Book Review: Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon, A Government that Worked Better and Cost Less? Evaluating Three Decades of Reform and Change in UK Central Government
| Author | Andrew Connell |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929916666773 |
| Published date | 01 February 2017 |
| Date | 01 February 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Book ReviewsBritain and Ireland |
Book Reviews 143
When 29 Labour MPs were elected to
Parliament in 1906, the publisher George Allen
responded to a wave of public interest in the
new force in British politics by commissioning
a series of books on the ‘Labour Ideal’. From
Serfdom to Socialism was part of that series. In
it, Keir Hardie, Labour’s Parliamentary leader,
presented the basic principles of his socialism,
alongside more detailed discussions of specific
matters such as municipal socialism, the state,
the place of women and the relationship of
socialism to Christianity. Over a century later, it
remains an invigorating read; with great energy
and eloquent simplicity of language Hardie sets
out a vision of a socialism that is ethical rather
than economic (although he is uncompromising
in attacking the effects of the capitalist econom-
ics of his day), egalitarian, inclusive, and dedi-
cated to the full realisation of individual liberty
through social co-operation.
It seems strange then that this volume, pub-
lished to coincide with the centenary of
Hardie’s death in 2015, should be only the
third edition of what should surely be a better
known work. In his very comprehensive
Introduction to this edition, John Callow sug-
gests that the reason for this neglect lies in
the way that Hardie, after his death, was com-
memorated within the Party which he did so
much to found. Because Hardie was an attrac-
tive and foundational figure, all wings of the
Party could claim him as one of their own. But
the price of the near-universal appropriation of
Hardie’s memory was neutralisation and
patronage of the man. Hardie had little formal
education; his passion showed everywhere in
his writing and speaking; it was easy to honour
– and ultimately implicitly to dismiss – him as
a romantic prophet.
One of the aims of this new edition then is
to reclaim Hardie’s reputation as a thinker by
making these essays more widely available.
Does it succeed? Only in part. On the evidence
of this book, Hardie was in large part a roman-
tic prophet. He himself admitted that here
he was outlining the ends to be achieved;
the obstacles to achieving the ends could be
addressed once the ends had been accepted.
But Callow makes a convincing case for
Hardie’s visionary wisdom in shaping a Labour
Party that was deliberately theoretically amor-
phous in order to unite within it a diversity
of socialists of all classes and traditions. And
anyway, there is really nothing wrong with
being a prophet.
Andrew Connell
(Cardiff University)
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1478929916666771
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A Government that Worked Better and
Cost Less? Evaluating Three Decades
of Reform and Change in UK Central
Government by Christopher Hood and Ruth
Dixon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.
229pp., £30.00 (h/b), ISBN 9780199687022
Christopher Hood is credited with inventing the
term New Public Management (NPM), and over
a quarter of a century after he first used the term
in print, he and Ruth Dixon have published an
exhaustive analysis of what NPM, and the wider
‘managerial revolution’ of which it formed part,
actually delivered. Hood and Dixon focus their
attention on the UK, not only because they are
British academics but also because the UK was,
along with the USA and New Zealand, one of
the leading adopters of managerialism in public
services from the 1980s onwards. After intro-
ductory chapters on the public management
changes of the last 35 years, and on their meth-
odology, they address in detail two questions:
(1) Over the period in question, and/or in com-
parison with other sectors such as local govern-
ment which had not experienced managerialism
to the same degree, had British central govern-
ment administration worked better, in the sense
of being more consistent, fair and procedurally
sound? (2) Had it cost less, in the sense of
spending less on administration, salaries and
revenue collection? Their answer in both cases
is, briefly, no. On the whole, Hood and Dixon
argue, most government services cost about the
same or more, and work about the same or
worse, than they had done previously.
Of course the key question here is how
you measure cost and, more problematically,
quality of operation. Hood and Dixon draw
extensively on elite interviews and focus
groups with current and former officials and
derive quantitative data from a number of
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