The Labour Party and Whitehall

Kevin Theakston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429833007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

First published in 1992. In this lively and controversial book, Kevin Theakston examines the Yes, Minister -style argument popularised by Tony Benn and Richard Crossman that the civil service obstructs Labour government policies. He argues that in fact the Labour party's problems and failures in office are largely political in origin.

The book surveys the development of socialist thinking about Whitehall, and examines the claim of a Labour MP in 1979 that 'It is as if Labour in office has now lost all stomach for administrative reform.' Theakston looks at the effectiveness of Labour's various reform schemes, raising important issues such as politicisation and power in the civil service, Whitehall management, elitism in civil service recruitment, and secrecy and 'open government'.

This book will appeal to researchers and students of British politics, public administration, and history, as well as to all those with an interest in Whitehall reform, or in Labour Party politics.

1 Introduction

When Attlee succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister in 1945, and returned to the Potsdam peace conference, he was accompanied by the same team of civil servants (including the same principal private secretary) that had made up his predecessor’s delegation. This continuity surprised the Americans and the Russians, but the officials concerned made the transition without apparent difficulty and the Labour leader himself had no doubts about the impartiality or loyalty of his staff. Out of office in the 1950s, Attlee would boast to international socialist conferences that the British career civil service was unequalled in the world, one of the strongest bulwarks of democracy, and that the same officials who had worked out the details of Labour’s programme were now busy pulling it to pieces for their Conservative masters. Other leading members of the 1945–51 Labour government also praised the Whitehall machine – Herbert Morrison, for instance, who penned an uncritical account of the working of the British system of government which ended with a ‘Tribute to the British Civil Service’.¹

Morrison’s biographers have rightly described him as ‘a fervent champion of the British administrative class.’ His view was that ‘The relationship between the Minister and the civil servants should be – and usually is – that of colleagues working together in a team, co-operative partners seeking to advance the public interest and the efficiency of the Department’. He insisted, ‘The belief among some of the public and even some Members of Parliament that civil servants do not work in harmony with Ministers I have hardly ever found to be justified’.² The contrast with the critical comments on Whitehall personalities, civil service obstruction and the negative power of the Treasury found in the diaries written by ministers serving in the 1964–70 and 1974–9 governments is marked. Searching for ‘what went wrong’ after the ‘failures’ of the Wilson and Callaghan governments, many on the Labour left seized on the higher bureaucracy as a scapegoat. Without major reform of Whitehall, the mandarins could not be relied upon to assist in Labour’s socialist project; rather they would systematically sabotage it.

Richard Crossman apparently thought that Government and Parliament was an ‘odious book’ and intended his diaries to provide the raw material for a work debunking Morrison and establishing himself as a modern-day Bagehot. In the event, Crossman’s own strongly expressed views, on how Whitehall functions and how the mandarins relate to their political masters, themselves require debunking (see chapter 2). But however unreliable a source he may be, views like Crossman’s have nevertheless become widespread in left-wing circles.

Tony Benn is also at the opposite pole to Herbert Morrison and Attlee. As he sees it,

It is one of the great myths of British parliamentary democracy that the British civil service is politically neutral, ready, anxious and willing to work with equal enthusiasm for any political party that may form a majority. This is a complete illusion largely spread by those who know perfectly well that the civil service is neither ready, anxious nor willing to work for socialist policies but has to be presented in that way so that it can perform its task of obstruction without being accused of partiality.

