despite the ever deeper involvement of Britain in the process of European inte-
gration, a significant part of the British political class and British public opinion is
increasingly Euro-sceptic. In the Conservative Party this Euro-scepticism is not isola-
tionist or protectionist. On the contrary it is globalist—its allegiance is to the liberal
world order dominated by the United States, and one of its main complaints about
the European Union is that it is too interventionist, too statist, too protectionist.
Rejecting a European future for Britain means endorsing an Anglo-American one.
Some Conservative Euro-sceptics have even advocated that Britain should leave the
EU and join NAFTA instead (Redwood 2001). Throughout the long European debate
the opponents of Europe have always been prepared to argue their case in terms of
identity, and to emphasize Britain’s Anglo-American identity, which is regarded as
far superior to the European identity represented by Brussels and the institutions of
the EU.
The United States has often played an important role in the European debate. It
has always seen great advantages to itself in Britain being a full participating member.
US administrations became impatient with British hankering after an independent
world role, and strongly urged British governments to join the European Community.
They thought that if Britain did so the Community would be stronger and more
viable, while at the same time if Britain was at the heart of Europe yet still a loyal
ally of the United States this would have advantages in inhibiting moves to which the
United States was opposed, such as European defence forces independent of NATO
and therefore of American control.
In pursuing these objectives the US rationale is similar to that of British policy
in the nineteenth century towards the United States. It is not in America’s interest
to see a weak and fragmented Europe always prone to the kind of instability and
conflict which afflicts the Balkans. But it is also not in America’s interest to see
Europe develop as a rival superpower which begins to contest American hegemony. If
Britain’s membership of the EU helps slow down the movement towards the creation
of such a superpower, then it is a bonus as far as the United States is concerned. Apart
from the devotees of the Anglosphere (Bennett 2004) there is little support in the USA
for Britain detaching itself from the EU, and integrating more closely with the United
britain and america 587
States. This would have few advantages for the USA and would leave behind an EU
which was potentially harder to manage.
Anglo-America will not lose its importance for Britain so long as the United States
is still the world’s leading power and at the centre of its governance. There is still a
question as to whether in the long term Anglo-America can provide a serious alterna-
tive to Europe for Britain (Diamond 2008). Many observers assume that Britain will
at some point embrace fully the logic of European integration, including joining the
euro, while seeking much stronger constitutional guarantees to limit the powers of
the European executive. There is no inevitability, however, that Britain will develop
in this direction. A part of the British political class and the media remains viscerally
attached to Anglo-America and does not hide its distaste for the European Union.
Joining the euro has been ruled out for the foreseeable future, and there are still deep
British reservations on the creation of a European army, on a common European
security policy, and on common borders. Such scepticism makes the British govern-
ment cling to its relationship with the United States, by supporting its continuing
hegemony and proposing that Britain remain a bridge between the two worlds of
Anglo-America and Europe. This stance may become increasingly hard to sustain, as
the worlds of Europe and America continue to divide. But Anglo-America has always
shown a remarkable capacity to renew its hold on the British political imagination,
and shows no sign yet of relaxing its grip.
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c h a p t e r 32
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AF TE R E M PI R E
.................................................................................................................
joel krieger
At its height during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837–1901), the British Empire
encompassed fully one-quarter of the world’s population, exerting direct colonial rule
over some four dozen countries scattered across the globe. With varying political and
constitutional arrangements, Britain presided over a vast mélange of countries and
dependent or semi-dependent territories, which were connected by a diverse set of
strategic, cultural, and historical links, rather than by allegiance to Crown or mother
country (Darwin 1991: 4).
Because the connections between the elements of the empire varied considerably
in character and degree, both the spatial and the temporal boundaries of the British
Empire cannot be sharply drawn. The first volume of The Oxford History of the British
Empire, The Origins of Empire (Canny 1988), even refuses to identify a commencement
date, and the fourth volume, The Twentieth Century (Brown and Louis 2001), resists
the conventional argument that empires and great powers decline and fall, which of
course would require an end date. Instead, Louis claims ‘the British Empire expe-
rienced a renewal of the colonial mission after both world wars’ (Brown and Louis
2001: p. viii). In this way, both revived and transformed, Britain was able to adjust to
the radically changed circumstances triggered by decolonization (Brown and Louis
2001: 703). In this post-imperial era the legacies of colonial rule continue to affect
Britain profoundly as well as the international order on which the UK continues to
exert significant influence, although its sway on former colonial territories is not as
great as anticipated (Darwin 1988: 329–30).
How best can we come to terms with the enduring legacies of empire in Britain?
P. D. Morgan offers an important methodological starting point. He argues that
to understand the British Empire, it is essential to recognize empire as ‘an entire
interactive system, one vast interconnected world’ that integrated the colonizer and
the colonized ‘into one frame, into a single analytical field,’ which was defined by the
after empire 591
complex interplay of similarities and differences, intriguing and provoking parallels,
shared fates, and interdependent mindsets (Morgan 1999: 68). The same method that
Morgan applied to the study of empire can be applied productively to this analysis of
the legacies of empire.
In a stunning reversal of Britain’s global status and fortunes, the empire fell apart
in the half-century of decolonization between the independence of India in 1947 and
the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Apart from a few scattered dependencies,
the sun finally set on the British Empire, but the interconnections lived on and in
some ways intensified.
After the demise of empire, Britain remains a cosmopolitan and interconnected
world that integrates the descendants of colonizer and colonized not only in a single
analytical field but also, more significantly, in close physical and cultural proximity,
which produce endless and varied encounters. Morgan’s methodological injunction
remains, but the focus and scope of this contribution are very different from Morgan’s
and the many others who have contributed to our understanding of the British
Empire.
Caveat lector. This chapter is not intended to contribute to the debate on the British
Empire (its causes, how the imperial system operated, why it collapsed, its economic
consequences or moral reckoning). Nor is it intended to be a brief history of empire or
a broad overview of post-imperial Britain. The analysis of empire is a very different
matter from the analysis of the consequences of empire for contemporary British
politics. It is one thing to analyse the empire (its causes, modalities, justifications,
consequences). Assessing how Britain’s past as colonizer shapes contemporary devel-
opments is a different matter.
The diverse experiences of empire and loss of empire have profoundly shaped
Britain, as the legacies of empire leave their complex, disputed, ambivalent, and
constantly evolving stamp on British politics. This chapter analyses the enduring
significance of Britain’s imperial past for understanding various aspects of contempo-
rary British politics, in particular its effects on British national identity and its role in
shaping perspectives on globalization and foreign policy, as those policies attempt to
modernize and maximize the UK’s continuing role in great power politics. In short,
this chapter takes up ‘the elusive question of the effects of the end of empire on post-
colonial Britain’, which is not treated in the end of empire debate (Darwin 1991: 5).
32.1 National Identity and the
Reverberations of Empire
.............................................................................................................................................
The UK’s imperial past has created diffuse boundaries of inclusion and nation-
hood. These have been subject to extensive redefinition during the post-war and
592 joel krieger
post-colonial period, and dislocating effects have continued on the diverse and het-
erogeneous communities and individuals with complex multi-ethnic and transna-
tional heritages. Ethnicity, intra-UK territorial attachments, and the processes of
Europeanization and globalization are complicating national identity. Context-
specific identities are being shuffled and left unsettled. As a result, it is becoming
increasingly difficult for UK residents automatically to imagine themselves as Britons,
people who constitute a resonant national community.
What does constitute ‘Britishness’? Has Britain fragmented into smaller commu-
nities and scattered individuals living side by side, but not necessarily in amiable
proximity? These questions are so difficult to answer categorically because British
identities, and degrees of inclusion and exclusion, operate on several conceptual,
cultural, and territorial frontiers. These matters are often ambiguous, and they are
always subject to political challenges and contested narratives (Cohen 1994).
J. G. A. Pocock, who helped launch the ‘four nations or one’ historiographical
debate, asks what becomes of the definition of national community and ‘the identity
it offers the individual’ when sovereignty is ‘modified, fragmented or abandoned’ as it
was with Britain’s entry into the European Union (Pocock 1992: 364). Hugh Kearney
questions whether the United Kingdom as a political unit comprises four nations
or one—and tries to slide past the conundrum by emphasizing the ‘multicultural’
as distinct from the ‘multinational’ history of Britain (Kearney 1991). Stuart Hall
notes that in defining themselves, UK residents say they are ‘English or Welsh or
Indian or Pakistani’ (Hall 1992: 291). Britishness becomes lost as people assert separate
territorial or ethnic or cultural identities that are based either on nations within the
UK or on places of origin or descent outside the UK.
How about English identity as a source of attachment and self-identification? ‘The
sense of identity of the English is almost as difficult to specify as the name of the
state’, observes Bernard Crick (1991: 91), reinforcing Hall’s argument. He then explains
that ‘British’ is a concept appropriately applied to matters of citizenship and political
institutions and emphasizes, ‘It is not a cultural term, nor does it apply to any real
sense of nation’ (Crick 1991: 97). As Crick observes, for the English it is easy to mistake
patriotism for nationalism (a ‘Britishness’ transposed into and experienced as English
nationalism). It is important to add, however, that this is a confusion to which ethnic
minorities are not prone, especially given the complex interplay between nation and
race in rhetorical definitions of Englishness/Britishness and in post-war immigration
and nationality policy.
Without digging very deeply into the historical record, it is easy to recognize
a potent blurring of lineage, race, and nationality that extends from the mid-
seventeenth-century historiography of the Norman invasion in 1066 (foreigners
oppressing the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’) through to Margaret Thatcher’s 1982 justification
for war against Argentina. (‘The people of the Falkland Islands, like the people of the
United Kingdom, are an island race’ (Miles 1987)). To ethnic minority communities,
the patriotic appeals during the Falklands War to a dubious part of the UK political
community 8,000 miles away emphasized the exclusion that ethnic minority individ-
uals felt right in the heart of England (Gilroy 1991: 51). Thus, one way of constructing
after empire 593
the national community appears to privilege race (the assertion of common ‘stock’ or
ancestry) over place (who actually lives in the UK, ethnic identity aside) (Goulbourne
1991; Jackson and Penrose 1994).
Pooled sovereignty within the European Union, the commingled histories (and
historiograhies) of four nations, and the complex interplay of race and nationality
have created doubts about British identity that run deep. Britain’s imperial past cre-
ated diffuse boundaries of inclusion and nationhood, which were subject to extensive
redefinition during the post-war, post-colonial period, and were dramatized further
by 9/11 and 7/7, which have inflamed already strained relations between the dominant
white Britons and the Muslim community.
Before anyone talked about globalization, the undeniably global phenomenon of
colonial and post-colonial migration transformed people’s lives and vastly compli-
cated the national identities of many thousands of new UK residents and citizens from
Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean. Inevitably, experiences of ethnic minorities
have been framed by the politics of citizenship and nationality and driven by notions
about what ethnic groups ‘belong’ in Britain (and to what degree).
What constitutes ‘Britishness’? This question remains so contentious because
British identity, which is framed by degrees of inclusion and exclusion, operates on
several conceptual, cultural, and territorial frontiers. The definition of ‘Britishness’
remains ambiguous, politically malleable, and a source of continuing dispute, espe-
cially in an era in which heightened concerns about security raise the stakes about the
importance of shared values and a common core identity.
Before 9/11, a counter-hegemonic multicultural narrative of Britain was emerging
with considerable force. In this narrative Britain was seen as a multi-ethnic society
that benefits from the diversity in its midst. The authors of a high-profile commission
report on multi-ethnic Britain (Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain
(CMEB) 2000), the Parekh Report, captured this sentiment: ‘Many communities
overlap; all affect and are affected by others. More and more people have multiple
identities—they are Welsh Europeans, Pakistani Yorkshirewomen, Glaswegian Mus-
lims, English Jews and black British. Many enjoy this complexity but also experience
conflicting loyalties’ (CMEB 2000: 10). There was a growing recognition of the reality
on the ground of life in a multi-ethnic society, which motivated a powerful counter-
hegemonic narrative that emphasized the value of social inclusion, political integra-
tion, and diversity, and that raised profound questions about tolerance, justice, and
inclusion in contemporary UK society. In a powerful and controversial analysis, the
report observed that ‘the word “British” will never do on its own. . . . Britishness as
much as Englishness, has systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations’ (CMEB
2000: 38). This narrative of a cosmopolitan liberal, multi-ethnic, and multicultural
Britain has suffered intensive backlash, defections, and recriminations.
Against the backdrop of intensified hostility directed at the Muslim community,
the period since 9/11 has witnessed a hardening of government policy on asylum,
refuge, and immigration, and has placed multiculturalism on the defensive. There is
increasing concern across the political spectrum that Britain needs to find a way to
deepen the ties of shared political culture and values in order to hold society together
594 joel krieger
as well as to ensure security. By implication, too much attention to racial and ethnic
diversity in the UK or to the reverberating implications of colonization and post-
colonial immigration on British identity—and the schisms within British identity—
may become dangerously destabilizing.
By spring 2004, race, immigration, and asylum issues were even stealing headlines
from the war in Iraq. There were charges of widespread fraud in the treatment of
East European applications for immigration. Beverly Hughes, the minister in charge
of immigration and asylum, resigned in the midst of accusations that she had misled
parliament. Official government data revealed record levels of hate crimes in England
and Wales. After an episode in which British-born Muslims set fire to the Union
Jack in London, debate raged about the validity of ‘separateness’ among ethnic com-
munities, and the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips,
called for a return to ‘core British values’ and the abandonment of the government’s
commitment to building a multicultural society. As Britain experienced increased
ethnic tension, polls indicated widespread unease with ethnic diversity. By the start
of the election campaign in April 2005, nearly one-quarter (23 per cent) of the British
people ranked immigration and asylum as the single most important issue facing the
nation—nearly double the percentage who thought health care (13 per cent) was the
biggest issue. A strong majority thought that laws on immigration should be tougher
(nine out of ten supporters of the Conservatives, but also six out of ten Labour
supporters) (MORI 2005). Then came the events of 7 July 2005.
Ever since the London bombings on 7/7, intense scrutiny has focused on the
Muslim community, and harassment has increased. According to police, the number
of hate crimes primarily affecting Muslims soared 600 per cent in the weeks after
the bombings. There were 269 hate-motivated attacks in the three weeks following
the bombings, compared to 40 in the same time period in 2004. In October 2006,
Jack Straw, a highly visible MP and former Foreign Minister, sparked a controversy
and angered Muslim groups when he said that the full facial veil worn by some
Muslim women had become a ‘visible statement of separation and difference’. He
then urged them to remove the veil when they came to see him in his constituency
office in Blackburn. Then, in 2007, the Queen knighted Salman Rushdie, whose
book, The Satanic Verses, had offended many Muslims around the world and forced
him into hiding in the face of a formal death threat from Iranian religious leaders.
Rushdie’s knighthood was widely held to be an affront to the Muslim community in
Britain.
There is increasing concern across the political spectrum that Britain needs to find
a way to deepen the ties of shared political culture and values in order to hold society
together as well as to ensure security, but there is little agreement about the way
forward. Is multiculturalism the disease or the cure?
To make sense of the ongoing debate about multiculturalism in the UK, it is useful
first to note that ‘multiculturalism’ is a term that is subject to several interpretations.
Three related but distinct multicultural arguments stand out for their seriousness,
for their applicability to post-imperial Britain, and for the challenges they pose for
British politics and society:
after empire 595
1. With reference to post-immigration and post-colonial Britain and other West-
ern democracies, multiculturalism is a political project to accommodate minori-
ties, advance their political and social integration, narrow socio-economic
inequalities, reduce colour racism and anti-Muslim cultural racism that foster
systematic disadvantage, and produce in all citizens a sense of belonging to a
shared political community (Modood 2005; 2007). Multiculturalism understood
in this way as an explicit political project reflects the argument and policy rec-
ommendations of the Parekh Report including, crucially, its characterization of
Britain as both ‘a community of individuals and a community of communities’,
and needs to reconcile these sometimes conflicting requirements (CMEB 2000:
48; see Modood 2007: 17).
2. Multiculturalism is also a component of a theory of politics that analyses how
identities and difference are embedded in and sustained by culture, which is
understood as systems of beliefs and practices through which individuals and
groups organize and interpret their lives. This approach requires fundamental
changes in the role and function of the state to reconcile unity and diversity,
while ‘cherishing plural cultural identities without weakening the shared and
precious identity of shared citizenship’ (Parekh 2000: 342).
3. Multiculturalism is also a politics of recognition, which contends that our iden-
tity as individuals and as members of a group, and how we understand our worth
and fundamental attributes as human beings, are shaped by the recognition
or non-recognition or distorted recognition of others, which can cause real
damage and erode prospects for equal citizenship. The demand for recognition
is especially urgent when it comes from minority groups who disproportionately
experience misrecognition, are subject to demeaning or distorting characteriza-
tions, and have difficulty persuading others to recognize cherished beliefs and
practices or remedy the maldistribution of resources (Taylor 1994; Fraser and
Honneth 2003).
It is probably correct to note that multiculturalism is neither the disease nor the
cure. But as outlined in the three versions identified above, multiculturalism captures
a set of challenges that are not uniquely British, but that do pose particular problems
for UK politics. ‘Paradoxical as it may seem, the greater and deeper the diversity in
a society, the greater the unity and cohesion it requires to hold itself together and
nurture its diversity’, observes Bhiku Parekh. ‘A weakly held society feels threatened
by differences and lacks the confidence and the willingness to welcome and live with
them’ (Parekh 2000: 196). Parekh’s observations capture the contemporary moment
of uncertainty about the future of multi-ethnic Britain and expose vulnerabilities at a
time when deep concerns about security heighten the challenges of unity.
Each of the three versions of multiculturalism identified above—multiculturalism
as a distinct political project, as a contribution to a political theory that requires a
transformed state, and as a demand for the politics of recognition—poses particular
challenges of conceptual clarification, political mobilization, and policy implementa-
tion. Moreover, multiculturalism faces the immense obstacle of achieving demands
596 joel krieger
for equal citizenship, recognition, and redistribution under difficult circumstances,
heightened by a sense that Britain must resist becoming what Parekh above, theo-
rizing more generally, characterized as a weakly held society. For multiculturalism to
succeed, it must overcome a context that is framed by fluid and contested identities
and by mistrust—mistrust that is heightened by legitimate security concerns, which
focus on British Muslims, who comprise about one-third of the ethnic minority
population in the UK.
Multiculturalism must also succeed on the merits of the case that the legitimate
grievances of ethnic minorities in the UK reflect an institutionalized bias that stems
from the experience of colonization and decolonization. To succeed, multiculturalism
also requires not only remedies for individual claimants, but also the recognition of
identify groups as rights-bearing collectivities. This approach cuts against the grain of
liberal democracy, especially as it is practised in the UK where, as Modood observes,
‘an ethical primacy is given to the individual and individual rights are politically
fundamental’ (Modood 2007: 6).
Modood is right to present multiculturalism ‘as a political project that we might
be for or against’ (Modood 2007: p. vii). Even so, this characterization understates
the specific, perhaps unique, character of multiculturalism. Whatever reservations
about multiculturalism may animate opposition to any or all of the three versions
noted above, this much is clear: the post-imperial terrain of ‘plural Britishness’
(Modood 2005: 185–209) represents profound and irreversible facts on the ground.
The term ‘multiculturalism’ may be problematic, and the conditions for success of
multiculturalism in any of the versions described remain daunting, but does it make
sense any longer to stake out positions for or against multiculturalism as a project
of political and social integration? Until Britain achieves a good deal of success in
resolving the tension between unity and diversity, the unease about the future of
multi-ethnic, multicultural Britain will remain an enduring legacy of empire.
32.2 Retreat from Empire and the Search
for a New Role
.............................................................................................................................................
As Cain and Hopkins observe, in assessing the changes Britain has experienced both
in the domestic realm and in the country’s role in the world in the last fifty years,
‘winning the war and losing the empire are the most immediately striking devel-
opments in the period’ (Cain and Hopkins 2002: 619). War, empire, and the retreat
from empire have had profound and continuing reverberations for Britain’s foreign
policy orientations ever since the Second World War. These developments shape UK
foreign policy and perspectives on globalization and humanitarian intervention, and
they produce what appears to be a path-dependent determination to assert great
after empire 597
power status and preserve a ‘special relationship’ with the United States, even at the
expense of a full commitment to economic integration with and leadership in the
European Union. In short, the legacy of empire and the retreat from empire have
inspired the search for a new role befitting a former imperial and still ambitious great
power.
With the end of the Second World War and the ouster of Winston Churchill, the
long-time leader of the most intransigent imperial stalwarts, in the election of July
1945, priorities as well as mindsets began to shift. As A. J. P Taylor famously observed,
and as many people in Britain came rather quickly to recognize, ‘Imperial greatness
was on the way out; the welfare state was on the way in. The British empire declined;
the condition of the people improved’ (Taylor 1965: 600). A different political order,
marked by new, often contradictory, sensibilities about the empire, was emerging
and a new post-imperial approach to great power politics came to dominate British
foreign policy, despite variations and party squabbles. Although the view that empire
produced prosperity was still widely held (not least in the Labour government, by
Attlee, Bevin, and Morrison), Britain’s imperial power was ebbing quickly. India
achieved independence under the Attlee government, and East and West Pakistan
were formed. Burma (now Myanmar) achieved independence, became a republic,
and quickly departed from the Commonwealth. The Irish Free State became a repub-
lic, Ceylon became a dominion. Palestine was abandoned, with the end of British
mandate rule (1922–48), the impasse over plans for partition between Jewish and Arab
states, and the ensuing war in 1948–9.
The return of the Conservatives in 1951, with Churchill as Prime Minister, produced
a schizophrenic period in Britain. The government acquiesced reluctantly to indepen-
dence movements in Sudan and the Gold Coast, but dug in against them in Cyprus
and several other territories. Also under the Conservatives, a series of federations
provided interim arrangements in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, which
ultimately led to independence (Judd 1996). Through the 1950s, diehards still insisted,
‘the British Empire could continue to exist if only the Colonial Office, and above
all the cabinet, would buck up, show more determination and less defeatism’ (Louis
2006: 1). But with Eden’s Suez debacle of 1956, and the withdrawal of all troops east of
Suez, the ultimate retreat from empire had become a fait accompli.
However reluctantly, Britain retreated from empire more readily than it gave up
an imperial mentality in foreign policy, which insisted, at times unrealistically, on
a pivotal role for Britain as a global leader. Winston Churchill bequeathed to post-
war and post-empire British foreign policy two distinct but more or less compatible
orientations that have, with important modifications, remained important guiding
principles. He left an indelible image of three interlocking circles of influence—
the United States, the Commonwealth, and Europe—with the United Kingdom the
link among the three (Hennessy 1993). Even more powerfully, Churchill articulated
Britain’s evolving foreign policy orientation and profoundly shaped the post-war
order in his 1946 ‘Sinews of Peace’ speech in Missouri, a speech in which he symbol-
ically passed the torch of empire to the United States. This speech is most famous
for the reference to ‘the iron curtain’ that helped define the cold war, but it also
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powerfully constructed the post-war order and the newly emerging hegemonic order
in another way. In ‘Sinews of Peace’, Churchill, in front of Harry Truman, also codified
the ‘special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the
United States’ (Churchill 1946).
Churchill also made explicit the view that bilateral relations between the USA and
UK, however essential and mutually productive, must not be used as means to erode
the power and effectiveness of critical multilateral institutions, beginning with the
United Nations.
The end of empire did not bring the end of great power aspirations, but it did bring
new British foreign policy formulations and challenges. ‘There was a profound draw-
back to [the] three-ring version of Britain’s place in the world’, noted Peter Hennessy.
‘The rest of the world did not share it’ (Hennessy 1993: 343). There was also a profound
drawback to the special relationship with the United States: it was inevitably a rela-
tionship between unequal partners, which has tended to exert a tremendous magnetic
pull on British foreign policy, to the relative neglect of European partnerships and
broader international influences. This context of post-imperial aspirations and the
problem of reconciling the US–UK special relationship with the three-ring vision of
Britain’s place in the world help explain Britain’s continuing global role, leading up
to, and including, the war in Iraq.
Tony Blair’s role in the Iraq story has to be understood by looking outwards to
the pulling force of Washington, and to the quite reasonable judgement that British
interests are often served by powerful strategic ties to the United States as the hege-
monic power. That said, Blair’s decision to join the war in Iraq, despite the readily
foreseeable political costs, can be understood at least as well by looking inward, to
the premises of past and present British—and in particular, Labour—foreign policy
orientations. These orientations present a complex and ambivalent portrait of a party
with powerful, and still unresolved, cross-currents of imperial and anti-imperialist
orientations.
To be sure, deep currents of internationalism and anti-militarism have historic
roots within the Labour Party, from as far back as the International Labour Party
(ILP) and the broader socialist foreign policy critique in the inter-war period to
the Keep Left mobilization after 1945, which called for a ‘third force’ between Soviet
Communism and American capitalism and argued that Britain should take a moral
lead in foreign affairs. This position still resonated deeply with the initial New Labour
foreign policy approach when Robin Cook was UK foreign secretary. Nevertheless,
when Britain faced security threats and the external demands of great power politics,
there has been a consistent tendency for the party to rally around flag and country.
The support for national war efforts was reaffirmed in party manifestoes issued in
the aftermath of the First World War, the Second World War, and the Korean War,
in which the party rightly asserted its contributions to wartime success (George 1991:
9). Despite subtle shifts with time and circumstances, Labour’s traditional foreign
policy comes down to a set of permanent objectives that transcend party preferences:
‘self-regarding promotion of national interests, defense of a far-flung imperial and
commercial network, and management of a European balance as a condition of
after empire 599
British security—all backed, whenever necessary, by the application of force’ (Gordon
1969: 1).
It should be noted as well that Labour foreign policy traditionalists put great stock
in massaging the relationship of Prime Ministers and party leaders with American
Presidents. Despite sharp differences over the Vietnam War and the refusal to send
even a symbolic British force to Vietnam—which put considerable strain on the
Atlantic alliance—Harold Wilson worked hard to preserve a close relationship with
the United States, and in large part for this reason pumped very significant resources
into NATO. James Callaghan was determined to reverse what he perceived as Edward
Heath’s commitment to Europe, which he held responsible for weakening Britain’s
ties with the United States. Working to undo the damage to relations with the
United States that resulted from Labour’s support for unilateral nuclear disarmament
through much of the 1980s (until its defeat in the 1987 general election prompted
a major policy review), Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock supported the Gulf War
in 1991, a development that strengthened the relationship between the Labour Party
and the US administration. And in a prelude to Tony Blair’s wartime alliance with
George W. Bush, after a meeting in Washington with President George H. W. Bush
in July 1991, the Labour Party leader, upon his return to London, proclaimed ‘there
are no differences at all between us in the areas we discussed’ (George 1991: 10).
Kinnock’s testimony is a fitting valedictory to Labour’s traditional foreign policy and
a presentiment of things to come.
The war in Iraq is the outgrowth of legacies left in the mindsets of contemporary
Labour leaders by the world-views of their predecessors, as these mindsets have been
shaped by the legacies of empire, understood as a civilizing mission expressed both in
support for humanitarian intervention and in support for a robust international role
to advance UK interests and influence, both of which may involve the use of force.
Initially Blair, who came to office without a foreign policy portfolio, created the
space for productive discussions within the government about foreign policy princi-
ples and policy directions. In the first two years of Blair’s premiership, the Foreign
Minister, Robin Cook, took the lead in framing an ethical foreign policy (‘a leading
force for good in the world’). This included expansive commitments to human rights,
civil liberties, and democracy, and a stronger activist role to strengthen multilateral
institutions and advance global development (Hill 2005; Coates, Krieger, and Vickers
2004: 9–21; Lawler 2000).
Before 9/11 New Labour stood for a coherent and progressive foreign policy
framework, one that linked globalization to a growing commitment to narrow the
development gap. The Kosovo War created the context for Blair’s explicit linkage of
globalization with foreign and security policy. In a speech delivered in Chicago on the
eve of NATO’s fiftieth anniversary, Blair argued that isolationism was no longer an
option. After all, financial insecurity in Asia destroyed jobs all the way from Chicago
to his own constituency in County Durham, and conflict in the Balkans brought
refugees to Germany as well as to the United States (Blair 1999).
Blair’s ‘doctrine of international community’ gave new weight to the notion of
global interdependence by asserting a responsibility to use military force when
600 joel krieger
necessary to achieve humanitarian objectives and contain catastrophic human rights
abuses. This doctrine, as well as Blair’s Atlanticist leanings, conditioned his response
to 9/11 and subsequently to the war in Iraq.
Instinctively, Tony Blair recognized the need (as he himself put it) to ‘stand shoul-
der to shoulder’ with the United States, thus cementing his privileged relationship
with George W. Bush and raising his international profile. In the days immediately
after the terror attacks of September 2001, Blair played an important role in tamping
down fears that 9/11 was demonstrating the validity of Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash
of civilizations’ thesis (Huntington 1993). Blair made clear that Al-Qaeda did not
represent Islam and expressed his belief in a liberal and multicultural Britain in which
the government had no concerns about the allegiance of Muslims (Hill 2005).
But in the days immediately following 9/11, the fateful attraction of the Atlantic
alliance, with Blair’s distinctive inflections, took an irresistible hold over British
foreign policy. At this critical juncture, several elements came together to forge the
decision to support the US administration, even when the venue of the war on terror
changed from Afghanistan to Iraq:
1. a fear that if the USA were left to fight the war on terror by itself, then unilateral-
ist forces in Washington would be strengthened, and the world would be worse
off (Riddell 2003: 289);
2. Blair’s conviction that Iraq should be understood, like Kosovo, as an exercise
in humanitarian intervention to save Muslims from catastrophic human rights
abuses (Blair 2004); and
3. a particular reading of the special relationship.
It seems clear that Blair’s interpretation of the special relationship gives it a sta-
tus above broader multilateral institutions, an interpretation that Churchill rejected
(Churchill 1946); it is also much more confining than the position of Harold Wilson,
who refused to support the American war in Vietnam, since it appeared to require
unqualified support for policies that made the UK a hostage to fortune as it assumed
a subordinate role in advancing America’s imperial design.
In an equally significant way, the UK’s foreign policy and geopolitical orientation
has been shaped by New Labour’s interpretation of globalization. The New Labour
leadership of both Blair and Brown accept globalization as a fact of life: not as a
set of transformations to be lamented, but as a set of challenges to be met and
mastered through pragmatic and innovative policies. The first critical postulate of
New Labour’s geopolitical strategy is revealed by this stance on globalization: its
commitment to interdependence and its pragmatic acquiescence to a world in which
the British state cannot control outcomes. This vision correlated precisely with the
early internationalism and multilateralism that framed the initial New Labour recon-
figuration of UK foreign policy on ethical lines.
This reading of globalization produces a clear set of foreign policy goals. Britain
should harness the forces of globalization and the practical realities of interdepen-
dence to advance internationalism, multilateralism, and cooperation in the eco-
nomic, environmental, and security dimensions of foreign affairs. When necessary,
after empire 601
it must advance humanitarian policy through resolute military means that are con-
sonant with the doctrine of international community and advance the strategic goal
of enhancing Britain’s global power and prestige. Its ethical responsibilities mean that
it must also engage the questions of debt reduction and institutional reform that are
required to secure the aims of human rights, democratic governance, and security.
In Blair’s doctrine of international community, the reverberations of empire were
unmistakable. The civilizing mission of empire and the right of the metropolitan
power to use force against the weaker dependent or failed states were both understood
as an exercise of humanitarian intervention.
It is too early to be certain about what Gordon Brown and his foreign policy team
will make their priorities and what new inflections they will add to Britain’s Atlanti-
cist and imperialist traditions. But two appointments may prove revealing: David
Miliband as Foreign Minister and Mark Malloch Brown, former United Nations
Deputy Secretary-General under Kofi Annan and a vociferous critic of the UK’s role
in the war in Iraq, as a minister with broad international responsibilities. Will Brown’s
foreign policy involve a renewed commitment to institutionalizing the UN’s Millen-
nium Development Goals (MDGs) and to advancing a far-reaching international
aid-financing agenda? Will it involve sustained efforts to mobilize an international
coalition for UN system reform and revitalize the UN’s capacity to respond to human-
itarian crises? How effectively will it help the Obama administration revitalize mul-
tilateral institutions? Will it involve sustained commitment to leadership on climate
change? If so, then the world will witness the emergence of a distinctive new role
for Britain, one that positively affirms the legacies of empire with robust initiatives
to advance development and aid agendas by playing a leading role in important
multilateral efforts.
32.3 Legacies of Empire
.............................................................................................................................................
The legacies of empire come through very clearly in Britain’s foreign policy orienta-
tions, its approach to globalization, and its continuing commitment to international
development goals; and in debates about—and fractures within—Britain’s multicul-
tural and multi-ethnic polity.
A recent leader in the Economist included this observation: ‘Perhaps because
of its imperial and trading past, Britain is remarkably at ease with globalisation’
(Economist 2007: 12). Indeed, under Blair and Brown, globalization has been the glue
that holds the model of government together, integrating a domestic commitment
to modernization, skill acquisition, and welfare reform, to a determined agenda to
enhance British competitiveness. With exports in goods and services accounting
for one-quarter of its GDP, Britain is a highly integrated economy (World Bank
2006). The UK’s imperial legacy may also be seen also in its natural assumption of
602 joel krieger
leadership in European foreign and security policy, in its advocacy of the use of force
for humanitarian purposes, and in its robust commitments to global development
agendas.
The ‘entire interactive system, one vast interconnected world’ (Morgan 1999: 68)
that integrated colonizer and colonized in the period of empire began decisively to
come apart more than sixty years ago, but the debates about the British Empire
show no sign of ebbing. Although the larger debate about the British Empire itself
falls outside the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting that one after-effect of the
British Empire is the shadow it casts on American politics. In recent years, competing
evaluations of the British Empire have been invoked in a powerful shadow fight
about an emergent American Empire. The claim that America’s post-9/11 geopolitical
strategy heralds the birth of a new American Empire has generated a far-reaching
debate. Niall Ferguson, one of the leading figures in the empire debate, warns that
the United States may not have the determination and staying power to succeed in its
global mission. He argues that the British Empire succeeded because many of the best
and the brightest were willing to spend their careers and much of their lives in colonial
outposts. How many of their American counterparts today will be eager to take on
long tours of duty in Kabul or Baghdad? Ferguson exhorts America to throw off its
cultural reluctance to ‘do Empire’ and put its best and brightest into an enduring
imperial project (Ferguson 2002; 2003). Ferguson’s many critics have challenged his
assessment that on balance the empire was beneficial. They object to its tendency
to glorify empire by arguing that it was the inescapable path to development and
modernization (Porter 2002) and for taking the further highly controversial step of
using a retrospective defence of the British Empire as an exhortation for a muscular
and unilateralist projection of power by the United States. As this debate makes
clear, long after its demise, the British Empire inspires and provokes debates with
considerable contemporary resonance.
Perhaps more than for any other former colonial power, the legacy of empire
animates a continued civilizing mission for the UK, with all the controversy and
cross-cutting motives of compassion, presumption, and pride such a role involves.
Indeed, the echoes of eighteenth-century commentaries about the conduct of the
British Empire may still be heard in contemporary foreign policy debates. Speaking
about the need for conciliation with the United States, rather than war against this
much admired colony, Edmund Burke observed in 1775 ‘the use of force alone is but
temporary. It may subdue for a moment, but it does not remove the necessity of
subduing again: and a nation is not governed which is perpetually to be conquered’
(Burke 1999). Burke provides a timely reminder that the effect of the use of force
may be ephemeral. What made that reminder even more timely and compelling was
that Burke’s remarks were quoted verbatim on the eve of the war in Iraq by Admiral
Sir Michael Boyce, Chief of the Defense Staff (CDS) at the time of the 2003 invasion
(Boyce 2003).
At the same time, the experiences of colonization and empire are powerfully
evoked in contemporary debates about British national identity and the challenges
after empire 603
of multiculturalism in post-colonial Britain. Consider the intensity of the backlash
against the Parekh Report, the debate unleashed by Jack Straw’s well-meaning but
incendiary advice that Muslim women who came to his constituency office should
remove the full facial veil, and the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie’s knight-
hood. All these episodes suggest that one abiding legacy of empire is heightened
unease about and tension within multi-ethnic and multicultural Britain. There is no
end in sight.
The British Empire remains the subject of unremitting ambivalence, passionate
debate, and, if anything, increasingly intense reflection more than sixty years after the
independence of India signalled the empire’s inevitable end. The experience of empire
and loss of empire have shaped Britain so profoundly that it is all but impossible to
think about Britain present and future without thinking of its imperial past.
As complicated as the history of empire may be, the challenges facing Britain
after empire may be simply stated: to achieve a high degree of social and political
integration that helps resolve the tension between unity and diversity; and to refocus
British foreign policy and the special relationship to advance development goals
and strengthen multilateral institutions that will serve enduring British interests and
sustain a robust international community.
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p a r t iv
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INEQUALITIES
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Section Eleven: Sources
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c h a p t e r 33
.................................................................................................................
CLASS
.................................................................................................................
fiona devine
In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, class still makes the news in Britain.
The current concern is that class inequalities are getting worse. This deterioration
takes many forms. After decreasing for a while, child poverty is on the rise again.
Income inequalities are growing as the pay of the rich soars ahead of everyone else
(Brewer et al. 2007). Wealth increasingly determines where you live so that the rich
and the poor hardly ever meet (Dorling et al. 2007; Massey 2007). Finally, social
mobility—the movement of people between classes—is declining, which undermines
the ideals of equal opportunities and meritocracy (Blanden et al. 2004; 2005). All of
these trends are seemingly happening under a Labour government which is com-
mitted to making Britain a more equal society. Awkward questions are raised about
Labour’s social policies and their impact on class. Of course, the growing consensus
that class inequalities are widening does not mean they are unequivocally getting
worse. The evidence in support of these claims is not clear-cut and it will be many
years before it can tell us about trends in class inequalities under Labour. By impli-
cation, it is not yet obvious whether Labour’s social policies have succeeded or failed
or, more likely, fallen somewhere in between. The aim of this chapter is to weigh up
the evidence on widening class inequalities and to consider how that evidence may
be used to assess Labour’s ten years in power as it has sought to make Britain a more
equal society.
This chapter will consider class with reference to social mobility because it is
seen as the key to equal opportunities for all and to the creation of a meritocratic
society. A concern with equal opportunities might be described as Labour’s modest
equalitarian agenda. To this end, it is important to understand social mobility in a
I would like to thank Yaojun Li for his detailed comments on this chapter. I am very grateful to the
reviewers and editors for their helpful remarks in improving the final draft.
610 fiona devine
historical timeframe. The first section focuses on the main patterns and trends in
class inequalities in Britain from the 1940s to the 1990s. It will be seen that the 1940s–
70s were characterized by much absolute upward mobility although relative mobility
chances stayed the same. The 1970s–90s witnessed a slowdown in absolute upward
mobility and relative mobility rates remained the same. The second section considers
ongoing controversies around class and the growing consensus that social mobility
is declining. It will be argued that the evidence is not clear-cut and it remains to
be seen whether generations of young people growing up under Labour have less
opportunities for social mobility than before. The third section considers Labour’s
social policies to improve social mobility with specific reference to its education poli-
cies. Some progress to reduce class inequalities in educational attainments has been
made but it is slow and class differentials in education remain stark. The conclusion
will consider the challenges that remain and the difficulties that Labour—indeed, any
government in power—confronts in tackling inequalities that have proved so resistant
to change.
33.1 Class Inequalities 1945–97
.............................................................................................................................................
Before discussing the statistics, it is important to discuss some definitional issues
around class and the categories by which we understand it. This chapter does not
consider class in terms of class identities (Heath et al. 2007), how people feel about
class inequalities (Pahl et al. 2007), or the cultural dimensions of class (Gayo-Cal et al.
2006). It focuses on class, defined in terms of employment relations, since it draws
on national data from official sources and other survey data used by sociologists
and economists. It makes reference, for example, to Goldthorpe’s class schema, the
Registrar-General’s socio-economic status classification which was used in official
statistics until 2001, and its replacement National Statistics Socio-Economic Clas-
sification (NS-SEC) (Rose and Pevalin 2003). This latest classification distinguishes
between seven classes although analysis of class inequalities is often based on a dis-
tinction between the middle class (high-level non-manual employees) and working
class (low-level semi- and unskilled manual workers). People are allocated a class
position according to their occupation and other details on their contract of employ-
ment. The focus is on the economic dimensions of class and its implications for life
chances. Of course, this definition and measurement of class is narrow. Nevertheless,
this ‘employment aggregate’ approach to measuring class is appropriate for under-
standing national patterns and trends in social mobility (Crompton 2008).
The main patterns and trends in class mobility in Britain since the Second World
War can be divided into two periods: (1) the post-war period ‘of the long boom’
(1940s–1970s) which was characterized by economic stability, high economic growth,
low unemployment, and decreasing income inequality; and (2) the mid-1970s to
class 611
the present day characterized by economic turbulence, lower growth, higher unem-
ployment, and growing income inequality. Our knowledge of the mid-twentieth
century comes from the Oxford Mobility Study (OMS) carried out by sociologists
at Nuffield College, Oxford. The survey was conducted in the early 1970s and the
results published in 1980 (Goldthorpe et al. 1980; 1987; Halsey et al. 1980). Goldthorpe
and his colleagues (1987) found there was considerable upward mobility, including
long-range mobility, from manual jobs into non-manual professional and manage-
rial careers. There was, in other words, a significant amount of mobility of people
from working-class origins moving into middle-class destinations. There was little
downward mobility in the opposite direction so the total amount of mobility was
high. Goldthorpe et al. (1987) explained these important changes with reference to
the changing occupational structure. The growth of high-level professional and man-
agerial jobs had a profound effect on the shape of the class structure and movement
between classes. Thus, changes in absolute mobility were the product of structural
changes in the shape of the occupational order as the distribution of jobs altered.
While highlighting these momentous changes, however, Goldthorpe and his col-
leagues (1987) also noted considerable stability in class relations. Relative rates of
mobility—where the relative chances of people coming from different classes ending
up in the middle classes are compared—had not changed. Middle-class children had
a 4 : 1 chance of securing a middle-class occupation compared with working-class
children and they had only a 1 : 4 chance of falling into a working-class job. They
explained this stability with reference to the evolution of the occupational structure.
That is to say, the growth of middle-class occupations meant there was ‘more room
at the top’ for everyone. There was space for those of middle-class and working-class
origins. Thus, changes in the shape of the class structure and patterns of mobility
between different classes had not made Britain a more open or meritocratic society.
Where people started out very much influenced where they arrived, despite the devel-
opment of the welfare state, and specifically the introduction of a universal education
system free for all after 1944. Attempts at equalitarian reform, such as government
legislation to establish formal equality of educational opportunity in the post-war
period, failed to establish a more open society. The individual mobility of people
moving between classes had not made Britain more equal.
Goldthorpe and his colleagues’ research generated much controversy. There was
considerable debate over Goldthorpe’s class schema and his very wide definition of
the middle class—embracing employers, alongside professionals and managers (Penn
1980). Similarly, there was a heated debate on the failure to include women in the
survey (Crompton 1980). Subsequent research by Marshall et al. (1988) showed that
women had not enjoyed as much upward mobility as men and often experienced
downward mobility out of the middle class. Interestingly, these debates did not engage
with the substantive findings on social mobility and the policy implications. The first
to do so were Marsh and Blackburn (1992) who argued that social policy had made
a difference to class differences in access to higher education in the 1960s and 1970s.
Without maintenance grants, for example, working-class children would have been
unable to go to university and class inequalities would have grown. Later, Saunders
612 fiona devine
(1995; 1997), preferring to focus on absolute rather than relative mobility, argued
Britain is a meritocracy and one based on intelligence. His argument about the pivotal
role of intelligence was quickly dismissed (Breen and Goldthorpe 1999; 2001; 2002;
Heath et al. 1992; Savage and Egerton 1998). Arguably, whether the focus should be
on absolute or relative rates of mobility is an unresolved issue. The difficulties of
simultaneously appreciating change (the glass is half full, which is a ‘good’ story) and
continuity (the glass is half empty, which is a ‘bad’ story) in patterns and trends in
social mobility has not gone away.
Turning to the later decades of the twentieth century, the mid-1970s onwards has
been characterized by economic turbulence with lower growth rates, mass unemploy-
ment, and rising income inequality (Atkinson 1997; Gallie et al. 1998; Heath and Li
2008; Li and Heath 2007). We do not have a survey like the OMS specifically designed
to provide an authoritative picture of patterns and trends in social mobility in this
later era. That said, sociologists have used the British Election Surveys (BES) because
some of the data are very similar—with the addition of women—to the information
collected for the OMS (Goldthorpe et al. 1987; Macdonald and Ridge 1988). Drawing
on pooled data (1964–97), Heath and Payne (2000) analysed the social mobility of
seven cohorts of people born before 1900 to 1959. The new analysis confirms the ear-
lier OMS findings on absolute mobility. The results on relative mobility are somewhat
different, however. Heath and Payne found the relative chances of a working-class son
securing a middle-class occupation improved relative to middle-class sons. There was
a downward trend across the century as the odds dropped from 16.0: 1 for the cohort
born pre-1990 to 7.7: 1 for the final birth cohort (1950–9). The same trend, albeit
less pronounced, was found among women (see Table 33.1). Britain had become a
more open—i.e. equal—society over the twentieth century (although the trend is not
always in a progressive direction).
This conclusion, which varies from the earlier findings presented above, has been
contested by Goldthorpe. Goldthorpe and Mills (2004) have examined intergenera-
tional class mobility by drawing on the General Household Survey (GHS) between
1973 and 1992. On absolute mobility, the trend towards increasing upward mobility
among men had been superseded by a slight decline while the trend towards declining
downward social mobility had reversed towards a slight rise. The overall effect on total
mobility (upward and downward mobility) is one of ‘no change’. Thus, focusing on
men, Goldthorpe and Mills (2004: 202–3) concluded ‘the generally optimistic picture
obtained from the OMS is by now in need of revision. Over the last decades of the
twentieth century, the previous rates of total, and especially of upward mobility to
rise has been halted and, if anything, it is downward rather than upward mobility
that has become more frequent’. For women, they found a steady increase in the
rate of upward mobility while downward mobility had decreased or flattened out
as more women from middle-class origins secured middle-class destinations than
in the past. The substantial upward mobility facilitated by the growth of high-level
professional and managerial occupations, which had characterized the 1940s–70s had
slowed from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s—when many low-level service sector
jobs were created (McKnight et al. 2005)—and might now even be reversing.
class 613
Table 33.1 Symmetrical odds ratios: men and women
Pre-1900 1900–9 1910–19 1920–9 1930–9 1940–9 1950–9
(a) Men
Salariat: working class 16.0 10.0 19.0 14.0 10.3 5.6 7.7
Salariat: petty bourgeoisie 5.5 7.0 6.7 9.4 6.8 4.1 7.3
Petty bourgeoisie: working class 9.5 11.0 9.6 8.2 5.8 3.2 4.9
(b) Women
Salariat: working — 17.2 15.2 13.4 7.3 10.6 5.8
Salariat: routine non-manual — 2.1 1.0 1.5 1.7 1.3 0.6
Routine non-manual: working — 6.5 4.5 1.9 3.3 2.7 3.2
Sample: Men aged 35 and over at the time of the survey and on the GB electoral registers. Retired or economically
inactive are assigned to classes on the basis of their last occupation. Economically inactive men (other than retired)
are excluded. Women aged 35 and over at the time of the survey and, on the GB electoral registers. Women who
have never had a job or who describe themselves as ‘looking after the home’ are excluded. Women who describe
themselves as ‘retired’ are assigned to classes on the basis of their last occupation.
Source: Heath and Payne (2000), tables 7.12 and 7.13.
Turning to relative mobility, Goldthorpe and Mills (2004; see also Goldthorpe
2007) found that there have been some slight shifts in relative rates of class mobility.
Relative chances of upward mobility have improved. While the ratio of middle-
class sons securing middle-class occupations relative to working-class sons secur-
ing middle-class occupations was 4 : 1 in the 1970s, this had changed to 3 : 1 by the
1980s (Goldthorpe 2007: 228). There was more openness in this direction and this
applied to women too. However, the relative chances of downward mobility had got
worse. While the chances of middle-class sons experiencing downward mobility into
working-class jobs compared with working-class sons staying in working-class desti-
nations was 1 : 4 in the 1970s, this ratio had increased to 1 : 5 in the 1980s. The effect of
these trends on total mobility is to cancel each other out (i.e. a counterbalance effect)
leaving no change or even declining openness. Despite slight fluctuations, Goldthorpe
and Mills (2004: 222) concluded that the new analysis confirmed the earlier finding of
‘the OMS that point to a high degree of temporal stability as a feature of relative rates’.
This stability results from the ability of the middle class to maintain its position over
time. Formal qualifications are important for entry into professional and managerial
positions and they protect people, irrespective of class origins, against downward
mobility. This security facilitates stability across people’s lives (Gershuny 1993) and
across the generations.
The analysis of different data-sets has produced different results and interpreta-
tions of social mobility trends from the 1970s onwards. Methodological issues may
explain these differences. Leaving these issues aside, Goldthorpe’s (1996; Goldthorpe
et al. 1987; Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992) argument that advantaged middle-class
families mobilize their economic, cultural, and social resources to ensure intergen-
erational stability has been widely endorsed. The ownership or non-ownership of
614 fiona devine
these resources shapes the opportunities and constraints on participation in higher
education, for example. A plethora of qualitative studies have illustrated the ways in
which middle-class parents increasingly mobilize their resources, via various strate-
gies and tactics, to ensure their children’s success in an education system driven
by market principles introduced under Thatcher and Major, and, arguably, pur-
sued further by Blair and Brown (Vincent and Ball 2006; Ball 2003; Butler with
Robson 2004; Gewirtz et al. 1995; Power et al. 2003; Devine 2004; Reay et al. 2005).
Much of this material suggests that there is considerable middle-class anxiety about
educational and occupational success which has fuelled strategic action—moving
to gain entry into high-performing schools, buying additional coaching, and so
forth—to secure advantages across generations. All of these individual actions at
the micro-level have the effect of reproducing advantage across the generations at
the macro-level. This is why the class structure can be said to have ‘self-maintaining
properties’.
While sociologists endorse this view, debate still rages as to why working-class
children do not pursue further education and, most especially, higher education.
The classic debate over whether economics (money) or culture (values) explains
why ‘working-class kids get working-class jobs’ (Willis 1977) continues to divide
opinion. Sociologists like Goldthorpe suggest that economic factors predominate.
They influence the choices about schooling—especially the perceived risks of staying
on—rather than any ‘poverty of aspirations’ among working-class children and their
parents. Others emphasize the importance of cultural predispositions. Working-class
parents and their children do not value educational success because it will not be an
important dimension in their working lives. There is surprisingly little contemporary
ethnography of working-class children and their parents. The most recent study to
enjoy media attention is Evans’s (2006) study of white working-class children in
London. Not surprisingly, as an anthropologist, she emphasizes the role of culture
in the reproduction of disadvantage. There is a disjunction between the home and
the school in relation to learning and participation which explains why working-
class children do less well than middle-class children in the education system. This
implies that the class differential in educational attainment is a key issue and it will
be considered with reference to Labour’s education policies in due course. Before
then, however, attention will turn to current controversies about class inequalities
and social mobility since Labour came to power in 1997.
33.2 Worsening Inequalities 2005–
.............................................................................................................................................
When Labour came to power in 1997, it inherited ‘levels of poverty and inequality
unprecedented in post-war history’ (Stewart and Hills 2005: 1). Child poverty had
more than doubled and income inequalities widened considerably. Unemployment
class 615
among men and workless households was a major source of these problems (Gregg
et al. 1999; Berthoud 2007). Initially very cautious, Labour committed itself to Con-
servative spending plans between 1997 and 1999. From mid-1999, however, Labour
launched a wide-ranging programme of social policies. Indicative of its high prior-
ity, a raft of education policies were introduced—reducing class sizes, introducing
literacy and numeracy hours, and so forth—to raise standards (McKnight et al. 2005:
47). It sought to reduce child poverty through income support via Working Families
Tax Credits (WFTC) and unemployment through a welfare-to-work initiative such
as the New Deal for Young People (Stewart and Hills 2005: 10). Child poverty started
to decline and income inequality stabilized. Labour’s social policies, it seemed, were
beginning to work. The news was good. More recently, however, bad news stories have
hit the headlines. Social mobility has haltered, or worse, is declining. A consensus has
emerged that rather than being a more equal society, Britain is becoming a more
unequal society under Labour.
The most important recent evidence of declining social mobility has been collected
by economists including Paul Gregg (who is a member of the Council of Economic
Advisors at the Treasury), Steve Machin, Jo Blanden, and colleagues attached to the
Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. A research
report for the Sutton Trust generated much media commentary (Blanden et al. 2005;
see also Machin and Vignoles 2004). As economists, they focus on income mobility
(rather than class mobility). They examined changes in intergenerational mobility
using longitudinal data from the National Child Development Study (NCDS) which
consists of a sample of children born in 1958 (who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s) and
the British Cohort Study (BCS) which is a sample of children born in 1970 (who grew
up in the 1970s and 1980s). They found that intergenerational mobility had fallen
for those sons born in 1970 compared with those born in 1958. (The analysis was
not conducted for daughters!) The percentage of sons in the lowest income quartile
whose parents were also in the lowest quartile rose from 31 per cent in 1958 to 38
per cent in 1970, while the percentage of sons in the highest income quartile whose
parents are also in the highest quartile rose from 35 per cent among the 1958 cohort to
42 per cent among the 1970 cohort (Blanden et al. 2005: 8). In other words, equality
of opportunity had declined across the two cohorts of young men.
Blanden and her colleagues argue that the decline in intergenerational mobility is
the result of a closer relationship between family income and educational attainment
between the 1958 and 1970 cohorts. Drawing on additional data from the British
Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to consider a third cohort of children reaching age
sixteen in the 1990s, they found that more children (sons and daughters) from both
rich and poor families stayed on in further education after sixteen. The proportion
of children from the richest income group who went into FE rose from 45 per cent in
1974 to 70 per cent in 1986 and then 86 per cent in the mid-1990s. The equivalent
proportions of children from the poorest income group were 21 per cent, 32 per
cent, and 61 per cent. Inequality between the two groups rose between the 1970s
and 1980s as the participation rates of the richer children surged ahead (a 38 per
cent gap) although inequality then fell as the participation rates of poorer children
616 fiona devine
0.9 0.86
0.8
0.70
0.7
0.61
0.6
0.5 0.45
0.4 0.38
0.32
0.3 0.25
0.24
0.21
0.2
0.1
0
1958 Cohort (NCDS) 1970 Cohort (BCS) Late 1970s Cohort (BHPS)
Proportion of sample who stayed on at school after age 16
Poorest 20 per cent Richest 20 per cent Difference
at age 16 at age 16 (Educational Inequality)
Fig. 33.1 Staying on rates (proportions) by parental income group
Source: Blanden, et al. (2005), Figure 1.
rose substantially in the mid 1980s–90s (a 25 per cent gap) (Blanden et al. 2005: 11).
Turning to higher education, and looking at degree completion rates, they found
degree attainment rates grew for both the richest 20 per cent and poorest 20 per cent
over the 1970s–90s. They noted, however, that the rise in participation across income
groups differed considerably in that the proportion of young people from the richest
backgrounds increased from 20 per cent to 46 per cent (a 26 per cent increase) while
the proportion of young people from the poorest backgrounds increased from 6 per
cent to 9 per cent (a 3 per cent increase). Thus, the participation rates between the
two groups widened from 14 per cent to 37 per cent over time.
The authors concluded that, ‘Our research . . . implies that the big expansion in
university participation has tended to benefit children from affluent families more
and thus reinforced immobility across generations’ (Blanden et al. 2005: 14). Equally
influential work, using the same longitudinal data-sets, for the Joseph Rowntree
Foundation has focused on the other end of the spectrum: namely, the persistence of
poverty across generations (Blanden and Gibbons 2006). For those teenagers growing
class 617
0.5
0.46
0.45
0.4
0.37 0.37
0.35
0.30
0.3
0.25
0.20
0.2
0.15 0.14
0.1 0.09
0.06 0.07
0.05
0
1958 Cohort (NCDS) 1970 Cohort (BCS) Late 1970s Cohort (BHPS)
Proportion of samples obtaining a degree by age 23
Poorest 20 per cent Richest 20 per cent Difference
at age 16 at age 16 (Educational Inequality)
Fig. 33.2 Degree completion by age 23 by parental income group
Source: Blanden et al. (2005), figure 2.
up in the 1970s, the chances of being poor as an adult were double if they were poor
as a teenager. For teenagers growing up in the 1980s, the chances of being poor as an
adult were four times as likely if they were poor teenagers. In other words, the per-
sistence of poverty strengthened—especially for women—across cohorts (Blanden
and Gibbons 2006: 12). Of course, there are numerous factors which explain why
poverty persists. They found that general family background disadvantages, especially
parental non-employment and low education and other factors such as being out of
work, having a partner out of work, having a limited work history, and poverty in
itself (as in a lack of money), contributed to the higher risk of poverty (Blanden and
Gibbons 2006: 30). Overall, early advantages are associated with later advantageous
outcomes while early disadvantages are associated with disadvantageous outcomes.
The effects of class background are profound.
This evidence has contributed to the growing consensus that intergenerational
mobility is falling and the view that Labour is failing to reverse these trends. The evi-
dence is very powerful. The strengths of longitudinal research, where economic and
618 fiona devine
social change and the processes of change can be fully explored, are readily apparent.
The results reported here, however, are primarily confined to young people growing
up in the economically turbulent decades of the 1970s and 1980s. It was in the 1980s,
under Thatcher-led Conservative governments, that poverty and inequality increased.
It is not surprising that intergenerational inequality declined, that opportunities for
HE were exploited by richer rather than poorer groups, and the effects of workless
households on the adult outcomes of poor teenagers were greater than in the 1970s.
The data, however, cannot tell us so much about trends in intergenerational income
mobility in the 1990s and, most importantly, since 1997 when Labour came to power.
What is needed is information on children born after 1997. It is this empirical evidence
that will illuminate patterns and trends in intergenerational social mobility under
Labour and, for example, the effects of policies on FE and HE participation rates
between the rich and poor. Given the strength of early class background on later life
chances, the jury is still out on these issues.
These caveats aside, there is mounting evidence that the effects of class are evident
among very young children, including those born since 1997. Feinstein (2003; 2006)
has found that social class has a ‘strong and enduring effect’ on children’s cognitive
abilities. Drawing on the 1970 BCS discussed above, there are social class differen-
tials among children tested on a variety of tasks at twenty-two months. Feinstein
compared the relative position of children with a high and low SES (socio-economic
status) with different test scores. His analysis showed that children with a high SES
and high test scores continued to do well in subsequent tests and outperform all
other children. Children with low SES and low test scores continued to perform
badly relative to all others. Importantly, he found that children with a high SES
but low test scores improved their performance at forty-two months and beyond
while children with a low SES but high test scores experienced a decline from forty-
two months onwards. Feinstein (2006: 415) concluded, ‘Thus, there is discontinuity
after 22 months but it is heavily socially determined. The advantageous mobility is
overwhelmingly for children from advantaged backgrounds, the downward mobility
for children from disadvantaged backgrounds’. Indeed, as Figure 33.3 shows, between
the ages of five and ten years the high achievers (children who scored in the top
quartile (Q) in the index of cognitive development at twenty-two months) from
lower-class backgrounds had been overtaken by the poor achievers (in the bottom
quartile) from higher-class backgrounds. This happens when children are in school.
Feinstein (2006: 413) rightly emphasizes that class does not determine children’s
lives since ‘relative ability is not fixed’. That said, test results at twenty-two months are
a good predictor of GCSE results at sixteen. The effects of class are, again, quite pro-
found. They are now being found among children born in 2000–2. The Millennium
Cohort Study (MCS) is a longitudinal survey of 19,000 UK children born in 2001–
2 whose parents were interviewed when cohort members were nine months. These
children will be followed into adulthood like the NCDS and BCS (Dex and Joshi
2005). The second survey, with the children now aged three, has also established class
differences in child development. Using a variety of tests, researchers (George et al.
2007: 97–8) found that the majority of children are of average ability so there is an
class 619
100
90
Average posiition in distribution
80 High SES, high
Q at 22m (n=105)
70
60 High SES, low Q
at 22m (n=55)
50
40 Low SES, high
Q at 22m (n=36)
30
20 Low SES, low
10 Q at 22m (n=54)
0
22 30 38 46 54 62 70 78 86 94 102 110 118
Months
Fig. 33.3 Average rank of test scores at 22, 42, 60, and 120 months by SES of
parents and early rank position
Source: Feinstein (2003: 73–98). See also Feinstein (2006: 411).
overlap between middle-class and working-class children. Nevertheless, middle-class
children are more likely to score average or above average in tests while working-class
children are more likely to be average or below average in performance. The results
mirror those of Feinstein. The MCS was designed to capture high concentrations
of minority ethnic populations whose presence has grown since 1970. Of note is
that children of Pakistani and Bangladeshi parents—invariably in lower rather than
higher social classes—underperformed in these tests. The effects of class and race are
evident.
The MCS was also designed to over-represent areas of child poverty and slightly
higher levels of poverty (26 per cent) were found among the families of the survey
than is the case in the total population (22 per cent) in 2003–4 (Ward et al. 2007:
172). Not surprisingly, they found that poverty (with family income below the 60 per
cent of the median threshold) affected few middle-class mothers (4.7 per cent) and
middle-class fathers (5.4 per cent). It was much more prevalent among working-class
mothers and fathers with poverty experienced by between a quarter (24.7 per cent)
and a third (35.9 per cent) of working-class families. Not surprisingly, it was very high
among all lone parents who did not work (92.3 per cent), fathers and mothers who did
not work (85 per cent), and families where the father was not employed although the
mother worked (Ward et al. 2007: 176). Differences in poverty rates, therefore, were
readily apparent amongst parents of this most recent survey. It should also be noted
that poverty was most prevalent among all lone parents (72.1 per cent)—highlighting
the effects of changing family demographics over time—and it was high also among
Pakistani and Bangladeshi families (67.9 per cent and 67 per cent respectively) (Ward
et al. 2007: 173–6). Thus, for ‘children of the new century’, social class differences and
620 fiona devine
other familiar inequalities of race and gender are beginning to shape children’s life
chances in ways to which we are accustomed.
Of course, these children were only three years old in 2003–5 and it is too early to
tell how they will get on in education and employment. Interesting findings can be
anticipated when these children progress through primary school from about now
(2005–11) and as they move through the secondary school system (from 2011 to 2016).
Some of their primary school years will be under Labour. These children will not go
into FE until 2016, nor enter HE until 2018. Labour may have left power long before
2018 (or, if they are in power, they are likely to have lost it in between). It will be this
cohort of children who will be most able to tell us whether the Labour governments
from 1997 have improved social mobility. Unfortunately, the MCS might not be able
to tell us about one of Labour’s early intervention policies—Sure Start—and its effect
on reducing child poverty since most Sure Start childcare places only came on-stream
from 2007. Measuring trends in social mobility is a long-term affair and establishing
the impact of social policy on patterns of social mobility is a complicated business.
Noting this, and bearing in mind the powerful early effects of class—through family
backgrounds—on later life chances, attention will now turn to Labour’s policies to
improve education for all children.
33.3 Education Policy and Politics
.............................................................................................................................................
Declining social mobility and enduring class inequalities, then, have been quickly
associated with Labour in power and the prevailing consensus has put pressure on
the government to renew efforts to deliver on policies close to its heart. At the time
of writing, the Labour government has been in power for ten years—1997–2007—
having allowed for evaluations of some of the policies that are seeking to reduce social
exclusion and increase opportunities. The most extensive evaluation of Labour’s
social policies has been carried out by researchers at the ESRC Centre for Analysis of
Social Exclusion (CASE) at the London School of Economics. Led by John Hills, this
group of scholars has proffered a sophisticated and balanced assessment of Labour’s
social policies, their success or otherwise to date, and their prospects for success or not
in the future (Hills 2004; Hills et al. 2002; Hills and Stewart 2005; Hills et al. 2007). Not
all of Labour’s social policies can be considered here, of course, even though many of
them are interrelated with, for example, child poverty. Rather, given the importance
attached to education for improving social mobility, attention will focus on Labour’s
education policies, the extent to which policy interventions have been successful in
enhancing social mobility and the political implications of this assessment. Of course,
all of these issues have to be understood in the wider context of the perpetuation
of market principles and an emphasis on choice in public services like education
(Ball 2003).
class 621
Considerable effort has been devoted to pre-school children (0–4 years) since inter-
vention in a child’s early years is seen as an effective way of improving educational
performance later (Sparkes and Glennerster 2002: 200). This is significant since, in
the past, these years were ‘treated as almost entirely a private responsibility’ (Piachaud
and Sutherland 2002: 152). There is recognition of the importance of the family as
part of any education policies although, arguably, this is a very difficult area in which
governments can intervene. There are a whole host of initiatives associated with the
‘early years’ agenda which is about the provision of better public services for under-
fives. Initiatives have included Sure Start which seeks to help families with children
from birth to the age of four in areas where children are at most risk of poverty
and exclusion. Launched in 1998, it was operating in 522 neighbourhoods covering
400,000 children including a third of all poor children by 2004. Its educational aim
is to promote the cognitive development of poor children so they are better prepared
for school and the early attainment gap between poor and rich children is narrowed
(Lupton and Power 2005: 121). Other more focused educational policies include the
expansion of nursery school provision for three- and four-year-olds and investment
in high-quality childcare via the 1998 National Childcare Strategy (Stewart 2005: 148).
Considerable investment, therefore, has gone into ‘early years’ education.
Sufficient time has elapsed for evaluations of these policies to have been under-
taken and, to date, the findings are somewhat mixed, indicating that much remains
to be done. With regard to Sure Start, an early, modest objective to ensure that all
children within its remit have access to good quality play and learning opportunities
has been achieved (Power and Willmott 2005: 284; Stewart 2005: 161). The results
are not so clear-cut with regard to more challenging educational objectives, however.
The national evaluation of Sure Start (Meadows 2005; Belsky et al. 2007) has indi-
cated that its beneficial effects (across the board) have been small while it has had
some small negative effects too. The verbal abilities of children of young mothers
involved in the scheme, for example, were lower than children of mothers in non-
Sure Start areas. Another report on the quality of childcare settings of children in the
Millennium Cohort Study, while critical of Sure Start where educational objectives
compete against other ones, found that high-quality provision—usually group child-
care settings—improved literacy skills although much more could be done for maths
and science (Mathers et al. 2007). Disadvantaged children, therefore, require high-
quality childcare to enhance their cognitive skills. Thus, while considerable effort has
gone into the ‘early years’ agenda, and some objectives realized, much remains to be
done—especially for children from poorer class backgrounds.
Turning to primary schools, Labour’s twin preoccupations have been to raise
educational standards for all while narrowing class differentials in attainment. There
have been various policy initiatives including a reduction in class sizes, literacy and
numeracy hours, curriculum developments, and so forth. The performance of chil-
dren at Key Stage 1 (tests at seven) has improved continuously since 1996. In maths,
for example, 89 per cent of boys and 92 per cent of girls reached or exceeded the
expected standards through teacher assessment in 2006 (Social Trends 37 2007: 32).
The class gap in attainment has also narrowed. While the performance of children
622 fiona devine
in maths improved from 94 per cent to 97 per cent between 1997 and 2001 in rich
schools (where less than 10 per cent receive free schools meals (FSMs)), it increased
from 70 per cent to 82 per cent in poor schools (where over 40 per cent of children
receive FSMs) (McKnight et al. 2005: 58). At Key Stage 2 (tests at eleven), 83 per cent
of boys and 85 per cent of girls performed at expected levels for science in 2006 (Social
Trends 37 2007: 32). The class gap in performance is greater at KS2. Nevertheless, the
performance of children in maths improved from 79 per cent to 85 per cent between
1997 and 2001 in rich schools while it increased from 37 per cent to 52 per cent in poor
schools (McKnight et al. 2005: 58). This gap is considerable but the difference has
declined. Labour’s policies have been partially successful although targeted initiatives
to reduce it are still required.
Various policy initiatives have sought to meet Labour’s twin objectives at secondary
school level. Some—the targeting of low attaining schools such as the Excellence in
Cities (EiC) initiative, the establishment of faith schools and academies, selection
procedures, and more choice—have been contentious. The evidence suggests that
attainment levels have improved for everyone. Three-quarters of young men and
women reached the expected standard for maths in 2005 (74 per cent and 77 per cent
respectively) at Key Stage 3 (tests at fourteen) (Social Trends 37 2007: 32). The class
gap in rich and poor schools, however, is stark. The median share of pupils reaching
expected levels in maths at KS3 in rich schools in 2001 was 86 per cent compared
with just 14 per cent in poor schools (McKnight et al. 2005: 58). EiC schools have
improved the performance of pupils with lower levels of attainment (Machin et al.
2003) so their impact is not insignificant but it is modest given the task at hand.
Key Stage 4 (GCSEs at sixteen) results have improved since the mid-1990s with 57
per cent of pupils securing five or more GCSE grades A* to C in 2004–5. Success,
however, varies by FSM eligibility. While 61 per cent of all pupils who do not get
FSMs secured five grades A*–C, only 33 per cent receiving FSMs did so (Social Trends
37 2007: 33). Young people receiving FSMs with the lowest levels of attainment in
deprived neighbourhoods need greater support through sustained interventions.
Since the mid-1980s, as we saw, there has been a rise in the number of young
people staying on in further education (16–19) (Bynner et al. 1997; Ferri et al. 2003).
Over three-quarters (76 per cent) of young people aged sixteen stayed on in 2005
(Social Trends 37 2007: 29). Staying-on rates, however, are patterned by class so
that young people from middle-class backgrounds have a staying-on rate of 80 per
cent compared with 58 per cent of young people from working-class backgrounds.
Prior attainment in key stage tests explains this gap although middle-class young
people are more likely to do A levels whatever the level of attainment than their
working-class equivalents (Jackson et al. 2005). Again, there have been a number of
‘14–19 reforms’ although there has been much disappointment about the failure to
take up the recommendations of the Tomlinson Report on academic and vocational
routes through FE. In 2004, Labour introduced a weekly cash allowance (up to
£30)—Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA)—payable to young people from
low-income families who stay in post-compulsory education full time. Direct finan-
cial assistance of this kind is anticipated to improve staying-on rates among target
class 623
groups although whether the policy works will not be known until 2005–6 figures are
published.
Finally, as we have seen, a substantial and rapid rise in the number of young people
going into higher education (aged 19+) began around 1987 and presently stands at 43
per cent. As part of a widening participation agenda, Labour has set itself a target of
50 per cent of eligible young people attending an HE institution by 2010. The current
figure is close but Labour is unlikely to meet this target. The class gap of course
remains, as young people from affluent families have taken up the opportunities to
go to university at a faster rate than young people from poor families. Of course, in
the 1960s and 1970s, means-tested maintenance grants facilitated working-class entry
into HE and allowed working-class students to take up the opportunities to go to
university as much as middle-class students. In the 1990s, however, the situation was
different. Under successive Conservative administrations, means-tested grants were
gradually replaced by student loans. Against the background of a crisis in the funding
of HE, Labour introduced top-up fees of £1,000 per annum in 1998 which were paid
up-front by students or, more likely, their parents (McKnight et al. 2005: 65). There
was considerable opposition to this move—not least from Labour backbenchers—
who were concerned that both loans and fees would deter young people in low-
income families from going to university.
These policies were expected to see a drop in university applications from
young people in low-income families because they are debt averse (Callender 2003).
Research has show that HE participation is more sensitive to parental income in the
1990s than the 1970s and that the impact of early tuition fees widened the class gap
(Galino-Rueda et al. 2004). Further policy changes have taken place, however. In 2005,
universities were allowed to vary tuition fees up to a maximum of £3,000 per annum.
These fees take the form of an income-contingent loan which is repaid after gradu-
ation (McKnight et al. 2005: 65). Again, fears were expressed that higher fees, even
as a loan, will deter potential students from low-income families. To date, however,
official statistics indicate the introduction of fees has not affected participation rates.
The proportion of students from low-income families increased from 25 per cent
in 1997–8 to 29 per cent in 2005–6 (HEFCE). Still, controversy surrounds the slow
place of change and doubts have been raised about initiatives like AimHigher which
seeks to raise the aspirations of poor teenagers. The class stratification between HE
institutions is also increasingly apparent as working-class young people dominate the
post-1992 new universities rather than the long-established old ones (Reay et al. 2005).
The recent announcement on the reintroduction of means-tested maintenance grants
from 2008—where students will get £3,000 a year if their family income falls below
£25,000—has been welcomed. The impact of this new policy on class differentials in
HE has yet to be seen.
Overall, Labour governments have made considerable efforts to reduce class
inequalities in educational attainment. Some of these policies will take years to have
an effect. In time, evaluations of policy can take place which will judge them a success
or otherwise. To date, the drive to improve educational attainment in primary schools
has seen children from poor homes do better in school than in the past. Some policies,
624 fiona devine
therefore, may be judged successful, albeit partially so, since much remains to be
done. Other policies, however, have not broken down the class attainment gap, most
notably at secondary school. Differential success rates then influence participation
rates in FE and HE. Interventions here have achieved only modest outcomes so far.
Sustained efforts are required to reduce class inequalities because the pace of change
is modest and slow. Labour is not unaware of the challenges that remain. The political
implications of this story are not predictable. Will Labour suffer in an election if
it has failed to deliver? The main opposition parties make political capital out of
the slow progress to raise the life chances of poor children. Both the Conservatives
and Liberal Democrats claim to be the ‘party of aspiration’. Many issues feature in
a general election, however. Whether Labour’s attempt to increase equal opportu-
nities to reduce class inequalities is the key issue on which it is judged remains to
be seen.
33.4 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
This chapter has considered class inequalities in the context of contemporary British
politics. Particular attention has been paid to patterns and trends in social mobility—
the movement of people between classes—as a way of looking at the extent to which
Britain is an open society. The focus of attention has been on equal opportunities
and meritocracy since they are key parts of Labour’s modest egalitarian agenda. The
chapter has not spoken of a more radical agenda which might focus on issues of equal
outcomes or acknowledge the dark side of meritocracy. This is not to say that these
topics do not feature in contemporary political controversies in Britain. Discussions
about a more redistributive tax and benefit system, especially when it is the growing
income of the rich that is driving the rise in income inequalities, are taking place.
Indeed, economists at the Institute for Fiscal Studies have been arguing for some
time that Labour’s equality agenda can only be achieved if the taxes on the affluent—
with annual salaries over £100,000 (when the average is around £23,000)—are raised.
The targets on child poverty will not be met otherwise (Brewer et al. 2007). All of
these aspects of class inequalities—and how to reduce and eradicate them—shape
the political climate in Britain. They will influence how all three main political parties
appeal to the electorate in future years.
These issues aside, the chapter has drawn on a wide range of material from official
data to theoretically informed empirical research—of the highest quality—by soci-
ologists and economists and specialists in social policy. It is pleasing that Labour’s
policies have been informed by this academic research. Much of the evidence shows
that class inequalities are remarkably durable and resistant to change. The effects of
class are felt early in children’s lives and shape the subsequent paths they take in life.
The influence of families is profound. Given this fact, the task facing Labour—or
class 625
any political party committed to equality—is enormous. The reproduction of class
inequalities across generations is a complex affair and policy interventions have to be
equally sophisticated in fashion. To date, policies to alleviate class inequalities have
been modest in their effect. Any progress has been gradual and slow. Sustained effort,
which includes finding out what really works, is required. Labour can hardly feel
satisfied with the progress that has been made so far. Even so, it does not have to
be ashamed of its efforts to make Britain a more equal society.
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c h a p t e r 34
.................................................................................................................
RACE
.................................................................................................................
james hampshire
34.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
At the heart of the politics of race in contemporary Britain lies a paradox. On the one
hand, there is abundant evidence of race-based disadvantage in Britain today. Non-
white Britons experience significant discrimination, inequalities, and exclusion, and
are under-represented in positions of power. As the Commission for Racial Equality
puts it in its 2007 legacy report, ‘an ethnic minority British born baby is sadly still
more likely to go on to receive poor quality education, be paid less, live in substandard
housing, be in poor health and be discriminated against in other ways than his or her
white contemporaries’ (CRE 2007: 1; cf. Modood et al. 1997). Yet at no previous point
in modern British history has the legitimacy of racial inequality and discrimination
been more widely challenged than today. Since the 1960s, when boarding-house signs
reading ‘No Irish, No Coloureds, No Dogs’ were commonplace, genuine progress has
been made to reduce racist discrimination. Such blatant racism is now not only illegal
but also morally inconceivable. Britain was one of the first European countries to
develop anti-discrimination legislation and its racial equality provisions are among
the most extensive in the EU. A powerful anti-racist norm pervades British politics;
to challenge this norm is to be cast to the political extremes. 1
This presents an analytical puzzle as well as a moral quandary. How can the
existence of a powerful anti-racist norm in political culture be reconciled with the
persistent evidence of racial disadvantage and discrimination in British society? And
if the anti-racist norm can apparently coexist with race-based disadvantage, does
the norm itself need to be re-examined? Is this a case of rank hypocrisy, a promise
1
Even the British National Party is careful to disavow racism in its public statements.
630 james hampshire
unfulfilled, or does it reveal something more complex about the nature of race politics
today?
To address these questions it is necessary to recognize that the apparent paradoxes
surrounding race politics in the early twenty-first century are not unique to Britain.
The contradictions of the British situation are part of a wider global ‘racial crisis’
characterized by the persistence of racially based social structures in the face of a
widespread delegitimation of race and racism (Winant 2006: 987). In the aftermath of
decolonization, Jim Crow, the Holocaust, and apartheid, race has been undermined
as a concept and ordering principle, yet it remains present as an identity, practice, and
social structure.
This poses a number of dilemmas, not the least of which is the dilemma of non-
racialism versus race consciousness. This dilemma arises because states that espouse
a normative commitment to anti-racism yet continue to be characterized by racially
structured socio-political orders—and this includes nearly all liberal democratic
states—must steer a course between the denial and reproduction of race. The very
policies and institutions designed to tackle racism and establish a post-racial society
have a tendency to reproduce existing, and even produce new, racial categories.
Census questions, anti-discrimination legislation, racial monitoring, and affirmative
action programmes all rest on racial classifications. Thus the anti-racist dilemma:
a refusal to recognize race may help delegitimize it as a social category, but at the
cost of denying the reality of race-based disadvantage; whereas race-based legislation
intended to address racial disadvantage risks reproducing the very categories that it
seeks to overcome. The political struggles around race in Britain today are caught on
the horns of this dilemma.
Whilst all advanced capitalist societies experience racial crisis to one degree or
another, its manifestations are shaped by distinct national contexts. Britain experi-
ences the crisis in a different way from, say, France or the United States, whose respec-
tive race policies and institutions differ markedly in their approach to the anti-racist
dilemma. This chapter argues that Britain’s race relations policy paradigm embodies
this dilemma in an especially acute way. By refusing to institutionalize a pure form of
either non-racialism or race consciousness, founders of the race relations paradigm
struck a pragmatic balance which in many ways succeeded in tackling racism. But
the limitations and inherent tensions of the race relations paradigm have become
increasingly apparent as it has failed to eradicate race-based disadvantage.
34.2 The Politics of Race Making
.............................................................................................................................................
Race is not a self-evident category of identification or analysis. While the language of
race lingers on in both popular and academic discourse, the use of ‘race’ as a term
to distinguish sub-groups of the human species is now almost unanimously rejected
race 631
by natural scientists and its validity as a category of social analysis is also questioned.
Some scholars go so far as to argue that the ordinary language of race has no place at
all in social scientific analysis (e.g. Miles 1989; 1993).
For most of the modern period, however, naturalistic ideas about race were taken
for granted. The belief that the world’s population was divided into discrete races
to which behavioural attributes could be ascribed was widespread and deep-seated.
Though it came in many guises, the naturalistic understanding of race assigned
human beings to discontinuous racial groups, often based on observed phenotyp-
ical variation, and then identified moral, social, and political differences with this
variation, with biology the determining factor (Banton 2002: 3). On these dubious
foundations a myriad of racial theories and typologies were built (see Banton 1998;
Hannaford 1996; Malik 1996).
It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that the naturalistic under-
standing of race was challenged. In the years following the end of the Second World
War, abhorrence at the horrors of the Nazi ‘racial state’ (Burleigh and Wippermann
1991), anti-colonial movements, and cold war politics gave momentum to national
and international anti-racist movements. Notwithstanding the fact that the world’s
most powerful democracy, the United States, remained a racially hierarchical socio-
political order (see King 1995), from the late 1940s onwards race was denaturalized
and an anti-racist norm began to develop across the liberal capitalist states. Ever since
this epistemic shift, governments, policy-makers, activists, and social scientists alike
have struggled over what to do with the race concept. In the words of Michael Omi
and Howard Winant, having repelled the temptation to think of race as ‘an essence, as
something fixed, concrete, and objective’, many moved towards the ‘opposite temp-
tation: to imagine race as a mere illusion, a purely ideological construct which some
ideal non-racist social order would eliminate’ (Omi and Winant 1994: p. xx).
Today, scholarly work on race operates between the essentialist and illusory poles.
Attention is focused on how race is constructed through practical social and political
activity. Processes of ‘racial formation’ (Omi and Winant 1994) or ‘race-making’
(Banton 2005; see also Murji and Solomos 2005) take place in many spheres of
society, ranging from everyday interactions in private spaces to public discourse and
social scientific analysis. No single set of actors or institutions has a monopoly on
the processes by which race is defined and given meaning. Nevertheless, it is clear
that politics, and specifically the state, plays an important role in the formation,
maintenance, and dissolution of racial categories and groups. As Michael Banton
argues, race making is strongly shaped by official policies and institutions:
If the legislature prohibits discrimination ‘on racial grounds’ it will define those grounds
and, inevitably, lend authority to a certain conception of race. In a similar fashion, if the
government holds a population census and requires members of the public to identify
themselves in terms of racial or ethnic origins, this will have an important influence.
(Banton 2002: 17; cf. Banton 2005: 64)
While some states in the past sought to define race for racist ends—e.g. the
Nuremberg laws in Nazi Germany, South African apartheid laws, or Jim Crow
632 james hampshire
legislation in the United States—in contemporary liberal democracies the politics of
race making occurs primarily through anti-racism initiatives. States committed to
anti-racism are drawn into racial definition and categorization as part of their efforts
to gather data and develop anti-discrimination policies. As US Supreme Court Justice
Harry Blackmun put it in the landmark Bakke case: ‘in order to get beyond racism,
we must first take account of race’ (cited in Banton 2002: 3).
Not all states approach anti-racism in the same way, however, and this has impor-
tant implications for race making. State approaches to anti-racism can be conceptu-
alized in terms of a spectrum, with complete disavowal of the race concept at one
end and official recognition at the other (Bleich 2003: 206). At the former, ‘colour-
blind’ end of the spectrum, the validity of race is denied, race is not recognized
in state institutions or policies, and its use as a basis for legislation is refused. Of
contemporary liberal democracies, France most closely approximates this model. At
the other end of the spectrum lies a ‘race-conscious’ approach to anti-racism, in
which race is recognized as a valid category of analysis and racial categories are used
in legislation. The United States approximates this model. 2
The politics of anti-racism in Britain operates between these two poles, though it is
closer to the American than the French model. On the one hand, and unlike in France,
in Britain race is recognized as a valid category of analysis and intervention: there is
a developed body of anti-discrimination legislation referring to, and defining, racial
groups; official statistics capture racial and ethnic data; and programmes targeted
at particular racial groups are mandated. On the other hand, Britain has stopped
short of the kind of affirmative action programmes that were developed in the United
States from the 1970s (see Skrentny 1996). While some positive action measures are
allowed in Britain, quota-based approaches or even accounting for racial background
in hiring practices is illegal. Thus British anti-racist policies recognize race, but they
refuse to use it as the basis for certain kinds of preferential treatment. This ambivalent
attitude is embedded in Britain’s race relations policy paradigm.
34.3 The Race Relations Paradigm
.............................................................................................................................................
The term ‘race relations’ was first used in Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s by
sociologists of the Edinburgh School in their pioneering work on colonial immigrants
(e.g. Little 1948; Banton 1955). It was soon adopted by political elites and enshrined in
early anti-discrimination legislation, where it has remained to this day.
2
Although it should be noted that race-conscious policies, especially affirmative action
programmes, are highly controversial. Moreover, the limits imposed on affirmative action measures by
the Supreme Court in Regents of University of California v Bakke (1978) and more recently Gratz v
Bollinger (2003) represent a weakening of race-based university admissions policies, if not an end to the
use of race per se (see King 2007).
race 633
As an approach to anti-racism, race relations can be usefully analysed as a policy
paradigm: ‘a framework of ideas and standards that specifies not only the goals of
policy and the kind of instruments that can be used to attain them, but also the very
nature of the problems they are meant to be addressing’ (Hall 1993: 279). Understood
in this way, the British race relations policy paradigm has several identifiable features.
First, as mentioned above, since the 1960s British politicians have largely accepted race
as a valid basis for social analysis and policy intervention; second, the form of racism
that has received most policy attention has been access racism; and third, racism has
been understood primarily in terms of colour discrimination (this characterization is
adapted from Bleich 2003: 170).
The very idea of race relations logically presupposes the validity of race as a
category since it postulates relations between racial groups. It therefore bestows
legitimacy on the idea of race. Its reference to relations between racial groups also
implies that this is something in need of regulation to prevent conflict or hostility
from arising. For these reasons, most academics are now uncomfortable with the
term, but it remains widespread in official discourse and popular understanding.
For example, all three major pieces of anti-discrimination legislation and subsequent
amendments have been named Race Relations Acts (see below). At the same time,
policy discourse today often avoids explicit talk of race or racial minorities and refers
more often to ethnic minorities. In recent years, the former Commission for Racial
Equality has been much more likely to talk about ethnic minorities in its publications
(e.g. CRE 2007).
A good example of the confusion surrounding the concept of race in Britain was
the ‘ethnic group’ question in the 2001 census. In its final version, the question
asked respondents to indicate their ‘cultural background’, before offering a range of
categories some of which were defined by skin colour (e.g. white, black), some with
reference to nationality (e.g. Chinese, Indian, Pakistani), and some by region (e.g.
African, Asian, Caribbean). This muddle of categories reveals just how confused the
concept of race has become in British politics. Nevertheless, the wider point is that
in its attempt to challenge racism the British state has had to get into the business of
defining racial groups. This marks Britain out from other European countries such
as France (Bleich 2003: 145) and Germany (Thränhardt 2000), where the term race is
either illegitimate or taboo.
The second distinguishing feature of the British race relations paradigm is its focus
on access racism. Bleich (2003: 9) defines access racism as discrimination in employ-
ment, housing, and the provision of goods. It can be distinguished from expressive
racism, which consists of verbal or written statements made against individuals or
groups, and physical racism, which involves attacks against persons or their property
motivated by racial hatred. At the core of the 1965, 1968, and 1976 Race Relations Acts
were provisions to tackle racist discrimination in hiring and provision of services,
with civil law penalties for discriminators. This is not to say that expressive and
physical racism have gone unlegislated: on the contrary, the 1965 Race Relations Act
included anti-incitement provisions, which were updated in the 1986 Public Order Act
and then most recently in the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act; while the 1998
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Crime and Disorder Act enables courts to treat racist motivation as an aggravating
factor and impose stiffer sentences and fines. Nevertheless, as Bleich points out,
compared to access racism, expressive and physical racism ‘have taken a consistently
low profile’ (Bleich 2003: 52).
Lastly, the race relations paradigm conceptualizes racism primarily in terms of
colour discrimination (Bleich 2003: 170; cf. Modood 1992). Discrimination on the basis
of skin colour has been a concern of anti-racists since the early days of post-war immi-
gration. In the 1950s and 1960s, colonial immigrants were often perceived in homo-
geneous terms as ‘coloured’, and later ‘black’, while racist discrimination and conflict
was understood in dichotomous terms: a ‘white’ indigenous population versus the
‘coloured’ immigrant minority. Although this obscured the existence of anti-Irish and
anti-Semitic attitudes, colour racism was arguably a more prevalent phenomenon
and it was certainly the primary concern of the progressives who drafted the early
race relations legislation. This is in stark contrast to France and Germany, where the
legacy of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust shaped an understanding of racism that is
as much about genealogy and ethnicity as skin colour.
The story behind the evolution of the race relations paradigm is complex and
told in some detail elsewhere (e.g. Bleich 2003: 35–113; Hampshire 2006; Layton-
Henry 1992: 44–70; Saggar 1992; Solomos 2003: 82–94), but two key factors warrant
discussion as they help to explain why the paradigm took the shape it did: first, the
intertwining of immigration and race relations legislation; and second, the strategic
calculations that shaped this legislation.
The politics of race and immigration in Britain are inextricably connected, most
obviously in the sense that post-war immigration transformed Britain into a mul-
tiracial society, but also in the sense that immigration and race relations legislation
were developed as part of an explicit policy package. It is often forgotten by British
commentators that this race–immigration nexus is not universal. On the one hand, it
marks out Britain from countries where anti-racism was not primarily determined by
immigration, for example France, where immigrant integration was a less important
influence on early anti-racism initiatives than memories of Vichy, or the United
States, where the legacy of slavery and racial segregation were foremost in policy-
makers’ minds. It also distinguishes Britain from the so-called ‘guestworker’ coun-
tries, such as Germany or Austria, where immigration was not initially framed in
terms of race, largely because early guestworkers were not perceived to be racially
different.
In Britain, ‘coloured’ immigrants were perceived as racially different and the race–
immigration linkage was extremely close. Indeed, the race relations paradigm was,
in its early years at least, Britain’s version of an immigrant integration policy (Favell
2001; Soysal 1995). As significant numbers of non-white immigrants settled in Britain
during the 1950s, a handful of progressives within the opposition Labour Party argued
that legislation was required to tackle racist discrimination, which was impeding the
newcomers’ ability to participate in British society (Bleich 2003: 54–7; Hampshire
2006: 318–19). Strongly influenced by the civil rights movement in the United States,
organizations such as the Society for Socialist Lawyers and the Campaign Against
race 635
Racial Discrimination (CARD) lobbied MPs to pass anti-discrimination legislation.
The claims of these progressives fell on largely deaf ears until the 1958 riots in Not-
ting Hill, London, in which mobs of white youths attacked Caribbean immigrants.
These events, which were widely reported in the press as ‘race riots’, persuaded the
Labour Party leadership that they should pass anti-discrimination legislation once in
government, and a commitment to this end was included in the party’s 1964 election
manifesto.
After winning that election, the Labour government passed the 1965 Race Relations
Act. It faced a bumpy ride through parliament, which partly explains why it was,
in hindsight at least, such an astonishingly weak piece of legislation. Whilst the Act
outlawed discrimination on the grounds of ‘colour, race, or ethnic or national origin’
(note the plurality of definitions) in specified public places, it excluded the crucial
areas of housing and employment; in addition, the Race Relations Board (RRB)
which was established to enforce the Act enjoyed only very limited powers. Despite
these major shortcomings, the Act created a legislative beachhead such that it was
inevitable that the anti-discrimination provisions would be extended to those spheres
where discrimination was most significant. Indeed, this is exactly what happened: in
1968 the Labour government passed a second Race Relations Act which extended the
anti-discrimination measures to employment and housing and increased the powers
of the RRB; then in 1976 a third Race Relations Act was passed by the Callaghan
government. This Act, which remains the foundation of race relations policy today,
outlawed indirect discrimination (i.e. treatment that is formally equal but which has
a discriminatory effect on a particular racial group), created some limited positive
action measures such as targeting of resources to disadvantaged racial groups, and
replaced the RRB with the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), which was given
extended powers of formal investigation.
Throughout this period race relations legislation was viewed as one side of a policy
package. As successive Labour governments enacted increasingly restrictive immigra-
tion legislation—driven by hostile public opinion (Hansen 2000: 14) as well as elite
fears about multiracialism (Hampshire 2005; Spencer 1997)—they sought to appease
internal and external critics by adopting a more progressive stance on race relations.
As Anthony Lester put it in a 1966 internal report on ‘Labour’s White Problem’: ‘a
restrictive immigration policy would take the issue out of politics and so enable the
Government to have a decent policy on race relations’ (cited in Hampshire 2006:
323). The package worked the other way round too: it was hoped that by taking a
progressive stand on race relations the bitter pill of racially discriminatory immigra-
tion legislation would be sugar-coated for the left of the party. Politically, this was
a success; but its implications for social relations were more ambiguous. Essentially
this is because the illiberal rhetoric and practice of ‘tough’ immigration policies sits
uneasily—and maybe even undermines—the progressive aim of promoting good race
relations.
This Janus-face is not so surprising given that the commitment to anti-racism
was not popular in the 1960s. Indeed, the race relations legislation was not, as is
sometimes supposed, the product of grass-roots mobilization. Rather, it was the
636 james hampshire
result of lobbying by an elite group of policy entrepreneurs who eventually gained
the support of the Labour Party leadership due partly to growing evidence of racism
and fear of social disorder but also, crucially, due to party political calculations. This is
not to deny the moral opposition to racism that motivated many in the party, nor can
it obfuscate the fact that every piece of race relations legislation has been passed by a
Labour government; but it is to recognize that the admirable cause of racial equality
was shaped by strategic considerations.
By the mid-1970s, the institutional architecture of the race relations policy was
in place: legislation outlawing direct and indirect discrimination, backed up with
civil law measures, and enforced by the CRE. Moreover, the framework of ideas
that defines the race relations paradigm was well established: legitimation of the
idea of race, a focus on access racism, and an emphasis on colour discrimination.
With only minor adjustments, this framework remained in place for the next three
decades.
34.4 Race Relations Under Strain
.............................................................................................................................................
While the policy paradigm hardly evolved from the 1970s to the late 1990s, British
society was changing apace. This put race relations under considerable strain and
its limitations became increasingly apparent through the 1980s and 1990s. Despite
considerable successes in reducing racist discrimination and embedding an anti-
racist norm in British political culture, race-based disadvantage persisted and in
some respects increased during this period. The shortcomings of the race relations
paradigm were especially apparent in terms of its failure to secure racial equality
and to challenge the deep-seated prejudices that existed in parts of British society.
These two shortcomings can be illustrated with reference to political representation
and policing, respectively. Firstly, the continued under-representation of black and
Asian persons in positions of power, especially among national governing elites, has
made it increasingly difficult to argue that anti-discrimination measures alone will
ensure equal representation of racial groups. Secondly, a perception of police racism
and brutality caused relations between the police and some minority communities to
deteriorate rapidly, culminating in riots and urban unrest in the 1980s. I shall discuss
each in turn.
The anti-discrimination legislation of the 1960s and 1970s helped secure the black
and Asian vote for the Labour Party (Saggar 1998; 2000). It did not, however, suc-
ceed in achieving equal representation of minority communities in national level
institutions. Indeed, until 1987, when three black and one Asian MP were elected to
parliament (Diane Abbott, Paul Boateng, Bernie Grant, and Keith Vaz, all Labour
MPs), there were no non-white politicians in the Commons or Lords. The situation
has improved only slightly since then: there are now fifteen black or Asian MPs
race 637
(thirteen Labour, two Conservative), but if minority community representation was
proportionate to population size there would be at least fifty-one. Interestingly,
the House of Lords, which is largely appointed, fares slightly better: twenty-eight
black or Asian Peers (out of a total of 738). Westminster is in no way anomalous.
Under-representation stretches well beyond parliament to include many other elite
institutions: for example, while ethnic minorities comprise 8 per cent of the British
population, in 2007 they accounted for less than 1 per cent of senior judges, 3 and only
2.4 per cent of directors of FTSE 100 companies (CRE 2007: 18)
These figures belie an implicit assumption of the race relations paradigm as it was
developed in the 1960s and 1970s, namely that simply by outlawing discrimination—
whether direct or indirect—racial equality could be achieved. This assumption,
though rarely spelled out, rested on the belief that intentional discrimination, often
at the point of hiring or service provision, was the chief obstacle to racial equality
in Britain. According to this logic, once legislation was in place to discourage and
penalize discrimination, race-based disadvantage would begin to ebb away. As white,
black, and Asian people competed on the proverbial level playing field, society would
move towards greater levels of equality. This was to ignore the persistence of racism
at a societal and institutional level.
What would later be described in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report (see below)
as ‘institutional racism’—that is, processes, attitudes, and behaviour that amount
to racial discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, and stereotyping—
was rife in British society during the 1980s and 1990s. Perhaps witting prejudice was
also widespread. Certainly, both were left largely unchallenged by the race relations
legislation. Though it is difficult to prove, it seems likely that many white Britons
were aware of the racist attitudes and prejudices that persisted below the radar of the
evolving anti-racist norm and discrimination legislation. For example, in the sphere
of party politics a belief that parts of the electorate would react negatively to the
selection of a black or Asian parliamentary candidate factored into the calculative
decisions of party elites during this period.
This was especially true of the Conservative Party, which didn’t select a non-white
parliamentary candidate until 1990. Indeed, when the Conservatives did finally try
to address this issue they faced a backlash that appeared to bear out their fears.
In 1990 John Taylor, a black barrister, was selected for the safe Conservative seat
of Cheltenham, apparently with some intervention by Conservative Party Central
Office. A number of local party activists revolted. One local member complained
about the ‘bloody nigger’ that ‘central office have foisted . . . upon us’. 4 Taylor was
eventually confirmed as the party’s candidate, but he went on to lose the seat in the
1992 election, with a massive swing to the Liberal Democrats. Whether Cheltenham’s
electorate were rebelling against Taylor or his local party’s treatment of him is hard
to say.
3
Judiciary of England and Wales, Statistics—Minority Ethnic Judges in Post, 1 Apr. 2007;
http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/keyfacts/statistics/ethnic.htm.
4
Sheila Rule, ‘Tories in Uproar over Black Candidate’, New York Times, 6 Dec. 1990. Accessed at
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C0CE0DC1538F935A35751C1A966958260.
