Geoffrey K. Fry

More Than ‘Counting Manhole Covers’: The Evolution Of The British Tradition Of Public Administration

This article is a revised version of an inaugural lecture, delivered at the University of Leeds on 30 April 1998. The focus of the lecture and, thus, of this article is concerned with administrative history and the civil service. The first part of the article is about the pioneers of the academic study of public administration, and the subject’s relationship with political philosophy. The second part examines the role of the Webbs and the British approach to public administration. The third part evaluates the contribution of the academics of the ‘Golden Age‘ of public administration. The fourth part deals with changing perceptions of public administration, with a particular emphasis on developments in the civil service; it is deliberately self-referential. The final part briefly considers the future of the academic study of public administration, concluding that it has one.

What Kind of Revolution

‘The good news … was that the loan from the International Monetary Fund will be doled out in instalments up to some time in 1978, with audits to check whether Britain is fulfilling the loan’s terms’, The Economist observed in late 1976. ‘This period of rule by IMF Inspectorate General should give the country better government than successive teams of British politicians have done.’1 British experience had shown that the State could not, at one and the same time, perennially increase real incomes, attain price stability, sustain full employment, and continually expand the social services, as the Keynesian dispensation had led people to believe. Yet such a role for the State had become an integral part of Britain’s liberal democracy,2 and it was only obvious and regularly displayed excess on the part of the British trade unions together with a succession of external blows culminating in the Oil Crisis of 1973 and the IMF loan conditions of 1976 that eventually created the political climate in which the Governments of Margaret Thatcher could pursue their programmes of radical change.

The Ghosts in the Machine

‘Everybody I meet seems vaguely alarmed that something terrible is going to happen financially.’ So wrote Winston Churchill from Biarritz to Eddie Marsh on 7 August 1931, adding: ‘I hope we shall hang Montagu Norman if it does. I will certainly turn King’s evidence against him.’1 Eight days later, Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England, left Britain by boat for Canada. He did not depart to evade the hangman, but because he had experienced yet another of his mental collapses, and he had been ordered by his doctor to rest. Norman was to be away for over six weeks during which time the financial crisis deepened, and the ‘something terrible’ that he must have dreaded took place. His colleagues at the Bank tried to warn him of the announcement to be made on 20 September 1931, and of the legislation which, of necessity, followed the next day, but, as Norman made his homeward journey, they had no means of contacting him in confidence. ‘Sorry to go off before you arrived’ proved to be a message that did not convey the news to Norman. It was only when he reached the port of Liverpool that Norman learnt to his dismay that what was officially described as the suspension of the Gold Standard had taken place.2 The Gold Standard (Amendment) Act of 1931 marked the end of an era that dated back to the Armistice in 1918. For no longer was the British political nation dominated by the sentiment of going ‘back to 1914’.

The Conservatives and the Civil Service: ‘One Step Forward, Two Steps Back’?

The period since 1979 has witnessed more radical change in the civil service than in any other peacetime era in its history. Such has been the order of change that Lord Bancroft, the former Head of the Home Civil Service, has suggested that the civil service was in danger of being ‘demolished’ and of there being a return to the ills of the ‘unreformed’ service before the 1850s. This would be to take the ‘two steps back’ of the article’s title before the Northcote-Trevelyan report and the Warren Fisher era. Against the background of this possible outcome, this article evaluates the Next Steps programme and the other initiatives promoted by recent Conservative governments, before concluding that the requirements of the work and a markedly unified career civil service need not be compatible, and that there is at least the possibility that the various changes when fully implemented could represent ‘one step forward’.

Three Giants of the Inter-war British Higher Civil Service: Sir Maurice Hankey, Sir Warren Fisher and Sir Horace Wilson

The anonymity of the Civil Service may or may not be a valuable convention of the Constitution; it is one that the historian of modern Britain accepts at his peril.’ So wrote Max Beloff (1975, p. 227), who was of the belief that the inter-war period was ‘the one in which the Higher Civil Service in Britain probably reached the height of its corporate influence’ (p. 210). Administrative historians may well need all the encouragement that they can get, especially from such a distinguished source, in their often demanding pursuit of scholarly tasks, but surely few relatively modern interpretations of inter-war British politics fail to mention, for instance, Sir Maurice Hankey, Sir Warren Fisher, Sir Horace Wilson, Sir John Anderson, Thomas Jones and Sir Robert Vansittart. Even the erratic A. J. P. Taylor did so in his famous textbook, English History 1914–1945, written many years ago. One is spoilt for choice in writing about the giants of the inter-war Higher Civil Service, and in selecting Hankey, Fisher and Wilson for special attention one does so on the basis that they were at the top of the British machinery of central administration for either all or almost all of the inter-war years.