‘Life is so much easier for a minister who goes along with what his officials want and it is very difficult indeed to defeat them’, Benn says on the basis of what is, after all, a considerable ministerial experience, one only a little shorter than Morrison’s – eleven years as a minister, compared to Morrison’s thirteen. On the other hand, Denis Healey, another veteran Labour minister and a Cabinet colleague of Crossman and Benn, has stated his view that it is the ‘sheer intractability of the process of Government in Britain as it is now conducted’ that is the problem rather than ‘bureaucratic sabotage or political prejudice’ on the part of the civil service. ‘Whitehall’s obsession with procedure rather than policy has left it poorly equipped to handle change’, he believes, finding fault with the system’s ‘tendency to produce a soggy compromise’, with the Treasury’s stifling of the initiative of others, and with management and administrative training that does not match that provided by the famous French ENA. But from the outside, looking in, so to speak, the left-wing activist Hilary Wainwright does not share these technocratic views. Seeing the power of the higher civil service built up from the nineteenth century onwards as ‘a protection against the political consequences of the working-class franchise’, she believes ‘the rapid dismantling [sic] of the entrenched mandarin Civil Service’ to be a precondition of any sort of meaningful socialist and democratic advance. And, writing seventy years before Wainwright, Arthur Henderson – a key figure in the early decades of the party – expressed his view that ‘the great administrative services, swathed in red tape, hampered by tradition, conservative by instinct, saturated with class prejudice, are a more effective check upon the reforming impulse than even a Parliament dominated by aristocratic and capitalist influences’.³

It is clear that there are major disagreements within the Labour Party, and among both participants in and observers of Labour governments, about the role, power and nature of the civil service. Is it a party-politically neutral and efficient administrative instrument at the disposal of a Labour (or any other) Cabinet? Or is it a brake on radical ministers, a conservative – if not actually a Conservative – force? Is the civil service properly equipped to deal with the problems of modern government and to run the interventionist economic and social programmes to which Labour is committed? Is Whitehall sufficiently accountable to Parliament and the public? Is government too secretive? Labour’s experience in office and the work of socialist writers and academics over the years has yielded no single, coherent theory of bureaucracy, no answers to questions like these, that would be accepted throughout the Labour Party and the Labour movement. Labour in fact has often not paid much serious attention to these issues. This is rather curious, it is often observed, given that the party’s success or failure in office depends to a crucial extent on its relations with the civil service, on the efficient use of the government machine and on the quality of the administrative apparatus and personnel available to it in Whitehall.⁴

On a wider front, Jones and Keating have spelt out at length how Labour ‘has rarely given any sustained attention to the form of the state whose power and role it is pledged to extend’. It has spent little time thinking about the ground rules of the constitution: parliamentary sovereignty, Cabinet government, ministerial responsibility, and so on. The frequent lack of clarity, the confusion, the tensions and ambiguities that mark Labour’s thinking about the civil service also characterize its approach to the British state and the constitution in general. Jones and Keating’s historical review makes plain Labour’s ‘relatively uncritical acceptance of existing constitutional norms’ and its ‘uncritical inheritance of a British pre-democratic state form’ in the course of the party’s emergence and development and its integration into the British political system. Its attitudes and (in office) its actions towards reform of the institutions and practices of the state – including the civil service – have not been based on clear reasoning about constitutional first principles or about the institutional requirements of socialism, but have instead been piecemeal and pragmatic, and sometimes inconsistent and incoherent. To a great extent, when it has thought about constitutional matters at all Labour has simply taken over nineteenth-century Radical views. It is an interesting comment on the nature of the British Labour Party that some of its leading left-wing figures, such as Aneurin Bevan, Michael Foot and Tony Benn, should be the strongest defenders of parliamentarism and of what is essentially a pre-socialist view of the constitution.⁵

