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CHAPTER THREE

Public Servants

IN THE 1790S the established system of government in Britain came under sustained pressure. The revolutions in America and France had undermined many of the assumptions supporting monarchy and aristocracy. As Philip Harling points out, both the pressures of war and the re-emergence of religion as a force for reform play an important role in convincing political elites of the need to take into account the demands of an informed and sensible public. Pitt and later Prime Ministers recognized the need to make the administration of state business ‘more accountable to an emerging public ideology shaped in part by Evangelical morality’.1

After the American War of Independence and in the midst of a debt crisis, the British government set up a commission to consider reforms to the system of financial administration. The commissioners invoked what they called the ‘principle of public economy’ and recommended a number of changes to the way civil servants were paid and government offices were organized. The commissioners argued that ‘all positions in Government, including Parliament and the bureaucracy, were public trusts to be discharged for the benefit of the public, not to satisfy rights inherited or acquired by their incumbents’.2 This reform of public appointments – the decision to see them as public, rather than as private, possessions – marks an important expansion of impersonal government.

Yet while the truth discovered by a public of private individuals occasionally lent weight to calls for legislative change, as in the campaign to abolish the slave trade, for the most part the aristocracy remained free to shape the content of state policy. Even after the expansion of the electorate in 1832, Palmerston, Gladstone and Disraeli in their different ways found the public opinion that they needed in the country through skilful electioneering, but they did so within the confines of an elite consensus. Certainly the state changed in the face of pressure from an engaged public but the partial reform of government fortified the elites by allowing them to re-imagine themselves as indispensable servants of the people. The move away from aristocratic justifications and towards arguments based on efficiency and expert knowledge in some senses provided a rationale for continued aristocratic control. Public service was useful to those who resisted democracy. As legitimacy ceased to be conferred by the Crown or secured by the excellence of an aristocratic character it came instead to depend on particular properties of mind.

And so in an expanded franchise the aristocratic cliques that controlled the eighteenth-century Parliament, the Whigs and the Tories, reinvented themselves with little difficulty as national parties, rechristened Liberals and Conservatives. They became fluent in the language of public service and public trust and less likely openly to insist on aristocratic privilege to justify their position. Nevertheless the initiative remained with mostly aristocratic operators who reserved the right to determine the public interest. The voters ratified and legitimated decisions taken elsewhere. Politicians sought their support and approval for their platforms but the voters’ role was to choose between those platforms, not to develop and promote their own. I am not sure that one voter in a hundred in the expanded electorate of the 1830s registered the significance of the opium trade both to state revenues and to the country’s balance of trade. It can, however, hardly have escaped the attention of the elite, with its close ties to the East India Company and the trading interests of the City.

While those controlling the state emphasized its public character, the doctrine of laissez-faire in early Victorian Britain left the economy in private hands. Property owners insisted on their right to negotiate with their workforce as one individual to another and saw government regulation as an unacceptable interference in the sacred rights of contract. But by the mid-nineteenth century industrialization had expanded this private economy and the working population in the towns and cities of the industrial north and the midlands exploded. London itself grew in size from perhaps around one million in 1800 to more than six million a century later. As Hannah Arendt points out, the production of goods, which had been largely confined to the household, now took place on a massively larger scale in the quasi-public context of the factory and the mine.3

The complexities of urban and industrial civilization, the expansion of private industry beyond the private household, not to mention the moral enormities of unrestrained capitalism, forced the state to interfere in what had previously been considered private matters. As early as the 1830s the government had prohibited the use of children under the age of eight in the textile industry. The state did not only restrain private industry. The incapacitation of Parliament by the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858, not to mention a series of cholera epidemics, vividly demonstrated the limits of private planning. After all, epidemics that began in the slums, as Geoffrey Barraclough notes, had a habit of ‘spreading and slaughtering tens of thousands without respect for ranks or person’.4 The notion of ‘public health’ emerged as a matter of political concern in the mid-nineteenth century as the state used tax revenues on an unprecedented scale to improve the water supply.

