Vernon Bogdanor
IN the 21st century, people demand more from government but trust it less. How is this dilemma to be resolved?
There are two alternatives. The first is to move towards a minimal state, an option favoured by the Bush administration in the US, and by many governments in east Asia. In the minimal state, taxes are low but public services provide little more than a residual safety net. This yields, in the words of Richard Titmuss, poor services for poor people. The minimal state tends to have negative consequences for social cohesion and equity.
The second is to improve governmental effectiveness, to make public services so good that the better-off are prepared to use them and pay taxes to support them. Indeed, one of New Labour's central insights has been that governments can only do more for the disadvantaged if they succeed in also appealing to the advantaged. If governments are to improve public services without increasing taxation, they have to learn how to do more with less.
These two books explain how this can be done. Elaine Kamarck was an adviser to vice-president Al Gore, and is now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. The End of Government is an indispensable short guide showing how the bureaucratic government of the 20th century is being transformed into the enabling government of the 21st, operating through networks and markets rather than traditional command and control methods.
Making public services better requires a strategy rather than a series of initiatives. Indeed, Michael Barber "would ban the word 'initiative' in government", if he could. As head of the prime minister's delivery unit from 2001 to 2005, Barber was charged with bringing results for Tony Blair. Instruction to Deliver tells how he did it.
When asked what his greatest problem had been as prime minister, Harold Macmillan famously replied, "Events, dear boy, events." Although government is driven by events and crises, it is the steady routine of sustained implementation that delivers results.
Barber declares that "stubborn persistence and attention to detail are vastly underestimated in the literature on government and indeed political history". Good government, as Bagehot noticed, is dull government.
The essence of the delivery unit's strategy was to replace Whitehall's "essays decorated with the occasional number", with targets and monitoring. This required good data systems. Barber found that the data showing national crime trends over time were not given in terms of individual police forces. Improving data systems was "one of the delivery unit's most significant achievements".
The targets regime required centralisation. However, as public services improve, earned autonomy becomes possible. In Barber's view a targets regime is perfectly compatible with decentralisation. Yet a local authority may well not share central government's diagnosis of what is wrong with the public services nor how to improve them.
"You can't have Scotland doing something different from the rest of the country," Blair complained to Paddy Ashdown in 1999 when Liberal Democrats in Scotland sought a more generous student support system than in England. "Then you shouldn't have given the Scots devolution," Ashdown replied, according to his diaries. "Yes, that is a problem," Blair said. "I am beginning to see the defects in all this devolution stuff."
Barber seeks more centralisation within government and, in particular, a prime minister's department, to ensure greater grip. There is a profound conflict, however, between Barber's approach and the programme of decentralisation to which New Labour is committed.
The End of
Government ... As
We Know It:
Making Public Policy
Work
By Elaine C. Kamarck
Lynne Rienner $19.95, 148 pages
Instruction to
Deliver:
Tony Blair, Public
Services and the
Challenge of
Achieving Targets
By Michael Barber
Politico's £19.99, 397 pages
FT bookshop price: £15.99
Instruction to Deliver outlines the politics of a post-ideological, perhaps even a post-social democratic, age in which there is a broad consensus on how to improve the public services. Yet if that consensus really existed, we would have reached not only the end of history but also the end of politics, which would have become transformed into technocracy, a debate about means rather than ends.
No book has revealed the mindset of the Blair administration so well. It will remain a fundamental source long after the spate of journalistic effusions on the squabbles between Blair and Brown have been forgotten. It is one of the best books written on British government for many years.
Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Politics and Government at
Oxford University.
Target practice
FE Team | Published: August 18, 2007 00:00:00 | Updated: February 01, 2018 00:00:00
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