Abstract
There is a considerable scholarly literature that interrogates why politicians are transferring powers to non-elected experts and limiting their policy discretion through ‘external rules’. While New Labour adopted a model of depoliticised state management in reforming UK public services, equally prominent was the politicised approach more usually associated with the Westminster model. This article’s core argument is that any shift towards depoliticisation is countered by structural trends reinforcing a politicised model of state management in British governance. In the Westminster system, political actors are rarely prepared to forego governing capacity, recognising the limitations of ‘blame avoidance’. Governing in the British polity necessitates elements of both politicisation and depoliticisation, evidenced by the hybrid statecraft of Blair and New Labour. Our analytical focus should be explaining relative changes over time, rather than positing a linear shift from politicised to depoliticised state management. Moreover, it is necessary to conceptualise the governing pathologies and unintended consequences that arise from the dual processes of politicisation and depoliticisation in the British state.
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Notes
I am grateful to the editors of British Politics and two anonymous reviewers for their incisive and instructive comments on an earlier draft of this article.
‘Agencification’ was a process originating in the New Public Management reforms of the mid-1980s culminating in the creation of Next Steps agencies where core departmental delivery functions are delegated to ‘arms-length’ non-departmental public bodies (Hood, 2009).
The semi-structured elite interviews were conducted under Chatham House rules between June 2011 and May 2012. As such, the remarks are anonymous but the actor’s position in the Whitehall hierarchy is made clear.
This draws on Wood’s (2013) remark that a series of ‘ontological dualisms’ can be located beneath any binary understanding of politicisation and depoliticisation in British politics: first, structure versus agency; second, the material versus the ideational; third, punctuated change versus incremental change; and finally, power as ‘domination’ versus power as ‘influence’. Similarly to Hay (2007), Wood argues that it is necessary to interrogate, and move beyond, the dominant binary categorisation of politicisation and depoliticisation in the literature.
‘Public services’ in the 1997–2010 Labour governments refers to provision in schools, post-16 education, the NHS, criminal justice and policing, and public transport. The term ‘public services’ was preferred to the ‘public sector’ emphasising delivery through the diverse machinery of state, private and voluntary sector provision.
The Wanless Review had been commissioned by the then Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, and was used to justify the decision in Budget 2002 to raise employer and employee National Insurance contributions to fund increased spending on the NHS (Barbes, 2007).
Interview with David Miliband, former Head of the Downing Street Policy Unit, 3 September 2012.
Interview conducted with Sir Michael Barber, 13 September 2012.
They also usefully point out that there is no nothing inherently novel about depoliticisation, as evidenced by the decision of the Attlee Government in the 1940s to adopt a ‘public corporation model’ in the nationalised industries which nominally ensured ministers operated at ‘arms-length’ from industry managers (Flinders and Buller, 2005).
Interview conducted for this study, 4 October 2011.
Interview with senior departmental official, 6 June 2011.
Interview conducted on 9 September 2011.
Interview with a member of Blair’s Number Ten Policy Unit, 3 March 2012.
‘COBRA’ was the emergency response unit located in the Cabinet Office (Cabinet Office Briefing Room A) where senior ministers and officials met following major national emergencies (Barber, 2007).
Interview conducted on 14 October 2011.
www.parliament.uk/documents/commons/lib/research/briefings/snpc-05609.pdf. Numbers vary according to what are counted as ‘non-departmental public bodies’ since the definition was changed by the Cabinet Office in 2002.
‘Wicked issues’ have been depicted by John Stewart as policy problems of unusual complexity which the conventional structures of government characterised by ‘departmentalism’ struggle to adequately address (Marsh, et al., 2001).
Interview conducted with Geoff Mulgan, 14 October 2011.
Interview 13 conducted for this study, 19 October 2011.
Interview 17 conducted for this study, 11 November 2011.
The Modernising Government White Paper, London: HMG, March 1999.
Interview conducted on 5 July 2011.
Interview with Rt. Hon. Andy Burnham MP, 21 September 2011.
Interview with Rt. Hon. David Blunkett MP, 16 October 2011.
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Diamond, P. New Labour, politicisation and depoliticisation: The delivery agenda in public services 1997–2007. Br Polit 10, 429–453 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2015.10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/bp.2015.10