Since it won office, the government has made a series of reforms which go some way to tackling unhelpful concentrations and dispersals of power. It must now pull these changes together into a coherent story about changing where power lies – and so demonstrate vividly that democratic politics can make people’s lives better.
To do this, it needs to liberate itself from the outdated fears which demonise democratic government and disempower the state it leads.
The claims that government is inherently profligate and that public servants are in it for themselves are relics of 1970s New Right propaganda. The justification for letting powerful companies ignore their impact on everyone else stems from another 1970s angst – the plight of the shareholder – and from the mid-twentieth century fear of the state turning totalitarian. This also underpins the case for uncritical adherence to the ECHR.
Over the last 40 years, this spectre – of a spendthrift, self-serving, would-be tyrannical state – has driven a paradoxical shift. Power has both become concentrated in elements of central government, and been dispersed across a wide array of public bodies, private firms, and the courts, held in place by a vast tangle of rules.
This has now created deep structural problems for the viability of democratic politics. It splits the state’s power across public and private sectors in ways that are difficult for non-specialists to understand. It creates accountability sinks. It erodes public confidence and trust.
This is not to excuse the state’s many serious failures, for which it must always be held to account. It has centralised power to the point of debilitating itself, for example; delivering radical devolution, to free Whitehall to focus on what only it can do, is urgent. Charges of over-emphasis on process are fair. Calls for a mission-driven approach – or at least the principles and behaviours that such an approach implies – are sensible.
But criticism of state failure must be done with a clear, constructive goal in mind, because such criticism has been happening for decades and the situation has only grown worse. The state’s critics have been far too willing to overlook the role of the private sector since the 1980s in exacerbating state incapacity. Worse, many of those critics lambast the state not because they hope to improve it, but because they believe it is irreducibly useless, if not actively malign.
This mentality is destroying trust in democracy. It has to stop. If politicians won’t make the case for why it is worth having a democratically run state, for its virtues, merits and hard-earned nobility, in the face of relentless attacks from its enemies, who are they expecting to do it for them? Criticism of state failure must always be directed to improving its functioning. To restore confidence in democratic government, it is vital to restore the confidence of democratic government
Having rejected those old fears, the next step is to end the excessive emphasis on rules and quantification, which has now institutionalised distrust in democracy.
Numerical projections, and the assumptions that underpin systems of rules, are attempts to foresee the future. This is driven by the fear of uncertainty. But the hope that uncertainty can be dispelled is a delusion, and so cannot be a viable basis on which to lead a government. It has only taken on such a central role since the 2008 Crash because it is a substitute for having clear goals, and a clear theory of power with which to achieve them – both of which we have lacked for far too long.
Politicians – and the officials they lead – must replace their fear of uncertainty with confidence in their principles, and the belief that these will guide them, no matter what shocks may come. Accepting that the future is unpredictable would also be more honest; the public has had enough of airy number-laden promises. And it would liberate government from risk aversion masquerading as objective projection.
The more confidence government has in the future it is building, the more it will make the case for its own legitimacy. The clearer its vision, the more effective it can be, because officials will have a working understanding of the government’s aims, and the confidence that ministers will back them in pursuing those aims.
Sometimes, a polity reaches a point of paralysis where simply smashing through the old to something new has a revitalising effect in itself, triggering unanticipated positive side effects. When President Roosevelt declared in 1933 that Americans had ‘nothing to fear but fear itself’, it was not an accurate analysis: it was a galvanising act of will. A shift to a steadier, more principled, more confident approach on the part of the state would raise business confidence by showing that government will stick to its plans. It might also attract talented graduates of the kind who for too long have defaulted to working in consultancy or finance. And it could address the skewed incentives that confront civil servants, where obedient failure is tolerated, and risk-taking creativity discouraged.
This speaks to the broader need to restore the role of trust as an organising principle, in place of excessive use of quantification and rules. Too many of our institutions – the BBC and universities are two glaring examples – have deprived experienced professionals of autonomy in favour of a prescriptive, centralised, risk-averse approach to administration which saps morale and initiative, sours employee-management relations and drives away talent. This approach now causes more problems than it solves, and should be replaced by a bias towards trusting professionals far more.