638 james hampshire
The Taylor incident revealed an ugly seam of racism in the local Conservative Party
office of a predominantly white, middle-class constituency. But in some ways the
greater obstacle to equal representation was the failure of the Labour Party to make
more progress in increasing representation of minority groups. Until the late 1970s,
the Labour Party conspicuously failed to incorporate its black and Asian supporters
into its ranks (Solomos 2003: 207). While black and Asian voters solidly supported
Labour they were poorly represented within it. As the urban unrest of the early
1980s unfolded the party did begin to reflect upon its failings in this area. At the
local level, a number of Labour-controlled local authorities initiated race equality
policies and anti-racism initiatives. And within the national party a number of black
members called for the formation of ‘black sections’ to increase representation and
promote race issues (Shukra 1998: 70–80). This was debated at annual conferences
during the 1980s, but resisted by the party leadership who feared it would be divisive.
Advocates of black sections were not successful in achieving formal recognition, but
they did manage to put the issue of minority representation on the political agenda
and contributed towards the election of four non-white MPs in 1987, all of whom had
been involved in the black sections movement.
The issue of minority under-representation has not gone away and if anything it
has moved to a higher level of contention. From the late 1990s onwards, the possible
use of positive action measures, particularly minority shortlists for parliamentary
candidates, has been discussed by the Labour Party. Most recently, in February 2008,
a report by pressure group Operation Black Vote argued for the creation of minority
shortlists in up to eight parliamentary constituencies to ensure that more black and
Asian MPs are elected. The report was commissioned and received the endorsement
of Labour’s Deputy Leader, Harriet Harman, but it remains to be seen whether
the government will endorse the proposals (Hinsliff 2008). The central problem
is that minority shortlists would require a change in the law as the weak positive
action provisions allowed under the 1976 Race Relations Act do not permit such
measures. Indeed, quotas or other race-based preferential treatment are illegal under
the 1976 Act.
The controversy that would attend such a development was indicated in February
2008 when Keith Vaz MP introduced a 10 Minute Rule Bill to allow for minority
shortlists. The brief exchange neatly captured the dilemma of non-racialism versus
race consciousness. Presenting his bill, Vaz argued that positive action was necessary
to create ‘a Parliament that mirrors the society it represents’. Only such a race-
conscious measure could ensure that ‘the problems of imbalance in representation’
were addressed: ‘race can be used in a positive way to electrify the political process,’
he claimed. The Conservative MP and member of the Campaign Against Political
Correctness, Philip Davies, immediately shot back that this was ‘good, old-fashioned
positive discrimination . . . true equality should mean selecting people on merit irre-
spective of their racial background’. 5 The Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, has
indicated that he supports the proposal for minority shortlists, but the Conservatives,
5
Hansard, House of Commons, 6 Feb. 2008, cols. 973–7.
race 639
whose leader David Cameron has drawn up his own ‘A-List’ of parliamentary candi-
dates, nevertheless oppose it. At the time of writing it is unclear whether the proposal
will be included in the government’s promised equalities legislation.
A second problem left untouched by the race relations legislation of the 1960s
and 1970s was the issue of police–community relations. This is doubly important
both because it was (and remains) a pressing issue in the daily lives of minority
communities and because it has resulted in a major revision to the race relations
paradigm. Indeed, policing has become one of the most incendiary dimensions of
race politics in Britain.
From the early post-war years, black and to a lesser extent Asian immigrants, who
often had little choice but to settle in the most deprived areas of urban Britain,
were associated with criminality in police reports and media discourse. For exam-
ple, a Scotland Yard inquiry in the early 1950s into the ‘public morals’ of ‘coloured
Commonwealth immigrants’ made lurid allegations regarding their involvement in
vice and criminality (see Hampshire 2005: 127–32). Following the Notting Hill ‘race
riots’ in 1958, non-white immigration also became associated with social disorder
and violence, nowhere more virulently than in Enoch Powell’s notorious 1968 ‘Rivers
of Blood’ speech. Relations between the police and young Afro-Caribbean males
in particular deteriorated during the 1960s and 1970s. The police force persistently
denied it was a racist institution, but many young black men experienced harassment,
wrongful arrest, and even assault at the hands of the police. In some cities a climate
of distrust and hostility developed, and black criminality became a central trope in
media discourse (see Gilroy 1987; Hall et al. 1978).
In 1972, the Select Committee on Race Relations and Immigration published a
report on Police/Immigrant Relations which acknowledged the growing tensions, but
apportioned blame equally between police officers and young black men. It accepted
that young blacks did face discrimination but argued that it was impossible to ‘prove
or disprove’ claims of harassment or mistreatment (cited in Solomos 2003: 128–9).
In this context, it was not especially promising that public authorities, including the
police, were excluded from the provisions of the 1976 Race Relations Act.
In 1980–1, tensions between black residents and the police boiled over in a number
of British cities. Particularly violent confrontations occurred in the St Paul’s area of
Bristol, (April 1980), Brixton, London (April 1981), Handsworth, Birmingham (July
1981), and Toxteth, Liverpool (July 1981). As in 1958, these events were widely reported
in the mass media as ‘race riots’. The images of smouldering buildings, looting, and
bloodied policemen provided a major shock to the political system. In response to the
Brixton riots, the Conservative government, which had hitherto shown little interest
in racial politics or problems of urban alienation, appointed Lord Scarman to conduct
an investigation into what had happened and what should be done.
The Scarman Report concluded that the riots could only be understood ‘in the
context of complex political, social and economic factors which together create a
predisposition towards violent protest’ (Scarman 1981: para 8.7). Deprivation, unem-
ployment, alienation, and experiences of discrimination produced a combustible
atmosphere of resentment which was sparked by particular policing incidents. The
640 james hampshire
report’s assessment of the role of police racism was somewhat equivocal: it argued
that ‘racial discrimination’ was a factor behind the unrest, but it denied the existence
of ‘institutional racism’ in the police force.
Scarman’s recommendations fell into two groups: measures to improve policing
methods and restore black communities’ confidence in the police force, and measures
to address the ‘racial disadvantage’ that underpinned the violence. The government
accepted many of the former—for example, by introducing new safeguards on police
powers of stop and search in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984—but it
largely rejected the latter. In particular, Scarman’s suggestion that positive action
measures were urgently needed to tackle racial disadvantage was not implemented.
Given that successive Labour governments had not seen fit to enact substantive
positive action measures, it was highly unlikely that a Conservative government
committed to free market ideology would endorse such interventionist policies. In
any case, the post-Scarman reforms failed to repair police–community relations
(Benyon 1984) and violence erupted again in Brixton, Handsworth, and Tottenham
in 1985.
In 1999, the failure of race relations legislation and post-Scarman measures to
eliminate racism from the police force was starkly revealed by the Macpherson Report
into the Metropolitan police’s botched investigation of the racist murder of black
teenager Stephen Lawrence. Lawrence had been stabbed to death by a gang of white
youths whilst standing at a bus stop in Eltham, south London, in April 1993. Following
a prolonged campaign by his parents, the Labour government appointed an inquiry
into the police investigation under Sir William Macpherson. The Macpherson Report
described the investigation as ‘a sequence of disasters and disappointments’, but more
importantly it found there to be ‘institutional racism’ within the Metropolitan police
and indeed policing generally. Institutional racism was defined as:
the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional
service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or
detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through
unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvan-
tage minority ethnic people. (Macpherson 1999: para. 6.34)
Whereas Scarman had refused to accept the idea of institutional racism, Macpherson
claimed it was a feature not only of the police, but also ‘other agencies including
for example those dealing with housing and education’ (Macpherson 1999: para.
6.35).
It would be hard to overstate the impact of the Macpherson Report. The Labour
government responded immediately with the 2000 Race Relations (Amendment) Act,
which extends the 1976 legislation to all public bodies, including the police, and to all
private bodies exercising public functions. In addition, the 2000 Act creates a positive
duty on public authorities to eliminate unlawful discrimination, promote equality of
opportunity, and promote good relations between people of different racial groups.
As Hansen argues in this volume, this represents a significant shift from policies
focused on process to a concern with outcomes. The statutory duty means that it
race 641
is no longer sufficient for public authorities to avoid unlawful discrimination; they
must also demonstrate that they have in place policies and procedures that promote
good race relations.
The 2000 Act, as well as reforms to policing made in response to Macpherson,
have undoubtedly improved police–community relations. Nevertheless, some ten-
sions remain. For example, in February 2008, the Flanagan Report on policing rec-
ommended that the rules on ‘stop and account’ (when a person is stopped but not
searched) should be relaxed. The Home Secretary has accepted these recommen-
dations and also announced pilot schemes to give the police time-limited powers
to stop and search persons without giving a reason. These proposals met with a
sceptical response from members of the black community, some of whom believed
they marked a return to the hated ‘sus’ laws (under which a police officer could search
someone on suspicion alone) (e.g. Wheatle 2008).
The controversies surrounding political under-representation and police racism
serve to illustrate some of the limitations and tensions of the race relations paradigm
as it was developed from the 1960s and 1970s. Although it would be churlish to blame
the race relations paradigm for the failure to eradicate racism from all spheres of
British society, certain assumptions have had a limiting effect on the pursuit of racial
equality: the paradigm’s focus on access racism and the refusal of stronger positive
action measures were both important limitations, as was the decision to exclude
public authorities from the original legislation. Furthermore, the tension between
race consciousness and non-racialism that lies at the heart of the race relations
paradigm can be seen today in debates over positive action measures. Whether the
recent calls for minority shortlists are accepted remains to be seen. The outcome will
either nudge Britain’s anti-racism paradigm closer towards full race consciousness or
retain its uneasy balance between the legitimation and denial of race.
34.5 Whither Race Relations?
.............................................................................................................................................
This chapter began with the observation of a paradox. On the one hand, at no
previous point in British political history has anti-racism been more firmly embedded
in the legal and political culture than today; on the other, it is clear that racial
inequalities, discrimination, and disadvantage persist in British politics and society.
It should hopefully be clear by now that this paradox is not the result of hypocrisy
or the rank failure of anti-racist policies: the commitment to anti-racism is real and
there has been progress in shifting the moral climate. Rather, it is better understood
in terms of the inherent limitations of the state’s capacity to eradicate racism and the
specific limitations of the race relations paradigm. British policy-makers’ decision to
legitimate race in order to tackle racism, their definition of the problem in terms
of (implicitly) conflictual relations between racial groups, and their focus on access
642 james hampshire
racism and colour discrimination are all comprehensible in the British context. But
these core features have nevertheless delimited the anti-racist agenda, not always for
the good. In particular, the ambivalent stance on race-conscious policies—for exam-
ple in the ongoing debates over positive action measures—illustrates the difficulty of
simultaneously recognizing race as a grounds of disadvantage and refusing to use it
as the basis of means to rectify that disadvantage.
Whatever its strengths and weaknesses, the race relations paradigm remained
essentially intact at the turn of the twenty-first century. For although there have been
some important revisions, notably in the aftermath of the 1999 Macpherson Report,
there hasn’t been anything like a paradigm shift since the 1960s. Given the extent of
social change since that time, the longevity of this policy paradigm is nothing short
of remarkable; to draw an analogy, it is as if Keynesian demand management had
survived the economic changes of the last half-century.
This is not to say that the race relations policy paradigm is immutable. We have
already seen that major events have prompted policy change, and if proponents of
minority shortlists win the argument, then ‘harder’ positive action measures may yet
develop in Britain. Moreover, two recent developments, one institutional, the other
societal, suggest that the British state’s approach to anti-racism is currently undergo-
ing a period of re-evaluation which may yet lead to more fundamental changes to the
race relations paradigm.
Firstly, in 2007 a new Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) was
established to supersede the work of the three existing equality commissions, the CRE
as well as the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commis-
sion. The new body has taken over the work of these ‘legacy commissions’ as well as
incorporating other aspects of equality related to age, sexual orientation, and religious
belief. Although it is too early to tell what this means for race relations, it does suggest
that the government is moving away from a distinct approach to race issues, and
towards framing them within a wider context of equality and rights. This has caused
concern amongst some anti-racist campaigners who believe that racism could be
neglected; but for those who have long argued for a shift away from a language of race
relations to one of human rights (e.g. Banton 2002: 170 ff.) it may prove a positive step
towards a post-racial society. Whether this institutional reform will effect a profound
transformation in the state’s approach to anti-racism remains to be seen (the legal
basis for race relations has not been significantly amended, although the government
has promised a single Equality Bill).
The second, and arguably even more significant, shift relates to the changing nature
of prejudice and discrimination in British society. As we have seen, race relations were
originally conceived in dichotomous terms as relations between a ‘white’ indigenous
population and a homogeneous ‘coloured’ or ‘black’ immigrant population, the latter
including persons of Caribbean, south Asian, and African descent. While this made
sense in the early years of post-war immigration—in which different groups faced
similar problems of discrimination and exclusion—it became increasingly untenable
as the socio-economic position of immigrant groups was differentiated. Along with
events such as the 1989 Rushdie affair, which exposed ideological disagreements
race 643
between white, black, and Asian groups (themselves increasingly unwieldy cate-
gories), this led to a fragmentation of anti-racist coalitions and the decline of ‘political
blackness’ from the 1980s onwards (see Modood, this volume).
Today, this fragmentation is increasing as society becomes more diverse and racism
takes on new forms. In particular, the focus on colour discrimination looks increas-
ingly restrictive as anti-Muslim attitudes have developed into an important source of
prejudice. At first glance it might seem that anti-Muslim attitudes are distinct from
racist attitudes—Muslims are after all a religious group. But scholars such as Tariq
Modood (2005) argue that Muslims are an increasingly racialized religious group who
experience not ‘colour’ but ‘cultural racism’: ‘a certain culture is attributed to them, is
vilified, and is even the ground for discrimination’ (Modood 2005: 7). How this relates
to colour racism is a vexed issue (see e.g. Hall 2000); and whether labelling it racism
is analytically or normatively helpful is also debatable. What cannot be doubted is
that there has clearly been an inequality in the law on this question. For whereas
Jews and, since 1982, Sikhs are defined as ethnic groups and therefore protected under
race relations legislation, Muslims have not enjoyed these protections. As Modood
argues in this volume, a feeling of ‘grievance of exclusion from the existing equality
framework’ is a major factor behind the emergence and development of ethno-
religious claims.
The government has not responded by defining ‘Muslim’ as a racial or ethnic
group, but rather by extending religious discrimination laws. Religious discrimina-
tion in employment was outlawed in 2003, which was then extended to the provision
of goods and services in the 2006 Equality Act (which also established the EHRC).
There has also been legislation to outlaw religious hate speech. The complex issues
raised here go well beyond the scope of this chapter. But even this brief sketch provides
a further illustration of how the assumptions embedded in the race relations policy
paradigm—in this case colour racism—have struggled to keep pace with the evolving
politics of race in contemporary Britain.
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2007. ‘The American State and Social Engineering: Policy Instruments in Affirmative
Action’. Governance, 20/1: 109–26.
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Macpherson of Cluny. Cm. 4262–1. London: HMSO.
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Books.
2005. Multicultural Politics: Racism, Ethnicity and Muslims in Britain. Edinburgh:
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986–1003.
c h a p t e r 35
.................................................................................................................
GENDER
.................................................................................................................
fiona mackay
35.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
Gender equality (GE) provides a remarkable case of the institutionalization of new—
previously marginalized—claims, social values, and policy goals into British politics
and governance. Over the last thirty years, in common with most industrialized
democracies, GE has developed into a distinct area of public policy by means of the
introduction of ‘blueprint’ policies in the form of legal frameworks for equal treat-
ment, specialist women’s policy machinery within government, and, from the mid-
1990s onwards, the widespread international diffusion of the Gender Mainstreaming
(GM) policy approach. These, together with the gender quotas, provide striking
examples of international policy and norm diffusion. 1
My focus is the institutionalized politics of gender equality in Britain: the legal
and governmental architecture, political debates, state–society relations (particularly
the input of feminist gender equality advocates), and policy approaches that have
developed in order to address gender inequalities and to endorse gender equality as a
societal value and a political and public policy goal.
Patterns of inequality between women and men have changed dramatically in the
last thirty years. However, change has happened in complex and uneven ways with
highly differentiated outcomes resulting from the intersection of gender and other
social divisions such as ethnicity, class, disability, and generation. These changes
coexist with intractable and persistent patterns of material and cultural inequality
between men and women. 2 While it is far from settled as to the extent to which states
1
Mazur (2002); Squires (2007). For reasons of space, I leave gender quotas to one side. See
Lovenduski (2005); Krook and Squires (2006).
2
For current trends, see EOC (2006); Equalities Review (2007).
gender 647
and their legal and policy instruments are primary agents of social change, especially
in increasingly globalized contexts, nonetheless there is compelling evidence that
states and governments are implicated in the reproduction of gender inequalities and
are also players in any political project of reform (e.g. Sainsbury 1999; Walby 1997;
Mazur 2002; O’Connor, Orloff, and Shaver 1999).
The form, function, and goals of GE public policy and politics are contested, and
progress has been far from linear. Although always in danger of being bureaucratized
and professionalized, the GE ‘project’ is an ‘irredeemably political enterprise’ (Forbes
2002: 20), and its development is shaped by wider socio-economic and political
conditions and ideational contexts. This makes it a fascinating and distinctive area
of scholarly research, crossing the disciplinary boundaries between political studies,
social policy, sociology, law, and management (Newman 2002).
In this chapter, after reviewing the contested concepts of gender equality and
debates within feminist scholarship, I contrast these complex understandings with
the impoverished conceptions of gender and equality in public and political discourse
and argue there is a need for a common language of gender. I then draw upon a range
of British and comparative literature to survey and contextualize political and insti-
tutional developments over three decades. Researchers have raised questions about
the nature, extent, and significance of change: has GE gained a place at the heart of
government and the centre of the political agenda? Or is it an issue of symbolic rather
than substantive significance—still marginal and subordinate to other government
objectives? What has driven change and what are the underlying continuities? To what
extent do GE policy and processes address substantive issues of inequality? Do recent
developments add up to a ‘regendering’ of British politics?
35.2 What is Gender?
.............................................................................................................................................
Gender is a confusing and contested concept. In much public—and indeed some
academic—usage it is taken as a synonym for sex or women (Carver 1996). The
British sociologist Ann Oakley is credited with being among the first scholars to
introduce the sex/gender distinction, although others see its origins in Simone de
Beauvoir’s famous axiom, ‘One is not born, one becomes a woman’. Sex is taken to
refer to the biological, chromosomal, and reproductive differences between women
and men; in contrast, gender relates to the social meanings, roles, and expectations
attributed to those biological differences. In other words, sex refers to nature and
gender to culture. Gender is socially constructed and there is much evidence that the
specific meanings, roles, and ideologies surrounding what it means to be a woman or
a man vary across time and space (Oakley 1972; 2005). However, enduring patterns of
differentiation, dichotomy, and hierarchy can be mapped across cultures, where those
bodies, activities, roles, and attributes gendered as ‘masculine’ are deemed superior
to and more human than their ‘feminine’ counterparts.
648 fiona mackay
The sex/gender distinction was a simple but powerful insight, and has been a
key contribution to feminist analysis and to wider social science. Furthermore,
by distinguishing between the effects of biology and the effects of culture/society,
feminists challenged essentialist accounts that women were naturally and inevitably
subordinate to men and exposed the historic and socially constructed nature of
women’s oppression. This has under-girded a feminist political project of change;
if gender is socially constructed, it is amenable to reform or transformation. So,
for example, whilst it is a biological fact that (some) women give birth to chil-
dren, the meaning of motherhood is social constructed. The fact that mother-
hood means primary—sometimes exclusive—responsibility for domestic labour and
unpaid caring responsibilities in many societies results from gender—and its atten-
dant ideologies—not sex differences. Furthermore, the low status assigned to caring
work both paid and unpaid is not natural or inevitable, neither are the adverse social
and economic consequences of motherhood for many women. Instead, these are the
results of the institutionalization of gender inequality within social and economic
systems.
Most gender analysis and theory, generated by feminists over the last thirty years,
has come within a broadly social constructionist paradigm. 3 Concepts of gender have
developed over time from a narrow definition of the cultural constructions of mas-
culinity and femininity, to incorporate insights that gender is a dynamic process—
as well as a category—which operates at different levels with material, symbolic,
and cultural consequences. Early articulations of gender as rooted in a single social
structure and giving rise to two unified categories of ‘woman’ (and ‘man’) have
been complicated and enriched by pluralized accounts of gender: attentive to the
differentiated processes and institutions of patriarchy or gender regimes (Walby 1997;
Connell 2002); and alert to the multiple identities and experiences of different groups
of women as a result of the intersection of gender with structures such as race, class,
disability, sexual orientation, and nationality (Squires 1999). Furthermore, the sim-
ple sex/gender distinction has been undermined: by greater awareness of intersexed
bodies, which challenges the dimorphic model of biological sex and lends weight to
Butler’s assertion that discourses of gender construct sex as binary and fixed in order
to justify heterosexuality (Butler 1990); and by understandings of the ways in which
bodies are shaped by social processes and are simultaneously agents in those processes
(Connell 2002).
Gender theory has its roots in feminism and feminist scholars have been largely
concerned with women and their unequal status, female ontology, feminine identity,
and structures and mechanisms of gender inequality. However, men have come under
increasing scrutiny by feminist scholars and by researchers and theorists of masculin-
ities. According to scholars, there are multiple masculinities, which intersect with
other social divisions. However, distinction needs to be made between hegemonic
and subordinate masculinities: hegemonic masculinity is an ideologically legitimized
ideal—and pattern of practices—which requires all men to position themselves in
3
See discussion in Squires (1999: 54–79).
gender 649
relation to it. Whilst individuals and groups of men may be disadvantaged within the
social order, it is argued that men as a group benefit from the ‘patriarchal dividend’ of
economic, social, and cultural advantages that accrues from an unequal gender order
(Connell 1995; 2002).
A plethora of gender schemas exist but most accounts see gender operating on at
least three levels: subjective and/or interpersonal; institutional and/or social struc-
tural; and symbolic. There is also widespread agreement that gender works as a
primary way of signifying relationships of power, and as a category through which
humans organize their social activity and create and reinforce hierarchy (Harding
1986: 17–18).
Squires notes a difference between constructionist accounts that still retain a mate-
rial or social base—i.e. where there is a referent to ‘real women’ however differenti-
ated and culturally specified, and a causal connection between sex and gender—and
post-structural accounts which are discursive and loosen or lose altogether the link
between sexed bodies and gender. Here the emphasis is on femininity as a linguistic
construct, generated discursively and in relation to masculinity (Squires 1999: 59–61).
This discursive shift in gender theory is part of a wider challenge to the utility of
‘fixed’ categories within social science.
35.3 Gender and Public Discourse: Men
are from Mars and Women are from
Venus
.............................................................................................................................................
The sex/gender distinction and social constructionist explanations of the causes and
consequences of women’s inequality have had some purchase in wider public dis-
course. However, these have always coexisted with essentialist accounts and powerful
popular discourses, often reinforced by dubious populist science and pop psychology,
which renaturalize gender as sex differences hardwired into the genes or ordained by
the planets: that, in the words of the best-selling title on personal relationships, ‘Men
are from Mars and Women are from Venus’. As Oakley has remarked, there is scarcely
a week goes by without some new ‘discovery’ of sex differences reported in the media,
often using studies of animal and insect behaviour to infer innate and immutable
differences between women and men. Oakley sees this as part of an ongoing backlash
against feminism and women in British culture (Oakley 2005: 44).
There are paradoxes: on the one hand, gender is routinely used as a synonym
for women and the gender of men is seldom articulated in political discourse. On
the other, the move from talking about ‘women’s rights’ and ‘women’s equality’ or
‘women’s liberation’ to ‘gender’ and ‘gender equality’ is underpinned by an apparent
symmetry—where women and men are seen as potentially equally vulnerable to
650 fiona mackay
difference as disadvantage. For example the low numbers of men working in day care
is seen as an equivalent gender inequality to the low numbers of women working in
engineering, without attention being given to the different meanings and status of
the gender gaps in wider context. In other words, gender is used without attention
to the underlying structures of asymmetric power relations that are central to the
concept.
Leaving aside the question of whether or not there is a backlash, there are impov-
erished understandings of gender in public discourse; political elites and public alike
have difficulties in addressing gender, especially when compared with race, and are
prone to misunderstandings and simplistic assumptions. Gender is both open and
invisible (as compared with race). Open in the sense that people are comfortable
accounting for distinctions as fixed and natural; less visible in the sense that it can
be difficult to ‘find’ gender inequalities on a day-to-day level because ‘its hierarchy
is made through the often-subtle accumulation of often-small advantages across a
host of different institutional spaces—at work, in the family, in school, in religious
institutions’ (Burns 2005: 138). That ‘private ills’ may be rooted in patterns of gen-
dered hierarchy and structural differentiation and disadvantage can often only be
illuminated by looking at aggregate trends over time and space or by making links
between different institutional effects within an overall context. 4
The gulf between popular and academic understandings and discussions of gender
and gender equality has been noted in British, European, and North American con-
texts; and scholars argue that there is a pressing need to find ways in which complex
ideas can be successfully integrated into political discourse, ‘common sense’, and pub-
lic policy. This suggests there is a need for ‘a common language of gender’ (Beckwith
2005). Arguably, despite the theoretical difficulties, the sex/gender distinction remains
useful as a holding concept—‘as if ’ it were the case—as it is this explanation of gender
which is most readily translatable into political and policy discourses and debates
(Oakley 2005: 50). However, at the same time, articulations need to be carefully
contextualized as part of a more complex understanding of: how gender is produced
and reproduced at interpersonal, institutional, and symbolic levels; how systems of
gender intersect with other social structures such as ‘race’/ethnicity and class; and
how gender provides a lens for analysing power hierarchies in institutions.
35.4 Equality Frames and Policy
Directions
.............................................................................................................................................
Dominant frames and norms with respect to meanings of equality shape and con-
strain the approaches and strategies that are developed and adopted by govern-
ments, employers, and the GE lobby. Much of the work around gender inequality is
4
Burns (2005). Her study addresses the US context, but resonates with public discourses in the UK.
gender 651
positioned within the overlapping frame of equal opportunities (EO) with concerns
and dilemmas about the contested meanings of equality as a value and goal and
strategies for change shared with theorists, researchers, and practitioners from other
fields of equality, such as race, class, and disability.
Formal, liberal conceptions of equality centre upon the rights of all individuals to
equal treatment and rights. The translation into EO policy results in a procedural
model, which focuses upon equal opportunities for individuals to compete for scarce
resources (jobs, wealth, power, authority). Unequal distributions in outcomes result
from merit, rather than prejudice. Radical conceptions of equality are concerned
with equality of outcomes amongst social groups, and with the adoption of measures
to redress historic and ongoing disadvantage, such as employment and education
quotas and other forms of redistribution. Although the term ‘equal opportunities’
would appear to be most closely tied to liberal minimalist approaches, in practice it is
an umbrella term under which liberal and radical aspirations and understandings
coexist in tension. It also encompasses more complex conceptions of substantive
equality, which seek to challenge underlying norms upon which merit, fairness, and
competition are based (Webb 1997: 160).
Moreover the relative strengths and weaknesses of universal and particularist mod-
els of equality and citizenship play out in a fundamental debate within feminism
about whether women should seek to be treated like men or differently. In other
words, GE—if understood as formal equality—may not be the same as the libera-
tion of women, which may require different treatment to meet their specific needs.
However both visions underpinning the equality–difference question can be and have
been used to subordinate and disadvantage women.
Critics of equality—or ‘integrationist’ 5 —approaches argue that all too often equal-
ity means that masculine-defined values and male-constructed institutions are pre-
sented as universally valid models (of knowledge, citizenship, politics, humanity). In
other words, that the gender neutral individual is in reality gendered as masculine
and therefore those that are not male are disadvantaged from the outset. Difference
feminists have thus sought to assert the value of alternative cultural norms and
activities, those associated with women, particularly the norm and social practice of
care. However such strategies of ‘reversal’ carry with them the danger of essentializing
and reifying gender difference, and ignoring differences amongst women. Claims of
feminine virtues can also be used by conservative forces to justify the exclusion of
women from the public sphere.
Something of a consensus has emerged in recent years about the need for more
complex and contextualized interpretations of equality: an equality that ‘requires the
recognition and inclusion of difference’ (Scott 1998: 48). These ideas move beyond the
equality/sameness–difference dilemma in order to challenge the gender neutrality of
the standard model and ‘displace’ the dichotomy by, for example, refusing to frame
issues in those terms. As Bacchi notes, ‘By posing some new questions about how
we think and organise as a society, we open up the possibility of a new and better
5
Squires’s typology. See Squires (1999).
652 fiona mackay
vision. The questions we must ask are: why should it matter if women are the same as
or different from men? Why is pregnancy constituted a disadvantage in our society?
Why does the economic system reward competition and penalise caring?’ (Bacchi
1990: p. xvi).
35.5 The Policy Approaches
and Institutional Politics of
Gender Equality
.............................................................................................................................................
It is useful to consider the broad trajectories of GE policy approaches within the wider
European context. Equalities concepts and strategies—in Britain as elsewhere—are
contested, shaped, and promoted through different frames in the context of different
political sites and shifting political conditions. Whilst some comparative welfare state
scholars are sceptical that the European Union has had a discernible impact on gender
equity outcomes (e.g. Ostner and Lewis 1995), nonetheless the European arena is an
important site for the development of approaches to GE. Rees has characterized the
changing approaches of the EU in the past three decades as ‘Tinkering’ (1970s), ‘Tai-
loring’ (1980s), and ‘Transforming’ (1990s), with the dominant focus for each decade
being respectively, Equal Treatment, Positive Action, and Mainstreaming (Rees 1998).
These three approaches are also found in the UK. However, both in the UK and in
Europe more generally, there has not been a neat chronological evolution. Earlier
approaches have not been discarded—nor have they remained static—but rather they
have developed and coexisted and not necessarily in a coherent manner (Breitenbach
et al. 2002; Daly 2005).
Equal treatment perspectives are underpinned by ideas of liberal formal equal-
ity and are oriented towards non-discrimination legislation. Squires equates this
approach with the feminist strategy of integration (Squires 1999). As noted earlier,
this characterizes the dominant approach to EO (including GE) in British politics to
date. However the principles of equal treatment do not produce equal outcomes. For
example, equal treatment legislation had a negligible impact on gender inequalities
in pay in the UK and elsewhere (Browne 2007).
Criticisms of the limitations of this approach led to positive action measures by
the EU and domestic states. Such initiatives were designed to ameliorate disadvantage
from ‘deficits’ from the norm and create an equal playing field through the provision
of, for example, women-only training initiatives. However, positive action approaches
can stigmatize and fail to challenge the underlying norms or the standard from
which ‘women’ deviate. Squires equates the positive action approach with the fem-
inist strategy of ‘reversal’, noting the shared emphasis on women as a group and on
gender difference. According to critics, neither Equal Treatment nor Positive Action
is sufficient to tackle institutionalized discrimination (Rees 1998).
gender 653
The gender mainstreaming (GM) approach, which seeks to integrate considera-
tions of gender equality into the process and practice of policy-making and delivery,
comprises a remarkable case of global policy diffusion (True and Mintrom 2001).
Powerful champions include the EU, who adopted GM in the mid-1990s, and the
UN, through its post-Beijing Platform for Action. GM is viewed by supporters as a
potentially transformative approach, because of its capacity to ‘expose’ the hidden
differential effects of policies on women and men, and different social groups, and
to challenge institutional discrimination. Institutional or structural discrimination
occurs when various aspects of work policies, practices, norms, and values and
wider social systems combine to disadvantage specific groups. These may be directly
discriminatory, for example through workplace cultures that stereotype, devalue,
and denigrate women, ethnic minority groups, and the like. However it is more
likely to be ‘unconscious’ and ‘unwitting’ through uncritical and taken-for-granted
ways of thinking and ‘doing things round here’, and through the collective failure
of institutions to recognize and tackle indirect discrimination. Squires views GM as
related to the feminist strategy of displacement (in other words the deconstruction of
norms and gender dichotomies), but not wholly congruent with it because it does not
go far enough. She argues that it does not make sense—in the context of theorizing
about intersectionality and diversity—to look at gender in isolation from other forms
of equality (Squires 2005).
35.6 Gender Equality: The Institutional
Terrain 1970s–90s
.............................................................................................................................................
The 1970s saw a raft of anti-discrimination legislation enacted, following on from
the path-breaking Race Relations Acts of the 1960s. Landmarks included equal pay
and sex discrimination legislation, the strengthening of race relations law, and legis-
lation for Northern Ireland that outlawed religious discrimination in employment.
Enforcement machinery was also established, with the Equal Opportunities Com-
mission (EOC) set up as a non-departmental public body—an agency at arm’s length
from government—to monitor and enforce gender equality legislation in Britain. In
addition, Article 119 of the Treaty of Rome (signed by the UK government in 1973),
and subsequent equality directives between 1975 and 1978, provided legal foundations
for the principle of equal pay for equal work.
The 1970s anti-discrimination legislation in Britain was distinctive in that it was
potentially more sophisticated and more wide ranging than its European counter-
parts, In part, this can be explained by Britain’s characteristic position ‘between
Europe and America’ and, consequently, the impact of legacies and influences of dif-
ferent legal and political traditions (Gamble 2005). One example is the Sex Discrim-
ination Act 1975. Influenced by the US experience in race relations, it incorporated
654 fiona mackay
the notion of indirect discrimination, which ‘at least in principle recognizes that
social category membership may be a source of disadvantage or exclusion’ (Webb
1997: 162). It also gave extensive enforcement and investigative powers to the EOC.
However, the Act eschewed US-style provisions for ‘strong’ affirmative action in
terms of employment or educational quotas in favour of weaker ‘positive action’. In
addition, there were significant exemptions, especially where compliance with the
provisions might have implications for government expenditure (Gregory 1999).
Scholars have pointed to a number of factors to explain why successive Labour
governments in the 1970s acted to promote gender equality. These include pres-
sures and demands from organized women’s movement groups for equal citizenship,
within the context of wider civil rights movements and a political environment of
reform and social progressiveness, as well as global and regional pressures by bodies
such as the United Nations, who promoted women’s rights and their institutional-
ization through initiatives such as government women’s policy machinery from the
mid-1970s onwards. Anticipation and subsequent membership of the EEC provided
another impetus for change. In other words, developments relate to a range of
endogenous and exogenous factors including internationalization, regionalization (in
the form of Europeanization), and new social forces (women’s movements), within
the context of wider social and economic trends.
35.7 1980s and 1990s: Gender Equality
Policy in a Cold Climate
.............................................................................................................................................
UK equality legislation has been characterized as piecemeal and confusing, reflecting
a minimalist, individualistic, and reactive approach. Implementation has been, for
the most part, voluntaristic with the onus placed upon aggrieved individuals to take
a case through a long and complex process. Critics argue that the limited scope of the
legislation explains in part the limited impact it has had on the gendered patterns of
employment and issues of pay, occupational segregation, and so on. There are also
significant issues with relation to the operation and interpretation of the legislation
(Browne 2007).
However, it may also be the case that the full potential of equality legislation was
never realized in the unpromising post-1979 political climate.
Almost as soon as gender equality legislation and policy machinery were put in
place in Britain, and just as equal opportunities policies and procedures started to
be developed and implemented, the economic, political, and institutional terrain
underwent a sea-change with the incoming Conservative government of 1979. In
general, parties of the right are less amenable to social justice claims, including gender
equality, than their left counterparts. In addition, social democratic welfare arrange-
ments are viewed as more conducive to the pursuit of gender equality than are liberal
gender 655
welfare states. Over this period, fundamental shifts occurred in political discourses
about welfare, citizenship, and the respective roles of the state and the market, and in
thinking about the scope and function of state bureaucracies towards a neoliberal and
minimalist model. These trends had important consequences for gender relations and
for the development of equalities work, not least the marginalization of such concerns
from the mainstream political agenda, and the exacerbation of gender inequalities
generated by marketization, deregulation, and other employment policies, welfare
state retrenchment, and public spending cuts.
EO and GE initiatives tend to be ‘carried’ in the sense of the need to coincide or be
congruent with other public policy or political objectives. Crudely speaking, claims—
or rationales for action—are framed around citizenship and social justice, and the
need for a state to retain or regain legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens and external
actors, on the one hand; and, on the other, driven by a human capital or ‘business’
case agenda, concerned with the role of women in economic growth, efficiency, and
development. In the cold climate for equalities during the Conservative years, Webb
notes the marked shift in the rhetoric of public agencies such as the EOC towards
the business case for equalities, ‘restricting its agenda much more to employment
issues and the use of women as a resource to meet government [employment and
efficiency] priorities’ (Webb 1997: 162), and eschewing the language of equal rights or
gender justice.
Nonetheless, despite the inhospitable neoliberal context and successive central
Conservative governments’ indifference if not hostility to gender equality claims,
some advances were made over this period. A number of commentators account for
this modest progress by pointing to the central importance of European institutions
in the 1980s and 1990s in promoting and strengthening gender equalities provisions in
the UK: a case of ‘European law to the rescue’ (Gregory 1999: 98–9). In response to the
reconfiguration of the British state and the ‘uploading’ of power and competences to
the European level, domestic equality campaigners and feminist activists reoriented
to engage at the supra-state level. One form this activism took was of feminists strate-
gically mobilizing through a re-energized EOC to seek redress for gender grievances
through European institutions (Lovenduski 1995). The European Commission and
the European Court of Justice provided crucial alternative avenues to bring cases
to challenge ‘the shortcomings of domestic law and to limit the damage caused by
neo-liberal economic policies’ (Gregory 1999: 98–9). During the Thatcher and Major
governments, the impetus for more than 40 per cent of the decisions that promoted
gender equality in the areas of women’s rights and equal opportunities and pay in
employment came from either the European Commission or the European Court of
Justice (Bashevkin 1998).
Mobilizing opportunities were also provided by UN initiatives such as CEDAW and
the global women’s conferences, in the context of the trend towards an internation-
alization of gender equality policy in the 1990s and beyond. The run-up to the 1995
Beijing Conference and subsequent Platform for Action which governments endorsed
provided leverage for women’s groups in the UK to press claims on the Conservative
government of the day. These provide examples of a ‘boomerang’ strategy in terms
656 fiona mackay
of attempts to influence the supranational level in order to bring pressure to bear on
national government. 6
The British case is distinctive within Europe in that, while the 1980s and 1990s were
periods of central national government activity in many countries, demonstrating the
state’s capacity to institutionalize new demands for equality, in the UK developments
were forced upon a reluctant centre by Europe or took place ‘under the radar’ through
local government women’s, equal opportunities, and race equality committees and
their accompanying specialist units and officers, and similar developments in trade
unions—as part of the general oppositional political environment. There has been
surprisingly little analysis of the ‘local’ politics of gender equality over this period
and its legacies. 7 These developments have also fallen ‘under the radar’ of feminist
comparative scholarship, which has tended to (over-)emphasize the level of the nation
state and the machinery of central government. 8 However the lacunae can also be
seen as part of the central state-centric tendencies of British politics scholarship more
generally (Kerr and Kettle 2006).
Nonetheless, we must be careful not to over-state the impact of feminist GE
advocates or international and sub-state organizations. Governments over this period
made only grudging concessions and minimal adjustments after judgments from the
European Court of Justice on issues such as equal value, unequal retirement ages,
and pregnancy dismissals and rights for part-time workers (Gregory 1999: 98–9).
The Conservative government’s response to the post-Beijing Platform for action also
was minimal: mostly—although not entirely—rhetorical. At local level, municipal
women’s committees were relatively short lived; most of these initiatives had been
abolished or neutralized by the early 1990s, apart from some exceptions, mostly in
Scotland.
35.8 Gender Equality Politics in
Post-1997 Britain
.............................................................................................................................................
The post-1997 period saw an apparent reprioritization of equalities—including gen-
der equality, illustrated by the New Labour government’s espoused commitment to
gender mainstreaming, the creation of new policy machinery in central and devolved
governments, the implementation of new legal duties on public bodies, and an
ongoing review of equality legislation. In contrast to the grudging and minimal-
ist approach of the Conservatives, New Labour brought a different approach to
Europe in its commitment to sign the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty and
to (re-)introduce minimum wage protection, in line with other member states. In
addition, there have been some policy gains for women, or groups of women. Taken
6
See Keck and Sikkink (1998).
7
Though see Breitenbach et al. (2002); Lovenduski and Randall (1993); Edwards (1995).
8
See e.g. the influential RNGS framework at http://libarts.wsu.edu/polisci/rngs.
gender 657
together, these developments have provoked the question as to whether or not these
developments add up to a substantive change: to what degree has GE become institu-
tionalized and embedded within British politics as a value and policy goal?
Labour fulfilled its commitment to appoint a Minister for Women with Cabinet
status. In addition, specialist women’s policy machinery was set up inside govern-
ment for the first time in the form of a Women’s Unit (later renamed the Women
and Equality Unit). Established in June 1997, the unit was charged with scrutinizing
legislation to promote gender equality and the promotion of women friendly policies.
Labour also set up a cross-departmental Cabinet subcommittee with the intention of
coordinating gender equality work across government. The government’s commit-
ment to gender mainstreaming was formalized with the publication of revised Policy
Appraisal for Equal Treatment (PAET) guidelines in 1998 (Gregory 1999; Squire and
Wickham-Jones 2004). In addition to institutional machinery, policy initiatives with
direct or indirect relevance to GE include the introduction of the National Minimum
Wage (NMW), the enhancement of the rights and protections of part-time workers,
extended maternity leave provision and the introduction of parental leave, expansion
of childcare places, Working Tax Credits, pension reform, gender pay reviews in
public and private sectors, and new pay scales in the public sector.
However, early assessments of New Labour and its impact on women or on gender
equality were typically cautious and sceptical about the extent to which the Labour
modernization project offered substantive support for equalities, including GE. The
predominant view was that, while New Labour represented a change in terms of its
explicit commitment to social justice and democratic renewal, it represented conti-
nuity in respect of economic policy, limited public spending, and an attachment to
market mechanisms. 9 For commentators such as Coote, gender equality is not a part
of New Labour but rather was smuggled in by party feminists and their allies, drawing
upon older strands of egalitarianism in the party (Coote 2000).
A recent wide-ranging edited collection evaluates the impact of New Labour on
women and on GE. The central contention of the authors—which finds resonance in
the wider literature—is that the gender equality agenda remains subordinate to other,
sometimes congruent, oft-times contradictory, policy objectives. Whilst Labour has
addressed some issues typically described as ‘women’s concerns’, its achievements may
be as much ‘the unintended consequences of other policy initiatives’ than ‘the result
of purposive strategy’ (Annesley, Gains, and Rummery 2007: 3). In part, this relates
to a lack of political commitment to—or understanding of—gender equality; and in
part, it results from the considerable constraints upon making change happen, rang-
ing from patriarchal ideology to the power dependency and coordination problems
inherent in the institutions of policy-making in the UK system.
Turning first to employment-related family policy, New Labour has been more
proactive and cross-cutting in its approach than its Conservative predecessors. Under
the influence of the Treasury it has directed it ‘firmly towards the “adult worker”
model and to promote a social investment conceptualisation of childcare services
9
See e.g. Bashevkin (2000); Rake (2001).
658 fiona mackay
and education’ (Clarke 2007). According to this analysis, gender inequality has been
secondary to other policy drivers such as addressing child poverty through increased
parental employment, particularly in the case of lone parents. These efforts have been
accompanied by certain measures to rebalance parenting models and encourage men
to play a more active role in caring, some prompted by the European Directives on
Working Time and Part Time Work. For example, parents of children under the age of
six (fathers and mothers) can request a reduction in their working hours (although
there is no obligation upon the employer to grant this). Of note also are: the 2002
Employment Act, which introduced a statutory right to two weeks’ paternity leave;
and since 1999, there have been new limited entitlements to unpaid parental leave and
emergency leave by either parent (Clarke 2007: 160, 195). According to Clarke, these
developments amount to a ‘substantial raft of measures to promote maternal employ-
ment, particularly among poor families where lone mothers are concentrated, and, to
a lesser extent, to encourage and support greater involvement by fathers in caring for
children’ (Clarke 2007: 161). However, in practice, the results have been mixed. Despite
changes to maternity rights and an unprecedented expansion of childcare provision
and support, mothers of pre-school children are still less likely to be in employment
than counterparts with children of school age. Overall, although there is recognition
in policy documents of the desirability for greater paternal involvement in families,
policies to date have predominantly focused upon getting women to conform to the
Adult Worker model whilst simultaneously reinforcing their primary care role. There
have been substantial increases in the employment of lone mothers, although some
argue that, in many cases, paid work does not necessarily lift them out of poverty. It
is also the case that childcare provision and maternity and parental leave and benefits
remain among the poorest in Europe (Browne 2007: 265).
In terms of equal pay, policy interventions have been characterized as minimal and
timid. Policy action to reduce the gender pay gap and improve women’s job secu-
rity conflict with—and are frequently trumped by—other key government policies.
Labour governments have refused to acknowledge that their economic, public-sector
marketization, and welfare reform policies are each implicated in the gender pay
gap, whilst its NMW initiative is situated in the wider context of an unwillingness to
address wage inequalities more generally, and has resulted in only minimal improve-
ments to the relative position of low-paid women workers. In 2005, more than half
of all female part-time workers were classified as low paid as were a quarter of full-
timers (compared with one in seven male full-time workers). As evidence of New
Labour’s lack of sustained commitment, critics point to the refusal of government
to allow the level of the minimum wage to be set by the Low Pay Commission, in
a manner similar to the setting of interest rates, and to the government’s consistent
rejection of mandatory pay audits for private sector employers. By contrast, there has
been stronger performance in addressing gender pay inequalities in the public sector,
and the newly instituted positive gender duty requires public-sector organizations
to prepare action plans. However, these effects are diluted and frustrated by the
persistence of outsourcing public services and jobs to the private sector (Grimshaw
2007).
gender 659
Turning to GM as the approach endorsed by central government for institution-
alizing and delivering GE: how has it fared? Scepticism prevails about its impact or
efficacy with little evidence to suggest it has achieved its transformatory potential—
or even had a substantive effect upon key GE issues. Reporting on an eight-country
study, Daly adjudges GM in Britain as ‘a highly fragmented endeavour, confined
either to a small number of policy domains or to a specific program with a domain
and disconnected from general government policy on gender’ (Daly 2005: 439). As
a largely bureaucratic-technocratic enterprise, it also has had little success to date
in democratizing the policy process—in other words, giving voice to grass-roots
women’s organizations and women and citizens (Squires 2005; 2007)—although the
devolved territories have made more progress in this respect (McLaughlin 2007).
Furthermore, the Women’s Unit—later Women and Equality Unit—responsible for
driving mainstreaming initiatives at UK level is adjudged to have been weak, hobbled
by confusion over remit, lack of credibility and authority within civil service hierar-
chies, and ambivalent support from senior politicians, all adding up to a lack of insti-
tutional capacity to act (Durose and Gains 2007; Squires and Wickham-Jones 2004).
Space precludes a detailed discussion of devolution effects on GE and equalities
policy. Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales have each pursued a generic or
multi-strand mainstreaming approach, and promoted positive equality duties and
citizen participation—precursors of the emerging UK approach (McLaughlin 2007).
Equalities policy has been regarded as having a higher priority in the devolved
jurisdictions than at the centre, although no systematic comparative research has yet
been undertaken.
35.9 Conclusions and New Directions
.............................................................................................................................................
There have been fundamental changes to gender relations in Britain since the 1970s,
as evidenced by the transformation in the status and roles of women. However, these
changes are complex and highly differentiated according to the intersection between
gender and ethnicity, class, disability, and generation. The British state has played a
role both in reinforcing and reshaping these patterns and distributional imbalances.
There has been significant institutionalization of GE through legislative frame-
works, policy machinery, and policy approaches over the last thirty years; a trend that
has accelerated in the post-1997 period under successive Labour governments. We
can discern processes of internationalization and Europeanization over this period
including the ‘boomerang’ strategies of feminist GE activists; using different levels
and sites in order to apply leverage to—or bypass—a recalcitrant central state. Do
these changes add up to a fundamental ‘regendering’ of politics?
Whilst some argue GE has acquired a new centrality to the political agenda, the
weight of empirical evidence suggests that GE remains relatively marginal and subor-
dinate to other political and objectives. Furthermore, contradictory policy goals and
competing understandings of GE serve to dilute or distort the effects of initiatives
660 fiona mackay
to reduce inequalities. It is important to note that, in the context of significant con-
straints, continuities, and competing priorities, New Labour has undertaken a range
of measures that has resulted in both modest concrete policy gains and symbolic
outcomes. However, there has been little evidence of a politics that ‘negotiates the
complexities of gender’ (Annesley, Gains, and Rummery 2007: 3).
Progress has been uneven and the field is characterized by a series of discon-
nections: the gap between understandings of gender and equality in theory and
in practice; the disconnection between GE values, needs, and goals and the dom-
inant neoliberal political and economic orthodoxy; and, perhaps surprisingly, the
disconnection between GE machinery and approaches, such as mainstreaming, and
gender equality objectives. These each provide future research directions, as will the
theoretical and policy challenges posed by the implementation of new multi-strand or
intersectional approaches to equality, and the impact of emerging territorial dynamics
of devolution.
The current trajectory in the UK is one of an evolution from gender mainstreaming
to equality and diversity mainstreaming as the predominant approach to the man-
agement of equalities issues. This follows the logic of the Amsterdam Treaty and
subsequent equality directives that recognize and require the management of new
strands of inequality. The 2006 Equality Act created a new combined Equality and
Human Rights Commission, and positive duties on public bodies to promote Gender
Equality and Disability Equality are currently being implemented, together with a
strengthened race equality duty. In order to simplify and modernize discrimination
law, the government introduced a Single Equality Bill in 2008. The Bill is informed
by the findings of the Discrimination Law Review, which recently undertook a fun-
damental review of the patchwork of discrimination and legislation.
On the one hand, new institutional, legal, and policy developments promise an
opportunity for a more coherent legislative approach with similar levels of protec-
tion for groups deemed marginalized. A diversity framework and single equality
and human rights body makes sense in terms of the recognition of multiple and
intersecting dimensions of discrimination; that racism and sexism are intertwined
and cannot be understood or remedied separately. These developments are congru-
ent with theoretical efforts to address intersectionality and move beyond category
politics. They resonate with models that understand identities articulated through
gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability as fluid and interrelated, rather than fixed
or essential, and that require new forms of deliberative equality practice (Williams
1992). Squires argues that diversity and equality models of mainstreaming have the
potential to provide these sorts of deliberative opportunities and connect them to the
policy process (Squires 2005).
On the other hand, the practical obstacles to the implementation of an effec-
tive brand of equality and diversity mainstreaming are considerable. To date the
record on gender mainstreaming has been far from impressive, with significant gaps
between theory and practice; not least because of minimalist understandings of
gender by policy-makers in their implementation of gender mainstreaming, and in
wider gender equality policy initiatives. Furthermore, the outcomes of the operation
of early forms of equality mainstreaming in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland
gender 661
are inconclusive (McLaughlin 2007). In addition, sceptics see the diversity frame as
managerial and minimal, masking rather than exposing asymmetries of power, and
undermining the solidarities of group politics (Connell 2002: 134).
The Equalities Review, set up to inform a period of intensive institutional change
with respect to equalities, has argued that new, more relevant definitions of equality
are required, and a political and public consensus on equality. In Fairness and Free-
dom, it sets out a new approach, which draws upon concepts of human rights and
human capabilities as a potential way forward. 10 However the signs are that under-
standings of equality, and resultant policy initiatives, will remain tightly constrained
by the still-dominant neoliberal and market logics.
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Section Twelve:
Management
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 36
.................................................................................................................
AG E I N G A N D
GENERATIONAL
POLITICS
.................................................................................................................
alan walker
This chapter examines the relationship between ageing and politics, a long neglected
topic in political science, and emphasizes its dynamic nature. At the macro-level of
politics the liberal portrayal of older people as a deserving group, on which like all
Western ones the British welfare state was based, is being challenged. At the meso-
and micro-levels of politics, the last decade of the twentieth century saw the growth
of grass-roots activity and new structures of local participation. While this account
focuses on Britain similar trends may be observed in other European countries
(Walker and Naegele 1999). The chapter comprises three sections: a summary of
the new politics of ageing with reference to the macro- and meso/micro-levels; a
discussion of the limitations of the political influence and potential influence of older
people which casts doubt on the popular notion of grey power; and, finally, some
reflections on the prospects for generational relations in Britain.
36.1 The New Politics of Ageing
.............................................................................................................................................
Recent developments in the relationship between ageing and politics have been char-
acterized as the emergence of a new politics of old age (Walker 1998; 1999). In the
I am grateful to Paul Whitely for supplying data from the British Election Study and to the referees for
their suggestions.
ageing and generational politics 665
case of ageing politics, this is overwhelmingly concerned with resource distribution,
public identities, and human rights. This necessarily puts the spotlight on public and
social policy but does not diminish the importance of the personal identity work that
older people undertake everywhere as they negotiate and shape their responses to
ageing. Indeed there are important connections between public policy and identities
in old age (Hendricks 2004; Walker 1999; 2005). This chapter, however, is concerned
with the public issues rather than the personal ones, even when these are politi-
cal. This reflects Mills’ (1970) classic sociological distinction between the ‘personal
troubles of milieu’ and the ‘public issues’ of social structure. In the public arena
there are micro-level political activities undertaken by older people, individually or in
groups, to promote their interests. Then there is a range of meso-level organizations
and structures that represent their interests in the form of either self-advocacy or
representational politics (or a mixture of both). Finally, at the macro-level, there
are policies that mainly emanate from the state (including local government)—
as well as from corporations, the third or voluntary sector, and intergovernmental
organizations (IGOs). In practice there is a maldistribution of power between the
different levels. Looking top down the state, the representatives of ‘grey capitalism’
(Blackburn 2002), and the IGOs constantly make policies that impact hugely on the
everyday lives of older people. However, from a bottom-up perspective, the scope for
influence through micro- and meso-level participation fluctuates but remains very
limited.
What is meant by the ‘new’ politics of ageing becomes clearer if we consider first
the period 1945 to the early 1970s that may be described now as the ‘old’ politics of
ageing. Going back further still, the formative years of the modern politics of ageing
are rooted in the campaigns waged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
by older people and organized labour to establish pension systems. These contributed
to the introduction of public pensions, with the legislative bricks being laid first in
Bismarck’s Germany (1889), followed by the UK in 1908. In contrast to the early
history of protests and campaigns for public pensions the post-Second World War
period was characterized by political passivity. This passivity arose mainly from a
rather negative social construction of old age, even though some of the motivations
behind this were clearly benevolent.
One key element of this negative social construction was the close identification
between older people and the welfare state. Like all welfare states the British one
originated, wholly or partly, in the provision for old age and pension systems. They
are now the largest item of social expenditure. Welfare states were constructed at a
time of relative optimism about tackling need and the prospects for the future fund-
ing of benefits. Given their economic situation and difficulty remaining employed,
older people were regarded as a deserving cause for welfare spending. This was not
entirely good news because it also entailed their social construction as dependent in
economic terms and encouraged popular ageist stereotypes of old age as a period of
poverty and frailty (Townsend 1981; 1986; Walker 1980). There was certainly a case
for action because the poverty rate among older people remained high—one in every
666 alan walker
three in the late 1960s—despite the introduction of pensions and other measures to
assist them.
The other key element in the negative social construction of old age was the fact
that older people were largely excluded from the political and policy-making systems
by a process of disengagement whereby, on retirement, they no longer participated in
formal economic structures and institutions. Thus retirement operated as a process
of both social and political exclusion which detached senior citizens from some of
the main sources of political consciousness and channels of representation. This
exclusion contributed to a popular perception of older people as being politically
passive. This then fed into age discriminatory stereotypes that portrayed older people
as inactive, acquiescent, family orientated, and, therefore, uninterested in political
participation.
The scientific community played its part by contributing social theories that pur-
ported to explain the social and political passivity of older people. For example the
functionalist sociological theory of ‘disengagement’ was put forth in the early 1960s.
This theory argued that old age consisted of an inevitable and mutual process of dis-
engagement between the ageing individual and other members of society (Cumming
and Henry 1961). In accordance with it, most older people would not be expected
to be active participants in social and political life. The theory, however, neglected
the structural processes, noted above, that in effect were excluding older people from
participation (Walker 1980). Of course there were living examples of active senior
citizens who contradicted the stereotype, but this does not negate the general social
construction.
Other factors also operated to limit the extent of political participation on the
part of older people in the early post-war period. In a general political sense old
age was less significant than it is today. There were fewer older people; they were
less healthy; and retirement still acted as the key regulator of entry into old age.
Also, in political terms, age was less salient because attention was directed chiefly
at rebuilding the physical infrastructure damaged by the war and constructing the
major institutions of the welfare state. Thus, the politics of old age reflected the
general politics of the time. Issues of conflict were dominated by traditional class and
religious divisions, with corporatism containing policy conflicts within the political
system.
During this post-war phase in the politics of old age, pressure groups were estab-
lished to represent the interests of older people including the two currently dominant
ones—Age Concern and Help the Aged. Organizations such as these were not pri-
marily concerned with the political mobilization of the older population. Instead they
chiefly spoke on behalf of older people in the policy arena. Thus the politics of old
age in this period was characterized by consensus: pressure groups representing older
people who bargained for public policy advances within a context of shared under-
standing. Generally the groups agreed about the possibilities of politics, the (Fabian)
assumption of progressive welfare development, and the deservingness of the case
they espoused. It is not surprising therefore that this period has been described as the
ageing and generational politics 667
‘bureaucratic lobby’ phase (Estes, Biggs, and Phillipson 2003). Today things are quite
different.
36.2 The New Macro-politics of Ageing
.............................................................................................................................................
This ‘new’ (but now deeply entrenched) politics of ageing consists of two distinct
but causally related macro- and meso/micro-aspects. At the macro-level politicians
and policy-makers began to reject the consensus on which the welfare state was
based—in this case that older people were the deserving poor. Instead, they began
to question, more openly and frequently than hitherto, the cost of population ageing.
The first wave of this critical approach to welfare, particularly the public expendi-
ture implications of pensions and health care, occurred in the mid-1970s following
the world oil price shock and the fiscal crisis it contributed to (O’Connor 1977).
This was followed by a second wave of criticism in the 1980s when the macro-
economic implications of pension system maturation and the financial costs of
long-term care were the subjects of (sometimes heated) debate in Britain as well
as other countries. The immediate impact of this new approach was the change
from wage to price indexation for the basic national insurance pension (BP). The
State Earnings Related Pension was also cut substantially, and those still employed
were offered tax incentives to take out private pre-funded pensions (Walker 1991;
1993).
Sometimes this new discourse is expressed in terms of generational equity with,
invariably, the grossly simplified ‘dependency ratio’ between older people and those
of working age invariably quoted as evidence of impending doom. The fact that this
crude dividing line is not an indication of economic contribution because it excludes
the active above pension ages and the general tax contributions of older people,
the historic decline in the age dependency ratio, and the absence of an optimum
relationship in the face of rising productivity, is rarely considered when these ratios
are invoked (Walker 1990). Their political power and status belies the flimsy scientific
foundations on which these ratios are based. Only in the USA was there a sustained
public debate on generational equity that was spurred on by the creation, in 1985, of
the pressure group Americans for Generational Equality (AGE) (Quadagno 1989).
However, the organization proved to be a front for an anti-welfare ideology and
signally failed to dent the support of the general public in the USA for programmes
for older people, support which has remained resilient (Marshall, Cook, and Marshall
1993).
Similar discourses concerning the future costs of population ageing emerged later
in the other northern European countries, and this has led to modifications to most
668 alan walker
countries’ pension systems. The fact that Britain led the way in Europe, on this front
if not any others, is due to the abrupt hegemonic replacement of the last remnants of
liberal Butskellism with neoliberal Thatcherism.
The emergence of the neoliberal ‘New Right’ may be traced to the revision of
conservative politics that took place in the 1970s, especially in the UK and USA.
This revision intertwined the previously separate strands of liberal belief in a free
economy with the conservative belief in a small but strong state (Gamble 1986).
Monetarist economics was the practical tool used to implement neoliberal think-
ing, and this was the justification (or scientific legitimation) for reducing the role
of the state in welfare and the privatization of public interest (Walker 1984; 1990).
Social policies are always to some extent ‘path dependent’ in that they reflect a
particular country’s historical legacy and institutional model. This explains why
the UK (and Ireland) adopted neoliberalism more readily than the countries of
Continental Europe where a social democratic tradition had been more preva-
lent. This sea-change in political ideology had a critical impact on the relation-
ship between older people and the welfare state and, therefore, on the politics of
ageing.
Over the last twenty years this neoliberal ideology has been globalized by the
IGOs—particularly the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank but
more recently the World Trade Organization (WTO) and, to a lesser extent, the Orga-
nization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (Estes and Phillipson
2002; Walker 1990; Walker and Deacon 2003). This global aspect of the macro-level
new politics of old age is of increasing importance in determining the nature of provi-
sion in old age. Moreover, its power to undermine long-standing public pension and
social protection systems is immense as national governments, for various reasons,
fall in line with the neoliberal consensus. Back in the 1980s the first signs of the
emerging consensus on policies for old age were already visible in two influential
OECD (1988a; 1988b) reports. These were followed by others derived from a broadly
similar ‘burden of ageing’ discourse and advocated policy prescriptions that typically
involved a reduction in public pay-as-you-go (PAYGO) and private defined benefit
pension schemes and an increase in private, defined contribution ones (World Bank
1994; OECD 1998). In other words, an ageing crisis was manufactured as a pretext
for welfare retrenchment that would be consistent with the ideological objectives
of neoliberals (Minkler and Robertson 1991; Quadagno 1989; Vincent 1996; Walker
1990). The next logical step is the liberalization of the trade in services (including
health and social care) under the WTO, which would challenge national government
prerogatives to provide free services or to subsidize national not-for-profit providers
(Estes and Phillipson 2002; Walker and Deacon 2003). Thus, in Britain and globally,
neoliberalism has had a profound effect on the macro-politics of ageing by framing
policies that have reduced the extent to which the state guarantees socio-economic
security in later life (Estes 2004; Estes, Biggs, and Phillipson 2003). Although beyond
the scope of this chapter, population ageing has been described as a grave geopolitical
threat (Jackson and Howe 2008).
ageing and generational politics 669
36.3 The New Meso- and Micro-politics
of Ageing
.............................................................................................................................................
At the meso- and micro-levels the new politics of old age consists of a rapid expan-
sion in direct political involvement on the part of older people (including joining
action groups and taking part in demonstrations). Thus the National Pensioners
Convention (NPC) was reconstituted in 1992 by an amalgamation of different pre-
existing grass-roots and trade union groups (with Jack Jones as its first president).
The NPC has around 1.5 million affiliated members in the local pensioner action
groups that have mushroomed under its aegis (Carter and Nash 1992). Its annual
Pensioners Parliament in Blackpool involves more than a thousand delegates. While
this growth in grass-roots activity is mirrored in other European countries these new
social movements among older people involve relatively few pensioners. Activism is
pursued by a minority of persons in all birth cohorts, but many more older persons
are now involved than in the previous consensus era and apparently more actively so
(Carter and Nash 1992; Walker and Naegele 1999). Furthermore the nature of political
participation and representation is changing: there are more examples of direct action
by senior citizens, and the new action groups are citizens’ organizations composed of
older people who want to represent themselves. It is too soon to say how permanent
these new social movements will be. Indeed organizational instability is a familiar
feature of grass-roots activity, and it is predictable that some will fail, as happened
to the political party for older people in Belgium. The impact of these new forms of
self-advocacy will be discussed in the next section. But first, how do we explain this
transformation in the political participation and representation of older people?
To begin with, the growth in political action by older people is merely a reflection
of the global upsurge in social movements spanning almost every element of political
life (Jenkins and Klandermans 1995). This may be seen as one facet of the transition
from modernity to late modernity. On the one hand, this means the breakdown of
the traditional economic and social certainties of modernity. On the other hand, it
reflects the opening up of new concepts of citizenship and consumerism and new
channels of political action (Harvey 1989). The emergence of new social movements
outside of the familiar political institutions (political parties and trade unions) is not
surprising given the profound realignments under way in the social and economic
orders of the advanced industrial societies.
Secondly, some socio-demographic developments have supported both a height-
ened political awareness of old age as a political issue and the likelihood that older
people will participate actively. Quite simply there are more older people and, there-
fore, they are more visible than 15–20 years ago in political terms. Also the cohort
effects of a healthier and better-educated older population have produced a poten-
tially active pool of people in early old age (the ‘third age’).
Thirdly, the neoliberal inspired negative changes in the macroeconomic and
social policy contexts referred to earlier have had an impact on the radicalization
670 alan walker
of the politics of old age. The primary focus of the pensioners’ campaigns has
been government actions; both local and national campaigns have been con-
cerned almost exclusively with cuts in pensions and social services provision and
related issues. In Britain the relative inadequacy of welfare for older people has
sharpened the grass-roots’ response in comparison to the impact of social expen-
diture cuts in some other European countries such as Germany (Maltby and
Rohleder 2008). There may also be a reciprocal relationship between the growth of
social policy in the ageing field and the participation of older people. For exam-
ple, Campbell (2003) points out that in the USA the growth in social security
coverage has been accompanied by a parallel rise in the political participation
(i.e. voting and campaign contributions) of older people from the 1950s to the
1990s.
Fourthly, the growth of political participation among older people has been
encouraged by policy-makers. Most of the participation of older people in daily life
takes place at a local level, and this unit of administration is responsible, directly
or indirectly, for many of the services that they receive. It is useful, however, to
distinguish two different dimensions of participation in decision-making at the local
level. On the one hand there is the public policy-making process which deter-
mines the general direction of services and the distribution of resources between
groups. In contrast, there are policy decisions taken at an interpersonal level, often
by bureau-professionals, which concern the delivery of specific services to older
people.
As far as the local municipal policy-making process is concerned, the New Labour
government came to power pledged to increase the participation of older people.
Thus, in 1997, it introduced the Better Government for Older People initiative con-
sisting of fifty pilot projects designed to improve their participation in local authority
decision-making. Turning to the second dimension of participation in decision-
making at the local level, we are faced with a very complex interplay of personal and
professional relationships. The health and social services are key agencies in the con-
struction of dependency in old age (Townsend 1981). Professional groups have been
trained to regard themselves as autonomous experts, and this has had the common
effect of excluding older people and their family carers from decision-making about
the services required to meet their care needs. The last decade has seen the build-up
of pressure for increased participation in decisions previously regarded as the sole
province of professionals. These are coming, first, from the rise of consumerism (the
transition from modernity to late modernity) and the reassertion of individualism.
This social change is creating twin pressures for greater choice and for a participating
voice. Secondly there are grass-roots pressures from service users and from informal
carers. Thirdly there are changes within professions in their orientation and prac-
tice that are beginning to question professional autonomy and which are opening
up professional practice to user involvement. Together these processes are empha-
sizing the importance of the participation of older service users and their carers.
Although Britain has a relatively paternalistic service tradition, user groups are being
established by many local authorities (Cook, Maltby, and Warren 2004), although
ageing and generational politics 671
this does not often represent a radical form of empowerment (Barnes and Walker
1996).
Thus the recent growth in the political participation of older people and the devel-
opment of what appears to be a new grass-roots politics of old age must be regarded
as the consequence of two distinct impulses. From below there are undoubtedly
pressures on the part of older people seeking a political voice; from above, policy-
makers have consciously encouraged the involvement of older people.
36.4 The Myth of Grey Power
.............................................................................................................................................
To what extent has this political involvement been translated into effective power? The
evidence suggests that much of the increase in political participation witnessed in the
past decade has not led consistently to influence over events affecting older people.
In fact the ideological construction of grey power, often promoted by popular press
headlines (especially in the USA), has created a myth that sheer numbers and high
voter turnout are all that matters in the battle for political influence (Binstock 2005a;
Peterson and Somit 1994; Walker 1991). On the central issues in the UK pensioners’
campaigns—the restoration of the earnings link with the BP and a reduction in
means-tested support—the New Labour government was immovable. This is despite
a 1997 Manifesto pledge that the BP would remain the ‘foundation’ of retirement
income, campaign promises to restore the link and reduce means testing by the
Prime Minister and Chancellor, and the establishment of a Pensions Working Party
consisting of NPC leaders and Barbara Castle (following the latter’s challenge at the
1997 Labour Party Conference). By 1999 the then Secretary of State for Social Security,
Alistair Darling, wrote in the following bullish terms to Jack Jones (NPC president):
You have expressed concern that a consequence of linking the minimum income guaran-
tee to earnings could, in the short term, be to increase the number of today’s pensioners
dependent on means-tested benefits. I acknowledge that in the short term our approach
will increase the numbers on income support. I am unapologetic about this. We believe
that the minimum income guarantee is the most effective way to help those most in
need.
Although there has been a significant reduction in poverty in old age over the past
decade, it remains relatively high: one-fifth of pensioners have incomes below the
official poverty line. In fact the only instance of pensioners exercising substantial
political influence in recent times was the outrage that accompanied the 75p rise in
the BP in 1999 and then it was not only older people who were angry.
The reasons why the apparently latent power of older people has not been mobi-
lized consistently will be discussed later. However, it is important to note here that
the ideological construction of grey power sits closely alongside the neoliberal myth
672 alan walker
of ageing as a burden on society and serves a complementary purpose. Moreover it
may be that the various new forms and structures of participation, assembled in the
UK and other EU countries over the past twenty years, are masking to some extent
the absence of effective political power held by older people. Scientific evidence is
required to test this hypothesis, for example comparative studies of influence in differ-
ent countries and localities. On the positive side, however, there is some evidence that
it is possible to overcome the various barriers to organizing the local participation
of older people. Several of the BGOP pilot projects reported a successful impact on
decision-making. A strong desire for active engagement in the local policy-making
process and to have a voice in decisions affecting their lives has been demonstrated
even among some of the most difficult groups to involve, such as older women from
ethnic minority groups (Cook, Maltby, and Warren 2004). It is clear though that we
must be mindful about the limitations of local advisory councils. Also the structures
for local citizen participation are invariably the same and, therefore, fail to take on
board inequalities between older people. Research demonstrates that participation
takes many forms and this suggests that the structures created to facilitate it must be
flexible to be fully inclusive.
On balance, the available evidence suggests that grey power is a myth not just
in the UK but also in the USA and the rest of Europe (Walker and Naegele 1999),
and its popular promotion by policy elites and the media may have more to do with
attempts to legitimize neoliberal-inspired policies intended to reduce public spending
on older people than any genuine examples of sustained influence over policy at the
macro-level (as opposed to providing ‘advice’ at the local level). Also, while there are
continuing examples of the operation of grey power in local politics, these tend to
be part of the ebb and flow of pluralism rather than a sign of structured power, for
example to change resource distribution in favour of older people.
36.5 Barriers to Political Participation
and Influence
.............................................................................................................................................
While few would doubt the importance of the transformation that has taken place
in the meso- and micro-politics of old age it is important not to overstate what
has happened. So far this change has involved only a minority of older people. This
suggests, at least, that the barriers to political participation may be more formidable
than has been recognized generally and, perhaps, that there is no sound basis for
general political mobilization among older people. There are five main impediments
to such participation by older people in specifically age-related politics.
In the first place, contrary to popular perceptions, older people do not necessarily
share a common interest by virtue of their age alone which transcends all other
ageing and generational politics 673
interests (Binstock 2000; Street 1999; Walker and Naegele 1999). Thus it is mistaken
to regard senior citizens as a homogeneous group which might coalesce around or
be attracted by a one-dimensional politics of ageing. In other words, age is only one
of several forms of socio-political consciousness such as socio-economic status, race,
gender, religion, and locality. This perspective marked a break with the long-standing
tendency for social scientists to regard older people as a distinct and homogeneous
social group cut off from their own status and class position formed at earlier stages
of the life cycle (Quadagno 1982; Walker 1981). Although no longer prevalent in social
sciences this is still a view held by policy-makers in many different countries and in
IGOs (OECD 1994; Walker 1990). As Estes (1982) has argued, a largely classless view
of old age has been incorporated into public policy.
In fact, older people are just as deeply divided along social class and other structural
lines as younger adults. This means that large organizations such as Age Concern are
dealing with a very diverse membership, which can cause difficulties if the organiza-
tion takes a high-profile stance on an issue, or that the competition between different
organizations representing older people may diffuse potential mobilization (Douglas
1995; Binstock 2005a). A fundamental fault line is gender, and not only is this consis-
tently underplayed by policy-makers, but their policies are also crucial in maintaining
it (Arber and Ginn 1991; Calasanti and Slevin 2001; Estes et al. 2001; Estes 2004).
The process of retirement, not ageing, does impose reduced socio-economic status
on a majority of older people. Even so, retirement has a varying impact depending,
among other things, on prior socio-economic status. For example invariably there
is unequal access to occupational pensions (Reday-Mulvey 2005; World Bank 1994).
Women and other groups with incomplete employment and pensions contribution
records are particularly disadvantaged in the UK and most other Western countries
(Ginn 2003).
Secondly the majority of older people remain relatively powerless politically.
Traditionally the main source of working-class political power has been the eco-
nomic base provided by the workplace and trades union organization. Retirement
is often associated with social processes of exclusion that remove older people from
their main source of income but also from potential collective political power and
sources of socio-political consciousness. After retirement a larger portion of time
is spent, on average, engaged in private and individualized home-based activities.
Of course the ‘Fordist’ model of work organization is increasingly inappropriate
as a description of the late-modern often individualized world of work (Harvey
1989) but paid employment remains a collective activity for the majority of those in
employment.
Thus, in contrast to the mobilization effect of public policy referred to earlier,
detachment from paid employment may act as a dampener on political action, which
deters some from political activities or creates barriers for others to surmount in order
to be active. This is not to say that interest in politics and minimum levels of engage-
ment, such as voting, are diminished necessarily. Political interest and engagement
have been demonstrated consistently to be positively related to education and income
levels (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995). Recently, however, Campbell (2003) has
674 alan walker
found that interest in social security is high in the USA across all education and
income groups. Furthermore social security-specific participation (including writing
a letter, making a financial contribution, protesting, and voting) is higher for low-
income groups than for the high-income ones. This latter finding is not surprising
given that social security comprises 82 per cent of the income of US older people
in the lowest quintile and only 18 per cent in the highest. But the ‘democratizing’
effect of social security’s universalism in the USA seems to mirror that of the classic
Scandinavian citizenship welfare state (Korpi 1983; Esping-Andersen 1990; Palme
1990). Apart from local campaigns in the UK, for example with regard to transport
or access to services, it is the universal BP that has been the main rallying point for
British pensioners.
Despite the apparent pressures towards bifurcation, European and US research
suggests that differences between younger and older voters in attitudes towards key
policy issues are relatively small. This was the conclusion of a unique pan-European
study of attitudes (Walker 1993) and of an analysis of the 1996 presidential election
in the USA (Binstock 1997). In fact, it is not age as such that determines political
attitudes and behaviour; rather it is ‘the cleavages that cut across cohorts such as
economic, educational, racial and ethnic, gender, and partisan divisions’ (Binstock
and Day 1996: 364). Of course, it is obvious that some issues, such as pensions, have
greater salience for older cohorts.
The observation of a relationship between political efficacy and occupation dates
back more than forty years to US research by Almond and Verba (1963). Using a
similar approach twenty years later British survey analysis found that propensity for
collective action is lowest among the retired and, in contrast to the employed and
other groups in the labour market, retired people have a preference for personal
over collective action (Young 1984). The explanation for this passivity on the part of
older people consisted of a sense of powerlessness or non-competence which, in turn,
reflected a lack of real resources with which to gain political influence. There was,
predictably, a close association between both socio-economic group and education
and subjectively assessed power. Campbell’s (2003) US research does not contradict
these findings, since her focus was primarily on voting and political knowledge. In
other words, minimum levels of participation, high levels of political interest, and
low levels of collective action are not necessarily inconsistent.
Older people do demonstrate consistently greater political engagement than
younger people in one important respect: voting. Globally older people are more
likely than younger ones to turn out in national (general) elections, and this is true
for both men and women. Also the gender gap grows with age, which means that
older women are more likely than older men to vote in general elections (among
those aged sixty-five and over the difference is 3.7 per cent in non-turnout levels: 13.1
per cent for women and 16.8 per cent for men) (Pintor and Gratschew 2002). In both
Western Europe and the USA, older people commonly record the highest turnout
of all age groups in general elections (Turner, Shields, and Sharp 2001). European
data emphasize the higher turnout among older than younger people, even among
those aged seventy and over, which averages 90 per cent (International Institute for
ageing and generational politics 675
Table 36.1 Voting turnout in general elections by age and gender
Age 1970 1983 1997 2001 2005
M F M F M F M F M F
18–24 67 66 74 73 56 64 60 46 33 37
25–34 74 77 76 79 67 70 59 56 46 48
35–44 81 84 87 88 77 78 66 74 62 63
45–54 86 85 88 90 83 86 76 81 63 68
55–59 88 86 89 93 90 87 79 82 77 76
60–64 79 84 82 90 87 88 80 80 70 72
65 and over 93 84 86 82 87 85 87 87 71 63
Source: British Election Study, National Centre for Social Research; University of Essex.
Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA) 1999). The USA has seen long-term
growth in the portion of votes cast by older people in presidential elections (Binstock
2000). Since 1972 those aged sixty-five and over have comprised a larger share of
voters than of those eligible to vote, and this gap has grown over time. The key factor
in this rise is the changing turnout rates of different age groups: an increase of 6.5
per cent among those aged sixty-five and over between 1972 and 1996 coupled with
reductions in other age groups (e.g. 34.7 per cent among 18–24-year-olds). In the 2004
US presidential election the senior turnout rate was 68 per cent compared with 54
per cent for the electorate as a whole (Binstock 2005b). As Table 36.1 shows, turnout
at general elections in the UK is consistently higher among older than younger age
groups although the gender imbalance does not match the general Western one.
Thirdly, pensioners often lack formal channels through which to exert political
influence. Indeed the UK’s political representation system effectively excludes older
people from key institutions. For example, one of the major political parties provided
an organizational context for pensioners or made special efforts to include them in
their machinery. (This contrasts with Germany where political parties have taken
steps to try to incorporate them including a network of senior circles at district
and regional levels within the Social Democratic Party (Alber 1995).) Similarly, the
trade unions have been poor at involving ex-members and in providing continuing
membership after labour force exit although some, such as the TGWU, have done
this.
Fourthly, there are important physical and mental barriers to political partici-
pation in old age. Disability and socially disabling later life-course events, such as
widowhood, may further fragment political consciousness and discourage politi-
cal activity. The experience of ageing itself creates barriers to collective action and
political participation for a minority of older people. For those with intellectual
or learning disabilities who are now reaching old age for the first time, the ageing
process merely confirms their socio-political exclusion (Walker, Walker, and Ryan
1996). Other social structural factors that militate against active political participation
include poverty and low incomes, and age, gender, and race discrimination. For
676 alan walker
instance those suffering social exclusion as a result of poverty face substantial material
and psychological barriers to active engagement and are among the least likely to be
represented within the formal political system (Scharf, Phillipson, and Smith 2004).
This includes a small but significant proportion that live in institutions of various
kinds, whose voices are usually the quietest. In addition a large number of older
people, particularly women, are actively involved in caring for spouses and others in
need and, therefore, may not have the physical energy and mental space to be active
on the political scene as well. Despite these obvious barriers there is political activity
among low-income groups. Indeed as noted previously, in the US Campbell (2003)
found a higher level of activity among low-income senior citizens than more affluent
ones with regard to social security issues. This is possibly a function of the interaction
between the significance of social security to pensioners and the political culture.
Finally there is conservatism. It is not necessarily the case that people become more
conservative as they grow older—despite the commonplace nature of that assumption
(Hudson 1980). In terms of public opinion, on most issues they differ very little from
younger people in both the EU and the USA (Peterson and Somit 1994; Walker 1993).
However there is evidence that older people are more conservative in certain respects
than younger ones, but the reasons are not related primarily to age. Several key factors
have been mentioned already, such as the removal of sources of potential influence
and activity. In addition, there is a generational dimension. The present older gener-
ations have different reference points from younger people. Many of their formative
years occurred between 1935 and 1955, a unique historical period in Europe and the
wider world. Although the direction of party allegiance depends to some extent on
age cohort effects (Hudson and Strate 1985), when it comes to the strength of such
attachments the evidence shows that, in both Western Europe and the USA, there
is a uniform tendency for a disproportionate number of older people to hold strong
party allegiances, an observation that was first made in the USA (Campbell et al. 1960;
see also Binstock 2000; McManus 1996). All of this suggests that older people are not
more conservative in voting terms, but, rather, they have had a tendency to vote for
the party they have always voted for.
36.6 The Prospects for Generational
Relations
.............................................................................................................................................
Despite the development of a distinctly new politics of old age, with interrelated
macro- and meso/micro-features, it is clear from the previous section that the social
and economic foundations for political power and mobilization among older people
remain relatively weak. This is not peculiar to old age but a demonstration that age is
not, in itself, a sound basis for political consciousness. The relatively new direction of
ageing and generational politics 677
macroeconomic and social policies in the UK and other developed countries is clear.
However, based on the available evidence, grey power is more hype than substance.
Furthermore the ageing power myth is being reproduced and amplified regularly in
support of macro-level neoliberal policy prescriptions: growing numbers of older
people are not only swamping those in employment but they are also controlling the
political agenda to caricature matters somewhat. One reason for the apparent ease
with which this myth gets translated into popular discourses is the virtual absence
of scientific research on this topic in either gerontology or political science (Walker
1986).
A prime example of the tendency for hyperbole to fill a scientific vacuum is political
discourses on intergenerational relations. Indeed, even when there is some hard
evidence in this field, it is commonly discounted in favour of a controversial headline
or sound-bite. Looking backwards the occasional references to potential generational
strife in the UK and other EU countries have always proved illusory. Research con-
tinues to find high levels of solidarity between the generations as demonstrated, at
the macro-level, by support for the social contract underpinning public pensions and
health care (Walker 1993; Brook, Hall, and Preston 1997; Hills and Lelkes 1999) and, at
the micro-level, by the support provided within families (Dench, Ogg, and Thomson
1999). Even in the USA, where a high-profile campaign was waged on this issue in
the 1980s, it proved to be groundless (and the campaign a front for an anti-welfare
lobby) with continuing high levels of support for social security (for older people)
(Marshall, Cook, and Marshall 1993). In practice it has been the younger generation
that has attracted most media interest and, in the political arena, the voting habits of
older people have not only been neglected but taken for granted.
Contemporary discourses on the ‘baby boomer effect’ need to be regarded with cir-
cumspection in the absence of research evidence which demonstrates any real effects.
Of course there are differences between generations: one recent comparison between
Germany and the UK concluded that there are more differences between generations
within the two countries than between them (Potratz, Gross, and Hilbert 2009). In
other words, there are new generations of younger older people (50–74) who, as a
result of continuous employment and pension scheme maturation, are more affluent
than their forebears and display higher levels of hedonistic consumption and lifestyle.
This transition has led to a new emphasis on consumption in the sociology of ageing
(Gilleard and Higgs 2000). While there are key differences between the boomers and
previous generations, such as their greater affluence, higher levels of education, and
socio-political attitudes (especially individualism and liberalism) (Evandrou 1997;
Huber and Skidmore 2003), the key political question is: how salient are they? This
is a topic calling out for research but, for the moment, the answer must be ‘not
very’. Existing solidarities remain intact but, in practice, the traditional definitions
of ‘old age’, by arbitrary pension ages, are becoming less and less useful. Moreover,
speculation about how the baby boomer generations will behave, a favourite topic
for quiet news periods, is invariably misplaced. First of all the boomer generations
share some similarities but are also heterogeneous in terms of income and wealth,
education, gender, ethnicity, and political consciousness. Secondly such speculations
678 alan walker
usually display ‘cohort centrism’ which overemphasizes the uniqueness of the genera-
tion in question and its internal characteristics while downplaying both the structural
context and the ageing process itself (Riley 1992).
Looking forward and without indulging in speculation there are two critical polit-
ical questions that are likely to influence generational relations and may, possibly,
destabilize them. On the one hand there is the issue of the distribution of resources
between the generations. In the past the welfare state has been managed as an efficient
system of horizontal distribution that has, more or less, retained parity between
generations (thus each generation has got out of the social contract what it put
into it (Hills 1996)). However the neoliberal inspired individualization of welfare
responsibility and reduction in the scope of the welfare state threatens this balance.
Put simply, if younger contributors face the prospect of little or no pension in retire-
ment they may reasonably question their support for older generations. The UK was
very forward in adopting neoliberal policy prescriptions but it has been backward in
realizing the dangers inherent in the individualization of the social. To head off any
potential risks on this score is straightforward in social policy terms, if challenging
politically. It would mean reasserting the social contract and the importance of the
BP, combating child poverty, progressively raising the level of the minimum wage,
encouraging the extension of working life, and ending age discrimination.
On the other hand there is always a chance that politicians will talk the country into
generational conflict. Thus the unrecognized downside of heady political rhetoric
about dependency ratios and the ‘burden’ of pensions (which implies the burden
of older people) is that it will be taken seriously. The intelligent way to avoid such
dangers is to encourage an open, evidence-based debate about generational relations.
This would emphasize their fundamental importance to society and social cohesion,
encourage generational harmony, and subject all policies to a generational impact
audit (as happens in Austria). Gradually this sort of approach would move towards an
open discussion of generational distribution and, perhaps, even a reform of the social
contract in which all generations can expect equal shares. The idea of a prudential
lifespan account is only one of several possibilities (Daniels 1998).
36.7 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
This chapter has explored the relationship between ageing and politics and empha-
sized flux at all levels of society. Despite the signs of growing political participation,
it concluded that the barriers to it remain formidable and that the notion of ‘grey
power’ is far-fetched. The final main section consisted of some reflections on the risks
of generational conflicts and how to avoid them. While the future politics of ageing
and generations is unknown the key reference point is social policy. In other words,
ageing and generational politics 679
the future politics of ageing and generations depends a great deal on how the politics
of welfare develops in the coming decades.
Assuming the continued dominance of the neoliberal consensus, there are likely
to be conflicts between the organized pensioners’ groups and whichever of the two
major political parties is in power. The present Labour government has promised to
restore the link between the BP and average earnings but this is not likely to happen
until 2012 with no back-dating. This will perpetuate the relatively high proportion
of British pensioners on low incomes, compared with many of their European coun-
terparts, and maintain the momentum of campaigning on this front. The collapse
of the occupational pension system, which was the main source of affluence in old
age and has marked one of the major income divisions among older people for the
past thirty years, and the continuing inequality in pension entitlements between men
and women, will increase the political focus on the BP. Because of the low level of
the BP in comparative terms a concerted policy to extend working life would offset
concerns with regard to its sustainability (Aspalter and Walker 2008). It is possible
that this sort of strategy would enable the BP to be raised, thereby lifting many older
people out of the means-tested pension credit system without running any electoral
risks. The other major terrain of conflict is likely to be long-term care because the
need for care in advanced old age is rising as a result of longevity and the present
means-tested system is intruding increasingly into the sensitive area of property
inheritance.
It is likely too that, rather than a conflict between young and old (assuming that
politicians realize the dangers in time), greater differences will emerge between those
within the older population, as the relatively affluent group in the third age pursues
its own hedonistic interest, including full or partial location abroad (Warnes 2006),
and the frail and dependent group within the oldest old remains heavily reliant on
the welfare state. There will undoubtedly be some further dynamic polarization of
interests in this direction but it should not be regarded as a simple fault line because
of the diversity of both groups and their common interests, such as the NHS, taxation,
and the fact that the main family carers for the fourth age are in the third one.
Nonetheless the relatively affluent part of the third age, baby boomers, are likely to
continue to redefine early ‘old’ age in their own image. Whether this development
has any political salience, at the moment, is a matter of speculation.
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c h a p t e r 37
.................................................................................................................
W E L FA R E R E F O R M
.................................................................................................................
howard glennerster
‘Welfare reform’ was originally an American campaign slogan. In that context
it had a restricted meaning—limiting assistance given to lone parents. The term
was introduced into British politics by the Blair administration (Cm. 3805 1998,
‘The Welfare Reform Green Paper’). It still had a rather restricted meaning, being
largely concerned with social security payments to those of working age. Yet changes
to the wider British welfare state in the last thirty years have been substantial. It
is ‘welfare reform’ in this broader sense we discuss in this chapter. We begin by
briefly reviewing political science writing about British social policy in the imme-
diate post-war era in order to contrast it with the ‘new politics of welfare’ that
some commentators see emerging internationally after the economic crises of the
1970s (Pierson 2001).
We examine how far such a description fits the British case. Our contention is
that there is less that is new in British social politics than this literature suggests. We
end with a comparison of welfare reform, in its narrower sense, in the USA and the
UK to illustrate how different institutional traditions produce different responses to
apparently similar social and economic changes.
37.1 The Old Politics of Welfare
.............................................................................................................................................
The incremental growth of the post-war British welfare state first attracted political
scientists’ attention as a way to illustrate wider arguments.
welfare reform 685
As interest group politics became a fashionable topic writers turned their atten-
tion to social service producer interests—the British Medical Association, teachers’
unions, and the construction interests that had helped shape public housing policy,
for example (Eckstein 1955; Manzer 1970; Beer 1965; Dunleavy 1981). Later interpreta-
tions saw interest group power over the public sector as a cause of Britain’s political
malaise (Beer 1982).
The new ‘politics of budgeting’ (Wildavsky 1964) focused on reasons for the incre-
mental growth of public spending, much of it on social policy (Heclo and Wildavsky
1974). However, there were frequent attempts to restrain that growth, especially given
Britain’s poor economic performance, even if they sometimes failed (Lowe 1989).
Other authors analysed the social policy process. Heclo (1974) produced an influ-
ential account of social policy-making in the UK and Sweden emphasizing the role
academic and civil service elites played in analysing and responding to new political
demands and failings in old institutions—‘political learning’. Banting (1979) saw
‘intellectual and institutional adaptation’ as central. Social structures and poverty had
not changed that much in the 1950s and 1960s, he argued, but attitudes to them, driven
by changing knowledge and ideology, had.
There was interest in the battle for ideas within the Labour Party. Crosland (1956)
sought a complete break with its partially Marxist traditions. He rejected public
ownership as an end in itself and claimed that reducing social inequality was the true
socialist goal. That was to be achieved in large part through social policy. Miliband
(1961; 1969) saw Labour betrayed by such ideas. In the end, the revisionists won. Social
policy became central to Labour’s electoral appeal. Indeed, it became central to British
politics.
Most successful social policy ideas in the post-war period had been Fabian Socialist,
or at least Liberal, in origin. The Institute of Economic Affairs, founded in 1955 to
advance market solutions and challenge the growth of the state, began to revive
thinking about alternatives to the post-war welfare institutions—an end to rent
control, more private provision of pensions, health care, and education (Cockett
1995). These ideas made little immediate headway, except on relaxing rent control.
The big welfare structures erected between 1944 and 1949 remained intact. Then, the
economic turmoil of the 1970s resulted in the UK’s humiliating petition for help from
the IMF in 1976. This produced a more advantageous climate in which such ideas
could take root, just as the Second World War had been advantageous to ideas of state
collectivism.
37.2 A New Politics of Welfare?
.............................................................................................................................................
Pierson (2001) and his fellow contributors’ contention was that all welfare states had
entered an era of ‘permanent austerity’ after the 1970s, despite their resilience he
686 howard glennerster
had noted in an earlier study (Pierson 1994). Global economic pressures would force
changes of three kinds:
r ‘Re-commodification’ (Esping-Andersen 1990; 1996)—or moves to back to more
market-driven welfare entitlements;
r Cost containment—cutting back generous pay-as-you-go state pensions and
other cuts;
r Recalibration—reforming institutions to make them more effective in respond-
ing to social change.
I shall argue that these predictions do not entirely fit the British case. Where they do,
as in the final case, such a process is not new.
37.2.1 Re-commodification?
It is certainly true that in the 1980s, during Mrs Thatcher’s administration, a series
of initiatives were taken that do fit this description. The more generous wage-related
sickness and unemployment benefits, introduced in the 1960s, were repealed. The
purpose was to make living on state benefits less attractive and hence prompt an ear-
lier return to work. It is these measures that were picked out in an international study
of welfare state reform (Korpi and Palme 2003) to suggest that the UK had moved
furthest in a ‘de-commodified’ direction. In fact, the benefits chosen for illustrative
purposes in this study constituted less than 4 per cent of UK social security spending
but the story could be said to hold for other benefits too. The more generous wage-
related state pension scheme, only added as a supplement to the old post-war pension
scheme in the late 1970s, was cut back in the mid-1980s and big tax inducements
were given to employees to opt out and join private schemes. The aim, endorsed by
the Blair government, was to make private pensions the prime source of income in
old age. Most important, the basic state pension, which had been raised in line with
earnings since the 1950s, was linked only to prices after the early 1980s. This steadily
reduced the basic state pension relative to the incomes of the wider working popula-
tion. So far, the predictions might be said to hold. However, important elements in
recent British social policy have worked in the opposite direction.
The fastest recent (post-1999) increases in spending have been on universal services
like health and education where access is based on a test of residence not even formal
citizenship. The National Health Service’s share of GDP rose from 5.8 per cent in 1998
to nearly 9 per cent in 2008—a larger increase than had occurred in the fifty previous
years of its existence. Competition-based reforms in health and education derived, in
part, from an attempt to make these services more responsive to consumers and less
to the interests of producers. Probably the most significant extension of the British
welfare state since 1948 has been the wider access to childcare. We discuss these
changes later. None fit the rather ugly term ‘de-commodification’. None would have
been possible without the relative success of the UK economy since the mid-1990s—
something that eluded it in the period of the old politics of welfare.
welfare reform 687
37.2.2 Cuts in Pay-as-you-go State Pensions?
It is certainly true that almost all Continental European pension schemes have been
reduced in generosity for future recipients during the last decade. In Sweden, Ger-
many, Italy, and even France long negotiations between political parties, unions,
and employers have led to major reductions in pension entitlements (Fenge and
Werding 2004). The United Kingdom never had had a generous state pension. The
brief attempt to build one on a continental model by the 1975 Labour government was
dismantled by Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s. State pension income has been the lowest
of any major advanced economy (Pensions Commission 2004). The historical reasons
for this situation are discussed in the volume by Pemberton, Thane, and Whiteside
(2007).
Uniquely, the UK has relied on individuals’ voluntary membership of occupational
and private pension schemes, underpinned by means-tested additions to a very low
flat-rate state pension. This whole strategy was predicated on the continued success
of occupational pension schemes. But they were beset by some of the same problems
that faced generous public schemes in other countries—rising expectation of life, too
generous promises given in better times, and high labour costs resulting from the
need to fund accumulating pension rights. Private firms began to close their defined
benefit pension schemes to new entrants and reduce their contributions to any new
defined contribution schemes they offered.
In the absence of improving private provision and with declining public pensions,
three-quarters of the population could have expected, by mid-century, to be depen-
dent on means-tested public support (Pensions Commission 2005). This would have
made private pension saving even less attractive. An important, and growing, section
of the electorate faced a bleak pension future. So, too, did the public finances that
would have to pick up the pieces.
Pensions became of major political importance again. The voluntary private mar-
ket solution favoured by both major parties had failed. Government turned to an
old political strategy, largely discarded since Mrs Thatcher’s time, a commission of
inquiry.
The Pensions Commission (2004; 2005) produced two reports which were highly
critical of past policies and contained some of the best policy analysis in any public
document since the Second World War. The Commission pointed out that the share
of adult life spent in retirement had risen steadily since 1948 and could not go on
rising without taxes and pension contributions having to rise steadily too, something
no party was advocating. By spelling out the realities it managed to get all political
parties to sign up to the proposition that the age at which a full state pension should
be received should rise in line with life expectancy. In return the basic state pension
should be increased enough to free most people from pension means testing. It did
not seek to abandon the UK’s post-war path in pension policy, which gave a large role
to private funded pensions. But it did increase the role of the state in making them
work. All employees would be expected to pay into a national savings scheme if they
were not part of a good employer’s pension scheme. They could take steps to exclude
688 howard glennerster
themselves but if they did not their contributions, together with matching funds
required from their employers with state help, would be placed in a personal account
held nationally. The holder would choose into which state-approved private scheme
his or her funds will be placed. Nearly all of the recommendations were accepted by
government (Cm. 6841 2006; Cm. 6975 2006). Legislation to enact them was passed
in 2007.
This reform built on the UK’s pension past but it was also a major policy inno-
vation. It involved a significant additional role for the state and took substantially
more public money—about an extra 1 per cent of the GDP. It also won cross-party
support largely lacking since the Second World War in this field of policy. An old
political device had been used to build a new policy consensus. The policies of both
major parties had collapsed. The alternative—to leave a majority of the deserving and
growing elderly population dependent on means-tested handouts—was politically
untenable.
The Commission incorporated recent findings from behavioural economics (Choi,
Laibson, and Madrian 2004) which showed that most individuals do not act in
their own long-term best interests when making financial decisions about the future.
However, governments can use inertia to guide them to make advantageous long-
term decisions—assuming government gets those default choices right!
Thus, it its true that throughout Europe governments have been adapting their
pension schemes to fit demographic and fiscal reality. In every case this has entailed
reducing the state’s previous commitments. In the UK the reverse has happened.
Both state spending and the state’s role in regulating the private pension market
have grown. The Swedish and German reforms do, however, share some of the same
elements—raising pension ages in line with growing life expectancy and encouraging,
or requiring, private savings to be invested in schemes of the individual’s choice. The
last element has been taken furthest in the UK reforms.
37.2.3 Recalibration and Response to Social Change?
37.2.3.1 Family–Work Life Balance
We have just seen how the British welfare state has had to adapt pension policy to
an ageing population and to private market failure. Aside from ageing, one of the
most important social changes in British society, as in others, over the past forty
years has been the extended roles played by women and the tensions families face
in balancing home and work. Yet, for a long time, neither public services nor social
policy more generally took much account of this phenomenon. Britain continued
to provide minimal childcare facilities while Scandinavian and French governments
expanded theirs. Extensive childcare provision had been provided during the Second
World War and dismantled immediately after. Such provision had been opposed by
trade unions as endangering male jobs and by Conservatives as invading women’s
natural roles (Blackstone 1971). Schools were open only part of the day and provided
welfare reform 689
no support for working parents. Childcare provision was the responsibility of social
services departments in local authorities, education the responsibility of another
department. British institutional history seemed set against any significant change.
