Institutional Crisis in 21st Century Britain

David Richards, M. Smith, C. Hay, M. Smith, C. Hay

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137334398
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In 21st century Britain, a 'perfect storm' seems to have engulfed many of its institutions. This book is the first wholesale consideration of the crisis of legitimacy that has taken root in Britain's key institutions and explores the crisis across them to determine if a set of shared underlying pathologies exist to create this collective crisis.

Part I

A Thematic Approach to Crisis

1

A Crisis of Expectation

David Richards

Introduction

Much has been made about the current conduct of contemporary UK politics. There is a perceived malaise, reflected more often than not in terms of a rising tide of anti-political sentiment directed towards mainstream politics and disengagement by the general public from the formal arenas of politics – party membership or voter turnout – as the oft-cited examples. It is a theme the former Labour Foreign Secretary David Miliband reflected on when giving the Speaker’s Lecture at the Palace of Westminster in June 2012. His address, Ministers and Politics in a Time of Crisis offered a series of thematic comparisons with the 1970s, a decade, he observed, that had a similar:

debate about ‘fiscal crisis of the state’, the rise of separatist parties in the form of the SNP and Plaid Cymru, the birth of extremist parties like the National Front. The sociologist Daniel Bell claimed in the middle of that decade that the nation state ‘was too big for the small problems and too small for the big ones’. There was even a name for the crisis: ‘the ungovernability thesis’. Britain, it was claimed, was too divided to be governed.

Miliband went on to suggest that, similar to the 1970s, contemporary debates over a perceived crisis of politics reflect a sense of ‘broken promises’ on the part of the political class towards the electorate.

Those familiar with the now sizeable literature on the various problems besetting the conduct of contemporary liberal-democratic politics in the UK will recognise that Miliband’s contribution concerns the emergence of what is often referred to as a ‘crisis of expectation’ (Stoker 2006, Hay 2007, Flinders 2012a). It is formulated on the notion that there is an ever-widening gulf or ‘expectations gap’ (Flinders 2012a: 57) between what is promised by or expected of the political class and what it, in turn, can offer. Here it is argued that the gap between what is depicted as the demand- and supply-sides of democratic politics has exponentially grown. Recently, this figurative gap has been further widened by the financial crisis and the emergence of a new austerity age, further fuelling a growing sense of anti-political sentiment and cynicism surrounding the conduct of politics.

Addressing the symptoms of this crisis tends to invoke two broadly contrasting responses. The first is predicated on the need to change the way in which contemporary politics operates, stressing the need for reform in terms of the nature and practice of the institutions, processes and actors involved in delivering or supplying politics (Stoker 2006, Hay 2007). The second seeks ‘to map and diagnose the contemporary condition of disaffection and disengagement … as resting not with changes in the supply of political goods so much as with changes in the responsiveness to, and desire for such goods by their potential consumers’ (Hay 2007: 40). In terms of the latter, blame is mainly apportioned in the direction of what is characterised as an increasingly sectional and selfish electorate who hold ‘unreal-ideals’ and expectations of what democratic politics can offer. Flinders (2012a: vii) provides the starkest enunciation of this type of account, depicting the emergence of a ‘bad faith model of politics’, caused by a surge in demand-side pressures.

Hay (2007: 39) observes that demand-side explanations concerning a contemporary crisis of expectation currently form the dominant approach within the academic literature.¹ As such, much of this chapter is focused on this particular set of arguments and approaches, but not in an uncritical manner. For if we are to use the past to help illuminate our understanding of the present, the experience of the 1970s and the response to the first-wave crisis of expectation offers some crucial insights. As Miliband (2012) pointedly observes:

if these are the lessons of the 1970s, there is one seismic difference that is relevant. It concerns the political conditions in which the economic crisis has to be addressed. The 1974 Labour manifesto talked of a ‘crowning test of our democracy’ in confronting the economic perils facing the country, but there was little thought that the political system itself needed reform. Today we do not have that luxury.

(Miliband 2012)

The stress here, which forms the overarching theme of this chapter, is on the need to re-examine the way in which contemporary democratic politics is currently supplied. In so doing, it seeks to challenge those accounts that predominantly preference demand-side explanations concerning the current problems besetting politics. The argument presented below avers that contemporary demand-side narratives concerning a crisis of expectation are miscast, as they essentially offer a defence of the existing political settlement and in so doing perpetuate the very crisis they seek to address.

