ROBBIE
2004-04-05 21:21:46 UTC
The Sunday Times - Books
April 04, 2004
Cover book: Who Runs This Place? by Anthony Sampson
SIMON JENKINS
WHO RUNS THIS PLACE? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century
by Anthony Sampson
J Murray £29 pp416
Public life is driven, I am told, by a yearning for sex, money or power. Sex
can be found in the gossip columns and money in the Rich List. But where is
power? Where is this will-o'-the-wisp?
Forty years ago, Anthony Sampson went in search of it in The Anatomy of
Britain. He offered a left-wing Who's Who of the Establishment, a
toffee-nosed club of civil servants, bankers and bishops, of patronage,
secrecy and mutual back-scratching. Britain was "run by men I've never heard
of". Tut, tut, said Sampson. This will not do in the 20th century. The book
was a roaring success.
Now Rip Van Winkle has returned to his old haunts, blinking with amazement.
Good God, he cries, it is so different, yet so much the same. The buildings
are cleaner. People use Christian names and most of them are stinking rich.
But his old friend, the Oxbridge network, is alive and well, as is his old
bugbear, official secrecy. Four decades have not dented the paradox that
"the most respected British institutions are those most impervious to
democratic principles": the monarchy, the army, the judges and the BBC.
So after half a century who is up and who down? The answer is not entirely
surprising. Gone is the Church of England, London's clubland and Eton
College. Gone are the great nationalised corporations and their attendant
trade unions, killed by Thatcherism. Parliament, too, has been eclipsed,
along with the cabinet, the Foreign Office, political parties, the lord
chancellor and the universities. The MCC is down, the intelligence services
are up.
The winner overall is the prime minister, in a "duarchy" with the chancellor
of the exchequer. The steady concentration of power in Downing Street is
Sampson's leitmotif. "People have to know," said Tony Blair on taking
office, "that we will run from the centre and govern from the centre". He
was as good as his word. Power has been sucked upwards from local government
and other state institutions by means of targets, inspectors and regulators.
League tables are the gods of public administration. The days when a civil
servant could describe his job as "to speak truth to power" are over. What
matters is "Can he grovel?"
The Treasury may have transformed itself from a dingy-tiled office block
into an open-plan atrium run by a man called Gus. But just as the old
Treasury was run by classicists masquerading as managers, now it is run by
economists masquerading likewise. Sampson is too kind to the outcome, this
mighty department's astonishing ineptitude in handling anything it touches,
the British Library, Railtrack, the London Tube, child support, legal aid,
hospital privatisation, the Whitehall IT shambles. Nor does it answer for
its mistakes. As one official says, the Treasury takes the power, we take
the blame.
Behind this lies a deeper and perhaps related change detected by Sampson.
This is "the new respect shown to money". Taxation has plummeted since the
1960s. Britain has become an essentially mercantilist nation, perhaps more
than ever since the Victorians. Officials and ministers move freely between
government and "parastatal" banks and utility corporations, fat on fees and
privatisation proceeds. This world is typified by a Treasury official, Sir
Steve Robson, privatiser of the railway and other industries, who, according
to Sampson, trotted off to a private sector rich on his patronage, declaring
that "the public-sector ethos is a bit of a fantasy".
Britain's elite used to be held together by an esprit de corps, a
freemasonry of shared backgrounds and a belief that public service was not a
pork barrel. Today's rulers are, to Sampson, quite different. They are "held
together by their desire for personal enrichment, their acceptance of
capitalism and the need for the profit-motive". This change transcends
politics and party. It is reflected in the divergence between top salaries
and average earnings. It shows in the wealth of the parasite sector, of
lawyers, accountants, bankers and consultants. There are six times more
barristers today than in 1964. Homes in London's stockbroker belt are six
times more expensive.
I do not accept all of Sampson's analysis. He devotes too much space to
money, which does not confer any more political power today than it did in
the 1960s. The banking and corporate sector may be richer, but it is not
thereby more potent. Indeed, wealth is probably more constrained by the
market place. As Dr Johnson remarked, a man is seldom so innocently employed
as in getting money. It keeps him busy.
