BRITAIN AGAINST ITSELF?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9299.1983.tb00497.x |
| Published date | 01 March 1983 |
| Date | 01 March 1983 |
EDITORIAL
BRITAIN
AGAINST
ITSELF?
~~~~
The reception given by reviewers and political commentators to Samuel Beer’s
Britaiti
against
itsdf
contained few references to the parts played by public
servants or to the procedures of public administration. They placed their emphasis
on his thesis that the electorate had been deprived of a choice between different
views of the commongood which party government was intended to provide. This
deprivation was thought to be the outcome of the ‘Butskellite consensus’
of
the
late
1950s.
The Conservative Party‘s acceptance of Welfare State expenditure
while Butler was Chancellor, and the Labour Party’s revisionism under Gaitskell’s
leadership, according
to
Professor Beer, led the parties to formulate their policies
principally by registering the demands
of
groups of consumers and producers.
They cannot restrain, order
or
direct these demands; they promise anything which
they think will bring them votes, however incompatible these promises are and
whatever the consequences for the country as a whole may be. Commentators
have been seduced by the appeal of this vision
of
built-in catastrophe. The broad
measure of agreement between the parties condemned them
to
sterility and
incoherence in managing the mechanisms
of
public choice. An explanation of
political change was neatly encapsulated in the character
of
the polity itself, like a
fruit carrying the seeds of its own destruction.
If
this vision
of
British politics is accepted, all comment is reduced to an
appreciation of the inexorable and long-drawn course of a natural tragedy. Beer’s
diagnosis has the attraction
of
Greek theatre. The consensus of the
1950s
is
a
fateful force from which all try unsuccessfully to escape. Each leader in turn comes
up to wrestle with the dragon of ’pluralistic stagnation’
-
Heath in 1970, Wilson in
1974,
Thatcher in 1979
-
and each falls back, defeated by the accumulated power
of
strategically placed consumer and producer groups. Beer‘s arguments spring
directly from his description in
Modern British
Polifics
of the collectivist polity.
Indeed, they depend to a large extent on his division
of
political history into
pre-collectivist, collectivist, and now post-collectivist phases. This approach
allows him to characterize alternative post-collectivist futures
-
Thatcher
is
a
neo-liberal, Benn
is
a neo-socialist and Jenkins is a neo-radical, each with a
strategy to escape from the paralysis which afflicts the system of public choice.
The dynamics
of
the tragedy are the contradictions inherent in the collectivist
polity which has no means of making effective choices unless governments can
mobilize consent among the consumer and producer groups involved.
Governments are at the mercy of those whose co-operation they require.
If
this approach is accepted, a great deal of the improvement in management
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