The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain

The boundaries of the state in modern Britain

This innovative book provides an essential historical perspective on the boundaries of the state in modern Britain. At a time of intense debate about the state, the writers of these interdisciplinary studies are unimpressed by the apparent 'rise' of the state before 1979 and its supposed 'decline' in the wake of Thatcherism. The boundaries of the state in modern Britain constitutes a comprehensive and coherent attempt to delineate the many and varying aspects of public involvement in private life during the twentieth century. It shows how the state has advanced into some areas of life, whilst vacating others. It explores the impact of these changes on civil society and intellectual life in Britain, paying particular attention to the relationship between publicly sponsored activity and its intellectual justification. Finally, the essays consider where the state might be going in the twenty-first century.

The boundaries of the state in modern Britain Edited by

S. J. D. Green All Souls College, Oxford and the University of Leeds

and

R. C. Whiting University of Leeds

I CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcon 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Cambridge University Press 1996 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1996 First paperback edition 2002 A catalogue recordfor this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data

The boundaries of the state in modern Britain / edited by S. J. D. Green and R.C. Whiting. p. cm. ISBN 0 52145537 5 1. Political science - Great Britain - History - 20th century. 2. Great Britain - Politics and government - 20th century. 3. Government spending policy - Great Britain - History - 20th century. 4. Great Britain - Economic policy. 5. Great Britain - Social policy. I. Green, S. J. D. II. Green, S. J. D. (Simon J. D.) JA84.G7B58 1996 320.1T09410904-dc20 95-10665 CIP ISBN 0 52145537 5 hardback ISBN 0 521 52222 6 paperback

Contents

List of List of tables List of contributors Acknowledgements 1

figures

page ix x xii xiii

Introduction: the shifting boundaries of the state in modern Britain

1

S. J. D. GREEN AND R. C.WHITING

Part I 2

The state and political theory

Political thought and the state

15

JOSE HARRIS

3

'Boundaries' in theoretical language about the British State

29

MICHAEL BENTLEY

4 The twilight of the British state?: Henry Dubb versus sceptred awe

57

DAVID MARQUAND

5 Thinking about the state and the economy

70

ROBERT SKIDELSKY

Part II 6

The economy

The size and scope of the public sector

89

ROGER MIDDLETON

7 The boundaries of taxation

146

R. C. WHITING

8

Economic knowledge and the state in modern Britain G. C. PEDEN

170

viii

List of contents

Part III Welfare and social policy 9 The dilemmas of welfare: Titmuss, Murray and Mead

191

ALAN DEACON

10 Medicine and the English state, 1901-1948

213

ANNE DIGBY

11 The English state and educational theory

231

ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE

Part IV Conflict and order 12 British national identity and the First World War

261

j . M. WINTER

13 A state of seige? The state and political violence

278

CHARLES TOWNSHEND

Part V Religion and morality 14 Survival and autonomy: on the strange fortunes and peculiar legacy of ecclesiastical establishment in the modern British state, c. 1920 to the present day

299

S. J. D . GREEN

15 Religion and the secular state

325

BRYAN WILSON

16 The British state and the power of life and death

341

CHRISTIE DAVIES

17 Conclusion: on the past development and future prospects of the state in modern Britain

375

S. J. D. GREEN AND R. C. WHITING

Index

397

Figures

6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8

6.9 6.10

6.11

6.12

Summary indicators of public sector size, 1900 and 1979 page 91 Public expenditure as a percentage of GDP at current market prices, 1900-79 93 Public sector receipts and total taxation as a percentage of GDP at market prices, 1900-79 109 Standard rate of income tax (percentage), financial years 1900-80 111 Public employment by category as a percentage of working population, selected years 1901-79 118 GDFCF by sector as a percentage of total GDFCF, selected years 1900-79 120 Ratio of outstanding national debt to GDP, financial years 1900-79 121 Public sector financial balances as a percentage of GDP at current market prices, current and capital account, 1900-79 123 Relative price of government final consumption expenditure, 1900-79 135 Ratio of 1979 to 1950 general government expenditure as a percentage of GDP and annual average growth rate of real GDP, 1950-79 141 General government expenditure, including and excluding privatisation proceeds, as a percentage of GDP at current prices, 1978/9 to 1993/4 144 UK and OECD averages: general government expenditure and current receipts as a percentage of GDP, 1978-92 145

IX

Tables

6.1 6.2

6.3 6.4 6.5

6.6 6.7 6.8

6.9 6.10

6.11 6.12 16.1 16.2 16.3

The growth of public expenditure, 1790-1900 page 95 Public expenditure as a percentage of GDP at market prices, by economic category and functional classification, selected years, 1900-79 98 Total government expenditure as a percentage of GDP at current prices, selected years, 1880-1950 102 OECD: general government expenditure as a percentage of GDP, selected years, 1950-79 103 Functional distribution of OECD-Europe general government expenditures as a percentage of GDP, decennial averages, 1950s-1970s 107 Public sector receipts and total taxation as a percentage of GDP at market prices, selected years 1900-79 110 OECD: total tax receipts as a percentage of GDP at market prices, selected years, 1950-79 113 OECD: structure of taxation as a percentage of total tax receipts and social security contributions, and total taxation and social security contributions as a percentage of GNP at factor cost, in 1979 114 OECD-Europe: administrative employment per one thousand population, selected years, 1900-70 119 Summary measures of public sector growth: observed elasticities of public expenditure/taxation with respect to GDP at market prices, selected years, 1900-79 128 Public expenditure growth: correlation matrix, UK and OECD-16 average, 1951-78 133 Distribution of marketed output (as percentages of marketed output), selected years, 1900-91 142 Voting on capital punishment for desertion, by party 358 Numbers of MPs with military titles, by party 358 Conservative voting on capital punishment for desertion, by military title 359

List of tables 16.4 16.5

Voting on capital punishment for murder, by party, in 1948 Voting on capital punishment for murder, by party, in 1964

xi 362 366

Contributors

MICHAEL BENTLEY

is Professor of Modern History, University of

St Andrews. CHRISTIE DAVIES ALAN DEACON ANNE DIGBY

is Professor of Sociology, University of Reading.

is Professor of Social Policy, University of Leeds.

is Professor of History, Oxford Brookes University.

is Lecturer in Modern History, University of Leeds, and Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

SIMON GREEN

is Fellow of St Catherine's College and Reader in Modern History, University of Oxford.

JOSE HARRIS

is Director of the Political Economy Research Centre and Professor of Politics, University of Sheffield.

DAVID MARQUAND

is Senior Lecturer in Economic History, University of Bristol.

ROGER MIDDLETON GEORGE PEDEN

is Professor of History, University of Stirling.

is Chairman of the Social Market Foundation and Professor of Political Economy, University of Warwick.

LORD SKIDELSKY

CHARLES TOWNSHEND

is Professor of Modern History, University

of Keele. is Senior Lecturer in Modern History, University of Leeds.

RICHARD WHITING

is Reader in Sociology Emeritus, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College.

BRYAN WILSON

is University Lecturer in History and Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge.

JAY WINTER

is on the staff of The Economist, and is Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.

ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE

xii

Acknowledgements

We are happy to thank the Nuffield Foundation for providing financial assistance for a conference held in 1991 at Leeds University which proved to be the starting point for this book. The School of History and its then chairman, Dr Christopher Challis, provided additional encouragement and support for which we are grateful. We thank the editors of Political Quarterly (1993) for permission to reprint David Marquand's essay which received its first airing at the Leeds gathering, and the research for which was supported by the Leverhulme Trust. The untimely death of Geoffrey Finlayson, one of the participants at the Leeds conference, deprived the volume of what would have been a valuable essay. A measure of his substantial contribution to the history of social thought and policy can be gained from his posthumous book, Citizen, State and Social Welfare in Britain (Oxford, 1994).

Xlll

1

Introduction: the shifting boundaries of the state in modern Britain 5. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting

The theme One of the defining characteristics of twentieth-century British history has been the rise of the state. That we take to mean the transformation of the executive branch of government from a limited system of force into an extensive network of services, at once literally bigger, more selfconsciously competent and altogether more intrusive - for good or ill into the lives of its citizens than ever before.1 Whatever else can be said about it, this development has not passed unnoticed in our time. Lipservice is paid to it almost daily by politicians, journalists and even ordinary people. Academic colloquia are continually dedicated to its more sophisticated understanding. Books are written about it, often good books too. Studies in the history of government involvement in the organisation and management of Britain's post-war economy have multiplied, almost as this involvement has grown, during the past thirty 1

'Until 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post-office and the policeman.' A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945 (Oxford, 1965), p. 1. '[W]e have become [by 1987], a "much governed nation", with councils, boards, departments, and authorities of many kinds exercising . . . numerous . . . and extensive . . . powers . . . in the name of social justice and the common good.' W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, vol. I l l , part 1, A Much Governed Nation (London, 1987), p. 1; ibid., vol. I, The Rise of Collectivism (1983), p. 42. The fullest account of the process, in all its ramifications, is found in Greenleaf's three masterly volumes, viz. The Rise of Collectivism, The Ideological Heritage (1983) and A Much Governed Nation, parts 1 and 2 (1987); a fourth volume, The World Outside, is forthcoming. A very different perspective can be found in James E. Cronin, The Politics of State Expansion: War, State and Society in Twentieth Century Britain (London, 1991). For an elegant summary of the literature see Jose Harris, 'Society and the State in Twentieth Century Britain', in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.)j The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750-1950, vol. I l l , Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 63-177. And, for a simple introduction, Paul Johnson, 'The Role of the State in Twentieth Century Britain', in Johnson (ed.), Twentieth-Century Britain: Economic, Social and Cultural Change (London, 1994),

pp. 476-91.

2

S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting

years.2 Significant treatises on the rise of publicly managed social and welfare policy scarcely fall far behind.3 Similarly so for the transformation of political behaviour which these changes entail.4 Once neglected fields, such as investigation into the impact of, and alterations 2

3

4

The most recent, and fullest, history is now found in Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, vol. I, Britain in Search of a Balance, 1961-1974 (Basingstoke, 1986), vol. II, Threats to the Post-War Settlement, 1961-1974 (1990), and vol. Ill, The End of the Post-War Era, Britain since 1974 (1991). Other accounts, covering all or part of the period, range from the semi-official to the journalistic; cf., F. T. Blackaby (ed.), British Economic Policy 1960-74, National Institute of Economic and Social Research, Economic and Social Studies 31 (Cambridge, 1978), esp. chs. 2 and 14, and Samuel Brittan, Steering the Economy, 3rd edn (New York, 1971). The question of post-war state enterprise is treated in William Ash worth, The State in Business 1945 to the mid-1980s (London, 1991); and set in wider, historical framework by James Foreman-Peck and Robert Millward, Public and Private Ownership in British Industry 1820-1990 (Oxford, 1994), chs. 8-11. An essential, polemical work, an economic history of planning which informed the 'Thatcher revolution', is Alan Budd, The Politics of Economic Planning (Manchester, 1978), and see esp. the conclusion. For a purely theoretical introduction to the whole phenomenon, see Bruno S. Frey, Democratic Economic Policy (Oxford, 1983), esp. part 3. The most accessible introduction, which meritoriously integrated social with economic policy, is G. C. Peden, British Economic and Social Policy: Lloyd George to Margaret Thatcher (Hemel Hempstead, 1991), esp. chs. 6-9. A modern textbook on the welfare state in Britain is Michael Hill, The Welfare State in Britain: A Political History since 1945 (Aldershot, 1993), passim. For a comparative perspective, considering the example of the USA and western Europe additionally, see Douglas E. Ashford, The Emergence of the Welfare State (Oxford, 1986), esp. chs. 4-6. Critiques of the whole now range from socialist/feminist to conservative/liberal; see inter alia, Lois Bryson, Welfare and the State (Basingstoke, 1992), esp. chs. 2 and 4—6, or Digby Anderson (ed.), The Ignorance of Social Intervention (London, 1980), passim. More notably wide-ranging discussions, expressing several different viewpoints on the matter, are found in S. N. Eisenstadt and Ora Ahimer (eds.), The Welfare State and its Aftermath (London, 1985), passim; and Thomas and Dorothy Wilson (eds.), The State and Social Welfare: The Objectives of Policy (London, 1991), see esp. parts 3 and 5. For a critical account of recent developments in Britain, see Malcolm Wicks, A Future for All: Do We Need a Welfare State? (Harmondsworth, 1987), esp. part 2. Individual case studies include Peter Malpass, Reshaping Housing Policy: Subsidies, Rents and Residentialisation (London, 1990), esp. chs. 7 and 8; and Carol Walker, Managing Poverty: The Limits of Social Assistance (London, 1993), esp. ch. 7. It is acknowledged, for instance, in the very title of Samuel H. Beer, Modern British Politics: Parties and Pressure Groups in the Collectivist Age, 3rd edn (London, 1982), esp. ch. 3. For the particular, and allegedly peculiar, example of the Labour Party, see Barry Jones and Michael Keating, Labour and the British State (Oxford, 1985), esp. chs. 4, 6 and 7. On modern 'pressure-group' politics see, inter alia, A. G. Jordan and J. J. Richardson, Government and Pressure Groups in Britain (Oxford, 1987), esp. part 2; also Richard Rose, Politics in England: Persistence and Change, 4th edn (London, 1985), ch. 8, and Max Beloff and Gilliam Peele, The Government of the UK: Political Authority in a Changing Society, 2nd edn (London, 1985), ch. 9. And, in many ways, it formed the basis of the 'neo-corporatist' interpretation of modern British politics, fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s; see especially, Keith Middlemas, Politics and Industrial Society: The Experience of the British System since 1911 (London, 1979), passim, and Andrew Cox and Noel O'Sullivan (eds.), The Corporate State: Corporatism and the State Tradition in Western Europe (Aldershot, 1988), ch. 9.

The shifting boundaries of the state in Britain

3

in, the application of economic and social expertise in public and even private life now find their niche.5 And all the time, positive and normative theories of the state, especially the liberal state, and particularly the British liberal state, abound.6 In such an over-crowded field, the appearance of yet another book on the state in modern Britain requires some justification. This lies, or strictly speaking begins, with its title. The term 'boundaries' has been carefully chosen to incorporate not merely the contents but also the purposes of this book. For it enables the reader to appreciate the possibility, that is the significant intellectual possibility, of the modern historical phenomenon of retreating as well as of advancing public boundaries. (And in that understanding we include both those concessions which have occurred, and those which might yet come to pass.) More subtly, it also permits him to allow for the probability that what has indubitably expanded, as the state has extended the range of its formal interests - its specific, legally endorsed, concerns in British society - has not necessarily also acquired a concomitant increase in its competence actually to deal with - significantly to alter, to redirect or even to improve - what it now increasingly encounters. Accordingly it is an exercise which allows him to envisage the appropriateness of a history of the state in modern Britain which is, and must always be, a study not simply of its extent but also of its limits, not merely of its growth but also of its degeneration; a consideration, in other words, of its shifting and even of its transforming boundaries. 5

6

For a general, historical account, see Harold Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (London, 1989), chs. 4 and 8. The particular example of economic expertise is covered in Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple (eds.), The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences (Cambridge, 1990), see esp. chs. 6, 7, 10-12 and 14; a complementary volume on social expertise is Michael J. Lacey and Mary O. Furner, The State and Social Investigation in Britain and the United States (Cambridge, 1993), see esp. chs. 1, 6 and 9. The relationship of these developments to the growth of professionalism within the state is discussed in Bob Carter, Capitalism, Class Conflict and the New Middle Class (London, 1985), esp. ch. 4; and more widely in the various essays in Rolf Torstendahl and Michael Burrage (eds.), The Formation of Professions: Knowledge, State and Strategy (London, 1990). For a wider context still, see W. H. G. Armytage, The Rise of Technocrats: A Social History (London, 1965), esp. parts 4 and 5. Probably the best introduction is now Patrick Dunleavy and Brendan O'Leary, Theories of the State (London, 1987), passim; an alternative, and rather more historical account is found in John A. Hall and G. John Ikenberry, The State (Milton Keynes, 1989), see esp. ch. 2. Critiques of the phenomenon range from the 'Marxist' exposure in Ralph Miliband, The State in Capitalist Society (London, 1969), see esp. chs. 7 and 8; to the libertarian argument of Anthony de Jasay in The State (Oxford, 1985), see esp. ch. 4. Essential readings are presented in David Held et al. (eds.), State and Society (Oxford, 1983); see esp. part 1. For the British state in historical context see Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, vol. I l l , conclusion, pp. 447—87.

