The Heavy Thud

Keir Starmer's speech a couple of weeks ago was widely seen as a challenge to Whitehall, which owed everything to the Prime Minister (or his speech-writer's) tendency to sprinkle his deathless prose with clunking metaphors: "Our plan commits Whitehall to mission-led government. An approach to governing that won’t just deliver change but also change the nature of governing itself. ... Make no mistake – this plan will land on desks across Whitehall with the heavy thud of a gauntlet being thrown down. A demand, given the urgency of our times, for a state that is more dynamic, more decisive, more innovative; less hostile to devolution and letting things go; creative - on the deployment of technology harnessing its power to rethink services rather than replicate the status quo in digital form." To make sure the message got through, he even combined a recent Americanism with a standard postwar lament: "I don’t think there’s a swamp to be drained here, but I do think too many people in Whitehall are comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline."

A few days earlier, the Prime Minister had appointed a "safe pair of hands", Sir Chris Wormald, as his Cabinet Secretary, which suggests that continuity rather than change may prove to be the order of the day, but he again took the opportunity to up the rhetorical ante: "To change this country, we must change the way government serves this country ... From breaking down silos across government to harnessing the incredible potential of technology and innovation, it will require nothing less than the complete rewiring of the British state to deliver bold and ambitious long-term reform." Leaving aside his penchant for 1980s management speak, this is a continuation of the new public management rhetoric that Tony Blair did so much to advance around the millennium: new ways of working and the smart application of technology can radically transform the state. I emphasise rhetoric because the actual practice was, to borrow a term, tepid. After all, Blair didn't drag the machinery of government into the 21st century. If he had, Starmer wouldn't be trying to sell us on a complete rewiring job now. 

Blair's technophilia was (and remains) notoriously shallow. Another area in which he has been consistent is the claim that political delivery is hampered by the machinery of government, a mantra that Starmer is happy to repeat. In his review of the "gauntlet", Andrew Grice in the Independent rehearsed a now-famous anecdote: "As Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s chief of staff and now Starmer’s national security adviser, put it: 'When you arrive in Number 10 and pull on the levers of power, you discover they are not connected to anything.'" This is misleading in suggesting that power is exercised by some procedural mechanism, rather than by persuasion, lying or bullying. People have to be made to do stuff. Blair didn't lead the UK into the quagmire of Iraq by pulling the Iraq quagmire lever but by twisting arms, dissembling and intimidating any opposition. It's also an example of projection: the conservative reluctance to actually change anything substantial, which underpins the protestations of progressive intent, is attributed to the state's functionaries, thereby exculpating the political class. Grice duly obliges with another anecdote: "Ministers tell me Starmer’s criticism is justified. Some have been shocked by the quality of the civil service they discovered and by how slowly the machine cranks into gear."

I'm confident that many civil servants will also have been shocked by the quality of ministers and their advisors, but the narrative of ineptitude is one that the liberal press only tends to deploy in respect of its foes, for example Trump's appointees in the US or leftwing shadow cabinet ministers when Jeremy Corbyn was Labour leader. The implication is that ministers and top civil servants are from different tribes, mutually surprised by their strange habits and alien mindset, but nothing could be further from the truth in the UK. To start at the top, Keir Starmer is a former civil servant who ran the Crown Prosecution Service, not an arm of the state noted for its dynamism or innovation, while Rachel Reeves is a former Bank of England employee, even if she did fluff up her CV. In terms of their social backgrounds, Labour ministers are quite similar to senior civil servants: Oxbridge, a complacent respect for meritocracy and very limited expertise outside of the traditional sectors of law and finance. They have far more in common with each other than either does with Conservative politicians.

