The Starmerite governing strategy; paralysis by analysis

+ paywalled postscript; Beating back the Blob.

This article was originally written for UnHerd in late December. All articles published elsewhere are published free here; but for paywalled articles & postscripts, subscribe below.

What is the Starmerite governing strategy? It appears to be not to govern at all, if possible; reports yesterday revealed that Labour have established a new quango every week since coming to power. This comes hot on the heels of the news that the Government has initiated 67 reviews and consultations, sparking accusations that Sir Keir’s administration risks falling into "paralysis by analysis."

Starmer’s approach is hardly original. In fact, it’s standard New Labour governing strategy; what Peter Burnham called ‘the politics of depoliticisation’. He described it as ‘the process of placing at one remove the political character of decision-making’, allowing Ministers to ‘retain arm’s-length control over crucial economic and social processes whilst simultaneously benefiting from the distancing effects of depoliticisation’. The use of Quangos helped Labour rebuild a reputation for competence by rallying behind ‘evidence-based policy making’, whilst at the same time offering Ministers plausible deniability if policies were received badly.

To paraphrase Reagan, “The Quangocracy is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth.” Since Blair, there have been numerous attempts to roll back the frontiers of the Quangocracy; David Cameron’s promised ‘bonfire of the quangos’ never really sparked, the investigation making a paltry 32 recommendations to abolish both body and function.

This ‘trim and singe’ rather than ‘slash and burn’ approach saw quangos spring back like cut roses. The cost of arms-length bodies tripled in the decade following the 2010 review, and both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss sought to tackle them; as the costs rose to £220 billion, Johnson ordered Jacob Rees-Mogg to lead a cost-cutting overhaul.

The failure to challenge the New Labour governing strategy was the worm boring at the heart of the last 14 years of Conservative government. Quangos became a vital element of the Blob, and were weaponised against them; Starmer intends to empower them even further. If they are to be broken, they must be understood.

As argued by Peter Mair in ‘Ruling the Void’, the emergence of the Quangocracy is the result of the decline in party democracy. Parties played a key constitutional function, providing a link between ruled and rulers by integrating and mobilising the public, articulating and aggregating interests, then translating these into public policy - whilst recruiting and promoting political leaders in the process. But as elites distanced themselves from the governed, they sought to redefine democracy as a system centered on institutional accountability, process, and the rule of law, downplaying the role of popular sovereignty and direct public participation.

Into this void stepped ‘experts’, allegedly impartial technocratic specialists operating within ostensibly accountable state or semi-state institutions. This deliberately created a ‘protected sphere in which policy-making can evade the constraints imposed by representative democracy.’ This was accompanied by a gradual shift of power, money and authority away from democratic control.

Starmer is the perfect foil for the Blob, an institutionalist who governs by the default impulses of the institutions - which seek ever-greater insulation from the demands of the electorate. Whilst Starmerism at first appears as grey and ineffectual managerialism, it is, in fact, an attempt to reduce politics to a process which can then be controlled or managed, rather than allowing it to exist in a state of nature as something which — deriving authority from the people — is as alive, unpredictable and demanding as they are.

When the right takes power back, it is vital that we roll back not only Starmer’s expansion, but that we untie the cords of the Blairite yoke at the same time. Otherwise, next time we are in government, we will make the same mistake as Cameron, consigning ourselves to see yet more power and authority slip away out of democratic control.

Postscript: Beating back the Blob

The New Labour political settlement begins with Margaret Thatcher and her ‘agencification’ of government. Her privatisations and economic reforms occupy the foremost space in our minds, but she also instituted what civil servants at the time described as ‘Perestroika in the civil service‘ – a radical change to the political settlement and how government operated in order to drive through her vision.

Driven by her Methodist valorisation of self-sufficiency, deep mistrust of the state and by the neoliberal desire to ‘keep politics insulated from the emotional demands of the uneducated masses’, Thatcher wanted a more business-like government, pivoting the role of Ministers and the Civil Service away from policymaking and towards management. Derek Rayner, head of her Efficiency Unit, wrote to Thatcher in March 1980, arguing that one of the key aims of civil service reform should be;

To alter the culture of Whitehall so as: - to drive home the fact that managing activities efficiently is of equal merit to thinking through policies and analyzing issues

However, Thatcher found this an almost impossible task, with Civil Servants and Ministers acting in concert as a block to her delivering her vision of government. In order to deliver it, this temporary alliance had to be broken up. The answer was ‘agencification’, laid out in an Efficiency Unit report called Next Steps;

The main recommendation of Next Steps was that large government departments should be disaggregated and split into agencies—agencification. Agency heads, now called “Chief Executives,” were to be put wholly in charge of how their agencies would operate within a policy and resources framework set by a department… Significantly, Ministers could have no say in the way agencies operate, nor interpret policy, in effect reducing the role of Ministers to “target setters.” Thatcher's main obstacle to “reform,” the bloc formed by Ministers and their civil servants, would be demolished.

This meant an overthrow of the ‘Westminster Model’, the previous political settlement, in which a ‘neutral’ civil servants had a key role in policymaking, but Ministers had operational control over their departments, meaning they were responsible for - and could directly intervene in - day-to-day departmental workings. This is the model we see in ‘Yes Minister’; Sir Humphrey presents Hacker with a policy fait accompli, and, on occasion, Hacker is able to meddle in departmental affairs enough to come up with a workaround - but they are both focussed on in-house affairs.