4

S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting

That said, one thing should be made clear from the outset. To acknowledge any such reversals or failures, even indeed to insist upon a proper understanding of the complexity of the effects, is not to argue for their inherent inevitability, still less desirability. Certainly, there is no need to accept the advantageousness of a diminishing state in order to apprehend that the boundaries of the state have, in fact, retreated in many, very important areas of British life during the twentieth century. After all, in certain respects, particularly as it relates to questions of public doctrine and social morality, this might almost be said to be a characteristic dynamic of modern states.7 On the other hand, there is no necessary correlation between the pursuit of such limitation(s) and the political complexion of its or their pursuers. So, one of the most important of these concessions discussed below, the power over life and death, was altogether more actively sought on the political left than on the ideological right, in this country as elsewhere.8 One of the more recent, the retreat of the state from its prohibitory regulation in the lives of homosexual men, similarly so.9 One might go further. Even to the degree that such concessions have 7

8

9

A point made in Bryan R. Wilson, 'Morality in the Evolution of the Modern Social System', British Journal of Sociology, 36 (1985), 315-32, esp. at pp. 318-24. Whether this is a good or bad thing, of course, is a quite different matter, and indeed constitutes the basic material for the political argument between liberal individualists and socialist and/or conservative communitarians in contemporary culture. See, inter alia, Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue (London, 1981), esp. chs. 2-6; and the liberal critique of Macintyre, and other communitarians, gathered together in Stephen Holmes, The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism (Cambridge, Mass., 1993); also the wide-ranging discussion, 'pro' and 'con', offered in Stephen Mulhall and Adam Swift, Liberals and Communitarians (Oxford, 1992), passim. The contemporary history of this movement can be consulted, academically, in James B. Christopher, Capital Punishment and British Politics: The British Movement to Abolish the Death Penalty 1945-57 (London, 1962), esp. ch. 7; and polemically, in the essays collected in Louis Blom-Cooper (ed.), The Hanging Question: Essays on the Death Penalty (London, 1969). The important, and changing, religious dimension of this struggle is considered in Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgement: Religion and the Death Penalty in England from the Bloody Code to the Abolition (London, 1993), esp. chs. 13-15 and 17. For an up-to-date, world-wide survey, see Roger Hood, The Death Penalty (Oxford, 1989), chs. 1 and 2. The fullest political account of this movement is probably now Stephen Jeffrey-Poulter, Peers, Queers and Commons: The Struggle for Gay Law Reform from 1950 to the Present (London, 1991), see esp. chs. 3, 5 and 12. A wider historical framework is set in Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800, 2nd edn (London, 1989), see esp. chs. 6 and 12-14. Perhaps the most moderate statement for the further liberalisation of the law is offered in Anthony Grey, Quest for Justice: Towards Homosexual Emancipation (London, 1992), passim. For a philosophical consideration of the problem, with practical implications, see Michael Ruse, Homosexuality: A Philosophical Enquiry (Oxford, 1988), esp. chs. 8-10; and for different arguments, with different implications, see Roger Scruton, Sexual Desire: A Philosophical Investigation (London, 1986), chs. 9 and 10.

The shifting boundaries of the state in Britain

5

been made, they have neither always presumed, nor actually entailed any increase in, or even restoration of, personal freedom and individual responsibility. Think of the very recent and speedily developing privatisation of punishment (the prison service) in this country. Ignore, for the moment, whether or not this will prove to be for the good of the criminal and to the benefit of the taxpayer. What it indubitably is - it could be no other - is an example of the willingness of the contemporary British state to trade one of the most basic expressions of its historically acquired authority - the exclusive right to coerce - for one of the more recent calculi of its continuing legitimacy - the willingness to do its public duty for the least possible expense. No criticism of that policy is implied in the observation that it has been done in a way, and to an end, that is entirely unconcerned about the continuing vigour, or otherwise, of Britain's law-abiding citizenry.10 All of which is perhaps no more than a long-winded way of saying that the boundaries of the state in modern Britain are far from obvious, either by nature or in direction. Still less clear has been the degree to which their identification and development have been sustained by a coherent doctrine of the state, and of its proper responsibilities, during the modern era. And, in so far as the state really has grown in this period, this uncertainty suggests three critical questions about the particular character of the state of its activities, in modern Britain: first, how far have these developments of state responsibility been adequately, or even coherently, justified by concomitant developments in the general political culture and according to specific intellectual dogmas of the time? Secondly, what have been the implications for the authority of the state of the exponential growth of particular professional expertise in key areas of interest? And thirdly, what (if any) have been the connections between the emergence of so many associated fields of scientific and pseudo-scientific 'knowledge' and the programme of a more nebulous, but equally critical, moral authority pertaining to their practitioners to employ that understanding on behalf of the state, and for the common good? It should go without saying that these are not the only questions worth asking about the rise of the state in modern Britain. Yet surely they are three of the most important. The first points to the putative connection between political democratisation and the growth of public 10

An intelligent discussion of the narrow question of privatisation can be found in Charles H. Logan, Private Prisons (New York, 1990), chs. 2, 3 and 14; and a wider consideration of the related social problem in Ira P. Robbins, The Legal Dimensions of Private Incarceration (New York, 1988), passim. Both concentrate upon the American case, but parallels with the (emerging) British example are obvious.

6

5. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting

authority in twentieth-century Britain, both conceived and executed during an era in which Britain very self-consciously became a democratic regime, indeed became one of the world's leading, and certainly one of the world's most stable, liberal democratic polities; and at a time when the political theory of democracy, and also, supposedly, of state welfare as an aspect of that democracy, became more widely entrenched in British intellectual life.11 The second identifies its direct, and often contradictory corollary: the extent to which the public implementation of these democratic desires (if such they were) actually and necessarily rested upon the particular benevolence of uncommon skill (if such it was).12 And this third explores the necessary, and contingent, tension between the two: between, as it were, the very obvious sense in which a democratic state rhetorically associates itself with the public good, and the less obvious reality of the means through which it fulfils its presumptively beneficent tasks.13 Answers to these questions should illuminate the wider question of the political relationship between the state and the civil society during the same period. Certainly, they should help us to understand the experiences of collective and individual interests in society in their relations with the state. An understanding of these experiences in turn should take us some way towards the goal of properly appreciating the degree to which the relationship between civil society and the state another way of describing the boundaries of the state - has not merely been uncertain, nor even simply generally perceived to be unclear, but also the uncertain and unclear product as much of the efforts by civil society to negotiate modification and qualifications in its relationship with the alternatively over-bearing or beneficial public juggernaut with which it was continuously confronted. This relationship has significantly changed, both by statutory fiat and through more nebulous civil negotiation, across the widest spectrum of British social life. Accordingly, any study of the boundaries of the state in modern Britain should, properly, be developed across the widest 11

12

13

By which we mean that public welfare became an aspect of political democracy itself. That view is implied in the analysis of Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, vol. I, ch. 4. For the political theory underpinning this view see, inter alia, Anthony Arblaster, Democracy (Milton Keynes, 1987), ch. 7; or, for its attempted repudiation, Brian Crozier, The Minimum State: Beyond Party Politics (London, 1979), ch. 2. Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society, ch. 8. For a comparative perspective see Charles Derber, William A. Schwartz and Dale Magrass, Power in the Highest Degree: Professionals and the Rise of a New Mandarin Order (New York, 1990), esp. part 5. As above, the question of what the public good consisted and consists in, conceived a priori, we leave unanswered. By this we do not imply that it is not, has not been, and cannot be, a matter of public concern.

The shifting boundaries of the state in Britain

7

practicable range of subjects. These include those obviously and unambiguously important areas such as the economy and social policy, but they are not restricted to them. They also include, for instance, the apparently more nebulous fields of religion and morality. The British state, after all, remains an Established order. And its ecclesiastical arm, however ineffectually, still embodies its defining - if not necessarily its prevailing - ethical dimension. Finally, they include the seemingly marginal concerns of warfare and rebellion. The British state, uniquely amongst the western democracies, still deploys its own troops routinely in order to police and protect its own citizens on the streets of at least one part of its own land. And that simple and brutal fact has ramifications far beyond the shores of Ulster. These will continue, in the short term at least; certainly well into the development of the so-called 'peace process' of contemporary times. These varying dimensions, and different boundaries, are explored below in terms of the various competences of the state, not in relation to their particular location. Specifically, that means that the political and, for that matter, legal aspects of both regional (county, urban, district) and supra-national (especially European) government are largely neglected in what follows. This is not to deny their importance. It is to suggest that they have their own place. Clearly, the question of local administration (and conversely, of central delegation) has been of enormous significance in British history, once almost a barometer of the changing climates of domestic liberty and tyranny. Perhaps it still is. But it does not illuminate the issue of where in the lives of each of its citizens the state, tout court, may legitimately intrude; or where, in fact, it has actually trod.14 Similarly, the very large matter of European integration cannot fail to engage the mind of anyone concerned, amongst other things, with public interference in private life, now or in the future. But, once again, it is difficult to envisage that the European Commission will conceive of whole new areas for its proper competence, unimagined or unimaginable by the British state. Only the most pessi14

A vast subject which can be done no justice in a brief bibliography. For the national/ local dimension, however, it might be worth considering the essays in Ken Young (ed.), National Interests and Local Government (London, 1983); and, from another perspective, Michael Harloe, Chris Pickvance and John Urry (eds.), Place, Policy and Politics: Do Localities Matter? (London, 1990), passim. The large question of finance is treated in N. P. Heyworth, The Finance of Local Government, 7th edn (London, 1984), see ch. 3 on 'Government Grants'. Perhaps the best primer remains Howard Elcock, Local Government: Policy and Management in Local Authorities, 3rd edn (London, 1994), see esp. chs. 1 and 2. On the vexed question of the relationship between politics and government in the localities, a start can be made in William Hampton, Local Government and Urban Politics (London, 1987), part 2.

8

S. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting

mistic Europhobe or, conversely, optimistic Europhile could really think that.15 The book This book is a collection of essays on the various aspects of these many and interrelated problems. Contributors were invited to participate in the project solely because the editors believed that they had something to say on subjects about which they are acknowledged experts. In making their choice, the editors envisaged no particular methodological, still less a specific doctrinal, approach. Accordingly, the volume is unashamedly multidisciplinary. It is hoped that this will be to its advantage. At the same time, whatever subsequent interdisciplinary virtues it may display have not been self-consciously wrought. Certainly, no attempt has been made to forge a social scientific synthesis out of such disparate material, and from so many diverging perspectives. None of the contributors was asked to sacrifice the wider purposes or specific conveniences of his own specialist academic discipline for the supposed needs of the whole. And the editors have made no attempt to mould the resulting efforts into a syncretistic intellectual blancmange. What the reader will find are the separate perspectives of economists, political scientists, sociologists and historians exploring as such in areas where they were judged to be especially competent to make a general contribution to knowledge. It is up to the reader alone to determine whether they have, in fact, done so; and whether, too, the editors' organisational indulgence has had a benign or malignant effect on their efforts. By the same token, it should go without saying that the volume neither professes, nor presumes, any particular political bias. Certainly, no specific line of ideological attack was envisaged. It is doubtful if the editors themselves could have agreed upon one. And it is likely that the value of the work as a whole would have been even less if they had. Thus 15

On the question of 'Britain in Europe', a beginning can be made in Stephen George, An Awkward Partner: Britain in the European Community (Oxford, 1990), see esp. chs. 1, 5 and 6. See also the essays collected in George (ed.), Britain and the European Community: The Politics of Semi-Detachment (Oxford, 1992), notably chs. 1 and 3-5. On the future, perhaps see Michael Franklin and Marc Wilke, Britain's Future in Europe (London, 1990), a frankly positive account; and James M. Buchanan, Karl Otto Pohl, Victoria Curzon Price and Frank Vibert, Europe's Constitutional Future (London, 1990), which, with one obvious exception, contains rather more sceptical readings of the matter. The historical question is introduced in Sean Greenwood, Britain and European Co-operation since 1945 (Oxford, 1992), see esp. chs. 1-7; and a wider framework still can be found in David Apter, The Politics of European Integration in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 1993), passim.

The shifting boundaries of the state in Britain

9

the reader will find a dozen or more different social and political perspectives in the essays which follow, each of them individually disclosed. This is taken to reflect the realities of the subject matter and the inevitable controversies which it has already stimulated and will continue to invoke. It is also understood to express the diverging judgements of an informed, but inevitably opinionated, multiple expertise. And, finally, it is assumed that the reader will be canny enough to establish each of their biases for himself and, where necessary, to supply his own, suitably salutary, corrective. For all that, the book does aspire to some degree of coherence. Certainly, it is the fervent belief of the editors that whilst not every conceivable avenue of enquiry has been followed, a sufficient number of the most important (if not necessarily the most obvious) have been addressed, and in a way which has made the pursuit of a broad academic angle at least compatible with the obligation to maintain a steady intellectual focus. Similarly, it is their strong conviction that the duplication of disciplinary perspectives should yield not merely a richer but also a more integrated picture of change in the British state during the past century: of what caused it, and where it now proceeds. In that way, it is hoped that a volume of essays, variously authored by specialists of different expertise, will enable the reader to appreciate more fully than hitherto just what is peculiar in, as well as general to, the formation and development of the state in modern Britain, or about how it has become so much like so many of the other states within the advanced world, but also about how, given its historical legacy, and according to the logic of its own political, social and economic context, it has developed in its own peculiar ways. To understand the general in the development of the British state is inevitably, even perhaps unconsciously, to contribute towards the theory of the state in a liberal democracy. And if this book makes any contribution to such a theory, that will be to the good. To be sure, it can offer no integrated, nor even coherent, account of the whole phenomenon. But to appreciate the particular more thoroughly is not, necessarily, to subvert the very possibility of such a general theory. It may even have the effect of pushing it further forward. At the very least, it should not be taken for a destructive activity, still less for a trivial pursuit. For in the progressively converging system of states - if not necessarily of economies - which the European Union seems increasingly to be, it might prove salutary to acknowledge, if for no other reason than to be properly prepared against, the individuality of the states' systems which necessarily have constituted and will constitute the basis of that wider organisation. But that, of course, is another question. And

10

5. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting

for all its intrinsic merits - indeed precisely because of those merits - it will not be dealt with here. Plan of the work The plan of the work follows the logic of the problem and the variety of its implications. Because this is a book concerned as much about the many different ways in which the state has been perceived - identified, described and understood - as about what it has actually done (or failed to do) in modern Britain, the first section is devoted to four quite separate and different interpretations of what might loosely be called the political theory of the state. Of these, that by Dr Harris is primarily concerned with the emergence (or otherwise) of philosophically coherent language to describe the politics of state development; another, by Dr Bentley, about the degree to which that language did or did not envisage the notion of boundaries. Later contributions by Professors Marquand and Skidelsky set out the ways in which such rhetoric envisaged either a wider role, or a more specific agenda, for the activities of government in modern British society. Part II is devoted to the critical, and unquestionably central, question of the development of the state in relation to the growth and performance of the British economy during the twentieth century. Dr Middleton provides an essential overview. Dr Whiting explores the limits, both administrative and political, of the tax system. Finally, Professor Peden considers the relationship between the economic activity of the state and the growth, or otherwise, of economic knowledge made available to it during this period. The so-called 'welfare state' is approached directly in Part III. Three aspects of its workings are described and analysed here: namely welfare policy, strictly speaking, by Professor Deacon; health, and the growing interventionism which prefaced the National Health Service, by Professor Digby; and finally education, and the putative emergence of a national educational system, by Dr Wooldridge. The more venerable and still important - albeit changing - 'warfare state' is treated in Part IV. Dr Winter explores the general question of the degree to which the waging of two world wars in this century - a state-dominated activity if ever there was one - has helped forge a British national identity. And Professor Townshend provides much needed consideration of the particular case of Northern Ireland, and the effect which the management of political violence has had upon the British state up to the present time. The last section of the book identifies and describes the significance of the religious dimension of the state. Dr Green outlines the major

The shifting boundaries of the state in Britain

11

implications of the continuing existence of a state church in modern Britain. Dr Wilson examines some of the ramifications of that continuity for the state's nonconformist, but religious, subjects. Finally, Professor Davies traces the changing contours of surely the most profound yet least discussed aspect of the state's involvement in civil society and personal life: the extent to which the state has chosen, and increasingly has not chosen, to reserve for itself the right to end the lives of each of us; and what that means for us all. In conclusion, the editors offer an account of the past development and future prospects of the state in modern Britain. This chapter in no sense summarises the book. Nor does it reflect the views of the other contributors. It is a personal view, albeit the product of the views of two people. It is based partly on what follows; and partly on wider reflection. It has no ex cathedra status.

Parti

The state and political theory

Political thought and the state Jose Harris

I One of the most striking features of writing on British politics and society from the early 1940s through to the late 1960s was the widespread silence that prevailed on the theme of the underlying nature, powers and purposes of the state. Britain's governors during that period waged a world war against one totalitarian state and a cold war against another. They withdrew from control of a global empire and devised ambitious state structures for many of Britain's ex-colonial possessions. They engaged for the first time in large-scale fiscal and monetary management, nationalised (and denationalised) major industries, introduced mass compulsory secondary education, centralised and bureaucratised many traditionally local services, and set up a welfare state designed to protect its citizens against want from the cradle to the grave. In virtually no other period of British history were the powers and functions of government so radically extended and redefined, and in no other period were the roles of state, citizen, economy, society and private voluntary associations more drastically remoulded. Yet, in striking contrast to what the naive wanderer along the highway of history might have expected, there were few attempts to analyse or justify these new powers and functions in theoretical terms. Major analytical or speculative works about the state in this period can almost literally be numbered on the fingers of one hand (and of these one was widely dismissed as 'the unhappy work of an ill man',1 while another was a work of fiction largely read by children). A similar point may be made not just about major but about minor philosophical works. For the space of about thirty or forty years, not merely 'good' and original thought about the state but bad and bumbling thought about the state virtually vanished from the pages of British philosophical, political and sociological 1

J. N. Watkins, 'Political Tradition and Political Theory', Philosophical Quarterly, 2 (1952), 323, commenting on R. G. Collingwood's The New Leviathan.