In terms of the organisation of the chapter, attention is first paid to the response to the first-wave, 1970s crisis of expectation in the shape of Thatcherism. Here, it is argued that what ensued was a series of economic and social reforms, but crucially not any substantive alteration to either the existing political settlement or with it the conduct of UK politics, which instead continued to operate in much the same way. This is explained by the ongoing commitment by post-1979 governments to the British political tradition (BPT), a theme already touched on in the introductory chapter to this edited volume.² It then explores the various dimensions of the second-wave crisis of expectation currently enveloping the conduct of UK politics, suggesting that the dominance of demand-side accounts to addressing this issue is not unproblematic. The argument developed here concerns themes of causality, correlation and sequencing. It is suggested that primacy must first be given to reforming the way in which politics is currently supplied, which in turn has the potential to render a shift in demand-side perceptions of what mainstream politics can offer. This chapter concludes by arguing that if such sequencing in the reform process is ignored, and with it the plea made by Miliband above overlooked, then there is a strong chance that, as with the 1970s, this second-wave crisis of expectation will be regarded as another missed opportunity to bring about a crucially needed remodelling of the existing political settlement.

We’ve been here before: The 1970s and the first-wave crisis of expectation

The current perceived crisis of expectation besetting UK politics is by no means a new phenomenon. A similar set of themes concerning an expectations gap first appeared in the course of the 1960s, culminating in the emergence of a more fully blown crisis in the 1970s. It led to the portrayal of the UK state as ‘ungovernable’. As Pierson (1991: 141) observes:

It was in this period of the early and mid-1970s that social democratic confidence in the competence of the mixed economy allied to greater social equity came under increasing challenge. It was also … the period of the flowering of New Right and neo-Marxist accounts of the welfare state, both of which concentrated on the ubiquity of crisis arising from the inherently unstable and contradictory elements within the post-war welfare capitalist consensus.

Various explanations were offered as to the causes underpinning the emergence of this state of ungovernability. One of the most prominent approaches was that of a crisis of expectation and what was labelled as the ‘overload thesis’. The concept of overload first emerged in two articles, published in the same year by Crozier (1975) in his analysis of the USA and Tony King’s (1975) account of the UK. The key theme of the overload thesis was predicated on the view that following the turn to more statist and welfarist programmes adopted by many advanced-liberal democracies in the aftermath of the Second World War, there had occurred a clearly identifiable rise in public expectations (demand) of what public goods government should provide. It was argued that, inevitably, governments had failed to deliver (supply) on many of these expectations, which in turn had resulted in a serious decline of public confidence in government.

In the UK context, Anthony King (1975: 166) captured the essence of the overload thesis in a striking aphorism which laid the failure to meet the expectations of the nation clearly at the door of the government:

Once upon a time, then, man looked to God to order the World. Then he looked to the market. Now he looks to government. The differences are important. God was irremovable, immutable. The market could be removed or mutated but only, it was thought at a very high price. Government by contrast, is removable, mutable – and corporeal. One blames not ‘Him’, or ‘It’ but ‘Them’.

It was a thesis that was to attract a number of exponents (Brittain 1975, Rose 1975, Douglas 1976, Moss 1976, Jay 1977, Barnes and Kaase 1979, Richardson and Jordan 1979, Parsons 1982, Birch 1984). Rose (1975: 14) succinctly sums up the main theme to emerge in these accounts and in so doing the emphasis they each placed on the demand-side:

Governments become overloaded when expectations are in excess of national resources, the government institutions, and the impact that its outputs can achieve. Such an overload arises from decision of citizens individually and in organized groups to ask more of government than it can in total provide [italics added].

Different elements of the overload critique were embraced by the Left (Habermas 1975, Offe 1975), but more crucially by the emergent New Right, which drew on them to explain what it depicted as a wider crisis of the state (Dorey 1995). The New Right claimed that if the trend towards governments attempting to satisfy the ever-increasing expectations of society was not arrested, then eventually both authority and legitimacy of government and the political system would be undermined:

Although ‘legitimation crisis’ is a concept usually associated with the Left, it does tie in very closely with much of the neo-conservative critique, for as the economist Samuel Brittan observes: ‘If a succession of governments … stir up expectations only to disappoint them, there is a risk of the whole system snapping under the strain’.

(Brittan 1983: 17)

Accounts of overload underpinned by a crisis of expectation narrative have subsequently received a number of revisionist critiques. Hay in particular (1996, 2007) offers a challenge to the overload thesis, identifying a key paradox; he notes how on one level the account seeks to frame a rational choice-based portrayal of self-interested voters open to political bribery in the 1970s. Such an image he avers is essentially patronising of the electorate, who are depicted as greedy, unprincipled and opportunistic. Yet, at the same time, by calling for a decisive break from the past, which had supposedly led to a crisis of expectation, overload theorists were ‘appealing precisely to the good sense of the electorate that they have previously just dismissed’ (Hay 1996: 136).