Political attitudes to the family and women’s roles were very slow to respond to
changing social reality (Lewis 2000). It was a gap New Labour sought to exploit in
attracting back women’s votes, though it did so very cautiously so as not to offend
too many traditionalists. As Lewis and Campbell (2007) have argued, the Labour
government, from 1997 on, did introduce a steady stream of incremental changes
to existing practice—‘policy instruments’ as Hall (1993) calls them—which together
add up to a significant change of policy direction (Streeck and Thalen 2005). Entry to
formal nursery schooling was extended from the age of five to begin at three years old.
Earlier and more extensive childcare and family services were provided in poor areas.
Then, in 2007, the government embarked on a programme that would provide every
child with care or education from eight in the morning to six at night from an early
age for those who chose it, mostly based on extended provision attached to schools.
This programme was the result of interdepartmental collaboration led by the Treasury
(2004). Parental leave was extended and family working time regulations introduced.
The overall outcome has been to move the UK much nearer to family policy models
established in Scandinavia and France. It amounts to the biggest extension of univer-
sal welfare provision since 1948, and a significant response to a major social change.
37.2.3.2 A Widening Gap Between Rich and Poor
Another major social change produced a less successful response—the widening gap
that opened up from the late 1970s between the incomes of the top and bottom
income groups. During the next quarter of a century the UK moved from being one
of the more equal of the advanced economies to one of the most unequal in terms of
income, nearly matching the inequality found in the USA. The fundamental causes,
shared with other advanced economies, lay in changing technology and the impact of
the global economy on the demand for low-skilled labour. But in the UK these causes
were exacerbated by the deliberate reductions in social benefits discussed earlier (Hills
2004).
By the mid-1990s inequality rose to near the top of voters’ concerns indicated
by public opinion polling. No less than 87 per cent of respondents in a national
public attitude survey agreed the gap was ‘too wide’. This was highest since the early
1980s (Hills 2004: 32–6). New Labour asked to be judged on the extent to which
it could reverse these trends (Mandelson 1997). Pledges to abolish child poverty in
a generation (Blair 1999) and to reduce pensioner poverty were followed by higher
benefits targeted on poor families and the poor elderly. But there were also structural
changes to the benefits system that merged the administration of benefits with that of
tax collection. This was not helpful to those numerous families whose circumstances
changed rapidly (Hills, Smithies, and McKnight 2006).
Though some progress was made in reducing levels of both child and pensioner
poverty, overall levels of inequality shifted very little even if they did not go on
690 howard glennerster
rising (Hills and Stewart 2005; IFS 2007). Most voters were not prepared to see taxes
rise substantially. Where they were prepared to see small increases it was to finance
services most people used—health and education—not cash benefits for those out of
work (Taylor-Gooby and Hastie 2002). Labour politicians, scared by their experiences
in the 1980s, concluded they could not afford to raise the top levels of tax. After a
decade in power Labour was unable to show it could reverse the big shift to inequality
that had occurred. This raised deep questions about the core case for social democ-
racy advanced by Crosland a half-century before. Not even Sweden has managed to
completely stem the widening of income distribution since the 1980s (Brandolini and
Smeeding 2007). Though the scale of welfare state redistribution has increased since
the Second World War, it has been outpaced by growing inequality in the marketplace
(Glennerster 2007: 269–72).
37.2.3.3 Consumer Interests and the Role of Ideas
The climate of ideas and the experiences that had influenced the post-Second World
War welfare state were changing. The scale of the economic crisis in the 1970s made
politicians of both major parties question them as they had not done since the 1940s
and early 1950s. Economic crisis was seen not just as a random external shock. The
view that the welfare state had been a cause of the UK’s economic decline gained
ground (Bacon and Eltis 1976). In the wake of the IMF visit the Labour government
stabilized public spending and introduced more powerful controls over it (Wright
1980). For the new Conservative government in 1979 high public spending was seen as
the main culprit—‘at the heart of Britain’s economic difficulties’ (Cmnd. 7746 1979).
As the economic crisis passed and new political demands arose public spending con-
straints eased. But those ideas that challenged the role of the state in delivering welfare
services were to have a lasting impact. In preparing for their third election victory
in 1987 the Conservatives presented plans to reform schooling, higher education,
housing, and, after the election, health and social care for the elderly.
The underlying principle for all these reforms was that consumers should continue
to have access to free services, or in the case of the elderly, means-tested ones, but that
schools, hospitals, and old people’s homes should compete either for an individual’s
state-financed custom or for that of a local purchasing agency. None of these ideas
were new. Many had been trailed, for example, by the Institute of Economic Affairs
since the 1960s, drawing heavily on Milton Friedman (1962). Now they were taken
seriously, modified, and legislated.
The Institute for Contemporary History in London brought together senior civil
servants who had been in post during that period. It was clear from their accounts
(Centre for Contemporary British History 2007) that the driving force initially was a
desire to find ways of containing their departments’ long-term budgets. If the produc-
tivity of these services could be improved this would provide some relief to demands
for more public expenditure. The reasons for poor performance lay, in part, in the
power of providers over users. Such power could be challenged by competition. These
ideas were taken up with a different set of motivations by the New Labour government
welfare reform 691
after 1997. Only if services were seen to be delivering quality improvements would
voters be prepared to go on voting more money. Improving public service efficiency
and shifting more power into the hands of service users also tapped into an old
strand of social democratic thought dating from the 1930s which feared that undue
producer power exercised in monopoly public services would cripple their efficiency.
Competition between public providers was the solution (Durbin 1949; Brooke 1996;
Le Grand and Estrin 1989; Le Grand 2003).
Thus, right- and left-wing traditions overlapped enough for these ideas to influ-
ence both administrations. How to run welfare services more efficiently, more respon-
sive to users’ needs, has became the centre ground on which the main parties are now
fighting.
In short, the British welfare state has gone on expanding, though at a slower rate
than before 1976, just as most other welfare states have (Castles 2004). Major universal
services have been expanded and others extended. The state has expanded its role
in providing and regulating pensions while keeping the large role played by private
funded schemes. It has responded to some major social changes and not merely
remained static in the face of them, as critics argue has happened particularly in the
USA (Orloff 2004; Hacker 2005). It has not been able to reverse the trend to greater
inequality.
So far, though, none of the policy examples we have cited cover ‘welfare reform’ in
the American sense. A comparison is instructive.
37.3 Welfare Reform US and UK Style
.............................................................................................................................................
37.3.1 The US Case
Until recently, ‘welfare’ referred to one particular federal programme—Aid for Fam-
ilies with Dependent Children (AFDC). It had originated as a Federal programme
in the Roosevelt era as Aid to Dependent Children supporting children in families
with no ‘breadwinner’, normally as a result of widowhood. As a tiny programme for
the deserving poor it raised little political interest. The New Deal had established
a contributory Federal pension scheme and state-run unemployment insurance but
public assistance was left to the states to administer. The southern Democrats would
not allow a national safety net that could include blacks (Skocpol 1995: 218–19).
In 1962 as part of Kennedy’s poverty programme the scheme gave money to moth-
ers as well as the children. It began to become the target of popular criticism for
several reasons:
r The substantial growth in the number of lone parent households.
r ‘Welfare mothers’ were seen as ‘a suspect social class, living apart from middle
class norms regarding marriage and child bearing’ (Brodkin 2006).
692 howard glennerster
r Though numerically most recipients were not black the common perception was
that they were.
r It was a trend many felt had been encouraged by the welfare system (Murray
1984).
r Costs tripled between 1965 and 1970 making the programme a target for any party
or President trying to reduce taxes.
Several attempts were made to contain the growth of welfare roles from President
Nixon’s time on (King 1996). His Family Assistance Plan, essentially a national neg-
ative income tax scheme, was defeated in the Senate Finance Committee dominated
by southern Democrats who were convinced work incentives would be undermined.
Various programmes to encourage work through training and support did get legis-
lated but proved very ineffective. President Carter tried again, giving more emphasis
to training and creating public service jobs. But fears about perverse incentives, lack
of harsh enough penalties to satisfy the right, and low minimum income guarantees
that did not satisfy the left, helped defeat the plan. Above all the old regional divisions
between members from the north and the south in Congress persisted (King 1996).
Reagan’s administration had also set about reducing claims on welfare first by
tightening eligibility rules. The Family Support Act 1988 required states to help moth-
ers into work in a variety of ways such as training, transport, and childcare. However,
it was the federal government’s strategy of permitting states to try tougher methods,
including caps on the time recipients could be on welfare, that really began to move
the debate and local practice.
This gave Clinton the chance to turn welfare into a federal campaign issue. He
embraced ‘welfare reform’ in his bid for the centre ground. In his original presi-
dential campaign he used the slogan ‘ending welfare as we know it’ to distinguish
himself from the old ‘tax and spend’ Democratic Party. Research by liberal academics
(Ellwood and Bane 1986) had suggested that mothers, children, and taxpayers would
benefit if sufficient inducements could be introduced to get them back into work
including adequate childcare, health care, and tax-subsidized low wages. This gave
Clinton the intellectual basis for a break with the old Democratic past and gave
an opening for some kind of cross-party agreement and agenda change (Weaver
2000). Many American liberals and feminists saw Ellwood’s (1988) support for work
requirements as a betrayal of poor mothers (Orloff 2001).
However, Clinton’s strategy and American ideas clearly influenced Blair and Brown
(Deacon 2002). Welfare reform could be used to help distinguish New from ‘old’
Labour and much of the language and ideas found their way into New Labour policy
(King and Wickham-Jones 1999).
37.3.2 The British Case
What was common to both countries was the rise in the scale of lone parenthood
and the belief that benefit policy had helped bring this about. The USA and the
welfare reform 693
UK had more lone parent families than most Western nations and had seen the
fastest growth (Kiernan, Land, and Lewis 1998). One of Blair’s first acts in 1997
was to adopt Conservative plans to abolish the lone parent premium—a higher
benefit introduced by a previous Labour government. He accepted the Conserva-
tive case that this was a perverse incentive that encouraged lone parenthood. To
abolish it would emphasize the ‘new’ in New Labour. So far a parallel can be
drawn with the US story. Yet, despite the similarity in political slogans and social
phenomena, the institutional histories of welfare provision in Britain were very
different.
What had emerged after the Second World War in the UK was a nationally admin-
istered and financed safety net (National Assistance) which may have been set low but
did include all citizens in need and for the most part catered for older people—the
deserving poor—not as in the USA, a stigmatized minority. This universally available
safety net had always been balanced by a requirement that recipients seek work or
face penalties. The 1948 National Assistance Act regulations and those of its successor
the Supplementary Benefit Commission were tough. Unemployment Review Officers
reviewed the cases of those out of work for six months in the case of older workers
and three months for younger people under forty-five. They could call on medical
advice. If convinced someone was not seeking work they could prosecute. Such a
person could have their benefits reduced, be prosecuted, fined, put on probation or
in prison (Cmnd. 6615 1976). Others could be sent to ‘Re-establishment Centres’ to
recover the work habit and train for a new occupation. Thus, conditions had always
been applied to the receipt of assistance for most of those of working age. They had
become impossible to enforce during the years of very high unemployment in the
Thatcher era.
By the 1990s the prime political concern in the UK was with high male unemploy-
ment, especially of young people. Layard (1997), asked to advise the incoming Labour
government, argued that what distinguished the UK from its European neighbours
was the scale of long-term unemployment. This was not just costly but made it
very difficult to control inflation. The reasons lay, it was argued, in the newly lax
administration of benefits. This situation had arisen not from any very clear policy
design but from the very difficulty of requiring recipients to seek work when there
had been large-scale unemployment in the 1980s. Much of the reform effort was thus
directed at the long-term unemployed and the young—quite different targets from
those of the USA.
In the case of lone parents the tougher strategy was to backfire. The public assis-
tance rules set after the Second World War reflected the view that the child’s best
interests were served by the mother being at home, whoever she was (Lewis 2002).
The idea of forcing women with young children into the labour force affronted
much conservative as well as liberal opinion. The proposal to abolish the lone parent
premium in the first months of Blair’s term caused the biggest Labour backbench
revolt since opposition to the IMF-imposed spending cuts in 1976. From then on Blair
and Brown trod very carefully. New rules required the parent, usually the mother, to
attend a work-related interview as the child neared five and she was advised about
694 howard glennerster
paid work possibilities. If job prospects were poor she would be advised about ways
to improve her work opportunities—training, considering a different range of jobs,
information about job-related benefits, or arrangements for childcare. There were no
threats or sanctions, merely advice. Such a parent was assigned a personal adviser like
all the other categories of benefit recipients under the reforms. This advice was widely
appreciated and the results, though not dramatic, were worth it in cost–benefit terms
(McKnight 2000; Gregg and Harkness 2003).
The age at which such interviews were required was steadily reduced and their
frequency grew. In Labour’s third term the strategy sharpened markedly (Cm.
7130, 2007). From October 2008 lone parents whose youngest child is over twelve
were longer entitled to income support. They may become eligible for a Jobseek-
ers Allowance and hence job search requirements. From 2010 that age will fall to
seven. Even that will be older than the benefit rules in almost all other OECD
countries.
The more positive side of the policy meant that low-income families in work have
had those incomes raised by a tax credit partly modelled on the US earned income
tax credit scheme and by a minimum wage.
Numbers of lone parents on benefit fell from nearly a million in 1997 to 775,000
in 2007. That was nothing like the halving in welfare roles that had occurred in
the USA (Haskins 2006). Much more worrying to the Treasury was the larger and
rising numbers of those on long-term sickness benefits (Nickell and Quintini 2002).
The government tightened the rules for gaining invalidity benefit, newly named the
Employment and Support Allowance. It involves stricter medical tests, help back into
work for those who can work, and more money for those who are unable to work
again. These changes took effect in 2008.
Waldfogel (2007) has compared the outcomes of the two reform strategies as they
affected families. Reductions in child poverty occurred in both countries but to a
larger extent in the UK. In the USA such reductions as there were came about as a
result of increases in paid work. In the UK the reduction in poverty was primarily
the result of higher benefits. In the USA higher lone parent family incomes went very
largely in meeting the costs of work—travel, childcare, mothers’ clothing—and were
not spent on the children. In the UK most of the higher income was spent on child-
related features of the family budget—children’s clothing, toys, fruit and vegetables,
books, and magazines.
Critics argue that US-style welfare reform sprang from a misdiagnosed prob-
lem and a false solution foisted on a weak section of the population by powerful
economic interests, male politicians, and a racially prejudiced electorate. The lone
parent ‘problem’ was misdiagnosed because the definition of work was limited to the
formal labour market. It ignored the crucial contribution of women in producing and
educating healthy future citizens (Pateman 2005). Welfare reform ought to involve an
as-of-right citizen’s income, at least for mothers. This would enable mothers who
wished to stay at home to bring up their children if they so wished regardless of their
married status. There is limited political support for this view in either country, at
least for the present.
welfare reform 695
37.4 What is New?
.............................................................................................................................................
We have argued that the history of the past thirty years has not produced an entirely
‘new politics’ of welfare. It has not been a story of declining expenditure or even of
declining state responsibility. Changes have taken place in the nature of state involve-
ment as society has changed. Consumers have become more concerned with quality
and responsiveness. This has all made the management of state welfare services
more demanding. But a process of political learning, the interaction between ideas
generated by academic and political elites, vocal user interests, and the resistance of
professional providers have continued. Policy is importantly affected by the historical
legacy of our institutions, as we can see in the comparison of American and British
interpretations of ‘welfare reform’.
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c h a p t e r 38
.................................................................................................................
AID AND
I N T E R NAT I O NA L
D EV E LO P M E N T
.................................................................................................................
oliver morrissey
38.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
British international development policy has witnessed change since the Depart-
ment for International Development (DFID) was established in 1997, initially under
the stewardship of Clare Short as Secretary of State for International Development.
International development concerns, in particular reducing poverty, were given a
higher profile on the domestic political agenda than had previously been the case, the
aid budget was increased significantly, and initiatives in aid policy have been espoused
and promoted. Britain has emerged as a donor that is prepared to take a lead on aid
policy thinking, and changes in aid policy have distinguished and identified British
international development policy since 1997. The changes have not been radical, and
often the differences between Britain and other donors or its British predecessor are
subtle, relating to how policy is implemented. This chapter argues that neverthe-
less some of the developments are significant, concentrating on aid because policy
implementation is under the direct control of the British government, specifically
DFID.
Some benchmarks are needed to identify distinctive elements of policy; while some
comparisons are made with its predecessor, the main contrasts in this chapter are
drawn between DFID and the World Bank (as representing mainstream development
policy). Since the late 1990s the World Bank has promoted aid selectivity, favouring
700 oliver morrissey
countries that were pursuing policies conducive to economic growth (World Bank
1998). Economic growth was seen as the prerequisite for development and poverty
reduction and donors were viewed as having limited influence over the policy choices
implemented by recipient countries and limited ability to ensure that aid was spent
in the way intended by donors. Thus, donors should select recipients according to
the policies they were implementing rather than trying to use aid to influence these
policies. Although DFID did not openly disagree with the World Bank aid proposals,
nor with the received wisdom on the types of economic policies conducive for growth,
aspects of the aid policies implemented by DFID differed from the Bank approach.
In particular, there was recognition that growth was not the only means to achieve
poverty reduction and that governments with a commitment to tackle poverty could
be trusted to use aid sensibly, even if they did not necessarily meet the Bank’s selection
criteria. One way of characterizing the difference is that DFID policy placed relatively
greater emphasis on the needs of poor countries for assistance in their strategy to
reduce poverty, whereas the World Bank placed greater emphasis on a growth-led
poverty reduction strategy.
This chapter analyses the evolution of British international development policy
under DFID, particularly since the early 2000s, as revealed in White Papers and other
policy documents, relating these to practice. Unlike earlier studies such as Morrissey,
Smith, and Horesh (1992), this is not an analysis of aid policy-making; we do not assess
the influence of individual actors or political processes. Rather, by looking at policy
statements and actions we infer DFID’s intentions and contrast DFID’s policy actions
with those of other donors. One implication is that we cannot claim to identify why
DFID chose particular policy options or actions, or which actors were instrumental
in choices (although we offer suggestions in the final section), but we can assess if
DFID established an identity in aid policy that distinguished it from other donors.
The structure of the chapter is as follows. The second section provides the historical
and global context, sketching the changing position of the international development
agency within Whitehall and major developments in global thinking on aid and
development policy. The third section briefly reviews the organization of DFID as
it relates to aid policy and reviews some trends in aid volumes. In the next two
sections DFID policy is contrasted with mainstream thinking (as represented by the
World Bank): the fourth section covers aid allocation for poverty reduction, while
the fifth addresses the emphasis on partnerships rather than conditionality. Two core
arguments are made in these sections. First, whereas the World Bank approach to aid
for poverty reduction emphasizes growth and economic policy, DFID policy is closer
to an alternative approach that emphasizes spending aid on social sector services
that benefit the poor. Second, whereas the World Bank favours increasing aid to
countries pursuing approved economic policies (selectivity), DFID has been willing
to increase aid to countries showing a commitment to poverty reduction (such as
through how they allocate aid and public spending). The following section considers
aspects of broader development policy, in particular how Britain has perceived the
role of trade relations with developing countries. The final section considers why
DFID chose certain approaches and concludes with a discussion of current policy
aid and international development 701
statements that emphasize economic growth and, in certain respects, suggest a shift
of British development policy thinking to closer alignment with the mainstream. This
raises the question of whether there will be a lasting legacy of DFID policy.
38.2 Context and Background
.............................................................................................................................................
As befits a colonial power, Britain has a long history of aid and engagement with
developing countries (before and after independence). The notion of providing reg-
ular aid to colonies to support development planning dates to the 1930s and was
formulated in the first Colonial Development and Welfare Act, 1940 (Morgan 1980a).
Until the mid-1950s almost all aid was to colonies, was untied so that it could be
spent locally, and typically financed infrastructure projects or technical assistance
(especially in education). Loans to independent states were tied, so that money would
support British exports, and this was extended to aid to colonies from 1962, from
when most became independent. During the 1960s almost 90 per cent of bilateral
aid went to Commonwealth countries, although this fell to around 65 per cent in the
1970s and 1980s (Morrissey, Smith, and Horesh 1992: 7). Thus, from the establishment
of the Ministry for Overseas Development (ODM) in 1964 a major strategic objective
of aid was to support British trade (and, to a lesser extent, foreign policy objectives).
It is interesting to reflect that it was an incoming Labour government that established
the ODM, with a belief that the ministry should be strong to show a commitment to
developing countries (Morgan 1980b), and that the first minister was Barbara Castle,
a strong-willed and popular female politician. History does indeed repeat itself.
British aid policy in the early decades was similar to most other donors: all donors
focused on aid for projects and technical assistance, providing profile to the donor
even when not actually supporting donor exports. There were differences in the
countries to which donors allocated most of their aid, but these reflected foreign
policy and/or commercial concerns: the British and French were most concerned with
their ex-colonies, the USA was concerned with the ‘fight against communism’, and the
Scandinavians tended to support socialist-oriented regimes such as that in Tanzania.
Until the 1970s, the broad focus of most donors was that aid should finance projects
to support and promote industrialization-led development, with less emphasis on
agriculture and social services (particularly education rather than health). The need
to address poverty only came to the fore in 1973, promoted by Robert McNamara as
president of the World Bank (Britain followed suit in the 1975 White Paper), but the
focus remained on projects (such as rural integrated projects).
A shift in global aid policy began in the early 1980s as the World Bank introduced
structural adjustment programmes; aid became overtly conditional—specified eco-
nomic policy reforms were required as part of the aid programme. Where the World
Bank went most bilateral donors followed: even if they did not offer conditional aid
702 oliver morrissey
themselves, they required developing countries to have an agreement in place with
the World Bank. The desirability and effectiveness of conditional lending became
hotly contested, critics arguing that the conditions (what came to be known as the
‘Washington Consensus’—Williamson 1990) were at best inappropriate and at worst
damaging for developing countries while supporters argued that the reforms would
work if only countries implemented them. This debate is beyond our scope here
(see Mosley, Harrigan, and Toye 1991), but two observations are relevant. First, the
Thatcher government in Britain in the 1980s was ideologically committed to the
market-oriented principles of adjustment and at the global level British aid policy
was in line with the Bank’s approach. Second, donors, especially the Bank, tended to
attribute any failures to a lack of commitment from developing countries. The lack
of political will to implement reform was soon reinterpreted as a problem due to
poor governance and a lack of democracy; economic conditionality transformed into
political conditionality (see Stokke 1995).
The 1980s also witnessed changes in British aid policy. The ODM had been incor-
porated into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in 1970 and became the
Overseas Development Administration (ODA). The Labour government of 1974–9
again restored the ODA to ministry status, but the Conservatives moved it back into
the FCO in 1979. Although individual ministers were successful in giving particular
concerns priority (Chris Patten was the first to emphasize environmental concerns
and Linda Chalker added emphasis on women), British aid in the 1980s was largely
driven by foreign policy and commercial (export) interests, although it delivered
neither very well (Morrissey, Smith, and Horesh 1992). The most dramatic change
was the decline in the value of aid from 0.48 per cent of GNP in 1978 to 0.31 per cent
in 1989, at a time when other donors were maintaining their aid levels (Morrissey,
Smith, and Horesh 1992: 90); while the rhetoric supported exporters, less money was
available to support these interests.
The formation of the Department for International Development, with Clare Short
as Secretary of State for International Development having a seat in Cabinet, to
replace the ODA was among the first measures implemented by the Labour gov-
ernment of Tony Blair elected on 1 May 1997. Short not only provided DFID with
clear and strong leadership, she was also a powerful advocate of development policy
within the government. DFID was soon involved actively in policy formulation and
a White Paper (DFID 1997) was produced as early as November 1997 with another
three years later (DFID 2000). The ‘Short–Blair years’ (Morrissey 2005a) saw the
emergence of DFID as a leading donor that promoted an approach to international
development policy that was often relatively independent from the global donor
community. Although Clare Short resigned in 2003 (ultimately over the invasion of
Iraq), the impetus she bestowed on DFID was maintained by her successors, Baroness
Amos and then Hilary Benn, with another White Paper (DFID 2006). When Gordon
Brown became Prime Minister in 2007 Douglas Alexander was appointed as Minister
for International Development; the ‘Alexander–Brown’ years are showing signs of a
shift in DFID policy, with increased emphasis being placed on economic growth (see
Section 38.7, below).
aid and international development 703
The various White Papers allow one to trace the evolution of DFID, hence British,
policy. The first (DFID 1997) was the incoming government’s statement of inter-
national development policy, with the aspiration in the title of ‘Eliminating World
Poverty’. Aid should be guided by the interests of the poor in developing countries,
and should be targeted at the poorest countries with the objective of promoting devel-
opment. However, the broader development policy presented was a rather uncritical
acceptance of the benefits of trade and investment liberalization (Morrissey 1998).
The second (DFID 2000) had the same title, but with the subtitle ‘Making Globalisa-
tion Work for the Poor’ there was recognition that liberalization need not necessarily
benefit poor countries. The emphasis was on what Britain would do to help achieve
international development targets, not only as an aid donor but also by exerting
influence on other donors and multilateral agencies, in particular regarding trade
policy. Developing countries too were given responsibility to show their commitment
by adopting poverty reduction strategies. The third White Paper (DFID 2006) had
the subtitle ‘Making Governance Work for the Poor’ and placed greater emphasis on
institutions and government in developing countries (with renewed emphasis on the
importance of economic growth), with Britain targeting aid on social sectors and
human development.
The enhanced political status of international development under New Labour
was matched by funding. Gordon Brown, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, showed
a commitment to provide funds to support developing countries and reduce poverty,
and DFID fared well with the real value of British aid doubling over ten years.
In 1998 Britain ranked fifth among bilateral donors in terms of the volume of aid
whereas by 2007 it ranked second behind the USA. The orientation of aid policy
changed, with much greater emphasis on using aid effectively to reduce poverty in
the poorest countries and an increased proportion of aid being focused on poor
countries. This orientation can also be seen in the Commission for Africa (2005) and
the poverty-reduction commitments agreed at the G8 summit in Gleneagles in June
2005. Although both of these are initiatives associated with the then Prime Minister,
Tony Blair, they had DFID involvement and were statements of British international
development policy.
38.3 Organization and Aid Volumes
.............................................................................................................................................
The establishment of DFID in 1997 gave international development an independent
department in Whitehall and a voice at the cabinet; under Clare Short until 2003, this
was a clear voice (see Morrissey 2005a for a review of this period). Previously, the core
function of the ODA was in effect administering the aid budget; development policy
was essentially a mix, often uneasy, between diplomatic interests of the FCO and
business priorities of the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI). The relationship
704 oliver morrissey
with the FCO, which became the Department of Foreign Affairs, may have been made
easier when DFID became an independent department. It is likely, however, that the
relationship with the DTI became more strained as DFID was strongly committed to
not using aid to support British exporters; indeed, the untying of aid so that it was not
linked to British exporters was considered an early success of DFID (Morrissey 1998).
Interestingly, DFID forged a close relationship with Her Majesty’s Treasury (HMT),
partly because Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer was committed to debt
relief and helping the poorest countries (and DFID’s budget had been increasing),
and partly because HMT established its own International Poverty Reduction Team
that worked with DFID on policy issues. International development policy became
politically more important because it had a dedicated department, independent of
the FCO and DTI and largely aligned with the Treasury.
There was increased focus on policies to promote development and poverty reduc-
tion, especially in poor countries, rather than the more traditional focus that could
be described as ‘spending aid monies’. This change in focus was associated with a
shift from viewing the aid agency as responsible for administration to viewing DFID
as responsible for delivering development. For DFID, aid should be deployed to
promote growth, development, and poverty reduction, and officials had a role to
ensure that the effectiveness of British aid could be improved. A practical manifes-
tation of this shift in goal was an increase in the number of young professionals,
economists in particular, employed in DFID, and a strengthening of their in-house
capacity to research, analyse, and promulgate policy. The process of policy dialogue in
which DFID engaged included consultations, workshops, and commissioned papers
with academics, NGOs, and the broader development community. Thus, while there
was almost no external consultation in preparing DFID (1997), DFID (2000; 2006)
involved wide-ranging consultation. Among donor agencies, DFID provided a voice
on development and aid policy that was typically informed and often innovative. 1
However, the differences mostly related to the practice of aid delivery and engagement
with recipients rather than broad views of what was required to achieve development;
the types of economic policies supported by DFID were entirely consistent with those
advocated by the World Bank.
The objectives of DFID to promote development led to a focus on building
partnerships with recipients and pursuing agreed development targets, negotiated
relatively openly with recipient countries. DFID negotiated agreed objectives and
targets with recipients, and resulting country strategies were made publicly available.
Arguably, DFID interpreted partnership as building a strong relationship based on
mutual respect. The approach to partnership was reinforced by the increase in the
number of DFID local offices and in the number of DFID employees based overseas
(Morrissey 2005a: 165). Although DFID shared the general support for ‘economic
liberalization’ as the route to growth and development, it arguably provided greater
flexibility than other donors in how this was applied in agreements with individual
1
For example, the two presentations on policy issues at the OECD-DAC ‘Informal Experts Meeting
on Aid Effectiveness’ in 2001 were by DFID staff and one of these (Beynon 2001) was quite critical of the
World Bank approach.
aid and international development 705
countries. Nevertheless, DFID often attracted criticism, especially from NGOs, for
being too closely aligned with World Bank liberalization policies (e.g. promoting
privatization of utilities).
DFID inherited an aid budget equivalent to 0.26 per cent of gross national income
in 1997 (compared to 0.27 in 1990) and this was increased to 0.32 per cent of gross
national income in 2000 (IDC 2002: 30); by 2006 it had risen to 0.51 per cent of
gross national income. The policy statements of DFID suggested that aid allocation
to the poorest countries should increase most, as these were countries with high
poverty, established relationships with Britain, and in need of assistance. This has
happened to some extent: there was a noticeable increase in the share of bilateral aid
going to low-income countries (at a time when bilateral aid was taking an increasing
share of the aid budget, from just over 40 per cent in 2000–1 to over 50 per cent
in 2006–7), which accounted for over two-thirds of the total by 2007 (Table 38.1).
Table 38.1 also shows that an increasing share was allocated to Africa, especially sub-
Saharan Africa (SSA), and Asia, with reductions to Latin America and other regions.
While total bilateral aid increased by 47 per cent, aid to Africa increased by over 50
per cent and to Asia by over 60 per cent (largely accounted for by Afghanistan and
Iraq).
It is difficult to compare the figures in Table 38.1 directly with earlier years as the
regional classifications and precise aid definitions used in published statistics change
often. Nevertheless, in 1990–1 some 35 per cent of bilateral (country programme) aid
went to Africa, rising to 41 per cent in 1997–8 and 55 per cent in 2000–1 (Morrissey
2005a: 168). The allocation to Africa has fallen slightly as a share of the total since the
early 2000s: 42 per cent in 2002–3, 37 per cent in 2003–4, and 44 per cent in 2006–7
(DFID 2008c: 25). The reason is evident in the composition of the ten major aid recip-
ients. In 1998–9 three were in Asia (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) and the others
were Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda (DFID
2001: 159–60). In 2004–5, Pakistan, Kenya, Mozambique, and Rwanda dropped out
Table 38.1 Allocation of bilateral aid, 2002–3 and 2006–7
Bilateral programme 2002–3 2006–7 Change
%
£m % £m %
Africa 741 42.5 1,135 44.3 53.2
Of which sub-Saharan Africa 703 40.3 1,107 43.2 57.5
Americas 95 5.4 62 2.4 −34.7
Asia 542 31.1 881 34.4 62.5
Total 1,745 2,562 46.8
Low-income countries 1,024 58.7 1,725 67.3 68.5
Notes: Change is over 2002–3 to 2006–7 as percentage of 2002–3 figure. Regional shares are as percentage
of bilateral country programme (Total) and do not add up to 100 due to omitted categories.
Source: Statistics on International Development 2002–3–2006–7, available at www.DFID.gov.uk.
706 oliver morrissey
of the top ten, replaced by Afghanistan (reconstruction), Ethiopia, Iraq, and Sudan
(humanitarian aid). By 2006–7, Ghana and Malawi also dropped out (to positions
11 and 13 respectively) and Congo DR and Nigeria entered (DFID 2008c: 27). The
intention of DFID to increase aid to the poorest African countries was somewhat
thwarted by political realities determined on a broader political stage: reconstruc-
tion aid to Afghanistan, reconstruction and debt relief to Iraq, and debt relief to
Nigeria.
The prominence of the first two of these countries highlights another development.
Traditionally, challenges to the (policy) autonomy of the aid agency arose regarding
the FCO and DTI, but since 9/11 relations with the Ministry of Defence (MoD)
have become important. This is a complicated and under-researched area where the
division between the aid and defence budgets becomes blurred, where the MoD is
sometimes expected to undertake what is effectively an aid agency role, and where
DFID staff face the challenge of working in conflict environments. Whilst Afghanistan
and Iraq are prominent examples, related issues (especially the last one) arise in many
African countries. DFID (following earlier ODA initiatives) showed a strong, and
relatively successful, commitment to Mozambique and Rwanda; Sierra Leone is a case
where the military played a major role in ending conflict and DFID invested heavily in
reconstruction (effectively funding the budget). It remains to be seen if lessons have
been learned to apply elsewhere, such as Congo DR.
38.4 Aid Policy: Aid and
Poverty Reduction
.............................................................................................................................................
Aid in its various facets is central to the implementation of development policy.
Traditionally, aid effectiveness has been evaluated against impacts on economic per-
formance and in particular on economic growth. Morrissey (2006) characterizes
the current state of the debate as being between those who view the glass as half
full and those who view it as half empty. The pessimists (half empty) contend that
aid is generally not effective in contributing to growth, although countries with
good economic policies are able to utilize aid effectively; this is essentially the view
promoted by the World Bank (1998) and accepted by many donors and researchers
(especially those based in the USA). 2 The optimists (half full) counter that aid is in
general effective, independent of policy, but the impact on growth is quite small; this
view has no institutional champion but is promoted by many researchers, especially
2
In this context it is generally the World Bank that defines what constitutes ‘good policy’ and this
could broadly be considered as the so-called Washington Consensus, which has been heavily criticized
(see Jomo and Fine 2006). As observed above, however, Britain or DFID have never disagreed strongly or
openly with these broad economic policy prescriptions.
aid and international development 707
European, and has to a large extent been accepted by DFID. 3 Recently donors and
researchers have placed more emphasis on the impact of aid on poverty reduction,
the explicit objective of British aid policy.
Poverty and poverty reduction can be defined and interpreted in many different
ways. One approach is to focus on aggregate country measures of income poverty,
typically the headcount ratio (the proportion of the population below some income
poverty line) or simply the headcount (the number of poor). In this context reducing
poverty means reducing the headcount which means increasing incomes (of some of
the poor). As there is a strong correlation between economic growth (rising incomes)
and poverty reduction (falling headcount), achieving growth is typically advocated as
the core strategy to reduce income poverty. An alternative approach focuses, at least
conceptually, on a broader definition of poverty accounting for non-income aspects
such as health status and access to health services, education, and clean water, for
example; in economic language, a common term used would be the welfare of the
poor (which includes income, but also includes access to non-pecuniary goods and
services that provide utility or benefit).
Associated with the dichotomies outlined above (aid pessimists who tend also to
adopt income poverty and aid optimists more prone to think in welfare terms) we
characterize two approaches to directing aid towards poverty reduction. The first
focuses on the allocation of aid across recipients so as to maximize the reduction
in the number of poor and is closely associated with the World Bank. Given the
assumptions that donors are unable effectively to target aid on poor households, or
to ensure that aid finances pro-poor public spending, and that growth is the only
sustainable way to reduce poverty, donors ‘can only affect poverty by raising aggre-
gate income’ (Collier and Dollar 2002: 1483); proponents of this approach advocate
reallocating aid to those recipients where the potential of aid to increase growth is
greatest. The second approach focuses on how aid is used, in particular aid-financed
government spending: aid can be used to finance particular projects, interventions,
or types of government spending, some of which are more likely to benefit (increase
the welfare of) the poor than others. Proponents argue that aid used to increase
the provision of public goods offers the greatest potential to improve the welfare of the
poor (and in doing so can contribute to growth objectives); policy and growth exist
in the background and aid is important because it finances government spending or
delivers public goods directly. 4
The first approach can be said to encapsulate a World Bank discourse on aid and
poverty reduction that revolves around growth-promoting policies. Contributions
in this literature create a discourse by explicitly repeating, or implicitly accepting, a
number of propositions: aid is only effective in countries with good policies, good
policies are those that promote growth, good policies require good governance, and
3
For example, ‘aid helps reduce poverty by increasing economic growth, improving governance and
increasing access to public services’ (DFID 2006: 12).
4
The two approaches are not necessarily inconsistent; for example, one can recognize the importance
of growth (and that certain policies are conducive to growth) but target aid to finance public goods. In
practice, however, the approaches have been presented as being distinct.
708 oliver morrissey
growth is a prerequisite for poverty reduction. Collier and Dollar (2001; 2002; 2004)
provide a coherent and persuasive strategy for increasing the effectiveness of aid, in
contributing to growth and to reducing poverty, based on selective reallocation to
countries with better governance and economic policies. Emphasis is on the policies
supported and promoted by donors; Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) are
perhaps a dominant current example of this discourse. 5
This approach can be presented in a four-step argument (Morrissey 2006). First,
the amount of aid alone has no effect on growth (World Bank 1998; Burnside and
Dollar 2000). Second, aid makes a positive contribution to growth only in those
countries with good policy: ‘the interaction of aid and policy is good for growth,
so that aid enhances the growth effect of policy and good policy increases the growth
effect of aid’ (Collier and Dollar 2001: 1787–8). Third, attaching policy reform con-
ditionality to aid does not work, i.e. donor leverage does not ensure that govern-
ments implement good policies or pro-poor spending. Donors ‘are unable to exert
significant net influence on policies and institutions, and are unable to by-pass the
government in implementing expenditures’ (Collier and Dollar 2004: F245). Fourth,
and as a consequence, (increased) aid should be given to those recipients already
implementing good policies—the selectivity approach.
The Collier and Dollar (especially 2002; hereafter CD) poverty-efficient aid alloca-
tion model estimates the allocation of aid across countries that would maximize the
number of people lifted out of poverty. This optimization is based on estimates of
country parameters for the impact of growth on poverty reduction, and this impact
is conditional on policy. Thus, aid should be reallocated to countries with growth-
promoting policies, including good governance. ‘The general point is that the optimal
allocation of aid for a country depends on its level of poverty, the elasticity of poverty
with respect to income, and the quality of its policies’ (Collier and Dollar 2002: 1489).
Other avenues for reducing poverty are precluded given donors assumed inability to
target the poor (directly or through public spending) or affect income distribution.
Although the CD approach places considerable emphasis on the importance of
good policy, this factor transpires to be of minimal actual importance in determining
their poverty-reducing aid allocation. A DFID economist, Beynon (2002), reanalysed
the data and showed that even in CD’s own model the impact of reallocating aid
on the basis of poverty criteria is bigger than reallocating aid according to policy
criteria, i.e. the reallocation is driven by the cross-country incidence of poverty rather
than by variations in policy. Collier and Dollar (2004: F247) acknowledge this and
point out that the ‘good policy’ criterion effectively operates between countries with
similar poverty levels to prevent allocation away from those with fairly good policies
(e.g. Uganda) towards others with relatively bad policies (e.g. Sudan). 6 Nevertheless,
the implementation of the CD approach implies that donors adopting selectivity (e.g.
5
While one may challenge many aspects of PRSPs, in particular some of the specific economic
policies included, one achievement has been to place poverty firmly on the political agenda in poor
countries. Booth (2003) provides an informed analysis.
6
These examples are salient in our context as Uganda (largely because of strong commitment to
poverty reduction) and Sudan (for humanitarian reasons) were major recipients of British aid
aid and international development 709
the USA and Netherlands stated they would do so) should tend to allocate aid in line
with recipient scores on policy and governance indicators (Hout 2007a).
As its aid policy developed, DFID diverged from this World Bank approach. As
it adopted a somewhat more optimistic view of aid effectiveness, greater emphasis
was placed on delivering aid-financed services (what aid was spent on) to promote
poverty reduction as compared to the emphasis on economic growth (or more
broadly the recipient policy environment in which aid was given). In effect, DFID
placed less emphasis on the economic policies a country was pursuing (as long as
they were broadly acceptable) and more on the commitment to allocate government
spending in ways that contribute to poverty reduction. As a concrete example, DFID
was one of the first donors to offer aid in the form of General Budget Support (GBS),
effectively trusting that recipients will spend the money appropriately rather than
trying to specify how elements of aid should be spent (for a discussion of GBS see
Koeberle, Stavreski, and Wallister 2006), and is the donor most supportive of GBS; by
2006–7, some 18 per cent of DFID’s bilateral aid was allocated as (general or sector)
budget support with the view that this promoted poverty reduction (DFID 2008d).
In the ‘public goods approach’ to aid, well-being can be interpreted as increased
access of the poor to public social services (especially health, education, and sani-
tation) in addition to increasing the consumption of the poor or reducing income
poverty (Gomanee et al. 2005). Aid can improve well-being directly (through donor-
managed projects), indirectly through growth (if this is in some sense pro-poor), and
indirectly through aid finance for the provision of public goods (especially public
expenditure on social sectors). There are two general arguments for (increasing)
spending on social sectors. First, it finances the provision of, and therefore increases
access to, public goods, which would be underprovided otherwise, and contributes
to welfare; to the extent that the latter includes improving the quality of human
capital this contributes to growth. Second, there are equity arguments as spending on
social sectors is the type of government expenditure most likely to increase aggregate
welfare and to benefit the poor. This approach was evident in DFID (2006) with the
commitment that 50 per cent of bilateral aid should be allocated to public services for
the poor, in particular providing clean water and sanitation and supporting greater
access (e.g. eliminating the need to rely on user fees for primary education and
health). This is also reflected in DFID’s approach to GBS; in general this is provided
to countries demonstrating a commitment to social sector spending.
A major concern is that whilst aid can increase the level of social spending, this
spending is not very effective in delivering public goods and services (especially in
ensuring access for the poor). The available evidence suggests that the efficiency of
spending is quite low in poor countries, although there is fairly robust evidence that
aid does increase welfare and this effect appears to be greater for low-income than for
middle-income countries (Gomanee et al. 2005). The need to address this problem
underpins the emphasis on ‘making governance work for the poor’ in DFID (2006).
throughout the period. Uganda was the first country to draw up a PRSP and was also the first country to
which DFID granted general budget support.
710 oliver morrissey
Thus, the way in which DFID differs from the ‘mainstream’ (World Bank) view is
in the mechanisms it adopts for aid delivery—GBS and a focus on social spending.
In this context, the World Bank tends to the view that donors cannot ensure that
recipients will allocate aid to appropriate public spending and are therefore, like many
other donors, wary of GBS.
38.5 Aid Policy: Selectivity and
Conditionality
.............................................................................................................................................
As developed from the 1980s, conditional lending by the IMF and World Bank, and
bilateral donors that followed suit, required recipients to implement specified (ini-
tially economic but from the 1990s including democratization and governance) policy
reforms in return for being granted aid. The reforms did not have to be fully imple-
mented prior to funds being released, as the practice was to release funds in stages as
conditions were met. In principle, this would allow the donor to assess if countries
were undertaking the required actions, and to deny resources if they failed to do so.
Although conditionality has been central to donor–recipient relationships for more
than two decades, as outlined above it has not been demonstrably successful and has
attracted criticism (some arguing that it is the conditions that were wrong, others
that recipients failed to implement the policy conditions to a significant degree).
There is evidence that, over time, countries receiving aid subject to conditionality
have implemented reforms so that policy has moved in the direction, although not at
the speed, advocated by donors (Morrissey 2004).
The general criticisms of conditionality associated with policy-based lending have
led to considerable rethinking of how best to link aid with leverage for policy reform
(see Koeberle et al. 2005). Two approaches emerged as front-runners for a new form
of conditionality. The first is selectivity, mentioned above and as advocated by many in
the World Bank and particularly evident in US views, where conditions (in the form
of prior actions or indicators, such as for governance or corruption) are used as a
means of selecting the most deserving recipients and excluding the least deserving. As
indicated above, selectivity is based on the premise that countries with ‘better policies’
(defined in some way by the donor) will make the best use of aid, therefore (more) aid
should be allocated to such countries. The Netherlands is an example of one donor
that adopted this approach, although it did not appear to have a significant effect on
actual aid allocation (Hout 2007a).
A second alternative approach is ‘conditionality with a light touch’, where the
emphasis is on dialogue with recipients and monitoring the use of aid and the comple-
mentary policies being implemented to enhance aid effectiveness (Morrissey 2005c).
This is the approach adopted by DFID, who placed less emphasis on selectivity and
aid and international development 711
more emphasis on monitoring the use of aid to engage more effectively with recipients
with different policy environments (such as fragile states). From the outset, DFID
was inclined towards a monitoring with dialogue approach based on partnership
rather than selectivity: ‘genuine partnership between poorer countries and the donor
community are needed if poverty is to be addressed effectively and in a coherent
way’ (DFID 1997: 37). The obvious concern is how donors can be transparent in
demonstrating the way recipient governments can qualify as partners (Maxwell and
Riddell 1998). It is not sufficient that partners are revealed ex post as being those with
whom an aid agreement is signed. There must be a mechanism for announcing in
advance how recipients can demonstrate their suitability as partners. What emerged
is that recipients, by revealing commitment to poverty reduction through adopting a
PRSP (including reasonable economic policies) and allocating increased spending to
social sectors, could earn the entitlement to a partnership.
The second White Paper did not use the language of partnership but recognized
that development success ‘is dependent on developing country leadership but some of
the resources needed will have to be provided by the international community’ (DFID
2000: 14). If developing countries reveal their commitment to poverty reduction
DFID can determine that they are eligible for a partnership agreement. Thus, DFID
(2003) has a chapter on ‘Partnerships to Reduce Poverty’ and budget support is seen as
the instrument of partnership to deliver aid in countries that demonstrate their com-
mitment to poverty reduction. To target aid on the poor, emphasis is given especially
to health and education spending. This emphasis on aid to finance delivery of social
services is evident in DFID (2006), which also places the onus on recipient countries
to provide good governance (this is their side of the partnership agreement). In fact,
although DFID emphasized partnership rather than selectivity, the effect was quite
close to the implications of selectivity. Among the major European donors, Britain
was the most selective in the sense of giving most aid to the poorest countries that
performed relatively well on governance (Hout 2007b). 7
The UK government advocated partnership based on the belief ‘that it is inappro-
priate and ineffective for donors to impose policies on developing countries’ (DFID
2004: 3). Although this downplays policy conditionality, conditions may be applied to
monitor how aid resources are used and whether recipients are attempting to imple-
ment agreed policies to achieve agreed objectives. The donor–recipient relationship
may include terms and conditions attached to aid, but these should be mutually
agreed ‘within the framework of the recipient country’s own poverty strategy’, ‘linked
to poverty reduction benchmarks’, and with provisions for interrupting aid if there is
a breakdown in the partnership (DFID 2004: 6).
The differences in approach between DFID and the Bank should not be overstated
as the distinction between selectivity and monitoring is often blurred. Although DFID
did not promote the selectivity approach as advocated by the World Bank (it did not
advocate selection according to a mechanistic rule applied to policy indicators, even
7
This is in part because DFID increased aid to countries that met their side of the partnership
agreement, but should not be overstated (Sudan remained among the top recipients because of
humanitarian aid; Afghanistan and Iraq emerged as major recipients).
712 oliver morrissey
if DFID had such formulae to guide allocations), in practice it was quite selective
according to its own criteria (it increased aid to those recipients who abided by
partnership commitments). Furthermore, whilst officially the World Bank promoted
selectivity, in practice it adopted more flexible, simple, and transparent approaches
to conditionality, advocating ownership and partnership and ‘an approach based
on reputation and results’ (Koeberle et al. 2005: 66). However, prior actions (good
policies) are still viewed as an important element of conditionality, if only to signal
commitment to a particular direction of policy. Although monitoring is seen as
important, it is not usually interpreted simply as monitoring the way in which aid
is used but rather ‘monitoring has typically focused more on compliance with ex
ante conditionality than on progress, outcomes and poverty impacts’ (Koeberle et al.
2005: 74). There is a difference between what DFID has pursued in practice compared
to the selectivity proposed by the Bank.
38.6 Economic Development Policy
.............................................................................................................................................
So far we have focused on DFID’s approach to aid policy, an area over which it
has direct control, and have argued that it has often taken positions independent
of other donors (in particular the World Bank). However, DFID has also expressed
British views on broader aspects of economic development policy, especially in the
various White Papers. The first White Paper considered international development
policy in relation to economic policies, specifically trade, agriculture, and investment
(DFID 1997: 58–67), but could be considered rather naive and accepting of prevailing
development policy views (i.e. consistent with the Washington Consensus): (trade)
liberalization was advocated to ‘encourage and assist developing countries to become
more fully integrated into the multilateral system . . . [and help] developing coun-
tries build their own capacity to take advantage of globalisation’ (DFID 1997: 58).
Statements of this form were more qualified in the second White Paper: ‘support for
open trade is not to be confused with unregulated trade [and] there are substantial
inequities in the existing international trading system’ (DFID 2000: 69). In DFID
(2000) specific attention was given to the constraints facing poor countries and how
donors could help in removing these constraints. British policy was more aware of
the realities of the imbalances and inequities in global trade, even if it remained
supportive of the principles of economic liberalization and globalization, and these
themes are also present in the Commission for Africa (2005). This awareness may
reflect the consultation process behind DFID (2000) as a response to views expressed
by NGOs and researchers.
The Commission for Africa (2005, especially chapter 8) places considerable empha-
sis on trade, albeit with a strong focus on increasing exports but neglect of imports
(Morrissey 2005b), and argues that if African countries are to benefit from more
aid and international development 713
liberal trade regimes, aid is needed to finance investment, support economic policy
and institutional reform, and promote an investment environment attractive to the
private sector. 8 Aid can also be used to facilitate trade (‘aid for trade’), e.g. paying the
costs of establishing product standard boards and testing facilities or computerization
to improve Customs procedures. This reflects increasing emphasis on the private
sector in DFID policies ‘on the ground’ or in-country. For example, in Ghana and
Tanzania, as part of general support and specific measures for trade capacity building,
considerable support and emphasis is given to promoting the private sector.
A theme evident in all British development policy statements and initiatives is
the importance of a concerted and cooperative global effort. DFID (2000: 95–7)
advocated the need to reform the aid practices of the European Commission (crit-
icized because aid administration was very inefficient and not focused on poor coun-
tries), the World Bank, and the United Nations. Developed countries must all play
a role, through liberalizing access to their markets and providing increased funding,
but developing countries must also act. Although Britain has limited discretion to
implement trade policy towards developing countries (trade policy is negotiated and
implemented by the EU, and Britain is only one among the competing interests of
member states), it has played a role. Within the EU, one can infer (from the White
Papers) that Britain has been a strong advocate for recognizing the interests and
needs of developing countries, and this is important to counter the protectionist
tendencies of other member states (at the time of writing, President Sarkozy has
openly expressed strong French support for protection). It is important that Britain
has been and continues to be an advocate, globally and within the EU, of Doha being a
genuine development round. Although British support for a pro-development stance
on trade policy can be identified this cannot be related to implemented policy, in
large part because negotiations are conducted by the EU (but presumably Britain
remains influential). Where Britain could implement policy, it supported (through
aid) capacity building in developing countries for trade, trade policy-making, and
negotiation (e.g. supporting the costs for African countries to send representatives to
WTO ministerial meetings).
38.7 British Development Policy in 2008
.............................................................................................................................................
The core argument of this chapter is that although the British view of broad economic
development policy was not at variance with the mainstream (World Bank) view,
DFID aid policy was not so closely in line with the mainstream and this altered the
relationship between Britain as a donor and the recipient countries. To a greater
8
The Commission for Africa (2005) argues for a substantial increase in resources, an additional $25
billion per annum in aid to Africa to be achieved by 2010, with a further $25 billion per annum increase
by 2015. Such money has yet to materialize.
714 oliver morrissey
practical extent than most other donors, DFID followed a partnership approach;
recipient countries had an input to the agreed aid programme, and DFID was willing
to maintain relationships with countries as long as there was a sustained commitment
to growth and poverty reduction. In particular, DFID is often one of the first to
commit support to reconstruction, and the most willing to offer General Budget
Support.
The feature that distinguished DFID aid policy from the World Bank and other
donors was the recognition that poverty reduction could, at least in part, be met by
public spending on social sectors and that (some) recipient governments could be
trusted to allocate aid-financed public expenditure to these sectors. In essence, this
appears to be a belief in the redistributive qualities of public spending, a vestige of Old
Labour thinking (perhaps attributable to Clare Short). The commitment to financing
government spending to reduce poverty, recognizing that economic growth is not the
only way to reduce poverty in conjunction with acceptance that poverty has many
dimensions (not all captured by income poverty), was the distinguishing feature of
DFID aid policy as compared to most other donors, especially the World Bank. This
may not appear to be a radical distinction, but it does imply a relationship with
recipient governments guided by partnership more than by conditionality. Although
there is no space here for an adequate review, this approach is consistent with much
of the British-based research on aid management (e.g. Hubbard 2005) and aid policy
or effectiveness; some of the research is cited above, or in DFID (2000; 2006), and
others in Morrissey (2006).
Although DFID has been quite successful as an aid agency, this is not to suggest
that it has been without critics. In very broad terms, there have been two types of
criticisms. On the one hand, many have argued that DFID, and Britain and donors
more generally, have not done enough for developing countries (such arguments are
particularly associated with NGOs). Despite the promises made in the Commission
for Africa (2005) and at the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, aid volumes have not increased
since 2005. 9 Indeed, if one strips out debt relief and allocations to Afghanistan and
Iraq, aid volumes (and flows to Africa) have actually declined. A related criticism,
although it should not be applied specifically to DFID, is that rich countries have
not made the appropriate concessions to developing countries in global trade nego-
tiations: the Doha Round is repeatedly facing collapse and the intransigence of the
rich countries is a major reason. On the other hand, there are more specific criticisms
of DFID (and other donors’) practice, such as that they tend to turn a blind eye to
corruption despite their rhetoric of good governance (e.g. Hanlon 2004) or that the
‘realpolitik’ pressures of operating in conflict countries, for which aid bureaucrats are
inexperienced, undermine the ability of donors to achieve humanitarian objectives
(e.g. Marriage 2006). It is worth noting that the Conservative Party, through the
Globalization and Global Poverty Policy Group (2007: 25–45), is not very critical of
9
The ‘celebrity development advocates’ such as Geldof and Bono have done much to place global
poverty reduction on the political agenda, and have played a role in prompting strong commitments by
politicians. However, such commitments have rarely translated into action on the ground, and it is
difficult to identify practical impacts attributable to the celebrities.
aid and international development 715
DFID’s record: most of the recommendations are to refine and improve what DFID
is doing, with no major policy departures.
Recently there has been a shift in focus: while for some ten years DFID concen-
trated on social spending and poverty reduction policies, now there is a re-emerging
view that economic ‘growth is the best way to reduce poverty’ (DFID 2006: 57).
This has been reinforced in the light of ‘consistently strong evidence that rapid
and sustained growth is the single most important way to reduce poverty’ (DFID
2008a: 3). At the time of writing a major initiative relates to funding research on
growth that can be applied to inform policy as a core element in the research strategy
for 2008–13: ‘to take knowledge about what influences growth and apply it to the
priorities of developing countries. Our new International Growth Centre will intro-
duce a major new research programme to support individual countries with their
growth strategies’ (DFID 2008b: 7). Whereas implicit in the approach to aid policy
was a view that human development would contribute to growth, the emphasis now is
that growth can promote human development. ‘There is overwhelming evidence that
higher incomes lead to a better quality of life, not least in terms of the Millennium
Development Goals on health and education’ (DFID 2008a: 9).
This apparent change in emphasis need not imply a change in the way in which
aid policy is implemented. The partnership approach underpinning country strategy
papers and agreements with recipients will be maintained, as will the tendency to
focus aid on providing social services. ‘The strong links between growth and human
development are often mediated by policy choices and structural factors, such as
the priority given to investing in health and education vis-à-vis other potential
policy interventions to achieve faster growth’ (DFID 2008a: 10). Two major policies
emerged under DFID: British trade policy was fully decoupled from aid (a major,
early achievement), and aid relationships were guided by varying interpretations of
partnership (a strategy agreed between donor and recipient) with aid used primarily
to support recipient spending on delivery of public services. In the period since
DFID was established, Britain has become one of the most important and influential
donors in terms of the volume of aid and aid policy and it is this that represents
the international development legacy. DFID may not have altered global discourses
on development or the types of economic policies most widely promoted, but it has
influenced discussion of how to deliver aid and engage with developing countries.
Hopefully, this will be a lasting legacy for improved donor–recipient relationships.
References
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Booth, D. (ed.) 2003. Fighting Poverty in Africa: Are PRSPs Making a Difference? London:
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Section Thirteen: Conflict
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 39
.................................................................................................................
P ROTE S T
.................................................................................................................
brian doherty
Research on protest in Britain is divided between two distinct approaches: analysis
of protest as a form of political participation and studies of protests as social move-
ments. The micro-level approach of participation surveys is best placed to address the
question of who protests; both approaches have something to say about how much
protest there is; and social movement research has most to say about how forms
of protest have changed and what their impact on politics has been. This chapter
will review these questions as they have been applied to protest in Britain. I begin,
however, with the question of how to define protest.
39.1 Defining Protest
.............................................................................................................................................
In the classic study, Political Action, protest is defined as ‘unconventional political
behavior [which] . . . does not correspond to the legal and customary regime norms
regulating political participation’ (Marsh, Barnes, and Kaase 1990: 15). This reflected
a consensus in political science in the 1950s and 1960s that it was possible to make
a sharp distinction between conventional politics within political institutions and
unconventional politics outside them. Underlying this was the view that once citizen-
ship rights had been achieved, protest in democracies should not be necessary and
was even, according to mass society theorists, irrational. The Political Action study
showed that protest potential had risen in the mid-1970s in Western Europe and
I am grateful to Christopher Rootes and the editors of this volume for their advice on the first draft of
this chapter.
720 brian doherty
the USA, particularly amongst the post-industrial and post-material new middle
class with higher education, and that protest was not generally linked with revo-
lutionary anti-system beliefs. The subsequent accumulation of evidence (discussed
below) that showed protest as an increasingly normal form of political participation
in democracies (Meyer and Tarrow 1998; Tarrow 2000; Norris 2002; Dalton 2006;
Norris, Walgrave, and van Aelst 2006) made the continued use of unconventional
political behaviour to describe protest problematic.
A less pejorative definition developed from the protest events literature, a research
method which catalogues reports of protests from the media or other sources (Rucht
and Olemacher 1992; Kriesi et al. 1995; Fillieule and Jiménez 2003). A protest event is ‘a
collective, public action by non-state actors, involving at least three people, and with
the expressed purpose of critique or dissent together with societal and/or political
demands’ (Rootes 2003a: 53). Even this inclusive definition is still open to some
questions: for instance, should we exclude protests by individuals (Jasper 1997: 5);
and how should we apply terms such as critique, dissent, and societal demands
that are clearly open to different interpretations? Nevertheless the definition of
protest as collective, public action based on social or political demands does have the
advantage of being descriptively neutral, and this is the definition that will be used
here.
39.2 Has Protest Increased?
.............................................................................................................................................
Protest has probably increased in Britain in recent decades. There were several
unprecedentedly large demonstrations in 2002–5, and in surveys more people report
having taken part in protest in recent years than in the past. However, systematic data
exist only for the last three decades and there are reasons to be cautious about its
validity.
Survey-based research on participation has been the dominant tradition in the
analysis of protest in British political science, and whilst it has produced substantial
and valuable data (cf. Parry, Moyser, and Day 1992; Jowell et al. 1997; Bromley, Curtice,
and Seyd 2001; Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004), it also has some limitations. The
first of these concerns the reliability of the survey findings. Much of the literature is
based on surveys of protest potential, but there are problems with using responses to
questions that ask respondents about protest actions that they might be willing to take
as reliable indicators of the level of actual or potential levels of protest (Rootes 1981;
Van Aelst and Walgrave 2001; Blanchard and Fillieule 2006). Topf (1995: 59) argues
that rather than allowing prediction of actual behaviour, questions about protest
potential should be seen as evidence about what respondents thought that they ought
to do. Changes over time in protest potential probably reveal more about changes in
the legitimacy of protest than in levels of action.
protest 721
The obvious alternative is to ask people whether they have actually taken part in
protests, but even this is not always convincing, since surveys of actions that people
only undertake occasionally are usually seen as less reliable. The UK Citizen Audit
carried out in 2000 therefore only asked respondents about actions that they had
taken in the previous twelve months. Only 5 per cent had attended a demonstration,
the same percentage as in 1984 (Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004: 81). In contrast, data
from several decades of the World Values Survey showed a rise in reported protest
participation in Britain over time. The percentage that said they had ever attended
a lawful demonstration rose from 6 per cent in the mid-1970s (based on the data
in Barnes et al. 1979) to 10 per cent in the early 1980s and 13 per cent in 1999–2001
(Norris, Walgrave, and van Aelst 2006: 295). The same survey showed that 25 per cent
of Britons claimed to have taken part in a challenging act (at least one of boycotts,
demonstrations, occupations, or an unofficial strike) at least once in their lives (Dal-
ton 2006: 66), but in the Citizen Audit in 2000 30 per cent claimed to have taken
part in boycotts in the previous twelve months (Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004: 81).
Although these findings are not necessarily contradictory, given slight variations in
questions and timing, there is enough disparity to reinforce the need to be wary about
making strong claims based upon them.
Reported rates of participation in demonstrations have increased in Britain in
recent decades, but less so than in most other industrialized countries (e.g. inter
alia France, Italy, the USA, and Germany), which suggests that Britain remains a
relative laggard in protest. The consistency in the cross-national increases does lend
weight to the claim that demonstration activity has risen; nevertheless the suspicion
remains that questions of this kind are vulnerable to unsystematic biases based on
the legitimacy of protest in general or of particular protests at any point in time
for different social groups (Blanchard and Fillieule 2006). 1 Yet it would be wrong
to ignore general population survey data altogether; despite its limitations, it remains
the best source that we have about changes in aggregate levels of protest over time,
and for cross-national comparisons, but accounts of protest that also draw on other
sources are likely to be stronger.
What of the other alternative, the number of protest events? For instance, it would
be possible for there to have been more protest events, but fewer people participating
in them than in previous decades (and, indeed, this seems to have been the case in
Germany since the 1960s; cf. Rucht 2006). Perhaps surprisingly there is no definitive
record of how many protests take place in Britain, or most other countries. While
social movement researchers have in recent years made extensive use of protest event
surveys, which seek to catalogue protests based on reports in published sources, these
fall short of a definitive or even a reliable record of how much protest actually occurs.
There have been a number of landmark studies in other European countries and
the USA but this research method is labour-intensive and so most surveys focus on
particular movements, as distinct from all protest (Kriesi et al. 1995; Rootes 2003a).
1
Blanchard and Fillieule cite the example of research on AIDS activists in France, where respondents
claimed to have taken part in gay rights demonstrations during the 1970s, even though their youth made
this impossible (2006: 3).
722 brian doherty
Only in Germany has a comprehensive survey covering all protest been attempted
and this does show a significant rise in the number of reported protests (Rucht
2005). As protest event researchers themselves point out (Rootes 2003a; Fillieule and
Jiménez 2003), the main methodological weakness with protest event data, which in
Britain are necessarily based on media sources, is that the media do not cover all
protests. Editors favour novelty, spectacle, and confrontation, so that many smaller,
less dramatic, or less novel protests are not reported. It is even less likely that local
events and protests by more radical groups will be reported (Mueller 1997) as are
events occurring outside a major protest cycle. 2 Since visibility in the public domain
is essential to national impact, analysis of national media coverage can show us which
protests achieve prominence, but we cannot be confident that it provides us with a
clear measure of how much protest is actually occurring. Its principal value is not
in measuring how many protests there are, but in providing indicators of how the
most visible protests are changing. The most important instance of this for British
protest is the historical longitudinal comparison of protests between 1758 and 1850 by
Charles Tilly (1995). This demonstrates the emergence of modern forms of protest
such as the rally, the march, and the petition, in which for the first time associations
formed for a specific campaign and addressed the national authorities in the name
of its citizens—gradually replacing the previously local, and often violent, protests
which were aimed at punishing specific moral offenders. Tilly’s work on the invention
of modern forms of protest in Britain is a major contribution to the understanding of
the role of contention in the struggle for democracy as well as a salient reminder of the
importance of conflict, disruption, and challenges to elites in the shaping of British
politics.
39.3 Who Protests?
.............................................................................................................................................
A research technique that offers the possibility of offsetting some of the problems
with surveys of protest by the general population is survey research carried out
during demonstrations (Favre, Fillieule, and Mayer 1997; Van Aelst and Walgrave
2001; Verhulst and Walgrave 2007; Norris, Walgrave, and van Aelst 2006). It is par-
ticularly well suited to gathering information on the kinds of participants who attend
demonstrations, allowing comparisons between demonstrators against immigration
or for global justice for instance, and also comparisons between demonstrators on the
same issue in different countries, as in the case of the 15 February 2003 demonstra-
tions against the Iraq War (Verhulst and Walgrave 2007). There are methodological
2
Doherty, Plows, and Wall (2007) used data from activist sources to analyse environmental direct
action in three UK cities, but such sources are not always available and have selection biases of their own.
protest 723
challenges in carrying out surveys during demonstrations, particularly regarding
effective sampling, and this kind of survey tends to underestimate participation by
the most radical protesters, who are generally sceptical of surveys or who avoid con-
ventional rallies (Rootes and Saunders 2006; Norris, Walgrave, and van Aelst 2006).
However, once these limitations are taken into account, data from demonstrations
provide a useful addition to that provided by more general population surveys. It also
allows us to test some of the central questions about the motivations of demonstrators
more confidently than in general population surveys.
Three main theoretical models have been advanced to explain participation in
protest. The first suggests that protest signifies a fundamental disaffection with the
political system and that protesters are likely to be mainly anti-system radicals—
whether of the right or the left. In this theory, if protest is rising, then the political
system is under threat (Gurr 1970; Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975). A second
model suggests that it is those with the most resources who are most likely to act
politically. The expansion of education has created a more cognitively skilled and
demanding set of critical citizens who use protest instrumentally as a means to
advance their interests (Inglehart 1990; Norris 2002). Rather than being anti-system
radicals, most protesters are likely to be well integrated into the political system. The
third model suggests that protesters vary contextually according to the issue and the
organizers (Tilly and Tarrow 2007; Norris, Walgrave, and van Aelst 2006). We might
then expect different kinds of protesters to attend a far-right demonstration, a global
justice demonstration, and a trade union demonstration and to see a less consistent
over-representation among demonstrators of the well-resourced middle class.
The disaffection theory, very popular in media explanations of protest, receives
little support from general population surveys (Marsh, Barnes, and Kaase 1990; Norris
2002; Dalton 2006) or from surveys of demonstrations. Surveys of the February 2003
anti-war demonstrations in London and Glasgow and the 2005 Make Poverty History
demonstration in Edinburgh (Rootes and Saunders 2006) showed no significant
evidence of anti-system sentiment and strong evidence of organizational embed-
dedness. 3 Protesters are more likely than the general population to vote, and much
more likely to be members of political parties, NGOs, and community, charitable,
or religious organizations. Over three-quarters of British anti-war protesters in 2003
were active members of a civil or political organization (Verhulst and Walgrave 2007),
for instance. It is of course not easy to assess anti-system sentiment using surveys,
but the evidence available does seem to refute the view that a rise in participation in
demonstrations is linked to either a decline in social capital or a decline in trust in
political institutions.
There is more evidence to support resource-based models because protest seems
to be disproportionately carried out by those with skills and capacities developed
through education and middle-class professions. If these groups are most able to
3
There was also evidence of overlapping involvements with 48 per cent of MPH marchers having also
been on an anti-war march and considerable overlapping membership of NGOs, such as Amnesty
International, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and Oxfam (Rootes and Saunders 2006: 11).
724 brian doherty
use protest as a means of influencing government, the inequality in the protest
population could have negative consequences for democracy (Dalton 2006: 74). The
picture is complex, however, and may vary cross-nationally: an analysis of a wide
range of sources on Belgian protesters in the late 1990s (a time of particular political
turmoil in Belgium) showed that demonstrators were more representative of the
general population than were members of political parties and those who join civic
associations; social class was not an accurate predictor of demonstration activism
(Norris, Walgrave, and van Aelst 2006: 296), providing support for the contextual
model. Cross-national analysis of participants in the February 2003 anti-war demon-
strations in Western Europe and the USA showed considerable differences between
participants (Verhulst and Walgrave 2007). For instance, in the UK and Netherlands
around 50 per cent of the participants were first-time demonstrators, compared to an
average in the USA, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Belgium, and Greece of 22 per cent. Within
Britain, there were significant differences between anti-war protesters and members
of the Countryside Alliance (CA). Participants in the CA at its height in 2002 were
overwhelmingly Conservative voters, whereas those on the February 2003 anti-war
marches voted for parties of the left; two-thirds of CA members were male, whereas 54
per cent of anti-war marchers were female; CA members were mostly aged over fifty
(40 per cent were retired, compared to 7 per cent of anti-war marchers); and around
a third of CA members had university-level qualifications (higher than average for
the age group but well below the two-thirds of anti-war marchers) (Verhulst and
Walgrave 2007; Lusoli and Ward 2003). It seems that while protest is similar to other
forms of political participation that go beyond voting in that the well resourced are
over-represented, the more that we learn about who protests, the more the evidence
also supports contextual explanations.
It is perhaps surprising that so much uncertainty remains about the amount of
protest and the motivations of protesters. As we have seen, this is in part because
of the absence of a definitive public record of protest events in Britain as in most
countries, but despite the need for caution about strong claims based on the various
kinds of survey, there have been advances in our knowledge of protest. It is likely
that the number of people who protest has increased and clear that protest has
diffused socially, so that it is now an option for a wider range of social groups than it
was in the 1970s, albeit that critical citizens with more resources and political skills
remain predominant. 4 We can say with some confidence that attitudes to protest
have changed so that it is now more acceptable in principle to British citizens (cf.
Dunleavy et al. 2005). It also seems that this is not a sign of a legitimacy crisis, despite
the evidence of declining trust in political institutions and leaders. As protest has
become more familiar it has also become less threatening. We have learned to accept
contained and non-violent forms of protest as a normal feature of politics, even if
most of us never engage in protest ourselves.
4
Also, the decline in working-class trade union membership and the related decline in trade union
marches and rallies have reinforced the concentration of protest among middle-class professionals.
protest 725
39.4 When Protests Become Social
Movements
.............................................................................................................................................
What can the study of social movements tell us about protest in Britain? First, it
is important to clarify the relationship between protest and social movements: not
all protests are part of social movements and not all that social movements do is
protest. According to Tilly (2004: 3–4), a social movement combines three elements:
(1) sustained collective and public action in support of claims directed at oppo-
nents (usually, but not necessarily, the authorities), a campaign; (2) the use of some
particular forms of action such as demonstrations or marches, petitions, vigils, site
occupations, and the formation of special-purpose associations, a repertoire; and (3)
the autonomous demonstration by participants of worthiness, unity, numbers, and
commitment (WUNC).
Some protests are too short-term and lack the unity necessary to sustain a
campaign. An example was the fuel protests of September 2000. The blockade of
oil depots by around 2,000 farmers and hauliers was spectacularly disruptive, but
this was in part because spontaneous action had caught the authorities off guard
and those involved were themselves unprepared for the impact of their unplanned
protests. The lack of prior joint-campaigning experience among the fuel protesters,
who were spread around the country, meant that they lacked the solidarity to be able
to sustain their campaign, and quickly fell out over who would lead further action
(Doherty et al. 2003).
Protest develops into social movement when it is sustained in the form of a cam-
paign, linking activists in a network based on shared aims that challenge opponents
politically. There is nothing inherently anti-hierarchical about a social movement;
their organizations are likely to vary—according to the aims of the campaign and
the culture of their activists—between informal groups, with considerable investment
in participatory processes (as in the case of environmental direct action groups like
those who tried to stop road-building in the 1990s), and groups staffed by experts
based in a national office who carefully control the protests sanctioned on behalf of
their organization (as in the case of Greenpeace). And if these organizations work
together in a sustained campaign based upon shared aims, which challenge power
holders, then they can be seen as part of the same social movement (in this case the
green movement). Nor are social movements the preserve of the left, as movements
against immigration and in defence of country sports have shown.
These points are important as correctives to some of the assumptions about move-
ments that were based on the emergence of the new social movements (NSMs) such
as second-wave feminism and environmentalism in the 1970s. The arrival of these
groups created a debate about whether these were a new kind of left-wing social
movement, and distinct from the previous labour or women’s suffrage movements,
insofar as they had moved away from claims based upon civil and political rights
and wages to post-material concerns (Inglehart 1990). The reality was more complex.
726 brian doherty
Social historians pointed to features in some nineteenth-century movements that had
been seen as distinctive to the NSMs (Calhoun 1995), such as the prioritization of
creating new identities over seeking to gain state power. More plausible was the claim
that NSMs had developed new ideologies that politicized issues such as gender and
the environment in innovative ways. Social theorists saw in the ideas of these new
radical movements a reaction to, and attempt to engage with, epochal changes in
Western society, such as the increased power of knowledge creators (Melucci 1996;
Habermas 1987: 392; Touraine 1981), but it was harder to show that their actions or
their organizations were distinctively new.
Instead, it seems that what made this seem like a new politics was the shock effect
that radical protests by young people from relatively privileged backgrounds had on
a settled and consensus-based politics in the post-war era. In many countries the
renewal of interest in social movements as subjects of study began in the 1970s, after
the major debates that were provoked by the civil rights movement in the USA and
the New Left protests of the late 1960s. This was later reinforced by 1970s anti-nuclear
protests, militant trade unionism, and the emergence of new social movements. Social
movements did not attract the same academic interest in Britain, 5 perhaps because
New Left protests in Britain in the late 1960s lacked the epochal drama of those
in other countries. Some identified a ‘British exceptionalism’ in the lack of strong
environmental protests in the 1970s and 1980s (Eyerman and Jamison 1991), which
they attributed to the influence of class politics and Labour on British movements.
This was only partly correct and even then accurate only for a brief period. During the
1970s, new social movements had emerged in Britain to campaign for women’s and
gay and lesbian liberation, anti-militarism, and environmentalism, but much of their
effort was in building movement communities that could demonstrate the feasibility
of alternative social relations (Doherty 2002a; Lent 2001). This was more than simply
lifestyle politics, but since much of the focus was internal, on changing the lives of
participants in the movement, it was not very visible and its protests were mostly local
and small scale. British governments had not chosen to expand nuclear energy in the
same way as in many other European countries (and had less need to do so because
of reserves of coal, oil, and gas) and so the anti-nuclear conflicts which were so
influential in radicalizing the environmental movement in many countries were on a
much smaller scale in Britain (Rüdig 1990). The return of large-scale social movement
protest came as a result of the second cold war of the early 1980s, which revived the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) as part of a European peace movement.
This coincided with Labour’s turn to the left, which created new opportunities for
institutional power at local level for many new social movement activists in radical
Labour councils and also made a Labour government seem the most likely route to
achieving nuclear disarmament in Britain for peace activists. Labour’s about-turn on
nuclear disarmament after election defeats in 1983 and 1987 and its retreat from ‘loony
left’ commitments on feminism, race, and sexuality in municipal government was a
disillusioning experience for many movement activists.
5
An exception was Frank Parkin’s study of CND (1968).
protest 727
By the time environmental issues rose to the top of the political agenda in the late
1980s, Labour had moved to the right and so the party was no longer an attractive
political option for the new younger generation of activists who followed. British
exceptionalism was therefore a misperception of British movement politics, depen-
dent on a contingent moment when Labour had seemed briefly attractive to new
social movement activists in the early 1980s, and a lack of appreciation of the less vis-
ible alternative movement cultures that had developed in the 1970s. More significant
for the 1990s generation of activists was the movement against the poll tax. Again, the
position taken by the Labour Party was important. The failure of the national party to
support the anti-poll tax campaign outside parliament, combined with the obduracy
of the Conservative government in the face of the consistent opposition from the
majority of public opinion, led anti-poll tax campaigners to argue that their protest
was justified by the weakness of British democracy. The withdrawal of the tax and the
resignation of Mrs Thatcher were not wholly attributable to the protests, but for a
new generation of young environmentalists, they seemed to demonstrate the value of
direct action (Rootes 2003b; Wall 1999).
In the 1990s, when environmental protest seemed to be in decline in some other
countries, radical and confrontational forms of direct action against roads and air-
ports was on the increase in Britain. Importantly, this movement was not completely
divorced from the movements of the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, one of the major
innovations of the 1980s direct action wing of the peace movement was the protest
camp, the best-known and most influential of which was the women’s peace camp at
Greenham Common (Roseneil 1999). Environmental direct action protesters chose
to establish camps in the 1990s not only as means of occupying a site to protect
it, but also as a means of demonstrating their commitment to forms of praxis that
prefigured a more egalitarian society. Their ethos was not the same as the radical
feminism that developed over time at Greenham, but it is clear that the form and
purpose of the camp was a direct inheritance. Thus, even when the aim was not to
protect a site from destruction, a camp was the taken-for-granted form of protest, as
in the Climate Action camps at Drax power station in 2006 and Heathrow Airport
in 2007. The frequency of protest camps in Britain is a feature of the particularity
of the repertoire developed by British direct action networks and sustained across a
range of movements over several decades. While some forms of protest such as the
demonstration have diffused across social and political boundaries, others such as
protest camps remain distinctive to particular movements. It is in these networks
that we find a sustained tradition of radical critiques of the political system and
central features of modernity (Doherty et al. 2003). While their numbers are small,
when set against the larger numbers of protesters who are embedded in conventional
political activity, their confrontational actions on questions of peace, gender, and the
environment have repeatedly provoked substantial debate and attracted significant
public support (Dunleavy et al. 2005).
Social movements have shaped British politics since modern forms of political
protest were first invented in Britain in the early nineteenth century (Tilly 1995)
but despite this the study of social movements has not been as significant a part of
728 brian doherty
political sociology in the UK in either politics or sociology as it has been in the USA or
the rest of Europe. This may have begun to change with a number of British scholars
emerging who specialize in the study of social movements (cf. Bagguley 2002; Barker,
Johnson, and Lavalette 2001; Byrne 1997; Chesters and Welsh 2006; Crossley 2001;
Doherty 2002b; Rootes 2003a; Roseneil 1999). As in the USA, however, the study
of social movements is stronger in sociology than politics, perhaps because most
research in Britain focuses on understanding the culture and motivations of groups
who usually position themselves as outsiders and challengers to the political system,
whereas political science in Britain remains strongly institutionalist in its focus.
39.5 The Impact of Protests
.............................................................................................................................................
If protest has increased, diversified, and normalized and if new social movements
continue to emerge, does the apparent expansion in protest itself politics matter if
protest itself remains uninfluential?
Analysis of the outcomes of protest, whether episodic or the result of sustained
social movement campaigns, is bedevilled by a number of obstacles. First, movements
rarely see their demands translated directly into public policy. When this does come
about, the number of intervening variables is so substantial that it is very difficult
to establish a causal relationship between movement action and policy outcome
(Amenta and Caren 2005; Gamson 1990; Giugni 2004a). For instance, Britain has
moved further and faster than countries with weak environmental movements to
develop policy on climate change, but while there may be a correlation between
strength of environmental movement and willingness to act, there are other pos-
sible causal factors such as the response of other interest groups, public opinion,
competition between the political parties, and international pressures. It would be
unconvincing to say that the environmental movement had played no role in policy
on climate change, but hard to show that it could claim sole credit.
Most analysts argue that policy impact is facilitated most by splits in elites, which
provide the movement with allies within the polity. Indeed, some also argue that splits
within the authorities provide the opportunities that encourage protesters to act in
the first place (Kriesi 2004). The likelihood of this is dependent on the structure of the
state. This can be illustrated by comparisons between France and Britain. Large-scale
protests in France such as those against the youth employment legislation in 2006
often provoke splits between the parties of the governing coalition. Movements are
also able to put pressure on the French Prime Minister due to his weaker authority in
a presidential system. In the UK while governments with small majorities have been
vulnerable to backbench rebellions, the dominance of the two major parties and the
stronger executive power of the Prime Minister make the British government more
protected against the effects of protest. Disruption might cause crises, but it rarely
protest 729
forces changes in government policy, except where there are deep divisions in the
governing party, as in the case of the poll tax in 1990.
A further factor is whether the aims of the protest touch on the core interests of
the state. Some scholars have argued that peace movements have had relatively little
impact on policy precisely because they attack one of the core areas of state policy
(Rochon 1990; Kriesi et al. 1995). Nevertheless, while they may fail in their principal
demands, it is not necessarily the case that they fail altogether. CND claimed plausibly
in the 1980s that it had opened up debates about defence policy on issues such as first
use of nuclear weapons that had previously been seen as the preserve of strategic
experts.
It can be argued that environmentalism has always lost out in confronting eco-
nomic growth because capital accumulation is too central to the purpose of the state
in capitalist societies, but it is possible that a new state imperative of environmental
conservation is emerging around the politics of climate change and the politics of
manufactured risks such as GM foods, which offers new opportunities to environ-
mentalists. Dryzek et al. (2003) argue that the prospects for environmental move-
ments taking advantage of this depends on the responsiveness of particular states to
environmentalism, and the ability of movements to overcome obstacles by making
the right strategic choices. Paradoxically, they argue that relatively open systems that
responded early to environmentalism, such as Norway, are not necessarily conducive
to the development of the strong environmental movements required to achieve this
substantial goal. Movements that lack a radical protest constituency lack the ability to
mobilize pressure and also lack the internal movement debates necessary to challenge
the orthodoxies of policy. In this reading, the UK environmental movement was
strongest in the mid-1990s when the institutionalized environmental groups were
combined with a strong environmental direct action protest network.
A second area of impact is the effect that movements have on the participants in
protest. It has been estimated that only around 100,000 people are ‘really committed
political activists’ in Britain, in the sense that for them politics is ‘a really time-
consuming activity’ (Moran 2005: 7). If that is the case, those with experience in social
movements and protest are likely to constitute a significant section of the politically
active, both inside and outside political institutions, and accordingly play a dispro-
portionately influential role in politics. Biographical evidence on New Left activists
shows that those who became core activists remained committed to the ideals of their
youth and more likely to be involved in political activity than their peers (Giugni
2004b; McAdam 1986). This runs counter to the life-cycle arguments that suggest
that radicalism is a passing phase of youth and the popular myth that young radicals
always become ‘old yuppies’. Activists from one movement often have an influence on
other movements (Meyer and Whittier 1994). Small numbers who remain active over
time or who have involvement in multiple movements spread repertoires and frames
between related movements. An example is the way that feminist ideas influenced
subsequent movements even though feminist protest reduced sharply after the mid-
1980s (Whittier 2004). It further suggests that as protest movements embed them-
selves, the number of activists available for episodic remobilization will increase.
730 brian doherty
The third and probably most enduring impact of protest movements is on culture
and values. For some movements the ability to define and express a collective identity
is at least a partial success in itself. The women’s movement challenged the taken-
for-granted conventions of masculinity and femininity that excluded women from
effective participation in public life and this entailed transforming the identity of
activists themselves. Although the impact of feminism on values and ideas is hard
to measure and by no means irreversible, it is clear that feminist arguments have had
a significant impact on values, gender roles, and language, as well as on public policy
and political institutions in Britain (Bagguley 2002; Walby 1997; Mansbridge 1993).
Here again, it is possible to distinguish the impact of a sustained social movement,
which diversified into institutionalized and radical sections, from the more superficial
effects of short-term, single-issue protest movements.
Most often, the impact of a protest movement falls well short of its declared aims,
particularly in the case of the more radical social movements. Nevertheless, it is clear
that many movements force responses from government and other opponents in
society, have a profound effect on their participants, and have a demonstrable impact
on wider culture and values.
39.6 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
There is evidence that protest has increased and participation in protest has spread to
new groups in recent decades. When party leaders join protest marches, as the leader
of the Conservative Party did at the Countryside March in September 2002 and the
Leader of the Liberal Democrats did at the anti-war march of February 2003, this
suggests that protests have become normal in British politics. Participation in protest
is still unrepresentative and a minority form of action, but attitudes to protest among
the wider population have been increasingly positive, reinforcing the view that it is
increasingly accepted as a conventional form of political participation. There is little
evidence to support the view that protest in Britain is an expression of anti-political
sentiment or that people are switching to protest in large numbers from other forms
of political participation.
Radical forms of protest remain in the networks of British social movements, which
keep alive the knowledge of protest repertoires and remain available for remobiliza-
tion in new campaigns. Although increasingly engaged in transnational campaigns on
global issues, most social movement activism is carried out locally and is still bound
by national traditions.
The impacts of protest are difficult to demonstrate precisely, since even when
protesters seem to have a substantive impact there are invariably other possible causes.
Nevertheless protest has certainly been a consistent feature of the development of
protest 731
British democracy since the early nineteenth century, and it continues to influence
political culture and to shape public spheres of debate.
Suffrage movements from the Chartists to the Suffragettes all played an essential
role in democratizing the British state and the consistent history of protest move-
ments having pushed social and political change through disruptive challenges to
elites throughout the past two centuries gives the lie to the model of Britain as a
deferential civic culture. Since the early nineteenth century there has been a consistent
recurrence of conservative concern expressed about the dangers posed by protest
(Crozier, Huntington, and Watanuki 1975), or a view that it is self-indulgent and
lacks seriousness (Stoker 2006: 88), but, in the centralized and majoritarian political
system of Britain, there are good arguments to say that non-violent protest serves as a
defence against the excesses of government and in a positive expression of citizenship.
Beetham (2003) argues that there is a good case in democratic theory for governments
in representative democracy to defer to large protest movements, providing that
movements can sustain their action and show that they represent majority opinion on
an issue of national importance which has been the subject of sustained public debate.
The campaign against the poll tax and the opposition to the invasion of Iraq would
both have met these criteria. While the number of critical citizens prepared to engage
in protest may still be small, on occasion protesters represent sustained majorities on
issues of national significance, which if repeatedly ignored, would be likely to increase
alienation from the political process. If that is the case, it is necessary to start to think
seriously about how representative democracy might be amended to make it more
responsive to protest.
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c h a p t e r 40
.................................................................................................................
IMMIGRATION AND
CITIZENSHIP
.................................................................................................................
randall hansen
Since the late nineteenth century, Britain has experienced three waves of immigra-
tion. The first was of Europeans, including many Jews fleeing pogroms, from the
1870s until 1905, when the Aliens Act introduced Britain’s first immigration control
on aliens (non-British subjects). The second occurred from 1948 until 1971, when
hundreds of thousands of Commonwealth immigrants took advantage of privileged
citizenship laws to migrate to the UK. The third occurred from 1997, when policy
change intersected with strong economic growth to create in absolute terms the
greatest level of immigration Britain has ever experienced.
In a manner that few people predicted in the 1990s, the latter half of that decade and
the one that followed were affected by the politics of immigration. When the Labour
government under Tony Blair came to power, it adopted a more open attitude to
immigration, which it saw as important to Britain’s economic growth and as part of
the new, modern vision of the country articulated by New Labour. The government
relaxed the previous Conservative government’s policy on work permits, and skilled
migration began picking up. By 2002 the UK was issuing record numbers of work
permits—well over 80,000 were issued each year from 2002 to 2006. From 2004, a
dramatic and unprecedented increase in immigration followed from the granting of
labour market rights to A8 (2004 EU accession countries minus Malta and Cyprus)
nationals. The majority of these migrants were unskilled. By the middle of the 2000s,
therefore, skilled and unskilled immigration were running at historic highs.
Economic migration formed one pillar of the post-1997 immigration experience.
Asylum seekers formed the second. In the 1980s, Britain was a no-go zone for
would-be refugees. While Germany frequently had more than 100,000 applications,
736 randall hansen
Britain received less than 10,000. This situation changed sharply in the 1990s. Asylum
seekers rose to 28,000 in 1993, and then tripled to 100,000 in 2000; for the first time
ever, Britain (temporarily) overtook Germany as asylum seekers’ main destination in
Europe.
These movements provoked contrasting reactions. Despite the high numbers, work
permit holders created few difficulties for the UK government. The majority were
skilled workers who integrated easily into the City and other professional sectors.
Asylum seekers, by contrast, provoked a bitter, tabloid-led public backlash. Partly
because they were highly visible—cameras caught asylum seekers nightly jumping
onto trains in France bound for the UK—the government was under intense pres-
sure to act. It responded with a clampdown on asylum, driving the numbers back
down. Just as the government was getting asylum numbers under control, the arrival
(or legalization) of tens of thousands of unskilled workers from Eastern Europe
reignited the immigration issue. Much tabloid press reflected old hysterias about
immigration—overwhelming numbers, rising crime—but a new twist was added:
low-skilled immigration might penalize low-skilled workers, making it worse for the
worst-off and making Britain more unequal.
Taking immigration’s current salience as its starting point, this chapter provides
an overview of immigration, integration, and citizenship in Britain. It proceeds in
three steps. First, it provides a brief history of immigration and anti-discrimination
legislation in the UK, considers the turn from multiculturalism in the early 2000s,
and examines economic immigration. Second, it examines scholarly interpretations
of UK immigration policy as they evolved over the post-war period. Finally, it offers
an institutional explanation of British immigration policy’s trajectory.
Integration is understood in this chapter to mean socio-economic integration—
the extent to which ethnic minorities are indistinguishable from the broader pop-
ulation in their economic and educational achievements. The assumption is that
the smaller the gap between ethnic minorities’ employment, pay, and education, the
greater the degree of integration. This socio-economic understanding of integration
is distinct from what might be called ‘cultural integration’, or the degree to which
immigrants acquire the broader culture of their new country. The choice is deliberate
in that defining integration in terms of culture acquisition is problematic for a num-
ber of reasons. There is often little agreement on what constitutes national culture
(Scots and Englishmen would likely disagree, as would aristocrats and workers),
and ‘culture’ is not fixed but malleable and ever-developing, not least in response
to immigration itself.
40.1 Immigration Policy
.............................................................................................................................................
Immigration policy refers to the complex of measures governing the temporary and
permanent migration of people to the UK. It includes policies towards asylum seekers,
immigration and citizenship 737
permanent labour migrants, family members, temporary workers, foreign students,
and tourists. The instruments for implementing immigration policy include visas
(tourist, entry, student, and family), work permits, grants of permanent residency,
and grants of citizenship. Measured by the size of the immigration streams, immigra-
tion to Britain has three main components: economic immigration, asylum seekers,
and family migrants.
40.1.1 Economic Immigration
In most countries, there is a lively debate about economic immigration, one which
tends to polarize. Proponents of economic immigration argue that it offers huge
economic benefits, and they tend to cite large net figures to bolster their case. On
the basis of very little reliable evidence the Home Office popularized the claim
that immigration to the UK was responsible for 0.7 per cent or more of Britain’s
GDP. Most recently, Home Office officials claimed that immigrants contributed
£6–11 billion of the UK economy. As this is larger than the total net contribution
of immigrants to the American economy, the figure is doubtful. Similarly, those
opposed claim great negative consequences for house prices (much higher) and
wages (much lower). Most econometric analysis shows that the truth lies between
the extremes: immigration brings a small net positive economic benefit, chiefly in
the form of wage depression (Chiswick 2005). It also creates winners and losers.
Low-skilled migration reduces the wages of low-skilled workers and increases
demand for higher-skilled workers and for capital (Chiswick 2005: 167). High-skilled
migration lowers the wages of high-skilled workers but raises the productivity of
low-skilled workers and capital (Chiswick 2005: 168). If the high-skilled workers
are in science or engineering they may also introduce technological changes that
increase the competiveness or productive capacity of the economy (Chiswick 2005:
168). In the UK, the great surge in low-skilled migration since the late 1990s (partly
through the asylum system, partly through enlargement) has had predictable effects.
The conclusion of a House of Lords inquiry into immigration (headed by Lord
Wakeham) that ‘The available evidence suggests that immigration has had a small
negative impact on the lowest-paid workers in the UK and a small positive impact
on the earnings of higher-paid workers’ most likely gets it right (BBC 2008).
40.1.2 Economic Immigration Streams
Until 2008, the work permit scheme was the foundation of Britain’s economic policy
for skilled migrants. As Table 40.1 indicates, the Home Office has issued 65,000–
85,000 work permits every year since 2000.
Total arrivals under these categories were 137,035 in 2005 and 145,120 in 2006.
In addition to the work permit scheme, Britain operated its own version of the
Canadian points system (which gives people ‘points’ for language, education, and
experience and specifies a minimum number of points that individuals have to
738 randall hansen
Table 40.1 Admissions of work permit holders and their dependants, excluding
EEA nationals, by category and nationality, 2000–4
United Kingdom Number of persons
2000a 2001a 2002 2003 2004 2003 2004
(P)c Excluding Excluding
accession accession
statesd statesd
Employment for 12 36,290 50,280 51,525 44,480 42,265 40,715 41,360
months or more
Employment for less 30,785 30,785 34,095 36,870 40,450 33,560 38,490
than 12 monthsb
Dependants of work 24,970 27,760 34,495 37,830 41,595 37,005 41,490
permit holders
All categories 92,050 108,825 120,115 119,180 124,310 111,280 121,235
Of which:
Europe 9,880 10,040 14,090 17,785 15,520 9,890 12,450
Americas 33,855 31,375 31,900 29,250 29,465 29,250 29,465
Africa 9,160 14,100 15,695 14,400 13,860 14,400 13,860
Indian 13,915 19,750 22,810 25,580 35,795 25,580 35,795
subcontinent
Rest of Asia 17,960 23,645 26,030 24,935 23,570 24,935 23,570
Oceania 7,175 9,785 9,370 7,070 5,950 7,070 5,950
Other 105 125 220 160 145 160 145
nationalities
All nationalities 92,050 108,825 120,115 119,180 124,310 111,280 121,235
a A change in procedures may have resulted in some under-recording for the fourth quarter of 2000 and the
first quarter of 2001.
b Includes the majority of work permit trainees.
c Includes nationals of the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia,
and Slovenia before 1 May, but excludes them from this date.
d Figures in italics exclude nationals of the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta,
Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia (countries which became part of the EEA on 1 May 2004) for the whole of 2003
and 2004.
(P) Provisional figures.
Source: Dudley et al. (2005).
achieve): the Highly Skilled Migrant Programme (HSMP). Few people, however,
took advantage, and in March 2006 the government took the decision to replace
all categories of labour migration with a points-based system, which took effect in
2008. The new system consolidates all tiers of visa applications into five streams:
(i) highly skilled workers—scientists, entrepreneurs; (ii) skilled workers with job
offers—nurses, teachers, etc.; (iii) low-skilled workers filling temporary shortages;
(iv) students; and (v) youth schemes. Points are awarded based on aptitude, expe-
rience, age, and level of need in any given sector. The system replaces all existing work
permit schemes. The scheme will be implemented for all tiers except tier (iii) over the
next few years.
immigration and citizenship 739
Table 40.2 Grants of Settlement for Family Formation and Reunion, excluding
EEA nationals, 2000–4
United Kingdom Number of persons
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2003 2004
(P) Excluding Excluding
accession accession
states states
Husbands 14,495 16,915 15,520 17,380 8,190 17,105 8,140
Wives 24,265 26,835 25,120 30,795 12,925 28,950 12,395
Children 6,870 6,795 6,355 8,955 5,855 8,770 5,805
Parents and 2,435 1,760 1,750 3,090 1,985 3,070 1,985
grandparents
Other and other 5,000 4,570 4,015 5,855 5,945 5,745 5,905
unspecified
dependents
Total family grants 53,065 56,875 52,760 66,075 34,905 63,640 34,230
(P) Provisional figures.
Source: Dudley et al. (2005).
40.1.3 Family Migrants
Because the flow is split into these various streams, it is difficult to determine the exact
number of family migrants the UK takes in, but Home Office statistics on settlement
(which show how many family members become permanent residents) suggest that
some 50,000 to 60,000 family members migrate permanently to Britain every year
(Table 40.2).
40.1.4 Asylum Seekers
An asylum seeker is one who is seeking to secure the status of refugee under national
and international law. British refugee policy is governed by the United Nations
convention relating to the status of refugees and its 1967 protocol, which the UK
has signed. The convention defines a refugee as one with a well-founded fear of
persecution on the grounds of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular
social group, or political opinion. The convention does not create a right to asylum,
but rather creates a duty on states not to return a refugee to a country where he or she
would face persecution. In practice, respecting this duty has involved hearing pleas
for asylum and determining whether the individual is a genuine refugee, one with a
well-founded fear of persecution.
As noted, asylum applicants were very low in the 1980s, and shot up in the late
1990s (see Table 40.3).
In addition to these three categories of migrants, an unknown number of (old)
EU workers and their families move to the UK each year. As they have full migration
740 randall hansen
Table 40.3 Asylum applications in select Western countries, 1985–98 (in thousands)
Year ’85 ’92 ’93 ’94 ’95 ’96 ’97 ’98 ’99 ’00 ’01 ’02 ’03 ’04 ’05 ’06
United 6.2 32.3 28.0 42.2 55.0 27.9 32.5 46 71.2 99 91.6 103.08 60.05 40.6 30.46 28
Kingdom
Rounded figures.
Sources: John Salt, Current Trends in International Migration in Europe, Strasbourg: Council of Europe (CDMG (99)
10), 1999; World Refugee Survey 1999; US Committee for Refugees, Washington, 1999; ECRE Country Reports,
1998, websites: http://www.unhcr.ch/statist/99profiles/can.pdf, http://www.unhcr.ch/statist/rsd220601.pdf, ‘2000 Global
Refugee Trends. Analysis of the 2000 Provisional UNHCR Population Statistics, May 2000’: http://www.unhcr.ch/statist/
2000provisional/trends.pdf (consulted 19 Sept. 2001); UNHCR, The State of the World’s Refugees 1995: A Humanitarian
Agenda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), Asylum Trends and Levels in Industralized Countries 2005 (UNHCR, 2005).
and residence rights, their arrival is not recorded, but anecdotal evidence suggests
that the strong British economy lured large numbers of such workers, particularly to
the service sector. Britain was also one of only three countries that granted citizens
of central and eastern EU members the right to work following the EU enlargement
of 1 May 2004.