15

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Jose Harris

literature. Exceptions to this rule consisted largely of a grumbling undercurrent of critical writings which portrayed the modern interventionist state in highly negative terms, either as a barrier to proletarian revolution or as the foe of personal, civil and economic liberty. Such writings were to be of some long-term significance in eroding public confidence in the virtue, competence and legitimacy of state power; but they had little impact on either the theory or practice of politics in the immediately post-war years. This surprising lacuna cannot be ascribed simply to a native AngloSaxon philistinism or distaste for speculative political thought, since the periods before and after these dates produced a great mass of theoretical writing on both the state in particular and the nature in politics in general. The 1970s and 80s saw a growing revival of interest in theoretical analysis of state institutions, in debate about the ontological primacy of groups or individuals, and in the validity of such concepts as social justice and human rights.2 And very recently there has been an explosion of historical, political and philosophical writing on the theme of citizenship - a concept that only a few years ago was widely treated as a litmus test of corny moralism, false consciousness and intellectual confusion. Similarly, the preceding political culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had generated a massivefloweringof speculative works on the nature of the modern state, written from many different philosophical angles - idealist, positivist, pluralist, socialist, syndicalist, scientistic and neo-utilitarian. Down to the 1930s in Britain political theorising of one kind and another occurred not merely in an academic context; it was virtually a national sport of British intellectuals of all ideological and professional complexions. It was engaged in not just by professors of philosophy and by practising statesmen, but by economists, historians, scientists, doctors, clergymen, social workers, soldiers, business men, labour leaders, fellow-travellers and a host of others who saw themselves as having a finger in the pie of the body politic.3 This academic and popular culture of political thought produced a great deal of sometimes amiable, sometimes nauseating rubbish; but it produced also many serious and systematic attempts to analyse the 2

3

See in particular Brian Barry, Democracy, Power and Justice (London, 1989). For reviews of recent writing see Alan Hamlin and Philip Pettit (eds.), The Good Polity: Normative Analysis of the State (London, 1989), and David Held (ed.), Political Theory Today (London, 1991). See Rodney Barker, Political Ideas in Modern Britain (London, 1978); W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, vol. II, The Ideological Heritage (London, 1983); Andrew Vincent and Raymond Plant, The Life and Thought of the British Idealists (London, 1984); Jose Harris, 'Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870-19124: An Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy', Past and Present, 135 (1992), 116-41.

Political thought and the state

17

role of the state and other political institutions, in a context of advanced capitalism, urban conglomeration and modern mass democracy. No single great paradigmatic thinker in the early twentieth century towered over the rest, but there were many who made an original contribution to public debate or who raised issues of fundamental importance for political and social philosophy. For several generations theorists of all complexions wrestled with the dilemmas posed by Mill, Herbert Spencer and T. H. Green - about how to reconcile 'individuality' with majoritarian democracy, about whether social reform was hostile or complementary to biological evolution, about the virtues and vices of bureaucracy, and about the role of the state in enhancing so-called 'positive liberty'. On more specific issues, one may mention A. C. Pigou's attempt to find a philosophic basis for the Webbs' doctrine of the 'National Minimum', the Webbs' own attempts to construct working models for face-to-face democracy, J. A. Hobson's attempts to ground redistribution in a concept of 'organic' surplus value, J. N. Figgis's critique of the notion of unitary sovereignty, and Bernard Bosanquet's attempt to locate a Rousseauesque 'general will' not in pure abstraction but in the day-to-day working of a common national culture.4 The virtual disappearance of systematic political theory from British public life between the early 1940s and the 1970s was not therefore, as some would have it, simply a natural expression of a characteristically pragmatic and philistine national culture. On the contrary, it was a strange death, whose causes and significance need to be investigated and explained. This can, I think, be done in a number of different ways. First, we must look at the earlier tradition of political philosophising that ran into the sand, and think about why it ceased to be a credible or morally compelling way of thought to theorists and practitioners of politics in a later generation. Secondly, we must take into account the peculiar political circumstances of Britain in the period during and after the Second World War - a period that for long was seen as the culmination of, but now looks increasingly like an aberration from, earlier centuries of British political and economic history. And, thirdly, since it seems scarcely conceivable that British intellectuals simply stopped thinking about politics altogether for a thirty-year period, we must look at other ways of analysing the role of man in society that may have 4

A. C. Pigou, memorandum to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws (Cd. 5068, XLIX, appendix LXXX, pp. 981-2, 1910); S. and B. Webb, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain (London, 1920); John Allett, New Liberalism: The Political Economy of J. A. Hobson (London, 1981); J. N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State (London, 1913); Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London, 1899).

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displaced or discredited traditional political theory during the wartime and post-war years. II First, then, the tradition that fell into disrepute and decay. I cannot in this short chapter adequately summarise all the many and varied strands in British political thought between the late Victorian period and the 1930s, though I have already given some examples of the range of interests that it contained. A general point that should be emphasised, however, is the overwhelmingly organicist and idealist character of nearly every aspect of that tradition, even in quarters that are often conventionally thought of as the inner heartlands of British positivism and individualism. The nature and scope of that wide-ranging idealism is perhaps a little different from what is often supposed. A number of recent studies have indicated both that the hegemony of idealism in British universities was less complete than was once claimed, and that the political influence of idealist philosophers like T. H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet was in practice fairly limited.5 Both of these points are, I think, up to a point correct. What they discount, however, is the fact that although idealism was under serious attack among pure philosophers by 1914, its influence upon what might be thought of as the sub-philosophical disciplines of political theory, sociology, social administration and social philosophy was far more all-pervasive and long-lasting. Moreover, the initial onslaught on idealism was largely an Oxbridge attack, and various forms of idealism remained deeply entrenched in the Scottish, Welsh and newer civic universities until well into the mid-twentieth century. And, similarly, although it may be hard to find proof of the direct influence of idealism upon policy documents in Whitehall, idealist categories were omnipresent in informed popular discussion of social reform, not just during the Edwardian period but right through to the 1930s and early 1940s, and not just in one particular enclave in British politics, but on the right, left and centre. As I have shown in more detail elsewhere, much British sociological writing until the 1930s was deeply impregnated with idealist preconceptions. The ten departments of 'social science' and 'social administration' that were set up in British universities between 1900 and 1920 were all fortresses of idealist thought, and many of them were founded and manned by prominent idealist philosophers - men such as Edward Urwick, Henry 5

Michael Freeden, New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (London, 1978), pp. 16-19, 55-6; Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (London, 1977), pp. 2, 312.

Political thought and the state

19

Jones, J. H. Muirhead and James Seth. 6 Edward Urwick, who from 1912 to 1924 held the chair at the London School of Economics later occupied by Richard Titmuss, made 'social philosophy' the core discipline of the school's social science syllabus; and throughout his career at the LSE his lectures and academic writings centred upon the application of Plato's Republic to the solution of social problems in the modern industrial state.7 The authority of Plato, and of classical authorities in general, was widely invoked in such media as the Sociological Review, the Social Service Review, the Hibbert Journal and the International Journal of Ethics, as pre-figuring the modern problems of how to turn men into citizens and how to subdue the fragmentation and relativism of modern industrial society to the 'common end of the good life'.8 Rousseau also was a frequent point of reference; and though Rousseau remained a somewhat suspect figure to many British readers, nearly all his Edwardian and post-Edwardian interpreters endorsed Rousseau's claim that 'true freedom' might be enhanced rather than diminished by the exercise of state power.9 Even the social survey movement, often seen as the embodiment of a purely descriptive, atheoretical approach to the study of social problems, constantly referred to the goal of 'awakening citizen consciousness' and of enabling isolated individuals to understand their roles and duties in the larger social organism. Of the major social sciences in Britain only economics remained largely wedded to an individualist and positivistic tradition; and, even within economics, welfare economists headed by Pigou and J. A. Hobson worked hard upon the problem of how to reconcile the private choices of individuals with the optimal welfare of the wider organic whole. 10 Such modes of thought remained dominant in popular and academic debate on state and society in Britain throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and may perhaps be seen as reflected in the many 'corporatist', communitarian and coalitionist experiment of the inter-war years. Idealist thought was deeply embedded in the long-drawn-out debate on poverty, which from the 1880s down to the Second World War was widely 6

7

8

9

10

Harris, 'Political Thought and the Welfare State', pp. 128-31, and 'The Webbs, the Charity Organisation Society and the Ratan Tata Foundation', in Martin Bulmer, Jane Lewis and David Piachaud (eds.), The Goals of Social Policy (London, 1989), pp. 27-63. E. J. Urwick, The Message of Plato (London, 1920) and The Social Good (London, 1927). Jose Harris, 'The Spell of Plato in English Social Thought 1890-1940', J. S. Neale Memorial Lecture, University College, London, 1992. G. D. H. Cole's introduction to Rousseau's The Social Contract (1913), pp. xi-xliv; Ernest Barker, Political Thought in England 1848-1914 (London, 1915), pp. 217-21; A. D. Lindsay, The Modern Democratic State, vol. I (London, 1943). A. C. Pigou, Wealth and Welfare (London, 1912); J. A. Hobson, 'Economic Art and Human Welfare', Journal of Philosophical Studies (1926), 467-SO.

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viewed among British social reformers not merely as a quantitative shortfall of material goods but as both a subjective and objective barrier to 'self-realisation' and virtuous citizenship.11 It was also widely pervasive in discussion about the future of democracy. Among the tidal wave of publications on the theory and practice of 'civics' that was designed to guide (or guide the guiders of) the new electorate after 1918, the overwhelming majority were couched in idealist or quasi-idealist terms.12 The mass of the British people were to be coached into an existential awareness of the moral purpose and common framework of the state through active participation in public-spirited, self-governing voluntary institutions. There were, of course, recurrent attacks upon the idealist school, such as Leonard Hobhouse's famous tirade against the so-called 'metaphysical theory of the state', and complaints from socialists like Harold Laski that political idealism ignored or marginalised the brute facts of economic inequality and class conflict.13 But Hobhouse's own political thought, and that of the progressive liberalism which he represented, was itself deeply imbued with idealist and organic visions of society and government.14 And, likewise, many aspects of British socialist thought were deeply intertwined with idealist notions, expressed for example in Ramsay Macdonald's philosophy of citizenship, in Tawney's invocation of an organic Christian commonwealth, and in G. D. H. Cole's abiding debt to the ethics and ontology of Rousseau and Kant.15 A common theme of idealist thought of the right, left and centre was that, though economic and constitutional arrangements were of great importance, the justice and well-being of the body politic was intimately bound up with and predicated upon the ethical disposition of its citizens: public-spirited, self-disciplined, co-operating individuals were viewed as the vital sinews of the modern collectivist state. During the 1930s, however, the idealist empire in social and political thought in Britain began slowly to crumble on many fronts. The longdrawn-out economic crisis in Britain and elsewhere made it increasingly 11

12

13 14

15

Bernard Bosanquet (ed.), Aspects of the Social Problem (London, 1895); Michael Freeden, 'The Concept of Poverty and Progressive Liberalism in Turn-of-the-Century Britain', paper to the symposium on 'Perspectives of Poverty: Past and Present', Agnelli Foundation, Turin, June 1991. E. M. White, 'The Purpose of Civics and How It Is Served in Recent English Textbooks', Sociological Review, 15 (1923), 209. Harold J. Laski, Liberty in the Modern State (London, 1930), pp. 55-61. Stefan Collini, 'Hobhouse, Bosanquet and the State: Philosophical Idealism and Political Argument in England, 1880-1914', Past and Present, 11 (1976), 86-111. R. H. Tawney, Commonplace Book (ed. J. M. Winter and D. M. Joslin, Economic History Review supplement 5, 1972); Ramsay MacDonald's Political Writings, ed. B. Barker (London, 1972).

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difficult for many to accept the claim of some idealist theorists that the powers of the state should be viewed as the tangible embodiment of the common good. Although the spread of Marxian ideas in Britain may have been fairly limited, theoretical Marxism - with its emphasis on economic rather than political analysis, and on the state as a tool of oppression and exploitation16 - undoubtedly supplied a new world-view to a potent and principled intellectual minority consisting of precisely the kind of people who would have been Hegelian or Platonic idealists a generation before. At a more popular level the spectacle of Fascism on the continent bred creeping disenchantment with holistic and communitarian modes of thought among certain kinds of people who had in the past been particularly prone to such modes. Social workers and organisers of private charity, for example, who down to the 1930s were widely influenced by an ethical vision derived from idealism and organicism, 17 were noticeably shocked and disorientated by accounts of 'communitarian' social work in Nazi Germany. And equally potent within an academic context were the messages that were beginning to come out of British philosophy in the 1930s - messages that were increasingly hostile, not merely to idealist political thought but to systematic political theory of any kind. Such messages were embodied in a whole series of works: in the argument of linguistic positivists that normative statements - and indeed all non-positivist forms of discourse - had no genuine logical status; in the claim of Bertrand Russell that what was commonly called 'political philosophy' had nothing whatsoever to do with philosophy properly so-called; and in the attacks of Richard Crossman and others upon the looming influence of Plato. These attacks took a variety of forms; but all agreed that - far from being a forerunner of modern social reform and democratic citizenship - Plato's political philosophy was a forerunner of Fascism, racism, elitism and totalitarian tyranny.18 These criticisms of idealism in particular and political philosophy in general - coming as they did at a time when traditional perceptions of state and society were in a traumatic melting-pot throughout Europe combined to influence the character of political discourse in Britain for the next forty years. In academic circles they were reinforced by the influence of academic refugees from Europe, who - with a few notable exceptions - added their voice to the anti-idealist, positivistic critique of 16

17 18

Though this view coincided with a well-nigh unanimous demand among marxian writers of the thirties for a great expansion of state power to deal with poverty and unemployment: a paradox whose ramifications cannot be fully explored here. Harris, 'Political Thought and the Welfare State', pp. 131-5. R. H. Grossman, Plato Today (London, 1938).

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state power. Rearguard actions were fought for some years by idealist or quasi-idealist theorists such as R. G. Collingwood, A. D. Lindsay and Sir Ernest Barker; but Collingwood's work in the late thirties and early forties was far too oblique and cryptic to attract much following; while the writings of Lindsay and Barker - with their intense emphasis on voluntarism and personal 'service' as the sinews of public welfare began to seem increasingly dated and out of touch (though they were written in an idiom that would have been perfectly intelligible and morally compelling only a few years before).19 The impact of new styles of thought was soon manifest in both academic and popular circles. Discussion of political ideas did not wholly vanish from academic journals of philosophy, but such discussion was increasingly confined either to purely historical matters or to technical issues of language and perception.20 The political and sociological journals that I mentioned earlier changed their style within the course of a few years from speculative articles about the nature of authority and the moral purpose of the state to largely descriptive studies of the nuts-and-bolts working of specific social and political institutions - or to theoretical studies based not on political philosophy but on the new positivistic social sciences. Publications like the Hibbert Journal and the International Journal of Ethics limped along in an increasingly uncertain vein until the late 1940s, and then either radically changed in character or ceased publication. Post-war studies of political thought were few in number and were increasingly dominated by the shadow of linguistic positivism - a shadow that could clearly be seen in the influential studies of T. A. Weldon, whose later works advocated total relativism in the study of different political systems and likened norms of political behaviour to the rules in a game of cricket.21 Some kind of reaction against the earlier predominance of idealism in political and social thought was perhaps to a certain extent inevitable. But the extent and extremity of that reaction appears in retrospect somewhat surprising and paradoxical, given the fact that it coincided with the enormous wartime and post-war growth in the powers of the state; and I want now to turn to the more specific character of politics and government in Britain during the 1940s. An interplanetary observer 19

20

21

Ernest Barker, Reflections on Government (London, 1942); A. D . Lindsay, The Modern Democratic State (London, 1943). There was nothing in the 1940s comparable to the discussions among professional philosophers about government growth and social reconstruction that had taken place during the First World War (see e.g. * Symposium: Ethical Problems of Social Reconstruction', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 17 ( 1 9 1 6 - 1 7 ) , 256). T . A. Weldon, States and Morals: A Study in Political Conflicts (London, 1946); The Vocabulary of Politics (London, 1948).

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23

surveying Britain through a sociological telescope in the middle of the Second World War might have been forgiven for thinking that, far from dwelling amid the ruins of a discredited transcendental political philosophy, Britain looked far more like the prototype of an idealist state than it had done a few years before; and certainly the notion of an over-arching 'general will' being tangibly embodied in the day-to-day life of society fitted Britain in 1940 much better than it had done when Bernard Bosanquet first thought of it in 1894. There was a sense in which the national solidarity fostered by war seemed simply to have solved overnight many of the imponderable problems classically debated by political philosophers; and as commentators like Stephen Spender and Lionel Robbins observed, the great conflicts of political principle that had raged in intellectual circles in the 1930s seemed suddenly to have become redundant. This sensation of living in a society steered both visibly and invisibly by a beneficent general will spilled over into much discussion of post-war reconstruction. It clearly inspired much of the work of Beveridge and other wartime social reformers; and it was symbolised by a speech of Barbara Betts (later Barbara Castle) at the Labour Party conference debate on the Beveridge report, when she called for an end to discussion of theoretical 'generalities' about 'the brave new world' and the beginning of social action.22 A great deal of reconstruction thought was premised upon the assumption that wartime standards of corporate solidarity and devotion to a common cause would survive into peacetime; in the eyes of many there was therefore no particular need to theorise about either the liberty of the individual or the legitimacy of state power. Such views were as common on the right as on the left: the reconstruction committees of the Conservative Party, which set out in the early 1940s deeply imbued with organic and ' Volksgemeinschaft' ideas, shifted during the course of the war towards the much more pragmatic, piecemeal and instrumentalist stance that was to be characteristic of official Conservatism for the next quarter of a century.23 Attempts within Conservative Central Office to promote the alternative vision of F. A. Hayek's Road to Serfdom met with conspicuously little response, from either planners or the wider electorate, until a much later period.24 This sense of the democratic redundancy of political theorising survived into the post-war world, and curiously dovetailed with that intel22 23

24

Labour Party Conference Report, debate on the Beveridge plan (1943). Jose Harris, 'Political Ideas and the D e b a t e o n State Welfare 1940-45', in Harold Smith (ed.), War And Social Change ( L o n d o n , 1987), pp. 2 3 9 - 4 6 . Harriet Overton Jones, ' T h e Conservative Party and the Welfare State', University of L o n d o n P h D thesis, 1992, pp. 106-8.

