In post-Thatcher Britain, Whitehall is a monument to decline

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7 hours ago

Why is Britain run so badly? Why is the UK economy, and many of its public services, on a seemingly inevitable downward course? Why do our leaders seem so unable to address the great geopolitical challenges to life and liberty, control immigration, or even just get a grip on the Civil Service machine? Where are the novel methods, people and skills that can reframe problems and build solutions coming from?
Fifty years ago, I was involved in the first great attempt – and, sadly, the last – to address such questions. The Stepping Stones project, triggered by Keith Joseph and Alfred Sherman at the Centre for Policy Studies, sought to analyse the UK economy as an ecosystem. It produced for Margaret Thatcher a series of joined-up, strategic interventions to resolve Britain's union problems and restore the government's authority, and our nation's economic performance.
Thatcher believed, like Louis Pasteur, that chance favours the prepared mind. It was not an accident that made her the UK's longest-serving prime minister. It was her well-prepared mind and its strategic courage.
In particular, Stepping Stones worked because it helped to train senior ministers and colleagues to act in unison; two years before they were elected – and afterwards, to gain not just office but 'office with power'. Its prime movers, including me and my co-author John Hoskyns, carried their strategic approach into 10 Downing Street with Thatcher.
Today, however, it is not just the unions that are the problem, but our entire system of government.
Inside Whitehall, rigid boundaries, silos, baronies, hatreds and dishonesty prevent timely preparation and progress. Individual and group inadequacies and rivalries limit freedoms to explore, study, accept and discover better ways. New prototypes are stifled before they can be born; while self-serving, problem-avoidant behaviours replace altruism and public service.
The resulting incoherence ensures that the deadly complacency of conventional governance groupthink dominates politics, and political parties. Even when Whitehall appoints internal 'red teams', to challenge its thinking, it is just groupthink at play: because red teams are selected from the existing people and culture, they will return to their box after their game is over.
The result is that policy formulators, task forces, project teams, nations or governing systems fail to achieve what their people need most to survive in our brutal global era. I have named it 'The Traumatics', as impermanence and vulnerabilities are innate risks that threaten human lives world-wide.
Imperfect bureaucrats and generalist amateurs imagine they are coping well. They avoid admitting their incompetence and unfitness for ruling. But citizens are not fooled, they know bad governance when they see it. Crucial strategic oversight is deliberately suffocated by wilful omissions in training, duty, intelligence and research.
In an ideal world, the regime change we need within government would be pioneered by a truly objective and radically reformed Civil Service; acting as a trail-blazing learning organisation, in the national interest.
Alas, a historic, inbred, meritocratic presumption of administrative excellence has resulted in a culture of untutored arrogance, limiting Whitehall's scope to become a knowledge-building and transforming institution. Polished complacency has been set in a concrete shell and preserved – as a national monument to decline.
This is not just a new complaint. In many ways, our greatest failure in the Thatcher era was to re-sculpt, or demolish, this great Victorian obelisk. John produced a famous 'wiring diagram', setting out the forces acting on the economy. Evaluating legacy governing ecosystems wasn't highlighted. So, in 1977, I did not envisage the need for an 'unwiring diagram' to diagnose and classify government's emergent existential flaws; geo-populism lit that fuse more recently.
So what should be done? Many have called for a Stepping Stones for our brutish era. If its new 'circuit diagram' establishes the eco-systemic causes of today's threats, then suitable policies can be prepared before crises happen.
A disjointed, piecemeal approach, is unlikely to identify and align the interlocking systems and innovations that could best enhance performance, stability and growth. Indeed, while good ideas can always improve current performance a smidgeon, tactics alone can never address or fix the defects in our existing governance, with its habitual positions, runaway egos, self-centred operating cultures and ongoing battles for power. Innovative working paradigms of system-wide strategic leadership, devised to improve citizens' lives and future security, are absent. Well-designed reforms, must upgrade or replace unsafe governing systems: but how?
Nasa's founding leader – the first among three equals – was James Webb, whose huge, eponymous, infrared telescope now orbits our planet. I learnt much from him in 1982, when he lectured on our first Oxford Strategic Leadership Programme. I designed and launched it for and with Douglas Hague. He was Margaret Thatcher's original economic adviser in opposition and consulted with the No 10 Policy Unit once she won office.
Under Webb, Nasa trail-blazed an open, original approach built around new blood, great minds, mixtures of various disciplines, competing teams and rocket science. The result was Nasa's environment of radical inventiveness which prepared them to address complex problems and find original solutions. Such tasks are best done well before seismic disruptions – like Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic and Trump's 'cards' – destroy the old world order.
Webb showed that high-level patronage and support are essential to provide the freedom and space to study, develop and alter legacy governing systems; and then plan for far-reaching change. Escaping existing conventions, rituals and cultures creates the chance for independent, outlier minds to provide the governance improvements we and the world lack.
Professional humility, collaboration and objectivity are all critical capabilities. Without these elements, any new team may turn out to be incapable of becoming the thinkers, talents, advisers, catalysts and leaders we need. And of course, any governing ecosystem must work before political parties can succeed.
But it is not just the Civil Service that needs reform. It would be wise, before the next election, for all candidates to have been taken through training syllabuses; custom-designed to reflect the complexities and challenges that they will face. Without such a 'regime change', it is hard to believe that any new leader or election manifesto will earn the chance of putting their party and nation back on track, with the expertise to govern well.
Yet voters must believe this next generation of leaders can succeed; or else their despair will only get worse.
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