The Permanent State

Commenting on the Infected Blood Inquiry report, Andy Burnham said "The unelected state in Britain has too much power. It's too easy to cover up". He went on to recommend a statutory duty of candour, which was originally proposed as the "Hillsborough law". There are two things worth noting here. First is the reference to the "unelected state". This is closer to the traditional British "men from the ministry" than the paranoid American trope of the "deep state", but it has a similar function in suggesting a power that is both persistent and unaccountable. The second point to note is that the proposed solution to this perennial problem of organisational failure isn't any sort of organisational change. A duty of candour - to be open and honest - is simply an appeal to virtue. In practice, it would be difficult to prove that an official had been insufficiently candid, particularly where they could point to the constraints of national security, commercial confidentiality or a poor institutional memory (i.e. conveniently missing records). The idea that if you change the culture of an organisation you thereby reform the organisation itself is naive ("You can put lipstick on a pig but it's still a pig"). It also misunderstands cause and effect. The Home Office isn't terrible because it employs bad people; but it probably attracts bad people because it's terrible.

The UK state has always been unelected because it ultimately derives its authority from the Crown. The advance of democracy has been limited to the legislature and local government, and while the former is the most powerful component of the state apparatus it is also one whose remit is carefully constrained both by the constitution (the Lords, the Supreme Court and the in loco regis powers of the Prime Minister) and by raison d'etat, which is most obvious in the subservience of the UK to the US in international affairs. In the US many states elect sheriffs and judges. In the UK we elect Police and Crime Commissioners whose purpose is largely to provide a fig-leaf, hence the low turnout in their elections. In the one instance where that authority might prove effective, the Mayor of London's oversight of the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, it is constrained by the competing authority of the Home Secretary. The "unelected state" is a tautology by which the Mayor of Greater Manchester seeks to create an implicit boundary between the political class and the state apparatus. If nothing else, this reminds us that for all his "good bloke" PR he is a fully-paid-up member of that class.

In all of the scandals listed by Burnham the root problem wasn't rogue public servants but the demands of the government, and often the personal prejudices of the Prime Minister. Margaret Thatcher decided that the South Yorkshire police were not to be held accountable for Hillsborough in the politically-charged climate following the miners' strike. Her government also decided to cover up the use of infected blood in the NHS. The Windrush scandal arose as a direct result of the hostile environment championed by Theresa May at the Home Office, itself a result of her need to get the rightwing press onside in advance of her long-planned leadership bid. The Grenfell tragedy arose from a combination of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's disregard for its poorer citizens and the undermining at national level of building safety standards in the cause of market deregulation. The Post Office scandal can be traced to the political pressure to make privatisation work. A point to emphasise here is that these scandals arose from policies that were shared across the entire political class. The last Labour government took 13 years to pull its finger out over Hillsborough, while the Liberal Democrats failed the subpostmasters and subpostmistresses just as much as the Conservatives did.

The problem in the UK is not that the "unelected state" has too much power, as Burnham suggests, but  arguably that it has too little. Consider the furious reaction to the (unelected) Supreme Court temporarily thwarting the government over Brexit and more recently Rwanda. In suggesting that the state apparatus needs to be subservient to the will of the people, Burnham is making exactly the same populist claim as the newspapers that charged the justices with being the "enemies of the people". My point here is not that we need more checks and balances to guard against an "elective dictatorship" but that the people demanding that public servants be further constrained and if necessary jailed for their misbehaviour are the representatives of a political class that is almost uniquely unconstrained amongst Western democracies. It is also a class that has been notably successful in neutering attempts at accountability for its own calamitous acts (cf. the Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War), and which has provided cover to limit the accountability of our feral press (cf. the Leveson Inquiry).

A less populist, more Olympian tone was adopted last week by Martin Kettle in the Guardian. His argument is that we rarely change governments, which he clearly considers a good thing on the whole, and that when we do the state apparatus ensures smooth continuity. This is not simply Kettle once more insisting that democracy needs to be bridled. He is also suggesting that the permanent state has a quasi-constitutional role in sanctioning change: "Our democratic ethos and institutions understand, in principle and without challenge, the legitimacy of such a change of party government." You only have to cast your mind back to the fevered speculation about a government of national unity in 2019, whose sole purpose was to deny Jeremy Corbyn entry to Downing Street in the event of Labour winning the general election, or to the overt threats made by anonymous military top brass since 2015 and amplified by the press, to realise that this legitimacy is not extended to everyone. In fact, the mandarins of the Civil Service would probably have accommodated a Corbyn government with little fuss: his mild social democracy was hardly a radical departure. The problem was the para-state centred on the intersection of the media and the political class.

One thing Burnham's intervention has made clear is the extent to which government is now about the management of scandals. They have always been part of the mix, but usually as a side-order in the UK: governments rarely fall because of them. But where the government has no coherent programme, or where its purpose has been reduced to simply clinging on to power, scandals can come to the fore simply because there is otherwise a vacuum. A good example of this is Israel today where "victory" seems ever distant. Netanyahu's sole aim is to hang on to office (if only to avoid any criminal charges) and to that end he will pursue the folly of his policy in Gaza. But there is no meaningful opposition to that policy. For example, Yoav Gallant's recent criticisms are both banal (get out of Gaza) and impossible (impose a non-Hamas authority). While the far-right seeks to fill the vacuum with an alternative impossibility (kill 'em all), mainstream attention has focused on the families of the hostages and the coverage of their plight has shifted from sympathy to outrage over the government's mishandling of negotiations for their repatriation.

The parallel with the UK is obvious. Labour's current pitch is: "We should be in charge, and we're promising nothing". But the more subtle echo is that politics is now coalescing around groups wronged or betrayed by the state. The problem with this is not just that it relegates issues of class and political economy to the margin, which Labour is happy enough with, but that it treats politics as a series of unnconnected matters for potential redress. The dots are not joined. The marketisation at the heart of the infected blood, Grenfell and Post Office scandals is largely ignored and the only commonality recognised is the malign nature of officialdom. While this superficially promotes a populist politics, it also treats the electorate as petitioners and the government as a higher judiciary, there to bring the state to account. It also incidentally reinforces the role of the media as public prosecutors, their own part in scandals such as Hillsborough and Grenfell obscured.

The dilemma for an incoming Labour government is whether to lean into this trend, presenting itself as the tribune of the people, or whether to resist it by insisting that the change of government has been enough to "reset" the state. Burnham and Kettle represent these two poles. Given that Keir Starmer's fundamental goal is to restore the authority and gravitas of the state, it's likely that he will lean towards Kettle's position. And given the stranglehold he has achieved over the Labour Party and candidate selection in particular, it is unlikely that anyone in the PLP after the general election will strongly oppose him, which explains why it's Burnham, with his separate mandate, who is pitching the alternative now. The challenge for Starmer is that despite his success in burying the Forde Report the press will be keen to pursue other historic scandals because they will be increasingly starved of political substance under an administration characterised by caution and a conservative aversion to real change. And then he will find that his own record of dissembling will not inspire popular confidence in government statements. The scandals will not end after July.