Beyond the Westminster model: the Labour Party and the machinery of the British parliamentary state.
| Author | Diamond, Patrick |
| Position | Essay |
One sure symptom of an ill-conducted state is the propensity of the people to resort to theories.
Edmund Burke (1981, 274)
We always demand from our civil servants a loyalty to the State, and that they should serve the government of the day, whatever its particular colour. This undertaking is carried out with exemplary loyalty. Any departure from this system would mean the adoption of a spoils system, and that would destroy our Civil Service.
Clement Attlee (1948)
The serious inquest into Labour's 2010 defeat, among its worst since universal suffrage, has yet to gain momentum, leaving the impression of a party not yet willing to recognise the scale of its electoral plight. The intellectual frameworks that defined the orthodoxies of the last thirty years are unlikely to suffice. The old models of traditional and modernised social democracy cannot be dusted down and reconstructed anew given the changing realities of the post-crisis economy and the post-crisis state. Moreover, the challenge posed by an increasingly radical and audacious Coalition government means that Labour should not expect power to fall effortlessly into its lap four years from now. The party has to initiate a phase of profound rethinking rather than slipping by default into the politics of consolidation.
In the light of the 2008-9 financial crisis that swept across the world economy, it is inevitable that attention should focus on Labour's model of political economy. The architects of New Labour believed that the Faustian pact with the global financial markets would generate the surplus necessary to revive Britain's ailing public realm after two decades of neglect under the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. At the same time, embracing financial capitalism would rejuvenate the British economy, leading to higher growth, employment, productivity, and living standards. This proposition was at the core of New Labour's claim to reconcile economic efficiency with social justice in a climate irrevocably shaped by globalisation.
Not only has this strategy been severely compromised by the destruction of the neoliberal growth model, leading to a permanent loss of capacity and output across most industrialised economies. It meant that New Labour's governing strategy was ultimately too light-touch on markets and too heavy-handed in its use of the state. The government demanded a rate of return on its historic investment in public services which quickly descended into the indiscriminate imposition of audit, targets, micro-management and centralised control. Despite committing the largest sustained increase in public spending on health since the inception of the NHS in 1948, the culture of equity, service and citizenship that once prevailed in British national life seems to be further imperilled.
The purpose of this article is not to revisit that critique, but to focus on another aspect of Labour's strategy, namely the procedures and practices by which the party governed after 1997, enshrined in the Westminster model of parliamentary democracy. This argument rests on two particular claims. First, that New Labour in government lacked a theory of government, and that transformative governments usually have a theory of how to govern, namely a form of statecraft. And, second, that the Labour administration resorted by default to governing through the traditional Westminster model. That is, the Westminster model was the dominant tradition that shaped the views and behaviour of Labour in power (Richards, 2008). This produced many unintended consequences, imperilling its social democratic project for Britain.
The implications of this strategy are explored in the light of the party's changing relationship with the British political tradition. The impact on the Labour government's legacy after thirteen years in office is then assessed. The continuation of the Westminster model meant that the policy-making arena remained hermetically sealed within Whitehall, perpetuating traditional hierarchies and governing elites that cut across the development of a more social democratic culture. Wider bottom-up and participatory reform was rejected in favour of a governance strategy in which fifty years since the former Labour Minister Douglas Jay uttered the phrase, 'the gentleman in Whitehall' still knows best.
These arguments have to be considered against the backdrop of the weakness of democracy more generally, as the result of profound shifts in the structure of society which make the challenge of governing and political leadership far harder than in the past. Finally, the parameters of a new centre-left strategy, seeking to move decisively beyond the old Westminster model and shaped around a decentralised, citizen-centred form of governance, are briefly considered. Changing the form of the state and with it the nature of citizenship will make Labour's governing objectives more realisable in the future. It also has the potential to transform the context in which British politics is conducted and in which Labour governments are compelled to operate.
British government and the Westminster model
The key feature of the Westminster model is untrammelled executive dominance, which ensures that the central institutions of British government are the machinery at the disposal of the parliamentary majority. This guarantees that political power and authority remain heavily concentrated at the core of the state. Governing is seen as a process conducted by a closed elite constrained by their concern for the public good, and within the framework of a balanced and self-adjusting constitution (Richards, 2008). Executive dominance is justified in order to achieve strong and decisive government, a core feature of the flexible and adaptive British political tradition which has endured since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Its attendant features are cabinet government and parliamentary sovereignty, both of which are underpinned by civil service neutrality and collective ministerial responsibility.
This view of British government has been increasingly challenged by an emphasis on the fragmentation of traditional governmental authority. It is widely assumed that power has shifted towards a range of actors outside the central state, both horizontally towards private corporations and civil society, and vertically towards the European Union and international institutions. More importantly, devolution and constitutional reform have established new territorial power centres outside the British state, and lifted the veil of secrecy by establishing a mandate for freedom of information. This has called into question the descriptive capacity of the Westminster model as a reflection of empirical reality, justifying the conceptual shift from 'government' to 'governance' in which a range of institutions, networks and actors are implicated in the process of governing (Bevir and Rhodes, 2004).
Nonetheless, it is important to acknowledge that the role and structure of government in Britain has shown remarkable consistency, despite deep changes in British society in the course of the twentieth century, as well as the emergence of collectivism after 1945. Responsible and decisive government is the norm, while the institutions and processes of Whitehall and Westminster have altered remarkably little. Politicians of all the established parties have viewed themselves as the arbiter of the national interest, effectively marginalising any substantive move towards participatory, bottom-up reform of British government.
Under New Labour after 1997, executive dominance grew more pronounced than ever. The rhetoric of modernising the British state and its institutions concealed the underlying commitment of the Blair and Brown governments towards the top-down, hierarchical nature of British public administration and the British political tradition. This underlines the struggle between two types of political project at the heart of the Labour Party itself: on the one hand, the determination by elites to seize power and control over...
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