On the other side of the account, I cannot see how even the dyed-in-the-wool
metropolitan can omit from a book about the running of Britain all mention
of the 70% of administration that is local government and another sizeable
chunk that is Brussels. Sampson's research is sorely limited. Not a page is
devoted to the shift of power over citizens' lives from cities and counties
to regional offices of central government. It is as bizarre to ignore these
new bastions of control as it is to ignore the devolved assemblies.
A fascination with the recent antics of the Blair government risks
distorting Sampson's story. The high status he gives to the military is due
largely to Blair's foreign interventionism, while the demise of parliament
is in part due to the size of Labour's majority. Sampson rightly emphasises
the advance of the media. He notes that, against all prediction, television
has lost power to the press. But his bias can be hilarious. He seems to
think that The Guardian has editorial "independence" when its editor would
be out on his ear if he advocated a Tory government. As for spin, Alastair
Campbell did not impose the fixations of government on a compliant press. He
did something far more dangerous. He imposed the fixations of the press on a
compliant government.
Yet Sampson's core message is correct. Britain stands alone in Europe in
spending the past half century concentrating virtually all political power
on its chief executive. Unrestrained by a written constitution and
contemptuous of "precedent", the British state has lost all pluralism. Civic
pride has been destroyed. The professions are sated with public money:
Ulster's Saville tribunal may end up costing £250m. "Dependent and
demoralised" universities are starved into submission. Only the press
remains an estate of the realm firmly sceptical of central government, which
pays it the compliment of rank paranoia.
This explains Sampson's paradox, that public trust has moved towards any
institution that is perceived as not in Blair's pocket. After Hutton,
Downing Street was shocked to find that most people still believed the BBC.
They also preferred a traditionalist monarch, a regimental army, unobtrusive
law lords and even their local council. The public will put its faith in
anyone or anything that is removed from the control freaks of Downing
Street.
Rulers who regard democracy as "one person one vote every five years" will
find the public notices and withholds its trust. Sampson,too, has noticed.
He has stood back from the trees and given us a snapshot view of the wood.
He is right to find it rotten.
April 04, 2004
Cover book: Who Runs This Place? by Anthony Sampson
SIMON JENKINS
WHO RUNS THIS PLACE? The Anatomy of Britain in the 21st Century
by Anthony Sampson
J Murray £29 pp416
Public life is driven, I am told, by a yearning for sex, money or power. Sex
can be found in the gossip columns and money in the Rich List. But where is
power? Where is this will-o'-the-wisp?
Forty years ago, Anthony Sampson went in search of it in The Anatomy of
Britain. He offered a left-wing Who's Who of the Establishment, a
toffee-nosed club of civil servants, bankers and bishops, of patronage,
secrecy and mutual back-scratching. Britain was "run by men I've never heard
of". Tut, tut, said Sampson. This will not do in the 20th century. The book
was a roaring success.
Now Rip Van Winkle has returned to his old haunts, blinking with amazement.
Good God, he cries, it is so different, yet so much the same. The buildings
are cleaner. People use Christian names and most of them are stinking rich.
But his old friend, the Oxbridge network, is alive and well, as is his old
bugbear, official secrecy. Four decades have not dented the paradox that
"the most respected British institutions are those most impervious to
democratic principles": the monarchy, the army, the judges and the BBC.
So after half a century who is up and who down? The answer is not entirely
surprising. Gone is the Church of England, London's clubland and Eton
College. Gone are the great nationalised corporations and their attendant
trade unions, killed by Thatcherism. Parliament, too, has been eclipsed,
along with the cabinet, the Foreign Office, political parties, the lord
chancellor and the universities. The MCC is down, the intelligence services
are up.
The winner overall is the prime minister, in a "duarchy" with the chancellor
of the exchequer. The steady concentration of power in Downing Street is
Sampson's leitmotif. "People have to know," said Tony Blair on taking
office, "that we will run from the centre and govern from the centre". He
was as good as his word. Power has been sucked upwards from local government
and other state institutions by means of targets, inspectors and regulators.
League tables are the gods of public administration. The days when a civil
servant could describe his job as "to speak truth to power" are over. What
matters is "Can he grovel?"