40.2 Ethnic Diversity in
the United Kingdom
.............................................................................................................................................
These three types of migration—economic, family, and asylum seeker—have
transformed the UK into a highly diverse society. Today, 10 per cent of the population
(5.75 million people) has ‘community backgrounds’ outside the UK (Parekh 2000).
Some 5.7 per cent (3.25 million people) has community backgrounds in Africa, the
Caribbean, or Asia. Ethnic minorities are concentrated in England’s cities, and above
all in London: 57 per cent of all African-Caribbean people live in Greater London, as
do 82 per cent of all Africans, 49 per cent of Bangladeshis, 42 per cent of Indians, and
29 per cent of Pakistanis. There are also substantial ethnic minority concentrations
in the West Midlands (including Birmingham) and in West Yorkshire (including
Bradford).
40.3 British Integration Policies
.............................................................................................................................................
The core of Britain’s integration policy is an anti-discrimination framework gradu-
ally developed since the 1960s, always under a Labour government. A Conservative
immigration and citizenship 741
government enacted the first immigration controls on Commonwealth immigration
in 1962, and the Labour opposition bitterly denounced the measure as populist and
racist. Two years later, the Labour Party was in power, and it quickly recognized that
family reunification meant that every pre-1962 migrant would bring to the UK two to
four of his family members. It abandoned its previous commitment to open borders
and extended immigration controls in 1965 (Hansen 2000: 136–7). At the same time,
there had long been pressure from backbenchers (above all, the indefatigable Fenner
Brockway) to enact anti-discrimination legislation, and the Home Secretary of the
day, Frank Soskice, argued that immigration restrictions would be more palatable to
the left wing of his party if accompanied by legislation against racial discrimination.
These liberal and illiberal sympathies were synthesized in 1965: labour immigration
from the Commonwealth was halved, and race relations legislation was passed. The
legislation criminalized the use of threatening, abusive, or insulting written or spoken
expressions designed to stir up hatred against others on the grounds of race, colour,
or ethnic or national origin. Prohibitions on discrimination were limited to public
places (hotels, pubs) and did not include discrimination in employment, the banking
and insurance sectors, or the private housing market. Heavily influenced by thinking
in the United States and Canada (Bleich 2003: 52–5), discrimination was subject to
civil rather than criminal sanction: it was dealt with by conciliation backed up by
recourse to the civil courts. The legislation was timid, difficult to enforce, and limited
in its application (Bleich 2003: 59).
The 1965 legislation has been extended three times in the last forty years. Roy
Jenkins was behind two of these moves. When he became Home Secretary in 1965,
he appointed the activist Liberal MP Mark Bonham Carter as the first chair of
the new Race Relations Board. Bonham Carter made a condition of his acceptance
his ability to push for the legislation’s extension (Bleich 2003: 72). Jenkins agreed,
and gave him support inside and outside parliament. Reflecting Jenkins’s particular
concern with discrimination in unemployment (Bleich 2003: 72), the Race Relations
Act 1968 extended the prohibition on discrimination to employment, housing, credit,
and insurance facilities. The legislation also increased funding for the Race Relations
Board and empowered it to investigate independently instances of racial discrimi-
nation. It was and would be for a long time the most robust anti-discrimination
legislation in Europe.
Although the legislation was an improvement on its ineffective 1965 predecessor,
those implementing it faced three difficulties: direct discrimination was difficult to
prove, the administrative procedures invoked in cases of suspected discrimination
were cumbersome, and the English civil courts were conservative in their judgments.
At the same time, the period from 1968 to 1975 was the high point in Enoch Powell’s
at times demonic campaign against non-white immigration. For many in the Labour
Party, backing anti-discrimination legislation was a means to marking the distance
between them and ‘Powellism’ (Bleich 2003: 92).
The 1976 Race Relations Bill addressed all three shortcomings: it allowed individ-
uals to appeal directly to the civil courts or to employment tribunals, it replaced the
previous two-tiered structure (a race relations board supported by the Community
742 randall hansen
Relations Commission) with the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE), and, most
ambitiously, it expanded the definition of discrimination to include direct and indi-
rect discrimination. The latter covers requirements or conditions that are formally
non-discriminatory but that disproportionately penalize members of a particular
racial group. Individuals who believe they have suffered racial discrimination have
three months to take the complaint to an industrial tribunal and six months to take
it to a county court. 1
Alongside the civil sanctions against discrimination, the UK has—and always has
had—provisions on the incitement to racial hatred, against which criminal charges
can be brought. The incitement provisions are invoked in some eighty cases per year.
40.4 The Race Relations Act 2000
.............................................................................................................................................
A defining moment in the evolution of race relations legislation followed the murder
of a black Londoner, Stephen Lawrence, in 1993. Following police bungling and a
failure to secure any convictions, Lawrence’s family led a polished and dignified
campaign on their son’s behalf, securing an endorsement from South Africa’s Nelson
Mandela. The media coverage greatly raised public awareness of hate crimes, and the
government responded by appointing a committee of inquiry which recommended
sweeping changes in police practice. The Labour government responded with a new
Race Relations Act.
Although enacted in response to the failings of the police service, it affected a much
broader range of institutions. It extended the 1976 race relations legislation to all pub-
lic bodies—the police, the universities, the National Health Service—and to all pri-
vate bodies exercising public functions, with the exception of parliament, the security
services, and immigration officers. It also placed a general duty on public authorities
to work towards the elimination of unlawful discrimination and to promote equality
of opportunity and good relations between people of different racial groups.
40.5 Citizenship Policies
.............................................................................................................................................
Until very recently, the United Kingdom provided liberal access to a thin citizenship.
Though viewed as inclusionary today, citizenship by birth—jus soli—has its origins
in feudalism (what’s born within the realm of the lord belongs to the lord) and
imperialism. From the early seventeenth century on, anyone born within the realm of
1
I am grateful to Erik Bleich, Middlebury University, for providing me with these statistics.
immigration and citizenship 743
the British monarch was a subject of that monarch, and British-subject status was the
basis of British nationality right up to 1981. This basic principle was carried over into
the age of empire, and all those born within the British Empire were British subjects
who enjoyed, in theory, full rights within the UK. This system was reaffirmed in 1948,
and it meant that the 500,000 non-white British subjects who entered the UK before
1962 did so not as immigrants but as citizens. The UK ended pure jus soli (which
no longer exists anywhere in Europe) in 1981, but there has otherwise been a high
degree of continuity in citizenship policy. All those born in the UK to permanent
residents, citizens, or recognized refugees are citizens at birth. Others may naturalize
after three years of marriage to a UK citizen or after six years of residence in the UK.
Dual citizenship is fully accepted.
40.6 Integration Outcomes
.............................................................................................................................................
Since the 1991 Census, the National Office of Statistics has recorded ethnic minor-
ity unemployment, income levels, and educational attainments. Overall, the ethnic
minority unemployment rate has remained double that of the white population.
Unemployment rates are highest in the Bangladeshi community, at 38 per cent, or
over nine times the national rate of 4.1 per cent (2001–2 figures). The Pakistani and
black communities (both African and Caribbean) also suffer from high unemploy-
ment. Only the Chinese and Indian communities enjoy employment levels similar
to those of the white population, though both suffer from higher unemployment.
Figure 40.1 provides data of unemployment levels among various ethnic groups.
With the exception of Indian men (who earn slightly more on average than white
men) and Chinese men, ethnic minorities earn lower wages than whites. In 1998–9,
black men earned £1 per hour less on average than white men, whereas Bangladeshi
and Pakistani men earned £1.50 less. The average white wage was £9.24 per hour.
Assuming a forty-hour work week and fifty-two weeks of work per year, the average
white man earned £19,219; the average black man, £17,130; and the average Pakistani/
Bangladeshi, man £16,099. Women of all ethnic backgrounds, including white, earned
less than men. A broad range of studies have confirmed these patterns of race-based
disadvantage.
These economic outcomes do not correlate perfectly with educational achieve-
ment. In the tertiary sector, black students start at the age of five at the same broad
level as the national average. By the age of ten, they have fallen behind, particu-
larly in mathematics, and black students are far less likely than others to secure
five GCSEs (Parekh 2000: 146). Indian students, by contrast, achieve results above
the national average, particularly in their GCSEs. At the university level, the results
are overall more positive. In terms of entry into university, Indian, Pakistani, and
Afro-Caribbean women exceed the national average, as do Indian, Pakistani, and
744 randall hansen
White
Mixed
Indian
Pakistani
Bangladeshi
Other Asian
Black Caribbean
Black African
16-24
Black Other All working age
Chinese
Other
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40
Fig. 40.1 Unemployment rates by ethnic group and age,
2001–2
Source: Annual Local Area Labour Force Survey, Office for National Statistics.
Bangladeshi men (Parekh 2000: 147). They are, however, disproportionately placed
at the least prestigious universities: 70 per cent of Afro-Caribbean men and 60 per
cent of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi students study at universities that were
once polytechnics (technical schools or community colleges), compared to 35 per
cent of the general population (Parekh 2000: 148). These institutions consistently fare
worse than older universities when it comes to placing job candidates. Finally, within
these averages there is substantial polarization: Bangladeshi and Pakistani students
are over-represented among both university entrants and sixteen-year-olds with the
poorest qualifications.
Evidence of any race-based gap in achievement is worrying, but two more ques-
tions need to be asked. First, to what degree does the gap reflect inadequate human
capital (language skills, education), which can be remedied, at least between gen-
erations? Second, are these gaps narrowing or increasing over time? Taking into
account personal characteristics (skills and education), sociologists working on the
first question note the disparity that persists between the chances of ethnic minorities
securing employment or higher-level jobs or income and the chances of others doing
so; they refer to it as the ‘ethnic penalty’ (Heath and Yu 2005). It thus includes, but is
broader than, the concept of discrimination. Separate studies have concluded that
Pakistanis and Bangladeshis (and particularly Pakistani and Bangladeshi women)
pay the highest ethnic penalty, while Indians (and particularly Indian men) pay the
lowest. Black men and women fall between these two groups. The literature is, how-
ever, less clear on why they pay this penalty, simply restating the question. Scholars
immigration and citizenship 745
have suggested that discrimination in hiring and promotion practices accounts for
the distinction (Carmichael and Woods 2000; Berthoud 2000). In the 1960s and
1970s, field experiments (which involved having white British, white non-British, and
ethnic minority applicants apply for the same job) demonstrated high levels of racial
discrimination (Hansen 2000: 226). These have not been repeated, but surveys on
perceptions of discrimination suggest that discrimination declined between 1968 and
1974 yet remained constant over the next twenty years (Heath and Yu 2005).
It is certainly plausible that discrimination partially accounts for higher unem-
ployment and lower wages among ethnic minorities, but this explanation cannot
easily account for variance in ethnic minority performance. It is not obvious why one
group of South Asians (Bangladeshis) would pay a high ethnic penalty while others
(Indians) paid a low one. Drawing on Robert Putnam’s distinction between bonding
social capital (which links members of a social group with each other) and bridging
social capital (which links members of a group with the wider society), a recent study
has suggested that Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have high bonding but relatively low
bridging social capital (Heath and Yu 2005). This would mean that while they have the
networks necessary to ensure employment in family businesses and/or the informal
economy, they lack the networks that play a decisive role in securing employment and
promotion outside the community. The issue can be further explored by considering
ethnic minorities’ experiences in education and the labour market over time.
40.7 Migrants’ Success
(and Failure) Over Time
.............................................................................................................................................
There are no UK data comparing recent migrants’ experience with that of earlier gen-
erations of migrants (partly because the concern is with racial minorities, migrants
or not), but Anthony Heath and Soojin Yu use multivariate analysis to compare
the ethnic penalty between first- and second-generation migrants in three areas:
access to the salariat, education, and employment (2005). The first generation was
born between 1940 and 1959, and most would have been migrants to Britain. The
second generation was born between 1960 and 1979, and most would have been born
in Britain. Heath and Yu find that while the first generation has enjoyed increased
access to the salariat over time, it has failed to close the gap with whites. By contrast,
in the second generation, Indians have overtaken whites in access to the salariat,
and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis have closed the gap. Given the last two groups’
high unemployment levels, this is an important finding. As the statistics suggest,
the most notable cross-generational changes have been in education. Whereas the
first generation had notably lower education levels than the population at large,
the second generation has closed the gap, and Indians have overtaken whites. The
authors do not mention it, but this conclusion should be qualified by noting ethnic
746 randall hansen
minorities’ concentrations in less prestigious universities. Finally, it is in the area of
employment that outcomes are the worst. Although the first generation paid no eth-
nic penalty in the form of higher unemployment, there is a large one for the second—
particularly, as noted, for Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. If the authors’ argument about
bridging social capital is to hold, it has to be the case that bridging social capital
either declined in these groups or became more important than previously in the job
market. Both developments are possible, but the authors suggest another explanation:
discrimination is class based. For each election from 1974 until 1979, British Election
Studies provided the percentage of respondents who felt that ‘attempts to give equal
opportunities to black people and Asians in Britain have gone too far’. The results
show a consistent pattern of greater prejudice among managers and employers in
small businesses than among professionals or managers in large organizations. The
evidence supports the authors’ hypothesis that there is greater discrimination at the
lower levels of the labour market than the higher ones, and it might explain why
there are continuing ethnic penalties in unemployment but not in access to the
salariat. Similarly, as Indians (and Chinese) are over-represented in the salariat while
Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are over-represented in manual positions, class-based
discrimination would explain the varying ethnic penalties they have paid.
40.8 The Turn Against
Multiculturalism in the UK
.............................................................................................................................................
Following the election of the Labour Party in 1997, ‘multiculturalism’ became a
fashionable term in the UK. Cabinet members used it frequently; the Home Office
commissioned reports on the topic and organized conferences around it; and min-
isters came back from trips to Canada with glowing words for its immigration and
multiculturalism policies. Eight years later, the term had almost become a dirty word.
The major newspapers ran articles and editorials denouncing the balkanizing effects
of multiculturalism, and the Home Office placed the accent once again on integration
in, and loyalty to, Britain. To be sure, the realization that three out of four of the July
2005 bombers were born in Britain and had relatively affluent backgrounds was a
profound shock to the national psyche; it had an effect comparable to that which
the murder of film-maker Theo Van Gogh had on the Netherlands. The rhetorical
shift began, however, before this. In the summer of 2001, riots broke out in northern
English cities between Asian (that is, of Pakistani, Bengali, or Indian descent) and
white youths. Although the rioting Asians were UK citizens, Home Secretary David
Blunkett framed the riots as a problem of immigration and integration. Since then,
the government has stiffened requirements for citizenship with the goal of ensuring
that naturalized migrants are better integrated: a US-style citizenship ceremony with
immigration and citizenship 747
an oath of allegiance to the Queen and the UK was introduced in 2004; and since 2005,
naturalizing migrants have had to pass language and citizenship tests. All of these
measures were enacted or set in motion before the bombings. Even the Equality and
Human Rights Commission (formerly the Commission for Racial Equality, CRE),
the official voice of ethnic minority concerns in the UK, has joined the integrationist
chorus. In 2004, the CRE’s black director, Trevor Phillips, made national headlines by
insisting that ‘multiculturalism is dead’.
Is it? In the main, these changes amount to a shift in accent or rhetoric rather than
policy. The right of ethnic minorities to practice their religion, speak their language,
join ethnic associations, and lobby for group-based causes is fundamental to liberal
democracy in the UK and elsewhere. To this degree, multiculturalism flows from
liberalism: it manifests itself in group-based claims and activities, but these claims
and activities derive their logic and justification from individual rights grounded in
national constitutions and defended by the courts. Changes have of course occurred.
There are more obligations involved in acquiring citizenship, and its acquisition is
meant to reflect a meaningful attachment to Britain (which is hardly an unreasonable
expectation). That this threatens multiculturalism is doubtful: it is not at all clear that
requiring citizens to speak the national language violates multicultural principles;
only denying them the right to speak their own language would do that. In contrast
with the Canadian government, the UK government has provided no national funds
for sustaining different cultures; in contrast with their counterparts in the Nether-
lands, ethnic minorities in the UK have not been encouraged to organize politically
along ethnic lines (indeed, such efforts within the national political parties have been
resisted). The government’s main flirtation with group-based politics was its highly
controversial informal association with the Muslim Council of Britain (the MCB), an
organization that claims to speak for all Muslims. The association attracted intense
criticism following the MCB’s denunciation of homosexuality, equivocal response to
terrorism (describing Hamas-inspired suicide bombers as ‘freedom fighters’), and
refusal to recognize Holocaust Memorial Day.
40.9 British Immigration Policy and the
Study of Politics
.............................................................................................................................................
With some exceptions (Geddes 1996; Hansen 2000; Shaggar 1998; Studlar 1978;
Hampshire 2005), students of politics have played relatively little attention to British
immigration history and policy. The claim that immigration is important will secure
enthusiastic agreement in departmental meetings or at conferences, but this is rarely
followed through with research projects. Given that at certain periods—in the late
1960s, when Enoch Powell was at the peak of his powers, and from 1997 to the
748 randall hansen
present—immigration is central to British political life, this is curious. For whatever
reason, immigration has not captured the same level of interest among British politi-
cal scientists as the Westminster institutions, the country’s relationship with Europe,
devolution, or economic and social policy. Only recently have comparativists turned
their attention to the topic (more on this below).
Part of this inattention reflects the original framing of the issue. To a unique degree
in the Western world, British policy-makers have interpreted immigration through
the lens of ‘race:’ immigration created race problems and the goal of public policy
was ‘good race relations’ (meaning an absence of racial problems, namely violent
conflict). The first scholars working on the topic—Nicholas Deakin, E. J. B. Rose,
and John Rex—were empiricists. The earliest works in this vein offered an essentially
pluralist interpretation: the steady rise in non-white Commonwealth immigrants in
the 1950s, and the accelerated arrival in the early 1960s, led the Conservative govern-
ment to end, reluctantly, the right of Commonwealth immigrants to enter (Deakin
1968; 1969; Rose 1969).
By the early 1970s, ‘race relations’ was becoming an academic industry dominated
(like left-wing politics in Britain generally in the 1970s) by Marxism. One early, semi-
nal work applied class analysis to the whole of Europe, including the UK (Castles and
Kosack 1974; also see Miles 1982). According to Marxist-functionalist interpretations,
immigrants responded to the needs of capitalism (namely a supply of cheap labour),
cushioned its crises-tendencies (by bearing the brunt of unemployment), and delayed
its inevitably collapse. 2
Closely related to this literature was a set of arguments that might be grouped
together under critical race theory (Carter, Harris, and Joshi 1987; Solomos 1989;
Gilroy 1987). The title of Paul Gilroy’s book, There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack,
said it all. The British and their immigration policies were determined to a superlative
degree by racism, and British identity itself was thoroughly race-based (or ‘racial-
ized’). Betraying their Marxist origins, under some versions of the thesis, the British
working class was seen as enlightened and foreigner-friendly until being duped into
racism by Labour and Conservative politicians (Foot 1965; Paul 1997).
Like many schools, both the Marxist functionalist and critical race approaches
offered important insights. British immigration to the UK was largely market driven,
and it was true that British politicians had a tendency to think that ‘race’ rather than
‘racism’ was the problem. But in the end they left too little unexplained. Opposition to
immigration came too often from those with the greatest interest in capitalism (such
as Margaret Thatcher) to accept the Marxist-functionalist story as an explanation
of policy (as distinct from an account of how markets move migrants). Similarly,
the emphasis of racism could not explain: why immigration policy stayed so liberal
for so long (open borders until 1962, and easy movement until 1971); why there was
never any serious effort to block family immigration; and why politicians such as Iain
2
Another important argument was offered in an important book by Ira Katznelson (1973), who
argued that Britain’s integration policy reflected an adoption in the metropole of the colonial strategy of
indirect rule: issues of immigration and race were shunted to the periphery (i.e. local government)
where they were dealt with in cooperation with local elites.
immigration and citizenship 749
MacLeod (over the Kenyan Asians), Ted Heath (over the Ugandan Asians), or Roy
Jenkins (over anti-discrimination) legislations adopted bold, pro-migrant positions
at variance with public opinion. Finally, the claim that the working class was a bastion
of liberal opinion talked into racism could not be taken seriously.
From the 1990s, comparativists—mostly in political science, but also in
sociology—began to study the UK as one case among others in Europe. Two related
trends stood out. First, British immigration policy had shifted from periods of
great liberality (the 1950s and 1960s), to great restrictiveness (the 1970s to mid-
1990s), back to (relative) liberality again (the mid-1990s to the present). Numbers
fluctuated accordingly: high in the 1960s to early 1970s, low in the 1980s, and high
again in the last decade. Second, rhetoric on the UK showed similar tendencies:
periods of bipartisan consensus keeping immigration out of politics (the mid-1960s,
much of the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s) were suddenly disrupted by periods of
intense bipartisan competition. A number of authors (Freeman 1995; Joppke 1999;
Hansen 2000) explained these features with reference to British institutions. The
absence of the checks on the executive found in the United States or Germany
mean that the UK can maintain for relatively long periods policies that fly in the
face of public opinion (open immigration). When governments do restrict, however,
those same institutions also mean that they are able to achieve a high degree of
restrictiveness.
An institutional account also sheds light on the jarring shifts in rhetoric over immi-
gration. Immigration is a highly divisive issue that tends to split the parties: tradition-
ally, between the free trade/pro-European versus protectionist/little Englander wings
of the Conservative Party and the working class/liberal professional wings of Labour.
It is also exceptionally hard to respect discourse constraints: as in Germany or the
USA, debates about immigration often bring out nativist or xenophobic sentiment in
both the parties and the public. For these reasons, the parties often agree informally to
leave the issue alone. Yet, at the same time, Britain’s system of adversarial government
encourages competition over the issue, and both parties and individuals have an
incentive to politicize the issue. This is particularly true when numbers are high and
when there is little distance between the parties on economic issues (true of the 1960s
and of today).
Framed in this way, an institutional account avoids the over-determination of
Marxist-functionalist or critical-race interpretations. Institutions encourage certain
responses, but leave much room for agency. In the 1960s, Roy Jenkins articulated
a vision of an inclusive, tolerant society (partly out of principle, partly because it
did him a lot of good with the intellectual wing of the Labour Party). In the 1980s,
Thatcher (and some of her ministers, such as Kenneth Baker, Norman Tebbit, and
Alan Clark) were particularly hostile to immigration. Finally, in the 1990s, Tony Blair
and others in the new Labour government, who were too young to have lived through
Enoch Powell and the immigration crises of the 1960s and 1970s, viewed immigration
as an issue to be managed in the interest of Britain’s economic success. Nonetheless, in
several of these cases—Enoch Powell in the 1960s, Thatcher in the late 1970s (when she
famously said that the British feared being ‘swamped’ by people of a different culture),
750 randall hansen
and then-Tory party leader Michael Howard in 2005—used immigration to create
political distance between themselves and the opposition. Somewhat paradoxically,
British institutions make UK immigration both excessively liberal and excessively
illiberal.
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Studies, 26/3: 389–416.
Bleich, E. 2003. Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking since the 1960s.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Castles, S., and Kosack, G. 1974. Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe.
London: Oxford University Press.
Chiswick, B. 2005. ‘The Economic Effects of Migration’. In M. Gibney and R. Hansen (eds.),
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71–98.
Carter, B., Harris, C., and Joshi, S. 1987. ‘The 1951–55 Conservative Government and the
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Caribbean Diaspora in Britain. London: Verso.
Deakin, N. 1968. ‘The Politics of the Commonwealth Immigrants Bill’. Political Quarterly, 39:
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Foot, P. 1965. Immigration and Race in British Politics. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
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tional Migration Review, 29/4: 881–902.
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ings of the British Academy.
Joppke, C. 1999. Immigration and the Nation-State: The United States, Germany, and Great
Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
2005. ‘Citizenship’. In M. Gibney and R. Hansen (eds.), Immigration and Asylum from
1900 to the Present. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Clio.
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2006. ‘Multiculturalism and Immigration: A Comparison of the United States, Germany,
and Great Britain’. Theory and Society, 254: 449–500.
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1900–30, and Britain, 1948–68. London: Oxford University Press.
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Parekh, B. 2000. The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain: The Parekh Report. London: Profile
Books.
Paul, K. 1997. Whitewashing Britain. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
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University Press.
Saggar, S. 1998. Race and British Electoral Politics. London: UCL Press.
Salt, J. 1999. Current Trends in International Migration in Europe. Strasbourg: Council of
Europe.
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Analysis’. British Journal of Political Science, 4/3: 371–81.
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US Committee for Refugees 1999. World Refugee Survey. Washington, DC.
c h a p t e r 41
.................................................................................................................
TH E SE CURI T Y
S TATE
.................................................................................................................
richard j. aldrich
This chapter will examine developments in the UK security state, focusing on the
intelligence and security services, together with the Whitehall machinery that con-
nects these agencies with the core executive. It will also consider related aspects of
security policing or ‘high policing’. It seeks to interpret the major developments that
have taken place since the end of the cold war against the background of Euro-
peanization, globalization, and the so-called ‘Global War on Terror’. The discussion
will address some of the more important legislative changes that have ushered in
mechanisms for oversight and a remarkable new culture of regulation. However,
before analysing these changes it might be helpful to advance some general propo-
sitions. During the last two decades, the UK security state has undergone a major
transformation that might be said to have three main aspects.
First, the UK security state has moved from the shadows to centre stage. During
the 1980s the very existence of the security services was often denied by a government
characterized by obsessive secrecy. The main agent for change here was Europe.
Important cases brought before the European Court propelled many countries,
including the UK, to avow their agencies, to place them on a firm legal basis, and
to institute oversight mechanisms. By the mid-1990s, Whitehall had begun to make
virtue of necessity, employing the Central Intelligence Machinery as a flagship of
Open Government and employing websites for personnel recruitment. This shift
towards a higher public profile accelerated with the debate over intelligence prior
to the Iraq War. Thereafter, multiple inquiries into intelligence transformed what
had been a gentle limelight into a harsh spotlight. By early 2005, as John Scarlett
the security state 753
took up his new post as Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) at Vauxhall
Cross, his face was well known and his track record was actively debated in the
broadsheet press. Hitherto secret parts of government have witnessed unprecedented
exposure.
Second, the inhabitants of the security state have ceased to be watchers and have
instead become fixers and enforcers. The main driver here has been globalization.
Until 1989 (with the exception of Northern Ireland) the cold war had required
the secret services to focus largely on the passive observation of a relatively static
enemy. However, by the late 1990s, the liberalization of economies, together with the
impending expansion of Europe, had increased anxiety about crime. Indeed, across
the world organized crime was killing more people than either war or terrorism and
was increasingly regarded as a security problem in its own right. This prompted a
shift towards intelligence-led policing and towards security agencies that would not
only observe but also disrupt harmful activities. This trend was already evident in
1999, but the upsurge in terrorism has completed a transformation of the security
agencies.
Third, the security state has expanded remarkably and its boundaries are now
uncertain. The size of the UK Security Service (MI5) has broadly doubled, reaching
c.4,000 in 2008. Expansion is also taking place in the Metropolitan Police Special
Branch—now merged with the anti-terrorist police. MI6 and Government Com-
munications Headquarters (GCHQ) are also growing. In April 2006, they were
joined by a new Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) with a strong intelligence
component. Moreover, all elements of government are now empowered to conduct
‘covert operations’. There are also important public–private partnerships. Increased
size has consequences for complexion and character. One of the historic virtues often
claimed for the UK security state is that it is small and operates as a genuine com-
munity. Senior staff have tended to be long-term professionals rather than political
appointees (unlike the United States) and are known to each other. However, the
UK’s expanded security state poses new challenges in terms of coordination and
management.
We also need to pause to consider the analytical frameworks that have been
applied to the security state. Conventionally, this area has been conceptualized in
terms of ‘intelligence’, ‘surveillance’, and ‘secrecy’. ‘Intelligence’ has been defined as a
secret activity designed to provide information that makes policy or operations more
effective, typically through advanced warning of events. Both Christopher Andrew
and James Der Derian have asserted that intelligence is remarkably for its under-
theorization (Andrew 2004; Der Derian 1993). It is perhaps more accurate to say
that it has been narrowly theorized, with much focus on why surprise attacks often
defeat elaborate bureaucracies designed to provide warning. Although limited and
profoundly positivist, this work has convincingly shown that intelligence failures
rarely occur because of poor intelligence collection. Instead they tend to result from
analytical weakness, bureaucratic failure, or poor responses by policy-makers (Betts
2007).
754 richard j. aldrich
The use of the phrase ‘security state’ in the domestic context is synonymous with
excessive ‘surveillance’ and odious interference in everyday life (Sidel 2005: 10–14).
Ideas of surveillance have proved far more amenable to post-positivist approaches.
Theorists have often connected ‘surveillance’ with Foucauldian ideas of disciplining,
or with Gramscian notions of hegemony (Scott-Smith 2002: 9–12). Christopher Dan-
deker emphasizes the central importance of information gathering on citizens as a
facet of modern governance. This extends far beyond security agencies to areas such
as public health and the welfare state. Similarly, Giddens has argued that surveillance
is key to the mobilizing of administrative power in the modern state (Dandeker 1990;
Giddens 1990). Sociologists have tended to place more emphasis on technology and
view surveillance as an inescapable manifestation of modernity (Lyons 1994). This
latter approach reminds us that surveillance often manifests itself as ‘dataveillance’ by
corporations as well as states. Security activity now involves public–private partner-
ships that facilitate the data mining of passenger records, or data aggregation using
business methods. The UK public has proved surprisingly amenable to surveillance,
whether through its customer loyalty cards or CCTV.
Others have argued that the key conceptual prism for those analysing the secu-
rity state is not information but ‘secrecy’ (Vincent 1998). Many of the functions
of the security state, including gathering information, are not especially distinct
from other areas of government, or indeed the private sector—except that they are
covered by a cloak of intense secrecy. This opens the door to critical perspectives
that suggest that secrecy has less to do with operational efficiency and more to do
with hiding unsavoury activities, or evading democratic accountability. Typically,
this might mean the surveillance and disruption of fringe groups that are legit-
imate but inconvenient, such as environmental campaigners. Accordingly, critical
writers often use the term ‘security state’ interchangeably with the ‘secret state’.
The most sophisticated treatment of the lineage of UK ‘secret state’ is offered by
Peter Hennessy who underlines its long-standing cold war connections with states of
emergency and resilience. However, Hennessy argues that the UK secret state repre-
sented a proportionate response to the credible threat of Soviet subversion (Hennessy
2000: 18).
Contemporary theorization of the UK security state requires some consideration
of ideas of regionalization and globalization. Practitioners and scholars alike have
made great play upon the distinction between domestic security surveillance and
foreign intelligence, especially in recent legislation. In reality, within areas such as
communications interception, the distinction between the domestic and the foreign
is breaking down. More importantly, this chapter argues that the UK security state
has been placed under contradictory pressures by globalization. On the one hand,
its work in policing the underside of globalization—including global terrorism—has
required riskier operations by the security agencies and cooperation with unsavoury
overseas partners. On the other hand, the rise of global civil society has placed security
agencies under increasing scrutiny, one might say even ‘counter-surveillance’, by an
informal network of pressure groups and the media. Europe has also operated as
the security state 755
a restraining factor. The most visible manifestation has been the uncertainty about
how the UK might simultaneously embrace an American ally that conducts ‘extraor-
dinary rendition’ while meeting the provisions of the ECHR (Rees and Aldrich 2005:
905–7).
41.1 The End of the Cold War
.............................................................................................................................................
The overall architecture of the UK security state still reflects its heritage. The most
venerable component is the police Special Branch whose origins lie in counter-
terrorism in the 1880s. The UK’s lead security element consists of the Security Service
(known as MI5), created in 1909 in response to anxieties about German espionage.
Their main cold war opponents were the Soviet Bloc espionage services whose human
agents achieved remarkable success in gathering intelligence, albeit their masters
proved incapable of making effective use of it in their policy (Andrew and Mitrokhin
1999: 554–5). The cold war and the rise of ideological conflict introduced concomitant
anxieties about ‘subversion’ and this in turn led to the expansion of political policing.
MI5’s directive, set out by the Home Secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, in 1952, required
them to address the problem of ‘subversion’, often defined as the undermining of
democracy by political, industrial, or violent means. Most of the activities surveilled
by the security state constitute a crime under UK law, but subversion does not. In
reality the notion of subversion focused on the possibility of instrumental economic
disruption. There is now substantial evidence of organized entryism by the far left
using flawed union elections during the 1960s. The Special Branch of each constabu-
lary worked with major companies such as car manufacturers to keep known activists
off the payroll. Large companies also made extensive use of intelligence gathered by
freelance organizations staffed by former intelligence officers. Surveillance of unions
probably reached its high point during Margaret Thatcher’s confrontations with the
miners in the early 1980s. Ironically, the process of curtailing union power eventually
turned in on the security state itself with the prolonged GCHQ trade union dispute
between 1984 and 1997 (Leigh and Lustgarten 1994: 396–403).
MI5 activity also involved a process of background checks on UK citizens engaged
in sensitive government work, referred to as ‘vetting’. The volume of individuals vetted
was high and included policy-makers in Whitehall, researchers at Aldermaston, and
even non-government staff in the arms industry. Vetting was introduced in 1951 under
strong American pressure following the discovery of Soviet moles, including the atom
spy, Klaus Fuchs. This was one of the last initiatives of the Attlee government. During
the 1960s and 1970s fear of Soviet penetration in both Washington and Whitehall
was intense. Security measures included background checks on BBC employees who
756 richard j. aldrich
were sometimes debarred from promotion for fringe political activities. If deemed
suspect they had a ‘Christmas Tree’ stamp placed on the cover of their personnel file.
Controversially, potential ministers could also be blacklisted. Betty Boothroyd, the
former speaker of the Commons, has revealed that MI5 had once asked her to gather
information on four Labour MPs. MI5 also maintained files on both Jack Straw and
Peter Mandelson as a result of their youthful political activities (Sunday Times, 18 Feb.
1996; Barnett 2002: 376–7).
The end of the cold war took the UK’s security agencies by surprise. It was not pre-
dicted by the UK’s main intelligence analysis body, the Joint Intelligence Committee
(JIC), nor indeed by the intelligence agencies of its allies. Although this resulted in
budgetary cuts of some 25 per cent for the UK security agencies, they did not suffer the
sort of psychological crisis that gripped their American counterparts. After 1989, the
IRA was still active and spare resources were redirected towards Northern Ireland. In
1992, MI5 were given overall responsibility for intelligence on the IRA on a worldwide
basis. Moreover, the need to maintain a watch on extremist groups and to maintain
databases to support vetting remained. During the 1990s the focus moved to single-
issue groups such as animal rights activists (Leigh and Lustgarten 1991: 613–42).
41.2 Northern Ireland:
The Other Long War
.............................................................................................................................................
Although the UK security state enjoys a reputation for joined-up government and
integration with the core executive, this did not occur in Northern Ireland where
six different intelligence and security services spent the first decade of the Troubles
tripping over each other. For most of the 1970s there were over 250 deaths each
year and it was only in the 1980s that this fell significantly. Gradual penetration
of the paramilitaries, together with the deployment of a vast range of surveillance
technologies, deterred an increasing proportion of the planned attacks. In part this
required the UK to build a large corps of intelligence officers who were skilled
in running covert operations, a process which typically takes a decade (Gearty
1991: 123).
The challenge of Northern Ireland was assisted by the development of additional
Cabinet Office machinery. Hitherto the role of coordinating the intelligence and
security services had fallen to the Cabinet Secretary, reflected most clearly in his chair-
manship of the Permanent Secretaries’ Committee on the Intelligence Services (PSIS)
which reviewed budgets. This role had been greatly enjoyed by Burke Trend in the
1960s, but was becoming increasingly time consuming. In 1968 this role transferred
to the newly created post of Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office. The first
the security state 757
incumbent was Dick White (1968–72), former head of MI5 then MI6. His successors
were confronted with squabbling agencies in Northern Ireland. Proper order was
not imposed on intelligence in the province until the mid-1980s with the creation
of six regional Tasking and Coordinating Groups (TCGs) which had full over-
sight of all covert operations in a particular area. The current National Intelligence
Model employed by the UK police makes use of TCGs and other lessons learned in
Ireland.
Although MI5 gradually became the intelligence overseer in the province, the
most important institutional effect was the ‘Ulsterization’ of the British Army. Large
military intelligence units were developed and even routine regiments of the line
devoted 10 per cent of their strength to plain-clothes surveillance. Special sections
such as the Force Research Unit applied ruthless pressure to the paramilitaries
through agent penetration. However, this confronted the government with the awk-
ward problem of running agents who needed to commit criminal acts to main-
tain their cover. They also faced the possibility that violence between the various
paramilitaries would result in the loss of key agents who it had taken years to put
in place. The desire to avoid this contributed to the alarming collaboration between
intelligence and protestant paramilitaries revealed by the Stevens Report in 2004
(Rolston 2006).
A frequent complaint about the security state is that they can facilitate invisible
policies that are not subject to democratic scrutiny. This was certainly the case in
Northern Ireland. Contrary to Margaret Thatcher’s assertions about ‘not talking to
terrorists’, the UK was engaging with the IRA continuously through MI6 officers
based in Dublin. Latterly, this eased the way towards a political settlement in Northern
Ireland. Declining IRA activity was felt most keenly by MI5. Having taken the lead on
Irish terrorism following the end of the cold war, it was now losing another area of
core business. To keep it alive, the government took the extraordinary step of handing
MI5 some responsibility for intelligence support on organized crime after a process
of minimal consultation.
In retrospect, the last spate of IRA activity, which targeted the UK’s financial dis-
tricts, now looks like the first wave of the future. The attacks on the City of London in
1992 and Canary Wharf in 1996 signalled a new anxiety about strategic terrorism that
threatened national infrastructures and economic well-being, and raised worrying
questions about resilience. The response also pointed the way towards public–private
partnerships in security. A ‘Ring of Steel’ was thrown up around the City of London
reflecting a network of agreements between government agencies, private security
companies, and the financial institutions. The latest format is Operation Griffin,
which not only helps to train private security operatives employed by the banking
houses, but also permits the exchange of intelligence between public and private
partners. Some of the communications infrastructure for Griffin is provided by
JP Morgan rather than by government networks. ‘Griffinization’—the development
of public–private security partnerships—has accelerated (London Assembly 2005:
39–42).
758 richard j. aldrich
41.3 Europeanization and
the European Court
.............................................................................................................................................
Alongside shifting targets, the UK security state has also faced nothing short of a
regulatory revolution. The main driver was two cases in the European Court of
Human Rights. The first was brought in 1984 by Harriet Harman when an MI5 officer
revealed that files were held on her and a colleague. The nub of their argument
was that MI5 had no legal standing and lacked proper mechanisms for oversight
and accountability. In the Leander case of 1987, the European Court found against
the Swedish security service on similar grounds. Like most European states, the UK
and Sweden had dealt with its security services by pretending that they did not
exist and hoping that its operatives were never caught. Across Europe, states now
rushed to put their agencies on the statute books. Despite initial anxiety, a firm
legal status and clear guidelines for surveillance have meant that agencies are free
to carry out more operations. The legislation has been permissive since the criterion
is now ‘is it legal?’ rather than ‘will we get caught’? This outcome was not anticipated,
nor indeed welcomed, by civil rights campaigners who had long advocated greater
regulation.
The Security Service Act of 1989 and the Intelligence Services Act of 1994 placed the
UK’s three main agencies on the statute book and gave them formal remits. Addition-
ally the functions of the National Criminal Intelligence Service were covered by the
1997 Police Act. MI5 retained a brief for countering subversion, although the problem-
atic term ‘subversion’ was no longer employed in the statute. A range of tribunals and
commissioners, normally former judges, were created to deal with public complaints
arising from operations. The security services introduced staff counsellors to respond
to colleagues who had anxieties about their work. Most importantly perhaps, they
also conjured into existence what has become the most visible mechanism for UK
accountability, the Intelligence and Security Committee.
The UK Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) resembles a Parliamentary
Select Committee. However, it is merely a statutory committee and has not enjoyed
the full powers of a select committee, nor is it owned by parliament. Instead its
members are selected from parliament by the Prime Minister and report to Downing
Street. ISC reports are made public, together with the responses of government, but
in a sanitized form, and can be edited by the Prime Minster. In short it is a committee
of parliamentarians but it is not of parliament. The ISC initially lacked any research
component, rendering it anodyne by comparison with its foreign equivalents. Mean-
while members of genuine UK Parliamentary Select Committees, typically on Home
Affairs, have argued that the creation of ISC curtails their own right to introspect into
the security agencies. Some have complained that its reports are mere ‘audits’ and
contain only limited reflection or analysis, albeit there is a good working relationship
with the agencies. There is little consensus on the effectiveness of the ISC. In July 2007,
Gordon Brown’s Green Paper on ‘The Governance of Britain’ undertook to consult
the security state 759
on how the ISC could be brought ‘as far as possible’ into line with that of other
select committees, including the restoration of the investigator whose services were
abruptly dispensed with in 2004. Similar notions were aired in the 2008 UK National
Security Strategy (Gill 1996: 313–31; Glees, Davies, and Morrison 2006; Leigh 2005:
84–9, 93).
Observers have expressed scepticism concerning the modernized security state.
Some have argued that the advent of tribunals, commissioners, and counsellors was in
part an attempt to keep disaffected intelligence officers away from the unpredictable
realm of courts and normal employment tribunals. Only one complaint to any
tribunal concerning intelligence and security matters has been upheld since their
creation in the mid-1980s. Depending on one’s view, this is either very reassuring
or else very worrying (HC 314 2007, s. 38). The argument that increased regulation
has in reality meant greater opaqueness is most compelling with regard to the new
Official Secrets Act of 1989. The original Act had been introduced to parliament in
1911 and passed in an afternoon. Widely criticized down the years by senior judges,
including Lord Denning, its last vestige of credibility was destroyed by the failed case
against Clive Ponting in 1985 and the Spycatcher affair in 1987. The new Act removed
the notorious catch-all Section 2, replacing it with offences that related to specific
groups of people and information. However, the new Act also went to great lengths
to remove the possibility of a ‘public interest’ defence. Subsequently, ‘whistleblowers’
such as David Shayler, the dissident MI5 officer, have had to fall back on the ECHR
with its relatively weak protection of freedom of expression. Notwithstanding this,
whistleblowers continue to trump government lawyers, as underlined by the Cather-
ine Gunn case in 2005 and the Derek Pasquill case in 2007 (Gill 1996: 313–20; Morrison
2006: 51–2).
More important has been the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000
(RIPA), which sought to control the use of covert surveillance, agents, informants,
and undercover officers by UK authorities. On the face of it, this legislation was
marked by the commendable incorporation of parts of the ECHR into its operating
principles. Managers are required to show that surveillance was necessary to avoid
public harm and that the information could not be obtained by less intrusive means.
There are also important references to the proper control of, and safety of, the agents
themselves, a category of person who is sometimes recruited under duress and whose
rights have historically received precious little respect. RIPA also created an Inves-
tigatory Powers Tribunal which superseded the Security Service Tribunal, the Intel-
ligence Services Tribunal, and the Interception Tribunal that had been established
between 1985 and 1994. This has the power to quash warrants, destroy records, and
award compensation. Importantly, the tribunal can also hear proceedings brought
under Section 7 of the Human Rights Act of 1998 against any of the intelligence
services.
At the same time, the public were disconcerted to learn just how many government
departments were now empowered to use covert surveillance. This included not only
the obvious praetorian elements, but all departments of state and even local govern-
ment. In 2008, Britain’s interception of communications commissioner revealed that
760 richard j. aldrich
nearly 800 public bodies, including NHS trusts, were making an average of nearly
1,000 requests a day for communications data, including actual phone taps, mobile
phone records, email or web search histories, not to mention old-fashioned snail mail.
Empowered bodies also include 474 local councils who made 1,700 requests to access
mobile phone records and other private information in the last nine months of 2006.
Therefore, while Europe has initiated the UK security state into the new culture of
regulation, this was of a facilitating kind (Ash 2008).
41.4 Globalization, E-infrastructure,
and Organized Crime
.............................................................................................................................................
The end of the cold war, and to some extent the drawing down of conflicts such as
Northern Ireland, reflected broader changes in the international system which relate
to ‘globalization’. Globalization is most commonly associated with deterritorialization
and assertions of the decline of the sovereign state, together with notions about the
communications revolution as an accelerator of these processes. For the UK, global-
ization has perhaps been most significant in economic terms. The UK deregulated
faster than most other European states and gained visibly from the expansion of
world trade and the financial services industry. This is symbolized by the growth of
London as a major financial capital and the emergence of its airport as the world’s
largest air transport hub. In short, the declinist predictions about the UK were
confounded.
Accordingly, during the early 1990s, few in government viewed globalization as
anything other than unqualified good. Many had bought into Francis Fukuyama’s
assertions about a peaceful post-cold war system characterized by economic compe-
tition between liberal democracies. A notable exception was Sir Colin McColl, the
Chief of MI6. Against the background of the end of the cold war and the decline in
domestic terrorism, he reassured his staff that they would not be without work. Far
from witnessing ‘the end of history’, he predicted that, instead, they would soon be
busier than ever. During the early 1990s, MI6 created a global issues section. Their
working style gradually began to shift from a focus on country stations in capitals
around the world to more London staff who responded to problems on a global basis.
However, they were unable to dissuade the Treasury from cutting the budgets of the
security agencies (Smith 2003: 233, 240).
McColl was right. One of the entities that thrived on globalization was Al-Qaeda,
which emerged just as the capacity to address it was being curtailed drastically.
Moreover, the 1990s saw the rise of separate but connected challenges, many of which
might be described as complex clandestine networks. They included narcotics, money
laundering, people trafficking, war-lordism, nuclear proliferation, and the illegal light
the security state 761
weapons trade. These problems were accelerated by globalization and overlapped
with new civil wars, of which the former Yugoslavia was the most prominent. In
Russia, the Balkans, and Central Asia, a range of shadowy figures from the security
services were also major players in the criminal underworld.
The common element among these new threats was that many of them operated
clandestinely. The UK response was to redirect the security state. One symptom was
more intelligence-led policing underlined by the creation of the National Criminal
Intelligence Service and eventually a National Intelligence Model that was rolled out
to all police services by the end of the decade. By 1998 government was reversing the
cuts in the budgets of the security agencies (Rice and Thomas 1997: 14–15). The shift
in emphasis was confirmed by a summit at 10 Downing Street in late 1999 attended
by MI5, MI6, and GCHQ which authorized a significant diversion of their resources
against organized crime. In June 2000, the shocking discovery of fifty-eight Chinese
illegal immigrants who had perished in a container lorry at Dover highlighted the
seriousness of these issues. They were now reconceptualized as a security problem.
In part this reflected the planned expansion of NATO and the European Union,
giving the UK an open frontier that extended as far as the Urals (National Criminal
Intelligence Service 2000; Barnett 2002: 366–7).
The increase in the power of global markets has been intimately associated with the
retreat of the state. In the UK this has manifested itself in terms of deregulation and
privatization. The UK’s new dependence on financial and service industries has also
required concerted attention to critical national infrastructure. In the 1990s, the new
priority was to guarantee secure e-commerce. This required a major culture change
for the UK security state. Hitherto the security of communications infrastructure had
been conceived largely in terms of government agencies. The work-a-day security of
government cyphers had been protected by the Communications Electronic Security
Group, the defensive arm of GCHQ in Cheltenham. However, during the 1990s there
was a growing realization that government would need to roll out the same level of
protection to banks and businesses. Moreover, many activities that had been state
owned, including the UK’s telecom infrastructure itself, had been privatized. Accord-
ingly, by 1997 the Communications Electronic Security Group transformed itself from
a secretive entity into a national technical advisory service with a public face, setting
standards for encryption and offering support to business on a cost recovery basis.
However, its activities have remained controversial, since many question its interest
in encouraging the independent growth of truly secure systems.
GCHQ is the intelligence giant in the UK, constituting the largest and most expen-
sive element in the UK security state. Yet despite its size, the exponential increase
in global communications traffic, together with new modes of communication,
have presented severe challenges. A Treasury-inspired review under Roger Hurn in
1995 revealed that GCHQ was falling behind and needed to undertake significant
change. The following year, under the direction of David Omand, much of the old
Fordist organizational structure was abandoned. Modelling themselves on leading
business corporations, they undertook a management revolution, which resulted
in flatter hierarchies, flexible teams, and greater knowledge sharing. Its Mechanical
762 richard j. aldrich
Engineering Division was entirely privatized. This was followed by a decision to invest
in cutting-edge technologies under a programme entitled Signals Intelligence New
Systems (SINEWS). Emblematic of this change was the move to a vast new GCHQ
building on a PFI basis, completed in 2003 at many times the original estimated cost.
However, the world remained stubbornly unpredictable and the new building was
soon found to be too small to accommodate the expansion of GCHQ personnel that
followed the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
41.5 Terrorism: After 9/11
.............................................................................................................................................
During the late 1990s, the UK security state was gradually becoming aware of what
some have called the ‘new terrorism’. This was characterized by religious motivation
and ambitious attacks together with new organizational structures and operations
that took advantage of globalization. The physical manifestation of this was the
exodus of trained foreign fighters from Afghanistan after the end of the Western-
backed war against the Soviet occupation. There was also growing concern about
the interaction between terrorism, proliferation, failed states, and organized crime.
These trends were addressed by the UK Terrorism Act of 2000 which offered a
much wider definition of terrorism which included political, religious, or ideo-
logical causes and also covered activities outside the UK. The new act expanded
police powers relating to stop, search, and detention and empowered stronger finan-
cial investigation. In the wake of a peace settlement in Northern Ireland, some
found it odd that special provisions were being expanded rather than dismantled.
However, these changes anticipated future trouble (Cornish 2005: 148–9; Moran
2006: 343).
Following the remarkable attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September
2001, the UK government moved to implement a new counter-terrorism strategy
entitled ‘Contest’. Confronted with terrorists that favoured mass casualty spectaculars
and that seemed hard to deter, the official view was that merely increasing intelligence
activity would not be enough. ‘Contest’ consisted of four main strands:
r Prevention: addressing the underlying causes of terrorism both here and overseas
through, for example, support for moderate Islam;
r Pursuit: using intelligence effectively to disrupt and apprehend terrorists, with
increased joint working and intelligence sharing internationally, tightened bor-
der security, and new measures to target identity theft and terrorist finance;
r Protection: using protective security precautions to minimize risks to the UK
public at home and abroad; and
r Preparedness: improving resilience to cope with terrorist attacks or other serious
disruption.
the security state 763
Arguably, we have seen a fifth ‘P’ in the form of ‘pre-emption’ that reflects gov-
ernment anxiety about large-scale attacks and the potential use of unconventional
weapons. The security state is much less willing to allow potential terrorists to remain
at large. Over the years, and reflecting its experiences in Northern Ireland, the UK
had developed an intelligence strategy towards terrorism that might be described as
‘watch and wait’, hoping that terrorists who remained at liberty would continue to
give off valuable intelligence. Since 9/11, the UK strategy has increasingly leant towards
‘seize and strike’; however, once suspects are incarcerated, the flow of intelligence
quickly becomes outdated (Omand 2005: 107–16; Innes 2006: 222–41).
The events of 9/11 also triggered significant changes in structure. During June 2002,
the post of Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office was upgraded to become
a Second Cabinet Secretary with wider responsibility for Intelligence, Security, and
Resilience. The addition of ‘resilience’ greatly expanded the role and reflected Sir
David Omand’s desire to encourage joined-up government with many departments
that had hitherto given little thought to resilience or security (Omand 2004: 26–33).
The traditional view that security was the responsibility of specialist sections was at
an end. This was reflected in a new mechanism for processing operational intelligence
on terrorism, an all-source fusion centre called the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre,
located within the MI5 building at Thames House. This consists of participants from
many different departments. Its inclusiveness has been widely praised and its has been
emulated across Europe. MI5 itself has taken on an expanded coordinating role for a
range of national security activities that go far beyond its traditional roles (Bamford
2005: 744–5).
New organizations were accompanied by new powers. Most controversial was the
new Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act of 2001 which extended police powers
against suspects (Fenwick 2002). The authorities were quick to use the new powers
granted in 2000 and 2001 to arrest demonstrators who clearly had no relationship
to terrorism, typically peace protestors outside a DSEi arms fair in London. In one
case the police served a Section 44 Order (anti-terrorist order) on an eleven-year-
old-girl. Similarly, the US Department of Justice has conceded that the Patriot Act
has been little used against terrorism, but has proved useful against drug trafficking
and organized crime. This reflects a deliberate corrosion of the boundary between
intelligence and criminal investigation. The most obvious example of this in the UK
has been use of intelligence presented to ad hoc tribunals regarding immigration,
detention, or control orders. This material is of variable reliability and yet it is difficult
to challenge (Moran 2006: 342, 345; Wada 2002: 51–9).
Notoriously, Part IV of the 2001 Anti-Terrorism Crime and Security Act allowed
a significant number of people to be held indefinitely without charge by derogation
from ECHR. For many, this recalled Ulster’s dubious era internment under the Spe-
cial Powers Act of 1972. By February 2004, some fourteen individuals were held under
these provisions and kept at Belmarsh Prison. These were non-EU citizens detained
on the basis of secret dossiers that often catalogued their associations rather than their
activities. Returning to their country of origin was the only alternative to permanent
detention. The following December, a nine-member bench of the House of Lords
764 richard j. aldrich
ruled this to be a contravention of their human rights. This system has been replaced
by restraining orders that are akin to house arrest. Under further legislation passed
in 2002 the Home Secretary gained the power to revoke citizenship (Bamford 2005:
748–9; Chirinos 2005: 265–76; Walker 2005: 400–1).
The Civil Contingencies Act of 2004 is the most remarkable piece of recent leg-
islation and underlines the extent to which the whole UK state is now tinged with
security. This Act replaces outdated cold war planning and allows the government
to declare an ‘emergency situation’ and thence to restrict many civil liberties with the
imposition of curfews, the prohibition of public protests, forced movement of people,
and seizure of property. The original drafting of the bill set out a wide range of events
that might trigger the declaration of an emergency, including threats to political,
administrative, or economic stability. Although the phrasing was eventually tightened
up, government remains at liberty to declare a ‘state of emergency’ as the result of
threats that might disrupt transport or communications. Parliamentary criticism was
fierce and the final version for the Act incorporated a sunset clause of thirty days and
a requirement for approval by both houses within seven days (Bamford 2005: 750;
Cornish 2005: 152–5; Sidel 2005: 153–4).
Detention without trial and civil contingencies, together with the period during
which a suspect can be held for questioning, all created a political furore in the UK.
ID cards have also formed a perennial subject for debate. However, equally important
changes affecting UK citizens that have occurred outside the UK attracted almost
no attention. After uneasy negotiations, the EU and the United States came to an
agreement about the sharing of airline passenger data. A similar agreement gives US
counter-terrorist investigators access to data on money transfers in Europe completed
via the ubiquitous Swift system. There were also moves to require European telecom
providers to retain data on their callers for a period of five years in order to assist
investigators. These decisions resulted in the creation of vast warehouses of data
relating to UK citizens, which can be aggregated and shared with private entities, but
which are not within national control. Again, it is hard to resist the conclusion that the
boundaries of the security state are expanding and increasingly blurred (Mathieson
2005: 1–2; Rees 2006: 231).
41.6 Iraqi WMD and the Four UK
Intelligence Enquiries
.............................................................................................................................................
On 20 March 2003, the UK government joined the United States in a controversial
invasion and occupation of Iraq that focused on non-compliance with UN resolu-
tions on Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD). Prior to this the UK government
had decided to release two public dossiers on Iraq which it claimed to be based on
the security state 765
intelligence material. The dossiers had been prepared for public consumption and
were not actual declassified intelligence reports. Sceptical journalists could not believe
that government press officers had been able to resist the temptation to enhance the
dossiers. Subsequently, bitter arguments were played out in the full glare of publicity
and rendered the security state more visible than ever before. In particular, the role
of the JIC, a hitherto little-known organism, became the subject of national debate.
Although the dossiers were in line with a long-term trend of allowing intelligence a
more public profile, they also risked the charge that intelligence was being used to
generate political support rather than to illuminate policy issues.
Following the invasion, no WMD were found, despite an intense search by the
Iraq Survey Group. The controversy intensified and there followed an unprecedented
‘season of inquiry’ in Whitehall and Washington, with no less than four UK investi-
gations between July 2003 and July 2004. Intelligence on Iraqi WMD was the subject
of the first inquiry by the Parliamentary Select Committee on Foreign Affairs and the
second inquiry by the ISC. The third, chaired by Lord Hutton, looked into the death
of Dr David Kelly, a government scientist who had been closely cross-examined by the
first inquiry. Finally, Lord Butler, a former Cabinet Secretary, was called in to conduct
a more general investigation into the UK WMD intelligence. The Hutton inquiry, in
particular, treated academics and journalists to a remarkably detailed view of the UK
security state (Davies 2004: 495–520).
Was the Iraqi WMD fiasco a product of intelligence failure by the agencies, or
deception by politicians and spin-doctors? Inevitably, the answer is ‘both’. Having
badly underestimated Iraqi WMD stocks in 1991, intelligence officers did not wish
to be caught out a second time and so opted for ‘worst case analysis’. Moreover,
the allies cooperated so closely on WMD estimates that, far from challenging each
other’s findings, they succumbed to a form of ‘Groupthink’. Only the Dutch and the
Canadians expressed serious doubts. However, there was also government dishonesty.
There was some plausible intelligence to suggest that the Iraqis might have hidden
some old stocks from 1991. There was also some evidence that Iraq continued to seek
WMD components on the world market and had future ambitions. However, there
was no plausible evidence for the core claim that Iraq was engaged in ‘continued’
production of WMD. This latter assertion was made forcibly by the Prime Minister
in his personal foreword to the Iraqi WMD dossier. ISC identified this mis-statement
by Tony Blair, but curiously made little of it (Aldrich 2005: 73–5, 81). Equally, Butler
noticed that there was no change in the intelligence reports on Iraqi WMD during
the period between 2002 and 2003, when the UK shifted dramatically from a policy of
containing Iraq to a policy of confrontation (Runciman 2004: 76–7).
These fourfold inquires into the security state deflected accountability downwards.
Their remits did not allow an investigation of the relationship between intelligence
and policy-making and so transparency translated into a hunt for minnows, while
the big fish swam away. More importantly, by comparing these reports we can deduce
much about the weak overall management of the burgeoning UK security state.
The ISC pronounced UK intelligence on Iraqi WMD to be ‘reliable’ and credible,
while Lord Butler’s more thorough inquiry into the same issue pronounced the
766 richard j. aldrich
intelligence unreliable and its validation to be flawed. While Butler’s conclusions
were more accurate, his team was soon dissolved and oversight of the UK security
state now remains with the ISC. Moreover, at Cabinet level there is supposedly a
Ministerial Committee on the Intelligence and Security Services. Yet despite repeated
exhortations, this body never met during the entire Blair administration. Arguably it
is in the realm of experienced managerial oversight, as well as accountability, that the
UK security state is impoverished.
41.7 Terrorism: After 7/7
.............................................................................................................................................
The bombings in Madrid in March 2004 and then London in July 2005, together
with the planned attack on airliners in August 2006, illuminate the scale of the
current challenge faced by the UK security state. MI5 had taken an interest in radical
Islamic groups in the UK during the 1990s but had not been greatly concerned
about their presence. Each group was primarily interested in their own ‘near enemy’,
namely their home governments in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Algeria, and were
regarded as inert from the point of view of London. However, Al-Qaeda was a
new element in the security equation because it thought globally and sought to
mobilize these parochial groups in a worldwide war against the ‘far enemy’—the
United States and its adherents (Gerges 2005; Bamford 2005: 739–40). Accelerated
by the controversy over the Iraq War and the UK’s closer association with the United
States and Israel, radicalized Islamic groups that had hitherto been of only marginal
interest to UK security agencies suddenly became a problem. The London bombings
of 7 July 2005 also underlined the scale of a new indigenous threat (Gregory and
Wilkinson 2005).
Shortly before the 7 July 2005 bombings, JTAC, the UK’s intelligence fusion centre
for terrorism, lowered the threat level. Subsequently, we have learned that two of
the bombers, Mohamed Sidique Khan and Shazad Tanweer, had been the subject
of attention by MI5 and may even have been filmed and recorded at meetings with
other individuals of interest. While the events of 7 July 2005 probably contained
some elements of intelligence failure, the more important lesson is that the efforts
of Al-Qaeda, perhaps helped by current Western policies, have energized many con-
stituencies that would not have thought to attack the UK a decade ago. As a result,
the number of active individuals is beyond the capacity of even an expanded security
state to keep under surveillance (Pythian 2005: 361–79).
Neither politicians nor the public recognize the limits of intelligence. During
2006, Elizabeth Manningham-Buller, Director of MI5, explained that there were 1,600
individuals of concern within the UK (Manningham-Buller 2007). Surveillance of
one suspect requires the allocation of twenty operatives. Even with the expansion
of MI5’s A Branch, larger specialist police elements, and the occasional co-option
the security state 767
of specialist military units it has not been possible to watch more than 200 people
at any given time. The Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, revealed in
the Summer of 2005 that he was spending £500,000 a day over budget on terrorism-
related security measures. The security state is at full stretch and this is also depleting
the ability to counter organized crime and espionage (Harfield 2006: 743–61). More-
over, counter-terrorist intelligence and the law do not make easy bedfellows. This
has been underlined by a change in the attitude of the judiciary. During the cold
war, commentators were inclined to observe that UK judges were cowardly when
confronted with the spectre of national security rationales (Leigh and Lustgarten
1994: 321). However, following revelations about Guantanamo, Abu Graib, and ‘spe-
cial renditions’, a new climate is evident. Equipped with the Human Rights Act of
1998 senior judges have become more robust in challenging the security state. The
most obvious example is torture. On 8 December 2005, the House of Lords ruled that
evidence obtained under torture from third countries was inadmissible in UK courts.
The subject of torture has resonance. Some have alleged that the planned multiple
attacks against airliners in the UK in August 2006 were thwarted by intelligence
gained after the Pakistani security authorities had vigorously interrogated Rashid
Rauf, a British subject (Danchev 2006: 587–95; Campbell and Ramesh 2006). More
recently, the Venice Commission has underlined the importance of actively ensuring
compliance with ECHR when cooperating with foreign services, a development that
has profound significance.
Government has sought avenues by which it might discourage radicalization, but
has moved uncertainly in this area. Efforts by the Foreign Office to engage directly
with radicals have been dismissed as too timid by some and tantamount to appease-
ment by others. Institutionally, the desire for a more sophisticated approach was
signalled by the creation of a new Office of Counter-terrorism and Security within
the Home Office in August 2007 under Charles Farr, a diplomat with extensive
experience of counter-terrorism. Simultaneously, the post of Intelligence and Security
Coordinator in the Cabinet Office has been downgraded. Farr’s new office contains a
Research Information and Communications Unit headed by Jonathan Allen, another
diplomat who has a background in public relations. This represents an overt drive to
win hearts and minds and parallels long-standing covert information activities. The
creation of a Home Office unit run by diplomats also underlines deterritorialization
and the end of a security state that has a largely domestic focus.
41.8 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
Globalization is now the fundamental security challenge for the UK. The porous
nature of the market state has left government with little choice but to place its
intelligence agencies on the front line in the struggle against terrorism, people
768 richard j. aldrich
trafficking, narcotics, and the other transnational pathologies of the early twenty-
first century. This requires operations that are riskier, more kinetic, and often involve
unsavoury partners. Activities against Al-Qaeda are an obvious example, but some
of the operations led by MI6 in Colombia against the drug cartels from 1999 would
serve equally well. The secret services are no longer the silent sentinels of the cold
war; they have been recast as the ‘toilet cleaners of globalization’. Yet at the same
time Europeanization has presented a very different vista. Europe is still driving the
new culture of regulation that overtook the security state in the 1990s. European
institutions have worked with civil society in an effort to restrain the security agencies.
As a result, the new security challenges that seem to call for more action, perhaps
even a degree of beastliness, sit awkwardly with the rise of civil society and a complex
legal culture. These contradictions do not augur well for the UK security state and its
partners (Aldrich 2006: 158–61; Urban 2006: 24–5).
This, in turn, tells us something about the trajectory of the state in general. In the
1990s many had made confident assertions about the decline of the state, phrased
in terms of marketization, the rise of consumerism, and the expansion of global
governance (Marsh 1996; Paul and Ripsman 2004: 355–60). The catchphrase was the
‘twilight of sovereignty’. Things look so different now. The long-awaited engines
of global governance—much beloved of academics—are nowhere to be seen and,
instead, muscular nation states are equipping themselves with arbitrary powers. The
formidable growth of the UK security state might be unprecedented in national
terms, but viewed through a comparative lens it is hardly unique. Enhanced mil-
itary and intelligence capacity, together with extraordinary statutes that confer an
intense cloak of secrecy, are now the spirit of the age. Political leaders who once
embraced a neoliberal perspective on globalization have had to fall back on the
Westphalian refuge of nation-state sovereignty. Accordingly, the security state that
we thought had fallen out of fashion in 1989 is now very much ‘back in’ (Sidel 2005:
145–6).
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Urban, M. 2006. ‘The British Quest for Transparency’. Pp. 17–25 in Tsang 2006.
Vincent, D. 1998. The Culture of Secrecy: Britain 1832–1998. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wada, K. 2002. ‘Outline of Anti-Terrorism Legislation in Foreign Countries’. Journal of Police
Science, 55: 51–96.
Walker, C. 2005. ‘Intelligence and Anti-Terrorism Legislation in the United Kingdom’. Crime,
Law and Social Change, 44: 387–422.
part v
.................................................................................................................
P RO C E S S E S
.................................................................................................................
Section Fourteen:
Social Change
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 42
.................................................................................................................
PA RT I C I PAT I O N
AND SOCIAL
CA PITAL
.................................................................................................................
paul whiteley
The political culture in Great Britain also approximates the civic culture.
The participant role is highly developed. Exposure to politics, interest,
involvement, and a sense of competence are relatively high. There are
norms supporting political activity, as well as emotional involvement in
elections, and system affect. And the attachment to the system is a balanced
one: there is general system pride as well as satisfaction with specific gov-
ernment performance.
(Almond and Verba 1963: 315)
Popular engagement with the formal processes and institutions of democ-
racy has been in long-term decline since the 1960s. Party memberships have
been falling continuously since that time to the point where they stand at
less that one-quarter of their 1964 levels. The number of people who say
they identify with one of the main parties has followed a similar severe tra-
jectory. Turnout for other elections—local and European parliamentary—
have remained stubbornly low for decades.
(Power to the People 2006: 27)
774 paul whiteley
42.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
These two descriptions of the state of civil society in Britain are separated by nearly
fifty years. The first comes from the classic study of participation by Almond and
Verba undertaken in 1959. The second comes from the report of the Power Com-
mission, an investigation of the state of democracy in Britain published in 2006.
They characterize some of the important changes which have occurred in political
participation in Britain over time. Political participation is essentially about ordi-
nary citizens trying to influence the policies and the personnel of the state. So the
relationship between the state and participation is central to the analysis. We know
that key forms of participation such as voting and party membership have declined
significantly over time (Clarke et al. 2004; Whiteley and Seyd 2002). At the same time
other forms of participation, such as consumer involvement in buying or boycotting
products for political reasons, are growing in importance (Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley
2004). Unfortunately voting is much more important for democracy than boycotting,
since it determines who governs the state, so these developments have not left the
civic culture undamaged. Notwithstanding this point, why should we be concerned if
some important types of participation have declined and the civic culture in Britain
has deteriorated over time? What difference does it make?
Figure 42.1 illustrates why political participation is important. It shows the rela-
tionship between government effectiveness and political participation, using data
from thirty-seven countries. The governmental effectiveness measure was developed
by World Bank economists and combines indicators of the quality of public services
and the effectiveness of policy formulation and implementation in each country into
a single scale (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Mastruzzi 2006). The participation measure
comes from the International Social Survey Programme Citizenship Survey of 2004,
and combines eight different indicators of political participation into a single scale. 1
As the figure shows the relationship is quite strong, indicating that countries with
high levels of civic engagement tend to have effective governments. It is noteworthy
that the relationship gets stronger as participation increases, so that countries with
very high levels of participation have very effective governments. By implication
the public services are likely to be of poor quality and government is likely to be
incompetent in states where participation is low.
Given the importance of participation, it is not surprising that the literature on
this topic is vast and a number of different theoretical models have been used to
explain why some citizens get involved in politics when others do not (Verba and
Nie 1972; Verba, Nie, and Jae-On Kim 1978; Barnes and Kaase 1979; Muller 1979;
Parrry, Moyser, and Day 1992; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995; Pattie, Seyd, and
1
Respondents were asked if they had participated in eight different activities: signing a petition,
boycotting certain products, taking part in a demonstration, attending a political meeting, contacting a
politician, donating money to a political cause, contacting the media, and joining in an Internet forum
about politics. The scale used in Figure 42.1 is derived from a principal components analysis of these
items.
participation and social capital 775
3.5
3
Government Effectiveness
2.5
1.5
0.5
0
0 0.5 1 1.5 2
Participation Index
Fig. 42.1 The relationship between political participation and government effec-
tiveness in thirty-seven countries, 2004
Whiteley 2004). A comprehensive review of this literature is beyond the scope of
this chapter, and instead we will concentrate on examining a prominent theory
of participation which has been influential in recent years. This is social capital
theory.
The term social capital was introduced into modern social theory by the sociologist
James Coleman who viewed it as a set of obligations and expectations on the part
of individuals as well as a set of information channels linking them together (1988).
In Coleman’s interpretation social interaction generates ‘credit slips’ of obligations
and fosters norms of reciprocation in society. In a trustworthy environment these
credit slips can be acquired and used by third parties, and they facilitate social and
political interactions of all kinds. In a similar approach Robert Putnam defines social
capital as ‘features of social organizations, such as trust, norms and networks that
can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating co-ordinated actions’ (1993: 167).
Social capital is concerned with the extent to which individuals embedded within
communities interact, support, and trust each other. Localities rich in social capital
have many citizens who are active in both formal and informal community groups
and, according to the theory, they are characterized by high levels of trust between
776 paul whiteley
citizens. In common with the research on political participation, there is now a vast
interdisciplinary literature on social capital. 2
This chapter examines the relationship between social capital and political partici-
pation in Britain, and it is divided into four sections. In the second section we review
the evidence on political participation in contemporary Britain, as well as looking at
changes in participation over time. This is followed by an examination of the thesis
that social capital drives political participation. In the fourth section we examine
evidence on the relationship between social capital and political participation from
the 2005 British Election Study. The final section discusses the findings and their
implications for civic engagement in contemporary Britain.
42.2 Participation in
Contemporary Britain
.............................................................................................................................................
In 1959, the year that Almond and Verba were conducting the fieldwork for their study
of civic culture, the turnout in the general election was 78.7 per cent; almost half a
century later, the turnout in the 2005 election was 61.5 per cent. Trends in turnout in
British general elections are charted in Figure 42.2. They show that turnout was at a
maximum in the first fully post-war election of 1950, and thereafter it gently declined
over time before dropping dramatically after the 1997 election. 3 Low turnouts have
also been a feature of recent elections to the European Parliament, in local gov-
ernment elections, and elections to the Scottish, Welsh, and London assemblies, as
well as the London mayoral election. The evidence shows that electoral participation
among young people has declined faster than among the old, and there has been a
corresponding decline in the norms which support voting among the young (Clarke
et al. 2004).
Another development is the decline of party membership and party activism,
which has been documented by more than fifteen years of surveys of grass-roots party
members in Britain (Whiteley and Seyd 2002). Tony Blair’s success in recruiting an
additional 40 per cent of new members to the Labour Party between 1994 and 1997
has not been sustained. Figure 42.3 shows the trends in party membership over the
period 1983 to 2005, and it is evident that all three parties have been shrinking in
size during this period. Rates of activism among the surviving members have also
declined.
2
David Halpern provides an excellent and comprehensive introduction to this literature (see Halpern
2005).
3
It has been suggested that turnout in general elections followed ‘trendless fluctuations’ prior to the
1997 general election, but this is not the case. The decline in turnout from 84 per cent in 1950 to 71 per
cent in 1997 is highly statistically significant.
participation and social capital 777
90
85 83.9
82.6
80 78.7 78.8
77.1 77.7
75.8 76.0 75.3
Percent Voting
75 76.8
72.8 72.8 72.7 71.4
72.0
70
65
61.5
60
59.4
55
1945 50 51 55 59 64 66 70 74F 74O 79 83 87 92 97 01 2005
Election
Fig. 42.2 Turnout in United Kingdom general elections, 1945–2005
Source: UK Election Statistics 1918–2004, House of Commons Research Paper 04/31, p. 17; General Election
2005, House of Commons Research Paper 05/33, p. 1.
The common characteristic of these trends is that they are related to voting and
party activity. But the repertoire of participation in contemporary Britain is much
wider than that. Before one can draw definite conclusions about the state of par-
ticipation in Britain, it is necessary to examine a wide range of activities which
constitute participation. To understand the state of contemporary British democracy
it is necessary to cast the net fairly wide, in order to get a full picture of what is hap-
pening. A useful distinction in examining political participation is between macro-
and micro-participation. The former refers to actions designed to influence directly
government policies or personnel, while the latter refers to actions seeking to improve
the services delivered to particular individuals. Traditionally research into political
participation in Britain has focused on macro-participation (Parry, Moyser, and Day
1992) and rather neglected micro-participation. Macro-participation can be classified
into individualistic, contact, and collective forms (Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004).
These distinctions relate to the extent to which citizens have to work with others to
make their participation effective. Thus individualistic forms of participation, such as
boycotting goods, do not require any particular organization, and can be done easily
by individuals acting on their own behalf. In contrast, collective action such as taking
part in a demonstration, or attending a political meeting, involves organizationally
based cooperation. Contact participation can be individualistic or collective, but it
778 paul whiteley
1400
1200
1000
Thousands
800
600
400
200
0
1983 1992 2001 2005
Labour Conservatives Liberal Democrats
Fig. 42.3 Trends in party membership 1983–2005
Source: Beetham (2002) and party sources.
commonly takes an individualistic form, with citizens seeking help and advice from
officials to navigate the complexities of the modern state.
Micro-participation is about individuals obtaining specific benefits for themselves
rather than about changing the law or influencing local and national policies. In the
past some of this has not been fully recognized as participation, but in a growing
consumerist society and in the context of government advocating choice as a desir-
able goal for delivering public services, this form of participation is becoming more
important.
We can get an overview of the different forms of participation in Britain using
data from the Citizen’s Audit conducted in 2000 (Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004).
Table 42.1 shows that macro-political participation in Britain most commonly takes
individualistic rather than collectivist forms. Thus, voting, donating money to a
voluntary organization, signing a petition, displaying posters, and boycotting goods
are the most common forms of political action. Acting collectively to organize a
political group, to participate in a demonstration, or to organize a strike are much less
common. These findings are unsurprising, since the modern era is characterized by
individualistic consumerism which stresses the importance of market relationships.
A number of sociologists have suggested that a decline in community solidarity
and cohesion has occurred across the advanced industrial democracies and these
developments are linked to growing affluence and to the pervasiveness of market-
based relationships and the ‘individualization’ of modern society (Bellah et al. 1985;
Beck 1992; Etzioni 1995). These developments sit alongside the decline of many large
participation and social capital 779
Table 42.1 Acts of political participation in Britain (%)
Actual Potential
participation participation
Individual actions
Donated money to an organization 62 75
Voted in a local government election 50 71
Signed a petition 42 76
Boycotted certain products 31 59
Raised funds for an organization 30 55
Bought certain products for political, ethical, or 28 49
environmental reasons
Worn or displayed a campaign badge or sticker 22 49
Collective actions
Attended a political meeting or rally 5 26
Taken part in a public demonstration 5 34
Formed a group of like-minded people 5 23
Taken part in a strike 2 27
Participated in illegal protest activities 2 13
Contact actions
Contacted a public official 25 59
Contacted a solicitor or judicial body 20 60
Contacted a politician 13 53
Contacted an organization 11 50
Contacted the media 9 43
Actual participation: ‘During the last twelve months have you done any of the following to influence
rules, laws, or policies?’
Potential participation: ‘Would you do any of the following to influence rules, laws, or policies?’
collective organizations, such as trade unions, political parties, and pressure groups,
which used to provide the framework for collective action. In this situation it is not
surprising that traditional forms of collective politics are gradually being replaced by
individualistic forms.
Notwithstanding this point, Figure 42.4 shows that many people are involved in
diverse types of political action. More than three-quarters of the respondents in the
Citizen’s Audit had engaged in one or more political actions over the previous twelve
months, and about a third had taken five or more actions. The mean number was 3.6.
Thus it appears that most people in contemporary Britain participate in some form
of political action, even if most of these are individualistic in nature. It might be that
voting or party activity are in decline, but it would be wrong to assume that people in
general are not interested in or involved in politics viewed from a broad perspective.
Who are the participants? What are the social background characteristics of those
who get involved? In order to distinguish the non-participant from the active par-
ticipant, we classify the respondents into those who engaged in no political actions,
those involved in between one and four, and those participating in more than four
actions. We can see in Table 42.2 that there are significant differences between various
groups of people in their rates of participation; the young and the old are more likely
780 paul whiteley
45
39
40
35
29
30
Percentages
25
20
15
15 13
10
4
5
0
None One Two to four Five to nine Ten plus
Number of Actions
Fig. 42.4 The number of political actions undertaken in a year
to be disengaged than the middle-aged. The poorest members of society, manual
workers, and those with little education are less likely to be active than the affluent
professionals and the highly educated. Thus respondents with an annual household
income of £50,000 or more are twice as likely to be very active as those with an income
of less than £10,000. Professional and managerial workers are about twice as likely
to be active than manual workers. Interestingly enough, people’s gender and ethnic
backgrounds appear to be unrelated to their rates of participation, since women
participate at the same rate as men, and ethnic minorities are similar to the ethnic
majority. However, there is a clear geography to political participation in Britain, with
Londoners and people living in the south-east of England more likely to participate
than people living in the north, Scotland, or Wales.
We have introduced the distinction between individualistic and collectivist forms
of participation. Are there differences between people in relation to these different
modes of participation? If we take typical examples of the three types of participa-
tion, individualistic participation defined in terms of buying goods for political and
ethical reasons, contact participation measured by communications with officials and
politicians, and collective action by involvement in demonstrations, we discover in
Table 42.3 that the types of participant do differ. Those engaging in individualistic
forms of action are found among the middle-aged professionals who tend to be rather
participation and social capital 781
Table 42.2 Variations in political participation by social backgrounds (%)
Number of political actions None One to four Five plus
undertaken in 2000
All 15 52 33
Age
24 and under 17 55 29
25–44 15 49 37
45–64 13 50 37
65 and over 16 60 24
Gender
Male 15 53 33
Female 15 51 34
Class
Professional and managerial 8 45 47
Intermediate 14 51 36
Manual 18 58 24
Religiosity
Religious 12 52 36
Non-religious 17 52 31
Household income
Under £10,000 19 56 25
£10,000 up to £19,999 15 54 31
£20,000 up to £29,999 10 51 39
£30,000 up to £39,999 10 47 44
£40,000 up to £49,999 9 41 50
£50,000 and above 3 43 54
Education
15 years and under 19 57 24
16–18 15 52 33
19 years and over 7 43 50
Ethnicity
White/European 15 52 34
Black/Asian/Caribbean/Other 18 56 26
Location
Greater London 11 51 38
South West 16 50 34
East/West Midlands 21 54 25
North West/North/Yorkshire 14 54 31
South East/East Anglia 13 47 40
Scotland 17 54 29
Wales 6 73 21
affluent, highly educated, and live in London and the southern counties. The contrast
is most marked in relation to educational backgrounds, where the highly educated
are three times more likely to be engaged than those who left school at age fifteen.
Similarly, professionals are about twice as likely to be individualistic participants as
manual workers.
782 paul whiteley
Table 42.3 Variations in individual, contact, and collective actions by
social backgrounds
Individual Contact Collective
% yesa % yesb % yesc
All 28 13 5
Age
24 and under 28 6 10
25–44 33 11 5
45–64 29 17 4
65 and over 16 13 3
Gender
Male 27 14 6
Female 29 12 4
Class
Professional and managerial 43 19 7
Intermediate 31 13 4
Manual 18 9 4
Religiosity
Religious 28 14 4
Non-religious 28 11 6
Household income
Under £10,000 18 11 4
£10,000 up to £19,999 24 14 5
£20,000 up to £29,999 34 12 7
£30,000 up to £39,999 41 15 4
£40,000 up to £49,999 57 13 8
£50,000 and above 56 18 7
Education
15 years and under 17 11 2
16–18 27 12 5
19 years and over 52 19 10
Ethnicity
White/European 28 13 5
Black/Asian/Caribbean/Other 27 13 5
Location
Greater London 38 14 6
South West 28 13 6
East/West Midlands 22 10 4
North West/North/Yorkshire 25 14 5
South East/East Anglia 34 14 4
Scotland 20 13 6
Wales 14 7 4
a Percentage who had ‘bought certain products for political, ethical, or environmental reasons’.
b Percentage who had ‘contacted a politician (for example, a member of parliament or a local
councillor)’.
c Percentage who had ‘taken part in a public demonstration’.
participation and social capital 783
The profile of contact participants is rather similar to that of individualistic partic-
ipants. Again, they are more likely to be affluent professionals and managers, highly
educated, and middle aged. However a person’s gender, income, ethnicity, religiosity,
and geographical location do not appear to influence their contact participation.
This may be because it is about seeking help and advice rather than taking initiatives
primarily of an individualistic nature. In focusing on the relatively small number of
people involved in collectively organized political actions, differences in their social
characteristics are rather less apparent. The only two significant differences in this
group are age and education; the young and those with higher education are much
more likely to be engaged in collectively organized actions. The educational effect
is huge, with the highly educated being five times more likely to participate in a
demonstration than the uneducated, and the young about three times more likely
to do this than the old.
Table 42.1 understates the importance of collective action, however, since it
says little about organizational involvement. A very important aspect of collective
participation is organizational membership and this is examined in Figure 42.5 and
Table 42.4. Respondents were asked if they had been members of a set of different
Forms of organizational participation
60
55
50
40
30
21 22
20
10
3
0
0 groups 1 group 2-4 groups 5+ groups
Fig. 42.5 Membership of organizations
Question: ’In the last twelve months, have you been a member of this type of organisation (in other words have you paid
a membership fee if it is required), have you participated in an activity arranged by this type of organisation, have you
donated money as an individual to this type of organisation, or have you done voluntary or unpaid work for this type of
organisation?’
784 paul whiteley
Table 42.4 Types of organizational membership
Percentage of people who are members of:
Motoring 29 Youth 1
Trade union 9 Environmental 1
Sports/outdoor activities 8 Animal rights 1
Gymnasium 6 Business/employers 1
Residents/housing/neighbourhood 6 Women 1
Professional 5 Humanitarian aid/human rights 1
Social 5 Medical patients/illnesses 1
Conservation 4 Consumer 1
Religious/church 3 Parents and teachers 1
Hobby 3 Disabled 1
Cultural/music/dancing/theatre 2 Other 5
Ex-service 2
voluntary organizations during the previous twelve months, where membership is
defined as paying a fee to the organization. Figure 42.5 shows that the majority of
the public are not members of any organization, but there are nonetheless four out
of ten people affiliated. On average these joiners belong to two different types of
organization, with only 3 per cent of the population being members of five or more
organizations. These figures tend to underestimate the extent of people’s organiza-
tional involvement, because they distinguish between types of organizations rather
than specific interest groups. Clearly, people may be members of more than one group
within any particular type of organization.
What types of organizations do people belong to? Table 42.4 reveals that people are
most likely to join a motoring organization (for example, the Automobile Association
or the Royal Automobile Club), followed by sports, fitness, and work organizations.
Other types of organizations which attract relatively large numbers of members
are the residential and neighbourhood, social, conservation, religious, and hobby
groups. Some organizations are concerned with human rights (e.g. women’s rights
and animals rights), and others seek to represent particular constituencies (e.g. the
disabled and consumer groups). Yet others represent cultural, arts, and hobby groups.
The 2001 Census reports an adult population of 44 million in Great Britain, suggesting
that almost 13 million people are affiliated to a motoring organization, about 3 million
to sports or outdoor activity organizations, 2 million to a gymnasium, and between a
quarter and a half million to human rights, women’s, and consumer groups.
Many people would argue that joining a motoring organization is not really
political participation at all, since the main aim is to provide an insurance policy
against vehicle breakdown. If this category of membership is excluded from the data,
we find that almost one in three people (31 per cent) are members of at least one
voluntary organization. But what do they do in these organizations? Do they pay their
membership dues and do nothing else, or are they actively involved in various ways?
Respondents were asked to describe their activities in the one organization which was
participation and social capital 785
Table 42.5 Participatory activities in the ‘most important’ organization (%)
Often Sometimes Rarely Never Don’t know
Attend meetings 32 14 10 41 3
Participate in decision-making at meetings 22 13 11 51 4
Speak at meetings 16 13 11 57 4
Plan/chair meetings 8 6 5 77 4
Write report about meetings 6 6 6 78 4
Talk about organization problems/goals 25 22 10 39 4
Call upon fellow members for practical help 18 21 12 45 4
Disagree about organization problems/goals 12 24 14 47 4
Meet socially 24 22 12 38 4
Questions: ‘Thinking about the one organisation which is most important to you, how often do you . . . ? ‘Again,
thinking about the one organisation which is most important to you, how often do you do any of the following
with other members of the organisation?’
most important to them. Not surprisingly, as Table 42.5 reveals, membership for a
large number of people involves no real participation in the organization’s activities
nor any interaction with other members. This point is relevant to the later discussion
of social capital. However, about one in three often attend meetings and one in five
often participate in decision-making. Furthermore, outside of the meeting, about a
quarter regularly talk with other members of the group, and a similar proportion
often meet socially with their fellow members. In total, around four out of ten group
members are involved in personal interchange with their fellow members at some
point. One can see therefore that associational life provides a meeting point and a
source of social interaction for millions of people in Britain. This is very relevant to
the issue of social capital, a theme which we shall return to below.
The earlier discussion showed that election-related and party-related forms of
political participation have been declining. However, it is important to stress that
this is not true of all types of participation. Table 42.6 compares the responses to a set
Table 42.6 Changes in participation, 1984–2000 (%)
Type of activity 1984 2000
Voted in a general election 83 72
Signed a petition 63 42
Contacted a public official 25 25
Boycotted products for ethical reasons 4 31
Contacted the media 4 9
Attended a political meeting 9 6
Attended a demonstration 5 5
Attended an illegal protest 1 2
Source: Parry, Moyser, and Day (1992) and Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley (2004).
786 paul whiteley
of questions asked in a national survey of the population conducted in 1984 (Parry,
Moyser, and Day 1992), with the same (or similar) questions asked in the Citizens
Audit survey of 2000.
Table 42.6 shows that voting has definitely declined in importance, but boycotting
or buying goods for ethical and political reasons has grown rather dramatically in
importance. Young people, in particular, are attracted to this type of participation
and many buy things like ‘fair trade’ coffee and boycott the fur trade. Similarly,
contacting the media has become more common, something which is related to the
proliferation of new media outlets that has occurred in recent years. There is also
tantalizing evidence that illegal protest activity may have increased as well, but so few
people are involved in this type of activity that it is difficult to be sure how much
of an increase has actually taken place. Other indicators of political activity such as
attending a political demonstration show no change from 1984. But if we look back
further in time, the potential for protesting, if not actual protesting, appears to have
grown in importance. In 1979 some 20 per cent of respondents in the British Election
Study survey stated that they would be willing to go on a protest demonstration. By
2000 this had risen to 33 per cent. The campaign against the Iraq War saw upwards
of 1.5 million people on the streets of London in 2003, and the previous two years
had seen major nationwide protests occurring over fuel prices, and over rural issues
by the Countryside Alliance. Campaigns against road schemes and airport expansion
plans are now commonplace and have become a standard feature of the planning
process in Britain. Such demonstrations and campaigns have all been made easier
by the Internet which allows people to mobilize and organize protests much faster
than was the case a generation ago. In one sense a willingness to join in a protest
demonstration is an indicator of civic health, rather than civic decline, except that
it might be argued that people demonstrate when they find orthodox channels of
influence weak or ineffective. It is interesting to note that the evidence from Citizen
Audit suggests that young people are more likely to get involved in demonstra-
tions than their older counterparts, while at the same time being much less likely
to vote.
Another development is that the norms supporting political activity have weak-
ened over time. When asked ‘what part do you think the ordinary person should play
in the local affairs of his town or district?’ some 70 per cent thought that citizens
should be participants in their communities in the 1959 survey (Almond and Verba
1963). When asked to respond to the statement, ‘Every citizen should be involved in
politics if democracy is to work properly’, only 44 per cent agreed or strongly agreed in
the Citizen Audit survey of 2000 (Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004). This may explain
why the numbers willing to serve on public bodies seems to be declining, and there are
often difficulties in attracting people onto parish councils, school governing boards,
or community health councils.
The focus up to this point has been on macro-participation. However, as the earlier
discussion indicates, there is a whole dimension of participation which is very impor-
tant. When citizens come into daily contact with the institutions or representatives
of the state, this can generate its own type of participation. For example if a person
participation and social capital 787
spends time in hospital, regularly visits the dentist, has children in school, helps a
relative who is drawing social benefits, or has occasion to report a crime to the police,
they are interacting with representatives of the British state. Such interactions will
often involve attempts on their part to influence the behaviour of state representatives.
This does not involve changing the law or altering official policies, but it does involve
trying to influence the implementation of these policies at the local level. The Citizen’s
Audit of 2000 sought to measure aspects of this micro-participation world. It focused
on three areas: education, health, and the workplace. After finding out if respondents
had children in school, if they had recently obtained medical treatment, or if they were
in paid employment, follow-up questions were asked about these areas. They were
asked if they had tried to influence their child’s education, their medical treatment,
and their working conditions during the previous year.
As Figure 42.6 shows, about one in four respondents with children had tried to
influence the way their child’s education was provided; one in ten who had sought
medical treatment tried to influence that treatment; and almost half of employed
50
45 43
40
35
30
Percentages
24
25
20
15
11
10
0
Education Medical treatment Working conditions
Fig. 42.6 Attempts to influence education, medical treatment, or working
conditions
Note: The chart shows the percentages of parents with children in schools, the percentages of individuals seeking
medical treatment, and the percentage of people in work who tried to influence their conditions and treatment over the
previous year.
Source: Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley (2004).
788 paul whiteley
people had taken action to try to improve their working conditions. Much of this
type of action is not ‘political’ in the traditional sense of the word, but it nonetheless
has an important influence on people’s day-to-day lives, and when they take this
form of action they are often trying to influence state policies as they are applied in
practice.
The differences in Figure 42.6 are striking and are explained by the quality of the
service provided on the one hand and the opportunities available to take action on
the other. Thus people will take action when they are dissatisfied with their treatment
and also when the opportunities for involvement are available. The opportunity
structures for involvement are particularly important (Tarrow 1998). Parents have
many opportunities to be drawn into the daily life of their children’s school via
parent–teachers’ associations and with school visits. In addition to organizing par-
ent evenings, teachers will often encourage parents to become involved in informal
ways in their children’s education. Thus the opportunity structures for participation
exist. In relation to the workplace, a complex legal framework exists to regulate
workplace rights, working conditions, and health and safety issues. Negotiations
between employees and employers, often involving state officials, are a day-to-day
feature of the modern workplace. There are trade unions, works councils, and formal
procedures for people to articulate their concerns in the working environment. In
contrast with schools and the workplace, there are many fewer opportunities for
patient involvement in hospitals or in the doctor’s surgery. There is something of
a tradition of patient deference to the professional health care providers, and many
of these have heavy workloads and little time to discuss specific treatments with their
patients.
When asked if they were successful in influencing the professionals, more than
half the respondents said that they were successful in changing the way their child’s
education was provided (59 per cent), about half were successful in influencing their
medical treatment (50 per cent), and almost two-thirds (62 per cent) felt successful
in influencing working conditions. So not only is there a lot of micro-participation
taking place, but people feel generally that they are successful in exercising influence,
even though this was less true in the case of health care than in education and in the
workplace. Having mapped out the main aspects of political participation in Britain
we turn next to the task of explaining why participation occurs.
42.3 Participation and Social Capital
.............................................................................................................................................
There is no shortage of theoretical explanations for political action. In the analy-
sis of the Citizen Audit six alternative models of participation were examined
(Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004). Broadly speaking, these theoretical models divide
into two categories: those linked to choice behaviour and theories of decision-
participation and social capital 789
making, and those linked to structural or sociological accounts. Choice theories
emphasize the role of the individual as a decision-maker who makes choices about
his or her level of involvement. Issues such as the costs and benefits of political
action loom large in these accounts. Structural theories, in contrast, focus more
on the social backgrounds of individuals and socialization processes which might
account for their participation. In the present context we will focus on social capital
theory, which provides a structural account that has been quite influential in recent
years.
Putnam’s explanation of the relationship between social capital and participation is
best known. He explains social and economic differences between the Italian regions
and between American states in terms of their different levels of social capital (1993;
2000). He finds that in areas like Minnesota or Emilia-Romagna, people are socially
active, join groups, and take part in a wide variety of activities, both formal and
informal, which put them in close contact with their fellow citizens. This builds a
reservoir of social capital in these active communities. Feeling able to trust one’s
fellows most of the time on most issues helps reduce the costs of political interaction
and helps to develop ‘norms of reciprocity’. People come to expect broadly fair
dealing, both from their fellows and from government. By contrast, in areas like
Mississipi or Calabria civic life is not conducive to building social capital. In these
places associational life is less active and norms of reciprocity and trust are relatively
weak.
According to the theory interpersonal trust and voluntary activity are linked in a
virtuous circle, so that as people mix with others in a voluntary setting, they come to
know and trust each other, and this in turn promotes even more voluntary activity. As
this happens those feelings of trust begin to extend to people beyond an individual’s
immediate circle of acquaintances. These interactions produce what the economists
call ‘externalities’, which arise when cooperative behaviour spills over into the wider
society. Because they know and trust their fellow citizens individuals are more likely to
trust and to help strangers. As social capital develops, society works more efficiently
by reducing the transaction and policing costs associated with widespread mistrust
between citizens. Societies poor in social capital display only weak associational ties
and exhibit limited mutual trust, and as a consequence they fare worse and work less
efficiently than their more fortunate neighbours.
It is important to note that voluntary activity is much broader than political partic-
ipation, and so the two concepts are not the same thing. In Putnam’s interpretation,
social capital can be built in all types of voluntary organizations such as sports clubs,
cultural organizations, choral societies, and informal groups, all of which have little
to do with political participation. The social capital model argues that these relatively
non-political forms of voluntary activity can stimulate political participation by
building trust between individuals, and political participation is encouraged by high
levels of trust.
Social capital appears to have major consequences for society. Empirical research
suggests societies where levels of trust in other people are high tend to perform better
on a range of economic and political indicators than do societies where trust is lacking
790 paul whiteley
(Knack and Keefer 1997; Knack 2002; Inglehart 1999; Whiteley 2000; Newton and
Norris 2000). Putnam claims that social capital in America delivers many benefits to
localities where it is high, including better economic performance, improved health
and education, reduced crime, and higher levels of life satisfaction and happiness
(Putnam 2000).
But social capital may not be an infinitely renewable resource. There is evidence
of a decline in citizen activism and in social capital in the United States since the
1960s: in an influential argument, Putnam blames television for this development
(Putnam 1995; 2000). Television now constitutes the main leisure pursuit for very
large numbers of Westerners. The trend towards privatized television watching has
grown rapidly over time, isolating people in their own homes, and reducing the
time available for precisely the various kinds of social networking and associational
activity which are claimed to be conducive to developing social capital. This claim
about the importance of television is controversial, however, and has been challenged
(Norris 1996).
The social capital argument has been subject to considerable critical scrutiny, both
theoretical and empirical (Tarrow 1996; Newton 1999; Claibourn and Martin 2000;
Milner 2002; Halpern 2005). One important finding is that while social capital may
have been declining in the United States, it does not seem to have declined much
in Britain (Hall 1999). One implication of this finding is that social capital cannot
therefore account for the decline in turnout and in party activity (Franklin 2004).
There is also evidence to suggest that social capital has declined in Sweden during
a period in which electoral turnout actually increased in that country (Rothstein
2002). Thus social capital might be important for explaining some forms of political
participation, but it may not be relevant for others.
Another finding relates to the link between local government and social capital
in Britain. It appears that while service outputs at the local level are not influenced
by social capital, service outcomes are. The former refer to the amount of money
spent on services by local authorities, while the latter refer to the effectiveness of
those services in delivering outcomes. In the case of education, for example, which
is the biggest item in the budget for English and Welsh local authorities, the best
pupil performances in GCSE are found in areas with high levels of political partic-
ipation and associational activity (Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004: 189–223). While
the geographical distribution of social capital does not appear to influence local
government spending on services, it does influence the effectiveness of those services.
Other case studies of real estate development and urban management schemes in
the United States have shown that social capital significantly improves the quality
of policy delivery in areas where it is high (Saegert and Winkel 1998; Glaeser and
Sacerdote 2000).
