John Kay has a telling of Labour's economic record that I think is wrong -- he thinks there was "good Blairism" that sought to increase public provision without centralising decision-making and "bad Brownism" that sought to increase public spending and central control.
He writes:
"When Labour came to power in 1997, dissatisfaction with publics ervices such as health, education and transport was widespread, and justified. For two decades not enough money had been spent, particularly on capital projects. This underspending had contributed to weak and demoralised management, reservations about which led to a fear that simply allocating more cash would provide poor value for money.
There were two possible directions of reform. One – it might be described as Blairite – decentralised management authority and financial responsibility. The other – it might be described as Brownian – tightened centralised control and imposed performance targets on managers, with associated sticks and carrots. Both approaches were pursued, inconsistently, but overall with more Brown than Blair. When, by 2000, there was little to show in the way of beneficial results, the decision was made to spend lots more anyway. There were some service improvements, but the concern that the extra money would not be well spent proved largely justified."
Actually, I think there is very little evidence of decentralising Blairism anywhere. This is probably most visible in the rapidly abandoned regionalisation agenda.
I think a better interpretation of how Labour fell into such centralising ways is that the Tories had changed the culture of public service delivery to a market model. Whitehall would become a buyer of services that autonomously run agencies would deliver. In a world of a shrinking state, it was difficult to tell whether the model was working or whether failure was due to budgets being cut.
When Labour wanted to increase public provision again, the only model that Whitehall knew was to be the "centralised buyer". When you're buying on that kind of scale, a target culture becomes endemic. Provision is reduced to the measurable. The ills of central planning resurface. Ultimately, the desire to increase public provision combined with the Thatcherite model of the public service as central buying pool is what makes for the database state. There is no evidence that Blair tried to resist this.
The solution has to come from re-humanising the scale of administration---whether corporate or governmental. The financial crisis has brought the Tories out in favour of breaking the banks up into units that are small enough to fail. But it is hard to see how the same principle should not apply to other corporations or indeed to most government functions. The HuffPo has a piece today arguing for a new activist anti-trust that keeps the size of organisations down, if only to reduce the political influence of corporations---a factor not taken into account by standard anti-trust legislation.
The basic loss of collective control at the heart of the credit crunch should lead us to a massive clean-up of all the organisations that are too big, too complex and too centralised. In the case of Whitehall, that means real decentralisation.