This should be balanced by the principle that they will be held personally responsible for any serious failings, with strict adherence to the rules no longer considered an adequate defence. Mission-driven behaviours in government should reinforce this by placing direct personal responsibility in the hands of leaders, who should see their task through to completion and be judged on its success. As Peter Hyman and Morgan Wild suggest, mission leaders, ‘once given a budget and a problem to fix, should have maximum discretion’.1
Throwing off procedural arcana and restoring trust in the judgement of officials and professionals should bring with it a new focus on treating those members of the public engaging with the state as individual citizens with dignity
and agency.
But there is a final reason why reawakening confidence in the idea of a democratically run state – and its capacity to make choices and judgements on principle – is vital. To achieve their goals and re-empower the public, democratically elected politicians must face down the inevitable self-interest of powerful unelected players. They cannot do that by hoping everyone will be nice. This is another reason for pushing back the excessive reliance on rules and quantification: doing so will make it more difficult for vested interests to persuade the government it can’t do things.
The 1970s claim that the state is inherently useless has combined with politicians’ relatively high visibility to leave them accepting the blame for far more than they should, while private power is allowed to undermine public power without consequences. This report has identified some examples, but there are more. Liz Truss richly deserved her fate, for example – but what of the role played in the disaster she triggered by the blundering of the pension fund industry? The head of P&O Ferries told MPs he had broken the law by summarily firing 800 workers – and faced no legal action.2
Right-wing commentators continue to invoke the state failure of the IMF crisis in 1976 – but somehow allow the financial sector to insist that the far worse crisis it caused in 2008 belongs to the distant past.
As the Labour MP Jake Richards has argued:
‘Fundamental change also inevitably means making enemies. … The government will need to make clear who will lose from their agenda, only to emphasise the wider benefits. ‘There is scope for more aggressive attacks on the vulture capitalist class – the Covid-fraud billionaires, those making their fortunes from desperate asylum hotels and accommodation in the children and adult social care system, and the multi-national corporates that thrive on illegal working. Why is it that foreign states are often profiteering from our basic domestic public services?’3
Steve Akehurst of Persuasion UK has tested messaging on this theme with Reform-curious Labour voters, and reports the effectiveness of suggesting that Nigel Farage fights for ‘the rich, the powerful, his mates in big business’, pointing to donations from ‘fossil fuel lobbyists, polluters, and climate change deniers’ and suggesting that Farage wants to hand ‘even more power to the elites he pretends to oppose’4
Akehurst argues that one reason why such messaging is potentially effective is that, broadly, economic themes unite Labour’s support.
Akehurst contends that public attitudes to big business have fundamentally shifted over the last 30 years, as the polling we began with suggests. Voters are more open to these arguments than political strategists: here again, outdated fears are needlessly constraining a decisive assertion of power. However, he cautions that such messaging needs to make intuitive sense to voters.
Calling out the damage done by the concentrated power of certain firms is not ‘anti-business’. To think so is to make the same mistake as the extremist who cannot distinguish between, say, Labour politicians and hard-line communists. Most businesses are a great benefit to society; it is more damaging to their reputation not to call out the few among them that exploit and extract, especially as the victims of such practices often include other businesses. Here, New Labour shows the way. It introduced a windfall tax on the excess profits of the privatised utility companies. And it pitched the national minimum wage as a means to stop unscrupulous businesses undercutting decent ones, while facing down incorrect predictions that it would destroy two million jobs.
It is time for the elected government to free itself of outdated fears, to assert itself as the people’s champion against those who disempower them, and to begin at last the long process of rebuilding the state’s capacity and self-confidence. If it does so, it can re-earn the trust of the public, and dispel the theories we began with: that politicians are useless, uncaring or corrupt, that the real levers of power are hidden, and that everything is a scam.
The government needs to decide whether or not it will dare to build a new, fairer orthodoxy, leading to true national renewal. If it opts instead to patch up a dying status quo – which may seem the safer option – it will waste a precious, once-in-a-generation opportunity to shift power in ways that improve working people’s lives. And it risks opening the door to those who see the modern state as their enemy, and seek to destroy it.