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lectual crisis of confidence in the whole enterprise of normative political philosophy that I have already discussed. The consequence was that, in marked contrast with the Edwardian period and the inter-war years, much public and academic debate on major social and political issues in the period after the Second World War was curiously devoid of reference to first principles. The legislation that set up the welfare state generated some discussion about whether the nation could afford it (though even on this point debate was more limited than might have been expected) but very little analysis of the impact of welfare upon state power - or upon the rights, duties, attitudes and behaviour of individual citizens.25 The sheer size and scope of the new social services meant that 'welfare' increasingly rivalled the traditional spheres of defence, property and public order as a fundamental rationale and purpose of the state's existence; yet any serious attempt to explore and defend the legitimacy and implications of that role was conspicuous by its absence.26 Awkward questions tentatively raised by Oakeshott and others about the sheer capacity of the organs of the state to devise rational solutions to social problems were left largely unanswered.27 Even theorists and polemicists who favoured further expansion of planning and public services found it far more difficult to define the proper purposes and boundaries of state power than to denounce its dangers and abuses (in the writings of Richard Crossman, for example, invective against 'managerial society', 'the State Leviathan' and 'this new feudalism' figured far more prominently than the claim that there were certain socio-economic functions in complex modern industrial societies which only the state could perform).28 Normative and morally exhortatory language ('fellowship, service, altruism') still played a major part in social policy debate, but rarely within any clearly stated philosophic framework.29 It became increasingly a commonplace - and indeed was viewed as a virtue - that the new social services were neutral, mechanical 25

26

27

28

29

See for example the discussions of the committee on the abolition of the Poor Law, an area of administration which for centuries had been a crucible for rival schools of economic, social and constitutional theories ( P R O , A S T . 7/810 and 828). T h e implications for political philosophy of the n e w welfare functions of the state were touched upon by A. C. Ewing, The Individual, the State and World Government (London, 1947) and J. D . Mabbott, The State and the Citizen ( L o n d o n , 1948); but in both cases the discussion, though intelligent, was brief and inconclusive. Both works were firmly within the waning idealist tradition. Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London, 1962); R. F. Harrold, 'What is the Correct N u m b e r of Nurses?', The Cambridge Journal, 2, 8 (May 1949). R. H . S. Crossman, 'Planning for Freedom', lecture to the Fabian Society, 1955, reprinted in the book of the same title (London, 1965), pp. 64, 72, 84. See, e.g., C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956).

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25

and non-moral in their impact, by contrast with the 'moralistic' and socially coercive services of twenty or thirty years before.30 The welfare state therefore lived for several decades in a kind of historic vacuum of political theory, sustained by its popularity and by its practical success in meeting certain obvious needs, but largely unbuttressed by systematic intellectual support. This is not of course to deny that there was from the start a great deal of impassioned debate about whether government policies were going too far or had not gone far enough; but this was very largely conducted in pragmatic or sentimental terms, rather than in terms of systematic analysis of the proper purposes and boundaries of state action.31 Paradoxically it may even have been the case that the affluence and security brought about by 'state intervention' made possible the growth of choice, mobility and libertarian individualism on a far wider scale than had ever prevailed under freemarket capitalism; thus leading to the gradual piecemeal erosion of the communitarian ties and sentiments on which the welfare state was implicitly based. But what, one may ask, of the school of T. H. Marshall and Richard Titmuss and other distinguished post-war theorists of social policy? And what about the great post-war growth of the newer and more applied social sciences, which clustered around and supplied normative criteria for the development of services within the welfare state? Clearly there is room for disagreement here, but I do not myself see the writings of Marshall and Titmuss as constituting a school of political thought that adequately explored and legitimised the new role of the state in post-war Britain. T. H. Marshall usefully drew attention to the question of rights, and claimed that the new growth of 'social' rights was comparable with the growth of legal, civil and political rights in earlier epochs. 32 But merely calling something a right does not make it a right, and Marshall evaded the issue of how far something which was a product of social action could also be a predicate of that action - a question which was to engage many social and political philosophers later in the twentieth century. Richard Titmuss was an historian of great imaginative power, who had a knack of detecting dramatic issues of principle and historic change in the most prosaic and inconspicuous of 30

31

32

Barbara Wootton, 'Before and After Beveridge', Political Quarterly, 14, 4 (1943), 3 5 7 - 6 3 ; H. L. Beales, ' T h e Passing of the Poor Law', Political Quarterly, 19, 4 (1948), 312-22. There were many percipient critical comments on this absence of systematic thought at the time; but the critics themselves seemed puzzled about h o w to fill the gap. (See, e.g., D o n a l d G. Macrae, 'Domestic Record of the Labour Government', Political Quarterly, 20, 1 (1949), 1-11; and N . A. Smith, 'Theory and Practice of the Welfare State', Political Quarterly, 2 2 , 4 (1951), 3 6 9 - 8 1 . T . H . Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (London, 1950).

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social institutions (demographic trends, tax structures, day-to-day relationships between citizens and officials). But as a theorist he scarcely began to tackle the problem of rooting the welfare state in general principle: and Titmuss's social and political thought seems to me uneasily torn between a moral commitment to 'community', 'service' and 'citizenship' derived from Edwardian idealism, and an approach to practical policies that was largely utilitarian.33 New developments in the social sciences (particularly economics, psychology and criminology) undoubtedly contributed a strongly theoretical dimension to certain aspects of post-war public policy, most notably in such areas as casework, control of deviance, and fiscal and monetary management.34 But social sciences which focussed upon diagnosis by experts rather than customary intuitive knowledge or rational choice by citizens merely reinforced the challenge to the traditional concerns of moral and political philosophy - and confirmed the widespread sense of many in the 1950s that classic 'political theory' was in terminal decline.35 Ill Did the weakness of political theory matter? Did it make any difference that policy-makers in the post-war era were not inspired or constrained by a culture of academic and public discussion that might have given the new functions of the state a more than merely pragmatic legitimacy? In the short term, perhaps not. Many would argue that high politics in Britain has always been hermetically sealed from the world of grand theory, even in epochs when theory was at its grandest, and that in this respect the post Second World War era was just following the general rule. At a more grass-roots level, surveys of public opinion in the 1950s found a high degree of popular contentment with and confidence in the institutions and functions of the British state.36 And it may perhaps be the case that, just as happy families have no history, so nations that feel themselves to be just and contented have no need for anything so abstract and artificial as systematic 'political thought'. 33

34

35

36

A n approach exemplified by his The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy (London, 1970). See John Bowlby, 'Psychology and Democracy', Political Quarterly, 17, 1 (1946), 6 1 - 7 6 ; and for a critique of such trends, Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Social Pathology (London, 1963). See introduction to Peter Laslett (ed.), Politics, Philosophy and Society, first series (London, 1963), pp. vii-xiv; and Isaiah Berlin, 'Does Political Theory Still Exist?', in Peter Laslett and W. G. Runciman (eds.), Politics, Philosophy and Society, second series (London, 1972), p p . 1, 33. Gabriel A l m o n d and Sidney Verba, The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, 1963).

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27

It seems arguable, however, that the strange death of serious analysis of the functions of the state in the epoch after the Second World War was of wider and possibly damaging significance in British political history in a number of different ways. Some of these were as follows. First, it contributed to a certain impoverishment and stereotyping of day-to-day political discourse, and to a reluctance among politicians on all sides to pursue intransigent problems to their logical conclusions. When public figures did make efforts to ground the new public services in some kind of general principle, they invariably fell back upon the idiom of an earlier generation - upon public spirit, duty, co-operation and national solidarity - which frequently sounded hollow, even if it was not. 37 Secondly, it led to the displacement of political by technical goals, and fostered encroachment by experts and professionals upon the roles of citizens. This was one unfortunate side-effect of Keynesian economics, which as a political theory was premised on the view that there were certain forms of medicine which citizens would not take - so therefore the medicine must be suitably doctored by pain-free economic management. It was evident also in the widespread tendency of 1950s social workers to treat the residual 'poor' as candidates for psychotherapy. Thirdly, it led to widespread lack of understanding about the historical meaning of many major items of contemporary policy - items which often appeared to be merely practical and pragmatic, but which in fact had profound significance for the underlying long-term character of both state and society. Instances of such lack of understanding can be found at many points where state activity bisected and redefined the lives of individuals and communities: in policies towards families, education, immigration, transport, sexual morality and madness (to name but a few). And, fourthly, it fostered trivial and confused visions of the institutions of the state: visions in which central government was viewed, often simultaneously and by the same persons, both as inherently intrusive and oppressive and as a toothless and passive beast of burden, to which massive social functions could be continually transferred without any ensuing shift in the structure of political power.38 Such confusion left the welfare state and the public services in general peculiarly vulnerable to theoretical attacks from both right and left when eventually public spending fell into popular disfavour - and when,

37

38

C. A. R. Crosland's The Future of Socialism, for example, continually invoked the old communitarian catchwords of ethical socialism — whilst at the same time deriding the old culture of puritanism and stoicism from which such ideals had sprung. A point made by W . A. R o b s o n , ' L a b o u r and Local Government', Political Quarterly, 24, 1 (1953), 3 9 - 4 5 .

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concurrently, philosophical discourse about the fundamentals of state power began to revive.39 39

This chapter is part of a larger study on the intellectual history of modern social policy, being carried out with assistance from the British Academy and the Nuffield Foundation. I should like to express my thanks to those two bodies for their encouragement and support.

3

'Boundaries' in theoretical language about the British State Michael Bentley

I When and why did spatial metaphor become part of normative language about the State in Britain? It has acquired so much familiarity in recent years - especially through the Thatcherite topos of 'rolling back the frontiers of the State' - that it stands in danger of turning transparent and unremarked. But in failing to notice its pervasive presence we remain blind to a strange and time-specific way of talking about politics. Writers of any period cannot but recognise that any given State has a territorial element: to identify one in relation to another involves stipulating which piece of land or stretch of sea comes under its distinctive, and normally exclusive, sway. So when Alfred Zimmern, all too conscious in 1918 of how States consisted of fields and towns and coasts that might suffer their boundaries to be crossed by invaders, decided on a definition of the State as, 'a territory over which there is a government claiming unlimited authority',1 he hardly said anything worth confuting. The age of imperialism among European powers (and of Frederick Jackson Turner in the United States) had already quickened its romantic language by allowing the frontier a role as cultural metaphor. Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set; or so it seemed to Lord Appin when he remarked, during one of John Buchan's more excruciating conversations among the imperial elite, that all 'this modern talk of empire seeks to extend the boundaries of Britain so that a quarter of the world shall be one state'.2 Understood in this non-problematic sense, the notion of a 'State' has considerable force in the theory of international politics but none in discussions of internal relations between governors and governed. More interesting is the translation of a spatial description of a unit of sovereignty into the language within which 1

2

Zimmern in Nationality and Government (London, 1918), quoted in Harold Laski, 'The Pluralistic State' (London, 1919), reprinted in David Nicholls, The Pluralist State (London, 1975), appendix B, p. 146. John Buchan, A Lodge in the Wilderness (London, 1906), p. 296.

29

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sovereignty itself is conceived and debated. This language - or, more accurately, this dialect - has become valuable to British individualists who need a register in which to say what is wrong with a State3 that over-masters its citizens: it makes available images that help underline danger and strengthens the sense of threat. And those dialects, for there are more than one, have a history as well as a function. This essay will take an interest in the origins and modulations of some of them.4 'State' in its weak territorial sense occurs in political texts long before the stronger sense emerges in the first half of the nineteenth century. Even historians who lack Macaulay's sharp picture of that stronger sense have no compunction over speaking of a 'British state' as early as the twelfth century - meaning, simply, the territorial extent of where a ruler's writ ran.5 The stronger usage rested on a connection between State (often defined crudely as government) and society (often not defined at all). And that relation was taken by nineteenth-century writers to have been confirmed in the Reformation and its aftermath in Britain. The State, by absorbing the Church and itself becoming confessional, pressed its claims to exert sovereignty over all the commonwealth. Far from speaking the language of boundaries, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries instituted (as it seemed from the high ground of nineteenth-century criticism) the very reverse: a vocabulary of fusion in which the commonwealth, 'some regiment or policy under which men live', has broken down the barrier between Church and State to become an undifferentiated community of which the king is 'the highest uncommanded commander'.6 However unclear the consequences of the fusion. 3

4

5

6

The question whether to capitalise the term is inescapable and insoluble. I have chosen to represent State in this sense with a capital letter throughout this chapter while retaining within quotations the style followed by the contemporary text. I shall not take space here with a discussion of the usefulness of 'languages' in political theory: for an introduction the reader can go to Anthony Pagden's introduction to Pagden (ed.), The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1987,1990) and especially to J. G. A. Pocock's introductory essay on 'The Concept of a Language and the metier d'historiert (pp. 19-38). We can note, however, that 'boundary language' has enjoyed much prominence recently as an analytical tool. See, for example, Michael Freeman and David Robertson, The Frontiers of Political Theory (Brighton, 1980); Charles S. Maier, Changing Boundaries of the Political (Cambridge, 1987); Guglielmo Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy (London, 1991). See Michael Bentley, 'The British State and its Historiography', in W. Blockmans and J.-P. Genet (eds.), Visions sur le developpement des etats europeens: theories et historiographies de Vetat moderne (Rome, 1993), pp. 153-68. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (London, 1662 edn), p. 188. Cf. William Gladstone's gloss in coloured retrospect: 'And thus much at least is clear: there can be no doubt that [the Eighth Book of the Laws] teaches or rather involves, as a basis and precondition of all its particular arguments, the great doctrine that the state is a person, having a conscience, cognizant of matters of religion, and bound by all consti-

'Boundaries' in language about the state

31

the nineteenth-century State did not figure among them; and it follows that one struggles to identify any unambiguous 'boundary dialect' in the texts of the intervening period. Naturally one notices rulers and discovers metaphors in which their relation to their subjects is given immediacy. Hobbes has a tantalising play with space and liberty, for example. 'For whatever is so tied, or environed, that it cannot move but within a certain space, which space is determined by the opposition of some external body, we say it hath not liberty to go further.' But then he pulls away because such metaphors are inapplicable to human beings ('that which is not subject to motion, is not subject to impediment') and returns to an imagery of 'chains' which behave less like halters than peculiar receptors. They are 'artificial chains, called civil laws, which [men] themselves, by mutual covenants, have fastened at one end to the lips of that man, or assembly, to whom they have given the sovereign power; and the other end to their own ears'.7 No individual will seek personal space from his governor, else why come out of the state of nature in the first place, an arena in which everyone had 'enjoyed' social space by the acre but also all the insecurities that Hobbes alleged to be its accompaniment. 'He that brings an action against the sovereign, brings it against himself.'8 He, the new citizen, is not playing a ball-game, inhabiting a world of mere practice. He is rather acknowledging his part in a geometry; and the geometry of commonwealths, like all others, has its axioms and rules.9 Had Hobbes lived to witness the geometry of John Locke he would have found it non-Euclidean but perhaps have seen a certain comity in Locke's determination to ban boundaries as a form of logical solecism. Instead of 'bounds' we have 'fences' but there is little point, apparently, in discussing their usefulness against a tyrannical ruler. 'For if it be asked what security, what fence is there in such a state against the violence and oppression of this absolute ruler, the very question can scarce be borne.'10 Once turn towards a civil society, conversely, and the question again need not be borne because it cannot arise. The citizens have emerged from the state of nature in an act of resignation: they have left '[t]his executive power of the law of nature and . . . resign[ed] it to the

7 8

9 10

tutional and natural means to advance it.' Gladstone, The State in its Relation with the Church (London, 1838), p. 9. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (ed. Michael Oakeshott, Oxford, 1946), ch. 21, pp. 137-8. Ibid., ch. 20, p. 136; ch. 21, p. 144. He is willing to discuss 'the bounds of that power' granted to the sovereign (ch. 22, p. 147) but of course the assumption behind measuring them makes the concept self-defeating unless the commonwealth be reduced to anarchy through the impotence of its sovereign. Ibid., ch. 20, p. 136. John Locke, Two Treatises on Government (1690), Bk III, ch. 7, sec. 93, p. 162.

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public'; and they have done so for one overwhelming reason - to secure 'the preservation of their property5 which Locke's otherwise nonHobbesian state of nature had left insecure.11 It followed that, although the theoretical problem of ensuring that 'men . . . be restrained from invading others' rights' might arise in an imperfectly formed commonwealth, in a Lockean civil society its very fons et origo would work in a contrary direction on behalf of the citizens so that 'the power of the society or legislature constituted by them c[ould] never be supposed to extend farther than the common good'.12 The death and resurrection of the 'body politic' as an organising idea really wants its own essay. Certainly it would help understanding if one could ascertain with some precision when the anthropomorphism of seventeenth-century political thought gave way to the mechanism of late eighteenth-century writing and when, under the cover of Darwinian language, it made its return after 1870. What seems demonstrable is that the supression of boundaries implicit in Hobbes and Locke does not consistently survive the end of the eighteenth century. Perhaps in part the shift owes something to a well-known importation of scientific vocabulary, especially from the mechanical sciences and most notably within a constitutional doctrine which stressed the appropriateness of check-and-balance imagery. In part it doubtless derived also from an assertiveness in the expanding legal profession as it looked for textual fixities to keep control over a society undergoing unsettling change. Fundamentally, indeed, an explanation might best be sought in confusions of social status, dislocation within industrialising towns, major attacks on traditional modes of rural existence and the substitution of a conflict-inspired mode of thought for one resting on cosmic harmony. That such new modes retained their organic patina one can concede at once. Blackstone's State is neither a tree nor a clock; but it assuredly remains 'a collective body composed of a multitude of individuals united for their safety and convenience, and intending to act together as one man'.13 Burke's arboreal state likewise pays attention to the community of interest in which the people have a voice that no sovereign dare ignore: I have nothing to do here with the abstract value of the voice of the people. But as long as reputation, the most precious possession of every individual, and as long as opinion, the great support of the state, depend entirely upon that voice, it can never be considered as a thing of little consequence either to individuals or II 12 13

Ibid., ch. 7, sec. 89, p. 160; ch. 9, sec. 124, p. 180. Ibid., ch. 2, sec. 7, p. 120; ch. 9, sec. 131, p. 182. Blackstone quoted by Jeremy Bentham in his Fragment on Government (London, 1776 edn), p. 126.