These findings all suggest that social capital is an asset to government, but its
relationship to political participation is more ambiguous. Putnam (2000: 31–64)
produces a lot of evidence to support the idea that social capital and political
participation have both declined at the same time in the United States. Moreover,
individual-level analyses of civic participation repeatedly show a correlation between
participation and social capital 791
personal affluence and education on the one hand and indicators of social capital
such as trust and voluntary activity on the other (Parry, Moyser, and Day 1992; Brady,
Verba, and Schlozman 1995; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995; Franklin 2004). Since
affluence and education are determinants of political participation, this establishes
an important indirect link between social capital and participation. Extending this
to the community level, the implication is that the more affluent the community,
the more social capital and the greater the level of civic involvement. However, as
Oliver (2001) points out, social capital is not the same thing as affluence and other,
subtler relationships are possible. He suggests that participation varies systemati-
cally across different types of American suburban communities. Even after control-
ling for individual-level factors such as personal affluence, political participation is
greater, ceteris paribus, in economically mixed communities than in very poor or very
rich communities. It is also greater in racially mixed than in near all-black or all-
white communities. Both reflect the greater political stakes in ‘mixed’ rather than in
homogeneous communities. Politics in diverse communities involve a battle between
potential ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, whereas in homogeneous communities residents have
similar interests, and hence the risks of non-participation and the potential gains
from participation are not so great. This is a challenge to social capital theory,
since it is often the most homogeneous communities which have the most social
capital.
Another important factor in explaining participation is community size. People
living in less populous communities are more likely, other things being equal, to
participate in politics than are people living in larger urban centres (Oliver 2000;
Frandsen 2002). This, it is claimed, reflects the relatively smaller prospects of free-
riding in a small community than in a large one. Equally, the smaller the authority
the more people living there trust their local government (Denters 2002). Again these
findings are inconsistent with the social capital model, which suggests that there is no
necessary relationship between the size of a community and its levels of social capital.
An important problem associated with research into social capital is to establish the
causal processes at work. Does social capital explain participation, or is it the other
way round? There may be virtuous or vicious circles at work in these relationships,
but unless the starting point of the interaction can be identified, social capital runs the
risk of being a theory without any solid foundations. To be fair, given that voluntary
activity is a much broader concept than political participation, it is not tautological
to argue that the former drives the latter.
All this suggests that while Putnam’s (2000) evidence supports the idea that
social capital drives participation there is evidence which clearly contradicts this
hypothesis. With this point in mind, it is interesting to explore the relationship
between social capital and political participation in Britain in order to establish just
how strong the links are in practice. We do this using data from the 2005 British
Election Study (Clarke et al. forthcoming). The analysis is cross-sectional and so is
unable to identify the causal sequences at work. Rather than testing a fully specified
causal model, the aim is a more modest one of establishing if social capital and
participation are actually related.
792 paul whiteley
42.4 Modelling the Relationship
between Social Capital
and Participation
.............................................................................................................................................
A series of indicators of political participation were included in the British Elec-
tion Study post-election survey of 2005. In that study the focus was on voting and
party-related political participation and, since these have been in long-run decline
and they are particularly important for democracy, it is interesting to focus on their
relationship to social capital. In the survey respondents were asked if they had voted in
the 2005 general election and they were also asked about their likelihood of voting in
future elections to the European Parliament and also in local government elections.
The latter two scales varied from zero to ten, so that respondents were being asked
essentially to assign a probability that they would vote in these secondary elections.
In the case of the European parliamentary elections, for example, just under a third
assigned a score of ten indicating that they were very likely to vote, and 37 per cent
assigned a score of five or less, suggesting that they were not. The three measures
can all be regarded as observable indicators of an underlying latent ‘probability of
voting’ scale. In addition to the indicators of voting, there were three measures of
party activism included in the survey. The first measure asked respondents if they
were currently members of a political party. The second asked about the likelihood
of their giving money to a party, and the third about working for a party in a future
election. These were measured with zero to ten probability scales, and they can all be
regarded as indicators of an underlying latent ‘party involvement’ scale.
Social capital was measured with indicators of interpersonal trust and also volun-
tary activity. One question asked, ‘On balance, would you say that most people can’t
be trusted or that most people can be trusted?’; and another, ‘Do you think that most
people you come into contact with would try to take advantage of you if they got the
chance or would they try to be fair?’ Again, responses were measured using zero to ten
scales, and can be regarded as indicators of an underlying latent interpersonal trust
scale. The voluntary activity aspects of social capital were captured by three different
questions in the election study. The first asked, ‘Over the past few years, have you
volunteered to get involved in politics or community affairs?’ In addition two zero to
ten scales were used to measure the respondent’s views on voluntary activity in the
future. One asked, ‘how likely is it that you will be active in a voluntary organisation,
like a community association, a charity group, or a sports club?’; and the other, ‘how
likely is it that you will work actively with a group of people to address a public issue
or solve a problem?’ Taken together the three items provide measures of an underlying
‘propensity to volunteer’ scale, a key indicator in the social capital model.
Figure 42.7 shows the results of a confirmatory factor analysis which shows the
relationship between the participation and social capital measures. 4 The observed
4
This was produced by LISREL 8.0. See Joreskog and Sorbom (2001).
participation and social capital 793
0.52 votelast
0.36 euvote 0.59
0.80
0.98 VOTING 1.00
0.05 lgvote
0.38
0.50 partymem
0.71
PARTY 1.00 0.34
0.82
0.33 workprty
0.80 0.10 0.33
0.37 monprty
TRUST 1.00 0.58
0.78
0.40 trustoth
0.78 0.14
0.40 fairoth
VOLUNT 1.00
0.71
0.50 Volunt
0.75
0.71
0.44 Volact
0.50 group
chi–square = 554.48, df = 38, p–value = 0.00000, RMSEA = 0.057
Fig. 42.7 The relationship between indicators of participa-
tion and social capital in the British Election Study, 2005
variables appear in the rectangles on the left and the latent measures in the ovals
on the right. The magnitude of the coefficients linking observed and latent vari-
ables show how effective the former are in measuring the latter. While we do not
see perfect relationships of 1.0, the links between the observed and latent variables
are nonetheless very strong, indicating that the former are good indicators of the
latter. The relationship between social capital and participation is captured by the
correlations between the latent variables. The strongest correlation (+0.58) is between
party activism (party) and voluntary activity (volunt). There is a strong tendency
for individuals who are active in political parties to be active in other types of volun-
tary organization as well. Party activism can be viewed as a special type of voluntary
activity, although it is by no means inevitable that involvement in sports clubs and
cultural organizations should carry over to participation in parties.
The correlations between electoral participation (voting) and the social capital
indicators (trust and volunt) are much weaker. Individuals who trust others are
a bit more likely to vote than their fellow citizens (+0.34), and the same point can
be made about volunteers (+0.33). But neither effect is very strong. The weakest
relationships are between party activism and trust (+0.10), and trust and volunteering
(+0.14). Since social capital theory suggests that interpersonal trust should be closely
linked to voluntary activity, this tends to undermine the credibility of the model. It
794 paul whiteley
does not appear that volunteers are that much more trusting than the rest of the
population.
In fairness to social capital theory, the strongest effects are held to operate at the
community rather than the individual level. Thus places with lots of social capital
should have higher rates of political participation than places which lack this resource.
If we examine the correlation between the social capital and the participation
measures when they are aggregated into constituencies, they are generally higher
than the individual-level coefficients. 5 On the other hand, social capital cannot be
divorced from the people who live in these communities. Widespread distrust among
these individuals inevitably means that the community has low levels of social capital.
Communities with high levels of social capital are endowed this way because their
inhabitants trust each other and work together. So the roots of social capital must be
found at the individual level, and the evidence suggests that at that level key links are
relatively weak.
42.5 Conclusions and Discussion
.............................................................................................................................................
There are a wide variety of types of political participation taking place in Britain,
from standing for public office at the high intensity end of the scale to voting at the
low intensity end. A broad overview suggests that political participation in Britain
is relatively healthy. But a narrower focus on elections and political parties reveals a
different picture. A long-term decline in electoral participation in Britain has been
taking place, something which has been happening in other advanced industrial
democracies as well (Wattenberg 2000). Linked to this is a long-term decline in grass-
roots party activity. Since political parties and electoral participation play such an
important role in making democracy work, these developments can only be regarded
as problematic for the future of civil society. One influential theory of participation,
social capital, produces a rather mixed picture as an explanation. While voluntary
activity and party activity are closely related to each other, relationships between
trust and participation are much weaker. The forms of participation examined in
this chapter are important but rather specialized, and it may be that social capital
does a better job of explaining other forms of participation than voting and party
involvement. However, the Achilles heel for the theory is the very weak relationship
between voluntary activity and interpersonal trust. This is a key relationship which is
thought to be at the core of the social capital model.
These findings tend to support the evidence of other research into the deter-
minants of political participation in modern democracies. Increasingly citizens are
5
The aggregate correlation between the first of the trust indicators and voting in the 2005 election
was +0.48, and between volunteering and voting was +0.25.
participation and social capital 795
instrumental in their approach to participation, and they will get involved if this
furthers their interests, and avoid involvement when it does not. This is why choice
models of participation tend to explain things better than structural models like the
social capital model (Pattie, Seyd, and Whiteley 2004). A number of developments
in society reinforce these trends. In addition to the rise of consumerism referred to
earlier, there is the point that governments are increasingly constrained by global
and regional forces in policy-making. If citizens conclude that governments cannot
do very much to influence, for example, the state of the economy, they may very
well decide that economic voting is a waste of their time. Equally, modern campaign
strategies which emphasize the importance of capturing the middle ground of politics
reduce the range of alternatives open to the voter, and this reduces the incentives to
vote (Clarke et al. 2004: 267). On the other hand, if a local planning proposal threatens
house prices in a community, a rapid mobilization of that community is likely to
ensue. This will involve a lot of voluntary activity, as well as petitions, demonstrations,
and contact participation. Social capital may play a role in explaining these kinds of
developments, but it is probably a minor role in comparison with more instrumental
considerations.
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c h a p t e r 43
.................................................................................................................
POLITICAL
M A R K E TI N G
.................................................................................................................
heather savigny
Politicians increasingly behave like celebrities (Street 1997; 2004; Higgins 2008),
appearing on TV programmes such as Richard and Judy, Have I Got News for You,
Parkinson, etc., and a plethora of spin doctors advise politicians on their interactions
with the media. Political actors need to be ‘telegenic’ (Newman 1994: 17); how politi-
cians look is as (if not more) important than what they say. This emphasis upon image
and media management form, however, just one part of a broader set of strategies,
referred to within the academic literature as political marketing.
Political marketing, while played out in and reliant upon a media environment,
is not simply about media management strategies. Political marketing is some-
thing which has become much more than a ‘trendy buzzword’; it has become
an integral part of the practice of contemporary politics. Labour and the Con-
servatives routinely and extensively employ marketing in their electioneering and
as Newman observes, in the current environment, the question becomes whether
it is conceivable for a candidate not to adopt a marketing perspective (Newman
1994: 21). In this sense, it is important to establish not only what political mar-
keting is, what it does, why and how it has become so prominent, but also what
the implications of the application of marketing to politics might entail. As such,
the aim of this chapter is to reflect critically upon these issues in relation to
I would like to thank: Lee Marsden, John Street, Mick Temple, Colin Hay, and the Handbook editors,
Matthew Flinders, Andrew Gamble, and Mike Kenny, and the anonymous reviewers, for their
constructive and insightful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
political marketing 799
political marketing as both as set of political practices and an academic disci-
pline. It will also highlight the tensions and areas of contestation in this devel-
opment, particularly with respect to the potential impact on the democratic
process.
Broadly speaking political marketing is informed by a set of assumptions and
models derived from management, which start from the premise that parties can
be conceived of as businesses and voters as consumers. This fundamental premise
has given rise to a divergent set of literature which details contemporary elite-
level political behaviour, largely but not exclusively, in election campaign practice.
The term ‘political marketing’ is used in this chapter to detail this use of business
assumptions, models, and practices in politics as both (a) a set of practical strategies
used by political actors, and (b) an academic literature which has charted these
developments.
As a literature, political marketing draws from communications studies, political
science, and management marketing literature (Scammell 1999), and has been able
to capture and describe the changing nature of electioneering. This literature has
proliferated, with a wealth of books, articles, and a specialist journal (Journal of Polit-
ical Marketing) which detail, describe, and analyse contemporary elite-level political
behaviour. This has also meant that alongside traditional election studies such as the
Nuffield series, elections for more than a decade have been accompanied by books
and special issues of journals (e.g. European Journal of Marketing; Journal of Marketing
Management) devoted specifically to ‘political marketing’.
As will be noted below, however, this literature has not only described campaign
practice, but has also been used by some prescriptively, as justification for nor-
mative claims about the benefits to (a) political actors—that marketing is a nec-
essary template for electoral success (e.g. Kotler and Levy 1969; Egan 1999); and
(b) that it enhances the democratic process (e.g. Harrop 1990; O’Cass 1996; Lees-
Marshment 2001a; 2001b). One of the main points of critique within this chapter
is the extent to which the more prescriptive literature commits a logical fallacy,
conflating evidence consistent with its models as evidence of its normative contri-
bution to political practice 1 and the potential problems this raises for the democratic
process.
The chapter proceeds by placing the growth and use of political marketing, in
literature and practice, in its broader communications context. It then provides a
historical overview of the trajectory of political marketing, as both political practice
and a disciplinary subfield. Attention is then turned to the specific models and
concepts, derived from business, which underpin and inform this development, and
illustrates how these have been used to both describe and prescribe practice. The final
section places political marketing in its broader context and explores its structural
1
Paradoxically, given the empiricist/positivist nature of the more prescriptive literature, and yet the
positivist emphasis on observer neutrality. For further discussion of this point see Savigny (2007).
800 heather savigny
basis. Throughout, the underlying assumptions are teased out (which have often been
uncritically accepted within much of this literature), and key areas of contention and
debate are also highlighted.
43.1 Background
.............................................................................................................................................
Political marketing has informed and influenced election campaigns in the USA, UK,
Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Canada (Bowler and
Farrell 1992; Lilleker and Lees-Marshment 2005), Australia (O’Cass 2001), Sweden
(Nord 2006; Strömbäck 2007), and China (Sun 2007). For some, marketing strategy
lies at the heart of electoral success (Kotler and Kotler 1999: 4). Commentators suggest
we have reached an era of the ‘permanent campaign’ (Blumenthal 1980), and so
in turn political marketing has been viewed by some as a method of governance
(O’Shaughnessy 1990; Newman 1994; Lees-Marshment 2001a; for a more critical
account see Needham 2005).
The term political marketing has been more widely used ambiguously as a ‘catch-
all’ phrase to characterize a variety of changes that have been taking place in the
practice and presentation of politics. For some political marketing is: ‘smoke and
mirrors’ (Palmer 2002); synonymous with spin (Jones 1997); the packaging of politics
(Franklin 1994); and the ‘professionalisation of political communication’ (Negrine
and Lilleker 2002). This activity has also been described as representative of the
behaviour of a ‘public relations state’ (Deacon and Golding 1994) or the workings
of a ‘public relations democracy’ (Davis 2002). This for some has come to represent a
‘crisis in public communication’ (Blumler and Gurevitch 1995), and Franklin suggests
that this attention to presentation has been at the expense of political substance, and
has led to a ‘dumbing down’ which stifles democratic debate (1994). Although in
contrast some suggest it enhances opportunities for political participation (Temple
2006; see also Brants 1998). While this emphasis on professional media strategies
conforms to Panebianco’s (1988) electoral–professional party, what is qualitatively
different in the contemporary environment is that the presentation of politicians and
policy has become at least as significant for political actors as the policy content. As
Gaber notes, a spin doctor for New Labour was quoted after the 1997 election saying:
‘communications is not an afterthought to our policy. It’s central to the whole mission
of New Labour’ (1998: 13).
While media and communications do play an integral role in the marketing
process, political marketing is, as the term suggests, extensively informed by mar-
keting. What differentiates ‘political marketing’ (in the academic literature) from
other analyses of the relationship between politicians and the media, or election
campaigning per se, is the explicit emphasis upon ‘marketing’; that is, the explicit
political marketing 801
acceptance and usage of assumptions, methods, and practices developed within and
associated with both business practice and the academic management marketing
literature. Thus the chapter proceeds by detailing the use of political marketing in
practice, in order to provide the historical context from which the academic literature
has developed.
43.2 Historicizing Political Marketing
as Practice
.............................................................................................................................................
If political marketing in practice is about the art of persuasion then it could be
argued that this goes back to the days of Aristotle. Its historical antecedents are
widely noted; for Harris (2001) these date back to Machiavelli. Wring charts the
historical developments of marketing techniques in Britain back to the early twen-
tieth century (1996: 102). In its contemporary form, however, the development and
refinement of marketing in practice can be located in the USA, with Britain following
closely behind. Maarek argues that while political marketing is ‘entirely rooted in
the history of political communication in the United States’ (1995: 7) its modern
manifestation coincided with the emergence of television, when Eisenhower became
the first candidate to make use of this technology as a means of persuasion (1995:
7–21). Shama describes how, in the early 1960s, political campaigning was ‘viewed
and practiced as the selling of candidates’ (1976: 767–8), but in the USA it was the
Reagan campaigns of the 1980s that marked the wholesale adoption of marketing (as
pursued by commercial companies) (Newman 1994: 25).
The development of marketing in Britain closely followed the American lead. It was
the advent of Thatcher as leader of the Conservative Party, in particular the election
campaign of 1987, which is generally regarded as changing the manner of British
electioneering (Wring 1996: 107; O’Shaughnessy 1990: 218). While the Conservatives
had previously employed advertising agents Saatchi and Saatchi (1979: ‘Labour isn’t
working’) (Lock and Harris 1996: 21), it was in the 1980s that marketing strategies
were used to determine which policies would be electorally unviable. Scammell notes
that, ‘In 1987 . . . the manifesto and electoral strategy closely followed the analysis
of marketing research’ (1996: 124), and the Conservatives led the way on the use
of marketing to inform their ‘market positioning’. Labour followed and during the
leadership of Neil Kinnock the term marketing also became part of Labour’s orga-
nizational thinking (Wring 1996: 102; see also Gould 1998). This recognition and
description of marketing as a set of practices employed by political elites is also par-
alleled by an academic literature, the origins and development of which are charted
below.
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43.3 Historicizing Political Marketing
as an Academic Literature
.............................................................................................................................................
The phrase ‘political marketing’ was first used by Kelley in 1956, but it was the seminal
article by Kotler and Levy (1969) which marked the origins of the embedding of this
term as a feature of contemporary academic discourse and the foundation for the
subfield. Kotler and Levy argued that marketing could be extended to other areas of
endeavour whose primary aim was not the making of profit; that marketing could be
extended to services/persons and ideas (1969: 10). Indeed, their words seem somewhat
prophetic now that managerial thinking and marketing has become a feature of many
areas of public life (for example health and higher education).
Kotler and Levy argued that marketing is not something that is confined to business
practice, but ‘political contests remind us that candidates are marketed as well as soap’
(1969: 10). For some, the use of these strategies is a response to the context political
actors find themselves in. Proponents suggest that there is a similarity in political and
commercial contexts, as political actors find themselves in an electoral marketplace
where they have to ‘sell’ their ‘product’ to a consumer. As such they assume that busi-
ness managers and political campaigners face similar challenges, in a similar context
(of a marketplace), and therefore similar responses/methods are appropriate (Reid
1988; Newman 1994: 34; Butler and Collins 1996). The acceptance of the assumption
that politics is as amenable to commodification as any other kind of commercial
‘product’ has profound implications, not only for the reshaping of the way in which
politics is conducted, but also raises broader issues about the role and function of
democracy. Does it matter, for example, if all citizens do not participate in formal
politics, as long as enough of the ‘product’ gets ‘sold’ in order for politicians to win
elections? As will be evident from the discussion below, while some of the literature
espouses the benefits to politicians of adopting marketing, these more fundamental
normative questions are only just beginning to be addressed.
43.4 Underlying Definitions within the
Political Marketing Literature
.............................................................................................................................................
In some senses, one of the many difficulties for students of political marketing is in
delineating what it actually is, as there is no agreed definition of the term (Scammell
1999; O’Cass 2001; Lock and Harris 1996). Operating with an implicit commitment
to pluralism, the political marketing literature describes what politicians do to get
elected, but crucially this is through the use of strategies and techniques derived
from business. Consistent with the positivist thinking which underpins much of the
political marketing 803
management marketing literature, political marketing has been defined as the ‘science
of influencing mass behaviour in competitive situations’ (Mauser 1983: 5).
The focus within the literature is largely upon election campaign practice rather
than electoral outcomes. Election campaigns are viewed ‘as, in all its essentials, a
condensed consumer-product marketing campaign’ (O’Shaughnessy and Henneberg
2002: p. xi) and so methods and strategies from marketing are deemed appropriate.
Simply put, the existing research into political marketing highlights ‘where, why and
how a party positions itself in the electoral market’ (Harrop 1990: 277). This draws
heavily on management marketing literature, where scholars define ‘[m]arketing [as]
the delivery of customer satisfaction at a profit’ (Kotler et al. 2005: 5). While there
are a variety of definitions of political marketing within the literature, all accept that
marketing entails two actors (the organization and the consumer) and the desire
for the organization to achieve their ends (for non-profit organizations this is to
maximize utility rather than make a profit).
In this way, the political marketing literature differentiates itself from other forms
of analysis of media and professionalized political behaviour, with its explicit empha-
sis on marketing. That is, it accepts the fundamental principle of marketing that ‘the
essence of marketing is reciprocity: “consumers” themselves bring something to bear
on the selling’ (O’Shaughnessy 1990: 2). The adoption of this central assumption sug-
gests that consumers (voters) are elevated from being passive recipients of a political
‘product’ to playing an interactive role in its production. This is achieved through
public opinion research (such as polls and focus groups) so that public opinion is
identified and fed back into, thereby shaping, the political ‘product’. In marketing
this same process takes place, in order that the business can then sell the product to a
receptive consumer and make a profit. In politics, the means are regarded as the same,
but the aim for the political party is simply viewed as winning the election (Lock and
Harris 1996: 18).
Henneberg argues that a formal analytical definition of political marketing is that
it ‘seeks to establish, maintain and enhance long term voter relationships at a profit
for society and political parties. So that the objectives of the organisation are met’
(Henneberg 2002: 102–3). In politics, this translates into a focus on the strategies and
techniques employed by political actors in a competitive (and minimally specified)
context to achieve their goal: electoral victory. Although, as will be discussed later in
the chapter, it is worth noting that the key point here is that relationships with voters
are viewed as instrumental and necessary insofar as they enable organizations to
achieve their goal (Wring 1997: 652; see also Sackman 1992). As such this assumption
introduces a tension between, on the one hand, the idea of a voter as a citizen,
informed, engaged, and playing a participatory role in the political process, and
on the other, functioning instrumentally simply enabling political actors to achieve
their goal.
The basic premise within these definitions, and accepted by the more positive liter-
ature, is that candidates and/or parties can be positioned and marketed in a manner
analogous to that of businesses in the commercial sector. Policy content is formulated
and communicated within an assumed ‘political market place’ (e.g. Newman 1994;
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Worcester and Baines 2006). This analogy is extended and the ontological and analyt-
ical supposition is that political parties can be conceived of as businesses and voters
as consumers, who purchase (exchange their vote for) a political product (party or
candidate) on the day of the election. This simplistic starting point clearly resembles
that of Downs’s (1957) spatial model of electoral competition. The economic roots of
Downs’s model are acknowledged within the literature (Mauser 1983; Newman 1994;
Wring 1996; Butler and Collins 1999: 55; Scammell 1999: 726, 739; Lees-Marshment
2001b: 694) and while for some political marketing is viewed as a contemporary
variant of rational choice theory (Savigny 2004) others claim that political marketing
goes beyond Downs, through the detailing of how parties identify voter demands
(Lees-Marshment 2001b: 694).
For those who advocate political marketing as practice, as well as an academic
literature, there is the claim that it provides parties and candidates with a method that
facilities the ‘ability to address diverse voter concerns and needs through marketing
analyses, planning, implementation and control of political and electoral campaigns’
(O’Cass 1996: 48). There are two aspects to this process: the first is concerned with the
techniques of marketing which include e.g. advertising, market research, and media
management. The second is at the level of strategy, and as leading marketing scholars
note, in order for an organization to be successful a marketing ‘mindset’ must be
adopted (Kotler and Andreasen 1996: 37). That is, management marketing includes
prescriptive tenets: marketing is not only about a set of tools and techniques, but a
way of thinking. The ultimate philosophy for organizational success is claimed to be
marketing (Webster 1992) and electoral success has also been linked to adherence to
marketing ideals (e.g. O’Cass 2001; Lees-Marshment 2001a; 2001b). The difficulties
with this are discussed later in the chapter.
43.5 Models and Concepts within the
Political Marketing Literature
.............................................................................................................................................
In simple marketing terms, what distinguishes marketing from selling is the emphasis
on the consumer. For example, while Labour’s 1987 election campaign might have
been regarded as highly professional, according to marketing scholars the distinc-
tion was that the emphasis was upon ‘selling’, whereas the Conservatives placed
greater emphasis on the ‘marketing’; that is, a response to public opinion and the
successful communication of that response (O’Shaughnessy 1990; Scammell 1995).
One framework that is widely used in the academic literature, to describe this orga-
nizational transition from ‘selling’ to ‘marketing’, is Keith’s three-stage evolution-
ary model (1960). Keith’s model claimed that firms went through three interlinked
stages: product, sales, and market orientations. These stages overlapped and, Keith
argued, once a firm reached market orientation, that is it adhered to the marketing
concept (detailed below) and placed the consumer at the centre of the product, it
political marketing 805
would be successful. What this model highlights is the differing stages of fluidity in
the process: in the selling stage, public opinion is thought to be malleable and subject
to persuasion (through, for example, advertising); in the marketing stage, however, it
is the product that is thought to be malleable, responsive to public opinion.
This three-stage model of evolution has been widely used and adapted to describe
and analyse how political actors have moved towards and employed marketing in
election campaigns. The literature uses these stages to reflect differing points of
emphasis. In marketing accounts, the descriptor is the managerial ‘product, sales and
market orientation’ of parties/candidates (Shama 1976; Smith and Saunders 1990;
Newman 1994; Lees-Marshment 2001a; 2001b; see also Mauser 1983). In accounts
which privilege communications and technology, the media provides the context
to describe development from ‘premodern’ to ‘television revolution’ and then as a
‘telecommunications revolution’ (Farrell 1996); for Norris (2000) these stages are
characterized as ‘premodern, modern and postmodern’. Wring combines these dif-
ferent aspects with internal organizational learning, defining these stages as the ‘pro-
paganda, media and political marketing’ phase (1996; 2005). Despite differing foci
of analysis, what the application of this model highlights is the way in which political
marketing is conceived as a process implying continuance over time, rather than a sta-
tic, one-off phenomenon. This three-stage approach highlights historical, temporal,
and contextual factors; electioneering being influenced by both endogenous factors
(such as organizational learning from electoral successes and losses; party leaders and
members) and exogenous factors (such as a densely populated media environment;
behaviour of opposition parties; a changing societal base; advice from strategists from
‘sister’ parties such as in the USA and Australia).
43.5.1 The Marketing Concept
As management guru Peter Drucker argues, ‘the aim of marketing is to make selling
superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well
that the product fits him and sells itself. Ideally, marketing should result in a customer
who is ready to buy. All that should be needed then is to make the product or service
available’ (Drucker 1974: 64–5). At the heart of this lies the marketing concept, which
is premised on the notion that ‘the consumer, not the company, is in the middle’
(Keith 1960: 35). While its utility has been debated (see e.g. Houston 1986), the
‘marketing concept’ is used within the political marketing literature to suggest that the
consumer (voter) is at the centre of the process. As such, parties/candidates listen to
(targeted) public opinion, and provide the electorate with a ‘product’ that they want,
in order to achieve electoral victory (Mauser 1983; Reid 1988; Shama 1976; O’Cass 1996;
Egan 1999; Lees-Marshment 2001a; 2001b).
These concepts, however, have been employed as more than heuristic devices.
In practice, advocates argue that adherence to the marketing concept enables
parties/candidates to ‘find out who the voters are and what they want the candidates
to stand for. Candidates can then feedback to the voters the ideas that they know will
sell in the marketplace’ (Newman 1994: 16). From here, once voter preferences have
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been identified, advertising and other promotional strategies then form part of the
marketing process of both relaying the refined ‘product’ to ‘consumers’, and seeking
to persuade them that their wants have been incorporated into the ‘product’.
Labour’s electoral victory in 1997 provides a clear example of this process in prac-
tice. Labour’s use of opinion research to inform their repositioning meant that focus
groups became a key element in the planning of electoral strategies and assessment
of policy proposals (Gould 1998). Extensive opinion research was undertaken which
enabled Labour to identify Tory ‘switchers, particularly in marginal seats, who were
necessary for a Labour victory (see Gould 1998: 204, 329, 350). The emphasis on the
importance of both the perception of the electorate that their wants had been accom-
modated and the demands of a densely populated media environment are highlighted
by Mandelson’s statement that: ‘If a government policy cannot be presented in a
simple and attractive way, it is more likely than not to contain fundamental flaws
and prove to be the wrong policy’ (1997, cited in Franklin 2001: 131). The appearance
of responsiveness to public opinion has been evidenced more broadly, with strategies
such as Labour’s ‘Big Conversation’; the Conservatives’ ‘Listening to Britain’; the use
of new media technologies such as blogs and petitions on the Downing Street website.
Consistent with a ‘permanent campaign’ approach to government, this process has
continued throughout Labour’s period in office; Brown’s maiden speech as Prime
Minister reinforced this: ‘As I have travelled around the country and as I have listened
and I’ve learnt from the British people, and as Prime Minister I will continue to listen
and learn from the British people, I have heard the need for change’ (24 June 2007,
cited in Lilleker and Scullion 2008: 1).
The desire to present the appearance of a visible engagement with the voters
illustrates for some the centrality of the ‘consumer’ (voter) to the political process.
In this way, advocates advance the normative claim that marketing ensures account-
ability and responsiveness and, as such, is a beneficial force for democracy (Shama
1976; Harrop 1990; Scammell 1995; O’Cass 1996; 2001; Kotler and Kotler 1999; Lees-
Marshment 2001a; 2001b). Lees-Marshment observes that political parties in Britain
‘no longer pursue grand ideologies, fervently arguing for what they believe in and
trying to persuade the masses to follow them. They increasingly follow the people’
(2001a: 1); and while this is presented as evidence of the responsive nature of political
marketing, some warn of the potential for negative effects on the political process.
This is in terms of both the dangers of populism (e.g. O’Shaughnessy 1990; Scammell
1995; Henneberg 2004), and the anti-democratic nature of this method of listening
to voters who are necessary for electoral victory rather than the polity as a whole
(Savigny 2007).
43.5.2 Implementing Marketing
Once public opinion has been identified, according to marketing, and fed back into
the ‘product’, the next stage in the electioneering process is to ‘sell’ the ‘product’ to the
public in an attempt to mobilize electoral support. One of the key ways in which this
is done is through market segmentation. First introduced by Smith (1956), the notion
political marketing 807
of ‘market segmentation’ draws attention to the heterogeneity of the marketplace.
Acknowledging that political ‘markets’ are not homogeneous (Butler and Collins
1996: 35), and consistent with management marketing, voters are ‘segmented’ into
target groups (in practice this has been evident in categories such as ‘Mondeo Man’ or
‘Worcester Woman’). Here, the assumption within the literature is that the electoral
‘market’ can be divided into subcategories building upon traditional variables such
as class and gender. Segmentation means that parties can identify voter attitudes
and beliefs, so in turn the message can be ‘tweaked’ to fit the profile of the voter
whose support is being targeted. It is also assumed that this enables parties to gain
a priori insights into voter behaviour (Smith and Saunders 1990; Smith and Hirst
2001). Technological developments, refinement of marketing strategies, advice from
international strategists, and greater availability of information about voters’ lifestyle
choices and consumer trends have meant that, in practice, voters are now segmented
into much smaller groups, leading to a much more specific individualized refining of
the targeted campaign message.
Segmentation, while detailed in the literature, has also been widely used in political
practice and, again, it is worth looking to the USA for some historical background.
Clinton, aided and advised by strategist Dick Morris, relied on opinion research, but
extensive voter profiling enabled him to focus in an unprecedented way on localized
markets (Newman 1999: 6–7; see also Morris 1999). Clinton bypassed traditional
media forms to communicate directly with the voters, for example through cable
channel TV shows, and employed researchers to provide detailed opinion research
based on ‘lifestyle’ analysis (Novotny 2000: 18). American strategists Penn and Schoen
have also advised the Labour Party, and so again there has been a transfer of American
strategies and technologies to the UK.
In 2005, both the Conservatives and Labour used comprehensive voter profil-
ing software. The former, following consultation with the (now former) Republi-
can strategist, Karl Rove, used US Republican software, ‘Voter Vault’; Labour used
the ‘labour.contact’ database. This technology and collaboration with international
strategists enabled both parties to build up highly detailed personal profiles of aggre-
gated groups (Wintour 2005). Target voters were no longer identified simply by tra-
ditional demographic social class, but by much more distinct and discrete categories.
In 1997, campaign resources had focused on ninety key seats (Seyd 2001: 54). In
2001, further refinement had meant that there were ‘no key seats only key voters’
(Seyd 2001) and by 2005 over sixty-one different categories were identified. Those
targeted by Labour included ‘symbols of success’, ‘upscaling new owners’, and ‘affluent
blue collar’ (Wintour 2005). This in turn led to highly individualized campaigning,
according to voter profiles and their likelihood of impact on the electoral outcome.
Here the conflation of analytical and ontological assumptions of voters as
consumers seems to be most obviously accepted in political practice. Indeed,
profiling of voters through reference to their purchasing habits and lifestyle choices
suggests a perception by politicians that voters can be equated with consumers (for
further discussion of voters/citizens as consumers see Scammell 2003; Schudson 2006;
Lilleker and Scullion 2008; and more broadly see Lewis, Inthorn, and Wahl-Jorgensen
808 heather savigny
2005). Crucially however, and directly undermining the normative claims that
marketing benefits democracy, this means that campaigning then becomes focused
on a small segment of the electorate. In 2005 only 2 per cent of the electorate
were considered strategically significant (Wintour 2005) as such; campaigning was
directed at them rather than at the electorate as a whole. In this sense, if only 2 per
cent of the populace were considered strategically significant for elites to achieve
their goals, this potentially serves (a) to disenfranchise the broader electorate and (b)
to undermine the claims of the marketing concept that the consumer is at the centre.
43.6 The Broader Context of Political
Marketing: Literature and Practice
.............................................................................................................................................
While the political marketing literature draws attention to political actors and voters,
clearly they do not operate in a minimally defined context. Moreover, given the
prescriptive nature of some of the political marketing literature, this might suggest a
one-way relationship where marketers are able to influence politicians and politicians
simply able to influence the electorate. But politicians operate in a densely structured
context which affects the course(s) of action available to them (cf. Giddens 1984). This
is not to deny autonomy to political actors, nor deny their complicity in the marketing
of politics, but rather to suggest that they interact not only with the electorate, but
that this is done via the media (who have their own agendas and constraints), in the
context of broader political structures and the rules of the electoral ‘game’. As has been
highlighted throughout, the international context is important, not only in terms of
electioneering strategies, but in terms of defining the parameters of possibility of the
promises that political actors may make, in terms of the constraints and opportunities
afforded by the influence of institutions such as the European Union; international
agreements; and (academically contested) processes such as globalization. The same
is true for the influence of business (such as the relationship between politicians and,
for example, the CBI). The relationship between politicians and their electorates is
clearly not as straightforward as implied by the political marketing literature, and so
while politicians may respond to public opinion, there are other constraints which
mean that politicians cannot simply accommodate expressed voter preferences into
their ‘product’ without consideration of potential loss of support from, or opportu-
nities to engage with, for example, the media, international leaders, and/or business
leaders.
43.6.1 The Media
The media are assumed to be so significant that Harrop suggests the media are
the causal mechanisms for political marketing, making the use of marketing in
political marketing 809
contemporary political practice ‘inevitable’ (Harrop 1990: 284). Whether causality for
this phenomenon lies with the media or not, here the political marketing literature
departs from other academic literature which discusses the relationship between
politicians and the mass media in a democracy, in terms of both what that rela-
tionship is and what it should be (e.g. McNair 1999; Street 2001; Lloyd 2004; Louw
2005). The media clearly are of key importance in the communication to the masses
of election campaigns and political strategies. Labour’s experience of a hostile media
environment and their subsequent media-friendly behaviour suggests that they per-
ceive the media to have an enormous influence on voting behaviour (irrespective of
academic debates, see for example Newton and Brynin 2001). Clearly, too, so do the
media. For example, consider Blair’s studious courting of Murdoch, and subsequent
favourable newspaper coverage, which led to Britain’s biggest selling newspaper to
proclaim in 1997: ‘The Sun backs Blair’. This suggests that the media can become
political actors while at the same time setting the context for the conduct of electoral
competition.
However, as has been observed, the political marketing literature has yet to
acknowledge the agency of the media in the marketing process, assuming media
compliance when politicians present their message (Savigny and Temple 2008). While
in liberal theory, the media in a democracy function to hold elites to account, this
would suggest that some scepticism within the media towards political elites and their
messages is almost to be expected. Notably, however, the media do not hold busi-
nesses to account in the same manner. In this way, politicians may also be responding
to the behaviour of the media. If the press and media are more favourably disposed
to business interests, is it a surprise if in the pursuit of positive and favourable
media coverage (perceived by political elites as necessary for electoral support) parties
attempt to position themselves as businesses?
43.6.2 Political Structures
Some suggest that marketing is ubiquitous in the UK, because, like the USA, there is
a two-party system (although more broadly it is recognized that this is debatable).
The first-past-the-post system means that electoral competition occurs between a
number of key seats and marginal constituencies. In 1995, Kavanagh concluded that
it was the strength of the British party system itself (in large part due to the nature
of party/candidate funding) which meant that ‘pollsters and experts on public rela-
tions and communications still have an insecure relationship with the politicians’,
preventing British politics from becoming completely Americanized by the marketing
process (Kavanagh 1995: 7). However, as marketers and marketing become increas-
ingly influential, if both Labour and the Conservatives are employing marketing
strategies, then differences between them become, almost by definition, stylistic and
presentational. Systematic studies have noted and debated the centrist tendencies of
electoral competition in the UK (see for example Hay 1999), and if there is little
to distinguish political parties then party competition, problematically, potentially
becomes about who is the better at marketing strategies rather than about formal
political substance.
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43.6.3 Societal Structures
Whatever the debate—partisan dealignment (Sarlvik and Crewe 1983) or realignment
(Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 1985)—clearly there has been a profound shift in public
behaviour towards formal political activity, and parties are no longer able to rely on
high levels of partisan support. Demographic changes in voting behaviour have been
widely noted (e.g. Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 1985; Crewe 1986; Miller et al. 1990;
Franklin 1992: 121; Parry, Moyser, and Day 1992; Dalton 2004). Party membership
has fallen. Estimates suggest decreasing Conservative Party membership with figures
around 290,000 in 2006 (Helm 2006). In July 2005 Labour’s membership figures had
fallen to 210,374 (Guardian 2006). This is consistent with the view of the perceived
decline of political parties as relevant vehicles for the expression of public interest (see
for example Lawson and Merkl 1988; Webb 1995). For some, marketing is presented as
a method to reconnect with this increasingly diverse and volatile electorate. Accord-
ing to the literature, opportunities arise through the marketing process to build
‘brand loyalties’ (e.g. Smith and Saunders 1990), to replace partisan loyalties. This
support is necessary within the marketing literature, because without it (returning
to the definition of marketing) organizations (parties) are not able to achieve their
aims.
43.6.4 Voters and Participation
Participation, according to the political marketing literature, is assumed to occur in
two sites: where the public influence the construction of the political product; and
in the act of voting. In formal political terms, this implies a participatory rather
than a representative form of democracy. This participation by voters is what is
assumed, within the political marketing literature, to keep political elites respon-
sive and accountable. But for this analogy to work, participation by the electorate
is crucial. However, the picture in the UK and other Western democracies is one
of declining electoral turnout and increasing disaffection and lack of trust in both
politicians and the process of politics (see for example Dalton 2004; Newton 2006;
Hay 2007).
Advocates argue that marketing provides increased responsiveness to the public
and hence enhances accountability (Shama 1976; Kotler and Kotler 1999; O’Cass
1996; Harrop 1990; Lees-Marshment 2001a; 2001b). But the empirical reality is that
marketing has not proved a panacea to the difficulties of mobilizing electoral support
and arguably has contributed to a ‘marketing malaise’; a source of public disconnec-
tion from politics (Savigny 2008). Despite, or maybe because of, extensive marketing,
the last two general elections show an alarming degree of non-participation. Follow-
ing the post-war record low turnout of 59 per cent in 2001, turnout improved only
marginally in 2005 to 61 per cent (compared also to 76 per cent in 1979).
In some senses this changing electoral base conforms to the fairly negative view of
voters held within the political marketing literature. Voters are seen as fulfilling an
political marketing 811
instrumental function for parties, being the means through which politicians can
achieve their goal. In terms of motivation to vote and choices for whom to vote,
voters are not assumed to vote on the basis of party loyalty (Newman 1994: 29).
Voters are assumed to regard policy content as secondary; for some, it is thought
this is incidental (Harrop 1990: 280). Within the political marketing literature there
is the assumption that ‘voters are unable to unbundle the electoral product offering,
the vast majority therefore choose on the basis of overall political package, concept
or image’ (Lock and Harris 1996: 17). Indeed, as implied throughout this chapter, it
would seem, whether there is an awareness of academic literature on this topic or not,
that political actors do indeed behave in a manner consistent with this assumption of
voter behaviour.
O’Shaughnessy and Henneberg further argue that ‘Political marketing works
because of the apoliticality of most voters who are cognitive misers and who are
thereby inadvertent consumers of political information’ (2002: p. xviii). This claim
would suggest that marketing is used because that is what the public want: that the
public are uninterested in the minutiae of policy detail and political debate; they want
their voices heard but at the same time want information relayed in a cost-saving
‘soundbite’ and an identifiable brand or image. Despite the claimed centrality of the
consumer (voter), paradoxically, the voter has received little attention in the political
marketing literature apart from the instrumental role afforded to them as a means
through which organizations can achieve their goal. The assumption that the public
want marketing thinking to influence their politics to the extent that politics needs to
be delivered in soundbites, images, or are simply disinterested, while a fundamental
supposition about how and why marketing should inform politics (both in literature
and practice), has yet to be rigorously either theorized or empirically tested.
43.7 The Prescription of Political
Marketing
.............................................................................................................................................
There is nothing new in the adoption of management literature to the practice of
politics. New public management informed many of the changes to public-sector
services in the 1980s (see for example Christensen and Laegreid 2002) and other
literature premised upon rationalist economic assumptions, notably public choice
theory, has been heavily influential in policy practice. This attempt to influence the
political process is also evident within some of the political marketing literature,
where, for some scholars, marketing is not simply an analytic or descriptive frame-
work, but provides practical advice for political actors. Here, again, management
marketing provides the influence. In management marketing the marketing concept
is not only a means to operationalize models, but also functions as a philosophy:
812 heather savigny
a template for thinking and guiding organizational behaviour (Kotler and Zaltman
1971; O’Leary and Iredale 1976). This prescriptive element has been accepted by some
within the field of political marketing, and in turn analytic assumptions become
rendered ontological. O’Cass argues the marketing concept is ‘both a philosophical
and practical guide for the management of marketing’ (1996: 48). Marketing models
and frameworks are regarded by some as ‘pragmatic and realistic’ (Mauser 1983: 1)
which have practical utility (see also Reid 1988; Smith and Saunders 1990: 304; Butler
and Collins 1996: 42).
Lock and Harris argue that political marketing ‘has to develop its own prescriptive
and predictive models if it is to inform and influence political action’ (1996: 23).
Lees-Marshment highlights how ‘political marketing can enable us to observe how
organisations may lose touch with their market; maybe even to advise them how not
to do so’ (2001b: 706–7). Political marketing claims to be able to show a political
party what they ‘ought’ to be doing (O’Cass 1996: 56) to manage their campaigns
more effectively (Maarek 1995). While Henneberg (2004; see also Henneberg and
O’Shaughnessy 2007) highlights the need for greater theoretical and conceptual devel-
opment within the field, Butler and Collins argue that ‘research into the field of
campaign/marketing management must be dominated by questions of practicality’
(1994: 32; emphasis added). Indeed this is nowhere more clearly emphasized than
in Egan’s view that politicians need marketing, lamenting the difficulties in getting
politicians to accept the utility of such models in practice: ‘Political marketers do not,
however, always have it their own way. Politicians have a habit of taking back the
reigns of electoral management particularly when things do not seem to be going
to plan. This is largely political arrogance’ (1999: 496). This quotation highlights
the desire for marketers both to influence that which they describe and to have a
direct influence on the strategic behaviour of politicians. As Scammell notes, ‘as the
techniques of market research and market prediction become more “scientific” and
precise, the more influential marketing and marketing experts are likely to become in
politics’ (1995: 19). However, to model and prescribe political behaviour from frame-
works and assumptions developed in management is to work within the constraints
of these management marketing assumptions, in effect to subordinate politics to
marketing. For those concerned with the impact marketing has upon democracy, this
is an alarming trend.
43.8 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
As the historical location of political marketing (as a literature and in practice)
suggests, for some, marketing represents a continuation of existing techniques and
practices which are simply enhanced and refined in accordance with developments in
technologies. For others, while there is a historical component, the use of political
political marketing 813
marketing also represents a fundamental change in party thinking. That is, while
parties may have adopted these strategies in the past, what is qualitatively different
is the extent to which marketing, as a set of guidelines, now dominates organizational
behaviour.
Some argue that, in practice, the UK is simply following trends in the USA, both in
the use of marketing and also as marketing has become entwined with a permanent
campaign approach to government (Sparrow and Turner 2001), which could be
seen to reinforce the Americanization thesis (cf. Mancini and Swanson 1996). But
the changing character of contemporary electioneering is not that straightforward.
Politicians operate in opportunity structures which both constrain and facilitate
action, and include: a densely structured media environment, which brings with it
a demand for twenty-four-hour news; a changing demographic base from which
to draw electoral support; and declining electoral turnout. Political marketing, as
practice, has been a method through which political actors have responded to, and
played a role in reconstituting, this changing environment.
As has been argued, the political marketing literature is far from homogeneous.
Within this literature, differing starting points mean that some scholars focus on
election campaign strategies (the external presentation of parties), while others draw
attention to the internal behaviour of parties and party membership. Some focus
attention on the role of the media as driving this process, some on the methods
of marketing and marketers, and others on political parties themselves as agents
of change. Some see marketing as a positive phenomenon for politics, while others
adopt a more critical approach. What this fragmentation in the literature suggests
is the existence of a healthy debate around a set of ideas, practices, and techniques
that have extensively altered and reshaped the nature of elite-level political activity.
This not only relates to presentational or stylistic concerns in electoral campaigning
but also to the methods and ways of thinking about what politics is, and how it is
and should be conducted. Within the political marketing literature, the driver of
political change is viewed as the ‘campaigners’ strategic understanding of the political
market’ (Scammell 1999: 723). This overt emphasis on markets as shaping the activity
of politics arguably, and problematically for some, however, reflects a much broader
fundamental change in the conceptualization of politics, what its form and function
is, and what politics should be.
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c h a p t e r 44
.................................................................................................................
T E C H N O LO G Y
AND RISK
.................................................................................................................
henry rothstein
44.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
Biotechnology, pesticide residues, and global warming are for many people an
expression of our contemporary preoccupation with risk and our urge—for good
or for bad—to seek to control threats to health, safety, and the environment. Popular
concern with risk is not new; in nineteenth-century Britain public outrage at a series
of food scandals, such as the adulteration of flour with white lead and sugar with
ground glass, led to the 1875 Sale of Food and Drugs Act, which introduced basic
controls on food safety. In recent decades, however, risk has achieved a heightened
salience within the UK in a number of ways.
Animal health crises have hit the UK hardest. BSE contributed to the downfall
of the Conservative administration in 1997 and rocked the EU, whilst, in 2001,
foot and mouth disease brought parts of the country to a standstill and cost the
public and private sectors £8bn. New technologies, such as bio- and nanotechnol-
ogy, have created public anxieties and international trade disputes, fed by alarming
images of Big Brother style genetic databases, ‘Frankenstein foods’, and globally
creeping ‘grey goo’. Scientific uncertainty has even caused public panics, such as
that caused by a claimed, but later discredited, link between the MMR vaccine and
autism, which resulted in outbreaks of measles as parents stopped vaccinating their
children.
Such events have called into question the capacity and effectiveness of the institu-
tions of UK risk governance and have prompted a wide range of sometimes controver-
sial reforms. Dedicated risk regulation agencies have been created, the precautionary
technology and risk 819
principle has been embedded into policy frameworks, and there have been attempts to
open up policy processes and to bring the public into decision-making. Most recently,
we have seen the emergence of risk-based governance as a central theme of regulatory
reform. Opinion is divided, however, about the impacts of such reforms, or even
whether they have amounted to little more than window dressing.
For some, the heightened salience of risk has had negative impacts on the UK econ-
omy and culture. In 2005, the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair claimed the public
and private sectors were too driven by society’s ‘wholly disproportionate attitude to
the risks we should expect to run as a normal part of life’ (Blair 2005). The PM was
anxious that the UK was failing to exploit key technologies and was losing business
to countries like India and China that were less risk averse. For others, however,
risk politics mediate deeper anxieties about the shifting character of risks, conflicts
between the public, the state, and business over technological progress, and deeper
structural failures in governance (e.g. Irwin and Wynne 1996). From that perspective,
the problems posed by technology and risk cannot be solved by simple changes of
attitude.
These different dimensions of risk have attracted a range of disciplinary interests
across the social sciences. The following chapter will attempt to bring together some
of those insights in order to understand the character of risk politics in the UK and
contemporary governmental responses. The chapter will then go on to consider why
risk has become such a significant concept for governance across policy domains and
organizational settings, and what this tells us about the character and future of UK
risk governance more generally.
44.2 The Risk Society
.............................................................................................................................................
One popular explanation for the character of contemporary risk politics relates to
the kinds of risks faced by advanced industrial democracies. Science and technology
may have solved many problems associated with traditional societies, at least in the
developed West, but for some the promise of modernity has revealed its Faustian
nature. Beck (1992) and Giddens (1991), for example, argue that the risks of late
modernity are different in type and scale to those of previous eras. Indeed, Beck
argues that in what he calls the ‘Risk Society’, the distribution of ‘bads’ has assumed
more significance than the distribution of wealth and has generated a new kind of
risk politics and consciousness that has supplanted that of class.
Others argue that the problems risks pose today are not so different from those
posed in previous centuries. Turner (2001: 13), for example, points out that in the
fourteenth century, the Black Death travelled on the backs of international trade
and warfare from Mongolia to Greenland, destroying a third of Europe’s population,
irrespective of social class, and brought with it a new ‘baroque vision of death’. Yet in
820 henry rothstein
an era of high expectations that risks should be managed, it is fairly clear that, at the
very least, the pace and character of scientific and technological innovation poses seri-
ous governance challenges. For example, risks that extend their reach beyond national
borders and threaten global catastrophe, such as climate change, necessitate global
political solutions. The irreversibility of some risks, such as nuclear contamination,
have focused governance attention on future generations. And the creation of risks
that affect both rich and poor, such as long range air pollution, has made risk politics
cut across those of class.
The emergence of advanced technological and production systems has also
increased the salience of risk in advanced Western societies. As technologies have
become increasingly complex and interconnected, so they have become vulnerable
to what Perrow (1984) termed ‘normal accidents’ in which trivial events rapidly
snowball into major disasters. For example, incidents have alarmingly demon-
strated how the security of national IT databases can be catastrophically vulner-
able to the loss of just a few compact discs containing the records of millions
of individuals. Equally, intensification of the UK’s food supply chain has made it
vulnerable to food contamination incidents that can rapidly propagate across the
country.
Moreover, contemporary risks often pose difficult questions that touch the hori-
zons of human knowledge, where potential harms and/or their probabilities of occur-
ring are uncertain. Such uncertainties pose problems for governance as decision-
makers have been forced to rely on what Weinberg (1985) has termed ‘trans-scientific
knowledge’ in which the norms of proof occupy an often contested meeting ground
between science and politics. One need look no further than debates around genet-
ically modified crops to see the ample scope for conflict as governments are torn
between precautionary and resilient stances. Such uncertainties have created a new
politics of expertise in which it is no longer clear who the experts are, or who should
be trusted to give advice.
44.3 Risk and the Public
.............................................................................................................................................
A second factor that has shaped the politics of technology and risk in recent years
is not so much the kind of harms that society has faced, but rather concerns public
perceptions of those harms. Decision-scientists and social psychologists, for example,
have long observed that public perceptions of risk are shaped by factors such as
perceptions of control, familiarity, dread, voluntariness, and impact—rather than
probability—of harm (Fischoff et al. 1978; Slovic 2000). For example, research sug-
gests that public perceptions are shaped by an ‘availability bias’ that leads people to
overestimate the likelihood of risks that are most easily remembered or imagined,
perhaps because of a media story or personal experience.
technology and risk 821
Indeed, public perceptions of risk can be readily amplified or attenuated by the
way in which risk is communicated to the public by government, social institutions,
and, in particular, the mass media (Kasperson et al. 1988; Pidgeon, Kasperson, and
Slovic 2003). The media, for example, will readily focus on risks where there are
easy stories to be told about failure, blame, or personal tragedy, especially where they
reinforce other current stories or play on public anxieties. Such ‘social amplification
of risk’ can help explain the occasional public panics seen in the UK in recent years,
especially when journalists are faced with ‘slow news’ days. In 1995, for example,
intense but flawed media coverage of research suggesting that third-generation oral
contraceptives could cause deep vein thrombosis created considerable anxiety and use
of the pill dropped significantly (Breakwell et al. 2001).
Not all public anxieties about risk, however, can be related to media coverage.
Cultural theorists, for example, argue that societal attitudes to risk are shaped by
specific ‘world-views’ related to fundamentally distinct types of social organization
(Douglas and Wildavsky 1982;Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky 1990). Risk politics, for
cultural theorists, reflect broader cultural battles between hierarchical world-views of
science and the state, individualist world-views of business, and egalitarian world-
views of civil society groups. From that perspective, for example, the conflict between
Shell, Greenpeace, and the UK government over the sinking of the Brent Spar oil
platform in 1995 was not just about the possibility of environmental contamination,
but reflected broader contested notions of the exploitability and resilience of nature,
scientific authority, and decision-making legitimacy.
Other sociologists, however, caution against putting too much weight on a deficit
model of public understanding of science or overly deterministic cultural heuristics.
Instead, they argue that risk debates serve as a cipher for a broad range of legitimate
and often well-founded public concerns, such as the handling of uncertainty, regu-
latory effectiveness, and trust in governments and professionals that go beyond any
one issue (Irwin 1995). Certainly, the image of John Selwyn Gummer, the Minister of
Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, feeding his daughter Cordelia a beef-burger during
the BSE crisis became an indelible metaphor for a loss of trust in government that
rippled across policy domains, from vaccination to mobile phone masts. Indeed,
risk politics, as Langdon Winner (1980) observed, can give voice to wider anxieties
about the way in which technologies embody particular institutionalized patterns of
authority, power, and social organization, but which are often beyond the remit of
risk governance mechanisms to address. For example, public anxieties about genet-
ically modified food in the UK have not simply been about human and environ-
mental harms, but have embodied wider anxieties about the distribution of bene-
fits, the ethics of genetic modification, and the impacts on global food production
systems.
These diverse explanations suggest that public perceptions of to risk are complex
and cannot be reduced to a single measure. Snap opinion polls, for example, are
likely to reveal different attitudes to more reflective reasoning. Yet, such subtleties
have often been lost in practice in the UK, where politicians or regulators have
been driven to respond to proxy indicators of public attitudes, such as front-page
822 henry rothstein
news stories, rather than considered public judgements in order to protect their
short-term reputation. Well-known examples include the greater attention paid by
government to widely reported multi-fatality accidents on the railways than lives lost
in unreported smaller but more numerous incidents. Indeed, the UK Health and
Safety Executive now builds in a ‘societal concerns’ factor into its decision-making to
give greater weight to such high-profile problems (HSE 2001). Yet in-depth research
suggests that when the public make reflective judgements they are indifferent to such
differences in the manner of death (Slovic, Fischoff, and Lichtenstein 1984; Burton
et al. 2001). Such research suggests that decision-making can be driven in perverse
ways if the spotlight of media attention is confused with more considered public
judgements.
44.4 Risk and Interest Group Politics
.............................................................................................................................................
Whilst general public attitudes towards risk can help explain something of the char-
acter of risk politics, account also needs to be taken of the distributions of risks,
costs, and benefits of scientific and technological advance. The configuration and
mobilization of affected societal groups (such as business interests and green and
consumer lobbies) in trying to shape those distributions can go a long way to explain
particular patterns of risk politics in the UK (Peltzman 1976; Wilson 1980; Breyer
1982; Hood, Rothstein, and Baldwin 2001; Vogel 2003). The creation of a panoply
of national and supranational risk regulation frameworks in recent decades, for
example, has provided a wide range of lobbying opportunities for organized interests.
Equally, organized interests can seek to mould organizational and public behaviour
in order to shape markets in their own interests.
In some cases, concentrated business lobbies have exploited their comparative
advantage in organized lobbying to obtain gains at the expense of diffuse groups
of consumers. Until the late 1990s, for example, UK food safety policy was a classic
case of ‘client politics’ where food agri-business lobbies ‘captured’ the Ministry for
Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF), capitalizing on its conflicting responsibil-
ities for food safety and its promotion of food and agriculture business; a conflict
that many observers linked to a series of food safety failures that culminated in BSE.
Other examples include businesses that profit from small relaxations in regulatory
standards that have vanishingly small impacts on the health of individual consumers,
such as on drinking water contaminates; or, conversely, businesses that profit from
tougher safety rules such as companies operating bedside phone services that benefit
from controversial restrictions on mobile phone usage within hospitals.
In other cases, where technologies have offered diffuse societal benefits but
imposed risks or costs on a small group, NIMBY-style risk politics have emerged.
Common examples have included the formation of local groups to oppose the siting
technology and risk 823
of incinerators, mobile phone masts, or nuclear waste facilities. Similar patterns of
activity have emerged where scientific and technological advances have identified
previously unidentified risks, such as genetic predisposition to disease or vulnera-
bilities to natural disasters. In such cases, the creation of new populations deemed
‘at risk’ has provoked often heated debates about their rights and responsibilities,
for example in relation to health or flood insurance. The emergence of such groups
and their success, however, has been dependent on their effectiveness at mobilizing
support, and success has often been at the expense of others less able to organize.
UK waste policy, for example, has been marked by exports to the developing world,
siting incinerators in poorer areas, or leaving legacies for future generations to
solve.
Risk controversies have also reflected tussles between organized interest groups.
Sometimes, such ‘interest group politics’ have been between business lobbies seeking
to protect their markets or increase their market share. Well-known cases include
the spat between British and French farmers over BSE when the French banned
British beef towards the end of the 1990s, despite the European Commission having
given British beef a clean bill of health, or the controversial EU ban on American
hormone treated beef (Ansell and Vogel 2006). Interest group politics has been
particularly evident with the emergence of green and consumer lobbies, which have
strong incentives to concentrate on those issues that gain public and media attention,
such as high-impact, low-probability risks. Such tactics proved effective, for example,
in the late 1990s when Greenpeace successfully campaigned against a proposal to
relax the controversial EU standards on drinking water quality, against a backdrop of
hard lobbying by the water utilities and the agrochemical industries. However, gains
at the policy formulation stage can be accompanied by failures in implementation.
For instance, in the 1990s, the transport lobby managed to delay by many years the
implementation of European rules on vehicle exhaust emissions that had been subject
to extensive bargaining between the vehicle and petrochemical industries and green
groups.
Such interest group perspectives can help explain the underlying dynamics of many
risk controversies. Whilst it is often assumed that risk controversies have their origin
in inherent scientific uncertainties, competing interest groups can also ‘manufacture’
controversies by constructing and amplifying uncertainties through the selective use
of scientific evidence and expertise (Nelkin 1975; Jasanoff 1990). Typical examples
include businesses trying to gain market share over rivals, environmental and con-
sumer groups keen to raise their public profile, or scientists seeking publicity for their
research. In the early 1990s in the UK, for example, the ‘cling film’ controversy over
the safety of chemicals leaching from plastic food wrap into food was driven, in part,
by rival firms selectively highlighting safety concerns over each others’ products. Or
later, the absence of computer crashes at the turn of the millennium was evidence
for some that the Millennium Bug risk had been exaggerated by an opportunistic IT
industry eager for new business, but was evidence for the IT industry that mitigation
strategies had been successful (Quigley 2004). Such dynamics help explain why risk
controversies are not always readily resolved by ‘more’ or ‘better’ science and ‘rational’
824 henry rothstein
discussion as regulators and politicians regularly wish for, since judgements of what
stands for those concepts is often the subject of controversy itself.
44.5 Risk Governance Failure
.............................................................................................................................................
Another important explanation for contemporary preoccupations with risk lies not
so much in the demands of the public and interest groups, but in the problems and
failings of governance regimes in managing threats facing society. Risk politics in the
UK is often mediated through complex and highly varied multi-level governance
regimes, with their various functions such as standard setting, monitoring, and
enforcement sometimes dispersed from across the supranational level of the World
Trade Organization and the EU down to the level of local government (Hood, Roth-
stein, and Baldwin 2001). Risk politics can vary widely across such dispersed gover-
nance settings, sometimes having quite a different character at the policy formulation
stage from that of the delivery stage, and that has often introduced irrationalities and
incoherence into risk governance within the UK.
In recent years, for example, much of the hard politics of risk governance decision-
making in many policy domains has shifted to the supranational level, where the
dynamics of risk politics reflect different patterns of interests and public attitudes
from those found within the UK. In some cases, the UK has proved reluctant to
abide by EU decision-making; for example, the 1980 Drinking Water Directive was
not implemented in the UK for ten years because of concern about the cost of meeting
its strict standards. Since then the UK has taken a more active lead in risk decision-
making at the EU level in a wide range of domains. British regulators subject to
the discipline of ‘full cost recovery’ have been especially keen to lead in domains
such as pharmaceuticals and pesticides, because mutual recognition rules have cre-
ated a competitive market in product approval amongst member-state regulators.
Indeed, supranational risk governance has even provided convenient blame-shifting
opportunities for the UK government and regulatory agencies, which on occasions
have proved happy to pass the buck to the EU when faced with politically difficult
decisions.
The national level is still important in many domains of risk governance in
the UK, but it has often been marked by sluggishness, incoherence, and failure.
For example, the machinery of UK risk governance has sometimes proved ill-
suited to the fast pace of technological advance, particularly in the biosciences,
where policy often seems to be in a constant game of catch-up. Equally, its archi-
tecture has proved ineffective in handling trade-offs between risks within differ-
ent policy domains, such as the closure of part of the UK rail network with lit-
tle regard for the dangers of increased road traffic following the Hatfield train
crash in 2000. Sometimes, the same risks have been handled in contradictory
technology and risk 825
ways in different domains; exposure to artificial sources of radiation is strictly con-
trolled, for example, but exposure to the natural radioactive gas radon is subject
only to lax recommendations in the UK that could result in 1,500 lung cancer deaths
annually. And in some domains, such as chemical and pharmaceutical safety, the tra-
ditional style of UK risk governance in which select experts advised ministers behind
closed doors lent a whiff of secrecy to policy-making that all too easily spiralled
into conspiracy theories. A series of risk governance failures increasingly made that
paternalistic and opaque style untenable, most notably when MAFF reassured the
public that BSE was not transmissible to humans, despite accumulating evidence to
the contrary.
Sometimes risk controversies have emerged not so much from rule-setting failures,
but rather from implementation failures. Many risk governance regimes in the UK are
fragmented vertically between national policy-making and regional or local enforce-
ment, making it difficult to ensure appropriate enforcement. Indeed in some cases,
that fragmentation has provided opportunities for central government ministries to
‘throw policy problems over the fence’, landing local authorities with often unfunded
or unworkable mandates. And sometimes rules have been under- or over-enforced
because of the way in which inspectors’ understandings of problems, responsibilities,
and ways of working have been filtered through organizational pressures and cultures
(Lipsky 1971; Hutter 1988). Traditional occupational ‘health and safety’ culture, for
example, has held employers more culpable for tractable safety risks such as slips and
trips than less tractable long-term health risks, such as low-level exposure to chemical
fumes (Baldwin 1987).
Enforcement failure, for example, was a significant contributing factor to the BSE
crisis during the early 1990s, when infectious meat found its way into the human
food and animal feed chains because local authority inspectors failed to enforce rules
on the removal of specified bovine offal from cattle carcasses (Rothstein 2003). In
that case, MAFF designed rules that were difficult for inspectors to enforce. Abattoirs
were often working at the margins of economic viability and were resistant to further
regulation, and inspectors were sometimes subject to violence or intimidation. In
addition, the coping and fatalist implementation culture of local authority inspectors
was ill-disposed to the assiduous enforcement of the BSE-related rules on spinal
cord removal in abattoirs, particularly in the context of unwarranted government
reassurances about the threats BSE posed to the public.
44.6 Reforming UK Risk Governance
.............................................................................................................................................
Perceived failures in the capacity and competence of politicians and the state to
manage risk adequately have prompted an often linked set of reforms to risk gov-
ernance. For many, the answer has been to try to improve the scientific and eco-
nomic rationality of decision-making (e.g. NRC 1983; Royal Society 1992; House of
826 henry rothstein
Lords 2006). Since the BSE crisis, considerable effort has been put into separating
out processes of risk assessment and risk management, and improving the quality
of scientific advice and how it feeds into policy-making (e.g. May 1997; European
Commission 2002). Interest has also increased in cost–benefit analysis, which has
long been used in transport safety and has had considerable success in countering
local political pressures and motoring lobbies over local road safety measures. Over
the years, related approaches have found favour elsewhere. The UK Health and Safety
Executive’s ‘Tolerability of Risk’ framework, for example, broadly requires marginal
increases in safety in the workplace to be proportionate to the costs, and the National
Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence now assesses the cost—as well as the
clinical—effectiveness of drugs, before recommending their use by the NHS.
Such attempts, however, face the kinds of constraints already discussed above.
Better science advice is always welcome, but more scientific evidence can serve to
open up debate, as much as close it down, and it cannot be expected to address more
broadly grounded public anxieties. Similarly, political anxiety about retaining public
support can conflict with the economic rationality of valuing human life. After the
Ladbroke Grove train crash in 1999, for example, the Deputy Prime Minister John
Prescott declared that ‘cost will not be a consideration’ in introducing Automatic
Train Protection systems even though the costs implied a value of life of £14m. That
figure was ten times the accepted figure for road safety (and 100 times the figure that
is spent in practice). Other kinds of reform to risk governance, therefore, have proved
necessary.
One approach to reform in the UK, as well as elsewhere in the EU and North
America, has been institutional, most prominently the creation of risk regulation
agencies for diverse policy domains such as food, environment, and pharmaceuticals.
In the UK, agencies have proved attractive as ways of healing the scars of crises such
as BSE that have left politicians badly burnt. Agencies have offered the opportunity of
improving policy-making stability against the changing preferences of parliament and
ministers, enhancing the expertise and the efficiency of policy processes, and perhaps
most importantly of all providing a blame conduit for difficult policies or policy
failure (Thatcher and Stone Sweet 2002). The pattern and success of institutional
reform has been variable across sectors, however, with some agencies having greater
powers, coherence, and independence than others.
One recent example was the creation of the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) in
2000, by the relatively new Labour administration, which was keen to avoid the blame
the previous Conservative administration had suffered for its failures in managing
food safety. The FSA has successfully gained some support from the public, consumer
groups, and the food industry, at least in part by consolidating food safety respon-
sibilities and expertise from across central government and having no conflicting
responsibilities for business promotion (NAO 2003). The agency’s scope for action
has been constrained, however, by the multi-level governance regime within which
it sits. FSA proposals have been rejected by the EU, such as its BSE-related ban on
sausage casings made from sheep intestines, which would have deprived Germans
of their daily diet of eleven million such sausages (Rothstein 2004). At the national
technology and risk 827
level, the FSA has been constrained by other major government departments, such as
the media regulator Ofcom, which constrained the FSA’s scope for action on food
promotion to children, arguing that a ban on TV advertising to children would
be ‘ineffective and disproportionate’ (Rothstein 2007). Moreover, the FSA has only
had limited levers for changing food safety surveillance and enforcement behaviour,
because those activities are still the responsibility of local government.
Another kind of reform, ostensibly designed to respond to public anxieties about
the uncertainties of risk assessment, has been the embedding of the ‘precautionary
principle’ within UK, EU, and international regulatory frameworks in the last twenty
years (Lofstedt 2003). Those frameworks have broadly adopted the formulation of
the principle found in the 1992 UN Rio Declaration, which states that, ‘where there
are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not
be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental
degradation’. The principle is, however, infamously poorly defined; there are at least
nineteen formulations of it that are often vague and incompatible and have given rise
to considerable controversy (Sandin 1999).
For some, the precautionary principle is a way of ensuring that decision-makers
award the benefit of the doubt in ways that best reflect the interests of the public
and the environment. Shrader-Frechette (1991: ch. 9), for example, argues that policy-
makers tend to have an in-built cultural preference for the conservative bias in science
and law that presumes innocence until proven guilty. In contrast, others argue that
the principle, at least in its strongest form, is incoherent and can have perverse
consequences, for example if proven therapeutic benefits of drugs are outweighed
by uncertain evidence of carcinogenicity (Majone 2002; Sunstein 2005: 26). Indeed,
some observers are concerned that the principle is simply an instrument of trade pro-
tectionism, as American policy-makers claimed when the EU banned hormones in
beef and milk and genetically modified food. In the absence of any agreed consistent
definition of the precautionary principle or method of application, however, there is
little hard evidence that the precautionary principle has changed policy outcomes.
Instead, the regular references to the principle in UK and EU policy documents with
little accompanying analysis very likely reflects its use as rhetorical justification for
decisions that have been shaped by other more conventional factors already discussed
in this chapter (cf. Heyvaert 2006).
A final significant trend within risk governance in the UK has been the move
towards greater transparency and participation across governance domains. Greater
access to information and engagement in governance processes is argued to have the
potential to enhance the quality of decision-making, improve the representation of
the public interest in governance decisions, and build trust and support for policy
processes and outcomes (Dryzek 1990; NRC 1996; Funtowitz and Ravetz 1996). For
example, public access to environmental information and decision-making has been
enshrined in the Aarhus Convention (1998) and such ideas have been actively pro-
moted by a range of bodies in the UK, such as the Royal Commission on Environmen-
tal Pollution (1998). Innovations in the UK have included public access to information
on local environmental risks, monthly open meetings of the Food Standards Agency
828 henry rothstein
Board, and ‘GM Nation’—a government sponsored nationwide debate on genetically
modified foods in 2003.
There is some limited evidence of success. The FSA, for example, prides itself on
its open decision-making procedures, which appear to have helped it take difficult
decisions and improve public trust. For example, in 2005 the agency reassessed the
BSE-related rule that prevented cattle over thirty months entering the food chain,
which carried high costs for the state in compensation payments to farmers, but
delivered only an estimated small safety gain for the public (Royal Society 2005). After
extensive public meetings and consultation, the FSA was able to relax the rule without
attracting public controversy.
Such reforms, however, have only had limited impacts. Public information is of
only limited use if it is ignored, misinterpreted, or creates further confusion, such as
has been found with flood maps and exhaustively detailed food labels. Such inno-
vations clearly require greater attention to the way in which risk is communicated.
Moreover, greater openness and accountability have led to perverse ‘blame-games’
as organizations and individuals have attempted to deflect their enhanced liabilities.
Such responses have included increased proceduralization; shifting decision-making
to less scrutinized contexts, such as from the proverbial meeting-room into the corri-
dor; or fudging accountability by diffusing responsibility, and hence blame, amongst
multiple organizations (Hood 2002; Hood, Rothstein, and Baldwin 2001: ch. 9). For
example, whilst much has been made of UK scientific advisory committees holding
their meetings in public, often the important work and discussions are undertaken
by subcommittees out of view of the public.
Moreover, greater public participation has only had limited success because of
a number of institutional constraints (Irwin 2006; Rothstein 2007). For example,
the impacts of participation on policy outcomes have been dependent on the fit
between participative processes and the practical demands and needs of governance,
the strength of other drivers shaping decision-making, and the degree of consensus on
the goals of participation. Such constraints have meant that participation can improve
some aspects of risk governance, such as building awareness or support, but simul-
taneously fail in others, such as improving equity of outcomes or the evidence base.
The inevitable trade-offs between these goals have sometimes created disillusionment
and conflicts, for example, when participation has been used to raise awareness
but participants have expected to have policy impacts, or when public opinion-
gathering exercises have been used to balance pressures from consumer group
lobbies.
The Food Standards Agency, for example, experienced such problems when it
established a Consumer Committee in 2002 to help the agency achieve one of its
core objectives of ‘putting consumers first’. In practice, the Committee’s contributions
only had a limited impact on decision-making and did little to improve support
for policy processes because, amongst other things, the representativeness and value
of the Committee’s contributions were contested, it was poorly integrated into the
policy process, and it had a poorly defined role and purpose (Rothstein 2007). As a
consequence, it was abolished as a failure after just three years.
technology and risk 829
44.7 The Emergence of Risk as an
Organizing Principle of Governance
.............................................................................................................................................
This chapter has so far focused on a range of traditional explanations to understand
the contemporary political salience of risk in the UK and the problems it poses for
governance. In recent years in the UK, however, the concept of risk has evolved
from a simple concern with harms to individuals and the environment to become
a key organizing principle for regulation and extended governance regimes across
policy domains and organizational settings. ‘Risk-based regulation’ has become a
central feature of the Labour administration’s third term, and risk-based corporate
governance has become standard practice in organizations across the public and
private sector (ICAEW 1999; Cabinet Office 2002; Hampton 2005). Analysis of this
conceptual shift in the use of the term ‘risk’ sheds light on the way in which risk has
been intimately related to changing patterns of governance in the UK.
At first glance, risk-based governance offers a beguilingly simple rationale for
decision-making by prioritizing activities according to the impact and probability
of events. Indeed, it is often promoted as a means for cutting through entrenched
organizational cultures to aid entrepreneurialism within both the public and private
sectors. The emergence of risk-based governance, however, has not just been related
to the management of what might be termed ‘public risks’—such as threats to the
environment, or health and safety. Instead, risk-based governance has additionally
emerged in response to what might be called the ‘institutional risks’ of governance;
that is, threats to organizations themselves in trying to manage public risks—such as
liabilities and loss of reputation. In other words, there has been a growing empha-
sis on the risks of risk management (Rothstein, Huber, and Gaskell 2006; Power
2007).
The emergence of ‘institutional risk’ can be related to the increasing need to
account for the limits and failures of governance. Governance regimes only have
a limited capacity to achieve their intended goals because they operate within a
range of common institutional constraints such as scarce resources, cognitive uncer-
tainties, regime incoherence, ungovernable actors, and unintended consequences.
Within weak governance structures, such problems can go undetected, unmanaged,
or unaccounted for until too late. Recent years, however, have seen both the public
and private sectors in the UK caught in a grip of audit and target cultures and
exposed to greater external transparency and accountability (Power 1997; Hood et al.
1999). This change has amplified and routinized the management of institutional
risks, as failures are recorded, potential failures are anticipated, and new categories
of failure are defined. ‘Good governance’, paradoxically, has become a source of risk
itself.
The use of the term ‘risk’ to describe both the objects of governance and threats
to governance institutions is more than a linguistic coincidence. As Luhmann (1993)
argued, modern societies frame decisions in terms of risk in order to manage the
830 henry rothstein
inherent uncertainties of rational decision-making. The concept of risk, according
to Luhmann, anticipates and legitimates the possibility of failure by transforming
decision-making into probabilistic assessments of success and failure. Framing gov-
ernance objects as risks, therefore, is an attempt to manage threats to society, whilst
reflexively managing the negative institutional externalities of governance itself.
This process has been well illustrated by the rise of the regulatory state in which
the creation of numerous regulatory agencies in the UK has been accompanied by
the introduction of tighter systems of scrutiny and accountability to compensate
for the inherent democratic deficits of outsourcing the state’s policy functions. In
that context, risk has become a valuable concept for regulators in justifying their
activities and performance, as the US Environmental Protection Agency found in
the early 1980s when faced with a barrage of adversarial legal actions (NRC 1983).
Such dynamics help explain the development of risk assessment and management
tools by independent regulators such as the UK Health and Safety Executive (HSE)
in the 1980s, and more recently a swathe of agencies from the UK Financial Services
Authority to the Housing Corporation (e.g. HSE 1998; Black 2005). The cliché that
‘there is no such thing as zero risk’, beloved by regulators, neatly expresses not just
an obvious practical reality, but also their need to find a way of rationalizing the
practical limits of what governance can achieve, and to render given degrees of failure
acceptable.
Attempts to manage the negative institutional externalities of governance has
transformed problems not conventionally understood as risks into risk problems.
Within the technological domain, for example, regulators are conceiving policy prob-
lems within ever more differentiated categories of risk, such as attempts to recast
ethical dimensions of the biosciences in terms of ethical risks, or public anxieties in
terms of reputational risks. In policy domains far removed from technological risk,
offenders on probation, mental health patients, and child welfare have been turned
from welfare problems into risk management problems as state agencies have been
increasingly held accountable for ever more visible failures. Even more widely, as
government has delegated decision-making to the public by empowering them to
exercise ‘choice’, be it through food labelling, hospital infection league tables, or flood
risk maps, it is perhaps unsurprising that the public has become more conscious of
risk and its inseparable bedfellow, blame. Such examples of risk ‘colonizing’ gover-
nance suggests that the emergence of risk is driven less by Beck’s new distribution of
ills in society than by a new distribution of ills in governance.
Framing problems in terms of risk may reflexively manage the associated insti-
tutional threats, but equally, such framings encounter the same kinds of problems
found in more conventional risk debates. Risk assessment, for example, is often an
inexact science, especially in softer areas of social policy, and can strain institutional
capacities to the point that it provides little more than a lingua franca for decision-
making while making little impact on actual organizational practices. Second, risk-
based decision-making can pose normative challenges for stakeholders and founder
on a clash of cultural understandings about risk. Third, decision-makers may elide
distinctions between public and institutional risk and choose to manage their own
technology and risk 831
institutional risks at the expense of risks to society, such as responding to front-page
news stories, irrespective of societal impacts. Such problems suggest that risk-based
governance may have unanticipated consequences. But if risk holds out the promise
of displacing the concept of failure within modern regulation and governance more
generally, it is not hard to see why it is provoking such excitement.
44.8 Conclusions
.............................................................................................................................................
This chapter has attempted to show how studies of risk politics can help understand-
ing of changing patterns of politics and governance in the UK in three ways. First, the
chapter has explored the factors shaping the politics and governance of risks associ-
ated with scientific and technological innovation in the UK. Popular commentary is
prone to convenient generalizations when it comes to risk politics, but in practice the
politics of risk may have more in common with Tolstoy’s dictum that ‘Every happy
family is the same, but unhappy families are all different’. There is no one single factor
that can be identified as the sole shaper of risk politics; rather, each case is shaped by
a collection of often interacting factors that include the transactional characteristics
of risk itself, complex patterns of public concern, and interest group lobbying and
sometimes problematic, if not dysfunctional, governance arrangements.
Such factors are common to all advanced industrial democracies, but their salience
and configuration varies across risks and across the complex policy, organizational,
and societal settings within which those risks are handled. There are undoubtedly
UK dimensions to some of those factors, such as the legacies of past crises that
have shaped public attitudes; the particular configuration and mobilization of private
and public organized interest groups; or the institutional specificities of UK risk
governance. Equally, the profile of those shaping factors may vary across governance
regimes, so that the politics of risk involved in shaping policy-making in Brussels or
Whitehall, for example, may be very different to the kind of politics that shapes the
implementation of that policy by local authority enforcement officers. The variable
‘push and pull’ of risk politics across risk governance regimes can have important
effects on the overall management of risk.
Second, the chapter has examined a series of contemporary reforms to risk gover-
nance in the UK that have mirrored changes across many advanced industrial democ-
racies. These changes have included reforms to governance architectures, such as the
delegation of decision-making to dedicated regulatory agencies; changes in decision
rules, such as the embedding of the precautionary principle within regulatory frame-
works; and changes in governance style, such as greater openness and participation.
In some respects, these changes represent a new mode of risk governance where the
need to establish institutional legitimacy in the wake of past failures has become a
central concern.
832 henry rothstein
At the same time, these reforms have been constrained by a range of institutional
factors that have limited their impacts on policy-making processes and outcomes.
For example, risk regulation agencies have sometimes had only limited levers for
shaping policy and implementation. The precautionary principle may be little more
than a rhetorical justification for decisions that are shaped by more powerful drivers.
Equally, greater openness and participation has triggered a range of blame-shifting
responses and trade-offs between various conflicting goals in ways that have reduced
the potential value of such reforms.
Finally, the chapter has tried to show how the contemporary salience of risk is as
much to do with its emergence as a general organizing concept for governance, as
its centrality to the politics of scientific and technological innovation. The chapter
has argued that risk has emerged as a key feature of contemporary governance as
tighter systems of scrutiny and accountability across the public and private sectors
have forced decision-makers to find ways of rationalizing the practical limits of what
governance can achieve. Risk has proved valuable as a way of framing policy problems
that reflexively manages the negative institutional externalities of governance itself,
and in so doing has transformed problems not conventionally understood as risks
into risk problems. That dynamic process suggests that the seeming proliferation of
risk may be less driven by societal conflicts over traditionally conceived harms arising
from scientific and technological innovation, than as a by-product of the increasing
need of politicians, regulators, and other decision-makers to account for the limits of
their success.
Risk has the potential to shape and change politics as it colonizes wide domains of
governance by offering a new rationale for decision-making. The value and success of
risk instruments, however, is limited by a range of fundamental challenges that can
reopen issues of knowledge, competence, acceptability, and blame. Studies of the pol-
itics and governance of risks associated with scientific and technological innovation,
therefore, may be able to offer useful insights into the character of risk politics and
governance strategies in policy domains that seem far removed at first glance. At the
very least, the lessons from the technological domain can act as a sensitizing device
for the dynamics that are underlying the colonization of politics by risk.
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Section Fifteen: Dynamics
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 45
.................................................................................................................
E U RO PE A N I ZAT I O N
.................................................................................................................
kevin featherstone
45.1 Introduction
.............................................................................................................................................
Contemporary debate recognizes the relevance of globalization to policy and party
programmes in Britain—even of ‘Americanization’, in the context of Bush and foreign
policy or Clinton and social policy, for example—and thereby the penetration of the
domestic political system. Set alongside these, in a manner that introduces much
complexity, are the more structured and often more visible impacts of European
Union (EU) membership. These involve distinctive features such as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’
law, the revision of existing competences, judicial interpretation, budgetary transfers,
and diverse forms of representation. Whilst it is often accepted that membership has
had a pervasive impact, charting its contours and depth is a daunting task. The study
of the interrelationship between the domestic and the EU system commonly refers to
processes of ‘Europeanization’.
The task of the present chapter is to review recent scholarship on the effects of
Europeanization on British politics to assess what has been learned to date. The
discussion offers a brief survey of research straddling policy, political actors, and
institutions, leaving the matter of party politics to the separate chapter by Buller.
It is important to distinguish what has changed and what has not, as well as ‘why,
when and how?’, for studies of Europeanization are sometimes criticized for being
too ready to attribute causality to the EU, without adequate discrimination. To
critics of Britain’s EU policy, there might be incredulity in the face of claims as
to her ‘Europeanization’. Yet, this chapter will argue that, though Britain generally
does indeed represent a distinctive case, the evidence of recent literature signals that
Europeanization here has had a far more complex and varied character than popular
images might suggest, and that there has been change over time.
838 kevin featherstone
45.2 The Study of ‘Europeanization’
.............................................................................................................................................
‘Europeanization’ as a term, even as an object of study, can appear faddish. Past
scholarship often used the term without definition, assuming the meaning to be self-
evident. This has left some scepticism as to the rigour of its causal explanations.
‘Europeanization’ here should not be seen as a synonym for ‘integration’: the latter
indicates the creation of new institutions, processes, and policies at the EU level; the
former signifies how member states adapt to the EU. It is useful, then, to open with a
résumé of the conceptual literature. A synthetical definition of ‘Europeanization’ has
been provided by Dyson and Goetz:
Europeanization denotes a complex interactive ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ process in
which domestic polities, politics and public policies are shaped by European integration
and in which domestic actors use European integration to shape the domestic arena.
It may produce either continuity or change and potentially variable and contingent
outcomes. (Dyson and Goetz 2003: 20)
This stresses the contingent nature of the national–EU relationship and that the
direction of activity, pressure, and resource opportunities are both to and from the
national system. Yet, ‘Europeanization’ does not constitute an independent theory;
rather, it is an ‘attention-directing device’ (Olsen 2002) to a distinct set of processes
in need of explanation (Featherstone and Radaelli 2003: 333). The ontology is com-
plex and may not easily fit with positivist notions. In any event, to explain what
occurred, how, and why, ‘Europeanization’ needs to borrow from established theories
of political science. Most writers on the subject have followed some variant of ‘new
institutionalism’, with their distinct interpretations of ideas, interests, and institutions
(Hall and Taylor 1996), though Boerzel and Risse (2003) have argued persuasively
that rationalist and constructivist logics can occur simultaneously or sequentially in
reality.
Crucial to such explanations are the links between the EU and domestic lev-
els (Goetz 2000: 222). A number of typologies have been developed to identify
them. Knill and Lehmkuhl (1999) refer to three: positive integration (where the EU
prescribes policy models); negative integration (where EU commitments dismantle
national regulations); and framing integration (where EU involvement alters beliefs,
expectations). Dyson and Goetz specify dynamics of: coexistence (where both levels
exhibit high mutual autonomy and there is little effective impact); co-evolution
(where there is mutual interaction leading to accommodation between the two lev-
els); and contestation (involving a clash of beliefs and preferences between the two
levels). Clearly, the latter two offer the greatest interest: both involve a degree of
change, rather than ‘no effect’ (though this might involve surprises of its own on a
comparative basis). More recently, Bulmer and Radaelli (2005) identified three modes
of governance in the EU, associated with distinct types of policy, to produce different
mechanisms of Europeanization. These range from the hierarchical and coercive—
where EU competence is strong and enforcement mechanisms limit the scope for
europeanization 839
‘cheating’ or non-compliance, though their exact nature varies between ‘positive’
and ‘negative’ integration—to the competitive and horizontal—involving regulatory
competition between states and actors where the EU plays a very limited role—and
the non-hierarchical/voluntary nature of facilitated coordination, as in the Open
Method of Coordination linked to the Lisbon Programme of 2000. The empirical
application of such a framework is not unproblematic: as Bache and Jordan (2006a:
25) point out, not all EU policies can be singly and neatly categorized in this fashion.
They themselves suggest a matrix distinguishing the intended ‘direct Europeaniza-
tion’ from the inadvertent ‘indirect Europeanization’, and ‘voluntary’ and ‘coercive’
Europeanization according to the acceptance or resistance of domestic actors to EU
stimuli (2006a: 24). The Bulmer and Radaelli typology seems more nuanced and,
like Dyson and Goetz, conveys the main theme of relevance here: that the linkages
between EU stimuli and domestic politics vary and that these are related to the type
of governance existing at the EU level.
Moreover, culture and agency are relevant to how Europeanization is communi-
cated and received. EU pressures are translated and interpreted within the domestic
cultural setting, creating scope for much variation (Morth 2003). Falkner et al. (2005)
have similarly argued that differences of domestic culture will determine the degree
of domestic compliance to EU legislation. They posit ‘three worlds of compliance’:
their world of law compliance (in which priority is attached to law compliance above
domestic concerns) seems the closest fit to the UK.
45.3 Reviewing the Evidence: The UK
Experience of Europeanization
.............................................................................................................................................
45.3.1 Policy
For the UK, as elsewhere, it is generally assumed that the impact of Europeanization
has been most evident in terms of public policy, rather than politics or the polity.
Yet, this differentiation is somewhat simplistic: each domain shows variation (Bache
and Jordan 2006b: 278). Differentiation cannot be consistently made between type
of policy or of policy process. A first category of cases is defined with reference to
timing and tempo, an important defining element of Europeanization (Radaelli 2003:
47–8). Here, the UK adopted policy change in advance of the EU developing a similar
agenda and/or requiring such reform. Deregulation, as well as privatization, under
the Thatcher governments of the 1980s went further and faster than in the rest of the
EU (Schmidt 2006). Financial market liberalization—the ‘Big Bang’ in the City of
London in 1986—was well ahead of any EU decision. Similarly, the liberalization of
the air transport sector in the mid-1980s, telecommunications in 1984, and electricity
in 1990 each pre-dated EU action. British Airways was privatized in 1987, a year
840 kevin featherstone
ahead of a sequence of three EU packages of reform spread over the following decade
(Graham 1997). The EU did not introduce market liberalization in electricity supply
until two directives in 1996 and 2003 (Jamasb and Pollitt 2005). Thatcher (2004:
293) found the EU stimulus to reform the regulation of telecommunications was
‘very limited’, differing sharply from the cases of France, Germany, and Italy. Indeed,
BT and the government were strong supporters of ‘exporting’ the domestic model.
Lehmkuhl (2006) examined the impact of the EU’s Common Transport Policy and
found that ‘it is almost impossible to identify a European influence in the regulation
of the British road haulage market’, though there were on some minor aspects (e.g.
the acceptance of bigger trucks) (2006: 9). Similarly, ‘the British Railways Act of
1993 represents the most radical and far-reaching railway reform in Europe’, with no
impact of the EU noted on its scope or timing of implementation (2006: 10).
It is sometimes suggested that the UK was a policy leader on privatization, with
other member states emulating its model and it being ‘uploaded’ to the EU level. Yet,
in a comparative study examining the relevance of different stimuli to privatization
across Europe, Clifton, Comin, and Díaz Fuentes (2006) find that the UK was more
an anomaly in this area. Britain’s partners did not embark seriously on privatiza-
tion until 1993 (and often in response to EU directives) and rather than copying
the UK, few others went as far. London had some influence on the EU directives,
however.
The fact that Britain was in advance of EU liberalization could also create problems
for harmonization later. Baldi (2006) examined the area of competition policy and
found that Britain was actually the last of the large and medium-sized member
states to harmonize its anti-trust laws with those of the EU. The ‘pre-existence
of an anti-trust system actually made harmonisation more difficult for Britain by
allowing British industrial interests to develop preferences for the domestic system’
(2006: 503). Pressure for UK harmonization stemmed, however, from an increasing
recognition of the success of the EU policy and the inadequacies of the UK regime,
and this influenced the Blair government in its introduction of the Competition
Act 1998.
A second category of cases involves contestation and a deliberate British decision to
reject participation in a common EU policy, securing some type of ‘opt-out’. The most
prominent case is that of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), where Britain’s opt-
out was part of a protocol agreed in the context of the Maastricht Treaty negotiated in
December 1991 (see Dyson and Featherstone 1999). It had, however, occurred after a
limited Europeanization of Britain’s monetary policy, when sterling was placed in the
then Exchange Rate Mechanism (from October 1990). To a section of the Conservative
Party, the media, and the relevant policy community, UK participation in the ERM
met a policy need, a governing style, and offered greater international influence: thus,
Europeanization was welcomed (Buller 2006). Yet, the extent of domestic adjustment
was little and late, and soon the experience of the ‘Black Wednesday’ ERM exit
(16 September 1992) provoked much bloodletting in the Tory party. The relatively
better performance of the British economy over the last decade; the perception that
a ‘one-size-fits-all’ monetary policy could seriously damage the British economy,
europeanization 841
given the lack of synchronization in the respective ‘economic cycles’ of the UK and
its continental partners; and the debate surrounding the rules of the Stability and
Growth Pact—each of these have been seen as strengthening the case for staying out
(cf. Hay, Smith, and Watson 2006). As if to celebrate Britain’s detachment, Gordon
Brown as Chancellor rarely attended meetings of the Council of Ministers, preferring
to send deputies instead, and frequently preached the UK reform model to his EU
partners. As a result, Britain has been little affected by EU monetary regulations and
directives—otherwise a key stimulus for domestic adaptation in other member states
(Featherstone 2004).
In the other sector in which Britain obtained an ‘opt-out’ at Maastricht in 1991—
social policy—the pattern has been more varied. The Thatcher government had
refused to sign the Social Charter in Strasbourg in December 1989, much to the
frustration of the TUC and the Labour Party. By contrast, one of the first moves
of the Blair government was to agree in June 1997 that the Charter be incorporated
into the EU’s Amsterdam Treaty. The EU’s Working Time Directive had also been
rejected by the Conservative government when it was first proposed in 1993. Again,
Labour and the unions protested. But, although it was introduced into the UK in
1998, the Blair government sought to retain the right of individual workers not to be
bound by one of its core elements: that an employee could not be forced to work more
than forty-eight hours a week (Arrowsmith et al. 2001). The agenda here highlighted
the conflict of social models between Britain and her major partners. The Major
and Blair governments saw the forty-eight-hour rule as increasing labour costs and
stymieing employment growth. EU partners stressed the values of social solidarity. In
other areas, EU action has been more directly consequential, as with the rulings of
the European Court of Justice on gender rights in relation to pay and pensions. By
contrast, the recent agenda of fighting social exclusion is one where British policies
were largely formed in advance of the EU taking action. The impact of the latter on
the formation of domestic policy appears to have been modest, competing with other
sources of influence (Armstrong 2006). Moreover, in the ‘National Action Plan on
Inclusion’ it was obliged to submit and share with its fellow EU governments, the
Blair government chose to stress its success on growth and employment, rather than
on poverty.
A third category of cases is of limited adaptation (shifting from coexistence to co-
evolution), but one paralleled by strong reservations about the format or applica-
tion of policy. Here, the ambiguous stance of Britain towards EU foreign policy
cooperation is a prime example. The disputes between the Blair government and
its EU partners over the invasion of Iraq, whilst at the same time being viewed as
slavishly pro-USA, are well known. And, whilst there have been a number of clashes
over the substance of policy, there has also been a consistent line to defend the
intergovernmental character of EU foreign policy cooperation. Some years ago, Hill
commented that the UK had sought to insert its leadership and to exploit the benefits
of cooperation under the old system of ‘European Political Cooperation’ (1996: 77).
More latterly, Oliver and Allen (2006: 197–9) noted that the UK had maintained
its commitment to intergovernmentalism and that it had continued to refuse to
842 kevin featherstone
have its hands tied. Yet, under the ‘Common Foreign and Security Policy’ (CFSP),
there have been ‘numerous foreign policy issues (that) show evidence of adaptation
(by Britain) to a European norm’ (2006: 197). A shared outlook was evident in
the content of the EU’s ‘European Security Strategy’ (ESS) of 2003, which reflected
much British thinking, and the Blair government’s own subsequent national strategy
documents. Moreover, the ESS showed the differences of policy perspective between
Britain and the EU, on the one hand, and the USA, on the other (Oliver and Allen
2006: 195).
A second, though distinct, case in this category may be agricultural and rural
policy. Paradoxically, given its overall importance for the EU, few political science
studies have been made of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) in general or
in relation to the UK, in particular. A policy study by Ward and Lowe (2004) con-
sidered how the Rural Development Regulation (RDR)—the CAP’s ‘second pillar’
agreed in Berlin in March 1999—has been implemented in England. They noted the
disadvantageous funding settlement for the UK under this policy and the subsequent
Whitehall decision to cross-subsidize the RDR for England from production subsidies
to environmental subsidies, a mechanism known as ‘modulation’. They accept that
‘an increasingly Europeanised approach to rural development funding, programming
and administration is being developed’ in general, but that it risks ‘distorting sub-
national priorities [in England] to spread rural development support beyond the
farm gate’ (2004: 121), a feature to which Britain had objected.
A fourth category of cases are those where there have been clear domestic impacts on
framing and prescribing the content. A prime example here is environmental policy.
It is also a sector that has been relatively well researched across the EU in terms of
‘Europeanization’ (see Knill 1998; Boerzel 2000; Haverland 2000; 2003). Jordan (1998)
in his study of coastal bathing water policy—focusing on actor participation—found
that EU action had significantly restructured a relatively stable policy area. It had been
dominated by engineers and scientists and governments had defended the practice of
depositing raw sewage into the sea. In combination with the pressures arising from
privatization, however, EU environmental ideas and policies shifted the British policy
process by opening it up to environmental groups and helped to redefine policy goals
and instruments. Again, Jordan (2000: 3) argues that UK policy here has been ‘irrev-
ocably transformed’. Yet Knill (1998), following a historical institutionalist/rationalist
approach, had found greater institutional resistance to implementation in (other
aspects of) environmental policy in the UK than in Germany (cf. Bugdahn 2005).
A fifth category of cases is of unilateral initiatives with a European frame. With
respect to policy on internal EU migration, Britain for a period was seen as being
more pro-Europe than most of its partners. Prior to the accession of eight countries
from central and Eastern Europe to the EU in 2004, most EU member states applied
long transition periods before allowing free movement of workers—a basic EU
principle—from these states. By contrast, the UK—along with Ireland and Sweden—
decided not to introduce any such restrictions. The effect was to open UK borders
to thousands of migrant workers from Eastern Europe, epitomized in stereotypical
images of Polish plumbers entering the market. Gajewska (2006) argued that the
europeanization 843
difference of response between EU governments was the result of different official
reactions as to how to deal with the far right and anti-immigrant political campaigns.
In any event, Britain was not the ‘awkward partner’ (George 1998). The optimistic
assumption was the faster growing, liberalized British economy needed an influx of
new skilled labour.
Britain’s exceptionalism became a problem, however, with the larger than expected
influx of migrant workers. The estimates of the likely net inflow from the new
member states ranged between 5,000 and 13,000 per year (Dustmann et al. 2003).
However, a total of 579,000 workers actually registered for employment between 1
May 2004 and 31 December 2006—and this figure excludes those coming as self-
employed workers. Nevertheless, this huge total represents the number entering and
does not take account of those leaving the UK (or their employment). 1 The increased
political sensitivity about the greater numbers led John Reid, as Home Secretary, to
announce (on 24 October 2006) that a more restrictive policy would be maintained
for Bulgarian and Romanian workers when their states joined the EU in January 2007,
with subsequent reviews.