In the 1930s some on the Labour left, such as Harold Laski and Sir Stafford Cripps, took up what amounted to a Marxist position on the nature of the state and its relations with the dominant economic class, arguing that the existing constitutional arrangements were in fact a formidable barrier to the success of a Labour government’s socialist programme. Despite all their excitable talk about ‘executive dictatorship’, emergency powers and so on, however, they did not in practice seem to envisage sweeping away the existing institutional landscape of British government (save for abolition of the House of Lords) so much as adapting it to serve socialist purposes more efficiently: streamlining parliamentary procedure, reorganizing the departmental structure of Whitehall and getting a stronger political grip on the civil service.⁶ Even then, it must be said, their ideas failed to find much support in the party outside a fringe of left-wing intellectuals. The party leadership continued to hold strongly to the Fabian belief in the essential neutrality of the state. On this view, the state had no inherent class nature – Labour could win control of it through the normal channels of electoral and parliamentary politics and without needing to go outside the accepted conventions of the constitution. Indeed, Ramsay MacDonald regarded questions of political and constitutional reform as red herrings, diversions away from the real tasks facing socialists. Hugh Dalton pooh-poohed the Laski-Cripps type of ‘panic talk’ and ‘theatrical nightmares of violent head-on collisions’, and Attlee, the party leader, was confident that with some fairly modest reforms the existing government machinery could be used to bring about socialism. Labour, he declared, was ‘resolved to preserve the essential fabric of the British system of government’.⁷

The fact that the Labour government elected in 1945 was able to successfully implement its far-reaching programme through Parliament and the civil service without major institutional reconstruction (see chapters 2, 3 and 6) appeared to vindicate the approach of the parliamentary leadership, as Laski himself seemed to acknowledge in his last work on British government.⁸ Eleven continuous years in office (first in the wartime coalition and then in the first majority Labour government) served to cement the identification of the party’s leadership with the existing machinery of the state and with the constitutional status quo. It was hardly surprising that in retirement Attlee and Morrison were to celebrate – even venerate – the system that had worked so well for them.

In the 1960s the reform debate reopened. Parliament, the civil service and local government all came on to the agenda, but in an uncoordinated and opportunistic way, and with Labour’s unwillingness to rethink basic constitutional questions and make connections between the different issues predictably leading to only limited change in practice (see chapters 4 and 6). The focus on administrative modernization and efficiency, reflecting the running together of long-standing Fabian concerns with the then fashionable managerialist thinking, also rather glossed over important questions of elitism and power. In the late 1970s (and continuing after 1979), as it tried to work out the lessons of the Labour governments of 1964–70 and 1974–9 and debated the institutional reforms it deemed necessary to implement a left-wing programme, there was something of a throwback on the Labour left to the ideas of the 1930s about the existing state set-up being an ‘obstacle’ to socialism. The left’s sights were on government secrecy, civil service and prime-ministerial power, reform of the Commons, and abolition of the Lords, but once again fundamental constitutional issues tended to be overlooked or disposed of too glibly. The tensions involved in simultaneously wanting strong programmatic government, strengthened parliamentary accountability and stronger party controls over the party leadership were also never properly resolved (see chapters 6 and 7). For their part, most Labour ministers in the 1970s were strong defenders of the traditional institutions and practices of government, a stance symbolized by the non-reform of the Official Secrets Act, despite a manifesto pledge to the contrary (see chapter 6).

Many important, first-order constitutional issues arose during the 1974–9 Labour government: devolution and the future of the United Kingdom, the implications of EEC membership, collective Cabinet responsibility (abandoned during the EEC referendum), the implications of the referendum device itself for parliamentary sovereignty, and the issues of electoral reform and a bill of rights also came on to the public agenda. Significantly, the latter two items were absent from the left’s reform schemes. But neither the Labour government nor the party as a whole had an overall and coherent view on these issues, reacting instead in an ad hoc fashion and giving priority to tactical and partisan considerations. Only after the third successive Thatcher electoral victory in 1987 was there evidence that Labour was even starting to come round from its constitutional somnolence, but the leadership’s relatively cautious and piecemeal approach, and doubts about the priority given to the issue, disappointed its critics in the party and in outside groups such as ‘Charter 88’. A long tradition of constitutional conservatism and a pragmatic approach to institutional reform was not something that could be easily or quickly shrugged off, however.

