Recent reading has included Crisis and Consensus in British Politics: From Bagehot to Blair, by Michael Williams, published in 2000, so an interesting view from the start of the Blair premiership now that we’re at its end. The book’s basic thesis is that there has been a dialectic in British politics between crisis and consensus, particularly over the issue of Britain’s relative international economic decline, which Williams says first became an issue in Edwardian times, when it was also facing international risks from the military power of the US and Germany, yet this also coincided with the transition to democracy, the management of which preoccupied the ruling class. It chose to do this by consensus, to defeat the more immediate threat from Germany.
That consensus was broken up by the depression, but after the second great war a new one was forged, “commonly conceived to consist of a bipartisan agreement on the boundaries between the public and private sector, a commitment to full employment maintained through Keynesian techniques of macro-economic management, the conciliation of the trade union movement, and universal welfare services. This came under increasing strain – chiefly economic, in the sixties and seventies, and the period from the Thatcher victory in 1979 to the fall of Thatcher was one of conflict, which was then replaced by a new consensus – perhaps you might call it “Blaijorism”.
Economically over the same period, “the First World War destroyed the liberal world economy which had been dominated by the City of London, a domination expressed through the Gold Standard which was suspended on the outbreak of war. British macro-economic policy since the 1920s can be seen as a series of attempts to restore the rentier capitalist paradise which had been lost in 1914. The attempt to restore pre-war ‘normalcy’ by returning to the Gold Standard in 1925 broke down in 1931 in the first of the great sterling devaluation crises that have punctuated British history since then.”
At the start of the Blair years, Williams saw developing “common acceptance of a managerial ideal and an emerging managerial society in which wealth and power are based upon the possession of marketable skills. Thus we are seeing the emergence of a new kind of state … with its stress on work, education, partnership and pragmatism”.
And the idea is that private sector management approaches are beneficial for the public sector – so all of the targets, efficiency drives etc. But while what has been called “the Super Class”, the very highly paid private sector professionals have done very nicely, Williams says (and as a Whitehall man he no doubt closely noted this himself). And, hardly news now, but perhaps not so obvious when he was writing, he comments on Blair matching “Lloyd George in his adminration for business leaders whom he has appinted in large numbers to his Goverment and to over 300 task forces”.
He notes, presciently it would seem creates “problems for Labour in government so long as it remains ‘the party of public professionals’… The Blair Government faces a problem in reconciling its commitments to tight controls on public spending and a continuing drive for efficiency in public servies with the expectations of the public-sector middle class from which it draws its main support.”
The ultimate logic was to achieve “a bureaucratic monoculture spanning the public and private domains” – “success” being defined as meeting the demands of the market, public or private. Williams says that Blair had in 199 an “essentially optimistic vision of the emerging society in which an aspirational middle class of ‘knowledge workers’ comprises an increasing majority of the population with a diminishing minority of the ‘socially excluded’.” But Williams adds, “it is equally possible to imaine a future in which the Super Class constitutes a beleaguered minority among an increasingly resentful majority… today’s political consensus may contain the seeds of a future crisis of managerial society.” (p. 211)
Mmm – think he might have had something there….
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