'Boundaries' in language about the state

33

governments. Nations are not primarily ruled by laws: less by violence . . . Nations are governed by the same methods, and on the same principles, by which an individual without authority is often able to govern those who are his equals or his superiors; by a knowledge of their temper, and by a judicious management of it.14 Yet within this organicism one finds hints of discrete divisions. In the case of Blackstone he dilates on the concept of state-qua-man by identifying an agency of sovereignty - '[a] supreme, irresistible, uncontrollable authority' - whose tasks will presumably include settling disagreements among individuals by asserting the boundaries of individuality. 15 As for Burke, his willingness to see the State as two 'parts' leaves open the obvious question, what is to happen when those parts have learned to police their mutual boundary and eventually come to covet one another's territory? Others went further in making that future explicit. An obvious strategy when examining boundary dialects involves turning to the proto-anarchism of Godwin whose Political Justice seems likely a priori to provide a dissonance when heard after Burke's more harmonic intervals. Godwin does not, it is true, have an industrialised state against which to rail in the way Carlyle and Ruskin would later declaim; but he finds no difficulty in blowing away organicist ideas by simply reasserting an individualist ontology in the most brutal terms and ridiculing the absurdity of that fiction by which society is considered, as it has been termed, as a moral individual. It is in vain that we endeavour to counteract the laws of nature and necessity. A multitude of men, after all our ingenuity, will still remain a multitude of men. Nothing can intellectually unite them, short of equal capacity and identical perception. So long as the varieties of mind shall remain, the force of society can no otherwise be concentrated than by one man . . . taking the lead of the rest . . . All government corresponds, in a certain degree, to what the Greeks denominated a tyranny.16 From tyranny it seems no great step to 'encroachment', the avoidance of which constitutes one of his oracular 'principles'. 17 Although territorial language comes into the discussion, however, it does so in a literal way as a form of imperialism or aggrandisement; and boundaries, when they 14

15

16

17

'On the Present Discontents', in B. W. Hill (ed.), Edmund Burke: On Government, Politics and Society (London, 1975, New York, 1976), pp. 75-6. So a 'state' has two 'parts', namely 'government' and 'people'; but they are joined like Siamese twins. Cf. ibid., p. 79. Blackstone, Commentaries, vol. I, p. 48, quoted in Harold Laski, Authority in the Modern State (New Haven, 1919), p. 24. William Godwin, An Enquiry concerning Political Justice and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (London, 1793), Pelican edn, p. 550. Ibid., 'Summary of Principles', p. 76.

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enter the argument as metaphor, function as an ethical guide in a passage on assassination and tyrannicide, to which he lends his support when ethical borders have been crossed and '[t]he boundaries that have hitherto served to divide the honest man from the profligate are gone. The true interest of mankind requires, not the removal, but the confirmation of these boundaries.'18 Here, then, is one coarse dialect of libertarian individualism. It does not present an hermetic account of the units within a state so much as a moral protest against the effects of tyranny. The metaphor had nonetheless begun an interesting career and, even in this primitive form, offered possibilities for depicting the agglomerations of government and the wider idea of a 'State' over the next half-century. Two traditions of thought call for identification in the period before 1832 and both had appeared implicitly in eighteenth-century reflection about the State. The first represents that organicist persuasion seen in Burke which, invigorated by the great German generation of Fichte and Herder, flowered in Britain with Coleridge, Carlyle and Arnold. Even taken by himself, Samuel Coleridge appears counter-thematic in any account of individualism. His metaphysics remained an analysis of 'errors and diseases of the body politic'; and, rather than adopt the language of mechanism to resist an unwelcome State, he reasserts the duty of the national Church to 'form and train up the people of the country to obedient, free, useful, organizable subjects, citizens and patriots, living to the benefit of the State, and prepared to die for its defence'.19 He combines a view of the Church's function with various certainties about its past and produces in the mixture a legitimation of the State's doing whatever it needs to do (or undo) with an authority that makes resistance unthinkable since it, the State, operates as an avatar for the wider 'nation' - 'that blended result of Laws, Language, Customs, long enjoyment of personal and political Independence, illustrious Forefathers and whatever else constitutes a Grand national character and makes a Nation more than an aggregate of Individuals'.20 This means that the State, authentically conceived, cannot usurp. True, there have been spectacular cases of apparent usurpation. Before the Reformation, for example, 18 19

20

Ibid., p p . 295, 540. On the Constitution of the Church and State (London, 1830), pp. 54, 56. Leadership did not rest only in the hands of the Church, of course, but within a broader 'clerisy' which included 'the sages and professors o f . . . all the so-called liberal arts and sciences, the possession and application of which constitute the civilization of a country, as well as the Theological'. Ibid., p. 46. Quoted in J. H . Grainger, Character and Style in English Politics (Cambridge, 1969), p. 215.

'Boundaries' in language about the state

35

large masses were alienated from the heritable proprieties of the realm, and confounded with the Nationality under the common name of church property. Had every rood, every peppercorn, every stone, brick and beam, been retransferred, and made heritable, at the Reformation, no right would have been invaded, no principle of justice violated. What the state, by law - that is, by the collective will of its functionaries at any one time assembled - can do or suffer to be done; that the state, by law, can undo or inhibit.21 This form of spiritual erastianism, of which the nineteenth century was to hear a great deal, offered compelling reasons for kicking over the barriers between Church and State and re-mapping their respective boundaries until one overlay the other like a transparency. The rolling back of the State (to the extent that it had rolled forward) would have prejudiced rather than enhanced the ability of the Church to produce social betterment. Earlier generations had understood this perfectly well, or so Thomas Arnold alleged in 1834; it was recent theology that had confused social thought: the State, being the only power sovereign over human life, had for its legitimate object the happiness of the people, - their highest happiness, not physical only, but intellectual and moral; in short the highest happiness of which it has a conception. This was held, I believe, nearly unanimously till the eighteenth century. Warburton, the utilitarians, and I fear Whately maintain, on the contrary, that the State's only object is 'the conservation of body and goods.' Thus they play . . . with the hands of the upholders of ecclesiastical power, by destroying the highest duty and prerogative of the Commonwealth.22 To announce a doctrine of this kind implied that organicism was not nearly so dead as Godwin had claimed; it also invited a rebuff from those proto-liberals who hated the language of resignation in the face of loss of individual rights. When liberals knew something of history> as did Macaulay, the challenge to romantic mysticism became very sharp indeed and deployed the vocabulary of invasion as part of its point. It is not by the intermeddling of Mr. Southey's idol, the omniscient and omnipotent State, [Macaulay sneered in the Edinburgh Review] but by the prudence and energy of the people, that England has hitherto been carried forward in civilization . . . Our rulers will best promote the improvement of the nation by strictly confining themselves to their own legitimate duties, by leaving capital to find its most lucrative course, commodities their fair price, industry and intelligence their natural reward, idleness and folly their natural punishment, by maintaining peace, by defending property, by diminishing the price of law and by observing strict economy in every department of the state.23 21 22

23

Church and State, p. 5 1 . T h o m a s Arnold to W . W . H u l l , 3 0 April 1934, in A. P. Stanley, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold (2 vols., L o n d o n , 1881), vol. I I , p. 378. * Southey's Colloquies o n Society', Edinburgh Review, (Jan. 1830) printed in Lord Macaulay's Essays and Lays of Ancient Rome (London, 1899 edn), p. 122.

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In this language of holding back the State the second tendency of thought suggests itself and presents a chronological context for the theme of this essay. The onset of utilitarian clear thinking about the nature of sovereignty dates from the same period; it clarified the argument even if it did so on the basis of a misjudged and later abandoned definition. Certainly John Austin's lectures of 1832 left no room for Coleridgean comfort or for the blurred affirmations of the Liberal Anglicans. The State was not a complex of interrelated particulars, nor some sponge pudding confected out of social units: it was finite and identifiable. 'It denote[s] the individual person, or the body of individual persons, which bears the supreme powers in an independent political society.' It meant that a State gave orders and that a people obeyed them. To talk about people obeying themselves was to fool with words because Burke's two parts of the State did not behave as discrete segments of an interresponsive whole; they were rather links in a chain of command. Sovereignty ceased at a stroke to float around mysteriously in the ether. Indeed by the end of lecture six it had become expressly grounded in a sentence that would find its way into much legal and political argument and whose italics gave it the resonance of Archimedes' principle. 'If a determinate human superior, not in a habit of obedience to a like superior, receive habitual obedience from the bulk of a given society, that determinate superior is sovereign in that society . . ,'24 The reduction of the State to a definable sovereign power provided the precondition for a political theory resting on boundaries. By the 1830s, then, we have a dual recognition: a sense of what a 'State' is and warnings about its tendencies to invade, infringe and constrain. It therefore becomes inviting (and dangerous) to project the story forwards in order to join together these changes with John Stuart Mill or twentieth-century individualists - showing perhaps that recent Conservatism is a liberal derivative25 in its determination to expose the individual to the weight of personal responsibility for social survival. Casting this line backwards proves no difficult task: Mrs Thatcher learned what she knew from Hayek; Hayek belongs to a tradition running back to Mill and Sidgwick: that government governs best which governs least . . . Cliches cluster around the argument like grapes. 24

25

John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (London, 1832), ed. H . L . A. Hart ( N e w York, 1954), pp. 194, 226n. From a growing literature about Thatcherism one might instance Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The politics of Thatcherism (Basingstoke, 1994); but early studies also can reflect the tendency. See Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, The Politics of Thatcherism (London, 1983); Martin Holmes, Thatcherism: Scope and Limits 1983-7 (Basingstoke, 1989); Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma: Britain under Thatcherism (London, 1992).

'Boundaries' in language about the state

37

Caution seems necessary in the light of two distinctions. The first separates a party doctrine from a climate of political ideas on the ground that these levels of discourse have different functions.26 What this implies for the history of boundaries is that their deployment as rhetorical construction may originate in purposes quite foreign to the concerns of political theorists and may, therefore, have their own context for enquiry. The second distinction has more urgency for the present problem. Individualism in Britain has not comprised a consistent and unequivocal language: it has given voice to a number of dialects whose users would not always understand one another. In its many texts commenting on the relationship between State and society, it presents a Janus face. One style of expression will be termed here 'organic' individualism; its defining characteristic lies in grounding judgements about the State in a conception of interdependence of political and social arrangements and an expectation of harmony - theoretically, at least between the various elements of society. The reverse face exposes what one might think of as 'inorganic' individualism. This collection of devices brings with it the idea that 'society' is a polite fiction and argues a strong ontological case about individuals as the sole 'real' element in a polity. This form of latter-day nominalism sweeps away the State as a universal with no more meaning than 'society' and follows Austin in seeing the State as no more than a government and a government as no more than superior force. Both dialects have words for boundaries but their linguistic operation is different. Both have a past, but it is not the same past. II The best-remarked boundary in the whole of modern political thought must be Mill's demarcation of an individual's self-regarding from his or her other-regarding ones - a principle which establishes an important point of reference for ethical philosophy but which also implies a political recommendation in applauding the presence of the State in controlling the deleterious effects of other-regarding behaviour while confining it to that domain and thereby excluding it from the selfregarding action of citizens whose 'negative freedom' thus gains protection from an over-zealous State.27 To establish the boundary, however, 26

27

I have developed this distinction elsewhere and shall not rehearse it again here: see Michael Bentley, T a r t y , Doctrine and T h o u g h t ' , in Michael Bentley and John Stevenson (eds.)j High and Low Politics in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1983), pp. 123-53. ' T h e State, while it respects the liberty of each in what specially regards himself, is bound to maintain a vigilant control over his exercise of any power which it allows him

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was almost implicitly to cross it. Mill's own examples excluded greyer areas of the self-regarding which a State (or the 'society' which Mill seems to see as its ultimate conditioner) could hardly refuse to enter. Perhaps one might anticipate that an Idealist such as Bernard Bosanquet would later declare the boundary a fake 'which cannot be traced and therefore cannot be respected'.28 We shall see that the heirs to Coleridge would pull down many such fences after 1870. It is more significant for individualist argument that Herbert Spencer had seen the crossing long before Mill saw the boundary. Social Statics had explained the futility of all such boundaries as early as 1850, most directly in its chapter on 'The Limits of State Duty': To the assertion that the boundary line of State-duty . . . is at the wrong place, the obvious rejoinder is - show us where it should be drawn. This appeal to expediency philosophers have never yet been able to answer. Their alleged definitions are no definition at all . . . Between the one extreme of entire non-interference, and the other extreme in which every citizen is to be transformed into a grown-up baby, there lie innumerable stopping places; and he who would have the State do more than protect, is required to say where he means to draw the line . . .29 Because Mill's name has so often appeared in a canon of individualist resistance to the State and Spencer's in an organicism linked to Darwin's, one easily misses the way in which their conceptions of state and citizen might be juxtaposed. Mill, for all his stress on individuality, sees his citizens ultimately as social constructs and socially answerable: he approves of the monitoring of social and ethical norms and produces a view that connects this idealised society to a role for the State to play in it.30 Spencer explains the coming into being of the State and society in organic, evolutionary language. But his view of the relationship between government and governed is the reverse of organic. By asserting, indeed insisting on, a particular ontology and defying anyone to begin anywhere else, he leaves little room for alternative understandings of what individuals are like. They either have 'moral feeling' or they do not. If they have it, then their 'society' may survive because it will contain the only 'force by which men's actions are to be restrained within certain

28 29 30

to possess over others', On Liberty, ed. John Gray and G. W. Smith (London, 1991), p. 118. Cf. Sir Isaiah Berlin's seminal exposition of the distinction in Two Concepts of Liberty (Oxford, 1958). For a recent re-examination of this distinction, see Horacio Spector, Autonomy and Rights: The Moral Foundation of Liberalism (Oxford, 1992). Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State ( L o n d o n , 1899), pp. 15-6. Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (London, 1850, N e w York, 1896), p p . 127, 131. See Michael Bentley, The Climax of Liberal Politics (London, 1987), pp. 4 1 - 3 . For an influential critique of Mill that stresses the authoritarian sub-text, see Maurice Cowling, Mill and Liberalism (Cambridge, 1963).

'Boundaries' in language about the state

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bounds'; for 'no legislative mechanism can really increase its results'. If they do not have it, then the future will be grim since no government can put it there. In whatever degree we lack the qualities needful for our state, in the same degree must we suffer. Nature will not be cheated. Who should think to escape the influence of gravitation by throwing his limbs into some particular attitude, could not be more deceived than are those who hope to avoid the weight of their depravity by arranging themselves into this or that form of political organization.31 The State has to have boundaries - Spencer was to become increasingly aggressive about that over the next thirty years - but they were needed less to protect individual freedoms considered worthwhile in themselves than to follow the cosmos in retaining the only true ontology and the link, as crucial in society as in the jungle, between actions and their consequences. He builds his idea of a society by beginning with a mental picture of a specific individual and then asking questions about the preconditions for that individual's survival and betterment. His conclusion is that the State can only detract from those preconditions by distorting the austere compression of cause and effect which propels the universe. The use of boundary-language from within a view of social organism helped engender an important criticism of individualism pur et simple from the 1870s and emerged as the justificatory theory for a revamped Liberalism at the level of Liberal Party doctrine from the 1890s. A second line of attack, which particularly concerns us, retained the refusal to countenance socially grounded concepts of sovereignty. It developed into a significant minority persuasion in the twenty years after 1880, enjoyed a brief afterlife in the current of pluralism during the first two decades of the twentieth century and resurfaced as a party doctrine within a curious form of Conservatism after 1975. That the organic mode of individualism gained ascendancy in Britain one may credit to a series of contingencies which have already attracted attention here. Hooker's erastianism and Gladstone's celebration of it comment obliquely on one component. For if relations between Church and State had taken a different turn after the Reformation, then the individualists of later years would have had ample scope for deploying their vocabulary to protect and enhance the divide. This (did not happen except at the margins of influence. From Gladstone it would have seemed strange in any case. From someone such as Edward Miall, whose Anti-State Church Association one might have expected a promising 31

Spencer, Social Statics, p. 116.

