With Tony Blair’s departure from Downing Street there’ll be much talk of restoring ‘good government,’ an end to the centralisation of power, politicisation of the civil service and ‘spin’. Rachel Sylvester has a great scoop in today’s Telegraph about how the establishment is pushing for this through something called the “Better Government Initiative.”
It is hard to dismiss a commission made up of five former permanent secretaries, two chiefs of the defence staff (ret.), Oxford academics and the like but this belief that the civil service is the answer to the government’s delivery problems seems wrong-headed. If you look at the Blairite reforms that have worked—say, city academies—they have been driven from the centre often against huge resistance.
It is not surprising that the establishment, a term first coined incidentally in The Spectator by Henry Fairlie in 1955, should want Blair’s experiment with ‘West Wing governance’ ended. But now that politics is so much about ‘delivery’ it is hard to see how you can depoliticise it.
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