The shift of policy was prompted by a domestic backlash which saw Britain as
being a ‘soft-touch’. The same theme had long been evident in the UK’s politics of
immigration. Britain had maintained a tough stance on border controls by refusing to
accede to the Schengen Agreement signed in 1985 by five EU states and subsequently
expanded. The Agreement lifts border controls on individual travellers within the
EU to random checks. The Blair government had also resisted placing immigration
and asylum policy within traditional EU policy-making (with no national veto) in
the context of the Amsterdam Treaty of 1997. Moreover, in 2003 Blair proposed that
asylum seekers wishing to enter the EU should have their claims processed in camps
located outside the EU—Romania and Albania were suggested as possible locations
(Geddes 2005).
This brief overview suggests a differentiation in the relevance of the EU—from UK
action in advance of the EU, to UK opt-outs, limited adaptation, and resistance to
some aspects of form, clear impacts on framing and content, and unilateral initia-
tives that were more in advance of her partners. Further differentiation is necessary
according to timing and tempo, as well as the make-up of the government in office.
Moreover, within each policy sector the significance of impact varies according to the
type of EU policy instrument. There is little consistent pattern across the typology. A
contrast may be made between areas of greater domestic political importance—such
as EMU and foreign policy—where the policy impact is limited and areas of lesser
political salience such as environmental policy, where the impact appears greater.
Political sensitivities have changed over time, however. Few would have predicted,
for example, the St Malo Declaration of December 1998 when the UK agreed with
France to the establishment of the European Security and Defence Policy. Indeed,
a number of authors note that the general reality of adaptation is much greater than
1
I am grateful for the advice of my colleague Evgenia Markova on this matter.
844 kevin featherstone
that suggested by the image and discourse. This contrast is perhaps even more evident
in the behaviour of actors and the operation of institutions.
45.3.2 Polity
EU policy processes have drawn in an increasing and varied number of domestic
political actors from the UK. Though research in this area is rather limited, a number
of studies have focused on those involved in subnational public authorities and
NGOs. Here the impact of EU initiatives and funding can be significant, though
generally short of the ‘multi-level governance’ depiction (Marks, Hooghe, and Blank
1996). Local actors can gain unprecedented access to information and resources, with
parallel gains of legitimacy, features that were seen as in short supply under the
Thatcher governments of the 1980s. Marshall (2005) examined the cases of Birming-
ham and Glasgow—both recipients of large amounts of EU structural funds—and the
evidence of Europeanization on local government and local actors (in urban renewal,
regeneration partnerships). He found significant impacts in terms of the engagement
of councils in EU lobbying, building local working partnerships, and developing
long-term strategic planning in order to benefit from EU funds (2005: 676). Moreover,
the EU had affected the behaviour of NGOs concerned with regeneration initiatives
(a greater EU awareness) and had restructured pluralistic politics at the local level
(new forms of inclusion). In addition, the form and content of local regeneration
partnerships had changed to accommodate EU Commission norms. The two city
councils had sought to ‘upload’ their preferences and practices (to input into future
EU policies) and to engage in sharing best practice in an EU context.
If local councils willingly circumvented Whitehall in the period of the Thatcher
governments, the same has been even more apparent in the case of British NGOs. The
expansion of EU competences into broader policy areas and the policy style of the EU
Commission to seek coalitions of supporters across member states have provided a
new dimension of political activity for NGOs. Indeed, British NGOs have been more
responsive in this regard than many of their counterparts in other EU member states.
They have joined EU-level campaigns, promoted European-level lobby organizations,
and often provided the leadership personnel for such bodies. Pugh found that volun-
tary sector groups concerned with children’s rights, infant health, disability, and the
elderly were extending their advocacy strategies to take on an important European
dimension (Pugh 1998). In the case of the pro-migrant sector, Gray and Statham
found that British NGOs had built ‘pathways’ and ‘linkages’ to a new European
political dimension (e.g. via the European Council on Refugees and Exiles), though
national governments still maintained their grip on decision-making (2005). In his
study of social exclusion policy, Armstrong (2006) found that participation in the EU-
level process of the ‘Open Method of Coordination’ (OMC) significantly affected the
domestic process of interaction between Whitehall, regional executives, and NGOs.
Fairbrass (2006) focussed on British business and environmental groups in terms of
their choice of targets and routes and drew a distinction on the basis that the latter
europeanization 845
saw the EU as a welcome alternative whereas the former was generally closer to the
stance of the British government.
This willingness to act at the European level and the relatively high profile of British
personnel in the relevant fora indicate a degree of engagement that contrasts sharply
with Westminster-centred images of Euro-scepticism and detachment. The deeper
reality is of a stratum of personnel whose schedules involve regular European inter-
actions. For local authorities, much of this is seen as managerial and administrative,
rather than being overtly political. For NGOs, it is a matter of creating and exploiting
new lobbying opportunities and wider coalitions. The motivations are undoubtedly
instrumental—seeking strategic advantage—but it is unlikely that a normative and
socialization aspect is totally absent.
45.3.3 Institutions
The consequences of EU engagement are most often discernible in the modus
operandi of governmental institutions. A common assumption in the UK is of their
persistence and of incremental change. The long-term picture of Whitehall’s manage-
ment of EU policy, indeed, suggested that the administrative machine had absorbed
the new demands without significant shifts of culture (Bulmer and Burch 1998). Fol-
lowing a ‘historical institutionalist’ approach, Bulmer and Burch noted that ‘The new
challenges posed by EC/EU membership have simply been absorbed into the existing
institutions and into the characteristic methods, procedures and culture of Whitehall’
(1998: 613). Surprisingly, the ‘critical juncture’ in this respect had occurred in 1960–1
at the time of Britain’s first application to join the then EEC. When Britain actually
did join, the consequence was of adaptation of what had been established, rather
than a reform of the administrative machinery. So, no ‘big bang’ but two ‘quantum
leaps’ did occur much later. The single European market programme (1985–92) led
to an ‘intensification of adaptation in particular areas of Whitehall’ (1998: 613), as did
the Maastricht Treaty’s extension of the EU’s role into matters of ‘Justice and Home
affairs’, which brought the Home Office more fully into the coordination process. In
addition, the onset of the European Council meetings—regular ‘summits’ of heads of
government from 1975—brought in the Prime Minister and the Cabinet Office much
more. Yet the framework and principles established at the point of Britain’s entry
were not altered, just adapted. Thus, ‘Europeanisation and the Whitehall model have
proven to be quite compatible thus far’ (1998: 613). 2
At the centre of the EU’s impact on Whitehall is the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office (FCO). Earlier portrayals saw the FCO as an institutional loser: ceding respon-
sibilities to departments concerned with domestic policy, as the agenda of the EU
broadened. Yet, Allen and Oliver (2006) see the FCO as having been able to revise
the format of its ‘gate-keeping’ function, via the role of the UK’s Permanent Rep-
resentation (‘UKRep’) in Brussels and coordination by embassies. The FCO retains
significant influence over major policies: it is both a winner and a loser. Moreover,
internally, the EU has had a range of impacts on the FCO: on the office of the Political
2
A similar situation was found to apply to the Scottish Office, with the prevailing culture and
approaches not exhibiting major changes (Smith 2001).
846 kevin featherstone
Director and Permanent Under-Secretary; the management of EU policy; the growth
of UKRep as a ‘mini-Whitehall’; the increased prominence of Europeanists in the
FCO; and the greater role played by the PM and Downing Street (Allen and Oliver
2006: 63–4).
Whitehall processes have had the reputation of being very well coordinated, estab-
lishing coherent negotiating mandates. The system is geared up to establish ‘an early,
agreed, cross-departmental European policy position on major issues’ and this is ‘a
feature which sets the British governmental machinery apart from most of its partners
in the EU’ (Bulmer and Birch 1998: 617; see also Rometsch and Wessels 1996; Wallace
1996; Wright 1996). Internal coordination in Whitehall may not be matched, however,
by an alertness to wider agendas or the ability to forge coalitions with partners in EU
negotiations (Dyson and Featherstone 1999: 758).
For one of the most important policy areas affecting Britain’s relationship with the
EU—EMU—Dyson stressed the strength with which the institutional culture of HM
Treasury enveloped the policy agenda (Dyson 2000). Issues were embedded in the
structures of belief and of meaning emanating from the Treasury and its surrounds,
and these were powerful, independent factors. Moreover, the ‘Treasury is much less
Europeanised in outlook than either the Bank [of England] or the FCO and very
cautious on EMU’ (Dyson 2000: 913). Following a constructivist approach, Dyson
highlights the differences of discourse on EMU in Whitehall—the impact of Euro-
peanization varied between departments. The incentives to join EMU also differed
for the UK in comparison to its partners: Britain had already had an economic policy
revolution independent of EMU and the granting of (de facto) independence to the
Bank of England in 1997 further decoupled domestic interests from the European
constraint. The lack of Europeanization was thus not attributable to an innate conser-
vatism: rather, the cycle of reform differed again and the ideational setting contrasted
with those of major partners.
The EU stimulus has not remained static, of course. Bulmer and Burch (1998:
622–4) noted that changes under way in the early period of the first Blair government
could lead to significant shifts. Labour’s agenda of constitutional reform—notably
devolution and human rights—looked set to reduce the disparities between the
British state and its major partners. It was ironic, they noted, that whilst Whitehall
had absorbed Europeanization pressures relatively easily, it was the EU that was chal-
lenging the very constitutional framework in which Whitehall patterns were embed-
ded (1998: 624). More recently, the same authors concluded that in fact Whitehall,
under Blair, was engaged in a ‘step-change’ with respect to Europeanization. The
government, at both the ministerial and the official level, was able to take a more ‘pro-
active, directive and strategic approach to Europe’, partly because Labour was not so
divided on Europe as were the Tories (Bulmer and Burch 2005: 886). This approach
was qualified to some extent by the control wrought by Gordon Brown and the
Treasury. Nevertheless, the government had seized the institutional opportunities and
cultural change had been promoted to overcome the passive and defensive approach
of the John Major years. The potential for projecting British interests onto the EU
stage was greater than ever before, government personnel were more aware and
europeanization 847
engaged, and there was leadership and a strategic vision. It was not clear, however,
whether these changes would endure, given the impact of Iraq and of Merkel and
Sarkozy as more assertive rival leaders.
Somewhat paradoxically, given its reputation for Euro-scepticism, the UK has had
quite a good record in transposing EU law into national law. There are few studies
of parliamentary scrutiny of EU legislation in the UK. However, in a detailed study
in the area of utilities and food safety regulation, Berglund, Gange, and van Waarden
found that there was little delay in the UK’s transposition and that this was due to
advantages in terms of the existence of administrative routines for effective, efficient,
and fast production of law (2006: 698, 712). Kaeding in a study of the transport
legislation of the EU, though, reported that the average delay in transposing the
legislation into domestic law was around thirty weeks in the UK, whereas—perhaps
counter-intuitively—in Spain it was just ten weeks (2006: 235). The overall picture
is very positive (e.g. Mbaye 2001 on compliance). As previously noted, Falkner et al.
(2005) explained the UK performance in terms of the strong prevailing culture of law
compliance.
Beyond Whitehall, researchers have examined the impact of EU membership in the
context of devolution and on the English regions. Smith (2001) found the prevailing
culture and approaches of the Scottish Office exhibiting much continuity. His later
study (2006) examined the impact of the EU on the work of the new Scottish Execu-
tive after 1999, confirming again the relevance of the embedded culture and arguing
that whilst there was no convergence to a European model of administration, there
was some change—including an apolitical bureaucratic enthusiasm for European
engagement. Burch et al. (2005: 474) examined each of the devolved administrations
in the UK and concluded that change was evident not so much in policy outcomes
as in the handling of EU policy. The devolved administrations were being drawn into
the centre of Whitehall policy-making and they ‘have more channels of access and are
applying more resources in a more focussed way’ on EU matters than in the past or in
comparison to the English regions. Yet, the EU impact varied between policy sectors
and access to UK policy-making appeared conditional on trust and agreement on
fundamental aspects.
Burch and Gomez (2002; 2006) analysed the impact of the EU on institutional
change on the English regional authorities. They distinguish impacts across two
periods: 1990–7 and 1997–2006. The impact was ‘often primary and predominant’ in
the first phase (a result in the main of the changes made by the EU in 1988 and 1993 in
the regulations for its structural funds) and ‘significant but secondary’ in the second
(2006: 95). In absolute terms, the EU had grown after 1997 but in the context of a
far greater expansion of regional activities. The programming concept of the Euro-
pean Regional Development Fund had ‘helped to both develop and consolidate the
regional tier by creating a clear focus for activities and opportunities for engagement
and activism’. The formal requirement for partnerships similarly exerted a ‘powerful
regionalising effect’. Post-1997, the EU effect was sustained but became secondary to
that emanating from central government. However, wider EU effects became more
apparent, as with rural development policy and environmental policy. They stress
848 kevin featherstone
gradualism and variability in EU effects and also that over time small changes had the
potential to emerge as transformative.
Long-term patterns have displayed small, incremental change. However, the onset
of the Blair government in 1997 prompted a number of reforms with substan-
tive implications: notably a step-change in Whitehall and a strong engagement
from devolved administrations. Much of this change appeared conditional and
contingent—not least on the political lead from on high—but, even so, it qualifies
notions of deeply embedded institutional cultures.
45.4 Explaining Britain’s Relationship
.............................................................................................................................................
What explains this complexity—of contrasts and change? This is a huge agenda and
one difficult to resolve. It is worth considering the arguments that have been deployed,
however, in order to gauge the possible intervening variables standing between EU
stimulus and domestic response.
The most all-encompassing starting point is to consider the nature of the political
discourse in Britain on Europe. Meanings and images are attached to ‘Europe’ in
speech and text and these structure political options and action. It is widely asserted
that ‘Brits’ talk and write about the EU in markedly different terms from the ‘con-
tinentals’ (Wallace 1997). The British, it is argued, have never really adapted to EU
membership in terms of their mindset. Schmidt (2006) compared Britain to France,
Germany, and Italy. To explain the British problem, she argues, it is necessary to
‘consider how the EU challenges traditional ideas about democracy and how national
leaders have responded to such challenges in their discourse to the general public’
(2006: 26). Britain and France share concerns about the EU threatening executive
autonomy, but only in Britain is this linked to parliamentary sovereignty, via the
traditional notion of ‘Crown in Parliament’. Moreover, the EU depoliticizes policy
issues—it involves ‘policies without politics’ (2006: 25)—and this poses a bigger
shock to highly charged, majoritarian, and simply-structured polities like Britain.
The arguments for joining the EU and, on occasion, deepening its integration have
been primarily economic—in contrast to France, for example, which saw it as an
opportunity for political leadership. The result of each of these factors, Schmidt
argues, is that the British public has been made ‘maximally aware of the drawbacks
to Europeanization, but of few of the benefits’ (2006: 29). Wallace has enlarged the
point: the symbolic resonance of European integration—the ideas, concepts, and
values associated with the project—has been much more positive than negative for
France, Germany, and Italy, framing the judgement on individual issues. By contrast,
for many in Britain this dimension has either been absent or negative (1997: 686).
This largely leaves the response to new EU initiatives without a supporting normative
discourse of a political kind. By default, issues are a cost–benefit analysis in terms of
europeanization 849
trade, investment, and the economy, with limits set anxiously on domestic political
encroachment. Few British politicians have been described as ‘Europeans of the heart’,
to use a phrase of Jacques Delors’, and more have been closer to the pragmatic
calculations of John Major or Gordon Brown.
The absence of a legitimating political discourse can be explained by reference to a
host of other factors. Unlike most continental nations, the legacy of the Second World
War was not one of seeking to exorcize history, as Jean Monnet himself commented
(1978: 450). With this came the ‘price of victory’: successive governments assumed a
weight for Britain in the world that became increasingly out of step with economic
realities (Charlton 1983). Nevertheless, a continuing feature of the British discourse
has been that ‘Europe’ is too small to meet her interests: variously, the emphasis
has been on the importance of the Commonwealth, the ‘special relationship’ with
the USA, the liberalizing economic logic of globalization. Strategic calculations left
Britain uncertain about the value of a deepening European tie (Allen 2005). The focus
can be further extended to cover differences of history, geography, and culture: some
would identify a near endless list. Such explanations can appear too static and general,
however, insensitive to change over time. If Britain lacks a narrative to explain its
political engagement with Europe, the same can be said increasingly of the EU as a
whole (Garton Ash 2001).
How the British political elite have managed the relationship with the rest of
Europe has been the source of much dispute. The political bias of the media has
been cited to explain the pro-European vote in the June 1975 referendum and, more
recently, the Euro-scepticism of public opinion since the 1980s. The Euro-sceptic
Lord Beloff argued that Britain’s European policy was based on deceit: the public
had been repeatedly misled about the real integration agenda by a Whitehall elite
that lacked confidence in Britain’s ability to go it alone (1996). By contrast, the ex-
EU diplomat Roy Denman has written of a litany of strategic mistakes made by
successive governments that have undermined Britain’s influence in Europe (1996).
More recently, former EU Commissioner Peter Sutherland (2008) argued that the
politics of Westminster and its associated press coverage has cut Britain off from a
wider European debate. Strong views on the desirability of integration can colour
explanations of how it has occurred. Taylor (2008) sought to explain how and why
the EU had a bad press in the UK. More generally, Allen (2005) has described the
UK as having a Europeanized ruling elite, but a non-Europeanized polity given the
absence of a public consensus and an aversion to debate about initiatives on the EU’s
long-term future.
Systemic features mediate responses to the EU at a general level: the political
discourse, the perceived threat to established traditions and principles, the motivation
for ‘cost–benefit’ analysis, the ‘Euro-scepticism’ of the media, etc. ‘Europe’ remains
a divisive, emotive issue and engagement and adaptation are often kept low profile,
sensitive to public images. Yet, differentiation and change was evident from the earlier
briefsurvey.Whilstthesemay bemoretheresultofstrategic calculation,ideationalshifts
were also apparent. The UK setting—from various ‘institutionalist’ perspectives—is
not as resistant or as impermeable to ‘Europeanization’ processes as generalized,
850 kevin featherstone
systemic images suggest. Instead, the intervening variables at play appear far more
varied and particular.
45.5 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
The foregoing has painted a picture of differentiation and change. Britain has expe-
rienced rather more adaptation than many might suspect and this has been evi-
dent across policy areas, political actors, and institutions. Yet, within each domain
there are significant asymmetries: many policy areas display only limited direct EU
impact; institutions exhibit much incrementalism and continuity; different types of
actor have been drawn into EU processes. The extent of Britain’s exceptionalism
seems more difficult to gauge today than at any time previously. Some important
dynamics of the British system are being reshaped, whilst settings appear more
contingent and fungible. ‘Every which way, but loose’ may be an appropriate epithet
here.
The agenda for Europeanization research in the UK is broad and, whilst schol-
arship to date has dwelt on particular cases, it has done so to varying degrees of
empirical depth. There remain major gaps and limitations. There is limited empirical
evidence of institutional adaptation across Whitehall; the impact of the EU on local
policy-making; the effects of EU policies in key areas like the CAP and immigration;
the strategies and perceptions of NGOs; the ideational influence of the EU on core
national policies, etc. Moreover, there is much more research to date on the ‘top-
down’ impacts of the EU, rather than the strategic effectiveness and substantive con-
tribution of UK actors ‘uploading’ ideas and interests at the EU level. To some extent,
scholarship remains ‘ghetto-ized’: analysts of EU effects are likely to be EU specialists
drawn to the study by a European, rather than a domestic, interest. Domestic politics
specialists instinctively have a different vantage point. ‘Europeanization’ studies are
susceptible to the prior expectations of impact on the part of EU specialists, but
the same is also true for experts on domestic politics. Further, the argument over
the extent of EU impacts is closely tied to the choice of alternative methodological
approaches—historical continuities, the policy relevance of increased interaction and
socialization, for example—rather than contesting evidence within the same tradi-
tion. This means arguments over Europeanization impacts are more disputes over
methodology.
The ontology of Europeanization explanations face much complexity, not least
in the context of considering alternative causal factors or depth or permanence of
change. Outcomes are not seen as consistently determinate across cases and settings;
rather the interest stems from their differentiation and asymmetry. ‘Europeaniza-
tion’ offers no theory of its own and it must rest on standard tests of rigorous
research design. As such, ‘imported’ methodologies reflect the assumptions, the wider
europeanization 851
strengths and weaknesses of their approaches. Institutionalist explanations need to be
adapted to two levels—the EU and the domestic—and to reveal the linking mecha-
nisms of influence between them—to answer the ‘how?’ question. Much research to
date has settled for the circumstantial and fails to penetrate a ‘black box’. Conceptu-
alizations of Europeanization processes are developing a more sophisticated ‘tool kit’,
drawing important analytical distinctions.
Studies of Europeanization dynamics in Britain are concerned with an important
and diverse phenomenon. With the increasing and broadening activity at the EU level,
few would predict such studies would become less important in the future. The task is
therefore to extend the research findings and to do so with a robust analytical design.
At the same time, the expectations of such research should be consistent with those
applied to other approaches: it lacks determinacy, so what’s new?
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c h a p t e r 46
.................................................................................................................
G LO BA L I ZAT I O N
.................................................................................................................
colin hay
This chapter provides a critical review of the substantial and growing literature in
British politics on globalization. It assesses the extent of the exposure of the British
state and economy to the pressures associated with globalization and the appropri-
ateness of the adaptation to such pressures that has increasingly come to characterize
domestic policy-making in Britain over the last two decades. Its argument unfolds as
follows.
In a short introduction the ubiquity of the appeal to globalization, both in elite
political discourse and in contemporary British political analysis, is established. Yet
it is demonstrated that this is still a relatively recent phenomenon, associated in
particular with the ‘modernization’ in opposition of the Labour Party and the tenure
of the Blair and now Brown administrations in government. Before 1995, the concept
of globalization appeared only rarely in British political discourse and, though often
assumed as a contextual factor in British political analysis, it was rarely a focus of
analytical attention. The diversity of the various senses of the term globalization
appealed to in both academic and elite political discourse is demonstrated. This
provides the context for a discussion of the semantic confusion that invariably
surrounds the term. Whether globalization is an accurate description of the chal-
lenges faced by the British state and economy in an age of political and economic
interdependence depends, unremarkably, on what globalization is taken to imply. A
range of potential definitions are considered and the importance of differentiating
clearly between regionalization on the one hand and globalization on the other is
established. A relatively exacting definition of globalization is proposed and defended
∗
I am deeply indebted to David Held, Grahame Thompson, and the other editors of this volume for
their characteristically perceptive, incisive, and encouraging comments on an earlier version of this
chapter.
856 colin hay
and the need to disaggregate the concept—particularly in terms of the scope, scale,
‘intensity’, and ‘extensity’ of the flows it entails (Held et al. 1999)—is established.
This provides the conceptual basis from which to move to a rather more empirical
treatment of the question of globalization as it impacts on contemporary British
politics and political economy. Here the chapter is concerned with three central issues:
(i) the extent to which the British state and economy can indeed be said to be exposed,
and increasingly exposed, to the (competitive and other) pressures associated with
globalization—i.e. the extent of the globalization of the British economy since the
1960s; (ii) the extent to which the reform trajectory of the British state and economy
since the 1980s provides a model of the adaptation of an advanced liberal democratic
welfare state to the competitive pressures of an ever more integrated global economy;
and (iii) the extent to which that reform trajectory rests on a particular understand-
ing of globalization and the nature of the British state and economy’s exposure to
globalization.
The chapter shows that the characterization of the British economy in terms of
globalization is both inaccurate and increasingly so. It argues, moreover, that the
reform trajectory on which the British state and economy has embarked is based
on assumptions about the extent and nature of the exposure to globalization that
are difficult to reconcile with the empirical evidence. Finally, it suggests that, far
from providing a model of adaptation to globalization which other advanced liberal
democratic regimes might benefit from emulating, such a reform trajectory may well
contribute towards the growing vulnerability of an increasingly debt-financed and
predominantly service-oriented post-industrial economy on the edge of an expand-
ing European Union.
46.1 The Public Discourse of
Globalization in Britain
.............................................................................................................................................
In no other developed economy has globalization been invoked so frequently and so
consistently as a source of constraints and imperatives which domestic policy-makers
must negotiate and internalize. Yet, however characteristically Anglo-liberal such a
discourse now appears, it is still a relatively recent phenomenon—and one associated
very clearly with, first, the modernization, in opposition, of the Labour Party and,
subsequently, with its tenure in office as New Labour. Indeed, arguably nothing better
defines New Labour than its interpretation and internalization of the constraints on
domestic policy-making latitude arising from globalization (Driver and Martell 2003;
Hay 1999).
New Labour’s new political economy has invariably been presented as a logi-
cal correlate of internalizing the lessons of globalization. Appeal has consistently
globalization 857
been made to processes beyond the control of political actors which must simply
be accommodated—and hence to a logic of economic compulsion which is non-
negotiable. In this way, a wholesale rethinking of its political economy was presented,
first in opposition and then in government, in almost technical terms as a pragmatic
response to the constraints imposed by globalization. Yet whilst this was certainly
given a distinctly New Labour inflection in the appeal to the language of globalization,
it arguably echoed themes already present in British public discourse—in particular,
the DTI’s turn to the discourse of competitiveness under the tutelage of Michael
Heseltine in the early 1990s. At that time, of course, the concept of globalization was
largely unheard of in public discourse. But both the DTI’s understanding of competi-
tiveness and New Labour’s of globalization were predicated on a highly conserved set
of open economy macroeconomic assumptions. From these were derived a common
set of general policy commitments—to monetary discipline, to fiscal prudence, and to
the elimination of labour-market rigidities and other microeconomic disincentives to
innovation and entrepreneurialism. Such a conception of globalization, understood
in terms of the challenge to competitiveness that it poses, continues to be extremely
influential (see, for instance, HM Treasury 2004; 2005a; 2005b).
This much is already well documented. Yet, less widely acknowledged is that the
appeal to globalization as a non-negotiable external economic constraint does not
exhaust the public discourse of globalization in Britain today. Indeed, in government,
New Labour’s appeal to globalization has diversified considerably—as is shown in
Table 46.1. This maps the range of potential discourses of globalization, differentiating
between them in terms of whether they depict the process as positive or negative
(judged by its effects) and in terms of the whether the process is seen to be inevitable
or contingent upon political interventions. Those present in contemporary British
political discourse are highlighted in bold.
Limits of space prevent a more detailed analysis, but a number of points might be
noted:
r New Labour’s public discourse of globalization is consistently positive—
globalization is, or at least has the capacity to be made, beneficial for all.
r New Labour’s appeal to the discourse of globalization is inconsistent.
r In domestic contexts, globalization is invoked as a non-negotiable process neces-
sitating structural reform.
r Yet in international fora it is repeatedly presented as a more contingent and
open-ended political project whose (potential) benefits to all need to be secured
and more effectively communicated to a sometimes sceptical audience (see also
Williams 2005).
r Consequently, the appeal to globalization is depoliticizing domestically yet politi-
cizing in international fora.
It is certainly tempting to attribute this discursive inconsistency in the appeal to the
language of globalization to confusion or, more simply, a lack of sustained reflection
on the part of those deploying it. Yet that temptation should perhaps be resisted here.
For, though inconsistent if taken as a whole, there is in fact a consistent internal
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Table 46.1 The public discourse of globalization in Britain
Globalization as Character of Globalization as
unambiguously globalization unambiguously
positive contingent upon negative
political choices
Inevitable/inexorable 1—globalization as a 2—globalization as 3—globalization as
process non-negotiable inevitable but a threat of
(non-negotiable) external economic process whose homogenization
constraint— content is amenable (no appeal to
globalization to political influence such a discourse)
circumscribes the (no appeal to such a
parameters of political discourse)
and economic choice
(New Labour’s
domestic political
economy)
Contingent process 4—globalization as a 5—globalization as a 6—globalization as
or tendency to political project which political project a political
which counter- should be defended— which must be project which
tendencies might globalization as made defensible—a must be resisted
be mobilized liberalization is socialized (no appeal to
potentially beneficial globalization is, and such a discourse)
for all (New Labour’s must be made,
foreign economic beneficial for all
policy) (New Labour’s
development policy)
Source: Adapted from Smith and Hay (2008).
pattern in the appeal to globalization exhibited here—with different contexts and
policy domains yielding predictably different appeals to the discourse of globaliza-
tion. Moreover such differences endure changes in office holders (Smith and Hay
2008). This suggests perhaps a rather greater degree of strategic deliberation. This is
reinforced by the way in which the appeal to globalization has served to depoliticize
domestic reform agendas, thereby disarming opposition, whilst politicizing issues
at a transnational level where arguably the responsibilities and capacity of domes-
tic political actors to deliver is rather less. The appeal to globalization, it seems,
has served to depoliticize contentious issues domestically whilst drawing attention
and rendering more contentious issues beyond the immediate purview of domestic
authorities. The success of such a strategy is certainly suggested by Eurobarometer
(2003) public opinion survey data. This shows that the British public has one of the
lowest levels of recognition of the term ‘globalization’ (second only to Luxembourg,
with only 62 per cent of respondents claiming to have heard of the term). But it also
shows that it is one of the most resigned to globalization and one of the most positive
in attributing to it benign economic consequences (here second only to Ireland,
globalization 859
with 64 per cent of respondents seeing globalization as having positive economic
effects).
46.1.1 Elite Political Understandings and Attitudes Towards
Globalization
There is, of course, only so much that can be said about elite political understandings
of globalization by focusing solely upon public discourse—on what Vivien Schmidt
terms the ‘interactive’ or ‘communicative’ dimension of discourse. Here it is particu-
larly instructive to examine the (albeit limited) attitudinal survey data on elite under-
standings of globalization—to reveal, in Schmidt’s terms, the genuinely ‘ideational’
dimension of discourse (Schmidt 2001: 249–50).
Summary findings from the only study conducted to date on elite political attitudes
towards globalization are shown in Table 46.2. The study took the form of a postal
attitudinal survey of parliamentarians and senior civil servants. This sought to solicit
responses to a series of closed questions with identical answer formats (‘strongly
agree’, ‘agree’, ‘neither’, ‘disagree’, or ‘strongly disagree’). 1 Table 46.2 shows net support
for each of a series of statements about globalization. Again, limits of space prevent a
detailed analysis, but a number of points might nonetheless be made:
r These responses seem, in general, to indicate the prevalence amongst senior civil
servants and MPs of all major parties of what, in Table 46.1, was referred to as a
type 1 understanding in which globalization is seen as principally economic, non-
negotiable, a significant constraint on policy-making autonomy, and benign (see
questions 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12).
r Such a seeming consensus, however, cannot hide a series of significant—and in
some cases quite stark—differences in understandings of globalization between
respondents (see questions 4, 6, 10).
r These seem to relate in particular to confidence in the capacity of political
institutions to manage globalization effectively, sensitivity to the potential dis-
tributional asymmetries arising from globalization, and the consequences of
globalization for social policy choices in particular.
r Moreover, these differences seem to divide respondents along pre-existing ide-
ological lines, with Liberal Democrat and Labour MPs more likely to retain
confidence in the capacity of political and regulatory processes to deliver solu-
tions to problems of global governance, more likely to associate globalization
with distributional asymmetries, and less likely to see welfare retrenchment as an
imperative summoned by globalization.
r As this suggests, and perhaps rather ironically, it is the attitudes and under-
standing of Conservative MPs and, perhaps less remarkably, those of senior civil
servants that chime most closely with the public discourse of globalization in
Britain.
1
For further details, see Hay and Smith (2007); Smith and Hay (2008).
860
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Table 46.2 British policy-makers’ understandings of, and attitudes towards, globalization
Net agreement (number of respondents)
Civil servants Conservative MPs Labour MPs Lib Dem MPs
1. ‘Globalization [is] . . . the integration of world markets’ +98.2 (165) +100 (62) +100 (105) +100 (24)
2. ‘For Britain, the benefits of globalization outweigh the costs’ +75.9 (166) +79.0 (62) +57.6 (106) +72.0 (25)
3. ‘Globalization increases economic prosperity in Britain’ +86.7 (166) +83.9 (62) +69.8 (106) +80.0 (25)
4. ‘Globalization benefits the poor in Britain’ −1.2 (163) +47.4 (59) −17.5 (103) −12.4 (24)
5. ‘Developed countries have a responsibility to ensure that the +89.2 (166) +63.2 (60) +93.3 (105) +100 (25)
benefits of globalization are more equally distributed’
6. ‘Globalization can be regulated effectively’ −8.0 (164) −21.0 (61) +11.0 (105) +44.0 (24)
7. ‘The anti-globalization movement seeks to reverse the +65.5 (164) +65 (61) +56.3 (103) +65.3 (24)
irreversible’
8. ‘Globalization undermines the autonomy of British +33.6 (164) +16.1 (62) +8.6 (105) +50.1 (24)
policy-makers’
9. ‘Globalization makes economic competitiveness a precondition +57.2 (164) +74.2 (62) +55.6 (106) −8.0 (25)
for all other policy goals’
10. ‘Globalization increases the need for reduced social spending’ −49.3 (164) +24.6 (61) −69.0 (103) −78.3 (23)
11. ‘Globalization promotes convergence in labour-market policies’ +70.6 (164) +75.0 (62) +66.6 (105) +75.0 (23)
12. ‘Globalization increases the need for public investment in skills’ +27.0 (165) +73.7 (61) +91.2 (102) +95.5 (22)
Notes: Net agreement = % agreeing or strongly agreeing minus those disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with the statement.
Number of respondents in parentheses.
globalization 861
These findings are very interesting, and certainly suggest the value of further and
more detailed attitudinal-based research on globalization amongst political elites.
They also serve to indicate that, understood as it tends to be in the British context as
a source of market-conforming imperatives, globalization has a more natural affinity
with the traditional ideological and policy preferences of Conservative MPs than it
does with those of Labour or Liberal Democrat MPs. The Conservatives may well be
the ‘natural party’ of globalization thus understood.
46.2 Globalization and British
Political Analysis
.............................................................................................................................................
As I have sought to show, the concept of globalization is a relatively recent addition to
British political discourse. Yet we would be wrong to assume that the concept has
had a long prior history in the analysis of British politics. It is a relatively recent
addition to the lexicon of British political analysis too. Indeed, it is really only with the
growing prevalence of the term in British political discourse that analysts of British
politics have turned to the question of globalization in any sustained fashion. Yet if
the concept scarcely appeared in the literature on British politics until the mid-1990s,
it has since become the single most significant contextualizing factor in the analysis
of domestic political dynamics. Policy-making and policy-makers must, it is widely
assumed, answer not just to the concerns of domestic constituents and interests but
to the imperatives of globalization. Indeed, as we shall see, in much of the literature
the two are increasingly counterposed—internalizing the imperatives of globalization
may come at some price in terms of the capacity to respond to the preferences of
domestic constituencies. A significant aim of this chapter is to assess the claim and
the tension between democratic and economic imperatives to which it points with
particular reference to the British case.
But in order to do so, we need first to establish what globalization is. And herein
lies an initial problem. For the increasing prevalence of the term has certainly not led
to greater clarity as to what the concept of globalization entails. Indeed, if anything, it
has led to a proliferation of the senses in which the term is used. This is problematic
in itself. But such problems are merely compounded by the fact that authors often
switch interchangeably between different senses of the term and, even where they
invoke the term consistently, rarely consign their understanding of globalization to
the page.
In general, understandings of the term can be arrayed along a continuum from the
least demanding to the most exacting. Unremarkably, perhaps, those with the least
exacting of definitional standards tend to find more evidence of globalization, whilst
those with rather more demanding definitional standards tend to be more sceptical
862 colin hay
as to claims, say, for the globalization of the British economy. As this suggests, it is not
just the evidence (and the various interpretations to which it gives rise), but crucially
also questions of semantics that divide protagonists in debates over the more or less
global character of Britain’s economic, political, and cultural interdependence. Even
where they agree on what is going on, they may describe that common understanding
in terms which are, seemingly, diametrically opposed (compare, for instance, Hirst
and Thompson 1999; 2000; and Perraton et al. 1997; or O’Rourke and Williamson
1999; 2002; and Frank and Gills 1993).
For many, then, globalization is merely a synonym for openness—the greater the
volume of trade, foreign direct investment, and financial flows and the higher the
level of migration between economies the more credible the claim that we have
experienced a process of globalization. Yet, for sceptics, this is not enough. For
them, openness is not, in and of itself, an indication of globalization; rather, it is a
(potential) description of the geographical character that such openness may (or may
not) exhibit. In order to be seen as globalized, economies must not only be open but
the economic flows to which they give rise must genuinely (or, at least, increasingly)
span the globe. 2
The preceding paragraphs might be seen to imply that, in the end, how we define
globalization is a purely semantic choice. And to some extent that is right. However,
the point is that it is not an innocent choice and one with significant analytical conse-
quences. Two observations might here be made. First, if we allow any and all evidence
of cross-border flows, regardless of their source or destination, to count as evidence
of globalization we may lose our analytical purchase on the geographical character
and composition of such flows. In particular, we are rather less likely to identify
trends in the always uneven patterns of economic interdependence which characterize
an economy if we treat any regionalization or ‘colonialization’ of economic flows as
evidence of globalization. 3 The more interested we are in the changing geographical
character of Britain’s economic interdependence and the specific configurations of
opportunities and constraints for domestic policy-makers and businesses with which
it may be associated, the less we can afford to treat globalization and openness as
synonymous. Second, it is very important that we are consistent in our use of the term
globalization—the more so, in fact, the more inexacting the definitional standard we
deploy. The point is a simple one. If any evidence of cross-border economic activity
is taken as evidence of globalization, then to point to the globalization of an economy
is to say precious little in terms of domestic policy-making autonomy, for instance.
2
This is, of course, to look at globalization simply in terms of flows. If we look at globalization, in
contrast, in terms of processes of standard setting (as some now do), then globalization may well occur
without a proliferation of cross- (or trans-)border flows. For, the extent to which global standards are set
(and implemented) is the extent to which no flows are required to deliver common outputs. I am
indebted to Grahame Thompson for pointing this out to me.
3
By regionalization and colonialization in this context I refer simply to the tendency for membership
of a regional bloc (whether formally constituted or not) or a colonial bloc (whether extant or historic) to
become ever greater predictors of volumes of cross-border flows. The identification of any such tendency
or tendencies implies an increasingly uneven geography of economic, political, or cultural
interdependence.
globalization 863
Yet if, by globalization, we mean a process by which regional and colonial patterns
of integration are (or are in the process of being) dissolved to be replaced by a single
world market—with, perhaps, convergence in the prices for which commodities are
traded and in interest rate differentials—then the consequences of globalization are
of an altogether different order. What we cannot afford to do—as arguably many
have done—is to conflate the two. In other words, we must be extremely careful not
to take evidence of growing openness as an indication of globalization and then to
infer from this identification of globalization the need to adapt domestic economic
management to the imperatives we might associate with a perfectly integrated world
economy. It is my argument in this chapter that much of the academic analysis of the
British political economy and, indeed, much of the public discourse of globalization
in Britain has been predicated on precisely such a conflation.
In order to show this, it is important to adopt an empirical approach to the
question of Britain’s economic interdependence. And it is equally important to be
explicit about how that evidence is to be interpreted. That, in turn, entails a clear
and consistent definition of globalization. In what follows, then, as in earlier work
(Hay 2006; 2007), I define globalization in contrast to terms like regionalization and
colonialization (see also Held et al. 1999: 16). If an economy becomes more open
by trading an ever-growing share of its GDP, but with only one or two countries,
whilst its trade volume with other countries falls then this is not globalization. To
count as evidence of globalization, the process under consideration must be gen-
uinely global-izing. As deployed here, then, the term globalization is taken to refer
to processes which reinforce the tendency for economic and political relations to
become more global in character over time. The advantages of such a conception
of globalization are that it is precise and that it is easily operationalized empirically. It
also serves to focus our analytical attentions on the changing geographical character
of the process of economic interdependence. It is to the evidence for globalization,
thus understood, and to the geographical character of Britain’s economic interdepen-
dence that we now turn directly.
46.3 Britain’s Economic
Interdependence: Globalization
or Regionalization?
.............................................................................................................................................
It is conventional to date globalization from the 1950s or 1960s and to cite, as evidence
of globalization, an exponential increase in trade volumes (imports plus exports
expressed as shares of GDP) since that time. And if one plots such raw data most
leading economies do show an impressive growth in openness. Yet the British case is
something of an exception here, as Figure 46.1 suggests.
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45
40
35
30
25
20
15
10
5
0
1913 1950 1973 1994 2000 2003 2005
% of GDP 44.7 36 39.3 42.6 43.9 38.7 40.8
Fig. 46.1 Ratio of merchandise trade to GDP at current prices 1913–2005
Sources: Calculated from Maddison (1987, table A-23); Hirst and Thompson (1999: 27, table 2.3); HM Treasury Pocket
Book Data (June 2007 edition).
The openness of the British economy certainly increased between 1950 and 2000,
but judged even by contemporary standards Britain was already a very open economy
in 1950. Moreover, the ratio of merchandise trade to GDP was in fact lower in 2003
than at any point since 1950. It has since risen, but has yet to return to the level
it reached in 2000, far less to its historic peak in 1913. This is a story of cyclical
fluctuation around what, in comparative terms, is a high and relatively stable mean
(of approximately 40 per cent of GDP); it is certainly not a story of an epochal shift
or of inexorable pressures leading to unparalleled degrees of economic integration.
That having been said, Britain is undoubtedly an open and international trading
economy. Indeed, when compared to its G7 counterparts, Britain is, in Paul Hirst
and Grahame Thompson’s memorable terms, ‘an over-internationalised economy in
an under-globalised world’ (2000).
Yet, whilst data like these might lead us to be suspicious of claims of an epochal
shift to an era of globalization, they cannot tell us whether the British economy
has experienced a process of globalization or not. For that, we need to consider
the geographical composition of economic flows. Figure 46.2 is here particularly
revealing. It shows the destination of British exports, plotting the ratio of exports
bound to the EU to those destined for all other markets.
Since the early 1960s Britain has seen a very significant transformation in its trading
relations, with a tripling in the share of its exports to the EU. In 1960, 23 per cent of
British exports went to the EU; by 1980 that has risen to 50 per cent; today it stands
in excess of 60 per cent. If Britain has indeed experienced an epochal shift since the
1960s in terms of its economic interdependence, it is surely this—a Europeanization
globalization 865
1.8
1.6
1.4
1.2
1
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005
Fig. 46.2 Ratio of British exports to the EU to those to the rest of the world
Source: Calculated from European Commission (1996), European Economy; UK Trade Information Dataset
(www.ukintrastat.com).
(strictly speaking an EU-ization) of its trading relations, not a globalization (for
a similar conclusion using rather different source data, see Overman and Winters
2004). This impression is only reinforced if we look in more detail, as in Figures
46.3a, 46.3b, 46.4a, and 46.4b, at the composition in recent years of British imports
and exports in goods and services.
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
EU Japan NAFTA Rest
Fig. 46.3a Origin of British imports (goods), 1998–2006
Source: Office of National Statistics’ Trade in Goods Data (various years).
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100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006
EU Japan NAFTA Rest
Fig. 46.3b Destination of British exports (goods), 1998–2006
Source: Office of National Statistics’ Trade in Goods Data (various years).
A number of interesting points emerge from these data:
r Whether we are talking about trade in goods or trade in services, the EU is by
some considerable distance Britain’s largest export market and its largest supplier
of imports.
r In goods, Britain is significantly more dependent on the EU as an export market
than as a supplier of imports.
r Yet in service markets the converse applies—Britain is more dependent on the
EU as a provider than as a consumer of services.
r Taken together, the EU, North America, and Japan alone account for around 70
to 75 per cent of Britain’s trade in goods, 70 to 75 per cent of its imported services,
and 60 to 65 per cent of its exports in services.
r Since the early to mid-1990s, the geographical composition of British exports and
imports has been remarkably stable—exhibiting only a mild tendency to further
regionalization;
Overall, then, this is not a story of globalization. Britain is, in comparative terms,
a very open trading economy. Yet that openness is highly—and, if anything,
increasingly—uneven.
This is all very well, but we might very plausibly expect trade to be more strongly
regionalized than, say, foreign direct investment. The point is that FDI can provide
a substitute for trade over long distances. Rather than import cars directly from
South-East Asia why not build an assembly plant in the EU, exporting cars to Britain
globalization 867
100%
90%
80%
70%
60%
50%
40%
30%
20%
10%
0%
1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004
EU NAFTA Japan Rest of World
Fig. 46.4a Origin of British imports (services), 1992–2005
Source: Office of National Statistics (2001, 2006).
from that regionally located plant? Transportation costs are reduced, any tariff and
non-tariff barriers to entry to the EU market are overcome—and, in the process,
interregional foreign direct investment (and the intra-regional trade to which it is
likely to give rise) replaces interregional trade. In other words, we are likely to paint
a somewhat skewed picture of Britain’s economic interdependence if we concentrate
solely on trade. So what do the FDI data show? In fact, the geographical distribution
of such flows is remarkably similar to that for trade in goods and services, as Figures
46.5a–d demonstrate.
As one might expect, since these figures show annual levels of new investment,
they fluctuate far more from year to year than those for trade volumes—in terms
of both their volumes and their geographical composition. Yet they show a strong
Europeanization of inbound FDI since the mid-1990s and very high proportion of
both inbound and outbound FDI coming from and going to the EU, North America,
and East Asia.
In terms of trade and foreign direct investment, then, Britain is undoubtedly an
open economy. Yet the geographical character of that openness is both highly uneven
and, if anything, increasingly so. Since the 1960s a somewhat more global geographi-
cal distribution of imports, exports, and FDI, associated with Britain’s colonial past,
868 colin hay
100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004
EU NAFTA Japan Rest of World
Fig. 46.4b Destination of British exports (services), 1992–2005
Source: Office of National Statistics (2001; 2006).
100%
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
EU(25) NAFTA East Asia Rest
Fig. 46.5a Origin of British inbound FDI, 1996–2005 (% of total)
Source: Office of National Statistics, Business Monitor.
globalization 869
95%
75%
55%
35%
15%
-5%
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
EU(25) NAFTA East Asia Rest
Fig. 46.5b Destination of British outbound FDI, 1996–2005 (% of total)
Source: Office of National Statistics, Business Monitor.
120,000
100,000
80,000
60,000
40,000
20,000
0
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Total EU(25)
Fig. 46.5c British inbound FDI, 1996–2005 (£M)
Source: Office of National Statistics, Business Monitor.
has given way to a far more regionally concentrated economic interdependence. It is
this dual process of decolonization and regionalization of trade and FDI, rather than
any process of globalization, that represents the most significant transformation of
the British economy in recent decades.
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180,000
160,000
140,000
120,000
100,000
80,000
60,000
40,000
20,000
0
1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
Total EU(25)
Fig. 46.5d British outbound FDI, 1996–2005 (£M)
Source: Office of National Statistics, Business Monitor.
But what about finance? Whatever one might say about the regionalization of
British trade and FDI in recent years, the global role of the City of London surely
cannot be denied? Up to a point that is certainly true. Yet even here there is need for
some caution. It is important here to differentiate between three types of market, each
very significant for the British economy—equity markets (the stock market), capital,
markets, and foreign exchange markets. Of these, it is capital markets and foreign
exchange markets that are most easily reconciled with a narrative of globalization.
Take foreign exchange markets for instance. As Figure 46.6 shows, whilst the trading
of sterling on foreign exchange (FOREX) markets accounts for a smaller proportion
of overall turnover on such markets today than it did throughout the 1990s, the
proportion of world FOREX trading taking place in the City of London has remained
relatively constant and has followed the global trend. As the volume of world financial
market turnover has increased, so too has turnover in the Square Mile. Data like these
would seem consistent with the notion of the British economy as embedded within
an ever more tightly integrated world economy.
Yet the evidence for the stock market is very different. The first thing to note here
is that stock market capitalization (123 per cent of GDP in 2004 and as high as 198 per
cent of GDP in 1999) is far greater than for any other leading economy. Yet, whilst
the share of total equity turnover accounted for by shares in non-UK companies has
risen significantly in recent years (see Figure 46.7), foreign holdings of equity remain
low when compared to other leading exchanges (Hirst and Thompson 2000: 346).
Yet there is one respect in which UK market actors are rather more internation-
alized than their G7 counterparts. The equity and bond portfolios of Britain’s insti-
tutional investors—pension funds, for instance—are typically far more diverse than
those of their US or Euro-Area counterparts. This is shown very clearly in Table 46.3.
But this is a story of internationalization not globalization. As for the trade and
FDI data already considered, even where there has been a clear internationalization
globalization 871
2000
1500
1000
500
0
1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004
Global FOREX turnover London FOREX turnover
Sterling FOREX turnover
Fig. 46.6 Daily average foreign-exchange turnover, 1988–2004 (billions of
$US)
Source: Calculated from BIS (2004); turnover expressed at April 2004 exchange rates.
3000 70%
2500 60%
50%
2000
40%
1500
30%
1000
20%
500 10%
0 0%
1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2004
UK holdings Foreign holdings Foreign as % of total
Fig. 46.7 Equity turnover on the London Stock Exchange—UK and
foreign holdings, 1987–2004
Source: London Stock Exchange Market Information and Analysis (various years).
of activity (through, for instance, the growth of foreign equity holdings or the diver-
sification of the bond and equity portfolios of institutional investors), this is largely a
result of increased economic interdependence with the EU and North America—it is
hardly evidence of the emergence of a genuinely global market.
872 colin hay
Table 46.3 Equity and bond portfolio allocation, 2003
Portfolio Equity portfolios—% invested in Bond portfolios—% invested in
UK USA Euro-Area Rest of World UK USA Euro-Area Rest of World
UK 69.7 8.9 8.1 13.3 59.7 11.0 18.8 10.5
US 2.8 86.2 3.3 7.7 1.2 94.8 1.3 2.7
Euro-Area 3.3 6.6 83.5 6.6 2.1 3.3 88.4 6.2
Source: IMF Coordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (2005).
The final piece in the jigsaw of British economic interdependence, often overlooked
in the existing literature, is the labour market. Of course, whilst many speak of a
single work market for goods, services, FDI, and finance, few if any commentators
suggest that the world economy is characterized by the emergence of a single market
for labour. Labour is a far less mobile factor of production than any other. Yet, since
1997 and, in particular, the passing of the Nationality, Immigration, and Asylum Act
in 2002, Britain has one of the most open labour markets of the advanced liberal
democracies (Hatton 2005). Moreover, despite much populist public rhetoric to the
contrary, all the evidence suggests that immigrants into the UK, unlike their counter-
parts in the USA, tend to have very similar levels of skill and educational attainment to
the resident population. As Dustmann, Fabbri, and Preston note, ‘there is no evidence
that past or more recent immigration led to an increase of the ratio of unskilled to
semiskilled or skilled workers’ (2005: 331).
The geographical distribution of migration to and from Britain is very interesting.
A number of points might be made about the data shown in Figures 46.8a and 46.8b.
First, since the 1970s, Britain has gone from being an economy of net emigration
40.0
35.0
30.0
25.0
20.0
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004
EU Aus, NZ, Can Rest C'wealth USA Other
Fig. 46.8a British in-migration, 1971–2004 (% of total)
Source: Office of National Statistics, Population Trends (2007).
globalization 873
45.0
40.0
35.0
30.0
25.0
20.0
15.0
10.0
5.0
0.0
1971 1976 1981 1986 1991 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004
EU Aus, NZ, Can Rest C'wealth USA Other
Fig. 46.8b British out-migration, 1971–2004 (% of total)
Source: Office of National Statistics, Population Trends (2007).
to one of net immigration (of around 100,000 per annum). During this time there
has been a significant rise in the EU as a destination for British emigrants. The EU
accounts for close to 35 per cent of all out-migrants from Britain today, three times the
proportion in 1970. During this time, total levels of emigration to the Commonwealth
have fallen, though those to Australia, New Zealand, and Canada have risen somewhat
in recent years. Taken together, emigration to the EU, the Commonwealth, and the
USA account for close to 80 per cent of all out-migration from Britain. This compares
to some 88 per cent in 1971. Nonetheless, despite some diversification in migration
destinations, the key change in the geographical distribution of migration from
Britain is a strong Europeanization. Moreover, historic ties to the Commonwealth
have proved more enduring in patterns of out-migration than they have in trade and
FDI.
The in-migration data by no means directly mirror these trends. Levels of in-
migration from the EU have certainly increased since the 1970s, but they have exhib-
ited a more cyclical pattern, linked to successive waves of EU enlargement (Geddes
2003). 4 In Figure 46.8a the EU is the second-most significant source of in-migration,
behind the developing Commonwealth economies. Interestingly, these still account
for over 30 per cent of all immigration to Britain—a proportion that is rising steeply
at present, as immigration from other developing economies is falling. Immigration
from the developed Commonwealth economies and the USA has fallen consistently
since the 1970s. Taken together immigration from the Commonwealth, the EU, and
the USA represents close to three-quarters of all immigration to Britain. This com-
pares to a figure of 84 per cent in 1971. Once again, though, there has been a mild
diversification of patterns of in-migration, but no pronounced globalization.
4
Here it is important to note that the data in Figure 46.8a run only to 2004. Since then it is clear that
there has been quite a steep rise in both the level and proportion of UK in-migrants from EU member
states, linked to the most recent phase of EU enlargement.
874 colin hay
46.4 The Myth of the Anglo-Saxon
Model of Adaptation to Globalization
.............................................................................................................................................
The British economy has been widely touted, not least by the government itself,
as a model of—and for—European competitiveness in an era of globalization. Its
unquestionably impressive record (until 2008 at least) of steady and uninterrupted
growth, stable and low unemployment, and, certainly in comparative historical terms,
low inflation is typically attributed to its lean and flexible labour markets, its fiscal
and monetary discipline, and, in European terms, its light-touch regulatory envi-
ronment. It is, in short, widely seen as a model of adaptation to the imperatives of
globalization—and one which other more reform-averse European economies can
benefit from emulating. Arguably precisely such an understanding of Britain’s growth
trajectory since the early 1990s underpins much of the Lisbon strategy for EU labour-
market and welfare reform.
Yet the evidence presented in this chapter suggests otherwise. There are two ele-
ments to this. The first, developed in some detail in the preceding section, challenges
this now well-established orthodoxy on the grounds that the British economy cannot
be seen as a model of competitive adaptation to the pressures and imperatives of
globalization since the British economy has not experienced a process of globalization
in recent decades. Britain is, undoubtedly, an open economy. But, as we have seen,
there is nothing terribly novel or recent about that. Indeed, as Paul Hirst and Grahame
Thompson have documented exhaustively, Britain has since the 1870s (if not before)
been the most internationalized of the world’s leading economies. And, as they have
also shown, its experience since then is one of quantitative continuity, even if it is one
of qualitative change (1999; 2000). Britain’s early internationalization was a product
of its imperial role and is still reflected today in patterns of trade, investment, and
migration which are remarkably ‘colonial’. Yet, since the 1960s in particular, there
has been a pronounced decolonialization of Britain’s economic interdependence,
paralleled by a yet more pronounced regionalization. As I have sought to show, it
is Europeanization—whether it be in trade in goods, trade in services, investment,
finance, or the labour market—that is the key driver of Britain’s changing patterns of
economic interdependence in recent decades, not globalization. If the British economy
can today be judged a competitive success, it is to competitiveness in European
markets not in global markets that we should increasingly be looking for the sources
of that success.
But this, too, would be to mischaracterize the British economy. This brings me
to the second element of my critique of the familiar idea of Britain as a model of
adaptation to globalization. This is concerned less with globalization per se than it is
with the characterization of the British economy as a model of competitiveness. The
point is a relatively simple one. That the British economy has performed well in recent
years in terms of the headline indices of growth, unemployment, and inflation does
not mean that it has done so because it has proved increasingly competitive in global
globalization 875
40,000
20,000
0
1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
-20,000
-40,000
-60,000
-80,000
Total goods Total services Total goods and services
Fig. 46.9 Britain’s balance of trade in goods and services, 1992–2005 (£M,
constant prices)
Source: Calculated from Office of National Statistics (2001; 2006).
(or even European) terms, far less that the model of labour-market flexibilization that
it has embraced is the source of that competitive advantage. Here, as elsewhere, the
evidence is illuminating.
Consider, first, Britain’s balance of trade statistics, as shown in Figure 46.9.
Though far less the focus of attention today than they were in the 1970s, these make
exceptionally depressing reading and are very difficult to reconcile with the image of a
modern, dynamic, lean and mean competitive economy which might serve as a model
to be emulated (see also O’Mahoney and de Boer 2002). Arguably more alarming still
are the data contained in Figure 46.10. These show Britain’s balance of trade position
in trade and services with the EU. Given the pronounced Europeanization of Britain’s
economic interdependence in recent years, it is particularly worrying that the British
economy has a growing trade deficit with the EU in both goods and services. Indeed,
this suggests that any competitive advantage that Britain may have enjoyed in service
markets with the EU has now been significantly eroded.
A no less depressing picture is painted if we turn from trade to foreign direct
investment. As is more widely noted, though Britain attracts a substantial amount
of European inward-bound FDI, it has long been a net exporter of FDI. Thus,
as Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson again note, ‘despite all the official rhetoric
about the UK being the best home for FDI in Europe, because of its basic compet-
itive advantages, in fact there has been a consistent hollowing out of UK domestic
investment as better opportunities for competitive success seem to have presented
themselves abroad’ (2000: 342–3). Moreover, with approximately one-quarter of all
British manufacturing employment (and a rather higher proportion of wages and
876 colin hay
5,000
0
-5,000 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005
-10,000
-15,000
-20,000
-25,000
-30,000
-35,000
-40,000
EU goods EU services EU goods and services
Fig. 46.10 Britain’s balance of trade in goods and services with the EU,
1992–2005 (£M, constant prices)
Source: Calculated from Office of National Statistics (2001;2006).
output) arising from foreign investment, the British economy is extremely vulnerable
to external shocks and the vagaries of international investors. Somewhat ironically,
this is merely compounded by the highly flexible character of the British labour
market when contrasted to that of other European economies. For, as and when
excess capacity emerges in the European economy (regardless of levels of demand in
Britain), it is far simpler to make cutbacks in Britain. Labour-market flexibilization
is, as this suggests, a powerfully pro-cyclical policy instrument; whilst it may well
be beneficial when demand is high, it predisposes an open economy like Britain’s to
labour shedding when demand falls (Hay 2004).
If Britain is rather less the model of export-led competitiveness in an era of glob-
alization than is often depicted, then to what can we attribute its indisputably good
aggregate economic performance since the mid-1990s? And, more to the point, how
stable is this likely to prove? Again, the evidence is not particularly encouraging.
Since 1992 Britain’s good headline economic performance has been driven to a
significant extent by consumer demand (Watson 2003). This, in turn, has been funded
out of unprecedented levels of personal debt and the release of equity arising from
sustained house-price inflation. Indeed, house prices have been rising at, on average,
12 per cent per annum since 1997 (Council of Mortgage Lenders 2005). At present the
average home increases in value by well over £20,000 per annum. This compares to
average wages of around £30,000 per annum. Given these figures it is not difficult to
see how dependent Britain’s long-standing debt-financed consumer boom has become
on sustained house price inflation—and the release of equity to fuel consumption
that this has allowed. But there are limits to house price inflation and hence to the
sustainability of this new, if unannounced and presumably inadvertent, growth model.
globalization 877
Indeed, at the time of writing, inflation is now once again a concern, interest rates are
rising, and house prices are somewhat less predictable than they were. What is more,
the anxiety engendered by this sense of fragility is, arguably, now beginning to interfere
with the Bank of England’s ability to control inflation and with consumer confidence.
The Bank’s Monetary Policy Committee seems today increasingly nervous to use
interest rate hikes to bring down inflation for the fear of puncturing an unstable house-
price bubble and, with it, the consumer boom it has sustained almost uninterrupted
since 1992.
46.5 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
If we piece together the jigsaw that I have sought to assemble in the preceding sections,
a very different picture of the British economy emerges to that with which we are
familiar. Britain is, most definitely, a dynamic and open economy whose headline
economic performance in recent years has been both impressive and sustained. But
it is not a model of adaptation to globalization. For, as I have sought to show, its
economy has simply not experienced a process of globalization by any but the least
exacting of definitional standards. Moreover, and more worryingly perhaps, its good
economic performance in recent years owes far less to competitive success in the
markets (largely European and North American) in which it is most exposed than
is invariably assumed. The determinants of Britain’s growth trajectory are rather
more peculiarly domestic and rather more fragile than this would imply—and they
have tended to mask a continuing deterioration in its trade balance with the rest
of the world. British growth is not the product of competitiveness but has been
achieved largely despite a lack of competitiveness. That growth has been fuelled by an
increasingly unsustainable consumer boom predicated on an ever more precarious
asset-price bubble. Despite the rhetoric, Britain is, in short, no model of adaptation
to globalization.
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c h a p t e r 47
.................................................................................................................
MARK E TIZAT I O N
.................................................................................................................
colin crouch
Marketization implies offering a good or service for sale, and therefore allocating
a price to it that can in principle be compared with the prices of all other goods and
services. The quantity and quality of it that is traded will depend on the intersection
between the price at which the producer wants to offer it for sale and the price that
consumers are willing to pay for it. In the context of contemporary British politics,
marketization refers specifically to the process of taking goods and services that had
previously been provided under bureaucratic, political, or professional means of
resource allocation and transferring them to market arrangements.
The concept does not necessarily imply private ownership of the means of pro-
duction; it is possible for services to remain in public ownership, and even to remain
delivered by public agencies, but for consumers to obtain them through purchase.
The quality and quantity of their provision can then be governed by consideration of
the prices that consumers are prepared to pay. Alternatively, marketization can be a
process carried on within an organization, whether in the public or the private sector;
the markets that develop in such cases are known as ‘internal’ markets (Le Grand,
Mays, and Mulligan 1998; OECD 1995; Osterman 1984; Rugman 1981). Organizations
of all kinds have a choice as to how they allocate resources among their different
departments. There may be a system of decisions by the organization’s leadership,
based on certain principles and desired outcomes, often preceded by a process of
bargaining with the departments; or the leadership may permit market forces to
determine how these resources flow. Often there is a combination of the two, with
market forces operating only after the leadership has fixed certain parameters, such
as prices. (For a more detailed discussion of these different approaches to intra-
organizational resource allocation, see Williamson 1975). Frequently the marketiza-
tion that has taken place in British public services refers to these internal markets.
880 colin crouch
Marketization must therefore be distinguished from privatization, which refers to
selling or otherwise handing to private owners the assets of a formerly public service.
This, in turn, might or might not imply marketization; a public service can be sold
to a private monopoly, with ultimate consumers having little or no ability to affect
the provision through their market behaviour. (This is the case with the privatization
of the water industry in the UK.) Discussion of marketization needs to pay careful
attention to these differences.
The idea that many public services would be improved by being marketized—and
possibly also privatized—entered British politics through the wave of changes that
accompanied the shift from a Keynesian to a neoliberal political economy in the mid-
1970s. The general circumstances and character of that change are described elsewhere
in this Handbook. Central to the neoliberal account was a strong criticism of the role
of public services. The following can be seen as the main limbs of the critique, and
of the associated new policies then advocated. Table 47.1 summarizes the perceived
failures, the preferred marketization remedies, and problems occurring with those.
This discussion has by no means been confined to the United Kingdom. However,
since our focus here is on British politics, exclusively British examples will be used;
also, the general wave of marketization around the world was in many ways pioneered
in this country.
47.1 Tackling Perceived
Unresponsiveness to Users
.............................................................................................................................................
Because they respond primarily to a governmental and political agenda, public ser-
vices are often considered to become unresponsive to users’ actual preferences. They
are said to be dominated by producer interests, as government policy-making is made
by the officials and professionals who deliver the services; these provide what they like
providing and are equipped to provide, not necessarily what consumers want. This is
also a remote, centralized process—at least within the British political context where
local government is weak and most power lies with the central ministries.
Arguments of these kinds flourished in the 1970s. Expansions of public services
under the Labour government 1974–9 seemed to many to have been associated with
increasing union militancy among public-sector workers, including some spectacular
strikes. Public employees tend to be more strongly unionized than private ones,
because public employers in a democracy cannot refuse the right of workers to
organize themselves. Also, public provision is usually monopoly provision, imparting
particular power to producers. This became particularly salient during that decade,
when high inflation was leading different groups in society to reach for whatever
means they could of protecting themselves.
marketization 881
Table 47.1 Marketization strategies in response to public service failures, and
newly emerging problems
Public service failure Marketization response Limits to marketization
47.1. Unresponsive to 47.1.1. Privatization, with Scope for extensive
consumers; dominated by regulation where marketization often limited
producer interests; competition remains by technical, etc. features,
centralized and remote imperfect with little reduction in need
for public action via
regulation
47.1.2. Market-making within Market failure problems of
public service, with direct information inadequacy,
consumer choice guided by resolved by top-down
performance data control of performance data
47.1.3. Private providers Limited use of price
compete with public ones, mechanism
but within publicly funded
system
47.2. Unwanted services; 47.2.1. Internal markets Limited use of price
inadequate cost mechanism
effectiveness; high taxes 47.2.2. Private subcontracting Central authorities control
pricing
Small numbers of contractors;
loss of responsibility
through contract chain;
long contracts inhibit use of
markets; development of
‘insider’ firms
47.3. Public service out of 47.3.1. Encouragement of Development of insider firms,
touch with business intensive interaction with, return to market failure of
and learning from, private inadequate barriers
sector between polity and
economy
47.3.2. Adoption of business Limits to and
criteria in government inappropriateness of pure
practice markets in public service
47.3.3. Public–private Doubts over financial
financing partnerships advantages to public sector
More generally, the neoliberal critique considered that virtually all economic activ-
ity would be more effectively conducted within profit-maximizing firms with clear
incentives to satisfy their customers rather than provide quiet lives for producers, as
neoliberals believed to be the case in public service organizations.
To these problems, the public service reform strategy offered a number of
responses.
882 colin crouch
47.1.1 Privatization with or without Marketization
This involves selling the service to a number of competing private owners, who will
then operate in the market, in principle bringing consumer sovereignty to the service
in question. Privatization of the provision of manufactured goods and public utilities
has today become an international orthodoxy, but it was originally highly contro-
versial. Particularly after the 1930s, when the general protectionist wave provoked by
the slump led to a major growth of monopolies which abused their position, parties
from all parts of the political spectrum had come to believe that certain goods and
services, particularly those that seemed to be ‘natural’ or inevitable monopolies or
somehow ‘essential’ public services, should be in public rather than private hands. US
economic theory had started to provide a new rationale for private monopoly under
certain circumstances in the 1970s (Bork 1978; Posner 2001). But it was in the UK that
the first major experiments in privatization were conducted. The reason for British
primacy may be found partly in the arguments about British union militancy noted
above. Also relevant was the fact that, during the 1980s, the British Labour Party,
which was at that time the primary guardian of the public ownership project, had
become virtually unelectable in national elections. It was torn by internal conflict and
had actually split, as described elsewhere in this Handbook. The Conservatives were
therefore left more free to pursue a strong radical agenda than had normally been the
case for post-war governments, or governments in most other advanced democracies
at that time.
A final important factor was that privatization was a means whereby governments
could attract private finance into the funding of major capital projects, instead of
relying on taxation or public debt. This was occurring at a time when it was believed
that taxation rates, especially on higher incomes, needed to be reduced, and when
counter-inflation strategy was considered to require a tight rein on public debt.
In practice, it was rarely possible to create pure markets for the privatized indus-
tries, problems of oligopoly and limited opportunities for competition usually having
been important reasons why these activities ended up in the public domain in the
first place. An exception was telecommunications, where technological change had
expanded enormously the means of transmission of signals, making possible com-
petition where there had before been very restricted provision possibilities. Other
public utilities are major examples of where competition remained restricted even
after privatization by the Conservative governments of the 1980s and 1990s. In many
areas it became possible to have more than one supplier of gas or electricity, but
usually only a small number. It did not prove possible to provide for alternative
water suppliers drawing from the same reservoirs, and the privatization of water
has (as already noted) not been a process of marketization, but of licensing private
monopolies.
Privatization of railway track provision and maintenance by the Conservatives
in 1994 was also an example of passing a service to a non-market monopoly. This
proved unsatisfactory, partly for reasons of rail safety, and the track was then, in
2002, placed by the Labour government into an unusual form of ownership, designed
marketization 883
to avoid giving the appearance of renationalization while also avoiding the market
failures of a monopoly. An organization called Network Rail was created, which calls
itself a private company acting on a commercial basis. But it was established by
government, has no shareholders, and reinvests all its profit into the rail network.
Its board comprises ‘members’ appointed from the rail industry and from users.
It is subject to a regulatory agency, the Office of Rail Regulation (ORR), and it is
underwritten by the government. Provision of rail services remains privatized. In
some cases there is not enough trade on a particular service to allow for anything
other than monopoly; on popular lines there may be limited competition, with two
or possibly three providers.
In virtually all cases the weakness of marketization in these privatizations has been
recognized by successive governments through the establishment of public regulation
of the service concerned: such agencies as ORR for the railways, Ofcom for the
telecommunications industry, or Ofwat for water. Regulation is a classic ‘old’ public
service response to market failure, but modern regulatory procedures are based on
sophisticated economic modelling, trying to reproduce what a true market would
have produced had it existed rather than on the implementation of bureaucratic rules.
Privatization is therefore typically not a case of ‘back to the market’, but an attempt
at providing a new compromise between markets and regulation, with private own-
ership and a form of regulation based on market principles, but a continuing strong
role for government agencies.
One result of this has been that controversies arising in these industries continue
to be highly political. At the time of railway privatization the then Prime Minister,
John Major, had offered as one of the benefits the fact that rail travel would cease to
be a political issue. His prediction has been falsified by subsequent history. Where
markets are highly imperfect, the service concerned important to daily life, and reg-
ulation continues to be required, the public continues to see government as involved
somewhere in the service.
47.1.2 Market-making within Public Service, with Direct
Consumer Choice Guided by Performance Data
Initially the privatization programme was seen as stopping at manufacturing indus-
tries, utilities, and some of the smaller welfare services that did not attract political
attention—particularly homes for the elderly. Conservative governments were far
more wary about touching the core of the health and education services, though they
also took steps to encourage small extensions of the private sector (for example, the
establishment of grant-maintained schools, and fiscal encouragement of private pen-
sions). They mainly experimented with enabling customer choice via marketization
within public services, but it was principally the Labour government elected in 1997
that took the customer choice agenda forward, and which also took bolder steps to
include outright privatization within this strategy.
884 colin crouch
Historically this has been a shift of major proportions for the Labour Party, which,
like all socialist and social democratic parties, has been rooted in suspicion of the pri-
vate sector where basic public services are concerned. There have been three aspects
to this suspicion. First, there was an early general hostility towards profit-making
capitalist enterprise as such. In reality, by the 1960s this had become mainly limited
to hostility to private monopolies, but basic public services were seen as completely
inappropriate to the profit motive. Second, the party was historically concerned to
ensure that, where important services were concerned, there should be near-equality
in access. This meant exclusion of the price mechanism at the point of purchase,
which seemed at that time to have excluded the role of the market. Finally, socialist
and social democratic parties, historically representing sections of the population
who are not major owners of private property, have had a concern to see resources
publicly owned and available, and are particularly sensitive to ways in which markets
cannot take account of externalities.
Labour’s change of position can be explained by three factors, all of which are
involved in the 1990s shift to ‘New Labour’. First, the decline in the size of the Labour
Party’s old voting bloc of manual workers left it bereft of one of its main population
bases. Its second and more recent bloc, public service workers, were deeply attached
to the maintenance of existing public service approaches, but the party leadership
had come to see them as a liability, tying the party to a ‘tax and spend’ image and
associated with the problems of the 1970s mentioned above. Disenchanted with both
of its sets of core voters, Labour was in search of new sections of the electorate, those
in the past who had been ‘natural’ Conservative voters. Imposing reforms on public
services, even—or indeed especially—if they were unpopular with those working in
the sector, could help Labour’s image with these other voters.
Second, far more than the Conservatives, Labour was strongly committed to
improving the quality of public service delivery. Here the party had not at all changed
from its earlier position as the principal political guardian of health, education, and
social care services. This had in fact become the main political dividing line between
the two parties. It was partly a question of Labour being more willing to spend money
on the services, but there were limits to the extent that this could be done. The
party therefore sought new ideas, which led it to emphasize consumer choice and
the development of new (private) providers.
Third, Labour, like the Conservatives, interpreted inadequacies of public services
as being the fault of the staff working in them, in particular professionals. The
Conservatives had regarded schoolteachers as a ‘guilty’ profession, believing that
left-wing teachers had dragged down educational standards. Labour extended the
suspicion to medical practitioners, but for different reasons. It here leaned on an
element in its own past traditions that mistrusted professional elites who were seen as
having contempt for their clients. According to a leading social policy expert who
became the Labour Prime Minister’s health policy adviser, the old model of the
professions required the public to believe that all practitioners were ‘knights’ who
could be trusted to work to the best of their abilities because of their professional
commitment (Le Grand 2003). But, argued Le Grand, few people were thoroughgoing
marketization 885
knights. It was better to err on the side of caution and treat everyone as potential
‘knaves’, who would behave well only when given a financial market incentive to
do so. Acceptance of this idea necessitated establishing market relationships between
providers and their customers wherever possible, replacing reliance on professional
ethics.
This all led to a customer choice agenda. Many (both Conservative and Labour)
marketization initiatives do not actually give much choice to consumers; govern-
ment typically place contracts for the monopoly provision of a service with private
providers, consumers using them just as they had used traditional monopoly public
services: the ‘customer’ in the market here is the government, not the ultimate users.
Eventually however the Labour government began to use customer choice as a means
of securing service improvement, particularly in health and education. If users could
choose from among a range of providers, and if budget allocations followed their
choices, weak providers would have a strong incentive to improve their services, or
close down. Under the School Standards and Framework Act 1998, parents were given
a range of schools from which they could choose to send their children; and under
the National Health Service Act 2006 patients had to be offered a choice of hospitals
for medical treatments. To guide their choices government required service providers
to publish details of selected aspects of their performance (for example, examination
success rates for schools; success rates for surgery for hospitals). The objective was to
give providers an incentive to raise their achievement levels on these indicators, their
budgets being dependent on their ability to attract customers.
The degree of marketization here remains limited. Services are still provided free
or at nominal charges at the point of use, so there are no actual prices to adjust
demand and supply. Government or local government, not the market, decides at
what point demand for a particular school or health centre has dropped so low that
the facility should be closed. The continuing importance of the typical market failures
of poor information flow and difficulty of introducing true pricing for ‘vital’ services
has continued to inhibit a stronger reliance on market forces. A public policy elite
continues, through the indicators it chooses to publicize, to shape what users ‘ought’
to regard as important information on which to base choices; but it is now much
more a political elite, not a professional one.
47.1.3 Private Providers Compete with Public, but within
Publicly Funded System
The second model can be restricted to competition among public providers (as in
choice of schools and hospitals among those provided by a public authority.) In a
more radical version of this approach, private providers have been invited to compete
with existing public ones. This introduction of an element of privatization may bring
new capital to the disposal of the public service in question, and may also bring new
ideas for delivery of the service.
886 colin crouch
Again, the Labour government has been associated with the most radical steps. By
the early twenty-first century the party had abandoned all belief that some services
required public provision. This belief had been based on the assumption that there
was such a thing as a public service professional ethic that constituted a motive for
the provision of such things as health care superior to the maximization of profits.
Acceptance of the Le Grand doctrine that it was better to suspect people of being
knaves rather than trust them to be knights led necessarily to preference for the profit
motive over any so-called ethical conduct. In fact, the government logically began to
favour private providers: markets could only be made in policy fields where they had
not previously existed if firms could be encouraged to enter them. Local education
authorities were permitted to bid to build new schools only if no private contractors
wanted to do so. In 2008 the government embarked on a programme to encourage
the merging of general practitioner and related health services into large ‘polyclinics’.
This is the form of health provision favoured by the US health-service firms who were
wanting to enter the British market.
The Labour government did hold fast to its core belief that services should be
free (or subject to nominal cost) at the point of receipt. In marketized public ser-
vices (whether provided by public authorities or by private firms) users choose, and
providers receive income as a result of their choice, but this is paid by government
not by the user. This limits the extent to which users rather than government are
the true ‘customers’. There is also a problem that the universal service required by
public health and education policy is not immediately attractive to private providers.
An important element of firm strategy in the true market consists in finding niches:
in the market it is not only customers who choose providers, but providers who
choose customers too. Firms often need inducements in terms of generous and
lengthy contract terms if they are to manage without this important component of
entrepreneurship. On the other hand, lengthy contracts to provide services, demand
for which is completely guaranteed by government, are highly attractive to firms. At
a time when markets in general are becoming increasingly competitive on a global
basis, public contracts have major advantages. This also explains the strong pressure
being exerted by representatives of private business on governments and international
organizations to encourage privatization of public services.
47.2 Tackling Perceived Unwanted
Services
.............................................................................................................................................
The marketization moves discussed above all assume that the public wants the ser-
vices in question, but seeks more choice and better quality. Some other arguments
for marketization are almost the reverse of this. It is argued that, because they are
funded by taxation and decided by producer interests, public services are provided in
‘excess’. If, rather than being compulsorily taxed in order to fund services, people had
marketization 887
the ability to choose how much they personally spent on, say, fire services, they might
spend less on these than taxation requires them to do. A more consumer-oriented
system might therefore be associated, not so much with better public services, as with
fewer of them. These arguments are difficult to make politically, but the growth of
many new forms of spending by left-wing Labour councils in the 1970s and 1980s on
services that could not easily be called ‘essential’ enabled Conservative governments
of the 1980s and 1990s to venture some of these arguments. They eventually reduced
the level of public service provision to an extent that became unpopular and was
instrumental in their eventual fall in 1997. The ensuing Labour governments contin-
ued to enjoy political reward for increasing public spending and service provision,
at least until around 2008, and in opposition the Conservatives began to accept that
line.
However, even if criticism of unwanted services is not as popular as it once seemed,
there are still concerns that there are inadequate pressures on public services to
provide value for money, and people would still prefer to pay lower taxes. The most
obvious way to square this circle is to improve efficiency. Government has recently
tended to believe that the best ideas for doing this are likely to be found in the
private sector, which is more immediately exposed to competitive pressure on costs.
Marketization lies behind responses to this agenda in a number of ways.
47.2.1 Internal Markets
Most important is the use of internal markets, a resource allocation option open to
organizations of all kinds, private and public, as mentioned above. It is easy to confuse
this with the idea of offering market choices to consumers within a public service.
The two can certainly be combined, but while the latter is targeted at the issue of
consumer choice, the internal market per se is more focused on managerial concerns
over efficiency, and may have no reference to the consumer. The internal market is
a means of ensuring that departments within an organization relate to each other as
though they were all separate firms in the real market, and not colleagues within the
same organization. These markets may or may not be ‘true’ in that central authorities
can ‘rig’ the notional prices used within them, which are not necessarily tested against
external markets.
In practice, neither Conservative nor subsequent Labour governments relied on
marketization alone to achieve the goal of efficient resource utilization, but on a
more traditional approach to improving public service efficiency: calling in experts—
though the role of the experts was now to introduce private-sector practices into
government. The Conservative government used the services of the chief executive
of Marks & Spencer, Derek (later Lord) Rayner, unleashing a round of changes
in working practices. The Labour government appointed Sir Peter Gershon, who
established savings targets for each department and agency. Nevertheless, the internal
market has been used too.
The first objective of the internal market is to make managers think hard about
whether they really need to use a service, by charging them for it. It can be, and is,
888 colin crouch
also used as a preparation for privatization. Some of these supply units, especially if
they might find work with more than one customer organization, might well be sold
off to a private firm.
A major example has concerned changes imparted to the role of schools in general
and headteachers in particular by the Education Act 1986. This removed from the
teaching profession to central government agencies responsibility for the curriculum,
but gave to headteachers and school governors greater responsibility for financial and
managerial decisions. There was therefore a shift away from the role of professional
autonomy and a move to managerial autonomy. At the same time, salary scales of
teachers were elongated so that the salaries of headteachers and other senior teach-
ing staff moved away from those of their non-managerial colleagues. These moves
were not directly related to marketization as such, but they were part of a move
from professional to managerial forms of leadership. By giving individual schools
a deal of financial autonomy they were encouraged to think more seriously about
the relationship between income and expenditure. In the National Health Service
(NHS) there was a more explicit move to marketization with the development of
internal markets (Le Grand, Mays, and Mulligan 1998). Again, this marked a shift
from a professional to a managerial form of decision-making. Whereas in the past
different units in the chain of patient treatment (e.g. from general practitioner to
hospital specialist) had related to each other as professional colleagues, with links
based on locality and personal acquaintance, they would now do so as purchasers
and providers. Primary health care units would have notional budgets with which
they would purchase services from service providers further up the supply chain. This
is therefore another example of partial marketization, with central authority able to
decide how far it will use the market, and how far it wants to continue to assert its
own priorities.
In opposition in the 1990s the Labour Party had opposed the introduction of the
internal market into the NHS, claiming that it would distort professional clinical
judgement in favour of financial criteria in judgements about patient care. When
in office however it renamed the exercise but maintained its essential features. The
Labour government did however also establish a range of expert services, such as the
National Institute for Clinical Excellence, to advise medical decision-makers on how
to reconcile clinical and financial assessments.
47.2.2 Private Subcontracting
Just as private providers can be invited to compete with public ones in order to
increase consumer choice, so too can private firms be used by public service managers
to try to find cheaper provision than is available within public service itself. This is
something that happens within the private sector, as managers contract out various
activities to supplier firms able to operate more cheaply than the contracting firm
itself. Normally an important determinant of whether to do this will be which services
are so central to the core business of the firm and its reputation that it must handle
marketization 889
them itself, and which are sufficiently marginal for cost to be the principal consider-
ation. Indeed, one can sometimes assess what a firm regards as its core business by
seeing what it does not contract out.
For private firms the biggest savings are to be found when activities can be con-
tracted to suppliers in second- or third-world countries with low labour costs. UK
government has not yet started to do this, though in principle such services as vehicle
registration or the administration of the state pensions system could be carried out
more cheaply by subcontracting them to firms in India. Until now, government has
preferred to reserve such activities for providing employment in depressed areas of
the UK, a matter which is important to political success and therefore itself ‘core
business’. But within the UK, government has been eager to encourage private firms
to contract for public service delivery. By the nature of much public service work, the
contracts involved often have to be for several years: it is not feasible to change the
identity of a firm running a city’s schools every year, though this is more possible for
contracts to police local car-parking schemes. Contracts involving capital expenditure
may need to last twenty or so years to be attractive to contractors.
This is therefore another limited, compromised form of marketization. The con-
tracting authority itself loses its chance to exercise a customer’s power for the dura-
tion of the contract, and there is not necessarily any element of market choice to
be exercised by the ultimate consumer. The subcontractor’s customer is the public
authority placing the contract. The subcontractor has no relationship to the users,
while, as Freedland (2001) has argued, the public also loses its ‘citizenship’ rela-
tionship to the public authority where provision of the service is concerned. In
some cases, where a lengthy chain of sub- and sub-subcontractors develops, any
responsiveness to the user becomes a matter for lawyers for the various corporate
partners to the contracts. This became a major issue in the early 2000s, when gov-
ernment wanted to apportion responsibility for a series of railway accidents, the
matter becoming confused by the terms of contracts between Railtrack and the
firms to whom it had subcontracted repair and maintenance work. This was one
of the reasons why government transferred the provision and maintenance of rail-
way track from a private firm to the unusually structured Network Rail discussed
above.
The length of some contracts also weakens the strength of the market mechanism,
displacing the relationship to one of negotiation of the contract rather than providing
the subsequent service. One consequence of this has been the emergence of a group
of firms who have expanded their businesses to cover a wide range of public services.
For example, firms that started as road-building contractors (where customers are
almost entirely public authorities) have become providers of administrative support
services to local government. The core business of these enterprises is winning gov-
ernment contracts, almost irrespective of the substantive activities involved. Such
firms achieve this position not just by learning how to complete contract forms
correctly, but by developing close relationships with government officials and politi-
cians at national and local levels, which brings us to some issues raised in the next
section.
890 colin crouch
47.3 Tackling Perceived Remoteness
from Private Sector
.............................................................................................................................................
In classic British (and many other) public service traditions, it was necessary to
maintain an arm’s-length relationship between public officials and private firms. This
was designed partly to protect markets from political or administrative distortions
through interventions designed to help ‘friendly’ firms, and at the extreme to prevent
actual corruption. It is in fact a concept closely associated with a belief in free
markets: if markets are to function properly, there must be an absence of mutual
interference between personnel in governments and private firms. However, one of
its consequences is considered to have been that public service became cut off from
developments in the private sector, where competitive pressures lead to constant
innovation in ways of working. Governments have responded to this in three ways.
47.3.1 Encouragement of Intensive Interaction with, and
Learning from, the Private Sector
The idea of a protective layer between public servants and private business people
has been almost completely discarded. Private-sector consultants have been taken
deep into government, not only offering advice but designing policies, and not being
placed under inhibition about using their consultancy role to recommend their own
products for purchase. This has, for example, happened with government purchase
of a number of computer systems. Similarly, staff seconded from US health firms have
been appointed to advisory posts in the Department of Health in order to assist in the
construction of a role for private firms in health provision.
The relationship between these developments and marketization is paradoxical.
On the one hand, by seeking advice from individuals and organizations in the private
sector, government is trying to get close to market-oriented forms of behaviour. On
the other hand, by so doing it runs the risk of weakening the market: too close a
relationship between public officials and individual enterprises, leading to the con-
struction of entry barriers around a privileged group of insider firms to the exclusion
of others. This issue, which has historically been a major concern of economic the-
orists, has not been raised as a serious issue in British political debate, which rarely
distinguishes between ‘the market’ and ‘the private sector’.
47.3.2 Adoption of Business Criteria in Government Practice
Public bodies have been increasingly urged to behave as though they were firms
acting in the market. This is encouraged by many of the practices discussed above,
such as internal markets, the introduction of competition among units, and most
commonly by the adoption of performance targets for public service organizations
and employees.
marketization 891
In general this approach is seen as constituting New Public Management (NPM).
This began with attempts in the USA to improve public services by modelling their
approaches to management on certain kinds of private-sector examples rather than
on classic bureaucracy (Osborne and Gaebler 1992). It is never clear exactly what is
meant by private-sector approaches, as the private sector of the economy contains an
enormous diversity of managerial styles, ranging from highly sophisticated processes
to so-called ‘macho management’, and from transnational corporations to small
firms. However, the images of the private sector that have most influenced NPM have
been a strong focus on matching action to managerially determined objectives, as
opposed to either the rule following associated with traditional bureaucracy (public
and private) or the acceptance of professionally determined goals and practices asso-
ciated with the more skills-based public services (mainly medicine and education)—
the knights and knaves problem again.
Behind this model of principal (political leadership) and agent (public service top
management) stands the analogy of the neoliberal concept of the firm, in which
the principal (the shareholders) requires the agent (top corporate management) to
maximize share values. There is a problem of finding a public service analogy for
the maximization of shareholder value. If politicians are the principals, then their
maximization strategy is aimed at electoral success; put simplistically therefore ‘votes’
are the equivalent of shareholder value. But democracy does not operate like profit,
providing a single measurable indicator. It constantly has to be interpreted by politi-
cians, their advisers, and other public opinion makers. In the end, therefore, the ethics
of professions and public service are displaced, not by the market, but by the ethics of
politicians.
NPM, starting with US and British experience, has subsequently become a transna-
tional orthodoxy. It is officially commended by the OECD, and countries seeking
assistance from the International Monetary Fund or the World Bank are expected to
follow its implications. It is also linked closely with privatization at these levels, with
countries being required to show that certain percentages of public service delivery
are in the hands of private firms. There is therefore no longer anything distinctive
about the UK’s pursuit of an NPM and marketization agenda. However, the country
continues to be a major example of it.
Adoption of the approach started with the post-1979 Conservative government,
and continued right through the subsequent Labour period. Several of the initiatives
described above are associated with it, particularly the use of internal markets to drive
up performance standards. A further feature is the removal of functions from control
by a government department itself and placing them in the hands of an agency. For
example, vehicle licensing, previously an activity of the Department of Transport,
was hived off to the DVLA. More controversially, the management of prisons was
removed from the Home Office to a Prisons Agency. Agencies are not necessarily a
product of NPM: they were in fact pioneered in Scandinavia in the 1970s. However,
they clearly fit the principal–agent model of the NPM approach. Ministers set the
parameters of policy; the managerial heads of the agencies agree to maximize fulfilment
of their requirements. An important aim is to clarify the distinction between political
892 colin crouch
decision-making and managerial execution; another is to protect ministers from blame
for operational failings. (The Prisons Agency was established when the government
was exasperated at receiving political blame for a series of prison escapes.)
It is doubtful whether either of these goals is achieved. As we know from the
private sector (Williamson 1975), there is no clear division between principal and
agent but frequent interaction between them. And the nature of party competition
is such that oppositions rarely let governments use the argument that a failure is
purely operational and nothing to do with ministers. Nevertheless, agencies do permit
a greater focusing of tasks within government.
Another central feature of NPM and of the principal–agent relationship has been
government by objectives, which means the establishment of targets by the principal
for performance by the agent. Targets have proliferated under the Labour govern-
ment, in particular. They are an attempt at providing output rather than input
measures of policy success. Instead of saying ‘We have spent £x million reducing child
poverty’, government says ‘we have met our target to remove y children from poverty
by the end of this year’. However, targets and quantifiable performance management
have a number of disadvantages (Radnor and Barnes 2007; Radnor and McGuire
2004). Some of these are in fact found in private firms, too, where senior managers
may set targets in ignorance of the realities of the business on the ground, leading
to both a distortion of activities and a perverse incentive to employees to ‘game’—
that is, to find ways of boosting the measured performance score without actually
improving performance. This commonly happens because a target focuses on one
aspect of a task at the expense of others; performance can therefore be improved by
concentrating on measured tasks and ignoring those that are not measured.
Management can respond to this by increasing the range of activities for which it
sets targets, but if this reaches a point where it is trying to measure and set targets
for nearly everything that a service does, there are two negative consequences. First,
the initial aim of priority setting becomes lost as everything is prioritized; second, the
record keeping and reporting necessary to monitor performance targets consumes
serious resources, especially of staff time, at the expense of the front-line activities of
the service. In other words, performance management has transaction costs.
The problem of a lack of a true analogy for profit maximization is also relevant
here. Public service goals are multiple; there is no obvious way to prioritize them.
Targets establish priorities, but by political or managerial decision, not in response to
markets. This increases the scope for gaming around targets and provokes irresolvable
debates around relative priorities.
47.3.3 Public–Private Partnerships
In recent years government has encouraged joint ventures for funding public cap-
ital spending projects between public authorities and private firms. Most of these
are covered by the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) (Akintoye, Beck, and Hardcastle
2003; Audit Commission 2001; Lonsdale 2005; Mumford 1998; National Audit Office
marketization 893
1999). This is an example of a more general phenomenon known as public–private
partnerships (PPPs), a concept invented by UK government but now widely imitated
around the world. An important motive of government in adopting PFI has been to
be able to fund building projects that it regards as important, such as new schools
and hospitals, without distorting its budget by raising taxes or increasing government
borrowing. The private sector finances the project, and therefore owns the facilities.
It leases these back to the public sector for a sum to be repaid over a period of years.
During this period the project is managed jointly by the firm and the public service
concerned.
However, this is not the only way in which governments can attract private finance
for public projects: they can simply issue repayable bonds to private purchasers. The
difference is that a bond holder is simply a passive holder of assets; firms involved
in public–private partnerships remain active in the management of the asset. For
this reason, these initiatives should be considered as the public sector seeking the
involvement of private-sector expertise and not just funds. An important example
was the funding of the modernization of London Transport. The Greater London
Authority wanted to finance this through the issuing of bonds to the private sector, as
had the New York and Paris underground railway systems when engaged on similar
modernizations. The government overruled this and insisted on a PFI arrangement,
in order to ensure the continued engagement of private firms in the management of
the assets (National Audit Office 2004).
A problem that has occurred with PFI arrangements is a rigidity induced by the
terms of the deal. If a school or hospital is being funded by a PFI, it is very difficult for
the public authority concerned to change its use or the organizational arrangements
surrounding it for twenty or (in the NHS) thirty years, because the original uses tend
to be enshrined in the initial PFI contract. Also, the market operates at the single
moment of establishing the contract; there is then a private monopoly for a lengthy
period.
47.4 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
The above has shown how marketization is a multifaceted strategy. It is not the same
as privatization, but overlaps with it. In several respects it is a purely technical device,
an attempt at finding ways of achieving efficiency and focusing activities within large
public service organizations in ways that cannot be reached by the bureaucratic rules
that governed classic public service. At the same time, it has been an intensely political
process. Initially it was part of the political offensive of first Conservative and then
Labour governments against public-sector trade unions. Gradually the target shifted
to being the alleged elitism of public service professions, whether taking trade union
form or not. For the Labour government of 1997 greater use of markets was also
894 colin crouch
considered to be a way in which a clear political demand for more and better public
services could be reconciled with public aversion to high taxes. More recently that goal
has had added to it the possibility of providing more individual choice to consumers,
so that they might access public services similarly to the way in which they buy goods
in shops.
As much of the above discussion has shown, the strategy has a number of weak-
nesses, several of them resulting from the fact that public provision had histori-
cally taken a non-market form because of certain market failures, some of which
return to prominence when attempts are made to introduce or reintroduce markets.
Controversy therefore continues to surround marketization. However, this is mainly
organized by user and campaign groups, professional associations, political commen-
tators, and some marginal groups within the Labour Party. The leaderships of both
major political parties, and to an increasing extent the Liberal Democratic Party, are
committed to the strategy, which is therefore largely beyond the reach of electoral
conflict or debate.
References
Akintoye, A., Beck, M., and Hardcastle, C. 2003. Public–Private Partnerships: Managing
Risks and Opportunities. Oxford: Blackwell.
Audit Commission 2001. Building for the Future: The Management of Procurement under the
Private Finance Initiative. London: HMSO.
Bork, R. H. 1978. The Antitrust Paradox: A Policy at War with Itself. New York: Free Press.
Freedland, M. 2001. ‘The Marketization of Public Services’. In C. Crouch, K. Eder, and
D. Tambini (eds.), Citizenship, Markets, and the State. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Le Grand, J. 2003. Motivation, Agency, and Public Policy: Of Knights and Knaves, Pawns and
Queens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mays, N., and Mulligan, J.-O. (eds.) 1998. Learning from the NHS Internal Market:
A Review of the Evidence. London: King’s Fund.
Lonsdale, C. 2005. ‘Risk Transfer, the UK’s Private Finance Initiative and Asymmetric
Post-Contractual Lock-in: The Cases of National Savings and Investments and the Lord
Chancellor’s Department’. Public Administration, 83/1: 67–88.
Mumford, M. 1998. Public Projects, Private Finance: Understanding the Principles of the Private
Finance Initiative. Welwyn Garden City: NPV/Griffin Multimedia.
National Audit Office 1999. Examining the Value for Money of Deals under the Private
Finance Initiative. London: HMSO.
2004. London Underground Public Private Partnerships: Were They Good Deals? London:
HMSO.
OECD 1995. Internal Markets in the Making: Health Systems in Canada, Iceland and the United
Kingdom. Paris: OECD.
Osborne, D., and Gaebler, T. 1992. Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit
is Transforming the Public Sector. Wokingham: Addison-Wesley.
Osterman, P. (ed.) 1984. Internal Labor Markets. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Posner, R. A. 2001. Anti-Trust Law, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
marketization 895
Radnor, Z., and Barnes, D. 2007. ‘Historical Analysis of Performance Measurement
and Management in Operations Management’. International Journal of Productivity and
Performance Management, 56: 284–397.
and McGuire, M. 2004. ‘Performance Management in the Public Sector: Fact or Fiction?’
International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, 53: 245–60.
Rugman, A. M. 1981. Inside the Multinationals: The Economics of Internal Markets. London:
Croom Helm.
Williamson, O. E. 1975. Markets and Hierarchies: Analysis and Antitrust Implications: A Study
in the Economics of Internal Organization. New York: Free Press.
and Masten, S. E. (eds.) 1999. The Economics of Transaction Costs. Cheltenham: Edward
Elgar.
Section Sixteen: Economy
................................................................................................................
c h a p t e r 48
.................................................................................................................
NATI O NA L
ECONOMIC POLICY
.................................................................................................................
helen thompson
Decline was the dominant motif in the academic analysis of British economic policy
during the twentieth century (Gamble 2000: 1–2). Whatever their view about the
viability of the post-war settlement, or its apparent demise during the 1970s and 1980s,
most scholars perceived the politics of the half-century after the end of the Second
World War as something that failed to find a means to solve the problem of relative
economic decline (e.g. Gamble 1994a; Coates 1994; Sked 1987; Wiener 1985; Cain and
Hopkins 1993). Although the causes of this were contested, few disputed that the story
of economic policy from 1945 to the early 1990s was one of disappointment. That
analytical narrative, however, is now spent (Gamble 2000: 17–20). Nonetheless, the
legacy of past failures haunts much of the academic literature on British economic
policy with many scholars unconvinced that anything has fundamentally changed
in the economic and political dynamics of the economy from the period of relative
failure. 1
Much of the intellectual effort of the past forty years to explain Britain’s relative
economic decline until the mid-1990s has begun with some theoretical conception
of the exceptional nature of Britain’s economy, culture, politics, or society. For many
years this debate was primarily an ideological one. For the right, Britain’s culture
since the second half of the nineteenth century had produced an anti-business bias
that made the economy ill-equipped to adapt to economic change (Wiener 1985). Its
governing elite, Correlli Barnett argued, whilst aspiring to imperial grandeur was in
its habits unworldly. This left British politicians fatally exposed by the economic and
political problems of the last third of the nineteenth century, the inter-war years, and
1
See e.g. Coates (2002).
898 helen thompson
the Second World War. Their post-war successors, Barnett continued, proved unable
to escape the great power delusion and added unsustainable social commitments to
the burden of the British state (Barnett 1986). For the left, the cause of decline lay
either in Britain’s peculiar class development, which in missing out on a bourgeois
revolution had left significant remnants of pre-modern politics and a weak industrial
class (Anderson 1964; 1987; Nairn 1963), or a long-standing financial bias in British
capitalism, which gave the City a distinctive commercial character that privileged
short-term gain in secondary markets over long-term industrial investment (Ingham
1984).