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platform for boundary-drawing, it does not happen either. On the occasion of Miall's trumpeted motion in the House of Commons in 1871 to disestablish the Church of England, the absence of such sword lines seems strange in retrospect. There was the usual attack on conformity and monopoly, 'sometimes bare-faced and repulsive, sometimes veiled and unobtrusive5. There was the familiar incantation that, '[considered simply in relation to its own purposes, the union of the State with the Church has been a mistake, a failure, and a wrong. ["Hear, hear" and "No!"].' There was the certainty parroted everywhere after 1869 that 'what was unjust in Ireland is unjust here'. Yet Miall granted that 'the State was the political phase [sc. face?] of the entire community'; and although the State had in this part of its duties carried out some 'injudicious meddlings', no sense emerges from the text of Miall's speech of an objection to meddling in itself.32 Devoted Conservative Churchmen such as Robert Cecil, later 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, and Roundell Palmer, later 1st Earl of Selborne, often expressed unhappiness over the State's interference in matters ecclesiastical, but neither would espouse a separatist language of resistance. Cecil only went so far as to repeat Mill's distinction between self- and other-regarding actions,33 but Palmer swung explicitly against an anti-statist position. Stimulated by Gladstone's first Irish Land Act, for example, he recalled a letter he had written as a young man to his father: Rights of property, such as they exist among us, seem to be incidents of civil society, created as well as defined by the supreme authority of the State, and subject to the control of that authority throughout all time, dejure as well as de facto. To restrain the exercise of this controlling power, there is public policy on the one hand, and distributive justice on the other . . . Circumstances will be very rare indeed, under which such a power ought to be used . . . But still, I cannot admit that [rights of property] are always, in theory and on principle, inviolable.34

Sensibilities of this kind helped those holding them towards the view that 'the church was not likely to be the moving party in measures for the dissolution' of its connection with State.35 What seems to have happened, as David Nicholls argues in his recent analysis, is that modern images of God in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries became themselves images of the State at any given moment, 'doing 32

33 34

35

Hansard: Parliamentary Debates, 3s, C C V I , cols. 477, 4 8 5 - 6 , 488, 4 9 1 , 9 M a y 1871. I am grateful to D a v i d Bebbington for reminding m e of Miall's potential significance in this account. Cecil, 'The H o u s e of Commons', Quarterly Review, 231 (July 1864), 2 6 3 - 4 . Palmer to father, n.d., in 1st Earl of Selborne, Memorials: Personal and Political 1865-95 (2 vols., L o n d o n , 1898), vol. I I , pp. 1 4 0 - 1 . Gladstone, State in its Relations with the Church, p. 3.

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more perfectly what the state [was] failing to achieve'. 36 There was no need for a language of bulwarks and ramparts until the pluralists of Figgis's generation discovered a use for one. A second explanation for the persistence of organic understanding of the State and society lies within a maturing conception of what it meant to be a State and how its sovereignty should be conceptualized. We have watched Austin's characterisation of sovereignty open new possibilities for the development of an explicit language of resistance. If it be granted that a utilitarian theory of sovereignty had this effect, then it must follow that the undermining of utilitarian notions of the State may also have produced new difficulties for individualist thinkers. From the 1860s not only did such an undermining begin to occur but it led to a paradigmatic shift in ways of thinking about the State that would have great significance for the next century. A key text in the transformation was Sir Henry Maine's Ancient Law, published in 1861. Directed largely at issues raised by Bentham and Austin, Maine's study criticised traditional understanding of the 'state of nature' on which social contract theory had rested and concluded that no such state had ever existed - which its proponents had often not denied - but also that its various forms could only have been invented by people, savages in some accounts, who had been soaked in legal language, which made a nonsense of what many writers had done with the idea. He saw that the function of the state of nature united Hobbes and Locke far more than their contrasting view of its character separated them: [T]he Lockeian theory of the origins of Law in a Social Compact scarcely conceals its Roman derivation . . . on the other hand, the theory of Hobbes on the same subject were purposely revised to repudiate the reality of a law of nature as conceived by the Romans and their disciples. Yet these two theories . . . resemble each other strictly in their fundamental assumption of a nonhistoric, unverifiable, condition of the race. Their authors differed as to the characteristics of the prae-social state, and as to the nature of the abnormal action by which men lifted themselves out of it into that social organization with which alone we are acquainted, but they agreed in thinking that a great chasm separated man in his private condition from man in society . . ,37 36

37

D a v i d Nicholls, Deity and Domination: Images of God and the State in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London, 1989), p. 30. It is noticeable that Fitzjames Stephen's well-known reply to On Liberty rested on an important fragment of the argument on religion. 'If there is a G o d and a future state, reasonable m e n will regulate their conduct by a wider kind of utilitarianism.' But although he counterposes Mill's surrogate religion to an explicit version of his o w n , and although a defensive individualism is the result, he does not identify the State as the origin of his malaise and no sophisticated theory of the State emerges. Cf. J. F. Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (London, 1873), p. 262 and passim. Ancient Society (London, 1861, N e w York, 1864), pp. 1 1 0 - 1 1 .

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Maine scrutinised 'primitive' societies and showed that their operation had different implications from those alleged in social contract theory. The distinct sovereign envisaged by Austin has no place in such communities in Maine's account. Neither did it in modern law which 'had scarcely reached the footing of custom' and in which ex post facto sentencing constituted the only reliable guide to what the law meant.38 The chain of command from the sovereign to the people offered no accurate model of how societies evolved through phases in their legal structures: 'from status to contract' would become a refrain among late Victorian intellectuals. And once societies could be observed prescribing laws to themselves in various complex ways, boundaries melted away. It became intolerable to build defences against the people's own indirect wishes in this age of Rousseauesque enthusiasm.39 Beside Rousseau stood the shade of Hegel by 1870. Beginning with Sterling's The Secret of Hegel in 1865 and continuing through a dynasty of Idealist apologists, a group of British philosophers grounded Coleridge's mysticism in a systematic philosophical exposition. The generation of T. H. Green, R. L. Nettleship, Edward Caird (and a fortiori the contemporaries of Bernard Bosanquet, D. G. Ritchie and Henry Jones) extended and popularised a conception of political thought that stressed the organic assumptions of Kant and Hegel. Without the aid of a state of nature or an escapist contract, they constructed a unity of sovereign and people that rendered frontiers between them not merely unnecessary but odious. To call upon the range of evidence available would test the boundaries of this essay: let one example suffice. Ritchie's Principles of State Interference (1891) perhaps most directly attacks individualist shibboleths by first giving the social organism a Hegelian flavour, so that 'an organic whole is not merely the sum of its parts. The body corporate is mysterious, if one likes to call it so, mysterious like the personality of the individual.' Once the State is assimilated to such a mystery then crass remarks about interference miss the point. Besides, '[t]hat we call a measure "interference" is no proof that the measure is bad; we may be interfering with what is bad. It is no proof even that individual liberty even in its quite negative sense - is being diminished.' 40

This style of thought characterised by social holism in various concentrations would have mattered even if it had not helped give rise to a party doctrine within the British political system. That it played some 38 39

40

Ibid., p. 7. N o t enough has been made of the vogue for pre-revolutionary writers in this generation: they stood on the threshold where 'history' finished. D . G. Ritchie, The Principles of State Interference (London, 1891), pp. 6 9 - 7 0 , 95 (emphasis added).

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role within the 'New Liberalism' of the 1890s and 1900s gave it still greater leverage. Quite what stress to place on so diffuse a collection of positions, whose justification seemed perplexing to any who lacked philosophical training, is a question that has provoked enough controversy elsewhere to allow it a quietus here. The relevance of this corpus of evidence to the theme of conceptual boundaries comes in the representation of state interference or involvement in society as a form of liberation rather than constraint because of the State's unique potential for providing forms of individual freedom, less in what Charles Taylor calls the 'opportunity-sense' of the word than in its 'exercisesense'. Rather than provide opportunities that most people lack the means to take, as the minimalist State is alleged to do, the maximal State can make it possible for the poor and socially unprivileged to exercise their freedom in a real way by giving them guarantees about employment, health insurance, pensions and so on. Herbert Spencer's jibe that providing these things turned a Liberal government into a Tory one felt very dated by 1900.41 What appears far more significant is that organic individualism became overwhelmingly a Liberal party doctrine and lay at the centre of much-remarked changes of direction in Victorian Liberalism in favour of welfarism and the apparatus of an interventionist State. It is this deep-structured language of organic individualism that has attracted attention since 1918. We see it oozing leftwards from the Liberal Party in the 1920s42 and rightwards in the 1930s as a LiberalTory centrism that would persist into the days of Edward Heath and enjoy a rudderless revival after 1990.43 But it goes deeper than this. Until the severe shifts of demeanour inside the Conservative Party in the mid-1970s, organic individualism held so much in its grip that its control verged on the hegemonic. Even Hayek did not say what Mrs Thatcher thought he had said: indeed he went out of his way occasionally to deny the propositions that Thatcherites brought down from Sinai. His essay on 'Individualism: true and false' had taken as its theme the damage done to political thought when ideas of 'society' were swept away.44 41

42

43

44

See the opening sentence of Spencer's most polemical work, The Man versus the State (London, 1884). Michael Freeden, Liberalism Divided: A Study in British Political Thought 1914-39 (Oxford, 1986). I have discussed this facet of modern party doctrine in a separate essay: see Michael Bentley, 'Liberal Toryism in the Twentieth Century', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1994). Hayek pilloried 'the silliest of the c o m m o n misunderstanding: the belief that individualism postulates (or bases its arguments on the assumptions of) the existence of

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Nor did Conservative policy statements deploy that language of rolling back boundaries which one might have expected. The two world wars gave ample opportunity for getting up the vocabulary of prising the State out of peace-time society as part of the project of 'normalcy'. But the manifestos did not reflect it. Bonar Law's in 1922 recommended 'the minimum of interference at home and of disturbance abroad'; but that was all. Baldwin's in 1929 was ameliorist and organic in tone if not in promise. Churchill inevitably allowed himself some expansiveness in 1945. 'This is the time for freeing energies, not stifling them', the doomed manifesto ran. 'Britain's greatness has been built on character and daring, not on docility to a State machine.' And apart from the 'bonfire of controls' rhetoric, that is how the language stayed. Indeed even in the Thatcherite period the election broadsides tended to concentrate on 'clearing away the obstacles to expansion'; on 'blockages', 'bottlenecks', 'restrictions', 'cutting a clear path through the jungle of bureaucracy'. This language broadcast a commitment to the family and an opposition to the over-powerful State but said nothing about where the boundaries of enemy territory were supposed to run.45 They reflected the priorities of a prime minister who remembered more of Attlee than Hayek, as Peter Jenkins pointed out in a mischievous account. Born in 1925, [he wrote] fourteen when war broke out, at Oxford 1944-7, her formative memories were not of the dole queue but of the queue outside the butcher's, not of the means test but of the ration book. Her crucial political experiences were gained under socialism at home and communism abroad; she was a daughter of the age of austerity, a child of the Cold War.46 Nor had her own proclivities fully displaced older traditions of Burkean community. One account of Conservative doctrine published as late as 1981 made no pretence of dismissing 'society'. 'The role of the State', it argued instead, 'is to maintain order and harmony while allowing the community to express its own preferences and to develop its own diversities. In this way does the community have a real existence: it is a

45

46

isolated or self-contained individuals, instead of starting from m e n whose whole nature and character is determined by their existence in society . . . [I]ts basic contention is quite a different one: it is that there is no other way towards an understanding of social phenomena but through our understanding of individual actions directed towards other people and guided by their expected behaviour.' Individualism: True and False (London, 1945), pp. 7 - 8 . Quotations from twentieth-century manifestos are taken from F. W. S. Craig, British General Election Manifestos 1900-74 (Aldershot, 1990). Peter Jenkins, Mrs. Thatcher's Revolution (London, 1987), p. 82.

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living, organic essence.'47 It is not difficult to see these sentiments in the radiation of John Major's governments. Where, then, does the language of boundaries come from in modern Britain? It may be significant that Hayek himself, seeking to show that 'the sphere of enforced command ought to be restricted within fixed limits', had to go back to Acton's Lectures on Modern History (1906) for a suitable quotation.48 The suspicion begins to strengthen that modern boundary-language, far from representing a resurrection of the WhigLiberal Party, is a relic of late Victorian argument which had become lost to the twentieth century until recent moods inside the Conservative Party exhumed it. The terminologies of Thatcherite doctrine and Hayekian political language are best sought in a now-forgotten dialect articulated within the British political intelligentsia between 1870 and the First World War, a resistance language spoken by those who appreciated the direction of State development but who chose to oppose it from a conservative standpoint as subversive of certain fundamental insights about the basis of government and the rights of the governed. Ill Boundaries come into conversation as tolerance tautens and patience wears thin: when you stretch a point, as the wit said, you draw a line. In the 1860s this mood about the State did not exist, apart from the trauma concerning reform of the franchise in 1867. High farming persisted; the People had their William; tariffs had not returned to the agenda; selfdoubt had little place in British culture. In the later 1870s that atmosphere began its radical change of hue as first urban and then rural depression sapped confidence and provoked reactions against the incipient doctrines of socialism that claimed to have a cure for it all. At first a sense of mild bewilderment is what strikes up through the texts - as though the writers were working from ancient maps. c[W]e have no new constitutions to discover and set up', Salisbury conceded in 1873 with an eye on the recent Commune in France, 'but within their boundary our politics are scarcely less chaotic. Our political geography has to be reconstructed. The old frontiers separate those who in opinion are not divided, and classify under one name men who have now no principle in common.'49 By the end of the decade that neutrality of judgement had 47

48 49

Philip N o r t o n and Arthur Aughey, Conservatives and Conservatism (London, 1981), p. 2 8 1 . Hayek, Individualism, p. 29. ' T h e Progress of the Radicals', quoted in Paul Smith (ed.), Lord Salisbury on Politics (Cambridge, 1972), p. 307.

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all but gone. Individualist thinkers who had not followed Mill or Green in moving towards a more statist position applied their sense of linedrawing to the mounting presence of the State. For every 'Liberal' who chose the road of Sidgwick,50 there were others who kept to the older course. Had Mill lived another decade, it has been acutely observed, he might well have died a proto-Fabian. Henry Fawcett, who died in the year of the Fabians' founding, did not do so;51 and many others stood where Fawcett had stood. Not all of them used boundary-devices to protect their individuals from government. Salisbury, for example, was often more exercised in the 1880s by the need to protect government and property from a populace that threatened to turn into their joint master.52 But for the inorganic individualists of the last quarter of the nineteenth century the flow of evil ran in the reverse direction. Mystical presentations of 'Community' and 'organism' gave rise to irreverence rather than inspiration: Social organism! As well talk of an ant-organism, of a beaver-organism, or of a wolf-organism. As well argue about a bird-organism held together by the common medium of the air. If we were all stuck together like the Siamese Twins, then the term 'organism' might do; but until that event happens, such a word, taken in anything like a literal sense, is a gross and unmeaning exaggeration.53 It became important to externalise agencies of power and put a stop to what governments did to interfere with what individuals had to be left to do for themselves. It might be the threat of economic protection that would elicit an insistence that 'both history and theory point to the conclusion that the more we curtail the nominal powers and duties of government, the greater the actual efficiency of its remaining functions' 50

51

52

53

Sidgwick had his cake and ate it in his influential Elements of Politics ( L o n d o n , 1891). H e expressly disowned Austin (p. 611). H e nevertheless located sovereignty in a determinate way in those acting on behalf of government: 'no other persons' commands are widely obeyed by adults from fear of physical force'. H e then claimed, however, that obedience to command was only a part of political obligation and had recourse to 'will' and 'opinion' and 'custom' as though mildly infected by Green (pp. 5 9 8 - 9 ) . Giacomo Becattini, 'Henry Fawcett and the Labour Question', in Lawrence Goldman (ed.), The Blind Victorian: Henry Fawcett and British Liberalism (Cambridge, 1989), p. 141.

T h e famous essay o n 'Disintegration' (1883) laments the reduction of the role of government to that of 'tenant at will of the House of Commons'; cf. Smith, Lord Salisbury, pp. 346-7. T h e tendency of the latter, moreover, is to come rushing into property agreements, as over Gladstone's Irish land proposals, in order to impose terms advantageous to the under-dogs - 'coming down with an act of power'. See his speech on the second reading of the 1881 Bill, Hansard (Lords) C C L X I V , col. 261, 1 Aug. 1881. M . D . O'Brien, The Natural Right to Freedom (London, 1893), p. 14.

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would become.54 It might be educational policy after the Forster reforms, prompting voluntarists to reject the prospect of finding themselves 'forced into union by external power'.55 It might be the populist repercussions of the third reform act and its promised democratisation that would press conservatives to build fortifications against democracy's 'own defects by limiting the powers of the State' and declaring invalid the 'interference of government in matters outside its normal duties'.56 Potential areas of irritation proliferated as the State's responsibilities expanded year by year. Joining all these issues together, and informing the dialect within which individualist responses were expressed, was a redefinition of the State as government or parliament, a resurgence of Austin's views about what sovereignty involved, a suspicion of 'authority' and 'will' as licence for taking positions which words such as 'power' and 'obedience' placed in a very different light. Whether Spencer (or any single individual) popularised this language is hard to say. Certainly he contributed to its currency and strengthened the presumption of a divided social cosmology: the State on one side, the citizens on the other. In his own case the vocabulary is not always territorial; he often turns to the language he knows best, that of engineering and natural science. So 'sphere' becomes a central noun57 and in all societies there are two of them - the sphere of 'family life' (where the need for nurture brooks no denial if the young are to survive at all), and 'social life' (where nurture has exactly the opposite effect of depriving individuals of the characteristics that allow them most effectually to compete and survive in the adult world). 'The intrusion of either mode into the sphere of the other, would be destructive either immediately or remotely.'58 When viewed from the standpoint of the citizen confronting an active State apparatus, this intrusion of spheres easily slides into a concern about 'external invaders'. Subordination of the individual to the State in some degree there has to be, else unfreedom will result: Spencer stays clear about that. But his principle of demarcation is no less strident, viz. that 'such a trenching on the freedom and property of each' will pass muster only in so far as it is 'requisite for the better protection of his freedom and property'. And this in turn means 'a limit 54 55

56 57

58

Baden-Powell, Protection and Bad Times (London, 1879), pp. 4 2 - 3 (emphasis added). Auberon Herbert, 'State Education: A Help or Hindrance?', Fortnightly Review, 34/28 (July 1880), 57 (emphasis added). Wordsworth Donisthorpe, Individualism (London, 1889), p. 71 (emphasis added). T h e dialect of 'separate spheres' was broadened by Victorian commentators in a variety of directions that would repay investigation. For an excellent definition of its use in issues of gender, see Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women's Suffrage in Britain (London, 1978). Spencer, The Man versus the State, p. 137.