The Treasury may have transformed itself from a dingy-tiled office block
into an open-plan atrium run by a man called Gus. But just as the old
Treasury was run by classicists masquerading as managers, now it is run by
economists masquerading likewise. Sampson is too kind to the outcome, this
mighty department's astonishing ineptitude in handling anything it touches,
the British Library, Railtrack, the London Tube, child support, legal aid,
hospital privatisation, the Whitehall IT shambles. Nor does it answer for
its mistakes. As one official says, the Treasury takes the power, we take
the blame.
Behind this lies a deeper and perhaps related change detected by Sampson.
This is "the new respect shown to money". Taxation has plummeted since the
1960s. Britain has become an essentially mercantilist nation, perhaps more
than ever since the Victorians. Officials and ministers move freely between
government and "parastatal" banks and utility corporations, fat on fees and
privatisation proceeds. This world is typified by a Treasury official, Sir
Steve Robson, privatiser of the railway and other industries, who, according
to Sampson, trotted off to a private sector rich on his patronage, declaring
that "the public-sector ethos is a bit of a fantasy".
Britain's elite used to be held together by an esprit de corps, a
freemasonry of shared backgrounds and a belief that public service was not a
pork barrel. Today's rulers are, to Sampson, quite different. They are "held
together by their desire for personal enrichment, their acceptance of
capitalism and the need for the profit-motive". This change transcends
politics and party. It is reflected in the divergence between top salaries
and average earnings. It shows in the wealth of the parasite sector, of
lawyers, accountants, bankers and consultants. There are six times more
barristers today than in 1964. Homes in London's stockbroker belt are six
times more expensive.
I do not accept all of Sampson's analysis. He devotes too much space to
money, which does not confer any more political power today than it did in
the 1960s. The banking and corporate sector may be richer, but it is not
thereby more potent. Indeed, wealth is probably more constrained by the
market place. As Dr Johnson remarked, a man is seldom so innocently employed
as in getting money. It keeps him busy.
On the other side of the account, I cannot see how even the dyed-in-the-wool
metropolitan can omit from a book about the running of Britain all mention
of the 70% of administration that is local government and another sizeable
chunk that is Brussels. Sampson's research is sorely limited. Not a page is
devoted to the shift of power over citizens' lives from cities and counties
to regional offices of central government. It is as bizarre to ignore these
new bastions of control as it is to ignore the devolved assemblies.
A fascination with the recent antics of the Blair government risks
distorting Sampson's story. The high status he gives to the military is due
largely to Blair's foreign interventionism, while the demise of parliament
is in part due to the size of Labour's majority. Sampson rightly emphasises
the advance of the media. He notes that, against all prediction, television
has lost power to the press. But his bias can be hilarious. He seems to
think that The Guardian has editorial "independence" when its editor would
be out on his ear if he advocated a Tory government. As for spin, Alastair
Campbell did not impose the fixations of government on a compliant press. He
did something far more dangerous. He imposed the fixations of the press on a
compliant government.
Yet Sampson's core message is correct. Britain stands alone in Europe in
spending the past half century concentrating virtually all political power
on its chief executive. Unrestrained by a written constitution and
contemptuous of "precedent", the British state has lost all pluralism. Civic
pride has been destroyed. The professions are sated with public money:
Ulster's Saville tribunal may end up costing £250m. "Dependent and
demoralised" universities are starved into submission. Only the press
remains an estate of the realm firmly sceptical of central government, which
pays it the compliment of rank paranoia.
This explains Sampson's paradox, that public trust has moved towards any
institution that is perceived as not in Blair's pocket. After Hutton,
Downing Street was shocked to find that most people still believed the BBC.
They also preferred a traditionalist monarch, a regimental army, unobtrusive
law lords and even their local council. The public will put its faith in
anyone or anything that is removed from the control freaks of Downing
Street.
Rulers who regard democracy as "one person one vote every five years" will
find the public notices and withholds its trust. Sampson,too, has noticed.
He has stood back from the trees and given us a snapshot view of the wood.
He is right to find it rotten.