After the end of Thatcher, the tone of the academic debate about Britain’s polit-
ical economy became less stridently ideological and more grounded in comparative
economic and political analysis. Yet out of these new perspectives one of the left’s
old arguments persisted. By the mid-1990s, the thesis that the character of Britain’s
financial sector was the cause of many of Britain’s economic problems had become an
academic commonplace. Many argued that even if the City’s position was not to be
explained by some version of absolute exceptionalism, it was still what distinguished
Britain’s Anglo-Saxon style of capitalism from that which prevailed elsewhere in
Europe. With a financial system based around capital markets rather than banks and
in which government played a limited role, the British economy was condemned to
suffer from low investment in the manufacturing sector and relatively poor growth
(Pollin 1995; Zysman 1993; Coates 2000; Hutton 1996). For some the consequences
of this financial bias in the structure of British capitalism were compounded by the
willingness of British governments to accept the primacy of external financial interests
around sterling’s status as an international currency over the domestic economy in
deciding macroeconomic policy (Pollard 1982). Starting from these premises, Britain’s
economic problems could only be solved, these scholars argued, by moving to a devel-
opmental state that would make possible greater investment in the productive econ-
omy, improved manufacturing competitiveness, and an exchange rate policy detached
from the City’s financial interests. 2 Those like David Marquand who lamented the
absence of a developmental state focused their explanation on the unsuccessful efforts
of governments in the 1960s and 1970s to modernize the British economy, and the
Thatcher government’s repudiation of that modernization project and acceptance of
an economy divided between a booming financial and services sector and manufac-
turing decline (Marquand 1988; Gamble 1994b; Newton and Porter 1988). From this
perspective, the Thatcher government’s approach had reinforced the old problems of
the economy and created new ones. 3
For all their strengths in diagnosing the apparent weaknesses of the British econ-
omy, the problem with these arguments was that they did not always distinguish
between politically explaining why economic policy had been as it was and normative
condemnation and aspiration. The urge to dismiss the Thatcher years for moral
reasons and because of what they did not attempt meant that less scholarly attention
2 3
See Marquand (1988). See Hutton (1996); Pollard (1992); Overbeek (1990).
national economic policy 899
was focused on explaining the Conservatives’ relative political success in economic
matters as a political party in a contested democratic politics with a troubled econ-
omy. Yet what politically distinguished the Thatcher governments from their prede-
cessors since 1961 was that for at least a five-year period they turned the economy into
a positive asset for the governing party in British politics (Bulpitt 1986). This would
have seemed highly unlikely in 1981, and the first Thatcher government only stumbled
its way to electoral success after initially embarking on a set of disastrous policies from
which it had to seek a rapid retreat. Yet from 1982 to 1988 the Thatcher government
found a way of managing the economy that did not threaten the Conservative Party’s
grip on power. 4 Strikingly that political success did not rest on a clear reversal of
relative economic decline. Measured against the performance of the other major EC
states, the British economy ended the 1980s at best modestly, and in some areas—
the proclivity for growth to produce rising inflation, a large current account deficit,
and an unstable currency—with the same liabilities as it had accumulated during the
previous decade. 5 This paradox left a problem for those scholars who argued that it
was the absence of a developmental state that defined the problem confronting British
politicians over the economy. If politicians could succeed in economic policy in the
terms that mattered to them—governing competence and electoral victory—without
a developmental state that might have given the economy a larger industrial base, why
would they have reason to think that the existing structure of the British economy was
a political problem?
This paradox was compounded by the relationship between the performance of
the British economy and the political fate of the final Conservative government.
Under John Major’s premiership, there was an end to relative economic decline
but the Conservative Party reaped no political reward for the achievement. The
end of decline was not the result of restructuring the economy through a devel-
opmental state, but the construction after the exit from the European Exchange
Rate Mechanism of anti-inflationary credibility through monetary and fiscal pol-
icy and the good fortune of serious problems befalling the German and Japanese
economies. 6 Yet by the time the Major government had figured its political way
to a macroeconomic policy that procured sustainable, non-inflationary growth that
created jobs, sterling’s short-lived membership of the ERM had destroyed the Con-
servatives’ reputation for governing competence. Whilst the political failures of
British governments had been directly tied to the relatively poor performance of
the British economy, the developmental critique of Britain’s economic and political
problems had considerable resonance. Once, however, as became the case during
the long period of Conservative rule, economic success appeared to be neither a
necessary nor a sufficient condition for political success for British governments, the
kinds of empirical explanations Britain’s political economy required became more
demanding.
4 5 6
See Smith (1987). See Johnson (1991). See Burnham (1999).
900 helen thompson
48.1 The British Economy and the
International Economy
.............................................................................................................................................
Wherever the burden of explanation was placed for understanding what had hap-
pened during the Thatcher and Major governments, from the mid-1990s the language
of globalization provided a new theoretical framework for analysis. It opened up a
new version of the exceptionalist argument: Britain, many argued, had an economy
that was different from other large EU states because the Thatcher governments
had embraced the internationalization of capital flows and, in contrast to the other
large EU states, accepted the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism on which a central
thrust of globalization rests. As a consequence, the Thatcher governments’ successors
were less capable of pursuing non-orthodox economic policies than other European
states (Gamble 2003: 104–7). Even some of those who were generally sceptical about
globalization saw Britain as having a distinctively internationalized economy com-
pared to the other G7 states with the financial sector standing at the centre of that
internationalized economy (Hirst and Thompson 2000: 335–6).
Yet whilst the British economy was indeed more internationalized than other
European states, the emphasis some scholars have placed on the Conservative gov-
ernments’ active encouragement of that openness has risked missing some important
political nuances about the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s. The Thatcher govern-
ments do have to be understood in the context of the post-Bretton Woods interna-
tional economy but it is erroneous to assume that they were strategically and tactically
rational in dealing with the constraints and opportunities of globalization because
they wished to procure a more open British economy. The Thatcher governments’
primary political project was not to restore a particular kind of British capitalism that
could thrive in an open international economy but, as Jim Bulpitt always insisted, to
re-establish the primacy of the Conservatives as Britain’s governing party (Bulpitt
1986). Rather than relying on international market forces to squeeze labour, their
success was in good part dependent on using the coercive power of the British state to
break the trade unions at the moment when the opportunity arose with the National
Union of Mineworkers’ strike. Moreover, the Thatcher governments never got to grips
with the problems created for exchange rate management in a financially liberal-
ized international economy. The ERM disaster that eventually politically destroyed
the Conservatives was a sterling accident waiting to happen because Thatcher and
her Chancellors never accepted that without capital controls, macroeconomic pru-
dence required letting the exchange rate constrain both monetary and fiscal policy
(Thompson 1996: 218–22). Whilst the Conservatives escaped the electoral conse-
quences of the sterling-induced recession that decimated the manufacturing sector
in the early 1980s, and reaped electoral reward in 1987 for the inflationary boom
that began in 1986, their luck was never likely to last indefinitely. ERM membership
might have taken the blame for the Conservatives’ final fate, but continuing non-
membership in the autumn of 1990 would have served them no better because high
national economic policy 901
interest rates alone could not have sustained confidence in sterling as it waned under
inflation and they had already pushed the economy into recession (Thompson 1996:
163–77). In macroeconomic terms, British economic policy had been at odds with
the openness of the international economy for more than a decade. After Black
Wednesday, the Major government found a means of macroeconomic adjustment,
but one in which a substantial burden to restore credibility had to fall on tax increases,
which was something that the openness of the British economy was supposed to deter.
What in many ways made British macroeconomic policy in the 1980s and early 1990s
exceptional was not how far it embraced globalization, but just how ill-suited it was to
the exchange rate constraints generated by the financial openness of the post-Bretton
Woods international economy.
48.2 New Labour and the International
Economy
.............................................................................................................................................
The political beneficiaries of the Major’s government’s post-Black Wednesday eco-
nomic success were New Labour. Unlike any previous Labour government, New
Labour assumed power without having to confront an immediate economic crisis.
Against that backdrop, it presided over ten years of continuous growth, low infla-
tion, modest interest rates, and what had become by early 2007 the second-lowest
unemployment level in the European Union. Rhetorically, and in many of its actions,
New Labour’s economic success was premised on acceptance of the constraints
of an open international economy. During Labour’s first term of office, Gordon
Brown insisted that there was no room for a discretionary macroeconomic policy
by immediately giving the Bank of England operational independence and, in 1998,
enshrining fiscal prudence in a Code for Fiscal Stability. For the first term anyway,
Brown made macroeconomic decisions according to rules as if the government were
a non-political agent of a new economic consensus (Burnham 2001). Those, like Ed
Balls, who theorized Labour’s approach justified it as ‘open macro-economics in an
open economy’ (Balls 1998). On the supply side, the government accepted from the
outset what were said to be the constraints of the existing structures of the British
economy in relation to the international economy, and looked to exploit Britain’s
existing comparative advantages in openness and labour market flexibility rather than
attempting to establish an indigenous investment ethic around the manufacturing
sector. International openness, in New Labour economic thinking, has been an asset
rather than a problem to escape. As Gordon Brown put it in his 2006 Mansion House
speech, ‘we can demonstrate that just as in the 19th century industrialization was
made for Britain, in the twenty first century globalization is made for Britain too’
(Brown 2006).
902 helen thompson
By Labour’s third term in office, New Labour’s policies had reinforced the inter-
nationalization of the British economy across a wide range of areas. In 2005, Britain
absorbed more FDI than the United States, and FDI constituted 45 per cent of Gross
Fixed Capital Formation, compared to an average of 16.1 per cent across the EU and
an average for all developed economies of just 8 per cent (UN Conference on Trade
and Development 2006). In contrast to furious political debates in other developed-
economy states about foreign ownership, including the United States, at no time
since 1997 has the New Labour government made a serious issue of this matter. Most
symbolically, in 2005, it accepted without fuss the acquisition of the assets of the last
British-owned car manufacturing company by the Chinese firm Nanjing Automobile
Group. Meanwhile the government’s immigration policies have been more open to
highly skilled migrants than the United States since 2001, and to foreign labour
generally than most other EU states, producing more than 600,000 new workers
since 2004. 7 This has reinforced the flexibility of British labour markets and prob-
ably acted as an anti-inflationary wage discipline in certain sectors. Perhaps most
revealingly, the financial and services sectors have become more, not less, important
to the British economy since 1997. From 1997 to 2006 manufacturing growth totalled
4.5 per cent compared to 36.8 per cent for the financial and service sectors (HM
Treasury n.d.).
New Labour’s embrace of the financial sector and Britain’s traditional comparative
advantages in international openness have been crucial to the growth of the economy
over the past decade given the continuing weakness of the manufacturing sector. It
also remains central to Britain’s balance of payments. In 2005 the financial sector
contributed £19 billion of net exports compared to a deficit in traded goods of £68
billion (Brown 2006; HM Treasury n.d.). When New Labour came to power, London’s
position as the premier European financial centre appeared vulnerable. The prospect
of the euro’s arrival excited many in Frankfurt to believe that they could take business
from London when London had already been damaged by the early 1990s recession
that hit the financial sector hard and the collapse of Barings. By Labour’s third term
London had not only seen off the threat of Frankfurt but re-established itself at New
York’s expense as the pre-eminent financial centre in the world, enjoying the biggest
share of international bond markets, over-the-counter derivatives, foreign exchange
turnover, and cross-border bank lending (Economist 2007c). More foreign banks
operate now in London than in any other city, and six of the ten largest international
law firms are located in London (Brown 2006). The government’s own approach to
the financial sector was instrumental to London’s success. Early in the first term,
Brown moved to change the regulatory environment in which the City operates,
creating a single regulator, the Financial Services Authority, which quickly established a
reputation for ‘light-touch’ regulation. When in 2002, in the wake of Enron’s downfall,
the United States’ Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act tightening accountancy
regulation for American companies, London as a market for new listings pulled
significantly ahead of New York. Since 2003 a growing number of American start-up
7
See OECD (2006).
national economic policy 903
companies have chosen to list on the Alternative Investment Market (AIM), which has
a market-driven governance regime, rather than the NASDAQ Stock Market where
Sarbanes-Oxley rules apply. The New Labour government has, meanwhile, proved
just as at ease with the growing foreign ownership of large City firms as of significant
parts of the manufacturing sector.
Given the magnitude of New Labour’s electoral success and the intellectual cri-
tique developed by the left, and the social and economic fallout, of the Thatcher
governments’ embrace of openness, it is not surprising that much of the academic
debate about New Labour has focused on whether Brown’s economic management
was a missed opportunity for national economic renewal. This debate has been
shaped by different theoretical understandings about just what globalization means
for economic policy in any state and indeed how far the international economy is
globalized at all. If New Labour has turned its back on creating the kind of develop-
mental state that might boost indigenous investment and non-orthodox economic
policies, was this a necessity produced by the prudence that the openness of the
international economy requires of all states, or a contingent and erroneous political
judgement for which New Labour can be reasonably censured? This question has
become for the left part of a larger one about the possibilities of social democracy
in today’s international economy, with some arguing that this kind of politics is
simply no longer viable in a world in which capital is so mobile (Gray 1998), and
others insisting that the international economy is far less policy prescriptive than the
globalization thesis supposes (Garret 1998; 2000; Pierson 2002; Hay 2000). For those
who are pessimistic about the prospects for social democracy today, New Labour’s
economic policy has been either grounded in a clear understanding of the structural
limits created by the openness of the international economy (Wickham-Jones 1997),
or operated in the shadow of the historical failure to create a developmental state at
a moment when the international economy was conducive to such a strategy (Coates
2002). For the more optimistic, New Labour has imprisoned itself. As a matter of
its own political judgement, it has chosen to cultivate mythological global economic
constraints that do not exist. For Colin Hay in particular, there has been a culpable
failure to restore an indigenous investment ethic to British capitalism and to use fiscal
policy as a counter-cyclical tool in an international economy in which there remains
the discretion to act in these ways (Hay 1999; 2004; Watson 2002; Watson and Hay
2003).
This debate has some of the same limitations as that around the Thatcher
governments, focused as much of it is somewhere between normative aspiration and
political explanation. But regardless of whether prescriptive judgement can offer much
to political explanation, both the optimists and the pessimists are right that the New
Labour governments have left some of the old weaknesses of the British economy
untouched. Unit labour costs in the manufacturing sector have risen by more than
the G7 average in every year since 1997 (HM Treasury n.d.). Meanwhile productivity
remains low. The annual increase in productivity from 1997 to 2005 has been lower
than Germany’s and the United States’ in every year but one, and in absolute terms
in GDP created per hour worked, Britain lags behind the USA, Germany, and France
904 helen thompson
(HM Treasury n.d.; OECD 2006). Whilst the Treasury’s 2000 paper promised policies
to increase investment in physical and human capital and promote innovation and
research and development (HM Treasury 2000), a range of initiatives has reaped little
reward. On investment, the British economy fares little better with Gross Fixed Capital
Formation as a percentage of GDP behind Germany, France, and Italy for the whole
period from 1997 (HM Treasury n.d.). And even the fall in unemployment disguises
a substantial rise in the number of people claiming incapacity benefit since 1997. The
crucial question is how consequential these indicators suggesting continuing relative
failure are in practice. On investment they may be less significant than those who
saw this weakness as central to Britain’s previous relative economic decline believe.
The service sector is less capital intensive than manufacturing, and consequently
continuing growth is less dependent on investment. Elsewhere in today’s world
economy, the relationship between investment and growth does not suggest that low
investment is necessarily a liability. For example, between 1997 and 2006 investment
as a percentage of GDP has been between 11.9 and 7.1 per cent lower in the United
States than in Japan but American growth has been higher in every single year (HM
Treasury n.d.). Nonetheless, Britain’s sizeable current account deficit which rose from
£0.8 bn in 1997 to £29.5 bn in 2005, or 0.1 per cent of GDP to 2.2 per cent of GDP
(HM Treasury n.d.), and is a symptom of Britain’s low investment and low savings
economy, is a serious long-term vulnerability. Whilst this deficit has been financed
with some ease for the past decade, even the Americans have found that a burgeoning
current account deficit eventually diminishes the external value of the currency and
is likely to put upward pressure on interest rates at domestically awkward moments.
If Britain’s current account deficit eventually places sterling under strain, a whole set
of external economic questions that have been laid to rest for more than a decade will
resurface.
Yet if these potential weaknesses are in part the consequence of a supply-side
approach that left the structure of the British economy much as New Labour found
it, the government’s macroeconomic policies have been more politically distinctive.
During the first term, as Peter Burnham has described it, Brown succeeded through
a strategy of depoliticization born out of an understanding of the consequences for
incoming centre-left governments of open short-term capital flows and the political
problems that macroeconomic policy caused to previous post-war governments. By
giving operational independence to the Bank of England, and setting fiscal rules in
1997 that allowed the government to borrow only to invest to keep national debt
at a prudent level, the government set out to establish its governing competence by
lowering expectations about what it could deliver and differentiating itself from the
approaches of not just previous Labour governments but reckless Conservative ones
too (Burnham 2001; Butler and Flinders 2005).
However, the depoliticization strategy allowed for more political discretion than
originally met the eye. In stark contrast to the terms on which the euro was created,
the framework for monetary policy allowed politicians to determine the inflation
target. Operational independence for the Bank of England did not deny the validity
national economic policy 905
of political debate about short- to medium-term trade-offs between inflation and
growth. In eschewing the euro and making clear that he regarded Britain’s monetary
model as superior to the subordination of all political judgement to the supremacy of
price stability, Brown was explicitly rejecting any notion that the current international
economy prescribes specific monetary policies.
On the fiscal side, even during the first term, the government’s tax policies con-
tained elements that would have been deemed risky if one started from the premise
that anything that smacked of redistributive tendencies or of penalizing business
would be punished in the financial markets, not least the windfall tax on the pri-
vatized utilities and the end of tax relief on the dividends of company pension
funds. 8 After the 2001 election, Brown appeared to jettison his earlier strategy of
depoliticizing important parts of fiscal policy in several respects. In 2003 he raised
National Insurance contributions. He also allowed Britain to move from having the
third-lowest rate of corporation tax among the EU’s old members in 1996 to the
sixth highest by 2006 (Economist 2006). Meanwhile public expenditure grew in real
terms by 4.6 per cent a year from 2000–1 to 2006–7, which was more than 170 per
cent the rate of average growth during the same period. This serious boost to public
expenditure was paid for by borrowing as well as rising taxes. Having established a
budget surplus during the first term, the Chancellor allowed borrowing to rise to 2.8
per cent of GDP by 2007 (Economist 2007b). There is a serious argument to be made,
as Clift and Tomlinson have done, that the sum of New Labour’s fiscal policy has been
decidedly Keynesian in approach. 9
As fiscal depoliticalization has unwound, it has become increasingly clear that the
New Labour government has wanted to redistribute wealth. This has been disguised
by the form redistribution has taken. Without any increase in the top rate of taxation,
few of Brown’s tax moves have hurt the rich. They have taken money away from
middle-income earners in the South-East, who have found themselves above the 40
per cent threshold for income tax as earnings have risen, and given it to the working
poor with children. In part this might seem a response to the supposed constraints of
the international economy on the top rate of income tax, but it is also at least as much
the product of the specific electoral geography that put New Labour in power.
48.3 New Labour’s Political Success
in Economic Policy
.............................................................................................................................................
Crucially, in its political consequences, New Labour’s economic policy was for ten
years extremely successful judged by any standards from the past century. It turned
8 9
See Clift (2002). Clift and Tomlinson (2007). For a critique of this argument see Hay (2007).
906 helen thompson
the economy into Labour’s primary electoral advantage for two consecutive general
elections and was the basis of the party’s claim to governing competence. 10 This was
despite the fact that various of the government’s moves, not least over pensions,
created the kind of problems for a section of the population that earlier Labour
governments would probably not have survived unscathed. In crucial ways, New
Labour both found and made the economy less politically problematic than any
governing party since the introduction of full-franchise representative democracy
after the First World War.
Perhaps most surprisingly given the Conservatives’ travails with ERM member-
ship, the New Labour government turned Britain’s non-participation in the euro into
virtually a non-issue. From 1919 to the late 1990s, sterling stood at the centre of British
politics. Much of the story of both internal political crisis and external decline can
be told through the fate of sterling. From the gold standard crisis of 1931 that tore
MacDonald’s Labour government apart to the destruction of the Conservatives’ six-
decade-long electoral dominance in the wreckage of the ERM in 1992, sterling has
had the capacity not only to undo governments but in its consequences to shape
the political landscape for a generation. From the humiliation of Suez in 1956 after
Eisenhower terminated American support for sterling to the fallout of Black Wednes-
day for ratification of the Maastricht treaty in 1993, it has also had the ability to derail
a government’s foreign policy. New Labour inherited impending non-membership of
the euro, and did not have the time, if it had so wished, to reverse course by January
1999 when monetary union began. With London’s position as the premier European
financial centre threatened by Frankfurt, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown always likely
to disagree on the issue, and any overt uncertainty risking speculation in the foreign
exchange markets, how to handle sterling was a potential minefield for the Labour
government.
From the onset, however, Brown found considerable room to manoeuvre. Despite
Blair’s efforts, especially after 2001, to turn the issue into one of general EU pol-
icy, Brown was able to retain Treasury control over the issue and block the Prime
Minster’s desire to make macroeconomic policy adjust to his ambition for greater
British influence within the Union. 11 Brown’s five tests for membership were polit-
ically driven, but the sheer weight of the economic facts gave Brown ammunition
that ultimately Blair could not counter with non-economic considerations. The
problems of the major euro-zone economies between 2000 and 2005, and the clear
political difficulties of the one-size-fits-all interest rate policy demanded by the single
currency when British interest rates were already on a different trajectory to the
Continent, made the prospect of jettisoning the existing monetary framework a
tremendous risk. 12 Having avoided even the hint of a financial crisis around sterling,
Brown could insist that the context of macroeconomic policy would be decided by
10 11
See Wickham-Jones (2002); Butler and Kavanagh (2005). See Peston (2005).
12
See Sinclair (2007).
national economic policy 907
macroeconomic considerations, and in rejecting Blair’s overtures to membership,
Brown freed exchange rate policy from the eighty-year-old shackles of aspirations
to international monetary status, imperial ambitions, and the illusory temptations
of European influence without sufficient common interests with one of Germany or
France. 13
Whilst there remains for some a plausible economic case for membership, 14 there
is a more plausible case against it. This goes back to some of the enduring difficulties
of British national economic policy in an open international economy in which
monetary power lies elsewhere, and where in a range of political contexts British
governments have had to try to accommodate themselves to decisions made by others
that impact on sterling as in 1926, 1947, 1956, and 1992. The euro will always be
something that Britain can join only on monetary terms that were agreed by others.
That was already true in 1997 but any British government that now wished to enter
the euro-zone would have to abandon sterling after the New Labour government
had spent a decade demonstrating that the way of the European Central Bank is
not the only way, and indeed perhaps far from the best way, to conduct monetary
policy for developed economies in a world of open short-term capital flows. The
New Labour government has not just coped with the euro issue for itself but set
effective political constraints on the context of macroeconomic management for
future governments.
The paradox of New Labour’s political success in economic policy over a decade
was that it became so comprehensive that it was for a long time taken for granted. It
carried the government through a second re-election in 2005 despite an unpopular
war that drained the Prime Minister’s credibility with a significant section of the
electorate. Until Brown’s tribulations as Prime Minister after he botched the election
of the autumn of 2007 that wasn’t, it left the Conservatives with no clear idea of
how to exploit the economy as part of a strategy to reclaim power and govern in a
different kind of way. Even after Brown gifted them a second chance, the Conserva-
tives seem unlikely in the run-up to the next general election to offer significant tax
cuts beyond inheritance tax, or promise to spend much less, or abandon the legal
framework for monetary policy, any more than they would seek to reconstruct an
indigenous manufacturing sector or regulate labour markets more tightly. Even if
the performance of the economy in 2008 costs Labour the next election, Labour’s
success still exhausted most of the substantive party-political debate about economic
policy after at least forty years when the two main parties have battled bitterly on
this territory. That for over a decade the Labour Party had come to assume that the
economy was unequivocally safe political territory for the party and that this was a
natural state of political affairs was, in historical perspective, a rather extraordinary
development.
13
On the European dimension see Bulpitt (1996).
14
Kettell (2004); Hay (2003). But cf. Hay, Smith, and Watson (2006).
908 helen thompson
48.4 National Discretion, the End
of Decline, and the International
Economy
.............................................................................................................................................
British national economic policy had to be understood within the constraints and
opportunities fashioned by the international economy long before the globalization
fetish made this a fashionable insight. This does not mean, however, that there is no
debate to be had about national economic alternatives, or that the actions of British
governments over the past two decades should be understood as inevitable responses
to an international economy in which Britain has found a circumscribed role. For
different domestic political purposes, both the Conservative and New Labour gov-
ernments exercised considerable macroeconomic discretion whilst doing little to try
to change the structure of the British economy. Whilst the foreign exchange mar-
kets and the failure to find a credible underpinning for exchange rate policy finally
curtailed the monetary and fiscal discretion of the Thatcher governments, the Major
government after 1993 and New Labour were both more prudent and more fortunate.
In May 1995, with sterling floundering, the Major government’s post-ERM monetary
policy was in some difficulty. But after the minutes of the Monthly Monetary Meeting
revealed that the Chancellor, Kenneth Clarke, had ignored the advice of the Governor
of the Bank of England to raise interest rates, sentiment in the foreign exchange
markets suddenly hitched sterling to an upwardly floating dollar, and the pressure
for higher interest rates to prop up sterling abated (Elgie and Thompson 1998: 87–9).
Similarly, the New Labour government has escaped any consequences for sterling of
the burgeoning current account deficit for reasons that would seem to have more
to do with the dollar’s weakness than any permanent indifference of investors in the
present international economy to current account weakness. Although this fortune
may well not last, and sterling may yet come once again to haunt British politicians as
a constraint on economic policy, any government of either party has acute domestic
political incentives to enjoy it whilst it does, regardless of what many regard as the
damaging consequences of the present structure of the British economy that the
current account weakness reflects.
Whilst relative economic decline is over, important aspects of the exceptional-
ism that was frequently held responsible for it remain. After a decade of centre-
left government, Britain still has both a heavily internationalized economy and one
that is in part removed from the core of the European Union. It is neither like the
economy of other EU states nor, despite the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon capitalism,
like that of the United States, where trade and Foreign Direct Investment are a far
less significant proportion of GDP (Economist 2007a) and technologically-advanced
manufacturing production is much more important. It stands unabashedly out-
side the euro-zone, and conducts monetary policy in a unique legal framework.
After the failed attempt to achieve at least macroeconomic convergence with the
other EU economies through the ERM and the option of opting in to monetary
national economic policy 909
union, successive governments of different parties appear to have laid to rest any
notion of strategic restructuring via the EU. They have also presided over what is
still an increasing internationalization of the British economy without producing
a significant backlash in domestic politics against globalization of the kind that in
different ways is firmly part of American, French, and Japanese domestic politics, and
has some echo in German and Italian. The internationalized nature of the British
economy may well have some serious deleterious long-term consequences, especially
given the financial sector’s consumption of so much scientific and engineering talent.
However, it could only be undone by a government with a comprehensive agenda
for domestic economic, cultural, and educational change that would severely test the
limits of where the discretion for significant supply-side restructuring for developed-
country states in the present international economy now lie. It would also be a serious
domestic risk for either party in government when one finally found a way of making
a political success of economic policy from a sustained period of relative economic
achievement in a polity in which for more than eighty years this seemed extremely
difficult and for much of the time impossible.
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Economy, 45/2: 113–32.
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c h a p t e r 49
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E U RO PE A N
ECONOMY
.................................................................................................................
ben clift
49.1 European Economy and
Comparative Capitalisms
.............................................................................................................................................
The broad distinction between more regulated Continental (European) capitalism
and more free-market-oriented Anglo-American capitalism is a powerful undercur-
rent of nearly all discussion of economic policy-making in Europe. In the 1980s,
Delors’s ‘European model of society’ (1992: 157–8) championed a European variety
of capitalism better able to reconcile economic liberalism and social justice than an
Anglo-Saxon neoliberal Thatcherite British ‘other’ (Wincott 2003: 288). The British
political economy, despite its geographical proximity to Europe, continues to be
characterized by its typological proximity to US capitalism. Between them, these
two form the archetypes of the ‘liberal market economy’ (LME) (Hall and Soskice
2001), with a limited role for the state, decentralized wage bargaining, and reliance on
market mechanisms as the organizing principle within capitalism.
As such, the British political economy is closely aligned with the liberal polit-
ical economic model which has in part driven the process of European eco-
nomic integration since the 1980s. In the realms of financial market liberalization,
privatization, deregulation, and opening up of markets, the UK was ahead of
the European game. As a result, the British political economy has been able to
adapt with relative ease to these aspects of the Single Market programme. Britain
has also opted out of the euro, guaranteeing enduring macroeconomic policy
autonomy.
european economy 913
However, EU economic governance has always been a complex, multifaceted amal-
gam. Liberal market-oriented elements akin to the UK model, many enshrined in
the Single European Market, coexist with social solidarity and redistributive ele-
ments, more reminiscent of Continental European models of regulated capitalism.
Both are institutionalized within European economic governance. It is discomfort
with the more generous social minima of many Continental conceptions of the
European social model, and regulatory aspects of European coordinated capitalism,
which explains the highly charged European economic policy debate within British
politics.
These debates are either explicitly or implicitly situated within the ‘models of cap-
italism’ frame of reference, pitting liberal British capitalism against a more regulated,
coordinated Continental European capitalism. A second, related, conceptual framing
of European economic policy debates is the nature of (and conceptions of neces-
sary reform to) the ‘European social model’. The chapter challenges the analysis
and assumptions underpinning the prevailing analysis and prescription (diagnosis
and cure) for European economic reform within British politics. These two discur-
sive framings inform and shape the relationship between British politics and the
European political economy. The British tendency is to assert the superiority of its
capitalism (and social model) in terms of economic performance, and degree of
‘fit’ with the global economy. On the back of this, there is a proselytizing desire
to redescribe (reinvent) the European political economic space in the UK image.
This explains successive UK governments’ civilizing mission to ‘modernize’ the
European political economic space (in the UK image) to respond to globalization’s
challenges.
This account questions the view that the reason for weaker economic performance
on the Continent is insufficiently flexible labour markets, and the assumed necessity
of reform along ‘British’ lines. Secondly, it problematizes the notion of the British
model’s superiority, especially in relation to inequality. Analysis explores the clash of
capitalisms and social models within the implementation, successes, and failings of
the ‘Lisbon agenda’. The relation between welfare state regime and economic perfor-
mance is examined, before considering attempts to tackle unemployment through
‘flexicurity’ reforms to labour market institutions, and the framing and content of
macroeconomic policy.
49.2 European Economic Governance
and The ‘Clash of Capitalisms’
.............................................................................................................................................
Attempts at European economic policy reform should be interpreted against a
backdrop of the ‘clash of capitalisms’ (Callaghan and Hoepner 2005; Hoepner and
Shafer 2007), crystallizing into ‘contending conceptions of the internal market’ and
914 ben clift
‘contending conceptions of capitalism in Europe’. The resultant ideological struggle
pits ‘the neoliberal project’ against ‘regulated capitalism’ and Europe as an ‘organized
[economic] space’ (Hooghe and Marks 1999: 74–9, 82–91; Wincott 2003: 292–4). The
role, nature, and logic of state regulation is one battleground. For example, the EU
takeover directive (inspired by the UK’s ‘City Code’) ignited this ‘clash of capitalisms’.
The directive was perceived on the continent (notably in Germany) as enshrining an
excessively ‘Anglo-Saxon’ view of takeover as a necessary discipline against inefficient
management which ignored valued European corporate governance traditions. This,
and some none too subtle ‘divide and conquer’ tactics by the European Commission
(EC) seeking to isolate Germany, explain its failure in 2001 (Callaghan and Hoepner
2005. The subsequent 2004 directive avoided asserting that Anglo-Saxon capitalism
was ‘better’, which appeased opposition at the expense of emasculating the directive
(Clift 2009).
Important ammunition in this capitalism ‘versus’ capitalism skirmish is provided
by stylized facts summarizing relative economic and employment performance.
Higher growth and lower unemployment in the decade preceding the 2008 crisis in
Britain (and the USA) compared to most of Continental Europe thus nourished the
‘clash of capitalisms’ axis. The reason, extrapolated from this observation, is that the
more nimble, flexible, liberal model adapts better to international competition. The
European economy is weaved into the UK political narrative as an undesirable other
in terms of its organizing political-economic principles. This informs a proselytizing
desire to reinvent the European political-economic space along UK lines. Yet New
Labour’s ‘hubristic interpretation of the domestic record’ (Hopkin and Wincott 2006)
requires interrogation. Such interpretations, especially when told by policy elites
advocating a particular course of action, need careful unpicking because they are
painted with broad brush strokes and are selective in their inclusion of yardsticks
by which success is judged.
Firstly, Blair plays fast and loose with his comparative statistical evidence, noting
for example that European productivity is inferior to US levels, neglecting to mention
French and German superiority to UK productivity levels (Blair 2005; contrast with
UK Treasury 2001: 20; Taylor 2005: 200–1). Another neglected statistic in UK success
storytelling is the UK ‘trade gap’ and its deteriorating balance of payments position.
This is because the UK balance of payments position over the last two decades has
been dire and is getting worse (Clift and Tomlinson 2008). The UK current balance in
2006 showed a deficit of $79.85 billion, whilst the German economy enjoyed a surplus
of $146 billion (OECD 2007).
If, synchronically, at a given point in time, the construction of a comparative
economic success story needs unpacking, then diachronically, across time, still further
nuance is required. For example, in the mid-1990s, after comparatively strong eco-
nomic performance by ‘coordinated economies’, notably Germany, Blair and others
were enviously eyeing the economic institutions, welfare state, and labour market
norms of Continental capitalism, convinced of their superiority. This was the crux of
the ‘stakeholder’ debate which preceded (by only a year) the election of the first New
Labour government in 1997 (Kelly, Kelly, and Gamble 1997).
european economy 915
The difficulty is that economic success comes and goes, but the institutions of
capitalism are enduring, and change only incrementally. This illustrates the dangers
of inferring direct causal performative significance from these capitalist institutions,
which cannot be the only independent variable acting upon economic performance
(see Coates 2000). Evidence amongst developed countries indicates that the insti-
tutional impact on performance is secondary, but that institutions do have a key
impact on distribution of income (Clift and Perraton 2004), a point to which we
shall return. Thus the characterization of Europe as stagnating and ridden with high
unemployment because of excessive labour market rigidities does not do justice to
the complexity of European economic experience, nor is it likely to stand the test of
time.
For example, Germany in the mid-to-late 1990s has been portrayed as the ‘sick man
of Europe’, encompassing all that is wrong with coordinated social market economies
(sluggish growth and high unemployment). Recently, however, the German econ-
omy has shown strong growth, burgeoning exports, and improving employment
performance, with unemployment dropping from 9.5 in 2005 to 8.4 per cent in
2006 (OECD 2007). Some argue Germany is re-emerging ‘like a phoenix from the
flames’ as the ‘economic motor’ of Europe (Créel and Le Cacheux 2006: 10). Whilst
we should be equally sceptical of over-exuberance about the German economy, the
ebullient self-confidence of UK policy elites in advocating (Anglo-Saxon) ‘solutions’
to European economic problems should be tempered. As Blanchard’s impressive
survey of European unemployment policy notes, ‘the history of the last 30 years is
a series of love affairs with sometimes sad endings, first with German and German-
like institutions—until unemployment started increasing in the 1990s—then with
the United Kingdom and the Thatcher–Blair reforms, then with Ireland and the
Netherlands and the role of national agreements, and now with the Scandinavian
countries, especially Denmark, and its concept of “flexisecurity” ’ (Blanchard 2006:
45). Should the worldwide economic downturn which began in 2008 undermine
Danish economic and unemployment performance, this may dampen the ardour
with which European economic policy elites have embraced ‘flexicurity’. The depth
of recession in the UK and US economies has certainly damaged faith in the liberal
model.
49.3 European Welfare Capitalisms
.............................................................................................................................................
The urge to cluster political economies into types and models exerts a power-
ful gravitational pull on comparative political economists. Thus alongside differ-
ent varieties of capitalist institutions, there are several ‘worlds’ of welfare state
institutions (Esping Andersen 1990). The number of identifiable European clusters
is disputed, but oft-identified welfare capitalism types include the ‘Nordic’, Con-
tinental/Bismarkian’, ‘liberal’, and ‘Mediterranean’ poles (Pierson 2001; Hemerijck
and Ferrera 2004; Ferrera, Hemerijck, and Rhodes 2000). It is a peculiarity of
916 ben clift
sub-disciplinarity within contemporary comparative political economy that, with a
small number of honourable exceptions (e.g. Stevens and Huber 2001), the rich liter-
atures on comparative capitalisms and comparative welfare states do not, as a matter
of course, ‘speak to’ each other. This is problematic because both analyse ‘welfare
capitalism’.
There are too few attempts to explore the interrelationship between comparative
capitalisms and welfare institutions and policy, or indeed comparative welfare state
theorizing. Yet, on the ground, the European ‘clash of capitalisms’ is echoed within a
clash of social models. The variety of welfare state ‘families’ feeds clashing conceptions
of the correct shape and trajectory of a singular asserted notional European social
model. Relationships between employment policy and social policy initiatives and
economic and employment outcomes remain contested. The ability of each welfare
capitalism type to combine economic competitiveness and social justice is variously
decried and lauded. Always infused with a strong normative element, the European
social model’s beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. Each discussion has in mind a
particular configuration, and a particular trajectory for its evolution. This explains
the absence of either an agreed definition of the European social model, or an agreed
blueprint for its evolution.
The identification of four welfare state ‘families’ (Hemerjick and Ferrera 2004: 252)
begs the question whether there are specific trajectories in the changing global polit-
ical economy for particular welfare families. Scholars have explored the ‘goodness
of fit’ between different sets of welfare policies, programmes, and institutions and
changing conditions of complex economic interdependence. An initial hypothesis
was that globalization was bearing down on all welfare states with equal force, induc-
ing retrenchment of programmes and convergence on minimalist neoliberal welfare
norms (see Schwartz 2001 for a discussion and critique).
This crude conception of the relation between globalization and welfare provi-
sion (assuming more minimal provision is a necessary condition of international
economic competitiveness) underpins the UK government’s vision for the future
shape and trajectory of the European social model. The accuracy of such assump-
tions has rightly been questioned. Closer empirical inspection showed that welfare
state retrenchment pressures had been overstated (see Swank 2002; Hobson 2003;
Hay 2006). Subsequent studies suggested that such retrenchment as is occurring
within European welfare states is distributed differently across different welfare state
clusters. This indicates differential vulnerability of extant EU welfare state ‘clusters’.
Significantly, the liberal model is not alone in (fairly) successfully navigating the
choppier waters of increasing economic interdependence. The (more generous and
more egalitarian) Nordic model is fairing well, too. ‘Bismarckian’ welfare states, on
the other hand, face greater retrenchment pressures (Hay 2006: 9–13; Sapir 2006;
Palier 2007).
Social rights are at the core of any welfare state regime. Looking at social rights
to unemployment insurance, sick pay, and public pensions, analysed in terms of
replacement rates and coverage, Scruggs assesses levels of benefits, duration of ben-
efits, and conditions necessary to qualify for and gain access to benefits. In this way
european economy 917
he unearths ‘social programme dynamics’ with more nuance than crude spending
measures can, enabling a more fine-grained assessment of ‘welfare state resiliency’
(Scruggs 2006: 349–50). Evolutions in aggregate spending levels can conceal sig-
nificant changes in the logic and character of welfare state provision. Analysis of
evolving European social rights leads Scruggs to reject unambiguously the notion
of a ‘race to the bottom’ (2006; see also Hobson 2003). Retrenchment (for example of
replacement rates) is a reality in all welfare states, and this retrenchment is greater in
the most generous social democratic welfare states (Scruggs 2006: 355). However, ‘it
is worth noting that all of these (social democratic) countries had higher expected
benefits in 2002 than in 1972’ (Scruggs 2006: 362). The story is a complex one;
‘while welfare state programmes are more generous than they were a generation ago,
there has been a shift away from expanding entitlements and towards retrenchment’
(Scruggs 2006: 362).
Significantly, New Labour’s other core assertion, that ‘Anglo-Saxon’ capitalism and
welfare institutions display more compatibility with globalization, is also inaccurate.
The relatively generous Nordic welfare states display superior compatibility with
globalization than the UK; ‘by some conventional analyses, all of Scandinavia should
have long ago collapsed under the weight of its public spending. Yet in 2005, three
of the four most competitive economies in the world, according to the Global Com-
petitiveness Index, were in Scandinavia; the United States is the other one’ (Scruggs
2006: 349).
Thus the British superiority complex is built upon decidedly shaky foundations
as the impact of the 2008 credit crunch and recession have demonstrated. This is
especially true in terms of the ‘welfare properties’ of British capitalism. The Joseph
Rowntree foundation’s 2007 report on changing wealth distribution in Britain over
the last forty years found that Britain is regressing towards inequality levels last seen
more than forty years ago. Indeed, the ‘breadline poor’ represented 23 per cent of the
population in 1970; this dropped in the 1970s, but rose to 27 per cent by 2000 (Dorling
et al. 2007: 16). Glyn notes, ‘differences between the most and least egalitarian OECD
countries have been and remain huge . . . unexciting sounding differences in Gini coef-
ficients measuring income inequality mask really enormous differences in distributive
patterns’ (2001: 6). In a West European context, the UK is a uniquely unequal society,
and this inequality has been exacerbated, not reduced, under thirteen years of New
Labour in government (Hopkin and Wincott 2006).
For all New Labour’s hubris about its ‘successes’ as an economic and social policy
model, there are dissenting voices. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for those analysts and pol-
icy elites contemplating reform within Bismarckian models, the more generous and
egalitarian Nordic model is a more attractive beacon than the UK (even if movement
towards either is unlikely given the complexity of welfare state restructuring—see
Pierson 1994). A common continental riposte to British hectoring over labour market
reform is that not all accept that realigning labour market institutions on the UK
model is a necessary condition of solving unemployment problems and achieving
growth. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that good employment performance
can be compatible with a variety of types of labour market, including those more
918 ben clift
regulated, and securing higher minimum standards, than the UK economy (Blan-
chard 2006; Hopkin and Wincott 2006). Sweden and Denmark are often invoked in
this context.
49.4 Labour Market Institutions
and Unemployment
.............................................................................................................................................
The political salience of welfare state reform has been augmented by persistent
high unemployment (and its fiscal consequences) in Europe. In this context, welfare
reform in the new European and global political economy becomes inseparable from
discussions of ‘appropriate’ labour market institutions, and their (un-)employment
effects. Dovetailing with New Labour’s underlying premises about the kinds of welfare
state compatible with globalization are assumptions about the necessary flexibiliza-
tion of labour markets. Here they align with a pillar of the dominant European
macroeconomic policy orthodoxy in the 1990s and early 2000s, whose essence was
distilled in the 1994 OECD Jobs Survey (Dostal 2004; OECD 1994). This prevailing
‘wisdom’ identified ‘labour market rigidities’ as the cause of persistent high unem-
ployment in Continental European countries, notably France, Germany, Italy, and
Spain (Blanchard 2006: 26).
Layard, Nickell, and Jackman (1991) had previously placed considerable emphasis
on the role of institutions in explaining high unemployment, yet it is the focus on
labour market institutions (and rigidities) to the exclusion of all else which is striking.
All unemployment, in this reading, is accounted for by excessive rigidities of labour
market institutions. The European Central Bank (ECB) explicitly aligns with this
compartmentalization of economic policy, seeing supply-side measures or ‘structural
reforms’ as the only option (Martin 2004: 24–7). Any role for macroeconomic policy
(or demand-side policy) in tackling unemployment is denied. New Labour anachro-
nistically align with this European consensus (for a critique see Hopkin and Wincott
2006: 53–5; Taylor 2005), despite combining demand- and supply-side approaches in
pursuing domestic full employment (see below).
As already noted, the empirical record does not support this simplistic reading.
The variety of recent employment experience across Europe (good and bad) does
not correlate with the variety of labour market regimes (less and more regulated).
Many mainstream economists agree that macroeconomic policy does have an impact
on unemployment. Blanchard, for example, explains how monetary policy (first
accommodating, then contractionary) helps account for the initial rise and long-
term duration of European unemployment in the 1970s and 1980s (2006: 21–3).
Even Financial Times economists note the excessive complacency in interpreting all
european economy 919
unemployment as resulting from labour market rigidities, and ignoring the possible
role of macroeconomic policy errors (Munchau 2006).
The labour market rigidity-unemployment causal assumption is confounded by
research offering little evidence of Continental labour market institutions increas-
ing aggregate unemployment levels (Nickell and Layard 1998), with differences in
unemployment protection ‘largely unrelated to differences in unemployment rates
across countries’ (Blanchard 2006: 30–1). Martin’s analysis finds that labour market
institutions did not have the impact on the NAIRU (the non-accelerating inflation
rate of unemployment) that some economics literature credits them with. He finds
‘no consistent relationship . . . between economic outcomes and labour market insti-
tutions’ (2004: 40), and little correlation between the extent of labour market reforms
and changes in the NAIRU. Labour market reform may, he concludes, help reduce
unemployment, alongside demand explanations. It is these interactions between
institutions and macroeconomic factors, assessing the relative weight to attach to
each, which is crucial.
Thus it is erroneous to assert (as New Labour does) that rigid labour market
‘equals’ poor economic performance and high unemployment. That is not to say that
labour market institutions may not benefit from reform, and that they may well be
one contributing factor (amongst many) to unemployment performance. Yet, as we
shall see when we look at ‘flexicurity’ debates, views differ on to what extent labour
market reform should erode job security, and the generosity and automaticity of ben-
efits. In short, how much social justice can be retained whilst seeking to reinvigorate
economic efficiency? The kind of labour and welfare institutions seen as ‘necessary’ in
a global economy in Britain are regarded as threatening cherished norms and acquis
sociaux in many European countries. Their defenders are comforted by countries like
Sweden and Denmark who have achieved success in a global economy without the
root and branch retrenchment of welfare and labour market flexibilization seen in
the UK since the early 1980s (Taylor 2005: 198).
49.5 Macroeconomic Policy,
Unemployment, and Political-
economic Ideas
.............................................................................................................................................
The 1994 OECD Jobs Survey approach takes a particular and very restrictive view
of the limits of the possible for macroeconomic policy in tackling unemployment.
Macroeconomic policy priorities have evolved in recent decades, with increasing
priority afforded to ‘stability’ (low inflation), and a decreasing conviction on the part
of policy-makers (in particular central bankers) that macroeconomic policy has an
active role to play in securing full employment. More unites European governments
920 ben clift
than divides them in their pursuit of macroeconomic policy. In terms of public
finances, within and outside the euro, all share the commitment to ‘sound’ public
finances and low inflation, deemed by all a necessary condition of economic credibil-
ity with deregulated financial markets (see e.g. Green-Pedersen, van Kersbergen, and
Hemerijck 2001: 309; SAP 2002).
The lessons drawn from earlier macroeconomic policy errors (such as the Lawson
boom of the 1980s, or Swedish policy in the 1980s and early 1990s—see Ryner 2000:
341–5; 2002: 150–3) is that activist macroeconomic policy, whilst potentially benefi-
cial, is also capable of doing considerable damage. Therefore ambitions are modest,
seeking to deliver stability as priority number one. This is often interpreted as an
‘abandonment’ of Keynesianism and an ‘embrace’ of neoliberalism or monetarism.
However, it makes sense to add more nuance, since elements taking inspiration
from both approaches are present within European policy mixes, and the quantities
put into the mix (and the policy infrastructure which delivers it) can vary cross-
nationally.
The euro’s institutional architecture has hindered the use of activist macroeco-
nomic policy in tackling long-term unemployment on the Continent. The ECB’s
view of the ‘appropriate’ (non-inflationary) growth rate of the euro-zone at 2–2.5
per cent assumes that monetary policy cannot have a (positive) impact on unem-
ployment without generating higher (and accelerating) inflation (Martin 2004: 24).
The UK, some European policy-makers have noted, has less unemployment and
a macro-policy infrastructure built on different assumptions which grants policy-
makers greater autonomy. This correlation may explain why UK policy elites’ desire
to provide a model for European fiscal and monetary policy governance finds a more
receptive audience than their welfare reform exhortations. Labour’s macroeconomic
policy approach is a pragmatic combination of monetarist ideas (particularly setting
targets for inflation) and New Keynesian ideas, particularly that policy activism can
improve economic performance (Annesley and Gamble 2003).
Gordon Brown established a rules-based macroeconomic policy framework con-
sistent with this outlook, characterized by Bank of England independence and stabil-
ity and credibility-centric fiscal ‘golden rules’ (Clift and Tomlinson 2004), a macro-
economic stance which nevertheless allows considerable scope for activism to support
full employment, notably through expansionary fiscal policy (Clift and Tomlinson
2007). For all the apparent ‘neoliberalism’ of New Labour, the UK’s ‘golden rules’ are
more supple and less draconian than the stability and growth pact (SGP), and the UK
stands on a more ‘Keynesian’ footing than do many of its euro-zone counterparts.
Indeed, New Labour’s fiscal activism in the early 2000s attracted both admiring
glances from some European governments and the disapproving glare of the Euro-
pean Commission (who took exception to New Labour breaching their 3 per cent
deficit target in 2001, 2002, and again in 2008). Gordon Brown attacked the ‘over-
narrow’ and ‘mechanistic’ interpretation of the SGP for taking insufficient account of
the economic cycle, public investment needs, and national debt levels.
At issue was the political economy model underpinning the economic architecture
of the euro. Many felt it drew too heavily from ‘monetarist’ orthodoxy, insufficiently
european economy 921
balanced by ‘Keynesian’ elements. As then Commission President Romano Prodi and
EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy attacked the SGP in 2002, the reform debate
gathered pace. This became a central issue in European politics between 2003 and
2005, when France and Germany exceeded SGP targets, heralding a crisis of European
economic governance. This was only resolved when the Commission and member
states secured an uneasy peace over a (much less restrictive) revised SGP in March
2005 offering more fiscal policy latitude to euro-zone economies (see Clift 2006).
Yet the appetite for reform of the euro’s economic policy architecture is not yet
sated. Once again, those advocating reform cast an approving eye upon British
monetary policy institutions. Many argue that the EU has to acquire institutions
ensuring a monetary and fiscal policy mix without a deflationary bias (Pisani-Ferry
2006). Part of the reason for high euro-zone unemployment may well lie with the
political-economic underpinnings of the euro, and the restrictive monetary policy
stance holding back growth (Martin 2004: 32–41; Ball 1999). Blanchard also ques-
tions assumptions by the ECB that low European inflation ‘proves’ that European
unemployment is at its ‘natural’ level, on which expansionary macroeconomic policy
cannot have a beneficial effect, except at the expense of (substantial and accelerating)
rises in inflation: ‘it may be that, in fact, an expansion of demand might decrease
unemployment without leading to steadily higher inflation’ (2006: 47).
In this light, the British model of an independent Bank of England with a symmet-
rical inflation target (in theory, at least, the central bank has to reflate the economy
if inflation falls too low) may be a step in the right direction. The rebalancing of
priorities between inflation and growth could alleviate the deflationary pressure of
the ECB (Pisani-Ferry 2006; Lamy and Pisani-Ferry 2002: 109–16; Martin 2004: 29).
By contrast, arguments for a ‘growth spurt’ induced in part by macroeconomic policy
to give an impulse to growth (and employment) (Ball 1999) fly in the face of the ECB’s
statutes which enshrine neoliberal orthodoxy on this point. Calls (from political
parties, trade unions, and employers’ organizations) for the ECB to change its statutes
to incorporate a priority for jobs and growth alongside its constitutional obligation
to keep inflation low continue to fall on deaf ears. In the meantime, more activist-
oriented European macroeconomic policy reformers may continue to gaze wistfully
over the Channel.
49.6 The Lisbon Process and European
Economic Reform: From Flexibility to
Flexicurity?
.............................................................................................................................................
If ECB monetary policy is unlikely to solve Europe’s unemployment problems, the
thinking goes, then social policy and labour market reforms will have to. Centrally
922 ben clift
focused on labour market and social policy, the Lisbon summit ambitiously commit-
ted to make Europe ‘the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy
by 2010 capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater
social cohesion’. This attempt to ‘operationalize’ the concept of the European social
model was launched in 2000 and relaunched in 2005 (Annesley 2007: 195–6; Daly
2006). The method to achieve this ‘Lisbon agenda’ was not ‘hard’ law (directives
and treaties) but the ‘open method of coordination’ (OMC), a ‘soft’ law approach
involving moral suasion, reporting, disseminating best practice, and benchmarking.
The OMC sees policy-making as involving ‘problem-solving and policy development
and learning through peer review, dialogue, soft incentives, normative reflection and
experimentation’ (Daly 2006: 466; Wincott 2003: 283).
The Lisbon process has been interpreted as an ‘interrogation of the orthodox asser-
tion that a “big trade-off ” exists between equity and efficiency’ (Hopkin and Wincott
2006: 51). There is a broad consensus on the need to scale back ‘passive’ welfare
provision spending which makes no discernible contribution to economic growth
(Annesley 2003; Bonoli, George, and Taylor-Gooby 2000). However, not all welfare
spending is tarred with the same brush. Ideas of ‘activation’ within employment
policy and social policy reform became widespread throughout Europe in the 1990s
and early 2000s and are at the heart of the Lisbon agenda (Vandenbroucke 2002).
This emphasis on ‘active’ welfare spending, and investment in human capital for-
mation through education and training, suggests a very different set of priorities for
social and labour market policy than the OECD’s Jobs Study. The Lisbon process has
political-economic foundations in ideas such as ‘supply side egalitarianism’, ‘compet-
itive solidarity’ (Streeck 1999), and ‘competitive corporatism’ (Rhodes 2001). Slightly
removed from the rigidity/flexibility dichotomy, the approach is more nuanced as to
the kind and degree of labour market reform desired, as well as its interrelationship
with other reforms.
The emergent employment-centred social policy consensus accepts ‘the market
and employment’ as ‘the primary loci of integration’ to solve social exclusion (Daly
2006: 469). It is, in welfare state literature terms, concerned with recommodification
(returning citizens to the labour market) not decommodification (Esping-Andersen
1990). Similar activation strategies have been pursued in many European countries,
including Denmark (Campbell and Pedersen 2007), France (Clasen and Clegg 2003),
Holland (Hemerjick and Visser 1997), and Portugal (Costa Lobo and Magalhaes 2004:
91–2) to name but a few, since the mid-to-late 1990s (see Bonoli and Powell 2004).
The European economic consensus should not be overstated, however. Concep-
tions of that ‘market’ differ widely in relation to its flexibility, and the degree of
generosity and redistribution of the regulatory institutions which frame it. Although
all champion employment-centred social policy, there are very different views on the
relative importance of flexibility and job security as policy objectives, and the inter-
action between activation and the distributive consequences of welfare policies. Thus
whilst all advocate activation, some remain more committed to redistribution than
others. This difference of view explains why more familiar social policy objectives,
such as redistribution, are ‘at best implicit’ in the objectives which underpin the
european economy 923
Lisbon process (Daly 2006: 470), and have been further marginalized in ‘Lisbon II’
since 2005.
The OMC provides opportunities in terms of ‘uploading’ social policy ideas. The
Blair governments sought to be the source, rather than recipient, of lessons on
social model reform. New Labour continued to drive home a particular framing
of European economic problems and challenges, and a (British) solution, placing
‘Britain at the leading edge of EU development, shaping its form, not “taking” policies
shaped elsewhere’ (Wincott 2003: 297). Most recently, this ‘uploading’ exercise has
been facilitated because New Labour’s ideas about the necessity of UK-style flexibility
to social model reform have found favour within an EC seeking to frame a pan-
European debate about ‘flexicurity’. The EC’s role within the OMC identifying and
disseminating ‘best practice’ (Keune and Jepsen 2007: 10; Casey and Gold 2005) gives
it significant discursive power. Through the EC’s deliberately narrow (New Labour-
esque) interpretation in seeking to develop an EU-wide set of flexicurity principles,
particular reform trajectories are prioritized, others marginalized (Keune and Jepsen
2007: 8).
Drawing on Dutch and more recently Danish experience, the mooted combi-
nation of flexibility and security within ‘flexicurity’ has been the central focus of
‘market-making’ regulatory social policy reform in recent years. Danish ‘flexicurity’
combines three elements in a context of increasing flexibility of work contracts and
work practices, as well as institutional decentralization of wage bargaining. Firstly,
there is limited private-sector employment protection (e.g. hiring and firing), and
thus high job mobility. Secondly, there are generous universal unemployment and
health insurance and other welfare benefits. These were increasingly closely tied to
employment seeking, levels were reduced, and eligibility restricted through reforms
in the 1990s. Thirdly, there are extensive retraining opportunities to help workers
acquire new skills, as well as assistance and support in locating new employment
opportunities (Campbell and Pedersen 2007: 316–19). This model’s combination of
welfare generosity with an ‘activating’ role for the state attracts admiring interest from
other European countries with high unemployment, such as France.
The fact that both poster children of flexicurity enjoyed employment rates 10 per
cent above the EU25 average has bolstered the case for the merits of flexicurity. The
support from academic studies, imparting causal significance to this correlation,
served to add a scientific, technical quality to EC discourse on flexicurity. However, its
appropriation and deployment by the EC was a deeply political process, emphasizing
the flexibility elements and downplaying welfare generosity. The EC interpretation
involves a very particular understanding of ‘security’. This in turn rests on a distinctive
conception of the European social model, and the relation between competitiveness,
flexibility, and social cohesion within it. The EC’s flexicurity agenda is framed, like
New Labour’s, by the perceived flexibility imperatives of labour market and welfare
reform in the global economy.
For the EC, flexicurity provides bridges between labour market situations of
employment, unemployment, and inactivity within ‘the increasingly transitional
nature of today’s labour market’ (CEC 2004: 159), whilst tackling problems of labour
924 ben clift
market segmentation and job precariousness. The key elements to deliver this are
work contracts providing adequate flexibility (i.e. facilitating hiring and firing), active
labour market policies, lifelong learning, and social security systems providing sup-
port during absence from the labour market and facilitating transition and mobility
(CEC 2006: 31, 39; Keune and Jepsen 2007: 12–13).
Significantly, job security is not a priority from an EC perspective, and dismissal
protection is deemed damaging to flexibility. It is people, not jobs, which are to be
protected. What the EC takes as the core of flexicurity is to prioritize increased mobil-
ity, use of non-standard employment, and reduced job protection. In the process, ‘old’
security will reduce, supplanted by ‘new’ security. The EC has redefined security, no
longer as ‘protection against risk’, but rather ‘the capacity to adapt to change by means
of a process of constant learning’ (Keune and Jepsen 2007: 15). The EC understands
flexibility primarily in terms of hiring and firing. The agenda which flows from this
is ‘a tightening of benefits schemes where they are “generous”, and a reduction of
employment protection’ (Keune and Jepsen 2007: 15). This erodes security (certainly
‘old’ security) without a ‘compensatory’ bolstering of redistributive provision miti-
gating the effects of labour market transition.
Since the Lisbon relaunch, adapting and specializing education and training sys-
tems and raising employment and employability have been increasingly central to the
agenda (Daly 2006: 466). As with ‘Lisbon II’ more broadly, social and redistribution
commitments are decreasingly visible within the EC’s flexicurity agenda. Given the
redefinition of security, the ‘balance’ between flexibility and security is decisively
skewed towards the flexibility side. The irony is that the OECD has, in the light of
evidence and analysis since its 1994 Job Study, departed from its myopic flexibility-
obsessed interpretation of labour markets and employment performance (OECD
2006: 96–100). The EC has moved onto precisely the terrain the OECD recently
vacated.
49.7 The European Social Model and
British Politics: ‘Uploading’ or
‘Downloading’?
.............................................................................................................................................
Whilst New Labour’s flexibility agenda has found favour with the EC, there is no
guarantee it will reshape the European political economy. The lack of agreement
and dissent from the relation between flexibility and economic and employment
performance espoused by New Labour and the EC is significant given the nature
of the OMC. In many member states, views depart from UK/EC norms over the
degree and nature of the emphasis on flexibility (and the status of job security as
a policy priority). Thus there has not been a seamless ‘uploading’ of the flexible LME
european economy 925
UK vision to the Lisbon agenda ‘mainframe’. New Labour’s attempt to shape the
future form of the European social model, whilst well aligned with the EC vision,
faces competition from other European visions and models which many deem more
attractive. British economic and social policy initiatives have to hold their own in
a battle of ideas. One’s policy record is a key weapon in this battle for ideas. Here,
given the poor inequality performance of the British social model, the UK policy
advocacy loses ground vis-à-vis Nordic variants. The Danish model, more than
New Labour, is evoked as the virtuous European path to ‘activating’ labour market
reform.
Another Nordic source of inspiration is the Swedish activation approach and the
‘adult worker model’ (AWM) in which ‘all adults—male and female, old and young,
abled and less-abled—are required to take formal employment to secure economic
independence’ (Annesley 2007: 196). This heralds an evolution away from the old
‘male breadwinner model’ (of which the post-war UK was a prime example) to an
‘emerging Europe-wide AWM’ seeking to integrate all economic inactive citizens—
be they women, older citizens, the disabled—into the labour market (Annesley
2007: 196–8). Within the European employment strategy, and the Lisbon process
more broadly, Annesley identifies (halting) progress towards a Swedish-inspired
‘supported’ AWM with state provision of, for example, childcare and parental leave
entitlements (2007: 199–202).
In practice, of course, no amount of enthusiasm for any of these models will induce
a high degree of convergence in social policy and labour market institutions and pro-
grammes across Western Europe. The differentiated labour market and welfare insti-
tutions, programmes, and histories are sedimented into their national landscapes.
The impact of EU economic governance on Europe’s social models involves the
complex interplay of endogenous and exogenous pressures, with ‘domestic’ ideational
and institutional variables playing a key mediating role (Featherstone 2004). The
prevailing depiction is of a differentiated ‘hybridization’ of Europe’s welfare and
labour market institutions, programmes, and policies (see Clift 2007).
The OMC highlights the limitations of the EU as a geological force eroding
national particularities. This has implications, of course, for the extent of change to
UK social and labour market policy induced by Europe. Many point to the lack of
‘teeth’ and change-inducing mechanisms within the OMC (Annesley 2007; Wincott
2003) and dissonance between the weakness of the Lisbon method and the very
ambitious Lisbon agenda (Sapir 2006: 386; Daly 2006: 478). Indeed, the OMC is
arguably little more than a ‘discursive bandwagon’ (Radaelli 2003: 32). Within the
OMC, Europeanization takes on a ‘voluntary form’ (Wincott 2003: 297), and national
policy elites choose to ‘learn’ those policy elements which align closest with their
existing practice.
Analyses of UK social policy in the 1990s and 2000s indicate hybridization, drawing
greater inspiration from both the USA (see e.g. King and Wickham-Jones 1999) and
the ‘growing influence of the European Union’s social policy agenda on the UK’
(Annesley 2003: 144), principally through signing up to EU social protocol (Annesley
2003: 158). EU influence is most evident on the industrial relations settlement, where
926 ben clift
there is evidence of UK realignment with European union recognition and employ-
ment and unfair dismissal rights norms (Taylor 1998).
The establishment of a national minimum wage was also a major structural change
for the UK labour market. Its original positive redistribution effect, Metcalf suggests,
was underestimated in most studies (1999: 184). After modest increases between 2002
and 2004, it was more dramatically increased in 2004–5, and by 6 per cent again in
October 2006 to £5.35; ‘according to DTI figures, these increases will improve the
pay of over 1.3 million low paid workers, the majority of whom are women’ (EIRO
2006a). The partial empowerment of employees vis-à-vis employers and improve-
ments in employee rights doubtless result from the ending of the opt-out to the EU
Social Chapter (Undy 1999: 332) and the acceptance of the Employment Chapter at
Amsterdam. Recalling Annesley’s AWM, there are ‘family friendly’ policies extending
rights to parental leave which are a direct result of the social chapter.
Yet the degree of change should not be overstated. A ‘pattern of initial rejection
of EU social legislation, followed by minimalist interpretation and implementation,
has repeated itself since 1997’ (Howell 2004: 8). Pierson and Liebfried (1995) point
to how the EU (through Commission activism and ECJ jurisprudence) is potentially
a powerful actor in welfare policy change, rendering member welfare states ‘semi-
sovereign’ (see also Ferrera 2005; Annesley 2003: 151–2). There is some evidence of
this in relation to working time. On rest periods, where the Commission felt UK
application invited non-compliance, the ECJ ruled in September 2006 that the UK
had ‘failed to fulfil its obligations under the directive, with the implication that the
government should amend the offending parts of the guidelines’ (EIRO 2006b). Yet
the degree of change induced by such rulings is limited, and the generalized opt-out
remains. This leaves the UK as an outlier in Europe, not least because of New Labour’s
unswerving commitment to labour market flexibility.
49.8 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
Underlying UK government understandings of the appropriate EU priorities of
economic and social policy reform have been conditioned by the hubristic, self-
congratulatory interpretation of the British social model, the British model of capi-
talism, and New Labour’s economic policy record between 1997 and 2007. Doubtless,
there have been conspicuously successful aspects to the policy record, but there are
clouds in the sky. The after-shocks of the sub-prime crisis (hitting the UK’s more
deeply financialized economy comparatively hard) have caused faltering growth and
eroding consumer confidence. The falling pound relative to the euro, and the ongoing
balance of payments deficit, beg further questions about the UK as Europe’s economic
success story. At present, international financial markets are sanguine about the
balance of payments deficit. However, it is clear that policy-makers do not control (and
european economy 927
possibly do not fully understand) the conditions under which that situation could
change. Increased uncertainty and the post-sub-prime global downturn could herald
a re-emphasis on ‘economic fundamentals’. On those grounds, Germany looks a safer
bet than the UK, and the inflows which offset the UK deficit may be harder to attract.
The UK’s export record of political-economic ideas to the European continent is
considerably better than its actual economic performance in terms of exports in the
last decade. Regarding the macroeconomic policy architecture, in relation to both
fiscal and monetary policy, the UK case is regarded with approval on the continent.
Whilst it is difficult to assess what degree of positive employment performance can
be traced to these macroeconomic policy institutions, there are some grounds for
thinking UK institutions are ‘right’, perhaps ‘better’, than the current EMU framework.
Yet since the economic architecture of EMU is not liable for reform, it is not here but
on social policy and labour market reform that UK governments concentrate their
reforming zeal. In these areas, their lessons fall on less receptive ears. International
competition is stiff, with Denmark and Sweden cornering a sizeable market share
of the economic and social reform agenda. This is partly because of the ambiguity
about how much of the UK comparative economic success results from the labour
market institutions it tries unsuccessfully to foist on the rest of Europe. Economic
performance and political-economic institutions display a more complex interrelation
than New Labour’s superiority complex chooses to admit.
Moreover, New Labour hubris conceals a comparatively poor redistributive per-
formance. New Labour has picked the ‘low hanging fruit’ by pulling those just below
the poverty line just above it. More structural problems of poverty and inequality
in British society remain unaddressed. Wincott and Hopkin’s analysis indicates that
the UK uniquely has an extremely poor inequality score, such that ‘the UK remains
an unusually unequal society by general European (never mind Nordic) standards’
(Hopkin and Wincott 2006: 59–61, 65). For all the commonality between aspects
of the UK social model and the EC’s desired direction of travel for labour market
reform, this gremlin seriously hinders the uploading of British social policy to the
EU ‘mainframe’.
The UK model was successful in terms of employment between 1997 and 2007,
but this success has been bought at what many consider too high a price in terms of
social inequality. Furthermore, the sub-prime crisis has highlighted the fragility of an
economic growth model predicated so heavily on consumer debt. This hinders the
effectiveness of first Blair then Brown as latter-day ‘fishwife Britannias’ (Clarke 1991:
317), when they emulate (in style if not content) Margaret Thatcher in haranguing
European policy elites about their failings to pursue the Lisbon agenda with more
vigour, and in a direction more closely aligned with New Labour’s vision of economic
and labour market institutions compatible with the new global economy.
Yet the Lisbon process lacks the mechanisms to induce the convergence it exhorts.
The process is an exercise in what Campbell calls ‘bricolage’, or ‘translation’, ‘the
combination of locally available principles and practices with new ones originating
elsewhere’ (2004: 65). When one looks closer, it becomes clear that commonalities of
direction of travel mask widely divergent starting points (Hay 2004), and differential
928 ben clift
degrees of commitment to activation. The result is differences in how much of the
pre-existing (protected, less reformed) labour market remains, and different relative
importance of ‘new’ activation-oriented contracts and programmes. Social minima,
welfare programmes, and labour market institutions will continue to differ widely.
The likely future trajectories of European economic and social policy involve cross-
fertilization and hybridization of models. Within the protean comparative capitalisms
(and European social model) debates, the relative merits of ‘regulated’ versus ‘neolib-
eral’ capitalism remain disputed, with little sign of the liberal convergence British
politicians so enthusiastically advocate. With the recession deepening in 2008–9, and
biting particularly hard in the UK, British export performance, at the level of both
goods and services, but more importantly at the level of political-economic models,
looks under threat.
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c h a p t e r 50
.................................................................................................................
I N T E R NAT I O NA L
ECONOMY
.................................................................................................................
peter burnham
steven kettell
In an influential study published in 1968, Richard Cooper argued that the trend
towards growing economic interdependence since the late 1940s had made the suc-
cessful pursuit of national economic objectives much more difficult. Interdependence
had increased the number and magnitude of the disturbances to which each country’s
balance of payments was subjected thereby directing policy attention to the impor-
tance of the restoration of external balance. Interdependence had also slowed the
ability of national authorities to act independently to reach objectives, and finally
the number of effective policy instruments available to national authorities had been
reduced by the spread of international agreements (Cooper 1968: 148). Since the
deregulation of financial markets in the late 1970s it could, with some plausibility, be
argued that the international economy has become more constraining than was the
case in the late 1960s, although the impact of this ‘constraint’ on individual nation
states varies considerably. In the case of Britain this chapter will argue that whilst
Cooper’s economic observations are broadly valid they are nevertheless incomplete
and need to be supplemented by a political analysis of how the notion of ‘growing eco-
nomic interdependence’ has enabled state managers to use the idea of ‘international
economic constraint’ to achieve domestic policy objectives. In so doing it will explore
a number of key themes including the utility of the ‘politicization–depoliticization’
couplet; the changing character of state–economy relations; and the notion of the
specificity of British capitalism.
The history of governing the political economy of Britain since 1900 is one of state
managers attempting to survive the shocks delivered by the international economy
international economy 933
whilst simultaneously trying to exploit the opportunities provided by such shocks
for realizing policy objectives at home. In this view, national states exist as aspects
of the international system and state managers are under constant pressure to make
more efficient use of resources, particularly labour power and money. Failure to
achieve stability of the currency and productivity growth will inevitably result in a loss
of reserves precipitated by balance of payments problems and inflationary pressure
provoking international exchange instability and financial crisis (Bonefeld, Brown,
and Burnham 1995: 2). National state managers cannot of course resolve this crisis
tendency which lies at the heart of capitalism but they can seek to manage its manifes-
tations within their territory in such a way as to avoid an ‘economic’ crisis becoming
a crisis of political authority itself. In Britain, one of the most popular methods used
to achieve this end (and to restructure social relations more generally) has been the
attempt to disengage the state politically from management of the economy so as to
‘depoliticize’ economic policy formation (Burnham 2001; Clarke 1990: 27). This strat-
egy has met with varying degrees of success and has been most obvious in the areas of
monetary and exchange rate policy (Buller and Flinders 2005; Flinders and Buller
2006; Hay 2007). ‘Externalist’ strategies have focused in particular on linking the
British economy to international economic rules—so-called ‘rules-based’ approaches
(Kydland and Prescott 1977). The well-known logic here is that if such rules are
credible (governments cannot easily renege on them), visible (rooted in clear, simple
regulations), and serve as the anchor for policy, then the public forms expectations
assuming that the rules are followed (Giovannini 1993). International regimes, usually
international monetary mechanisms based on a fixed exchange rate, set definite rules
and thereby build ‘automaticity’ into the system. In this way state managers have the
opportunity to secure a counter-inflationary strategy by altering expectations con-
cerning wage claims and ‘externalizing’ responsibility for the general imposition of
financial discipline. Depoliticized strategies achieved through the adoption of rules-
based international arrangements (Gold Standard, ERM, EMU, WTO) generally have
greater credibility than ‘domesticist’ approaches (such as granting operational inde-
pendence to the central bank) since in the latter case the regulatory mechanisms
are not widely perceived to be beyond the control of individual governments. The
British state has a long history of linking the management of the domestic economy to
international economic rules, in part in order to deal with some of the most difficult
governing consequences of long-term economic decline. This chapter will explore
aspects of the relationship between long-term decline and externalist strategies before
returning in the conclusion to consider some of the broader theoretical concerns
raised by an analysis of state–economy relations. Whilst there is of course a potentially
limitless source of topics and issue areas that could be discussed under the rubric of
‘Britain and the international economy’, we have chosen to focus on some of the most
high-profile policy decisions affecting sterling over the last century. The choice of
the inter-war gold standard, Bretton Woods, post-war recovery, Lawson’s externalist
strategies, the exchange rate mechanism, and aspects of New Labour’s economic poli-
cies is neither uncontentious nor is it meant to be totally comprehensive. It does how-
ever reflect a concern to engage with some of the most significant external economic
934 peter burnham & steven kettell
policy events of the last century and indicate how an interpretation can be developed
which challenges many orthodoxies (and which could, for instance, given more time
and space, be extended to other areas such as the relationship between Britain and
Europe).
50.1 The Return to Gold
.............................................................................................................................................
The decline of the staple industries and the implications of this for the interna-
tional use of sterling are issues that have long preoccupied British state managers.
In a wide-ranging review of Britain’s commercial and industrial policy at the close
of the First World War, the government produced a report concluding that unless
economic decline could be halted and the fall in the export trade checked, British
governments would suffer acute and recurring fiscal and balance of payments crises
that would put paid to Pax Britannica (HMSO 1918). The decline of coal, cotton,
textiles, shipbuilding, and iron and steel had been exacerbated by the rise of foreign
competition (particularly German) in other branches of industry that profited from
increased productivity, large-scale production, scientific advances, and investment in
training. By contrast, Britain suffered from the handicap of traditional organization,
liberal trade regimes, and small-scale production processes. The message was clear: in
the short term foreign competition could only be kept at bay by a low-wage strategy.
This however could give rise to industrial conflict on a grand scale—as had already
been seen in the so-called Great Unrest of 1910–12 (Aris 1998). A mechanism would
have to be found to impose discipline on both capital and the working class, and it
would need to be consistent with Britain’s continued international ambitions. The
restoration of the gold standard was widely seen as a policy measure that could
achieve both objectives.
The political economy of Britain during the inter-war period was dominated by
the events surrounding its return to the gold standard in 1925, and by its subsequent
departure from the system for a second time in 1931. In the conventional narrative of
this era, two core assertions stand out. The first of these is that the decision to return
to the gold standard (a fixed exchange rate system founded on the interconvertibility
of national currencies and gold) was motivated by a desire to restore the British
economy to its pre-war level of prosperity. The main considerations here, so it is
claimed, were to provide the conditions on which Britain’s international trading and
financial activities depended: namely, exchange rate stability and anti-inflationary
discipline. With sterling relinked to gold, any balance of payments weaknesses would
lead to an outflow of bullion, providing the trigger for a corrective rise in interest
rates by the Bank of England (for example see Pollard 1976; Winch 1969; Moggridge
1972; Sayers 1976). The second key element of the prevailing narrative concerns the
international economy 935
effect of the return. For the most part, the decision to restore the link to gold at
the pre-war exchange rate of $4.86 is considered to have been a mistake. This, it
is argued, overvalued the pound by around 10 per cent, undermined the compet-
itiveness of British exporters, put employers under pressure to reduce wages, and
required high interest rates to avoid losses of gold, leading to economic stagnation
(although the City of London prospered), chronically high unemployment, and
outbreaks of industrial unrest, the apogee of which was the General Strike of 1926
(see Keynes 1925; Winch 1969; Moggridge 1972). Those offering a more sympathetic
view of events, namely that the return to gold was not a mistake, pin the blame for
Britain’s subsequent economic malaise on external factors, most notably the poor
state of the world economy during the inter-war period (for example, Youngson 1960;
Howson 1975).
A central premise of the conventional view of Britain’s return to the gold standard
is that the decision to return, and its effects, were both largely shaped by Britain’s
external relations; principally by its high level of exposure (industrial, commer-
cial, and financial) to world economic conditions. Largely absent from this picture,
however, are considerations of the domestic politics involved in this policy (for a
limited exception see Williamson 1984). The key factor in this was the desire of
state managers to address a series of problems resulting from an expansion of the
state’s regulatory apparatus during the war. This had undermined the mechanisms
of the market, turned economic conditions and policy-making into overtly political
issues, and had made state officials directly responsible for economic affairs. On
this level the return to gold was chiefly designed to enhance competitiveness by
returning control of economic conditions to the market, and to ease the political
difficulties of so doing by displacing responsibility for economic conditions away
from state managers. The ‘automatic’ anti-inflationary mechanism of the regime
would effectively preclude any activist policy measures on the part of the govern-
ment and the Bank of England, each of whom could legitimately maintain that
such activities were incompatible with the rules and procedures of the gold standard
(Kettell 2004).
While the economic effects of the return to gold were less than impressive, in
political terms the policy was more successful than is usually appreciated. The
issue of unemployment remained politically contentious (leading to the defeat of
the Conservatives in the 1929 general election), but economic policy matters were
for the most part effectively displaced from the political agenda and the pressure
on state managers over economic policy-making remained lower than at any time
since the war. Responsibility for the poor state of the British economy was also
seen by the majority of domestic opinion to lie with producers themselves (with
employers blaming trade unions and vice versa), as well as conditions in the world
market more generally. Concerns over high interest rates were also successfully
deflected onto the gold standard regime, with Chancellors Winston Churchill and
Philip Snowden both declaring that the sole responsibility belonged to the Bank,
with the Bank highlighting the constraints imposed on its own actions by the
936 peter burnham & steven kettell
necessity of maintaining the value of the pound, and with the gold standard policy
itself attracting no significant criticism from any section of British society until
the onset of the 1931 crisis. The level of industrial unrest, too, was dramatically
reduced compared to pre-return levels, and while the General Strike remains the
single largest outbreak of unrest in British history, the role of the gold standard
in provoking this was, contrary to popular wisdom, limited at best (Kettell 2004:
57–78).
Britain’s exit from the gold standard, following a calamitous run on the pound
in September 1931, required the construction of a new framework for economic
management. This new regime, effectively in place by mid-1932, consisted of several
core components: a tariff on imports from non-empire countries, a ‘cheap money’
policy of low interest rates, a balanced budget commitment, and a floating exchange
rate, kept (as much as possible) at around $3.50 by the Exchange Equalization Account
and the establishment of the Sterling Area. As with the return to the gold standard,
this new framework is typically seen to have emerged as a response to external
conditions; an attempt to secure the greatest possible degree of national economic
prosperity in the face of a global depression and the collapse of the world’s trade and
financial systems. For some, this response also signifies the slow, but steadily rising
influence of Keynesian ideas of policy activism in Britain and an acceptance of greater
state responsibility for economic affairs (Winch 1969; Howson 1975; Middleton 1985;
Booth 1987).
While this new framework for economic management bore no resemblance to
the gold standard regime, a strong thread of continuity in terms of the underlying
policy objectives linked the two together. For state managers the central aims in
this respect were to revive Britain’s sluggish economy through a mild inflationary
stimulus while avoiding measures that risked undermining the competitive pressure
on domestic producers, and, in the face of greater calls for state action to ameliorate
economic conditions, to avoid any overt measures that might lead to a repoliticization
of economic policy-making. Aligned to this, for most of the 1930s, the ultimate policy
aim of state managers remained that of securing another return to the gold standard
at an exchange rate of $4.86. Unlike the 1920s, however, neither external nor internal
factors were now conducive to such a move. Sustained global economic and financial
instability, combined with domestic opposition to the prospect and political fears of
the social discontent that may follow a renewed bout of deflation induced by a high
pound, ruled out the possibility (Kettell 2004).
The slow recovery of the British economy from mid-1933, aided by the new policy
framework, also eroded the possibility of a return to gold, though the upturn was
never decisive and unemployment remained high and economic growth uneven. Sim-
ilarly, while impressions of an era of growing state activism are misplaced (the Bank
of England, for example, retained its operational independence vis-à-vis the Treasury
throughout the 1930s), the prospects for promoting a restructuring of the British
economy through the reimposition of competitive discipline remained elusive. This
was a dilemma that would subsequently re-emerge, though would not be resolved, in
the years after the Second World War.
international economy 937
50.2 From Bretton Woods to the 1976
IMF Loan
.............................................................................................................................................
International trade and financial relationships between 1944 and 1976 were dominated
by discussions surrounding the Bretton Woods Agreement, the move to currency
convertibility and non-discrimination in trade, the implication of the fluctuating
fortunes of the dollar, and the creation of the European Common Market. In terms
of domestic policy, British state managers operated in a context of increasing politi-
cization in an effort to stabilize sterling, regulate public expenditure, and control
inflationary wage settlements. In conditions of relatively full employment successive
governments sought to regulate labour through moral exhortation (always couched
as ‘in the national interest’), centralized authority over wage determination, and the
creation of new surveillance and guidance machinery. Indicative planning and official
incomes policies were combined with the discretionary management of money in an
attempt to maintain the value of the pound, contain prices, and stave off recurrent
balance of payments crises.
Bretton Woods sought to enshrine the following multilateral objectives: currencies
freely convertible at fixed exchange rates, with controlled capital movements; no
discrimination in trade (except by the formation of full Customs Unions); and the
abolition of quotas (except to meet temporary balance of payments difficulties), the
reduction of tariffs, and the progressive elimination of preferences (although there
was no obligation to reduce preferences except in return for tariff concessions of
equivalent value). The aim of the Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary
Fund, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Havana
Charter for an International Trade Organization was to translate these objectives into
international rules of behaviour in the economic field and establish institutions to
administer the rules and promote further action towards the objectives (Burnham
2003). The ITO was of course stillborn, but the commercial policy provisions of
the draft Charter for the ITO were incorporated into the General Agreement on
Tariffs and Trade (Irwin 1995: 130–2; Curzon 1965: 6–8). It was envisaged that after a
relatively short ‘transitional period’ (which allowed members to maintain restrictions
for a five-year period in order to adapt to changing circumstances), a smoothly
working international system would be established (HMSO 1944: 33). It was antici-
pated that balance of payments difficulties would arise but it was thought that such
problems would, over time, be the exception rather than the rule. The Articles of
Agreement indicated that in such cases, there should be no pressure on countries
to deflate (for this would jeopardize full employment). Rather, difficulties could be
rectified by import restrictions and short-term borrowing from the IMF. Universal
discrimination against a persistent creditor was permissible, in theory, under the
provisions of the Scarce Currency clause, if the IMF’s resources of that country’s
currency were approaching exhaustion. In short, the architects of Bretton Woods
assumed that, provided import and exchange restrictions were removed—and their
938 peter burnham & steven kettell
reimposition in time of emergency strictly controlled—and provided that there were
no discriminatory blocs, a smoothly working multilateral system would come about
automatically.
At the close of the Bretton Woods conference on 22 July 1944, as a band played
the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, Keynes and Morgenthau spoke of the creation of a new
‘brotherhood of man’ and of the Bretton Woods signpost ‘pointing down a highway
broad enough for all men to walk in step and side by side’ (Van Dormael 1978:
2, 222). However, this objective was never met, clear international rules were not
established, and British policy instead was dominated by the same concerns that
had been outlined by the government in 1918. In a review of the post-war situation
produced in the early 1950s, British Treasury and Bank officials concluded that the
architects of the ‘new system’ had failed to appreciate six key factors (PRO: T236/3071).
Firstly, the scale of the disruption in Europe and Asia and the double advantage
which North America had gained by both escaping physical damage during the
war and having developed its production of essentials under the forced drought of
wartime necessity. Secondly, the revolution in the international economy resulting
from the impoverishment of the UK and the transformation of Britain from the
world’s biggest creditor to the world’s biggest debtor—including the weakening of
sterling and competitive power. Thirdly, the move towards industrialization and
development in the ‘underdeveloped’ countries of the world, and the effect which
this would have on world trade. Fourthly, the abnormality of the great surpluses of
primary products in the 1930s and the major change in the terms of trade between
primary products and manufactures. Fifthly, the great demand for investment in
the disrupted world, and the resulting rapid world inflation. Finally, the inadequacy
of the gold reserves outside the United States in view of the rise in prices and the
size of the balance of payments deficits. The worldwide demand for food, consumer
goods, fuel, and capital goods—which could be supplied in sufficient quantities
only from North America—created the ‘world dollar shortage’ with the United
States amassing balance of payments surpluses of $7 billion and $10 billion in 1946
and 1947 respectively. As US aid was rapidly exhausted, the world’s gold reserves
flowed back to Fort Knox; European economies were plunged into crisis; trade
began to seize up around the world; and bilateral trade and payments systems were
reactivated.
Although the British problem was of course an aspect of the world dollar problem,
the Treasury recognized that a solution to the world problem would not necessarily
carry with it a solution to the special problem of the United Kingdom—in fact,
under certain circumstances it might have the reverse effect. Britain’s freedom of
choice in external economic policy in the post-war period was limited by three
factors which emerge from a consideration of the crises of 1947, 1949, and 1951 (PRO:
T236/3071; Burnham 2003). Firstly, any policy would have to attend to the problem
of the reserves. Even achieving a level of nearly £1,400 million in June 1951 could not,
Treasury officials noted, stop a loss of confidence in sterling three months later. The
first problem therefore was to adjust to this situation, either by acquiring substantial
resources to strengthen the gold reserves or by altering the external financial situation
in a way which reduced the strain on the gold reserves (or, of course, both). Secondly,
international economy 939
the balance of payments problem could only be solved in the long term by expanding
exports and invisible earnings, and by obtaining an increased share of world trade.
The third, and what the Treasury perceived to be the hard-core, problem of Britain’s
external economic policy was to provide an effective basis for eliminating the UK’s
large and increasing deficit with the dollar area, either by direct action or by multilat-
eral earning of gold or dollars.
A similar diagnosis was produced by the US State Department, who conducted
a number of surveys into ‘the British problem’ in the early 1950s (US National
Archives: RG 56/450). Inflation and over-full employment had ‘deranged’ the bal-
ance of payments by creating excess demand for imports and diverting resources
from exports to domestic markets. Business had become inefficient because of the
atmosphere of a seller’s market and the tight labour market had encouraged restrictive
practices and impeded the transfer of labour to essential industries. According to
State Department economists, studies of British productivity showed that in the
fourteen-year period 1935–1948, for twenty-two key industries, productivity in eight
had declined (including coal, coke, cotton spinning, and paper), productivity in seven
had increased less than 10 per cent, and in only seven had it increased by more than
10 per cent. In general it was found that real product per man hour was rising very
slowly and by the end of 1951 was only 5 per cent higher than in 1938. The State
Department concluded, ‘Restrictive practices of industry and labour are primarily to
blame for the inflexibility of the British economy. These practices impede production
and cause prices to be kept at artificial levels, either through price agreements or
inflated costs. Psychology of labour is dominated by fear of new techniques which
might jeopardise jobs or wages’. Britain’s competitive power in export markets was
in decline principally because newer industrial rivals had a higher rate of growth of
labour productivity and lower wage levels. According to the US State Department,
action needed to be taken in the sphere of ‘domestic British politics’ to reduce the
scale of the welfare programme (which had adversely affected incentives), reduce the
level of direct controls, and introduce greater flexibility.
In short, a solution to the problems of Britain’s long-term external economic policy
would have to be consistent with increasing industrial potential and competitive
power, and relieving pressure on the reserves to enable confidence in sterling to rise.
Alternatives to a one-world multilateral trade and payments system, such as bilat-
eralism, permanent discriminatory groups, and extended preference arrangements,
would, in the long term, be inconsistent with these objectives. Hence the Bank and
Treasury’s commitment by the first quarter of 1952 to Operation Robot: to the creation
of a multilateral system in which sterling was freely convertible (except for residents
of the Sterling Area), discriminatory or quantitative restriction of imports were kept
to a minimum, and market forces, through a floating exchange rate, were allowed
to effect a structural adjustment of the domestic economy and a restructuring of the
global economy, to enhance overall competitiveness (Bulpitt and Burnham 1999). The
debate over Robot was not a dry discussion of the merits of exchange rate regimes or
the technicalities of convertibility, although, of course, it encompassed both. At heart,
Robot was about the future direction of British, and by implication global, capitalism.
In one fell swoop Robot would demolish what remained of Bretton Woods and
940 peter burnham & steven kettell
re-establish Britain as a leading power alongside the United States. At home, market
forces would destroy the ‘rigidities’ set up under Attlee and help cure the economy of
the ‘creeping paralysis’ induced by over-full employment and the lure of ‘soft’ markets
for uncompetitive goods.
The decision to reject Robot left state managers grappling with successive balance
of payments crises and the spectre of heightened industrial action throughout the
post-war period. In terms of broad macroeconomic policy, the gradual relaxation
of direct controls in the late 1940s initially placed a greater burden on fiscal policy.
Although during the 1950s monetary policy played an enhanced role in the form of
credit restrictions and movements in short-term interest rates, the Radcliffe Report
of 1959 confirmed the view that interest rates were an uncertain tool for demand
management (Hatton and Chrystal 1991: 68; Dimsdale 1991: 89; HMSO 1959). How-
ever, balance of payments difficulties, experienced particularly under Wilson in the
1960s, led to increased reliance on monetary restriction to stabilize the external
balance. Even a 14 per cent devaluation of the pound on 18 November 1967 (from
$2.80 to $2.40) offered little more than a temporary respite to state managers whose
efforts to find a politicized solution to the major governing problems were look-
ing increasingly futile (Cairncross 1996). By 1975 the Treasury was forced to admit
that post-war management, and in particular incomes policies, ‘must be judged a
failure’ (PRO: T267/28). Inflation, in February 1975, reached 20 per cent and wage
rates were rising at 29 per cent (Browning 1986: 65). The Treasury now pushed
Healey to re-examine public expenditure, lay down a norm for pay increases, and
drastically deflate domestic demand (Wass 2008: 323). In July 1975, a system of ‘cash
limits’ was introduced as a means of controlling public expenditure and, before
the agreement with the IMF in 1976 (which granted Britain $3.9 billion from the
Fund and endorsed another $3 billion from the BIS), Healey decided to publish
the undisclosed monetary targets that had been in use since 1973 in an attempt
to placate the markets (Grant 2002: 97). Although the IMF package temporarily
restored confidence in sterling, unemployment and inflation continued to rise with
predictable consequences for the Labour government in the early months of 1979. By
the early 1980s the new Conservative government gave a clear signal that it would no
longer adjust demand to accommodate inflation. The credibility of this strategy, as
Hatton and Chrystal (1991: 74) emphasize, was established by the imposition of cash
limits, by the commitment to medium-term budgetary objectives, and by the refusal
to reflate the economy using fiscal policy in the early 1980s. Whereas in general in
the 1950s and 1960s changes in monetary and fiscal policy were not closely related,
the adoption of targets for monetary aggregates led to explicit coordination in the
1908s and the increased importance of exchange rate considerations dominating
monetary policy (Dimsdale 1991: 137–40). In summary, the international economy
had delivered significant ‘external’ shocks to the British economy in the post-war
period manifest in recurrent balance of payments, fiscal, and monetary crises alle-
viated in part through extensive international borrowing, and in the later phases
close control of public expenditure. Politicized management techniques allowed little
room for state managers to deflect the political consequences of economic crisis,
international economy 941
hence the charges of ‘overload’, ‘ungovernability’, and ‘legitimation crisis’ (Hay 1996:
98–101). The mid-1970s are therefore accurately seen by Grant (2002: 96) as a tran-
sitional period in which policy-makers were increasingly led towards depoliticized
solutions designed in part to reassert the operational autonomy of the political exec-
utive by placing at one remove the political character of decision-making (Burnham
2001). This is the context in which to understand economic policy under Thatcher
and in particular the move towards more explicit externalist approaches under
Major.
50.3 From Thatcher to Major
.............................................................................................................................................
Conservative statecraft from 1979 to 1997 is, for many observers, chiefly characterized
by its concern with domestic factors (Bulpitt 1985). Although the strategies employed
by the Thatcher and Major governments are located within the overarching context of
reversing Britain’s post-war economic sclerosis relative to its main global competitors
(see for example the notion of a shift to ‘post-Fordism’ in Overbeek 1990; Jessop
et al. 1988), the central theme is that of an attempt to achieve this by removing
domestic blockages to economic growth. This is set within a broad-ranging narrative
of decline in which the principal cause of the political-economic crises of the 1960s
and 1970s was seen to have stemmed from the inherent weaknesses of Keynesian
social democracy itself: namely, an over-extended and overly interventionist state
combined with overbearing trade unionism and a parasitic public sector. Present
too, although sitting somewhat uneasily with this theme, is a critique of the City
for its pervasive and anti-dynamic culture of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. In this setting,
Thatcherism is seen to constitute a process of ‘rolling back the state’, freeing up hith-
erto constrained market forces, a process of deregulation and liberalization designed
to improve the flexibility, dynamism, and competitiveness of the national economy
(Gamble 1988; English and Kenny 2002). In reality, however, the situation was a
much more nuanced affair. Domestic-based reforms designed to ensure a greater
degree of ‘fit’ between the British economy and the imperatives of the world market
were mixed with ‘externally-based’ measures designed to stimulate a restructuring of
domestic political and economic relations by directly exposing producers to global
pressures.
The initial cornerstone of Conservative statecraft combined an attempt to reduce
inflation, raise productivity, and reduce the direct economic involvement of the state
through the imposition of explicit domestic policy rules in the form of monetary
targets (Smith 1991). In a similar fashion, the numerous trade union reforms imple-
mented throughout the period of Conservative rule, along with the processes of
privatization, deregulation, and public-sector reform, were all essentially ‘domestic’
in nature. However by the mid-1980s it was clear that although the Medium-Term
Financial Strategy had achieved a degree of success in combating inflation, it had
942 peter burnham & steven kettell
been discredited in theoretical terms and it increasingly seemed that state managers
lacked a coherent approach to economic policy (Smith 1993; Johnson 1991). Law-
son now switched his attention to ‘externalist’ strategies—in particular linking the
pound to the German Mark. From 1987 onwards Lawson ‘shadowed the deutschmark’
within a range between DM2.75 and DM3.00, apparently without Thatcher’s agree-
ment (Grant 2002: 99). Other ‘outward facing’ measures adopted during this period
included the process of financial deregulation that culminated in the 1986 ‘Big Bang’,
designed to improve the competitiveness of the City by opening it up to external
competition; and the signing of the Single European Act, one of the core aims of
which was to expose British producers to the competitive disciplines of a Single
European Market. The impact of the external environment was also felt in other ways.
Indeed, the initial monetarist turn was itself largely undermined by global forces, the
ability to control or even measure the domestic money supply being compounded by
the instability of sterling, and by the liberalization of world credit markets (Tomlinson
2007). The decline of the world economy during the early part of the 1980s also
played a key contributory role in the onset of a fierce domestic recession, one effect
of which was to undermine the government’s attempt at scaling back the state by
prompting a large rise in unemployment and increased levels of welfare spending
(Gamble 1988).
Without question however the most notable attempt to secure domestic restruc-
turing via external means under the Conservatives centred on the use of the exchange
rate following John Major’s appointment as Chancellor in October 1989. The issue
of Britain’s relationship with the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) had
already led to deep divisions within the government following Lawson’s suggestion
that Britain should enter the German dominated semi-fixed rate system. For those
in favour (most ministers as well as Treasury and Bank officials), fixing the value of
the pound within an externally constituted system of rules offered a useful means
of tackling inflation, enhancing competitiveness, and reducing the direct involvement
of the state in economic affairs. Entry to the ERM would make the exchange rate floor
more credible, providing a new anchor for economic policy, thereby underwriting
the anti-inflationary resolve of the government. Thatcher, however, viewed this and
other externalist strategies as a sign of weakness and instead favoured the by now
largely discredited ‘domestic’ approach to tackling inflation (Bonefeld, Brown, and
Burnham 1995: 76–81). While membership of the ERM (achieved on 8 October 1990)
arrived too late to provide salvation for Thatcher, its benefits were not lost on her
successor, John Major.
According to received wisdom, membership of the ERM is considered to have been
a policy disaster. As with Britain’s return to the gold standard in 1925, joining the
regime at an overvalued exchange rate (DM2.95) is seen to have forced interest rates
to be held at onerously high levels, to have exacerbated the severity of the down-
turn, and to have dealt a fatal blow to the governing credibility of the Conservative
Party—epitomized in sterling’s ignominious withdrawal from the system on ‘Black
Wednesday’ 16 September 1992—from which it has still to fully recover (Thompson
1996; Budd 2005). This view however ignores several indicators of relative policy
international economy 943
success. Although the economy stagnated, unemployment reached chronically high
levels, and there was no real breakthrough in productivity in relation to Britain’s
main international rivals, the goal of lowering inflation was secured to notable effect
(dropping from 10 per cent in October 1990 to 3.7 per cent by September 1992),
clearing the way for a sustained period of low-inflationary growth in subsequent
years. Moreover, in political terms, notwithstanding the long-term damage to the
Conservatives’ reputation for economic management, ERM membership initially
proved to be still more beneficial, providing state managers with an effective means of
deflecting pressures over the condition of the economy and helping the Conservatives
to a fourth consecutive general election victory in April 1992 (Kettell 2008).
