Leverage

In the latest issue of The Economist, Matt Holehouse has an article that purports to reflect the consensus of the political class: essentially, that the levers of government are ineffective. He opens with an anecdote about the denizens of Number 10 Downing Street fiddling with redundant thermostats that fail to alter the temperature. This is, pretty obviously, an invention, though it does serve more purposes as a metaphor than the author perhaps intends. Rather than focusing on the systemic disconnect between dial and boiler, perhaps we should note the British state's unwillingness to rip out old fixtures and fittings (the House of Lords inevitably springs to mind), or even to wonder whether people who persist with a futile action (the very definition of madness) should really be in a position of power. Holehouse then quotes Keir Starmer: "Every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations, consultations and arm’s-length bodies that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be". Is this credible coming from a former DPP, who was supposedly so well-versed in the machinery of the state that he was seen as a natural for Prime Minister?

This bathetic introduction provides an opportunity for Holehouse to cite the recent complaints by Paul Ovenden, Starmer's former director of strategy, who quit the chilly building when vicious messages denigrating Diane Abbott came to light, about the supposed "stakeholder state: a sticky nexus of campaigners, regulators and lawyers who gum up government business with fringe causes." Ovenden's diatribe barely qualifies as analysis, but the language employed by Holehouse to summarise him is revealing, both the emphasis on a "nexus", which implies a common interest, and on the "fringe causes", which is a condescending way of describing attempts to hold the government to account. Whenever a politician talks about the ineffectivess of the levers of power, they are simply demanding fewer constraints on their ability to exercise that power. Holehouse makes this clear when he claims that "Focus groups increasingly see Reform UK’s leader, Nigel Farage, as a “just do it” politician." That bowdlerised phrase originates in the world of business - The Economist 's natural audience - and is usually abbreviated to JFDI: just fucking do it. In other words, execute my will without demur. If you want an example of what that means in practice, consider an unarmed civilian shot in the head by a masked agent of the state on a street in Minneapolis.

But Holehouse is not interested in impunity so much as unanimity: "This appetite for a stronger, faster, politically charged centre of government amounts to a curious consensus between Sir Keir, the Tories and Mr Farage. ... Like Mr Johnson during covid-19, Sir Keir has talked of “mission control” nerve centres in Whitehall, with large screens displaying data feeds. Reform UK shares the same vision. The party promises a cull of civil servants and quangos, and a shock-and-awe legislative campaign, to “ensure that the state apparatus obeys the will of the people”." The current experience of Reform in running local authorities - i.e. their realisation that far from cutting council tax they must increase it simply to keep the lights on - should have prompted some scepticism on Holehouse's part. And the ridiculous image of large screens, like something out of a James Bond film, should have stirred the memory of New Labour's obsession with fatuous and misleading metrics. But these are ultimately distractions. What matters is the claim of consensus, which might seem paradoxical if you were expecting the next general election to provide a clear choice between Labour and Reform.

Holehouse then pivots to present a more subtle argument. As he correctly notes "For governments that know what they want, arm’s-lengths bodies are not obstacles to their agenda, but instruments for executing it. Margaret Thatcher created “executive agencies” to run services like passports and patents, reckoning that a new cadre of business-minded managers would be more efficient than the Whitehall old guard." What he doesn't explore is the patchy record of the agency approach. He also accepts at face value the claims of decentralisation: "Such centralisation is a big intellectual break from the past 40 years. New Labour saw decentralisation as synonymous with modernisation. David Cameron came to power in 2010 with ideas of localism, volunteerism and personalised choice in public services." As any fule kno', the UK state has undergone massive centralisation since Thatcher opened her multiple fronts against local government, industrial coordination and the welfare state, and that direction of travel has continued up to today. The problem is that the antipathy towards the men from the ministry - the Civil Service - has seen that centralisation made deeper but narrower through the agency state: the parcellisation of power across "independent" regulators and commercial outsourcers.

As befits The Economist's ideological position, what Holehouse is really arguing for here is a continuation of the neoliberal state. The whining about ineffective levers is seen as an unflattering reflection on the political inadequacies of the government: "Sir Keir promises a “fundamental reform of the British state”, but his remarks reflect frustration with government more than a plan to remake it ... Sir Keir has, his colleagues say, no real theory of the state ... by lamenting that Labour feels powerless, Sir Keir only makes the case for his populist rivals." The worry then is that if capitalism's B team is admitting its inability to govern, at the same time as the A team have spiralled off into irrelevance and culture war posturing, then the way may be opened to a party of rightwing chancers whose approach to the neoliberal state will be a mixture of vandalism, cupidity and gross incompetence, in the manner of the latest Trump administration in the US. The Economist was against Brexit and remains in favour of closer economic ties with the European Union. It is disappointed in the timidity of the current government in achieving that. This is a vote of no confidence in Keir Starmer.

Coincidentally, Larry Elliott published a more centre-left variant of this critique in The Guardian on the same day. This was again heavy on the ineffective levers trope but did at least acknowledge the role played by "obeisance to market forces", the "dominance of the Treasury" and the "British cult of the amateur". Where Holehouse is happy with the neoliberal state but dismissive of the quality of the politicians tasked with presenting it to the public, Elliott wishes for a return to the indicative planning of the 1960s and the marginalistion of the Treasury, which (briefly) empowered politicians. This is hardly likely, not least because the political courage and imagination required to make it happen is lacking in a Labour Party now deeply imbricated in the agency state (Ovenden's bitter screed noticeably ignores the revolving door). As a high-profile Lexiteer, Elliott ignores rapprochement with the EU, but it should be clear that his desire for a more dirigiste economic policy would be in tension with any move towards greater integration, not least in attempting to "pick winners" in a single market hostile to preferential state subsidies.

The flurry of press articles about the ineffective levers of power is best read as a withering judgement on the calibre of the cabinet in general and the Prime Minister in particular, rather than a systemic critique. Indeed, the very emphasis on levers, buttons and dials tells you that these are not synecdoches of the machinery of government but metonyms of the politicians - the hands - meant to operate it. Significantly, these articles don't propose substantive policies ("picking winners" is an aspiration) or forward-looking structural reforms (recreating the NEDC is just nostalgia). This is because the authors have no confidence that Starmer, or anyone else among the senior ranks of the Labour Party, is capable of putting the machinery of government to radical use. As Elliott notes, "Only rarely, and then usually as a result of extreme circumstances, has the British state been geared up for transformative change." The chance was missed with the 2008 financial crisis and again with the Covid pandemic. Should another opportunity, offering similar leverage, arise over the next four years, it will be studiously ignored.