In the second half of the nineteenth century another round of reform took place. Entrance to the civil service became conditional on success in a competitive examination in 1870 and the buying and selling of commissions in the army was abolished in 1871. Indeed, in the 1870s the relationship between the public and the private changed decisively. For the first time the 1871 trade union act legalized trade unions and a few years later picketing became legal and workers’ organizations were given a public status for the first time. Rather than being treated as illegal conspirators, trade unionists were now recognized as the legitimate representatives of legitimate interests. There was also a wider pattern of interference in the private economy in the form of increased regulation and a greater willingness to use tax revenue to promote social goods, especially education.

In part, perhaps, the state moved into areas seen previously as matters for private philanthropy and the market in order to satisfy the promptings of humanitarian concern – what William Gladstone in 1887 called ‘a gentler time’ in which the ‘public conscience’ had ‘grown more tender’.5 In part it did so because industrialized and urbanized society was too complex to function without an interventionist state. But the state also abandoned laissez-faire and the division between the public and the private it implied in order to address the twin challenges of domestic unrest and the German Empire. Education provides a prime example. The reformer Sir James Kay Shuttleworth justified the establishment of state-funded school on the grounds that ‘property would be more secure, indigence more rare, and the whole people more provident and contented if they were better educated’.6 When Gladstone drew up plans for a national system of education it was to the Prussian model that he turned. Indeed Britain’s politics of administrative and social reform after 1870 derive from the recognition that a united Germany had emerged as a serious rival to the Empire abroad and that organized labour posed a threat to the structure of society at home.

Where the claims of private property had once dovetailed neatly with the needs of state power the state now moved to intervene in the economy and in society on a much larger scale. It placed increasing emphasis on accountability, selection on merit and incorrupt administration and it justified its growing activism by insisting on its disinterested commitment to the common good. In the famous Northcote-Trevelyan report on civil service reform the authors claimed that:

The great and increasing burden of public business . . . could not be carried on without an efficient body of permanent officers, occupying a post duly subordinate to that of Ministers . . . yet possessing sufficient independence, character, ability and experience to be able to advise, assist and, to some extent, to influence those who are from time to time set above them.7

The decision to move gradually towards universal male suffrage should be seen in the light of this increased state activism. As Benjamin Ginsberg notes, ‘electoral mobilization was closely linked to changes in the capacity of governments to extract revenues from their subjects’.8 An expanding state needed more money from more of its citizens. Giving them the vote made the state seem more a vehicle for serving the public interest, less an instrument for entrenching the interests of a narrow elite.

The notion of the public interest develops in Britain in ways that move away from classical liberal ideas; the operations of the private economy can no longer be left to deliver public goods. Instead the state must intervene in order to maintain the country’s stability and its global pre-eminence. It does so in the name of principles of both social justice and strategic necessity. This is not to claim that those who pursued reform all did so as conscious agents of imperial greatness, although both Joseph Chamberlain and Charles Dilke show how hostility to laissez-faire could exist alongside a close identification with Britain’s global Empire. But it became necessary to accommodate long-standing demands for reform against a background of steadily rising international tension. Where Locke had previously sidestepped the state in his justification of conquest in America and relied instead on the improving powers of private property, those who controlled the state asserted their right to intervene in the economy to maintain their position in the global system.

The decision to interfere in the relationship between capital and labour, to increase the state’s role in education, and to expand the franchise all derive from attempts by the elite to reshape British society in the face of external competition and the threat of internal disorder. The revival of Platonism as a governing ethos in Oxford and Cambridge ties the intellectual elite to a more highly professionalized state administration; the notion of public service expounded in the newly founded Victorian public schools binds the expanding middle class to the imperial project; the legal status granted trade unions undermines working-class radicalism by recasting the state as an institution capable of balancing competing interests. The success of public service as a device for promoting national unity can be seen in the enthusiastic response of much of the population, including much of the urban working class, to the outbreak of both the Boer War and the First World War.