The validity of such criticisms of the overload thesis is important, but it should not detract from the extent to which, as Hay (1996) indeed recognises, the sense of crisis in the 1970s was very real. From this perspective, what can be understood as the discursive construction of crisis had a very real or tangible impact. The context of this crisis narrative was employed by the New Right to depict the various governments of the post-war era as collectively the guilty party (supply-side emphasis) in their pandering to and attempting to appease the exponential growth in self-interested, sectional demands placed on them by societal groups (demand-side emphasis). It is in this sense that both the crisis narratives of overload and ungovernability were distilled into a broader crisis of expectation organised around a dialectical set of both demand- and supply-side forces. In so doing, the New Right could position itself to offer a potent challenge to the embedded Keynesian-welfare settlement pursued by different governments since 1945 by linking the growing expectations of the electorate to a range of economic and political crises. Such positioning afforded the New Right the opportunity to offer an alternative to the existing orthodoxy, a challenge taken up by key actors in the Conservative Party after 1975.

The Thatcherite response to crisis and the shadow of the BPT

Much has been written about the late 1970s ushering in a new neo-liberal political settlement under the auspices of Thatcherism. The literature on Thatcherism tends to embrace two binary positions: a set of transformative accounts depicting the 1970s as a critical juncture leading to a radical break embodied in the exceptionalism of the Thatcherite project; and those narratives stressing a more evolutionary or path-dependent approach emphasising historical continuity. Such a distinction is both well-rehearsed and remains as contested today as it was a few decades ago.³

In the context of this chapter, it is argued that from the late 1970s, the Conservative leadership appealed to a sense of crisis to justify a programme to transform what it regarded as an over-extended state. It proposed the withdrawal of the state to be replaced by non-state actors to meet the demands of the electorate. In governance terms, this involved reducing the size of the public sector, combating inflation not unemployment, disengaging from the economy and cutting direct taxation (supply-side solutions in both a monetarist and governance sense). In so doing, the demands of the electorate would shift from the state towards the marketplace to satisfy its expectations. Hence, the problems of both overload and the related crisis of expectation would be resolved.

Yet, in practice, there was a contingency that shaped the subsequent character of the reform programme pursued by the various Conservative administrations between 1979 and 1997. That contingency emerges in the shape of the BPT. Here, it is useful to disaggregate and go beyond what Marsh (1995) sees as a tendency in the literature towards ‘unidimensional explanations’ of Thatcherism. In so doing, in public policy terms, debate over the extent to which the post-1979 reforms in areas such as political economy and state welfarism are exceptionalist or evolutionary remains unresolved. But where there is far less contestation concerns the limited impact of Thatcherism on the existing political settlement. Here, there emerged a notable continuity with the past. There was a discernible lack of reforming zeal in such areas as the constitution or the broader system of governance as reflected in the Westminster model, much to the chagrin of some on the New Right (Hoskyns 2000).

Why? Thatcherism was to all intents and purposes constitutionally conservative, concentrating much of its political capital on addressing economic and welfare rather than political reform (Gamble 1994b). Indeed, it is worth noting that Thatcherism regarded what Barry (1965) referred to as the UK’s ‘power-concentration’ constitution, or what is now more commonly depicted as the core executive’s power-hoarding approach to governance, as particularly useful in pursuing its economic and social-welfare reform programmes. The more ‘high politics’ areas concerning the UK’s parliamentary state were left relatively unchallenged because Thatcherism had little interest in rejecting the Westminster model and starting afresh.

Throughout its period in office, the Conservative Party instead embraced a Burkeian position, remaining committed to parliamentary conservatism, an unwritten constitution, the existing model of representative democracy and a neutral civil service. Consequently, there was never an attempt, for example, to embrace a specific New Right model of bureaucracy that would have challenged the edifice of the parliamentary state. Thatcher, for example, when speaking about civil servants as individuals rather than Whitehall as an institution, was keen to praise their commitment and professionalism (Richards and Smith 2000). This view was recently reaffirmed by the current Cabinet Secretary Jeremy Heywood and Head of the Civil Service Bob Kerslake (2013): ‘Despite her “Iron Lady” image and her conviction politics … Margaret Thatcher mostly held a rather traditional view of the Civil Service.’ Thus, no alternative to the Westminster model was sought or developed during the 1979–97 Conservative administration. The Thatherite legacy was one that had limited effect on the way in which UK politics was to be supplied and, as such, continuity with the BPT was maintained (Richards 2004).

What this brief overview of both the literature and the events of this period illustrates is that in the course of the late 1970s and the ensuing period of Thatcherism, a crisis of expectation was used predominantly as a rhetorical tool by the New Right to delegitimise the previous post-war epoch of UK politics and so agitate for change. At one level then, it is operating as a narrative to challenge, not sustain the status quo. But the change that ensued was both contingent and focused on...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: A Crisis in UK Institutions?
• Part I: A Thematic Approach to Crisis
• Part II: Surveying Institutions in Crisis
• Conclusion: Après le Deluge? Crisis, Continuity and Change in UK Institutions
• References
• Index