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to the powers of Parliaments'.59 For all his stress on the metaphor of 'organism', therefore, Spencer's social theory cuts across its familiar implications for sovereignty by resting society on a more ultimate ontology, in the way that Hayek would attempt half a century later. When adding a few 'Reflections' to the 1894 edition of his Autobiography, Spencer explicitly drew attention to this aspect of his writing: A cardinal doctrine of M. Comte and his disciples is that individual men are products of the great body in which they exist... But it is no less true, or rather it is much more true, that the society is created by its units, and that the nature of its organization is determined by the nature of its units. The two act and react; but the original factor is the character of the individuals, and the derived character is the character of the society. The conception of the social organism necessarily implies this. The units out of which an individual organism builds itself up, will not build up into an organism of another kind: the structure of the animal evolved from them is inherent in them. So, too, is it in large measure with a society.60 His animals may not have defended territories but they gave encouragement to those who did. These men enjoyed their best years in the 1880s and 90s and it is not hard to see why. Not only had 1884 suggested (falsely) a coming democracy, but the arrival of German intellectual socialism, together with social-democratic experiments such as Joseph Chamberlain's Unauthorized Programme of 1884^5, also threatened rifts in the popular understanding of the State. Among intelligent witnesses who felt the weight of such changes, without seeing a clear way through them, one can often discern in retrospect some of these anxieties, as when Mandell Creighton tried to give a supervision from his Cambridge chair to the young Edward Grey in 1885. The 'old Radicals' had been one thing: opponents could respect them. But 'I see nothing in common between them and the charlatanism of - [deleted: presumably Chamberlain?] who would not tell you what he thought a State would do, or what were the limits of legislative action, or what was the basis of individualism as against State direction.'61 Others could have told him, especially anyone involved in the Liberty and Property Defence League, founded in 1882.62 Its presiding spokesman, the Earl of Wemyss, so hated the 59

60 61

62

Ibid.s pp. 179, 183 (emphasis added). N o t e that Spencer seeks protection for freedom, not the provision of it. Spencer, Autobiography (2 vols., L o n d o n , 1904), vol. I I , p. 465. Creighton to Grey, 1 D e c e m b e r 1885, in Louise Creighton, Life and Letters of Mandell Creighton (2 vols., L o n d o n , 1904), vol. I, pp. 3 4 8 - 9 . T h e League emerged from the 'State Resistance Society' (1880), itself a sport of the 'Political Evolution Society' (1873). See N . Soldon, 'Laissez-Faire as D o g m a : T h e Liberty and Property D e f e n c e League', in K. D . Brown (ed.), Essays in Anti-Labour History (London, 1974), pp. 2 1 0 - 1 2 .

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ambiguities of State involvement that he went beyond boundaries and denned the duties of the State as purely negative ones (without seeing that the State could not avoid positive involvement if it were to prevent those evils that even Wemyss thought it ought to prevent). Against so unsocialist an opponent as Lord Salisbury, he worried about the mild legislation to improve housing that the Conservative prime minister had countenanced lest government should take it upon itself to build houses for the poor. 'He could conceive of nothing', he told fellow Peers in 1884, 'which would be more prejudicial than that, because if they began on this system, where were they to stop?' It was the familiar argument that once the boundary between State and private responsibility had been moved at all from its defensive position, no one, lekst of all its movers, could tell where it would end. 'If they built homes, would they furnish them? Would they put fire in the grate or food in the cupboard? And if not, on this principle, why not?' 63 As another of the League's leading lights put it in the same year (and in a turn of phrase relevant to our theme), 'the spirit of the league [was] one of resistance to any overstepping by the legislature of its normal boundaries'.6* The languages involved in redefining the state either according to some minimalist range of functions or by granting it maximal status on the grounds of its co-extension with society could occasionally be shared by individualists of all kinds. But the ontological point could never be concealed for long and, when it appeared, so did the boundaries that a world of discrete units recommended. Once grant, after all, that '[a] 11 that really exists is the individual surrounded by a number of beings similar to himself and the State can only come into view as 'simply the sum total of the activities of individual Englishmen'. 'Strictly speaking', O'Brien urged in 1893, 'there is no such thing as a State. The term expresses a pure mental fiction, like acquosity, luminosity, and similar abstract figments.'65 In the boundary-language of the 1890s this ontological premise becomes more shrill and determined. No one persevered in it with more fixity of purpose than Auberon Herbert, who planted the flag of resistance like some latter-day cavalier: We must convert the common view of the State and the individual. We have slipped into the idea that the individual exists for the State; that the State is a sort of over-lord, a god which is supreme over us. All that superstitious mental

63 64 65

Hansard, C C L X X X I , cols. 1703-3, 22 Feb. 1884. Wordsworth Donsithorpe, Liberty or Law? (London, 1884), p. 9 (emphasis added). O'Brien, The Natural Right to Freedom, p. 10.

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construction must be tumbled over. The State is only a creation of our own hands, a servant, a useful tool.66

Yet how plausible could appeals of this kind seem by the 1890s? The economy had bumped along the bottom of a trough for twenty years; the first march of the unemployed had taken place a few years before these statements appeared; ideas about old age pensions and safety legislation in the workplace were already in the air. The liberation on offer from Lord Wemyss looked less than attractive when organicists and collectivists held out the promise of a genuine opportunity for individuals to improve their standard of life via the protection of the community. O'Brien's facile depiction of the State as the 'corporate action of individual despots'67 resurrected in the imagination not only John Austin but also Charles Dickens. That the State had entered a period of redefinition clearly contributed to the individualists' apparent antiquarianism. But so, too, had the idea of an individual undergone a shift of meaning. Forgetting for the purpose of discussion the growing complexity of modern States, one could miss altogether (as Herbert and his aristocratic friends did) the degree to which the concept of an individual had undergone transformation in an intellectual environment soaked in the language of sociology and collectivism.68 Herbert's world, beyond his brother's park gates at Highclere, had become, unbeknown to him, a plural universe of intermeshed institutions and group-personalities: one in which churches had replaced church, trade unionism trade unions. It was a context of voluntary societies, pressure groups, congealing local and regional economies, all the chaos of agglomeration and fragmentation that an industrialising society tends to drag behind itself. To see the single-celled individual as the building block of that plural complexity struck commentators even at the time as peculiar. All that was left to individualists was to switch tack and to redefine themselves as the true prophets of pluralism. Tluralists', though they did not use the term until after 1914, embrace a number of significant writers among whom one might count Neville Figgis, Ernest Barker, A. D. Lindsay and the pre-Marxist Harold Laski. Their project involved retaining the most telling parts of the individualist message by beginning, again, with ontology: a picture 66

67 68

' T h e Cabinet Minister's V a d e - M e c u m ' , Nineteenth Century, 34 (Oct. 1893), 521. T h e 'slipping' seemed to some writers no less than an historical process, in which '[h]istory is the record of the gradual and painful emancipation of the individual from the socialistic tyranny of slavery, feudalism, and centralized authority'. Cf. T h o m a s Mackay, The English Poor (London, 1889), p. v. O'Brien, The Natural Right to Freedom, p. 7. See the helpful discussion of Stephan Collini in his Liberalism and Sociology: L. T. Hothouse and Political Argument in England (Cambridge, 1979).

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of the 'real world5. They then extended their picture into a style of normative argument that stressed the falsity of monolithic views of the State and emphasised the challenge to political thought posed by the complication of the State in its modern forms. Possibly the programme was hopeless from the start; it certainly gave rise to theoretical ambivalences which ultimately destroyed the coherence of pluralism as a distinctive mode of thought. 69 During the last decade of peace before 1914 its apologists nevertheless produced a version of State theory that differed in a self-conscious way from previous ones. Older conceptions of the State based on Hegelian organicism had already come under critical scrutiny in America from the pragmatist scepticism of Dewey and William James. In Britain these ideas found a grateful response among critics of the Wilhelmine State and its apparent English voice in books such as Bosanquet's Philosophical Theory of the State (1899); or perhaps among those who worried about welfarism in a less tutored way, as in John Buchan's improbable seminar of notables in darkest Africa.70 Their tone did not match Bosanquet's sophistication, at least until Laski confronted him in a systematic way some years later. They used a vocabulary grounded in the everyday and they reflected suspicion about intellectuals who could not see something so obvious as that 'Society is larger than the State and is not to be confounded with it; and [that] there are interests outside both.' The 'modern citizen' was distinctive precisely because he 'ha[d] a life outside the State'.71 Thinking otherwise presumably led one in the direction of 'the intellectualist fallacy' - and, sure enough, Graham Wallas had his boundaries. He pointed out in his famous study of 1908 that not only had the Austinian mode of sovereignty fallen apart under the weight of purely quantitative considerations (small-scale societies had now become 'great' ones) but also because the language of analysis had imported terms from the negotiating table, the convention and the international treaty. Personally he thought that the Congress of Berlin marked the beginning of this phase. Since then 'everyone ha[d] become familiar' with a terminology that described international sovereignty not as an absolute but as a sliding 69

70

71

M y understanding of pluralism has been greatly strengthened by D a v i d Runciman's work: see his doctoral dissertation, 'Pluralism and the Theory of the State in English Political T h o u g h t , 1900-1939' (Cambridge, 1993). H i s duchess in The Lodge in the Wilderness is one such in 1906: * Without being a dogmatic individualist, I protest against the idea of the State incurring such vast responsibilities as providing employers with labour and moving populations around the world. I admit that the province of the State has been widened, but such an insane stretching of boundaries seems to m e to court disaster' (p. 216). Sir John Macdonnell, ' T h e M o d e r n Conceptions of Liberty', Contemporary Review, 106 (Aug. 1914), 199-200.

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scale of predominance:' "Effective occupation", "Hinterland", "Sphere of Influence" - to which the Algebras Conference ha[d] perhaps added a lowest grade, "Sphere of Legitimate Aspiration"'.72 What could be imported into the consideration of external sovereignty could percolate too into the internal. The mood generated by a sense of new conditions and a pluralist vocabulary in which to represent them leaves evidence in discussions of sovereignty in general but in some more limited areas in particular. For Neville Figgis, arguably the most coherent and effective of the early pluralists, the crucial test-case of these new relationships took him little time to identify for, as an Anglican monk in the Mirfield community, he felt its boundaries every day. His burden did not have a theoretical or normative form: the independence of the Churches from the State did not seem to Figgis to require advocacy but merely recognition. But the recognition had a touch of aggression about it. If the separation were real, as he took it to be, then that separation was a starting-point for argument, not a recommendation. Boundaries between Church and State existed whether churchmen wanted them or not, whether theorists liked them or not. In a word, when the Church asked the State to acknowledge that it has real powers for developing itself, it is asking not for a privilege to be conceded but for the facts to be realized . . . We must know the limits as well as the province of the Church within the modern State . . . It is a new problem. In the medieval world, and for a long while after the Reformation, Church and State appeared as merely different departments of the same institution. Of course they quarrelled, as Government departments do . . . Now, however, this has ceased even in appearance. What we have to secure is our corporate existence, our real life functioning inside a State, itself made up of complex elements and tolerating all religions. The tolerant State is the true State. The uniform State of the past was founded on a lie . . . But the State has yet to learn that she must tolerate not merely individual liberty but the religious society, must know that its life is real and must develop and cannot (not must not) be stopped.73 Other pluralists had less urgent concerns than Figgis but they extended the style of his argument to more general treatments of State and society, patiently trying to tease apart what the Idealists had glued together. Unlike the primitive individualists of the 1880s they did not try to deny the State's reality or utility: it supplied a 'rampart' in Lindsay's word, a fortified boundary, behind which it could carry out its work of protecting and policing social interests as a whole. But 'that 72 73

Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (London, 1908), p. 178. J. N . Figgis, ' T h e Church and the Secular Theory of the State' (1905), reprinted in David Nicholls, The Pluralist State (London, 1975), Appendix A, pp. 139, 141.

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[was] no reason for identifying the rampart with what it protected]'. 74 Unlike the generation of Spencer and Herbert and Donisthorpe, they acknowledged that the State had its own territory and that it needed a large one. But that was no reason, either, for forgetting that all large tracts of ground are made up of a patchwork of smaller ones, each with its own character, needs and affiliations. 'I do not know England', Laski said in a chatty moment, 'before I know, say, Berkeley Square and London; from Berkeley Square and London I come to know England.'75 He thus reduced the boundaries of the State to the dimensions of personal observation, located in the reality that he could see and touch. He knew because he was there. IV Confidence in the face of a spatially removed State barely survived the First World War. Doubtless the war made it harder for soi-disant realists to persuade readers that the State was something other than society, distant and surrounded by ramparts. 'Your Country Needs You' could be read in a territorial way but readers pointed at by Kitchener knew that the State stood behind him. What this transformation suggested was not so much the death of individualism as the instability of all forms of inorganic political thought in an environment of total war. The very language of an extreme individualist such as E. S. P. Haynes seemed wildly anachronistic after four years in which the respective vocabularies of society and state had become fused.76 Laski now talked about the 'fused good will' that lay behind coercion but in truth it was will and coercion that had merged.77 Of course this put Laski into the difficult definitional waters that Spencer and his followers had avoided and in his impressive Authority in the Modern State he did his best to disavow Austinian sovereignty in a new language 74

75

76

77

A. D . Lindsay, 'State and Society', in L. Creighton et al., International Crisis (London, 1915), p. 97. I owe this reference to D a v i d Runciman. Harold Laski, ' T h e Sovereignty of the State', in his Sovereignty ( N e w Haven, 1917). H e went on to quote William James as his validator. For an echo of Lindsay's 'ramparts', one might turn to Laski's 'safeguards' on the following page at whose meaning, as so often in Laski's less literate passages, one can only guess: 'We c a n n o t . . . take for granted the motives of governmental policy, with the natural implication that w e must erect safeguards against their abuse. T h e s e , I venture to think, the monistic theory of the state at no point, in actual practice, supplies.' ' T h e Pluralist State' (1919), printed in N i c h o l l s , The Pluralist State, Appendix B, p. 148. See Haynes, The Case for Liberty ( L o n d o n , 1919). Haynes fretted over 'Fabian' policies that had taken hold of the country since 1880 and left 'no logical or reasonable ground for resisting any interference by the state with marriage, or the birth-rate, or clothes' (P. 24). Laski, Sovereignty, p. 12.

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of 'absorption' and 'sweeping in'. Yes, the individual participated in the State but, no, he or she was never absorbed into it as if by digestion. Yes, he surrenders part of his nature to the collectivity but, 'no man surrenders his whole being'.78 So the point of Laski's project (and that of his enlightened individual) must lie in 'limiting] state absorptiveness'.79 This ambition never crystallises to the point at which he can show how it will be done; and at this point the structure falls down. Just before he closes his theoretical prologue to a study of selected European thinkers, there is an appeal to emotion rather than apparatus: In the external relationships of the state it is clear that the Machiavellian epoch is drawing to a close. The application of ethical standards to the foreign policy of nations is a demand that has secured the acceptance of all who are concerned for the future of civilization. Yet is it assuredly not less clear that the internal life of the state requires a similar moralization? We realise now the dangers of a state that makes power the supreme good and is careless of the purpose for which it is exerted. We have sacrificed the youth of half the world to maintain our liberty against its encroachments. Surely the freedom we win must remain80unmeaning unless it is made consistently effective in every sphere of social life. As events transpired, even Laski did not long remain persuaded by his own opinions. Amid the social stratifications of the inter-war years, vertical group interests paled before those of horizontal class, just as a concern with moralised freedom seemed less urgent than the problems of capitalist crisis. But he would have deserted anyway. He was too intelligent to fail to see the contradictions of the position. For those, meanwhile, who escaped the life of the mind in the 1920s, there remained the language of Baldwinian organicism with its climate of 78

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Laski, Authority, p. 4 3 . Laski's individual retains his moral sense and therefore presumably harbours ideas about what a legitimate State can do, with positive expectations that the State must fulfil. Ibid., p. 22. Ibid., p. 122. T h e nearest that Laski had come to fleshing out what a pluralist conception of the State and individual/group would involve had similarly fallen short of specific recommendation: It denies the oneness of society and the state. It insists that nothing is known of a state purpose until it is declared; and it refuses . . . to make a priori observations about its content. It does not deny that the individual is influenced by the thousand associations with which he is in contact; but it is unable to perceive that he is absorbed by them. It sees society as one only in purpose . . . In such an analysis the state is only one among many forms of human association. It is not necessarily any more in harmony with the end of society than a church or a trade union, or a freemason's lodge. W h e n we insist that the state is a society of governors and governed, it is obvious that its superiority can have little logical reference only to the sphere that it has marked out for its o w n and then only to the extent to which the sphere is not successfully challenged. {Ibid., p. 6 5 - 6 )

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sacrifice for the common weal, service for the common purpose.81 Of course Baldwin's doctrines occasionally led him to give the State a role that it could not achieve; it hardly mattered from the point of view of Conservative strategists. His central concern lay in articulating a range of social holism for which Anglicanism (not the hermetic one of Figgis but the erastian one of Gladstone) provided both flame and solder. Later leaders seldom retreated from this fusion of State benignity and social amelioration - at least until 1975. Whether at the hands of Churchill in his later years, of Macmillan or of Heath, British Conservative doctrine - the spiritual home, once, of inorganic individualism - met the twentieth century on its own terms, accepted the mixed economy, comprehensive schools, the National Health Service, even nationalised industries, and offered a Burke-cum-Disraeli language about the oneness of society and the responsibility of the State for the citizen as much as vice versa. When Margaret Thatcher and her colleagues changed all that by reaching back to an older tradition they did not become 'liberals' and it perpetuates confusion to say that they did. What Mrs Thatcher took from Hayek he had taken from a generation of mostly Conservative thinkers before the First World War. Her denial of the existence of 'society', her resurrection of an individualist ontology, her determination to redraw boundaries and roll back frontiers, had once been a Conservative programme but one suppressed in a Disraelian history that the party had invented for itself with all the acumen that the Asquithians later brought to Liberal history. After the years of fudged Butskellism it sounded pretty radical as a plan: it would have seemed only a little less so to Baldwin's audience. But Salisbury would have known what she meant and Donisthorpe and Herbert would have written prose-poems to the new Gloriana. None of this denies the place of that vein of Liberal-Toryism that wants to declare boundary-language unsubtle, immoral and un-Conservative. The point is rather that this continuity voices only one of the competing language-systems within British individualism since the 1860s. Mrs Thatcher's problem, from the vantage point of political theory, did not stem from her failure to be a Conservative. Her world failed for the same reason as Spencer's and Laski's: it proved incoherent when made to find a fit with practice. The boundary dialect had sounded persuasive for a short time — say between 1870 and 1900 - as the State entered a phase of enormous expansion. Thatcherism spoke from within so radically different a context that articulating its drift often seemed as strained as the prime minister's 81

See Philip Williamson, 'The Doctrinal Politics of Stanley Baldwin', in Michael Bentley (ed.)j Public and Private Doctrine: Essays in British History presented to Maurice Cowling (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 181-208.