Grice is also revealing about ministers' archaic understanding of organisational dynamics and their naivety about technology: "Wormald will need to make cross-departmental working happen; ministers grumble there is still a “silo mentality” in Whitehall. His other challenge will be to introduce AI into public services; it could deliver huge savings and boost productivity, which has not returned to pre-pandemic levels." AI isn't being sold on its potential to boost public service productivity, i.e. deliver more for the same cost, but on its potential to cut service delivery costs in line with the Treasury's across-the-board 5% target. A little vignette from today's news is the report that civil servants are thinking of standardising their document-sharing technology: "No 10, for example, uses Microsoft to share documents, while the Cabinet Office uses Google, leading to frequent delays as people pass information from one department to the other." The issue is not "silos" (email exists) but dumb purchasing. You have to pay Microsoft a licence; Google's tools are free. 

The point is that government's long track record of IT project failures and wasteful procurement is the product of both ministers and senior civil servants and their common groupthink. The institutions of the UK state inevitably reflect the culture and overlapping ideology of the leading political parties. This is a synergistic relationship at the top level, not among the ranks: lowly DWP staff don't influence the parties any more than CLP members influence Whitehall. The revolving door between the senior echelons of the parties and business is the same revolving door that exists between the Civil Service and business. Just as Whitehall colours politicians in power, as humorously portrayed by Yes, Minster, so the politicians, and increasingly their burgeoning special advisors, colour Whitehall. If you want to understand why the state appears overly-legalistic, technologically illiterate and wedded to a bureaucratic and bossy approach, you could do worse than note the CVs of the political class, which bias towards the law, parasitic business and the public/private nexus of the third sector. 

The apparatus of the state, long-used to a duopoly of alternating governments, is obliged by the prime directive of any organisation (to preserve itself and minimise change) to find common ground, which in turn encourages the parties to move towards a mid-point between their positions on the political spectrum. This will occasionally be disrupted by a genuine shift in the political consensus, such as after 1945 and 1983, but opening up a gulf between the parties invariably leads to a countervailing readjustment: pressure to "close the gap". This is not just a political calculation by the opposition to keep adjacent to the governing party by accepting much of its programme as a fait accompli. It also reflects the pressure exerted by Whitehall to maintain continuity once the administration changes (in other words, inertia). What is notable is that these major shifts tend to come roughly 40 years apart (you can include the 1905 Liberal government as well, with its constitutional and social reforms), so we're arguably due a genuinely reforming administration around now. But while Labour under Starmer have been happy to push the rhetoric of progressive reform, their actions have been either underwhelming or positively conservative.

The long periods of Tory rule mean that there is an ideological bias towards them within Whitehall over-and-above any sympathy due to class or culture. This is famously apparent in the Treasury's commitment to "sound money" and its preference for the interests of savers over workers, but it is also evident in other areas of government from the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence (both still important components of the social elite) to the various welfare departments where a minatory attitude towards claimants is embedded within their systems and organisational culture. This explains why Labour have historically been more prone to decrying the conservative resistance of the "men from the ministry", but also why the Tories took up a similar complaint against "the blob" after 13 years of Labour government. But while the rhetoric suggests a return to that progressive critique of Whitehall, the lack of any criticism of the Treasury, and the dominant role that it has taken in insisting on cuts to other departments' expenditure, tells you that this will be a conservative government in all but name.

It is highly unlikely that Keir Starmer would lead a revolution in the machinery of government anyway. He climbed the greasy pole by working with the system, not against it. He is not a natural disruptor by temperament and he isn't going to indulge a gadfly like Elon Musk, let alone another Dominic Cummings. Morgan MacSweeney's priority will remain control of the Labour Party, not reform of the state apparatus. Starmer's project is the restoration of the state's authority and dignity after the twin insults of Brexit and Corbyn, and while that means showing that the state can be trusted to deliver, it also means avoiding chaos. While Tony Blair continues to yearn for national ID cards, Starmer and his lieutenants are focused on the more mundane task of filling in potholes. Possibly using AI. A thoroughly unoriginal and uninspiring man, his eventual memoirs will no doubt repeat that tired old Jonathan Powell anecdote but presumably garnished with a clumsy metaphor about not having the right tools to do the job.