The scope of state activity continues to expand into the twentieth century. After the Second World War the British state establishes a national system of healthcare and nationalizes a number of industries. In the long post-war boom it appeared that the relationship between state power, capital and labour had been settled permanently. The idea of the ‘public domain’, which extended beyond the state to include the organizations of civil society, contributed to the sense that a rational and stable balance of interests had been achieved. This ideal of disinterested service to the greater good achieved a kind of apotheosis in the 1940s when the widespread acceptance of Keynesian economics combined with Keynes’s own ‘most characteristic belief: that public affairs should and could be managed by an elite of clever and disinterested public servants’.9 In the 1950s the Labour politician and intellectual Anthony Crosland was still convinced that capitalism had been transformed by the public service values of the managers of large companies.10

Keynes, and the administrative elite of which he was part, owed a good deal to the Platonism of the late nineteenth century. The self-interested owners and the narrow-minded workers could not be expected to take the broader and more generous view of the common good. A caste of guardians was indispensable if the precarious achievements of civilization were to be preserved. According to Edward Bridges this caste needed ‘much the same qualities as are called for in the academic world, namely the capacity and determination to study difficult subjects intensively and objectively, with the same disinterested desire to find the truth at all costs’.11 In Bridges’ account the modern state comes to resemble a space safe for public reasoning in Kant’s sense of the word.

The ethos of public service has inspired a good deal of nostalgia in recent years and has re-emerged as a model for liberal critics of neoliberalism. For example, at the 2009 Reith Lectures the British politician Shirley Williams argued that the British and the Prussians had underpinned their societies by producing ‘the modern concept of public service’. She went on to ask Michael Sandel if he thought that there was ‘any chance of creating what one might call the underpinning of democratic societies without having the sense of public service revived’.12 In the United States too, the notion that disinterested public servants should have a greater role in determining state policy has revived somewhat. Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz have both called for increased regulation of the economy in the public interest. Public-spirited administrators, long seen by neoliberals as the harbingers of totalitarianism, are back in fashion.

One should, however, be wary. The idea of public service excluded most of the population from an effectively public status just as effectively as had property qualifications and the mystifications of good breeding. The concerns of citizens might be legitimate, but they themselves lacked the moral imagination and intellectual discrimination needed to strike a balance between competing claims and incommensurable goods. As the franchise expanded and the prospect of universal suffrage loomed, liberals had begun to worry about the levelling effects of majority rule. Fears about the tyrannical impulses of the majority combined with the notion of public service to justify continued control by a social and intellectual elite. Only this classically educated caste could be trusted to reason disinterestedly and so discover the public interest by balancing different group interests. The individual outside the elite was assumed to be self-interested and narrow minded. He, and later she, registered as constitutive units of an idealized social force or as voices in the choir of a similarly idealized ‘public opinion’. Public service as a doctrine very successfully frustrated the emergence of a meaningfully sovereign public.

Broadcasting provides a good example of how a public service ethos can shape and limit the ways in which the general population engages with the political process. Much is sometimes made of the advantages of public service broadcasting over market-driven models. And certainly it seems preferable to treat information as a public good to which all citizens have broadly equal access, rather than as a private commodity where the ability to pay secures cumulative advantages for the wealthy. But treating information as a public good does not ensure that individuals will receive the information and analysis that they need for active citizenship and self-government.

From the 1920s onwards in Britain the public servants at the BBC sought earnestly to inform and to entertain a national audience. An assumption of cultural, intellectual and social superiority gave the managers of this system the confidence necessary to determine what counted as knowledge deserving of publicity. It further emboldened them to decide on the structure of legitimate controversy without serious or sustained attention to the views of the general population or even the facts of the matter. In political debates, public service broadcasters saw their role as that of representing views found in Parliament. In the words of Stuart Hood, impartiality was understood as ‘the acceptance of that segment of opinion which constitutes parliamentary consensus’.13 In such circumstances balance and impartiality reliably favoured those who had secured some degree of power already. In a society where wealth and power are distributed very unevenly the doctrine of balance will tend to favour those already favoured while making this bias seem both natural and just. Necessarily, too, balance will marginalize information that would strengthen calls for changes to the structure of power. So, for example, Sweden’s social democratic response to the economic crisis of the 1930s might as well have happened on the moon, as far as the BBC’s editors at the time were concerned.

Though shaken by the spread of market forces through the broadcasting system, the BBC’s managers remain convinced that they can discern what the population needs to know and that they can frame political and economic controversies in a balanced and fair way. The notion of public service helps them to see themselves as high-minded professionals. Their right to decide what receives publicity derives from their technical accomplishments, their experience and their commitment to a quite specific ideology. And so the doctrine of public service pre-empts and forestalls democratic participation in setting the agenda and broadcasting the content of journalistic inquiry. Quite understandable concerns about the impact of market forces should not blind us to the deficiencies of public service broadcasting as currently constituted.