Parliament and ‘morality’: Thatcher, Powell and Populism

Populism has little or no place in British politics. Only two politicians have been seriously considered to be populists in recent times, and these are, of course, Enoch Powell and Margaret Thatcher. Though definitions of ‘populism’ vary, this article argues that, if one takes it as meaning ‘the belief that the majority opinion of the people is checked by an elitist minority’, neither Powell nor Mrs Thatcher were populists. In Powells case, he was an intellectual par excellence, and even an opponent of capital punishment. Mrs Thatchers support for the death penalty misled many into believing she was consistently a social authoritarian. The positions that both politicians took on the permissive society legislation of the 1960s illustrates their attitudes, and, though these matters were complex ones, the conclusion drawn here is that neither politician was remotely a threat to the dominance of the ‘liberal’ elite.

SOME WEAKNESSES IN THE FULTON REPORT ON THE BRITISH HOME CIVIL SERVICE1

change in its own right and only all of them together would add up to an absolute transformation of the old mode of production into that of ‘associated labour’. The 1848 programme, like Engels’ statement in 1885, looked to changes in the direction of socialism, which were to be based upon the division of forces within capitalist society. The assumption on which these programmes rested was that their realization would not injure the industrialists and therefore it was not impossible to interest the latter, in some form or another, in their achievement.

The Economic Liberal Crusades III: The Reconstruction of the Civil Service

‘The sheer professionalism of the British Civil Service, which allows Governments to come and go with a minimum of dislocation and a maximum of efficiency, is something other countries with different systems have every cause to envy.’ At least in writing those words, Mrs Thatcher1 spared her readers, and for that matter the officials themselves, the platitude that Britain had the best Civil Service in the world. In terms of career Civil Services, Britain had one of the two most impressive such Services in the world, the other being that of France, and, since the governance of ‘Europe’ tended to be conducted in accord with French administrative culture as well as that country’s interests, the British Higher Civil Service had an unenviable task in conducting the relevant negotiations. When it came to running Britain itself, as one of their number, Sir Roy Denman, recorded with regret, the days when, at least he believed, higher civil servants were ‘the real, albeit shadowy, rulers of the land’ did not survive Mrs Thatcher becoming Prime Minister. She undermined ‘the bowler hated barons of Whitehall who had discreetly run the country’s affairs’, with it supposedly being the case that though she was on good terms with a few civil servants, mostly those who became her acolytes … for the most part she despised them. Her heroes were those who earned huge salaries in the City; those who worked for the State were by definition second-raters … The Civil Service found itself openly and publicly despised by its political masters and told that the role of the most senior was that of courtier … The quality of their advice suffered. So did the quality of the Service.

The Unfinished Revolution

‘Mrs Margaret Thatcher is the first outsider to reach 10 Downing Street since Bonar Law’, Jock Bruce-Gardyne was later to observe admiringly: Several others — Ramsay MacDonald, Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan — may have started from the wrong side of the tracks. But long before they reached the pinnacle of the political system all of them had been welcomed to the Club. Not so Mrs Thatcher … No matter how long she remains at Downing Street, she will never be absorbed by the Establishment.1 It does seem true to say of twentieth-century British Prime Ministers, only the exotic Lloyd George, the short-lived Bonar Law, and Mrs Thatcher did not become creatures of the Establishment. By this was meant the established institutions of the British State and the social arrangements that surround them — the Monarchy and the various estates of the Realm, the Church of England, the learned professions, Oxford and Cambridge, the Public Schools, the Foreign Office, the Higher Civil Service generally, and, in former days, The Times newspaper. What Bruce-Gardyne’s analysis neglected was that there was another Establishment, the Establishment of ideas, what it would be reasonable to call the ‘liberal’ Establishment. These ideas had penetrated the social Establishment, and had seemed even to overwhelm a once serious institution like the BBC.

The Economic Liberal Crusades II: The Recasting of the Welfare State

‘It is a familiar truism to say that the Conservative Party has been in existence much longer than the Labour Party [but] it is a less familiar proposition that Conservative concern for and involvement in what we nowadays call welfare politics has been much more marked, and much more effective, than that of any rival party’, Mrs Thatcher wrote in 1977, adding: ‘Practically every measure of social amelioration passed through Parliament in the nineteenth century was passed by Conservatives … The greatest social reformer of the period was the Tory, Lord Shaftesbury … it was the Tories who… sought to mitigate the rigours and the consequences of the Industrial Revolution.’ Mrs Thatcher denounced ‘the uncaring dogmas of socialism’ and declared: ‘Once everything is provided and controlled by the State, the voice of the individual is silenced, the ability to choose eliminated … I believe that only the Conservative principles of thrift and industry will provide that stability of provision which alone can provide shelter for the vulnerable. And I believe that only a free society can hope to be a truly compassionate one.’1