Citizens and Hoop-jumpers
As a Brixton man who had known unemployment, and as a sensitive man quick to feel slights, Major was well prepared by upbringing and temperament to take on the arrogant and inefficient quality of much so-called public service. In his early years he himself had been the plaintive figure who found ‘telephones answered grudgingly or not at all. Booths closed while customers were kept waiting…Remote council offices where, after a long bus journey, there was no one available to see you who really knew about the issue…Anonymous voices and faces who refused to give you a contact name.’ He was making a good point. Why in a country that spent so much on public services were so many of them so bad? The answer of the Thatcher revolution was that in the end only the market is properly responsive. Yet nobody in power during the eighties or nineties, including Margaret Thatcher, was prepared to take this logic to its limit and privatize the health service or schools or road system, compensating the worse off with vouchers or cash help. Nor, under the iron grip of the Treasury, was there any enthusiasm for a revival of local democracy to take charge instead.
This left a fiddly and highly bureaucratic centralism as the only option left, one which we have seen gather momentum in the Thatcher years and which would flourish most extravagantly under Blair. Under Major, the centralized Funding Agency for Schools was formed and schools in England and Wales were ranked by crude league tables, depending on how well their pupils did in exams. The university system was vastly expanded by simply allowing colleges and polytechnics to rename themselves as universities, and a futile search began for ways in which civil servants might measure academic merit and introduce league tables there. The hospital system was further centralized and given a host of new targets. The police, faced with a review of their pay and demands by the Home Secretary, Kenneth Clarke, for forces to be amalgamated, were given their own performance league tables. The Tories had spent 74 per cent more, in real terms, on law and order since 1979 yet crime was at an all-time high, as a doleful list of high-profile murders reminded the public. Clarke’s contempt for many of the police as ‘vested interests’ was not calculated to win them round to reform. Across England and Wales elected councillors were turfed off police boards and replaced by businessmen. Clarke’s hostility to local control had been confirmed by his time as Health Secretary when, according to one department insider, he showed himself as ‘a leading exponent of the Stalinist side of the Tory party. He castrated the regional health authority chairmen.’
In 1993 Clarke defended his new police league tables in language that was eerily echoed by New Labour later: ‘The new accountability that we seek from our public services will not be achieved simply because men of good will and reasonableness wish that it to be so. The new accountability is the new radicalism.’ Accountability: once the word had implied a contest of ideas and achievements, played out in front of the voters. Now it meant something very different. Across the country, from the auditing of local government to the running of courts or the working hours of nurses, an army of civil servants, accountants, auditors and number-crunchers marched in. Once, long ago in the 1940s, Labour had been mocked for saying that the man in Whitehall knew best. Now the auditors and accountants hired by Whitehall ruled instead. Weakly, from time to time, ministers would claim that the cult of central control and measurement had been imposed by Brussels. Some had been, but this was mostly a homegrown ‘superstate’.
Major called his headline policy the Citizen’s Charter, though he himself did not like the name very much because of its ‘unconscious echoes of Revolutionary France’. Every part of government dealing with public service was ordered to come up with proposals for improvement at grass-roots level, to be pursued from the centre by inspections, questionnaires, league tables and ultimately the system of awards, Charter Marks, for organizations that did well. Throughout, Major spoke of ‘empowering’ teachers and doctors, ‘helping the customer’ and ‘devolving’. He thought his great system of regulation from the centre would not last long: it was ‘a regulatory goad to raise standards…over time, I anticipated formal regulation steadily withering away, as the effects of growing competition are felt.’ But how would this happen? In practice, the regulators grew more powerful, not less so. If people are paid to respond to regulators’ targets and jump through hoops, they become excellent at target-practice and hoop-jumping. This does not make them wise administrators. Despite the rhetoric, public servants were not being given real freedom to manage. Elected office-holders were being sacked. Major’s hopes for central regulation withering away echo Lenin, who hoped for a ‘withering away’ of the Soviet State, with similar success.