Starmer and the State

At its heart, the Starmer project aims to restore the authority and gravitas of the UK state after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn. You could add Scottish independence to that list, though more in the sense of keeping the lid on an issue that is unlikely to return to the political foreground any time soon. As a reactionary and conservative exercise, focused on curtailing popular democracy and restoring the party cartel to the centre of politics, the project contains within it a fundamental tension between the desire to strengthen the state while preserving an economic system that has consistently undermined the state in the eyes of the electorate. Thus we have popular support for nationalisation and a rejection of the further encroachment of the private sector on the NHS at the same time that Labour rejects the former and supports the latter. The party's emphasis on the national interest and public service is intended not to reconcile these irreconcilable positions but to divert attention: to insist that the capture of the state machinery is a precondition for improvement, but without explaining how that improvment will be brought about, or even what it might look like. 

One result of this is the constant lowering of expectations about the likelihood of change combined with the hint that the inevitable disappointment will be the fault of recalcitrant public sector workers, not the government. It has become fashionable to point out the parallels between the rhetoric of the shadow cabinet and 90s-era Blairites, but this actually sounds more like 80s-era Thatcherities shorn of their revolutionary optimism. Where the rhetoric of the 1990s lives on is among the policy entrepreneurs of the think-tanks. A notable example of this is the recent report from the IPPR, Great Government: Public Service Reform in the 2020s, which provided ammunition for those newspaper articles on how little we could expect. The report starts with the bad news, "in many ways the inheritance facing the next government is even more challenging than that in 1997", but then offers hope in the form of the management consultancy pabulum that was sounding tired long before that annus mirabilis: "To fix public services we must move beyond arguments about a smaller or larger state and instead focus on creating a smarter state". 

Central to the IPPR report's worldview is the myth of leadership: the dynamic CEO who found political expression in the likes of Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. The idea that one person's intervention can make all the difference (even Blair wasn't solely responsible for the Iraq misadventure) is premised on the idea that organisations are static, rather than organic and constantly evolving. Exogenous rather than endogenous reform is therefore necessary. This supports bringing in "outside expertise", or applying "industry best practice", which has an obvious ideological connotation in the context of the public sector. It also plays to the liberal media's narrative of Starmer's "success" at the Crown Prosecution Service. Consider this example of the report's emphasis on contemporary leadership: "There are already a host of inspirational and talented public service leaders who are demonstrating that delivering great public services is possible." You'll note that the people who actually deliver the services don't even merit mention as spear-carriers.

So what does a "smarter state" look like? According to the report's authors, "The smarter state means delivering the three p’s of public service reform: prevention, personalisation and productivity. Prevention means intervening earlier – before people hit crisis point – and can result in better outcomes and reduced costs; personalisation seeks to put strong relationships between citizens and staff in public services at the heart of delivering better outcomes, and empowers citizens to take control of their own lives; and productivity means using the resources of the state to deliver the best outcomes possible." There is no obvious departure here from the ideas of the 90s. The trouble with prevention is that it is conflated with early intervention, which means treating people as suspect (e.g. "problem families"). In practice, the most useful early intervention is to prevent services collapsing, which usually means more funding. But that will clearly be anathema to a government fully subscribed to the Treasury View on public spending.

Personalisation may be a softer term for 90s-era consumer choice but it implies the same shift away from the collective negotiation of service through politics to a model of atomised consumption with the state acting as a referee, only nominally answerable to the people, to ensure service providers observe the rules of the game. Empowering citizens does not hint at a reduction in the state's ambit, despite the usual waffle about devolution (the relevant section, on page 7, has 10 actions, 9 of which start with "Goverment should ..."). The idea that productivity "means using the resources of the state to deliver the best outcomes possible" is close to meaningless, though you can reasonably infer that it's our old friend "doing more with less". The key action appears to be: "Government should invest in ‘employment friendly’ technology – including infrastructure, training and data – to speed automation and free up the frontline, while introducing a ‘right to retrain’ for impacted staff." Underneath the verbiage is the idea that public services are burdened by too many backoffice functions, thereby denying resources to the "frontline", which can be alleviated by automation and outsourcing. History suggest this is wrong on both counts.

Where the IPPR does diverge from the orthodoxy is the observation that during the New Labour years "NPM overemphasised extrinsic motivators and undervalued the need to unlock intrinsic motivation in staff and citizens." Of course, that critique of New Public Management was already available back in the 1980s, and most academic observers would agree that NPM went into decline in the late-90s as digital became the panacea du jour. What is significant in the IPPR critique is the emphasis on trust and autonomy, and how this in turn correlates with skill: "We argue that to fix public services a future government should invest in building a new public service playbook. We argue that this will mean shifting from a low trust, low skill, low autonomy public service model to a high trust, high skill, high autonomy one." The use of terminology like "playbook" isn't encouraging (pure West Wing), and "high-skill" is too often cover for outsourcing "low-skill" jobs, but the appearance of "autonomy", even if lacking the revolutionary implications of the 1970s, is none the less interesting.

There are two points to flag here. First is the implication that public services can only (or mostly) be fixed by addressing the organisation and culture of the public sector. In other words, it's the people: the service delivery rather than the service. But that begs the question as to what is fundamentally wrong. Most experts in the field agree that the root issue really is just a lack of money, and that most of the observable cultural and organisational deficiencies arise from that. The second point is that the emphasis on "high autonomy" runs up against the problem that the autonomy of public sector managers and that of workers may conflict. The report is vague on this distinction, but it is clear from comments by the Labour leadership (e.g. Wes Streeting on the NHS) that the preference will be to empower management rather than labour. In addition, it's fair to say that even the autonomy of management will likely prove more limited in practice than the IPPR imagines, not least because of Starmer's instinctive authoritarianism.

What the IPPR report suggests is that the policy hinterland of Labour has reverted to the managerial nostrums of the 1990s after an all-too-brief dalliance with more unusual ideas such as the foundational economy and universal basic income. This is understandable not only because of the innate conservatism of the Starmer regime but because of the attraction of a system of governance in which the state plays the leading role in the public performance of the satisfaction of wants and needs: the emphasis on financial prudence, the mania for targets and metrics, and the treatment of education and crime as disciplinary challenges. That the IPPR report focused its analysis of the public service inheritance of the next government on healthcare, schools and justice was no accident. These are the areas where the state can most easily display its power, even as it prepares the ground for relative failure and public disappointment (compare and contrast with the Tory government's foolish focus on asylum-seekers: a challenge it can never win and where the performance of goverment is increasingly absurd). The purpose of the Starmer administration will not be to improve public services but to re-establish ownership of the state.