Britain’s exit from the ERM presaged a return to ‘domestic’ policy rules, with a
regime of inflation targets setting the core framework alongside attempts to give the
Bank of England greater autonomy. While much of the Conservatives’ remaining
years in office turned on domestic affairs, most notably the continuation of the
privatization and deregulation agenda, the international context continued to exert a
defining influence. Growing pressures for ever-closer levels of economic and political
integration within the European Union, for instance, provided an ever-present site
of contestation in British politics, while the increasing pressures of ‘globalization’
and the shifting nature of the world economy, replete with notions of a ‘hollowing
out’ or a decline of the state (Holliday 2000), formed the backdrop to the ongoing
process of domestic economic change. Defined most notably by the rise of the service-
sector economy, by the processes of ‘offshoring’ and contracting-out, and by the
continued decline of Britain’s industrial base, the theme of necessary adaptation to
uncontrollable global forces would become one of the more enduring legacies of the
Conservative era.
50.4 New Labour
.............................................................................................................................................
Despite its professed adherence to strike a ‘Third Way’ between Thatcherite free
market capitalism and ‘Old Labour’ social democracy, in terms of external relations
the form of statecraft pursued by New Labour since 1997 bears a striking resemblance
to previous modes of governance. As with the strategic approach pursued by the
Thatcher governments, for example, many of the measures taken by New Labour
have focused on distinctly domestic matters. The mainstay of these has been an
effort to combine socially progressive policies such as the introduction of a minimum
wage and a large rise in public-sector spending (relabelled ‘investment’ in Third Way
discourse) from the second term in office, with a neoliberal commitment to ensuring
the effective operation of the free market (Grant 2002: 229–30). The maintenance of
the trade union reforms, economic deregulation, and privatization processes imple-
mented by the Conservatives have been accompanied by efforts to secure a closer
involvement of the private sector in public service reform, and by an openly professed
944 peter burnham & steven kettell
eagerness to be as business friendly as possible—a desire expressed in initial efforts
to establish governing credibility by adhering to the restrictive spending plans of the
outgoing Conservative regime (Ludlam and Smith 2004).
The two themes of the free market and progressivism, however, were not consid-
ered to be incompatible. Indeed, at the core of the New Labour project has been
the assertion that it is possible to transcend these apparently irreconcilable opposites
(Fairclough 2000). Here, Old Labour conceptions of the state as an instrument for
shielding society from the adverse effects of the market, primarily through the provi-
sion of welfare and public services, were supplanted by a notion of the state as a facil-
itative and enabling agency, the task of which was to equip members of society with
the means to make their own way within the free market, chiefly via the provision
of opportunity, macroeconomic stability, and the requisite access to skills, education,
and training (Ludlam and Smith 2004). All this was embedded within a system of
domestically constructed policy rules; both fiscal, in the form of the Treasury’s golden
and sustainable investment rules, and monetary, in the form of Bank of England
operational independence and a symmetrical inflation target. The avowed aim here
was to establish a credible framework for economic management that would provide
the necessary stability for long-term growth (and thus the required fiscal revenues
for public investment); the less obvious being the displacing of responsibility for
any potentially difficult and unpopular decisions away from state officials (Burnham
2001).
The attempt to achieve these goals also linked together the domestic and the inter-
national. Central to this, at least initially, was closer engagement with the European
Union (though not to the extent of joining the Single European Currency), and,
more enduringly, a strong discursive emphasis on notions of external change deriving
from the process of ‘globalization’. Presented as an uncontested reality of political and
economic life in the modern age, the much vaunted spread of globalization has served
as an ever-present banner under which is carried the need for unceasing national
economic adaptation in the form of improved competitiveness, productivity, and
dynamism (Hay and Watson 1999). As a key means of justifying the government’s
commitment to extending and deepening the marketization of British life, this dis-
cursive construct has thereby served clear political ends even though as Panitch (2001:
374–5) emphasizes, ‘nation states are not the victims of globalisation, they are the
authors of globalisation’.
To a large degree the successes and the failures of the New Labour project have
been inextricably linked to conditions in the global economy. Initial economic success
was founded on a large degree of fortune deriving from the updraft of a sustained
period of rising world economic growth, buoyed by an enormous expansion of credit,
which helped the government to avoid serious economic difficulties and to expand
investment in public services. Indeed, this latter point, along with rising levels of
consumer and national debt, provided the main reason why Britain was able to
avoid the worst effects of a global downturn that accompanied the arrival of the
millennium. The counterpart to all this however, a global ‘credit crunch’ presaging
international economy 945
a sharper and far more serious downturn in the world economy, and one from which
Britain is not able to insulate itself, threatens to bring an end to the New Labour era.
Yet even here it is the external context to which governmental hopes are pinned. New
Labour’s strategy for mitigating the fallout from the downturn has been unabashed in
its displacement of blame and responsibility onto the exigencies of the world market;
an insistence that the core drivers of discontent, namely higher prices for food, fuel,
energy, and credit, are inherently international in nature and beyond the purview of
any single government to solve.
50.5 Conclusion
.............................................................................................................................................
This chapter has highlighted the complexity of the relationship between domestic
policy-making and the international economy. In so doing it has confirmed the
sense of Block’s call for a unidisciplinary intellectual approach that brings together
the study of politics, economics, sociology, and history (Block 1977: p. x). British
policy, for example, cannot be understood in abstraction from the international
economy since capitalism is a single global relationship of class antagonism in which
state power is allocated between territorial entities. The accumulation of capital
within the domestic economy depends on the accumulation of capital on a world
scale. National states founded on the rule of law and money are at the same time
confined within limits imposed by the accumulation of capital on a world scale—
the most obvious and important manifestation of which is their subordination to
world money (Marazzi 1995; Bonefeld, Brown, and Burnham 1995: 28). The inter-
national monetary system, as Block (1977: 1) notes, is simply the sum of all the
devices by which state managers organize their international economic relations.
The construction and maintenance of global circuits of accumulation is an ongoing
task, built upon national states providing the ‘domestic’ political underpinning for
the stability and the movement of capital, and is one that requires constant effort
at the international level to guard against the restriction of trade and payments
systems.
In many respects the recent history of Britain’s articulation with the international
economy is one of a movement from relative ‘openness’ in the nineteenth century to
relative ‘closedness’ in the period 1930–60 (whilst always maintaining the ideology of
multilateralism) and thereafter regaining ‘openness’ as market forces were given a key
role by state managers in determining international transactions. As we have seen,
the principal methods of ‘adjustment’ open to state managers have tended to focus
either on changing the level of domestic economic activity and/or on altering the
exchange rate. Both methods, as Block (1977: 2–3) further indicates, result in applying
downward pressure on real wages and affect levels of employment with the likely
result being ‘a breakdown of social order and an intensification of class conflict’. In
such circumstances governments are well served by strategies that will ‘depoliticize’
946 peter burnham & steven kettell
the process of economic policy-making, thereby helping to reduce the likelihood
of a political crisis of the state. The more state managers embrace ‘openness’ with
respect to the organization of their international transactions, the greater becomes
the need for depoliticized strategies since increased reliance on market mechanisms
carries an enhanced threat of heightened social conflict (Goldthorpe 1978). As already
noted, however, the international economy is not an ‘external given’ but is a care-
fully constructed achievement representing distinct power relations and as such is
both fragile and subject to change and crisis (Block 1977: 221). This emphasis on
the crisis-ridden character of the intenational economy has definite implications
for commentators such as Douglas Wass (2008: 356–8) who argue that economic
policy in Britain has now changed fundamentally and that neither the balance of
payments, nor unemployment, nor pressure from the trade union movement is of
any great importance in terms of policy-making. It is certainly true that the freeing
of restrictions on capital movements has made it easier for debtor countries to finance
deficits and that in recent years Britain has had greater foreign exchange reserves
to manage its market interventions. However, the delicate character of the interna-
tional economy has been revealed once again with the contraction of international
finance, the return (even temporarily) of inflation, and a widening UK trade deficit
which many economists regard as unsustainable. Periodically in the last fifty years
arguments have been advanced that changes either in the international economy or
the British political economy have rendered redundant ‘old style’ economic crisis
and its management (Crosland 1956; Hirst and Thompson 1996). On every occasion
such arguments have been shown to be overly optimistic (and in many ways have
been a reflection of both the politics of the time and time-bound academic fashion).
The form of Britain’s integration into the international economy may change slowly
but the means available to state managers to deal with the manifestation of crisis at
international and domestic levels remain broadly constant. It is here that the political
analyst can contribute directly to the development of a unidisciplinary intellectual
approach by charting the political strategies employed by state managers in response
to economic crisis and indicating in particular how notions of ‘external constraint’
are consistently employed in an effort to secure ‘domestic’ policy objectives.
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Author Index
...................................................
Abramson, P. R. 466 Aspalter, C. 679
Achen, C. 101 Aspinall, M. 3–4, 142
Ackerman, B. 66 Aughey, A. 503–4, 509, 526
Ackroyd, P. 510, 512 Axelrad, L. 327
Adams, G. 520 Ayres, S. 393
Adams, I. 574
Adams, J. 395 Bacchi, C. L. 651–2
Adams, J. F. 78 Bache, I. 353, 839
Adams, W. G. S. 37 n. Bacon, R. 690
Adcock, R. 6, 8, 10, 18, 92, 93, 94, 95, 99 n. 8 Bagehot, W. 27, 33, 59, 249, 256, 314
Adonis, A. 67 Bagguley, P. 730
Afshar, H. 145–6 Baldi, G. 840
Aitken, R. 145–6 Baldick, C. 505
Aja, E. 426, 430, 433 Baldwin, R. 824, 825, 828
Ajzen, I. 101 Baldwin, S. 503, 506
Alber, J. 675 Bale, T. 557
Albert, M. 581 Ball, L. 921
Aldrich, R. J. 752–68 Ball, S. J. 620
Allan, T. R. S. 265 Ball, W. 145
Allen, D. 841–2, 845–6, 849 Balls, E. 565, 901
Almond, G. A. 4–5, 97, 100, 101, 674, 773, 786 Balsom, D. 543
Alt, F. J. 469 Bamford, B. W. C. 763, 764, 766
Alt, J. E. 80 Bane, M. J. 692
Amenta, E. 728 Banting, K. G. 395, 685
Andersen, R. 476 Banton, M. 631
Anderson, B. 573 Barak, A. 243
Anderson, M. 327 Bardi, L. 287, 297
Anderson, P. 13, 212 n., 898 Barendt, E. 241
Andreasen, A. 804 Barham, P. 206
Andrew, C. 753, 755 Barker, E. 9, 18, 26, 28, 29–30, 31, 32, 156, 506–7
Annan, N. 167–8 Barker, P. 205, 206
Annesley, C. 143, 146, 657, 660, 919, 922, 925 Barnes, D. 892
Anon 512 Barnes, M. 670–1
Ansell, C. 823 Barnes, S. H. 719, 723
Arber, S. 673 Barnett, A. 242
Arendt, H. 202 Barnett, C. 574, 897–8
Aris, R. 934 Barnett, H. 756, 761
Armstrong, A. K. 841, 844 Barry, A. 122, 123, 124, 308
Arrow, K. J. 76 n. Barry, B. 4, 7, 12, 28, 39, 46, 48
Arrowsmith, J. 841 Bartle, J. 104, 105
Arter, D. 391 Bartolini, S. 435
Ascherson, N. 509 Bashevkin, S. 655
Ash, T. G. 760 Bass, A. 377
Ashby, E. 327 Baston, L. 376
Ashe, F. 148 Bate, J. 202–3
Ashley, P. 512 Baumgartner, F. 365 n., 367, 368
950 author index
BBC 737 Boerzel, T. A. 838
Beatson, J. 272 Bogdanor, V. 36, 63, 95, 96, 97, 240, 244, 445, 450
Beatty, D. 242 Bonefeld, W. 933, 942, 945
Beck, U. 778, 819 Bonoli, G. 922
Beckwith, K. 650 Bork, R. H. 882
Beer, S. H. 4, 685 Bowen, J. 496
Beetham, D. 229, 242 Bowie, J. 538
Béland, D. 392 Bowler, S. 800
Bell, D, 397, 575 Boyce, M. 602
Bellah, R. 778 Boyd Orr, J. 538
Bellamy, R. 268, 271 Boyne, G. A. 85, 86, 360
Beloff, M. 37 n., 849 Bradbury, M. 205 n.
Belsky, J. 621 Bradley, A. W. 273
Benn, T. 578 Brady, H. 673
Bennett, J. 586 Bragg, B. 512
Benyon, J. 640 Braithwaite, J. 336
Berglund, S. 847 Brandolini, A. 690
Bergman, T. 308 Brassinne, J. 426
Berlant, J. 327 Braun, D. 308
Berlinski, S. 80, 357 Brazier, R. 244
Berman, S. 101 Breakwell, G. 821
Berry, J. 367 Brehm, J. 109
Berthoud, R. 614–15, 744–5 Breitenbach, E. 652
Besley, T. 85 Brenner, N. 424
Betts, R. K. 753 Breton, A. 58
Bevan, R. G. 360 Brewer, M. 609, 624
Bevir, M. 4, 6, 10, 18, 37, 40, 95, 96, 98, 99, 102, Brodkin, E. Z. 691
115–34, 345–8, 349–50, 356, 358 Brook, P. 677
Beynon, J. 708 Brooke, P. 508
Bhansali, R. J. 46, 77, 469 Brown, A. 12, 308, 933, 942, 945
Biggs, S. 84, 666–7, 668 Brown, G. 395–6, 406, 806, 901, 902
Bingham, Lord 264, 265, 267, 269, 270 Brown, J. M. 590
Binstock, R. H. 671, 672–3, 674, 675 Brown, K. 145
Birch, A. H. 223, 229, 241, 311 Brown, Y. A. 509
Bird, K. 145 Browne, J. 652, 654, 658
Bishop, J. 173–4 Browne, W. 366
Blaas, P. B. M. 29 Browning, P. 940
Black, D. 78 Bruce, S. 522
Blackburn, R. 611, 665 Brug, W. van der 469, 476
Blackmun, H. 632 Bryan, D. 522
Blackstone, T. 688 Bryant, C. G. A. 511
Blain, N. 548 Bryce, J. 14, 32
Blair, T. 183, 376, 408, 468, 573, 599–600, 689, 819, Brynin, M. 106–7
914 Bryson, V. 147
Blanchard, O. 915, 917–18, 919, 921 Buchan, J. 545
Blanchard, P. 721 Buchanan, J. M. 84
Blanden, J. 609, 615–17 Buck, T. 564
Blank, K. 844 Budd, A. 942
Blears, H. 418 Budge, I. 78, 474
Bleich, E. 632, 633–4, 741 Bueno de Mesquita, B. 79
Block, F. 945, 946 Bull, H. 572
Blondel, J. 34, 81, 94, 97, 105 Buller, J. 320, 321, 352, 553–67, 840
Blumenthal, S. 800 Bulmer, S. 353, 838, 839, 845, 846
Blumler, J. 800 Bulpitt, J. 426, 556, 559, 899, 900, 939, 941
Blumler, J. G. 107 Burch, M. 69, 353, 354, 845, 846, 847
Boddy, M. 411 Burchell, G. 123
author index 951
Burgess, A. 205 n. Chhibber, P. K. 297
Burke, E. 406, 602 Childs, S. 141, 148, 149, 150, 151
Burleigh, M. 631 Chirinos, A. 764
Burnham, P 320, 352, 577, 901, 904, 932–46 Chiswick, B. 737
Burns, A. 504 Choi, J. 688
Burns, N. 650 Christie, A. 397
Burnside, C. 708 Chrystal, K. 940
Burrell, 367 n., 372 Churchill, W. 447, 572, 598, 600
Burrow, J. 10 Clarke, B. 507
Burt, G. 78 Clarke, F. 345
Burton, J. 105 Clarke, H. D. 104, 105, 107, 108, 445, 446, 447, 470,
Butler, D. 14, 34, 67, 94, 96, 97, 103, 104, 105, 176, 475–6, 479, 774, 776, 791, 795
445, 462, 904 Clarke, J. 133, 415, 419
Butler, G. 176 Clarke, K. 359, 657–8
Butler, J. 127, 145, 648 Clarke, P. 927
Butler, P. 807, 812 Clarke, S. E. 410
Buzan, B. 46 Clarke, S. R. C. 580, 933
Byers, S. 414 Clift, B. 905, 912–28
Clifton, J. 840
Cain, P. J. 596 Cm. 565, 684, 688, 694
Cairncross, A. 538, 940 Cmd. 311–12
Calasanti, T. 673 CMEB 593, 595
Calderwood, R. 547 Cmnd. 690, 693
Calhoun, C. 726 Coates, D. 581, 903
Callaghan, H. 913, 914 Cockburn, C. 149
Callender, C. 623 Cockerell, M. 179
Campbell, Alastair 175, 183 Cockett, R. 685
Campbell, Angus 97, 99, 101, 445, 462 Cohen, G. A. 46
Campbell, A. L. 670, 673–4, 676 Cohen, R. 592
Campbell, C. 358 Coker, C. 577–8
Campbell, D. 579, 767 Cole, G. D. H. 9, 26, 29–30, 31
Campbell, J. 923, 927 Coleman, J. 775
Campbell, M. 146, 689 Colley, L. 511
Campbell, R. 145, 149 Collier, P. 707–8
Campbell, T. 268 Collini, S. 5, 10–11, 13, 15, 27, 504
Campion, Lord 43 Collins, N. 807, 812
Canny, N. 590 Colls, R. 502, 509–10
Caren, N. 728 Comín, F. 840
Carey, G. W. 100 Commission for Africa 712–13
Carlson, A. 406 Connell, R. W. 149, 648, 649, 661
Carlyle, T. 190 Conrad, J. 202, 208
Carmichael, F. 744–5 Conservative Party 229
Carson, W. G. 327 Cook, F. 667, 677
Carter, T. 669 Cook, J. 670, 672
Carver, T. 647 Cooke, P. 425
Casey, B. 923 Cooper, R. 932
Castles, F. G. 63, 691 Coote, A. 657
Castles, S. 748 Copus, C. 406
CEC 923–4 Cornish, P. 762, 764
Centre for Contemporary British History 690 Coughlin, P. 78
Chandler, J. 406, 407 Council of Mortgage Lenders 876
Charles, N. 145 Coward, R. 140
Charlton, M. 849 Cowley, P. 226, 228, 246, 257, 443, 444
Cheshire, P. 84 Cox, G. W. 80
Chester, N. 157, 303 Crabtree, J. 406
Chesterton, G. K. 501, 503, 505–6 Craig, D. 540
952 author index
Craig, P. 264 DETR 414
Crawford, K. 373, 375 Devine, F. 609–25
CRE (Commission for Racial Equality) 629, 637 Dewan, T. 78–9, 80, 357
Créel, J. 915 DFID 702–3, 704, 705–6, 707 n. 3, 709, 711, 712–13,
Crewe, I. 46, 189, 444 714, 715
Crick, B. 11, 13, 16, 17, 28, 34, 43, 44 n. 5, 45 n. 10, Diamond, P. 580, 587
46, 46 n. 14, 52, 96, 97, 100, 187, 201–16, 406, 502, Díaz Fuentes, D. 840
592 Dibelius, W. 510
Crompton, R. 610, 611 Dicey, A. V. 59, 222, 246, 430–1
Crosland, C. A. R. 685, 946 Dickson, B. 276, 393
Crouch, C. 320, 879–94 Diermeier, D. 84
Crozier, M. 723, 731 Dilke, C. 575
Cullis, J. 84 Dimsdale, N. H. 940
Cumming, E. 666 Dinan, W. 377
Cunningham, H. 503 Diplock, Lord 266
Curtice, J. 106, 388, 390, 465, 512, 513 Dobson, A. 577
Curzon, G. 937 Doherty, B. 719–31
Dollar, D. 707–8
Daalder, H. 284, 448 Dorey, P. 228
Dahl, R. 95 Dorling, D. 609, 917
Dahrendorf, R. 157 n. Dostal, M. 918
Daintith, T. 244 Douglas, E. 673
Dalton, R. 721, 723–4 Douglas, M. 821
Daly, M. 652, 659, 922–3, 924 Dowding, K. M. 62–3, 64, 75–86, 310, 345, 346, 347,
Danchev, A. 767 348, 352, 357
Dandeker, C. 754 Dowds, L. 393
Daniels, N. 678 Downs, A. 76 n., 78, 303
Daniels, S. 507 Drahos, P. 336
Darling, A. 671 Draper, D. 376–7
Darwin, J. 590, 591 Drew, E. 368
Davie, G. E. 544 Driver, S. 856
Davie, P. H. 759 Drucker, P. 805
Davies, J. S. 404–19 Druckman, J. N. 109
Davies, P. 67 Dryzek, J. 10, 95, 100, 729, 827
Davies, P. H. J. 765 Dryzek, J. S. 93
Davies, R. 385 DTLR 414
Davies, W. 406 Duff, A 564
Davis, A. 800 Dumbrell, J. 572, 577, 578
Dawson, G. 409–10 Dunleavy, P. 3–4, 14, 62, 78, 79, 81, 101, 102, 104,
Day, C. 674 105, 107, 109, 287, 297, 298, 350, 354, 359, 394, 446,
Day, G. 543 727
Day, N. 104, 777, 785–6 Dunn, J. 4, 19
Day, P. 360 Dunne, T. 39
DCLG 405, 412, 415 Dunsire, M. 62, 312
de Wilde, J. 46 Durose, C. 659
Deacon, A. 692 Dustin, M. 146
Deacon, B. 668 Dustmann, C. 843, 872
Deacon, D. 800 Duverger, M. 57, 284
Deakin, N. 748 Dworkin, D. 130
Delors, J. 912 Dworkin, R. 265, 531
Den Otter, S. 29 Dyson, K. 558, 838, 846
Dench, D. 677
Denning, Lord 266 Easthope, A. 12
Denters, B. 791 Easton, D. 93
Denver, D. 107, 178, 445, 446, 475–6 Eccleshall, R. E. 510
Der Derian, J. 753 Eckstein, H. 57
author index 953
Economist 601, 902, 905, 908 Fiorina, M. 468, 473
Edgerton, D. 575 Firestone, S. 144 n. 5
Eijk, C. van der 469, 476 Fischoff, B 820, 822
EIRI (European Industrial Relations Fishbein, M. 101
Observatory) 926 Fitzmaurice, J. 426
Ekins, R. 267 Flinders, M. 64, 67, 70, 146, 223, 230, 241–2, 256,
Elcock, H. 93, 102 257, 292, 303–21, 352, 353, 355, 359, 405
Elgenius, G. 512 Foley, M. 355, 448
Elgie, R. 307, 908 Foot, P. 748
Elliott, L. 548–9 Foote, G. 508
Elliott, M. 520 Ford, F. M. 205–6
Ellis, R. 821 Forster, E. M. 213, 507
Ellison, N. 412 Forsyth, C. 265
Ellison, S. 412 Foucault, M. 121–2, 123
Ellwood, D. T. 692 Frandsen, A. G. 791
Eltis, W. 690 Franklin, M. 469, 476, 790, 800, 806
English, R. 517–33, 941 Franks, M. 145–6
EOC (Equal Opportunities Commission) 140 Fraser, N. 595
Erikson, R. 613 Freeden, M. 4, 19
Esping-Andersen, G. 581, 674, 686, 915, 922 Freeman, J. 377
ESRC (Economic and Social Research Friedberg, A. 574
Council) 45, 46, 48, 52, 53 Friis, L. 561
Estes, C. L. 666–7, 668, 673 Fudge, C. 411
Etzioni, A. 419, 778 Fukuyama, f. 581
Eulau, H. 95, 100 Fuller, C. 417
Eurobarometer 233, 858–9 Funtowitz, S. 827
Evandrou, M. 677 Furlong, P. 102
Evans, G. 447, 476, 614 Fuselli, P. 204–5
Evans, M. 258, 345 n.
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 44 Gaber, I. 800
Ewing, K. D. 262–79 Gaebler, T. 891
Eyerman, R. 726 Gains, F. 143, 146, 345, 359, 657, 659, 660
Gajewska, K. 842–3
Fabbri, F. 872 Galino-Rueda, F. 623
Fairbrass, J. 844 Gamble, A. 4, 6, 19, 27, 70, 189, 222–3, 350, 406,
Fairclough, N. 944 450, 468, 571–87, 653, 668, 897, 898, 900, 914, 920,
Falkner, G 839, 847 941, 942
Farr, J. 10, 14, 43, 43 n. 4 Gamson, W. A. 728
Farrell, D. 800, 805 Gange, L. 847
Farrington, C. 522 Garmise, S. 411–12
Faulks, S. 205 Garrett, G. 64, 903
Favell, A. 634 Garton Ash, T. 849
Featherstone, K. 64, 353, 558, 837–51, 925 Gaskell, G. 829
Feinstein, L. 618 Gearty, C. 268, 756
Fenge, R. 687 Geddes, A. 843, 873
Fennell, P. 265 Geddes, P. 539
Fenwick, H. 763 Geertz, C. 100
Fererra, M. 425 Geoghegan, V. 504, 506
Ferguson, N. 602 George, A. 618–19
Fernandez-Alles, M. 66 George, B. 598
Ferrera, M. 915, 916 George, S. 843
Field, J. 16 George, V. 922
Fillieule, O. 721, 722 Gerges, F. 766
Finer, H. 13, 32, 308 Gerring, J. 368
Finer, S. E. 11, 13, 35, 36–7, 59, 96, 103, 240, 367 GfK NOP 490
Finlayson, A. 132, 345, 347, 349 Gibb, R. 557
954 author index
Gibbons, S. 616–17 Greve, C. 316
Giddens, A. 468, 754, 819 Grier, K. 367
Giddings, P. 60, 232 Grieve, C. M. (Hugh MacDiarmid) 543–4
Gilardi, F. 308 Griffith, J. A. G. 242, 264, 265, 275, 279
Gill, P. 759 Griggs, S. 128–9
Gill, S. 580 Grillo, R. 493
Gilland, K. 518–19 Grimshaw, D. 359, 658
Gilleard, C. 677 Grofman, B. 78
Gilpin, R. 577 Gross, T. 677
Gilroy, P. 129, 592 Gunnell, J. G. 10, 100
Ginn, J. 673 Gunningham, N. 336
Giovannini, A. 933 Gunther, R. 444, 448
Giugni, M. G. 728, 729 Gurevich, M. 800
Glaeser, E. L. 790 Gurr, T. R. 723
Glees, A. 759
Glennerster, H. 621, 684–95 Habermas, J. 726
Globalization and Global Poverty Policy Hacker, J. S. 691
Group 714–15 Hall, J. 677, 689
Glyn, A. 580, 917 Hall, P. 581, 689, 790, 838, 912
Godson, D. 524 Hall, S. 120, 130, 131–2, 592, 633
Goetz, E. G. 410 Hall, T. 411
Goetz, K. H. 838 Hallward, P. 397
Gold, M. 923 Halpin, D. 369
Golding, P. 800 Halstead, J. 488
Golding, W. 211–12 Hampshire, J. 629–43
Goldsmith, M. 95, 97–8 Hands, G. 107
Goldsworthy, J. 223, 246, 268 Hansard Society 229, 234
Goldthorpe, J. H. 468, 611, 612, 613, 946 Hansen, R. 635, 735–50
Gomanee, K. 709 Hansen, W. 367
Gomez, R. 847 Harding, S. 649
Goodhart, C. A. E. 46, 77, 469 Harfield, C. 767
Goodhart, D. 511 Hargis, J. 129
Goodin, R. E. 42–53, 101–2, 104, 141 Hargreaves, I. 179–80
Gordon, C. 123, 427 Harkness, S. 694
Gordon, M. 598–9 Harris, P. 801, 803, 811, 812
Goulbourne, H. 593 Harrison, W. 33
Gould, P. 449, 806 Harrop, M. 803, 808–9, 811
Gouldner, A. W. 48 Hartsock, N. 144
Grabosky, P. 336 Harvey, D. 405, 417–18, 580, 582, 669, 673
Graham, A. 839–40 Harvie, C. 535–50
Graham, C. J. 100 Haskins, R. 694
Grahl, J. 557 Hastie, C. 690
Grainger, J. H. 502, 506, 507 Hatton, T. J. 872, 940
Gramsci, A. 125, 539 Hay, C. 4, 19, 47, 93, 99, 101, 103, 141–2, 321, 345,
Grant, W. 95, 97–8, 940, 941, 942, 943 347, 352, 354, 555, 562, 580, 583, 855–77, 903, 916,
Grantham, C. 369, 373 927, 940–1, 944
Gratschew, M. 674 Hayek, F. A. 160
Gray, J. 18, 333, 334, 582, 903 Hayward, J. 4, 7, 12, 26, 27, 29, 39, 44 n. 5, 45–6,
Gray, V. 369 95–6, 98 n. 5, 99, 308
Greenleaf, W. H. 96, 158, 164–5 Hazell, R. 63–4, 241, 257, 384, 395
Greenwood, C. R. 57 Headey, B. 80
Greenwood, R. 57 Heath, A. 465, 475, 477, 512, 612, 744, 745
Greer, S. 392, 393, 396 Heath, O. 474
Gregg, P. 614–15, 694 Heclo, H. 44, 356, 358, 685
Gregory, F. 766 Heffer, S. 511, 578
Gregory, J. 654, 655, 656 Heffernan, R. 67, 355, 356, 441–57
author index 955
Heinz, J. 371, 374 Howe, N. 668
Held, D. 855–6 Howell, C. 926
Helm, T. 810 Howkins, A. 507
Hemerijck, A. 915, 916 Hroch, M. 537
Hendricks, J. 665 HSE (Health and Safety Executive) 822
Henley, W. E. 504 Hubbard, P. 411
Henneberg, S. C. M. 803, 811, 812 Huber, J. 677
Hennessy, P. 67, 353, 355, 597, 598, 754 Huber, M. 829
Henry, W. E. 666 Huby, M. 62
Herrero de Miñon, M. 431 Hudson, R. B. 676
Hickman, M. 518 Hughes, J. 427
Hickman, T. 277 Hume, I. 541
Higgins, M. 798 Hume, J. 526–7
Higgs, P. 677 Humphreys, E. 544
Hilbert, J. 677 Huntington, S. 584, 600, 723, 731
Hill, C. 130, 600, 841 Hurd, D. 560
Hills, J. 614, 615, 620, 677, 678, 689–90 Husbands, C. T. 107
Hilton, B. 503 Hutchison, D. 548
Hindmoor, A. 78, 79, 356 Hutter, B. 825
Hinich, M. J. 78 Hutton, Lord 183, 272
Hinsliff, G. 638 Hutton, W. 581
Hirchman, A. O. 85 Hynes, S. 204–5
Hirczy de Miño, W. 291 n.
Hirschl, R. 243 IDC 705
Hirst, A. 807 Imbroscio, D. L. 409, 411
Hirst, P. 864, 874, 875, 900, 946 Indridason, I. H. 80
Hitchens, C. 574 Ingham, G. 898
Hix, S. 49 Ingle, S. 211 n.
HM Treasury 902, 903–4 Inglehart, R. 723, 725, 789–90
HMSO 934, 937 Innes, M. 763
Hobsbawm, E. 574 Institute of Fiscal Studies (IFS) 689–90
Hoepner, M. 913, 914 International Institute for Democracy and
Hoggart, R. 130 Electoral Assistance (IDEA) 674–5
Hogwood, B. 309 Iredale, I. 812
Holliday, I. 69, 350, 354, 943 Irvine, Lord 268
Hollinghurst, A. 215 Irwin, A. 821, 828
Holmes, M. 582 Irwin, C. 522
Honeyford, R. 488 Irwin, D. 937
Honneth, A. 595 Ishiguro, K. 210
Hood, C. 60, 62, 82, 312, 333, 334, 337, 351, 358, 359, ISI Web of Knowledge 49
360, 824, 828, 829
Hooghe, L. 309, 360, 427, 844, 914 Jackman, R. 918
Hoopes, S. 86 Jackson, M. 622
Hope, Lord 267, 272 Jackson, P. 593
Hopkin, J. 914, 917–18, 922, 927 Jackson, R. 668
Hopkins, A. G. 596 Jamasb, T. 840
Horesh, E. 701, 702 James, O. 320, 342–61
Hough, D. 395 Jamison, A. 726
House of Commons 227, 229, 231, 234, 394, 566, Janda, K. 449
759 Jasanoff, S. 823
House of Commons Library 227, 228 Jasper, J. 720
House of Lords 397 Jefferson, T. 131
House of Lords Constitution Committee 245, 264, Jeffery, C. 384–99, 434
270, 275, 277 Jenkins, J. C. 669
Hout, W. 708–9, 710, 711 Jennings, W. I. 26, 29–30, 32, 59, 223, 241, 312, 352
Howarth, D. 127, 128–9 Jepperson, R. L. 292
956 author index
Jepsen, M. 923, 924 Kennedy, P. 582
Jessop, B. 63, 417, 465 Kenny, M. 3–21, 34, 35, 95–6, 97, 98, 99, 130, 461,
Jiménez, M. 722 507, 522, 941
Jogerst, M. 229 Kerr, P. 26, 39, 345, 656
John, P. 84, 85, 352 Kettell, S. 26, 39, 345, 656, 932–46
John, S. 375 Keune, M. 923, 924
Johns, R. 92–109, 479 Key, V. O. 99
Johnson, C. 942 Keynes, J. M. 190–1
Johnson, J. 375 Kiernan, K. 692–3
Johnson, N. 7, 16, 34, 61, 96 Kindleberger, C. 574, 575
Johnson, P. 77 King, A. 108 n., 189, 222, 444, 466
Johnston, R. J. 104, 461–79 King, D. S. 67, 692
Johnstone, R. 336 King, M. R. 76
Jones, B. 365 n., 367 Kipling, R. 504, 512
Jones, N. 800 Kirchheimer, O. 448
Jones, P. 84 Klandermans, B. 669
Jones, T. 538 Klein, R. 335
Jordan, A. 839, 842 Klingemann, H.-D. 101–2, 104, 141
Jordan, G. 365–80 Knack, S. 789–90
Jouve, B. 430 Kneeshaw, J. 105
Jowell, J. 242, 267 Knill, C. 838, 842
Jowell, R. 465 Koeberle, S. 712
Judd, D. 597 Koppell, P. 366
Judge, D. 60, 221, 223, 224, 225, 229, 234 Kollman, K. 297
Judicial Appointments Commission 273 Korpi, W. 674, 686
Kosack, G. 748
Kaase, M. 719, 723 Kotler, N. 800
Kabbani, R. 489 Kotler, P. 800, 802, 803, 804, 812
Kaeding, M. 847 Kraay, A. 774
Kagan, R. 327 Kramer, H. 561
Kam, C. 80 Kreps, D. M. 82
Kampfner, J. 571, 579 Krieger, J. 590–603
Kanf, W.-T. 78 Kriesi, H. 728, 729
Karmis, D. 430 Krook, M. L. 141, 150, 151
Kasperson, R 821 Kuhn, R. 183
Kassim, H. 69 Kumar, K. 502–3, 509
Katz, R. 448 Kundera, M. 204
Katznelson, I. 748 n. Kydland, F. 933
Kaufmann, D. 774 Kynaston, D. 329
Kaufmann, E. P. 393, 522, 584
Kavanagh, D. 3, 5, 5 n., 6, 11, 25–40, 70, 93, 94, 96, Laclau, E. 125–7
97, 355, 809, 904 Lacouture, J. 189
Keane, J. 583 Laffin, M. 63, 443
Keane, M. 84 Laibson, D. 688
Kearney, H. 506, 592 Lakatos, I. 93
Keating, M. 392, 423–36 Lamy, P. 921
Kedourie, E. 166 Land, H. 692–3
Kedward, R. 195 Langford, P. 503
Keefer, P. 789–90 Laski, H. J. 8, 9, 26, 29–30, 31–2, 97, 157, 161–2, 273,
Keith, R. 804–5 275, 279, 404
Kelly, D. 914 Laver, M. 60
Kelly, G. 581, 914 Lawless, P. 411
Kelly, P. 3–4, 154–69 Lawrence, D. H. 207
Kelly, R. 405, 412, 415 Lawson, N. 559
Kelso, A. 221–35 Layard, R. 693, 918, 919
Kennedy, F. 518–19 Le Cacheux, J. 915
author index 957
Le Carré, J. 209–10 Lustgarten, L. 272–3, 755, 756, 767
Le Galès, P. 411, 428 Lynch, F. 77
Le Grand, J. 884–5, 888 Lynch, P. 427, 545
Lecky, W. H. 29 Lyons, D. 754
Lecours, A. 392 Lyons, M. 413
Lee, J. 543
Lee, S. 509 Maarek, P. J. 801, 812
Lees-Marshment, J. 800, 804, 806, 812 MacGinty, R. 389
Lehmkuhl, D. 838, 840 McAdam, D. 729
Leibfried, S. 63 McAllister, I. 294
Leigh, D. 376 McAllister, L. 391
Leigh, I. 272–3, 755, 756, 759, 767 McAnulla, S. 345, 350
Leighton, D. P. 504 McBarnet, D. 337
Lelkes, O. 677 McCall, C. 519
Lent, A. 726 McCartney, R. 522
Leonard, S. 10 McConnell, J. 377
Lesquesne, C. 428 MacDonald, R. 195, 397
Lester, A. 635 McEwan, I. 205, 214
Levy, S. 802 McEwen, N. 392, 425
Lewis-Beck, M. 476 McGarry, J. 389
Lewis, J. 146, 689, 692–3 McGowan, L. 520
Lichtenstein, S. 822 McGrath, C. 365, 367 n., 372
Liebfried, S. 926 McGuire, M. 892
Lieven, A. 583 Machin, S. 622
Lijphart, A. 67, 285, 365–6, 388–9, 442 McIntosh, M. 148
Lilleker, D. 800, 806 MacIntyre, A. 101, 102
Lindblom, C. 374 Mackay, F. 148–9, 151, 391, 646–61
Linn, B. 393 McKay, S. 275
Linton, M. 106 McKenzie, R. T. 35, 447, 465
Lippman, W. 366 Mackenzie, W. J. M. 8–9, 13, 18, 27, 35–6, 44, 94,
Lipset, S. M. 286, 463 96, 97, 99, 101
Lipsky, M. 825 Mackintosh, J. P. 241
Lister, M. 352 McKittrick, D. 525
Lister, R. 143 McKnight, A. 612, 615, 622, 623, 689, 694
Lloyd, J. 182 McLaughlin, A. 366, 660–1
Lock, A. 801, 803, 811, 812 McLaughlin, E. 659
Lodge, G. 398 McLean, I. 81, 83, 233, 353–4, 397, 398, 399
Lodge, M. 60, 358 McLellan, D. 188
Lofstedt, R. 827 McLennan, B. 120
London Assembly 757 McMillan, A. 397, 398
Longstreth, F. 58, 67 Macmillan, Lord 328
Loomis, B. 374 Macpherson, Sir W. 640
Louis, W. R. 572, 590, 597 McNamara, K. 320
Lovenduski, J. 148, 655 McQuail, D. 107
Low, S. 27 McRobbie, A. 146, 147
Lowe, P. 842 Madrian, B. 688
Lowe, R. 685 Mahin, D. 574
Lowell, A. L. 27, 29 Maine, H. 29
Lowery, D. 369 Mainwaring, S. 286
Lowndes, V. 145, 412, 414 Mair, P. 283–99, 448, 452, 453
Ludlam, S. 943–4 Maitland, F. W. 156, 311
Luhmann, N. 829–30 Majone, G. 827
Lukes, S. S. 409 Major, J. 444
Lumley, B. 120 Malleson, K. 275
Lupton, R. 417, 621 Maloney, W. 366, 369
Lusoli, W. 724 Maltby, T. 670, 672
958 author index
Mandelson, P. 689, 806 Miles, R. 592
Mandler, P. 503, 504, 507 Miliband, D. 413
Manning, N. 81 Miliband, R. 37, 221, 274, 685
Manningham-Buller, E. 766 Mill, J. S. 33
Mansbridge, J. 368, 730 Miller, D. W. 10, 377, 531
Marazzi, C. 945 Miller, P. 123
March, J. G. 58, 69 Miller, W. L. 94, 96, 97, 99, 103, 104, 106
Marcusen, M. 320 Mills, C. 612, 613
Margetts, H. 394 Milner, K. 372, 374, 375, 377
Marinetto, M. 408 Minkler, M. 668
Marks, G. 309, 360, 844, 914 Minogue, K. 18, 159, 166
Marquand, D. 6–8, 10–11, 16, 187–99, 257, 320, 418, Mintrom, M 653
898 Mitchell, J. 385, 390, 391, 395, 396, 398, 538
Marr, A. 535 Mitchell, N. 367, 369–70
Marriot, J. 27 Mitrokhin, V. 755
Marsh, A. 719, 723 Modood, T. 166, 484–97, 595, 596, 643
Marsh, C. 611 Monnet, J. 849
Marsh, D. 46, 68, 95, 98, 102, 107, 142, 345, 348, 352, Montero, J. R. 444, 448
353, 357, 469, 580 Moodie, G. 35
Marsh, S. 768 Moran, J. 762, 763
Marshall, A. 844 Moran, M. 3–4, 20, 325–39, 729
Marshall, G. 35, 241, 611 Moravscik, A. 558
Marshall, J. 667, 677 Moreno, L. 425, 430, 435
Marshall, T. H. 395 Morgan, K. 396, 411–12, 425
Marshall, V. 667, 677 Morgan, P. 174, 178, 701
Martell, L. 856 Morgan, P. D. 590–1, 602
Martin, A. 918, 919, 920, 921 MORI 594
Martin, J. 512 Morris, J. A. 203
Martin, S. 86 Morris, W. 207
Marx, K. 188–9 Morrison, B. 215
Massey, D. 609 Morrison, J. 759
Mastruzzi, M. 774 Morrissey, O. 699–715
Mathers, K. 621 Morth, U. 839
Mathieson, S. 764 Mossberger, K. 60
Mathur, N. 408, 417 Mouffe, C. 125–7
Matthew, H. C. G. 198 Mount, F. 242
Matthews, D. 368 Mouritzen, P. E. 407
Mauser, G. 803, 812 Moyser, G. 777, 785–6
Mawson, J. 411 Moyser, M. 104
Maynard, G. 582 Mueller, C. 722
Mays, N. 888 Muir, R. 29–31
Meadows, P. 621 Müller, W. C. 60, 66–7, 78, 308, 444, 448, 452, 453
Meer, N 493 Mulligan, J.-O. 888
Mehring, F. 189 Munchau, W. 918–19
Meller, H. 538 Munger, M. C. 78, 367
Melucci, A. 726 Munro, C. 246
Menon, A. 64 Murdoch, R. 546
Mény, Y. 425, 428 Murphy, A. 561
Mergoupis, T. 84–5 Murray, C. 692
Merlo, A. 84 Murray, G. 526, 528, 531
Merrill III, S. 78 Murtagh, B. 389
Merrison, A. W. 334–5 Musgrave, P. B. 84
Messerschmidt, J. 149 Musgrave, R. A. 84
Metcalf, D. 926 Muslim Parliament 486
Meyer, D. S. 729 Myatt, D. P. 78–9, 80
Milburn, A. 413 Myrdal, G. 583
author index 959
Naegele, G. 664, 669, 672–3 Osborne, T. 122, 123, 124
Nairn, T. 13, 507–8, 898 O’Shaughnessy, N. 800, 801, 803, 804, 811
Nash, C. 669 Osmond, 543
Nash, F. 7 Ostrogorski, M. 29
National Audit Office (NAO) 826, 893 Oz-Salzberger, F. 541
National Criminal Intelligence Service 761
National Research Council (NRC) 827, 830 PAC 373
Négrier, E. 430 Padoa-Schioppa, T. 557
Negrine, R. 800 Page, A. 244
Nelkin, D. 823 Page, E. C. 357
Nelson, S. 522 Paisley, I. 524–5
Newby, H. 465 Palast, G. 377
Newey, G. 19 Palier, P. 916
Newman, B. 798, 800, 801, 805, 807, 811 Palme, J. 674, 686
Newman, J. 419, 647 Palmer, J. 800
Newman, M. 187–8 Palmowski, J. 410
Newton, K. 106–7, 789–90 Panebianco, A. 442, 448, 800
Newton, S. 898 Panitch, L. 944
Nickell, S. 694, 918, 919 Parekh, B. 166, 461, 595, 743–4
Niskanen, W. A. 81, 305 Parker, D. 86
Nord, L. 800 Parker, G. 564
Nordhaus, W. D. 46, 77 Parkinson, J. 581
Norman, W. 430 Parris, H. 311, 312
Norris, P. 447, 477, 721, 723, 724, 789–90, 805 Parris, M. 376
North, D. C. 76 Parry, G. 104, 777, 785–6
Norton, P. 226, 231, 444 Parsons, T. 408
Norval, A. 127 Parvin, P. 372, 375, 379
Nou, J. 81 Pateman, C. 46, 694
Novotny, P. 807 Paterson, A. 276
Patterson, H. 393
Oakeshott, M. 33–4, 44, 95–6, 155–63, 164, 165, 167, Patterson, S. C. 60
168, 510 Pattie, C. J. 104, 105–6, 461–79, 721, 774, 777, 778,
Oakley, A. 647, 649, 650 785, 786, 787, 788, 790, 795
Oborne, P. 182, 183 Paul, K. 748
O’Cass, A. 800, 804, 812 Paul, T. V. 768
O’Connor, J. 667 Paxman, J. 508–9
O’Connor, J. S. 520 Payne, C. 612
OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation Pearce, G. 393
and Development) 668, 673, 903–4, 914, 915, 918, Pearce, N. 16
924 Pedersen, O. 923
Ogg, J. 677 Pelling, H. 262, 578
Ogus, A. 326 Penn, R. 611
O’Hara, A. 215 Penrose, J. 593
Ohmae, K. 581 Pensions Commission 687
Okin, S. M. 147–8 Perkin, H. 6, 327
O’Leary, B. 389, 395, 812 Perraton, J. 915
Oliver, D. 242, 276 Perrow, C. 820
Oliver, J. E. 791 Peters, B. G. 57–71, 320
Oliver, T. 841–2, 845–6 Peterson, J. 64
Olsen, J. P. 58, 69, 838 Peterson, S. 671, 676
Omand, D. 763 Pevalin, D. 610
Omi, M. 631 Phillips, A. 46, 146, 149
Orloff, A. S. 691, 692 Phillips of Maltravers, Lord 275
Orwell, G. 207, 209, 212–13, 507 Phillipson, C. 666–7, 668, 676
Osborne, D. 891 Phillis, R. 183
Osborne, R. D. 393 Philp, M. 4, 19
960 author index
Piachaud, D. 621 Ratushny, E. 276
Pidgeon, N. 821 Ravetz, J. 827
Pierre, J. 60, 67, 320, 408 Rawlings, R. 63–4, 245, 250, 268, 387, 547
Pierson, C. 903 Raz, J. 264
Pierson, P. 58, 67, 68, 684, 685–6, 915, 926 Readman, P. 504–5
Pimlott, B. 187, 190, 192 Reay, D. 623
Pintor, R. 674 Reday-Mulvey, G. 673
Pisani-Ferry, J. 921 Redwood, J. 582, 586
Pissarides, C. 77 Rees, G. 411–12, 543
Plasser, F. 452, 453 Rees, J. 336
Pocock, J. G. A. 512–13, 592 Rees, T. 652
Pollack, M. 305, 307, 310 Rees, W. 755, 764
Pollard, S. 898 Rees Pryce, W. T. 541
Pollitt, M. 840 Reid, K. 377
Porter, A. 602 Reif, K. 391
Porter, D. 898 Research Councils UK 52
Posner, R. A. 882 Rex, J. 491
Potratz, W. 677 Rhodes, M. 915, 922
Poulter, S. 487 Rhodes, R. A. W. 37, 38, 40, 44, 60, 68, 95, 96, 98,
Powell, A. 209 99, 102, 345–50, 352, 353, 354, 355, 356, 358, 361,
Powell, J. E. 508 408
Power, A. 621 Ricci, D. M. 10, 100
Power, G. 257 Rice, G. 761
Power, M. 829 Richards, D. 222, 345, 348, 349, 352, 354, 355, 357,
Power Inquiry 233–4 358
Power to the People 773 Richardson, J. 79
Pratchett, L. 416 Riddell, P. 172–85, 379–80, 571, 600
Prescott, E. 933 Ridley, F. F. 45 n. 11, 46 n. 13, 48
Presthus, R. V. 93, 94 Ridley, N. 404
Preston, I. 85, 872 Riley, M. 677–8
Preston, L. 677 Rips, L. J. 109
Price, L. 175 Ripsman, N. M. 768
Priestley, J. B. 507 Risse, T. 838
Pringle, R. 145 Roberts, A. 47
Privy Counsellor Review Committee 255 Roberts, B. 367
Pugh, A. 844 Robertson, A. 668
Pulzer, P. G. J. 464 Robertson, D. 78, 263, 276, 279
Putnam, R. 16, 775, 789–90 Robinson, A. 503
Puwar, N. 149 Robinson, P. 395
Pythian, M. 766 Rochon, T. 729
Rockman, B. A. 58, 66
Quadagno, J. 667, 673 Roemer, J. E. 78
Quigley, K. 823 Rohleder, C. 670
Quine, W. V. O. 101 Rokkan, S. E. 286, 294, 385, 463
Quinn, T. 79, 450 Rollo, J. 565
Quintini, G. 694 Rolston, B. 757
Rootes, C. 720, 722, 723, 727
Radaelli, C. M. 64, 353, 838, 839, 925 Rose, D. 610
Radcliffe-Richards, J. 139 Rose, E. J. B. 748
Radnor, Z. 892 Rose, N. 122, 123, 124–5
Rafter, K. 528 Rose, R. 5 n., 11, 13, 27–8, 33, 34, 67, 69, 80, 294, 519
Rallings, C. 390 Rose, S. 512
Ramesh, R. 767 Roseneil, S. 727
Ranciere, J. 320 Roskill, S. 188
Randall, V. 138–51 Ross, D. 9, 14
Rasinski, K. 109 Rothstein, B. 790
author index 961
Rothstein, H. 818–32 Scott, P. 213–14, 215
Royal Society 828 Scott-Smith, G. 754
Rucht, D. 722 Scottish Executive 388
Rudden, B. 240 Scruggs, L. 916–17
Rüdig, W. 726 Scruton, R. 508, 510, 511
Rummery, K. 143, 146, 657, 660 Scullion, R. 806
Runciman, W. G. 765 Scully, R. 388, 391, 478
Rush, M. 223, 369, 373 Scully, T. R. 286
Rushdie, S. 484 Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs 320
Rushing, S. 129 Seeley, J. R. 9, 156
Russell, M. 146, 228, 233 Segal, L. 139
Ryan, T. 675 Seldon, A. 70, 179, 183, 355, 465, 556, 560, 580
Semetko, H. A. 106
Sacerdote, B. 790 Seyd, P. 79, 104, 105–6, 721, 774, 776, 777, 778, 785,
Saegert, S. G. 790 786, 787, 788, 790, 795, 807
Saggar, S. 477, 636 Seymour-Ure, C. 369, 373
Salmond, A. 549 Shafer, A. 913
Salter, A. 37 n. Shama, A. 801
Salter, B. 335 Shannon, R. 196
Samad, Y. 488–9 Shapiro, M. 263
Sanders, D. 46, 77–8, 93, 94, 100, 102, 105, 105 n. 12, Sharp, D. 674
107, 469, 470 Sharpe, L. J. 413, 424
Sandford, M. 393 Shaw, E. 443, 448
Sandholz, W. 558 Shell, D. 232
Sandin, P. 827 Sheppard, S. 84
Sapir, A. 916 Shepsle, K. A. 58
Särlvik, B. 46 Shields, T. 674
Sartori, G. 286, 287–8 Shils, E. 13
Sartre, J.-P. 203 Shirlow, P. 389
Sasse, G. 427 Shrader-Frechette, K. 827
Saunder, M. 205 n. Shukra, K. 638
Saunders, C. 723 Sidel, M. 754, 764, 768
Saunders, J. 807 Silver, A. 465
Saunders, P. 417, 611–12 Sinclair, D. 336
Saunders Lewis, J. 543–4 Singh, G. 487
Saussure, F. de 125 Skelcher, C. 359, 408, 417
Savigny, H. 95, 98, 142, 798–813 Skidelsky, R. 193
Scammell, M. 799, 801, 804, 812, 813 Skidmore, P. 677
Scarborough, E. 104 Skinner, Q. 19
Scarman, Lord 639 Skocpol, T. 691
Scharf, T. 676 Slevin, K. 673
Scharpf, F. 65 Slovic, P. 820, 821, 822
Schattschneider, E. E. 295 Smart, C. 143
Schlesinger, P. 377 Smeeding, T. M. 690
Schlozman, K. 378–9, 673 Smith, A. D. 509
Schmidt, B. C. 6 Smith, A. E. 676
Schmidt, V. A. 839, 848, 859 Smith, A.-M. 128
Schmitt, C. 196 Smith, B. 701, 702
Schmitt, H. 391 Smith, D. 507, 544, 941–2
Schondhart-Bailey, C. 83 Smith, G. 288, 292, 807
Schotland, R. 274 Smith, J. 563, 847
Schultz, K. A. 77 Smith, M. 408, 417, 760
Sciara, M. 228 Smith, M. A. 374
Scott, C. 351, 359 Smith, M. J. 67, 222, 348, 349, 352, 354, 355, 357, 358,
Scott, G. 68 943–4
Scott, J. W. 494, 651 Smith, N. J. 857–8
962 author index
Smith, T. 12 Taagepera, R. 102
Smithies, R. 689 Tarrow, S. 723, 788
Snow, C. P. 210–11 Tawney, R. H. 538
Social Trend 37: 622 Taylor, A. J. P. 536, 597
Solomos, J. 638, 639 Taylor, B. 475
Somit, A. 671, 676 Taylor, C. 10, 595
Sontag, S. 203–4 Taylor, D. 215
Soskice, D. 581, 912 Taylor, P. 849
Souza, C. 373, 375 Taylor, R. 919, 925–6
Soysal, Y. 634 Taylor, R. C. R. 838
Spark, M. 215–16 Taylor-Gooby, P. 690, 922
Sparkes, J. 621 Teague, P. 557
Sparrow, A. 181 Temple, M. 800, 809
Sparrow, N. 813 Thain, C. 356
Spencer, I. R. G. 635 Thalen, K. 689
Spirling, A. 233 Tham, J.-C. 267
Squires, J. 146, 150, 648, 649, 652, 653, 659, 660 Thatcher, M. 195–6, 308, 826, 840
Stacey, M. 334, 335 Theakston, K. 348
Stapleton, J. 30, 501–13 Thelen, K. A. 58, 67
Starkey, D. 509 Thomas, A. 63
Stavrakakis, Y. 127 Thomas, C. 365
Stedward, G. 148 Thomas, H. 576
Steinmo, S. 58, 67 Thomas, R. S. 535–6
Stephens, P. 559 Thomas, Sir S. 272
Steunenberg, B. 81 Thomas, T. 761
Stewart, J. 406, 409–10 Thompson, E. P. 129, 130, 131, 133, 507
Stewart, K. 614, 615, 620, 621, 689–90 Thompson, G. 864, 874, 875, 900, 946
Stewart, M. 411 Thompson, H. 557, 897–909, 942
Stewart, M. C. 107 Thompson, M. 537, 821
Steyn, Lord 267, 269, 277, 279 Thompson, S. 312
Stigler, G. 367 Thomson, K. 677
Stoker, G. 4, 19, 60, 405, 408, 411, 413, 416, 731 Thomson, S. 375
Stokes, D. 14, 34, 97, 104, 445, 462 Thorlakson, L. 297
Stone, C. N. 408, 409, 419 Thränhardt, D. 633
Stone Sweet, A. 263, 264, 265, 268, 279, 308, 826 Thrasher, M. 390
Stott, R. 175, 183 Tickner, A. 144
Strachey, L. 190, 191 Tierney, S. 250, 378–9, 435
Strate, J. 676 Tilley, J. 477
Straw, J. 180, 496 Tilly, C. 722, 723, 725, 727
Streb, M. J. 274 Tocqueville, A. de 405
Streeck, W. 689, 922 Todd, J. 522
Street, A. 312 Tomkins, A. 239–59, 268, 269
Street, D. 672–3 Tomlinson, J. 905, 914, 920, 942
Street, J. 798 Tonge, J. 478, 526, 528, 531
Strøm, K. 60, 66–7, 308, 444, 448 Topf, R. 720
Strömbäck, J. 800 Torfing, J. 63, 127
Stuart, M. 228 Touraine, A. 726
Sullivan, H. 416 Tourangeau, R. 109
Sun, H. 800 Townsend, P. 665, 670
Sunier, T. 496 n. 6 Toynbee, P. 294 n.
Sunstein, C. 827 Travers, T. 67, 394, 404, 416
Susser, B. 101 n. Treasury, HM 689
Sutherland, H. 621 Trench, A. 63–4, 251, 398
Sutherland, P. 849 Trentmann, F. 130, 131
Swann, Lord 494 Trimble, D. 522
Swift, G. 214 Trotsky, L. 576–7
author index 963
True, J. 653 Wallace, H. 848
Truman, D. 367 Wallace, W. 554
Tsebelis, G. 64, 66, 79, 81, 360 Wallas, G. 8, 9, 18, 26, 27, 32, 94 n., 97, 157, 161, 168
Tunstall, J. 173, 179, 181 Wallerstein, I. 577
Turner, B. 819 Walters, R. 228, 240–1
Turner, J. 813 Walton, J. K. 504, 506
Turner, M. 674 Ward, H. 46, 76, 78, 85–6, 107, 469
Turner, R. 582 Ward, K. 619
Turpin, C. 251, 256 Ward, N. 842
Ward, P. 506
Uebel, T. 115 Ward, S. 724
UKACIA (UK Action Committee on Islamic Ware, A. 445
Affairs) 486, 492 Warnes, T. 679
Undy, R. 926 Warren, L. 670, 672
United Nations Conference on Trade and Wass, D. 940, 946
Development 902 Watanuki, J. 723, 731
Urban, M. 768 Waters, C. 507
Urwin, D. 385 Watson, M. 562, 876, 903, 944
Watson, S. 145
Valle-Cabrera, R. 66 Watt, D. 572, 574
van Aelst, P. 721, 723, 724 Wattenberg, M. 791
van der Pijl, K. 577 Weale, A. 336
Van Dormael, A. 938 Weaver, O. 46
Van Thiel, S. 307, 316, 320 Weaver, R. K. 58, 66, 692
van Waarden, F. 847 Webb, J. 651, 654, 655
Vandenbroucke 922 Webb, M. 207
Verba, S. 101, 673, 674, 773, 786 Webb, P. 442, 449, 457
Verhulst, J. 722, 723, 724 Weber, M. 197–8
Vigor, A. 395 Webster, F. 804
Vile, M. J. C. 248 Wedderburn of Charlton, Lord 266
Villis, T. 506 Weight, R. 511
Vincent, D. 754 Weinberg, A. 820
Vincent, J. 668 Weiner, M. J. 26
Vincent, S. 359 Weingast, B. R. 76
Vogel, D. 327, 331, 823 Weir, S. 229, 242
von Luijeren, M. 496 n. 6 Werding, M. 687
Vout, M. 33, 35, 36 West, D. 374
Vulliamy, E. 376 Wheare, K. C. 59
Whelan, C. 337
Wada, K. 763 White, B. 563
Wade, H. W. R. 265 White, J. 404, 409, 410, 412
Wahlke, J. C. 95 Whiteley, P. 79, 105–6, 721, 773–95
Wakeham, Lord 272 Whiteley, P. F. 104
Walby, S. 648, 730 Whittier, N. 729
Waldfogel, J. 694 Wickham-Jones, M. 146, 659, 692, 903
Waldron, J. 268 Wiener, M. 537–8, 897
Walgrave, S. 721, 722, 723, 724 Wilcox, B. 333, 334
Walker, A. 664–79 Wildavsky, A. 44, 356, 358, 685, 821
Walker, C. 675, 764 Wilkinson, P. 766
Walker, D. 407 Wilks-Heeg, S. 411
Walker, G. S. 523–4 Wilks, S. 554
Walker, J. G. 77 Wilks, S. R. M. 352
Walker, N. 250 Williams, F. 660
Walker, R. 360 Williams, R. 130, 131, 133
Walkland, S. 227 Williamson, H. 206
Wall, D. 727 Williamson, O. E. 82, 892
964 author index
Williamson, P. 507 Woods, O. 173–4
Willis, G. B. 109 Woods, R. 744–5
Willis, P. 614 Woolas, P. 415
Willmott, H. 359, 621 Woolf, L. 213
Willson, F. 310–11 World Bank 601, 668, 673, 700, 706, 708, 710
Wilson, A. R. 143 Wright, A. 187
Wilson, C. 430–1 Wright, J. S. F. 414
Wilson, G. K. 358 Wright, M. 356, 690
Wilson, R. 389 Wright, P. 505
Wilson, R. M. 215 Wright, T. 450
Winant, H. 630, 631 Wright, V. 165–6, 425
Winch, D. 10 Wring, D. 801, 803, 805
Wincott, D. 395, 396, 912, 914, 917–18, 922, 923, Wyn Jones, R. 388, 391, 478
925, 927
Windlesham, Lord 248, 271 Yesilkagit, K. 310
Winkel, G. 790 Young, E. 242
Winner, L. 821 Young, H. 563, 582, 586
Wintour, P. 807, 808 Young, K. 674
Wipperman, W. 631 Yu, S. 744, 745
Wise, M. 557
Wlezien, C. 477 Zaltman, C. 812
Wolf, M. 581 Zizek, S. 127
Wolinetz, S. 455 Zuk, G. 107
Woodhouse, D. 223, 241–2, 271 Zürn, M. 63
Subject Index
...................................................
Note: page numbers in italic refer to figures, those in bold to tables.
A v Home Secretary 269–70 asylum seekers 593–4, 735–6, 739–40, 740,
actor-centered institutionalism 65 843
Acts of Parliament 246 Australian Journal of Political Science 49, 50
adult worker model (AWM) 925 Austria: party system 291, 292
advanced liberalism 124–5 autonomy, see devolution; European devolution
ageing, see generational politics AWM (adult worker model) 925
AHA (American Historical Association) 28
aid, see international development baby boomer effect 677–8
AJPolS (American Journal of Political Science) 49, backbench rebellions 83, 226
50 balance of trade 875, 875, 876
Alford Index 466, 467 international economy and 938–40
Alternative Investment Market (AIM) 902–3 Beattie Media 377
America behaviouralism 27–8, 37, 45 n. 10, 92–109
Britain and: see Anglo-America American political analysis and 36
and EU 586–7 and anti-scientism 96
American Historical Association (AHA) 28 British: barriers to 95–7
American Journal of Political Science (AJPolS) 49, British: differences in 97–100
50 British political science and 103–8
American Political Science Review (APSR) 49, 50 contribution of 106–8
analytical Marxism 46 definition of 93–5
Anglo-America 571–87 evaluation of 104–6
economic relationship 580–3 idealism and 95–6
history of 573–6 Marxism and 96
ideological relationship 583–5 and mass behaviour 98
special relationship 572–3, 574, 576, 596–8, 600 methodological concerns 96–7
strategic relationship 578–80 and modernist empiricism 99
theory behind 576–8 observable behaviour 93–4
Annual Review of Political Science 50 philosophy of social science 93
anti-foundationalism 115–34, 346 and political analysis 33–4
definition of 116–20 and political participation 98
governmentality theory 119, 120, 121–5 and post-behaviouralism 100–3
and meaning holism 116–17, 118 scientific methods, commitment to 94–5
and philosophy 116–17 surveys 104–6, 109
and political science 117–19 and voting behaviour 98
post-Marxism 125–9 Belgium: new parties in 284
and social constructivism 117 Better Government for Older People (BGOP)
social humanism 129–33 initiative 670
varieties of 119–20, 120 bibliometrics 51
anti-scientism 96 Bill of Rights (1689) 240, 243
anti-Semitism 506 biography 187–99
APSR (American Political Science Review) 49, 50 and charismatic leadership 197–9
area studies 4, 46 development of 189–94
Association of Professional Political Consultants passion v. reason in 194–7
(APPC) 372, 373 tombstone biographers 189–91
966 subject index
BISA (British International Studies Chartered Institute for Public
Association) 46 Relations—Government Affairs Group
BJPolS (British Journal of Political Science) 43, 49, (CIPR GAG) 372
50 child poverty 609, 614–15, 689, 694, 892
Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) voters 476–7 childcare policies 657, 658, 688–9, 693–4
BNP (British National Party) 441 feminism and 146
Bretton Woods Agreement 937–8, 939–40 America 691–2
Britain free school meals (FSMs) 622
and America: see Anglo-America Sure Start programme 620, 621
and EU 586–7 citizenship 149, 167, 506, 764
three circles of influence 572–3, 597, 598 immigration and 735–50
see also United Kingdom (UK) City of London: self-regulation 327, 328, 330, 331–3
British Commonwealth 59 civil service 30, 81, 358
British Election Study (2005) 792–4, 793 class 609–25
British Empire 590–603 and education 614, 615–16, 616, 617, 618–19,
legacies of 601–3 620–4
and national identity 591–6 inequalities (1945–97) 610–14
retreat from 596–601 inequalities (2005–) 614–20
British International Studies Association novels and 208–11
(BISA) 46 CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) 726,
British Journal of Political Science (BJPolS) 43, 49, 729
50 coalition government 38, 60, 251, 295–6
British National Party (BNP) 441 cold war 753, 755–6
collective responsibility 81
Cabinet government 30, 241 command regulation: limits of 336–8
cabinet studies 60, 79–81 Commission for Africa 712–13
Cambridge University 9, 26–7, 28, 51, 156 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 842
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 726, Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) 842
729 Communications Electronic Security Group 761
CAP (Common Agricultural Policy) 842 comparative politics 4, 46, 59
capitalism 912–18 Comprehensive Performance Assessment
‘clash of capitalisms’ 913–15 (CPA) 412
European welfare systems and 915–18 conceptual analysis 46
governance and 913–15 Conservative Party 32, 35, 78, 441
cartels: self-regulation and 329–30 Globalization and Global Poverty Policy
central state 342–61, 351 Group 714–15
central departments 357–8 and newspapers 176–7, 178
contemporary political history 343, 344 statecraft (1979–1997) 941–3
core executive 354–5 consociation: in Northern Ireland 388–9
executive agencies 358–9 constitution 59
governance and governance narratives 348–51 Constitution Unit 63–4
governance, disaggregation of 351–60 constitutional monarchy 244–5
influence of 358–60 Constitutional Reform Act 2005: 248, 264, 271–2,
mainstream politics and interpretivist 273, 274, 278
critics 343–50, 344, 352–3, 355, 356, 357, 358, constitutionalism 239–59
360–1 constitution: content 244–52
multi-level governance 353–4 constitution: unwritten, consequences
policy-making networks 352–3 of 239–42
political history 353 constitutional monarchy 244–5
Prime Ministers, presidentialization of 355–6 contemporary challenges to 252–8
qualitative political science 343, 344, 347–8, devolution and Union State 249–52
360–1 and EU 252–5
quantitative political science 343–7, 344, 360–1 ministerial responsibility 249
centralism 406–7, 410, 417 move from political to legal 242–3, 254–5
CFSP (Common Foreign and Security Policy) 842 and New Labour 255–8
charismatic leadership 197–9 parliament, sovereignty of 243, 245–6
subject index 967
rule of law 243, 246–7 DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) 384–5, 392,
separation of powers 248–9 392, 393, 523, 524–5
Conway v Wade [1909] AC 606: 262–3, 265–6
corporatism 32 ECB (European Central Bank) 558, 920, 921
counter-terrorism legislation 255–6 ECHR (European Convention on Human
CPA (Comprehensive Performance Rights) 252, 255–6, 270
Assessment) 412 ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) 758–9
cultural studies 130–1 Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) 557, 559,
culture 119, 120, 129–30, 507 846
Daily Express 176, 177 education 620–4, 885, 888
Daily Herald 176 class and 614, 615–16, 616, 617, 618–19, 620–4
Daily Mirror 176 ethnic groups 743–4, 745–6
dealignment 46, 77, 466–8, 467 FE 615, 622
debt 876 FSM eligibility and 622
delegation 303–21 HE 618, 623
constitutional history and theory 310–14 social capital and 790–1
delegated governance 316 Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) 622–3
politicization of 319–21 EHRC (Equalities and Human Rights
Russian Doll Model (RDM) 314–19, 315, 318 Commission) 642
study traditions: T1/’Americanist’ 305–7, 306 EiC (Excellence in Cities) initiative 622
study traditions: T2/’Europeanist’ 306, 307–8 employment
study traditions: T3/’British’ 306, 308–10 ‘flexicurity’ 913, 915, 923–4
Westminster Model (WM) 313 EMU (Economic and Monetary Union) 557, 559,
Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) 384–5, 392, 846
392, 393, 523, 524–5 England 501–13
Denmark: new parties in 284 citizenship 506
Department for International Development culture 507
(DFID) 699–700, 702–7, 709–15 and devolution 512
depoliticization 320–1, 326 and Europe 509
devolution 30–1, 38, 235, 385 immigration 508
double 413 as modern nation 508–11
England and 398, 512 nationalism 501–13
EU membership and 847 patriotism: between the wars 506–7
and federalism 63–4 patriotism: late Victorian/Edwardian 504–6
further reform 398–9 Powellism 128, 508, 741
and multi-level governance 353 and regional devolution 386, 389–91, 393–4, 435
Northern Ireland and 250, 251, 384–5, 386, regions 511
388–9, 397, 435 within UK before 1900: 502–4
regional 386, 389–91, 393–4, 435 Enron 375
Scotland and 250, 251–2, 384, 386, 388, 391–2, Entick v Carrington (1765) 247
397, 435 environmental issues: protests 727, 728, 729, 786
and taxes 407 Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) 653–4
in UK 384–99, 434–6 Equalities and Human Rights Commission
in UK: post-devolution government 394–8 (EHRC) 642
union: reconfiguration of 396–8 Equalities Review 661
and Union State 249–52 ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism) 470, 558, 840,
Wales and 250–1, 384, 386, 387–8, 391, 392–3, 899, 900–1, 942–3
397, 435 ESS (European Security Strategy) 842
see also European devolution Essex model of party support 469–70
DFID (Department for International Essex University 44–5, 51 , 76, 97
Development) 699–700, 702–7, 709–15 ethnicity
diaries 174, 175, 178 Asian identity 486
disaffection 46 black identity movement 485–6
discourse theory 126–7 Bradford Pakistani community 488–9
Doha Round 713, 714 diversity in UK 740
double devolution 413 and education 743–4, 745–6
968 subject index
ethnicity (cont.) newspapers and 178
and religion 484–97 Rapid Reaction Force 554, 563
and unemployment 743, 744–5, 744, 746 Regional Development Fund 847
Euro-scepticism 554, 559–60, 565–6 Schengen Agreement 843
European Central Bank (ECB) 558, 920, 921 Single Currency/eurozone 565
European Commission: and gender equality 655 Single Market 556–7, 563–4
European Consortium for Political Research 38, St Malo Declaration 843
44–5 and worlds of compliance 839
European Convention on Human Rights see also Europeanization
(ECHR) 252, 255–6, 270 Europeanization 64, 837–51
European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) institutions 845–8
758–9 policy 839–44
European Court of Justice 253, 559, 655, 656 polity 844–5
European devolution 423–36 study of 838–9
development of 424–7 UK experience 839–48
devolution as concept 423–4 UK experience: explanation of 848–50
division of powers 431–3 Excellence in Cities (EiC) initiative 622
intergovernmental relations 433–4 Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM) 470, 558, 840,
models of devolved government 428–31 899, 900–1, 942–3
UK 434–6 executive sovereignty 223
European economy 912–28
and capitalism 912–13 Factortame 253–4
European social model and British faith schools 491, 493, 494
politics 924–6 Falklands War 592
European welfare capitalisms 915–18 family–work life balance 688–9
governance and ‘clash of capitalisms’ FCO (Foreign and Commonwealth Office) 702,
913–15 703–4, 845–6
labour market institutions and FDI (foreign direct investment) 866–9, 868, 869,
unemployment 918–19 875–6, 902
Lisbon process 921–4, 927 federalism 59, 63–4
macroeconomic policy and Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) 370–1
unemployment 919–21 feminism 138–51
European Security Strategy (ESS) 842 within academy 140–2, 141
European Union (EU) 553–67 liberal 139
America and 586–7 Marxist 139
Blair government and 554, 560–6 and New Labour 140, 143, 146
Britain and 586–7 post-structural 140
Britain as awkward partner 556–60 and postmodernism 144–5
and co-evolution 838, 839 and racial issues 145–6
and coexistence 838, 839 Radical 139, 146–7
Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) 842 socialist 139, 140
Common Foreign and Security Policy standpoint 144
(CFSP) 842 and study of politics 142–50
Constitutional Treaty 564, 565–6 Financial Services Act 1986: 331–2
constitutionalism and 252–5 Financial Services Authority (FSA) 332, 902
and contestation 838, 839 ‘flexicurity’ 913, 915, 923–4
continued membership of 38 Food Standards Agency (FSA) 826–8
economic globalization 562 Foreign Affairs (US journal) 49, 50
enlargement 561–2 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) 702,
European Security Strategy (ESS) 842 703–4, 845–6
and gender equality 652 foreign direct investment (FDI) 866–9, 868, 869,
and gender mainstreaming (GM) 653 875–6, 902
institutional analyses of 64 foreign exchange markets 870, 871
and integration 838–9 France: new parties in 284
membership, and devolution 847 FSA (Financial Services Authority) 332, 902
New Labour and 560–6 FSB (Federation of Small Businesses) 370–1
subject index 969
GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and risk 824–31
Trade) 937 social humanism and 132–3
GCHQ (Government Communications Westminster Model 348, 349
Headquarters) 753, 755, 761–2 Whitehall Model 348, 349
gender 646–61 Governance of Britain Green Paper 245
definition of 647–9 government
equal opportunities 650–2 parliamentary party and 443–4
and public discourse 649–50 patterns of alternation in 293
gender equality (GE) 646 Government Communications Headquarters
anti-discrimination legislation 653–4 (GCHQ) 753, 755, 761–2
European Commission and 655 governmentality theory 119, 120, 121–5
European Court of Justice and 655, 656 Anglo-Foucauldians 122–3
European Union (EU) and 652 liberal governmentalities 123–4
New Labour and 656–8 subjectivity 124–5
1980s/1990s 654–6 Greater London Authority 394
post-1997: 656–9 Green Party 297, 441
gender mainstreaming (GM) 646, 653, 659 grey power myth 671–2
General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Gulf War 599
(GATT) 937
general elections heresthetics 83
results since 1945: 290 historical institutionalism: and path
share of electorate 290, 291 dependency 67–8
turnout 107–8, 234, 290 history: and politics 27, 37 n., 43–4
General Medical Council (GMC) 334–5 House of Commons 29, 30, 145, 225
generational politics 664–79 functions of 226
generational relations, prospects for 676–8 Procedure Committee 229
grey power myth 671–2 Public Administration Committee (PAC) 373
new politics of 664–5, 667–71 Public Administration Select Committee
old politics of 665–7 (PASC) 314, 317
political participation, barriers to 672–6 reform proposals 30–1
globalization 562, 582–3, 601–2, 767–8, 855–77 relationship with House of Lords 240–1
Anglo-Saxon model of adaptation, myth standing committees 227
of 874–7 strategic interaction with House of Lords 84
attitudes towards 859–61, 860 and television 180
and British economic interdependence 863–73, House of Lords
864, 865, 866, 867, 868, 869, 870, 871, 872, 872, functions of 225, 227–8, 232
873 and legislation 227–8
and British political analysis 861–3 reform of 30–1, 228, 232–3
definition of 861–3 relationship with House of Commons 240–1
New Labour and 600, 856–7 strategic interaction with House of
public discourse in Britain 856–61, 858, 860 Commons 84
security state and 760–1 as veto point 67
and welfare state 916, 917 house prices 876–7
Globalization and Global Poverty Policy Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA) 240, 247, 255–6,
Group 714–15 268, 270
GMC (General Medical Council) 334–5 humanism 129–33
gold standard 934–6
Good Friday Agreement 524, 525, 526 idealism: and behaviouralism 95–6
governance 38, 59 identity politics 166–7
and central state 348–51 identity voting 461–79
and ‘clash of capitalisms’ 913–15 Alford Index 466, 467
delegated 316 dealignment 466–8, 467
disaggregation of 351–60 electoral participation 474–6
and governance narratives 348–51 electorate alignment 462–6
multi-level 353–4 Essex model of party support 469–70
networked 46 floating voters 464
970 subject index
identity voting (cont.) inter-war gold standard 934–6
national identity and 477–9, 479 interdependence 932
partisan identification 462, 463 New Labour and 901–5
party identification 473 New Labour ‘Third Way’ 943–5
social class and voting 464–6, 464 Operation Robot 939–40
social cleavages 463–4 International Growth Centre 715
valence issues 468–74, 471, 476, 477 International Organization (US journal) 49, 50
immigration 508, 593–4, 634–5, 843 international political economy 46
asylum seekers 593–4, 735–6, 739–40, 740, 843 international relations 6
and citizenship 735–50 International Social Survey Programme
citizenship policies 742–3, 746–7 Citizenship Survey 774, 775
economic 737–8, 738 international studies 46
ethnic diversity in UK 740 International Studies Quarterly (US journal) 49,
family migrants 739, 739 50
immigration policies 736–40, 747–50 International Trade Organization (ITO) 937
integration outcomes 743–5 interpretivism 360–1
integration policies 740–2 and central departments 357
labour markets 872–3 central state and 343–50
migrants’ success/failure 745–6 and civil service 358
multiculturalism 746–7 and core executive 355
imports/exports 864–6, 865, 866, 867, 868 and power 352–3
indirect racial discrimination 487 and presidentialization of prime ministerial
inflation 469, 693, 876–7, 880, 904–5, 921, 940 role 356
low 874 IRA
and monetarism 580 security state and 757
institutional isomorphism 64 IRA (Irish Republican Army) 525, 526, 527–8
institutional racism 637–8, 639–41 Iraq war 182–3, 231–2, 244, 598, 599, 600, 786
institutional theory Iraqi WMD 764–6
in political science 57–8 ISC (Intelligence and Security Committee) 758–9
institutionalism 57–71 ISI database 48, 49 n. 19, 50, 51
actor-centered 65 Italy: new parties in 284
further/future directions 70 ITO (International Trade Organization) 937
historical 67–8
new 58, 61–4 JAC (Judicial Appointments Commission) 273,
old 59–61, 66 274, 278
and political analysis 58–64 jihadism: responses to 531–2
puzzles/paradoxes 66–70 Joint Committee on Human Rights 255
questions arising from 64–70 journalism, political 172–85
rational choice 62–3, 66 journals 48–9, 50
institutions: veto point model 66–7 Judicial Appointments Commission (JAC) 273,
Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) 758–9 274, 278
International Accounting Standards Board 338 judiciary 248, 262–79
International Affairs (UK journal) 49, 50 judicial review: and judicial
international development 699–715 accountability 274–7
aid budget 705, 705–6 judicial review: effectiveness of 267–71
aid policy: aid and poverty reduction 706–10 judicial review: legitimacy of 271–4
aid policy: selectivity and conditionality 710–12 law of 242, 247
British development policy (2008) 713–15 parliamentary sovereignty and rule of
context 701–3 law 264–7
economic development policy 712–13 power of 255
organization 703–5
international economy 932–46 Kosovo War 599
balance of payments 938–40
Bretton Woods Agreement 937–8, 939–40 labour market institutions: and
and British economy 900–1 unemployment 918–19
Conservative statecraft (1979–1997) 941–3 labour markets 872–3
subject index 971
Labour Party 32, 35, 37, 78, 441 perceived unwanted services 886–9
and connection with workers 131–2 private subcontracting 888–9
and newspapers 176, 177, 178 public services: perceived unresponsiveness to
see also New Labour users 880–6
leadership 78–9, 470 public–private partnerships (PPPs) 892–3
charismatic 197–9 Marxism 46
party 447–50 and behaviouralism 96
personal 69–70, 355–6 post-Marxism 119, 120, 125–9
legislatures 59 Marxist feminism 139
Liberal Democrat Party 38, 297, 441 masculinities 149
liberal feminism 139 MCB (Muslim Council of Britain) 491–2, 747
Liberal Party 38, 176, 177 MCS (Millennium Cohort Study) 618–19
liberalism 123–5 meaning holism: anti-foundationalism
Lisbon (Reform) Treaty 564, 565–6 and 116–17, 118
lobbying 365–80, 823 media 106–7
assessment of 379–80 Blair and 183
by business 374 Brown and 183–4
cash for access 376–7 ethnic press 176
cash for questions 373, 376 journals 48–9, 50
content of 378–9 newspapers 175–7, 178, 181–2
and corruption 374–7 and political marketing 808–9
definition of 368–9 radio 178
insider policy-making 365–8 television 175, 178–9, 180, 182–3
lobbyists, types of 369–72, 370 women’s magazines 176
political journalism and 180–1 median voter theorem (MVT) 78
professional, development of 373 Merrison Committee 334–5
Standing Advisory Committee (on Business Metropolitan Police Special Branch 753, 755
Appointments) 377–8 MI5 753, 755–6, 757, 758, 763, 766
local government 406–7 MI6 753, 760
club theory 84 migration 593, 872–3
rational choice 84–6 in-migration 872
resource dependency approach 60 out-migration 873
study of 60 see also immigration
Tiebout model 84–5 Millennium (UK journal) 49, 50
urban regime theory 60 Millennium Cohort Study (MCS) 618–19
see also localism ministerial powers 244–5
localism 404–19 ministerial responsibility 35, 80–1, 223, 229, 241–2,
Blair Paradox 416–18 249, 311, 357
foundations of 405–6 move from political to legal constitutionalism
New Labour and 412–18 and 243
new localism 410–18 and RDM 317
19th-century 409–10 minority rule 38
power and 408–9 modernist empiricism 96, 99
21st-century: origins of 410–12 monetarism 580–1, 582
logical positivism 93 multi-level governance 353–4
London School of Economics and Political Science multiculturalism 166–7, 593–6, 746–7
(LSE) 27, 51, 76, 157, 168 municipalism 409–10
Muslim community 594, 643
Maastricht Treaty 434, 558 Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) 491–2, 747
opt-outs 840–1 MVT (median voter theorem) 78
Macpherson Report 640
Magna Carta 240, 243 NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of
Malta 291 n. unemployment) 919
marketization 879–94 nation: definition of 517
internal markets 887–8 National Criminal Intelligence Service 758,
perceived remoteness from private sector 890–3 761
972 subject index
national economic policy 897–909 NICE (National Institute for Health and Clinical
British and international economy 900–1 Excellence) 826, 888
New Labour and international economy 901–5 nimbyism 822–3
New Labour and political success in economic NMW (national minimum wage) 656, 658, 694,
policy 926
905–7 non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment
National Health Service (NHS) 335, 396, (NAIRU) 919
686, 742, 885, 888 Northern Ireland 517–33
national identity British national identity 529–33
British Empire and 591–6 Catholicism 521, 530–1
features of 517–18 consociation in 388–9
and identity voting 477–9 and devolution 250, 251, 384–5, 386, 388–9, 397,
National Institute for Health and Clinical 435
Excellence (NICE) 826, 888 and identity voting 477–8
national minimum wage (NMW) 656, 658, 694, Irish unity 530–1
926 loyalism 522
National Pensioners Convention (NPC) 669 nationalism 525–9
national sovereignty 235 Protestantism 522, 525, 530
National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification rival national identities in NI 523–9
(NS-SEC) 610 rival national identities in UK 518–22
nationalism 166–7 security state and 756–7
definition of 518 self-determination 529–30
English 501–13 unionists 521–2, 523–5, 529
Irish 525–9 novels 201–16
NATO 579 class and 208–11
NDC (New Deal for Communities) 414 Empire 213–14
neo-Marxism 37 First World War 204–6
neoliberalism 123–4, 417–18, 580–1, 582, 668 post-1945: 214–16
Netherlands: party system 284–5 power 211–13
networked governance 46 time 208
New Deal for Communities (NDC) 414 town and country 207–8
new institutionalism 58, 61–4 NPC (National Pensioners Convention) 669
New Labour 38, 78 NPM (New Public Management) 46, 891–2
and British Constitution 255–8 NS-SEC (National Statistics Socio-Economic
Comprehensive Performance Assessment Classification) 610
(CPA) 412 Nuffield Electoral Studies series 14
and EU 560–6
and European social model 924–5 Oakeshottian teaching and tradition 154–69
feminism and 140, 143, 146 Experience and Its Modes 156, 157–8
foreign policy 598, 599–601 identity politics/multiculturalism 166–7
and gender equality 656–8 ‘Political Education’ 160–1
and globalization 600, 856–7 ‘The Study of “Politics” in a University’ 160,
and inequality 917 162–3
and international economy 901–5 ODA (Overseas Development
and localism 412–18 Administration) 702
and lone parent premium 693–4 ODM (Overseas Development Ministry) 701, 702
macroeconomic policy 920 OECD 668, 891, 924
political success in economic policy 905–7 OFSTED 333–4
social theories 132 old institutionalism 59–61, 66
Third Way 943–5 OMS (Oxford Mobility Study) 611
and valence issues 468 open method of coordination (OMC) 844, 922–3,
New Left 119, 120, 129–30 924, 925
New Public Management (NPM) 46, 891–2 Operation Robot 939–40
newspapers 106–7, 175–7, 178, 181–2 opposition parties 226
NHS (National Health Service) 335, 396, 686, 742, Overseas Development Administration
885, 888 (ODA) 702
subject index 973
Overseas Development Ministry (ODM) 701, path dependency 65–6, 67–8
702 historical institutionalism and 67–8
Oxford Mobility Study (OMS) 611 welfare state 63
Oxford University 4, 26–7, 51, 76 pension schemes 667–8, 671, 679, 686, 687–8
Pensions Commission 687–8
Parekh Report 593, 595 personal leadership 69–70, 355–6
parliament 221–35 PFI (Private Finance Initiative) 892–3
committee system 84, 229 place-shaping 413
and democracy 232–4 Plaid Cymru 384, 478, 542, 545–6
and legislation 225–8 pluralism 30, 31, 47
Modernization Committee 227 political analysis
and parliamentary government 222–4 behaviouralism and 33–4
Procedure Committee 226–7 history and 27, 33
rational choice 83–4 history of study of 25–40
roles of 224–5 institutionalism and 58–64
and scrutiny 228–32 psychology and 27
select committee system 229–32, 234 political business cycle 46
sovereignty 245–6 political economy models
sovereignty of 240 principal–agent 81–3
study of 60 transaction costs bureau-shaping 81
see also parliamentary sovereignty political journalism 172–85
Parliamentary Labour Party: and SDP 444 blogging 184
parliamentary sovereignty 27, 29, 38, 222–3, 240, gallery reports 180
252–5 Internet and 184–5
and constitutionalism 243, 245–6 journalist/politician relationship 172–5, 179–80
EU and 252–4 lobby correspondents 180–1
and rule of law 264–7 television and 178–9
participation political marketing 798–813
barriers to 672–6 as academic literature 802
choice theories 788–9 background 800–1
in contemporary Britain 776–88, 777, 778, 779, definitions in literature 802–4
780, 781, 782, 783, 784, 785, 787 literature and practice 808–11
macro-participation 777–86, 779 market segmentation 806–7
membership of organizations 783, 783–5, 784, media and 808–9
785 models and concepts 804–8
micro-participation 777, 778, 786–8, 787 political structures 809
participant profiles 779–83, 781, 782 as practice 801
and risk governance 828 prescription of 811–12
and social capital 788–91 societal structures 810
and social capital: relationship model 792–4, voters and participation 810–11
793 political participation, see participation
structural theories 789 political parties 441–57
voters and 810–11 campaigning methods 452–3
party activism 776 change/continuity 454–6
party membership 776, 778 electoral environment 441, 442, 444–7
party system 283–99 funding 450, 451–2
change, scope for 295–8 ideational environment 441, 442, 453, 454–6
cleavage structure 292–3 institutional environment 441–4
competition, structure of 292, 295, membership 450–1
297–8 party leadership 447–50
Labour/Conservative seat shares 296 and party system 442–4
membership/engagement 296 rational choice 78–9
new parties, challenge of 284–6 socio-economic environment 441, 442, 453–4
parties and 442–4 political science
understanding 286–9 anti-foundationalism and 117–19
weak parties in strong party system 289–95 behaviouralism and 103–8
974 subject index
political science (cont.) programme motions 227
future development suggestions 20–1 protest 719–31, 786
history of 8–15 definition of 719–20
institutional analysis and 65 environmental issues 727, 728, 729, 786
institutional theory in 57–8 impact of 728–30
insularity of 12–13, 15, 20 incidence of 720–2
inter-war years 29–32 protesters 722–4
pluralism of 5–6 and social movements 725–8
post-1945: 27, 32–5 Provisional IRA 527, 529
pre-1914: 26–9 PSA (Political Science Association), USA 28, 43 n.
professionalism and 4–8, 10, 11, 15–16, 20 4
professionalization of 10, 11–12, 20, 25–6, 38–9 PSA (Political Studies Association), UK 33, 43 n.
and public culture 7, 16–18 2, 49
qualitative 343, 344, 347–8, 360–1 PSA (Public Service Agreement) targets 354
quantitative 343–7, 344, 360–1 psychoanalytic theory 127
Political Science Association (PSA), USA 28, 43 n. psychology 27, 109
4 public–private partnerships (PPPs) 892–3
political science departments Public Relations Consultants Association
contribution to public life 52–3 (PRCA) 372
world rankings 49–51, 51 Public Service Agreement (PSA) targets 354
Political Studies (UK journal) 43, 48, 49, 50, 97 public services: perceived unresponsiveness to
Political Studies Association (PSA), UK 33, 43 n. users 880–6, 881
2, 49
political theory 4, 46 qualified majority voting (QMV) 557, 561–2
politics quangos 316
behaviouralism and 27–8
development as academic discipline 3–21 race 629–43
Differentiated Polity Model 38 cultural racism 643
in higher education 28 institutional racism 637–8, 639–41
and history 27, 37 n., 43–4 police–community relations 639–41
pluralism and 30, 31 race making 630–2
since 1990s 37–9 race relations paradigm 632–6, 642
study of : in America 38–9 racial identities 127–8
study of: British 42–53 representation of minority groups 636–9
study of: at Cambridge University 9, 26–7, 28 Race Relations Act 1965: 633, 635, 653
study of: at Oxford University 4, 26–7 Race Relations Act 1968: 633, 635, 653, 741
Whig view 28–30 Race Relations Act 1976: 633, 487, 635, 638, 639,
politics of presence 46 741–2
positivism 93 Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000: 492, 742
post-behaviouralism: behaviouralism and 100–3 racial identities 127–8
post-Marxism 119, 120, 125–9 racial issues 145–6, 487
post-structural feminism 140 Radical feminism 139, 146–7
postmodernism: feminism and 144–5 radio 178
poverty 616–17, 619 Rapid Reaction Force 554, 563
child 609, 614–15, 689, 694, 892 rational choice theory 75–86
in old age 671, 689 cabinet studies 79–81
poverty reduction, aid and 706–10 core executive 81–3
rich–poor gap 689–90 electoral politics 77–8
Powellism 128, 508, 741 literature 76–7
Power Inquiry 233–4 local government 84–6
PPPs (public–private partnerships) 892–3 methodology 75
PRCA (Public Relations Consultants and monitoring 82
Association) 372 Parliament 83–4
prime minister, office of 69–70, 355–6 political parties 78–9
Private Finance Initiative (PFI) 892–3 rational choice institutionalism 62–3, 66
privatization 880, 882–3 RDM (Russian Doll Model) 314–19, 315, 318
subject index 975
RDR (Rural Development Regulation) 842 SDLP (Social Democratic and Labour Party) 392,
referendums 38 392, 526, 528, 531
Regional Development Fund 847 SDP (Social Democrat Party) 444
regulation 325–39 SEA (Single European Act) 556–7, 559, 942
command regulation 336–8 secularism 494–5
see also self-regulation securitization 46
religion security state 752–68
anti-Semitism 506 European Court of Human Rights 758–9
Catholicism 521, 530–1 and globalization 760–1
ethnicity and 484–97 IRA 757
faith schools 491, 493, 494 and Iraqi WMD 764–6
Muslims 484, 486, 489–93, 494, 495–7 Northern Ireland 756–7
Protestantism 504, 522, 525, 530 surveillance 754, 759–60, 766–7
religious equality 491–7 and terrorism post-7/7: 766–7
Satanic Verses affair 489 and terrorism/post-9/11: 762–4
and secularism 494–5 and torture 767
Sikhs 487–8, 493 self-regulation 326–36
Report of the 1918 Committee on the Machinery and cartels 329–30
of Government 311–12 crisis of 326–30
Republic of Ireland 542 financial 327, 328, 330, 331–3
Review of International Studies (UK journal) 49, of medicine 330, 334–6
50 and scandals 329–30, 335
Rio Declaration, UN 827 of schools 333–4
risk transformation of 331–6
governance failures 824–5 self-regulatory organizations (SROs) 331–2
governance reform 825–8 SEPA (Scottish Environment Protection
and interest group politics 822–4 Agency) 378
as organizing principle of governance 829–31 Serious Organized Crime Agency (SOCA) 753
public and 820–2 SGP (stability and growth pact) 920–1
risk assessment 830 Single European Act (SEA) 556–7, 559, 942
technology and 818–32 Single Market 556–7, 563–4
rule of law single-member plurality system (SMPS) 443
constitutionalism and 243, 246–7 Sinn Fein 384–5, 388, 392, 392, 393, 526, 527,
parliamentary sovereignty and 264–7 528–9
Runnymede Trust 495 n. SNP (Scottish National Party) 384, 478–9, 542,
Rural Development Regulation (RDR) 842 545, 546
Russian Doll Model (RDM) 314–19, 315, 318 and Devolution Commission 388
SOCA (Serious Organized Crime Agency)
St Malo Declaration 843 753
Scandinavian Political Studies 49, 50 social capital
Scarman Report 639–40 participation and 788–91
Schengen Agreement 843 and participation: relationship model 792–4,
Scotland 535 793
Constitutional Convention 546 Social Charter 557
culture and nationalism 543–5 social constructivism: anti-foundationalism
and devolution 250, 251–2, 384, 386, 388, 391–2, and 117
397, 435 Social Democrat Party (SDP) 444
and devolution: background to 537–43 Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP)
and identity voting 478–9, 479 392, 392, 526, 528, 531
post-devolution 547–50 social exclusion 675–6
Scottish Parliament 251 social humanism 119, 120
Scottish Environment Protection Agency anti-foundationalism and 129–33
(SEPA) 378 and governance 132–3
Scottish National Party (SNP) 384, 478–9, 542, New Left 119, 120, 129–30
545, 546 and resistance 133
and Devolution Commission 388 Thatcherism 131–2
976 subject index
social mobility 609–20, 613 European devolution and 434–6
education and 614, 615–17, 616, 617, 618–19 post-devolution government 394–8
patterns and trends 610–11 see also England; Northern Ireland; Scotland;
social movements: protest and 725–8 Wales
social science, philosophy of 93 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP)
Social Science Research Council 39 297
socialist feminism 139, 140 United Nations (UN): Rio Declaration 827
SROs (self-regulatory organizations) 331–2 urban regime theory 60
stability and growth pact (SGP) 920–1 UUP (Ulster Unionist Party) 392, 392, 393, 523–4
standpoint feminism 144 UVF (Ulster Volunteer Force) 525
Steven Report 757
stock markets 870, 871, 872 veto-player theory 81
Strathclyde University 44–5, 51, 97 Vietnam War 599
Stubb Report 369, 372 voter disengagement 183
Sun newspaper 106–7, 175, 177 voting: and identity 461–79
Sure Start programme 620, 621 voting behaviour 294, 298, 810–11
surveys 104–6, 109 behaviouralism and 98
Switzerland: party system 291–2 Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) voters
476–7
Taff Vale Railway Co Ltd v Amalgamated Society of and participation 810–11
Railway Servants [1901] AC 426: 262 social class and 464–6, 464
technology turnout 107–8, 234, 290, 474–6, 475, 674–5, 675,
public and 820–2 776, 777
and risk 818–32 voting studies 101 n.
risk society and 819–20
television 178 Wales 535–6
BBC 175, 178–9, 182–3 background to devolution 537–43
House of Commons and 180 culture and nationalism 543–5
and political journalism 178–9 and devolution 250–1, 384, 386, 387–8, 391,
terrorism 392–3, 397, 435
post-7/7: 766–7 electoral polarization 392
post-9/11: 762–4 and identity voting 478
war against 531–2 post-devolution 547–50
Thatcherism 131–2, 140, 348, 350, 941 welfare reform 684–95, 918
The Times 172–4, 177 cost containment 687–8
torture 767 new politics of welfare 685–91
Trade Association Forum 372 old politics of welfare 684–5
trade unions 262–3, 265–6 re-commodification 686
Treaty of European Union, Maastricht 434, 558 recalibration in response to social
opt-outs 840–1 change 688–91
Trist v Child (1875) 375 UK style 692–4
US style 691–2
UK Action Committee on Islamic Affairs welfare state 124
(UKACIA) 491–2 and ageing, politics of 665–7
UK Independence Party 441 capitalism and 913–18
Ulster Defence Association (UDA) 525 globalization and 916, 917
Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) 392, 392, 393, 523–4 path dependence 63
Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) 525 West Peripheral Route (WPR) battle,
unemployment 614–15, 693 Aberdeen 369–70
ethnic groups 743, 744–5, 744, 746 Western European Union (WEU) 563
labour market institutions and 918–19 Westminster Hall 224
and macroeconomic policy 919–21 Westminster Model (WM) 29, 30–1, 222–3,
NAIRU (non-accelerating inflation rate of 311–12
unemployment) 919 challenges to 31–2, 35–7
United Kingdom (UK) and delegation 313
devolution in 384–99 and governance 348, 349
subject index 977
Whiggism 28–30 Working Time Directive 559
Whitehall Model 348, 349 World Bank 668, 699–700, 701–2, 704, 706, 707,
Whitehall Series 61–2 710, 711–12, 891
WM, see Westminster Model World Politics (US journal) 49, 50
women’s magazines 176 World Trade Organization (WTO) 668, 713, 891
Women’s Unit (later Women and Equality WPR (West Peripheral Route) battle,
Unit) 657, 659 Aberdeen 369–70
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