‘The gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves’, Douglas Jay famously (notoriously?) wrote in his book The Socialist Case in 1937. To be fair to him, Jay was apparently ‘only’ referring to the cases of nutrition, health and education policy, but his remark really has a wider relevance and reveals much about the dominant tradition of socialism in Britain. The dominance of a centralist and statist approach in Labour’s political thinking and practice obviously gives a vital role to the civil service and the Whitehall machine in the achievement of socialism. The alternative tradition of decentralization and ‘municipal socialism’ was rapidly downgraded as Labour became a major parliamentary party and the actual or alternative government in the 1920s and 1930s. The 1945–51 period saw ‘a relentless drive towards centralisation and bureaucracy sweeping everything else out of the way’, in W. A. Robson’s words. The revival of interest in the potential for ‘local socialism’ in the 1980s (reflecting Labour’s exit from power at the national level) and the party’s emerging plans for a system of regional assemblies represent something of a challenge to the ‘Whitehall knows best’ philosophy, but it is not clear that the full implications of these developments have been thought through either in constitutional terms or in terms of the potential impact on the pursuit of Labour’s nation-wide economic and welfare policy goals and its redistributive aims.⁹

‘Socialists – at any rate the type represented by the present Government – idealise the salaried public servant: they look to him to save the world’, Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary in February 1924 as ministers in the first (minority) Labour government were settling into their new jobs. The Webbs and the Fabian socialist tradition have had a crucially important influence on Labour thinking about the civil service (see chapters 3 and 4). Although they were early champions of ‘municipal socialism’ and decentralization (with Beatrice still dreaming up schemes for devolved assemblies when she was in her seventies), the Webbs’ socialism had an unmistakable centralist and bureaucratic flavour. A major role in bringing about and then governing a socialist society would be played by a selfless, dedicated, unassuming and public-spirited elite of expert bureaucrats. The Webbs wanted ‘to make the Civil Service something very like the Fabian Society in power’, as Rodney Barker has wryly observed. Competitive examinations and expert training (the Webbs founded the London School of Economics) would provide a new meritocratic elite to man the state machine and push forward with the social research and government action central to Fabian socialism. A ‘bureaucratic nightmare’ was how Margaret Cole described their blueprint for the future socialist state, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain (1920); the Webbs’ critics seized on their talk about a new body of ‘Samurai’ and their later admiration for Stalin’s Russia to point out the authoritarian, illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies in their thought. The Webbs’ insistence that their key ‘disinterested professional expert’ would have ‘no power of command and no right to insist on his suggestions being adopted’ does seem rather optimistic, if not actually naive. As Sidney Webb once admitted, ‘Experts are the danger of democracy. They are absolutely necessary, but they must be controlled by the electors, that is, by amateurs, and this is by no means an easy matter.’ And Beatrice Webb was acutely aware of the problem of ‘combining bureaucratic efficiency with democratic control’ when she served on the Haldane Committee. The Webb’s constitution-mongering did include elaborate arrangements for remodelling Parliament to try to improve accountability together with an early commitment to ‘open government’ – a combination of ‘measurement with publicity’ and ‘the searchlight of published knowledge’, they called it – but how far these devices would offset the concentration of bureaucratic power at the centre of the Web-bian state is open to question (see chapter 6).¹⁰

For all their incessant and earnest reformist writings on the subject of the machinery of government, the Webbs were in many respects great admirers of the British civil service. Sidney Webb once described it as a national treasure (see chapter 3). Beatrice sketched in her diary a by no means unfavourable impression after her time on the Haldane Committee:

This informal review of our bureaucracy leaves an impression of good temper and good manners, of native capacity and no systematic training, of philosophical indifference to ends, tempered by a moderately felt loyalty to the ideals of the British ruling class. Contempt for Parliament and a disdainful dislike for the newly imported ‘business man’, a steady depreciation of Parliamentary chiefs, are almost universal in the higher ranks of the civil service.¹¹

It is a fair criticism of the Webbs – and of the wider Fabian tradition – that their concern was with questions of efficiency and accountability and not with the democratization of a socially unrepresentative higher bureaucracy. The idea that the class background of top officials might make them unsympathetic towards socia...