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accent. Perhaps the central tension was this. An inorganic style of individualism cannot appeal to an organic concept of 'society' whose existence it rejects. Nor can it attract enthusiasm for the State whose tyranny forms a major part of its rhetorical allegations. So long as all Conservatives can feel comfortable in thrusting the State back behind its rampart and celebrating the atomism of their social arrangements, the language appears plausible. In the reality of a supposed organic crisis in 1982, language had to change and with it went consistency. The public had to be made to feel that they were now in the same boat when the language had denied both the togetherness and the boat. They had to be compelled to rejoice with the British State - 'Rejoice!' - when their enemy's boat sank. If a persuasion can be holed like a battleship, then the boundary disposition went down with the Belgrano.

The twilight of the British state? Henry Dubb versus sceptred awe David Marquand

'I have changed everything5, Mrs Thatcher is supposed to have said in 1976.l For long her claim was taken at face value, by outraged opponents no less than by eager supporters. Her fall, and the misadventures of her successor, have brought a new perspective. Post-Thatcher Britain is beginning to look suspiciously like pre-Thatcher Britain; the supposedly transformed state of the revolutionaries like the unregenerate state of the ancien regime. In this essay, I explore the possible reason for this curious state of affairs. I suggest that its origins may lie in the hold on the imaginations of the British political class of three competing visions of the British state, all of which have deep roots in British history, but all of which have been emptied by the upheavals of the last twenty years or so. I conclude with the hope - for it is only a hope - that a fourth and more promising vision, equally venerable, but in this century less influential, may replace them. The 'twilight' of my title is, in short, intended to be a warning, not a prediction. Twilight certainly lies in wait for states that cannot adapt to the momentous changes now taking place in civil society and in the international economy. Some spectacular examples have occurred quite recently. And there is no divine law exempting the British state from the need to adapt. But it is up to us to decide whether we do so or no. The visions exhibited I begin, like a barrister introducing a case, with three exhibits. Each exhibit is a quotation. Each quotation seems to me to represent a particular vision, or understanding, or perhaps myth of the British state. I shall suggest that the interplay between these three visions or myths holds a key - 'a' key, not 'the' key - to the history of the British state over the last fifty years or so. I shall argue that, for a variety of reasons, each of these visions has lost or is losing its persuasive power and moral 1

Patrick Cosgrave, Margaret Thatcher: Prime Minister (London, 1979). 57

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authority. Finally, I shall speculate as to whether the British political tradition has the intellectual and moral resources to inspire an alternative vision, closer to the realities of the modern world. Exhibit 'A' is a quotation from a speech to the House of Commons, made by Winston Churchill on 15 May 1945. Note the date. It was one week after the broken German armies had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies: one week after the most spectacular triumph in the whole history of the British state. Churchill was moving a Humble Address to the Sovereign, congratulating him on the successful conclusion of the war in Europe. In the circumstances, a certain vainglory might have been forgivable. There was none: or, if there was, it was not a military vainglory. Churchill began by pointing out that the British sovereign embodied 'a multiple kingship unique in the world of today and so far as 1 know in the history of the past5. Then he went on: Of this multiple kingship we in these islands are but a single member, but it is a kingship to which all the other Governments of the Empire feel an equal allegiance and an equal right. It is the golden circle of the Crown which alone embraces the loyalties of so many states and races all over the world . . . . . . We are fortunate indeed that an office of such extraordinary significance should be held by one who combines with an intense love of our country and all his people a thorough comprehension of our Parliamentary and democratic constitution. Well may it be said, well was it said, that the prerogatives of the Crown have become the privileges of the people . . . . . . If it be true, as has been said, that every country gets the form of government it deserves, we may certainlyflatterourselves. The wisdom of our ancestors has led us to an envied and enviable situation. We have the strongest Parliament in the world. We have the oldest, the most famous, the most secure, the most serviceable monarchy in the world. King and Parliament both rest safely and solidly upon the will of the people expressed by free and fair election on the basis of universal suffrage. Thus this system has long worked harmoniously, both in peace and war.2 Exhibit 'B' is less dramatic, both in language and occasion. Its author was a still unknown young Irishman called George Bernard Shaw. It comes from an essay entitled 'The Transition to Social Democracy', which Shaw contributed to the Fabian Essays of 1889. Shaw's purpose was to persuade his fellow-socialists - many of whom then disagreed with him - that the appropriate vehicle for their project was the state. At the beginning of the century, he conceded, it would not have been. In those days of jobbery and bribery, before the three great Reform Acts, 'incompetence and corruption' were 'inherent state qualities, like the acidity of lemons'. But, says Shaw, no longer. 2

Hansard: Parliamentary Debates,fifthseries, vol. 410, cols. 2305-7, 15 May 1945.

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Make the passing of a sufficient examination an indispensable preliminary to entering the executive; make the executive responsible to the government and the government responsible to the people; and State departments will be provided with all the guarantees for integrity and efficiency that private moneyhunting pretends to. Thus the old bugbear of State imbecility did not terrify the Socialist; it only made him a Democrat. But to call himself so simply, would have had the effect of classing him with the ordinary destructive politician who is a Democrat without ulterior views for the sake of formal Democracy - one whose notion of Radicalism is the pulling up of aristocratic institutions by the roots - who is, briefly, a sort of Universal Abolitionist. Consequently, we have the distinctive term Social Democrat, indicating the man or woman who desires through Democracy to gather the whole people into the State, so that the State may be trusted with the rent of the country, and finally with the land, the capital and the organization of the national industry - with all the sources of production, in short, which are now abandoned to the cupidity of irresponsible private individuals.3 Exhibit ' C , by contrast, is very dramatic indeed. It comes from an address delivered to the St George's Society on St George's Day, 1968. The author was Enoch Powell, in those days still a prominent Conservative politician. His theme was the rediscovery of England and the English identity which, in his view, had to follow the end of empire. This is how he begins. Herodotus relates how the Athenians, returning to their city after it had been sacked and burnt by Xerxes and the Persian army, were astonished to find, alive and flourishing in the midst of the blackened ruins, the sacred olive tree, the native symbol of their country. So we today, at the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of a demolished glory, seem to find, like one of her own oak trees, standing and growing, the sap still rising from her ancient roots to meet the Spring, England herself. The present generation of the English, Powell continues, has come 'home again after years of distant wandering'. Having returned, it has discovered an unexpected affinity with earlier generations, generations before 'the expansion of England', generations whose inscrutable effigies are to be found in England's country churches. Suppose they could talk to us, he asks, what would they say? This is his answer: One thing above all they assuredly would not forget, Lancastrian or Yorkist, squire or lord, priest or layman; they would point to the kingship of England and its symbols everywhere visible. The immemorial arms, gules, three leopards or, though quartered of late with France, azure, three fleurs de lis, argent; and older still the Crown itself and that sceptred awe in which Saint Edward the Englishman still seemed to sit in his own chair to claim the allegiance of all the 3

George Bernard Shaw, 'The Transition to Social Democracy', in Asa Briggs (ed.), Fabian Essays (London, 1962 edition), p. 216.

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English. Symbol yet source of power, person of flesh and blood, yet incarnation of an idea; the kingship would have seemed to them as it seems to us, to embrace and express the qualities that are peculiarly England's: the unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not be aware of it.4 So: 'the golden circle of the Crown', whose prerogatives have been mysteriously transmuted into 'the privileges of the people'. State departments equipped with all necessary 'guarantees of integrity and efficiency'. The 'sceptred awe' of Saint Edward the Englishman recalling the 'sacred olive tree' of the Athenians. What do these images imply? The visions examined Exhibit 'A', Churchill's victory speech, I take to represent a vision of the state which I shall call 'whig imperialist'. Central to that vision is a notion of balance - of balance between freedom and order, rulers and ruled, progress and stability. Central also are the notions of peaceful adaptation, timely accommodation, responsive evolution. In Harold Nicolson's marvellous political novel, Public Faces, a pompous Foreign Office official called Arthur Peabody, and known to his staff as 'old Peabottle', meditates on the nature of foreign policy. He likens it to 'a majestic river, flowing in a uniform direction, requiring only, at moments of crisis, a glib, but scrupulous, rectification of the banks'. 5 That is whig imperialist statecraft in a nutshell. Civil society is a majestic river, flowing in a uniform direction. The role of the state is to administer the occasional glib rectification of the banks. Statecraft politics - is, in R. A. Butler's phrase, 'the art of the possible': an art 'responsive to the demands of each new age, empirical as to method, resourceful in expressing itself in popular idiom'. 6 Constitutional rigidity, born of fixed principles, is to be avoided at all costs. It is impossible to lay down in advance what the role of the state should be. As John Maynard Keynes put it in his essay, 'The End of Laissez-Faire', the agenda and non-agenda of Government, as he called them, cribbing from Bentham, cannot be determined 'on abstract grounds'. The question of what the state should do and what it should leave to private individuals can be answered only 'on its merits in detail'. 7 By the same token, it is foolish and dangerous to try to protect civil rights or liberties through some formal code. Their true protection 4 5 6 7

J. Enoch Powell, Freedom and Reality (ed. John Wood), paperback edition (Kingswood, Surrey, 1969), pp. 338-9. Harold Nicolson, Public Faces, A Novel (London, 1932), p. 2. Lord Butler, The Art of the Possible (London, 1971), p. 28. J. M. Keynes, 'The End of Laissez-Faire', in John Maynard Keynes, Essays in Persuasion (New York and London, 1963), pp. 312-13.

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lies - can only lie - in the informal conventions, particular enactments and tacit understandings of a liberty-loving political class. And the reason why Britain's situation is uniquely 'envied and enviable' is that her rulers have learned the mysteries of this kind of statecraft: that they have mastered what we might call the Peabottle principle: that they have known instinctively when to resist and when to accommodate; when to administer the appropriate rectification to the banks and when to leave the river alone. Exhibit 'B', my quotation from Shaw, represents a vision which, following one of its most eminent exponents, Sidney Webb, I shall call 'democratic collectivist'. Like the whig imperialist vision, it is, in a profound sense, telelogical. It too sees the history of modern Britain as a long continuum of peaceful progress. But the differences are as significant as the similarities. For democratic collectivists, political authority is rational and secular in character, not sacral: they have no time for immemorial custom or golden circles. Where whig imperialist statecraft is reactive, democratic collectivist statecraft is proactive. The democratic collectivist state does not wait to rectify the banks of the social river; it digs a new channel through which the waters have to flow. Where whig imperialists appeal to judgement, experience, the intuitive wisdom of an ancient political class, democratic collectivists appeal to science, reason, professional expertise. Both speak of democracy, but they understand it in different ways. The whig imperialist state is democratic because it responds to popular demands. The democratic collectivist state is democratic because it is subject to popular control. Two implications follow. Because the democratic collectivist state is rational, it has both the capacity and the duty to replace the irrational higgling of the market-place with rational co-ordination and direction. And because it is democratic, further instalments of Shaw's 'formal democracy' - attempts to pull up aristocratic institutions by the roots of the sort that 'Universal Abolitionists' engage in - are pointless distractions from the path ahead. The task for democratic collectivists is to take control of the existing institutions of the state, and to use them to make society more rational and more just. Anything else is a frivolous luxury. The vision represented by exhibit ' C , my quotation from Enoch Powell, is harder to label. I suppose one possibility might be Tory nationalist. I prefer a label stolen from the historian, Jonathan Clark, who uses it to describe his own position.8 I shall call it 'authoritarian individualist'. 8

J. C. D. Clark, 'The History of Britain: A Composite State in a Europe des Patries', in J. C. D. Clark (ed.), Ideas and Politics in Modern Britain (Basingstoke and London, 1990), pp. 39-44.

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It too is similar in some ways to the whig imperialist vision. There is the same emphasis on immemorial custom. For it too political authority is sacral, not rational. As Michael Oakeshott, that most subtle of authoritarian individualists, put it, the 'intimations of government' are to be found in 'ritual'.9 But there are marked differences as well. The authoritarian individualist vision is much bleaker. Change is as likely to be for the worse as for the better. The role of the state is bleaker too. It has to police the passions which would otherwise tear society apart: to guarantee order and discipline against the disorder and indiscipline inherent in fallen human nature. It also has to guarantee property rights, social hierarchy, individual liberty against the forces of envy and folly which continually threaten them. To do all this, it must be strong and authoritative. '[W]e do not ask for a feeble state', said Mrs Thatcher in her famous Airey Neave lecture, soon after taking office. 'On the contrary we need a strong state to preserve both liberty and order.'10 And to be strong, the state must speak to the heart as well as to the head. It is not, said the great Lord Salisbury more than a century ago, a 'mere joint stock company', as individualistic Radicals imagine. It needs 'poetical trappings':11 majesty, dignity, glory. To strip these away would be at once impious and dangerous. But there is an ambivalence at the heart of authoritarian individualist statecraft. For the state is dangerous as well as necessary: a looming enemy as well as an indispensable friend. In the wrong hands, it may invade spheres which it has no business to enter: trench on the liberties which it exists to secure. Authoritarian individualists therefore view the responsive, adaptive whig imperialist state with a jaundiced eye. Suppose it responds to the wrong pressures? Suppose it adapts in the wrong way? Suppose that under the cloak of genial and accommodating whiggery it turns into the impious and destructive democratic collectivist state? What then? Sovereignty and identity So far I have looked at the implications of my three visions for statecraft; for the art of government; for rulers and those seeking to rule. They also have implications for two other crucial dimensions of statehood. One is sovereignty; the other is identity or nationality. The sovereignty story is full of complexities, but the essentials are starkly clear. For different 9 10

11

Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics (London, 1962), p. 188. Margaret Thatcher, In Defence of Freedom, Speeches on Britain's Relations with the World 1976-1986 (London, 1986), p. 63. Quoted in Philip Buck, How Conservatives Think (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 113.

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reasons and by way of different paths, all three visions converge on the same destination: on Enoch Powell's 'unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament'. To put it more precisely, all three take for granted the doctrine which the great Victorian jurist, A. V. Dicey, called 'the keystone of the Constitution': the doctrine of, in his words, the 'absolute legislative sovereignty or despotism of the King in Parliament'. 12 For all three, in short, the sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament is inherently unshareable and inalienable; for all three, the engine of concentrated executive power which Dicey's doctrine celebrates and legitimises must be left intact. It is not difficult to see why whig imperialists and authoritarian individualists should converge on this end point. This is the mystery enshrined in the immemorial customs they celebrate: the sacral source of political authority they both presuppose. But why should democratic collectivists join them? The democratic collectivist vision is rational, utilitarian, instrumental. Why, then, have democratic collectivists failed to challenge the Dicey doctrine? The answer, I believe, is twofold. Part of it is to be found in an autobiographical fragment in Aneurin Bevan's In Place of Fear> published just after his resignation from the Attlee Government. 'A young miner in a South Wales colliery', Bevan wrote, 'my concern was with the one practical question: Where does power lie in this particular state of Great Britain, and how can it be attained by the workers?' His answer was Parliament: 'a sword pointed at the heart of property-power'.13 Dicey's engine of concentrated power, in other words, offers the one hope of toppling the privileged and emancipating the dispossessed. State power is the answer - the only conceivable answer - to market power. And if, in Britain, state power happens to be founded on medieval mumbo-jumbo, then so be it. That leads on to the second part of the answer. The powers of the Crown in Parliament, say the democratic collectivists, are exercised by ministers: ministers come, by definition, from the majority party in the House of Commons: the majority party in the House of Commons has, by definition, been given its majority by the people. Whatever constitutional lawyers may say, the powers of the Crown in Parliament are de facto the people's powers. The body of democracy has been inserted into the skin of Westminster absolutism. To damage the skin would be to damage the body. The identity story is also rather complicated, but in a different way. There is no doubt about the Whig imperialist vision of British identity. 12

13

A. V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (London, 1950 edn), p. 70. Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (Wakefield, 1976 edn), pp. 21 and 25.

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The British state is, in a unique and special sense, an imperial state: inescapably the hinge of Churchill's world-wide multiple kingship. By the same token, the British nation is a uniquely imperial nation: constituted as a nation by its decision to seek an oceanic and imperial destiny rather than a merely continental, European one. Thus, for Churchill, British history is only part of the history of the 'English-speaking peoples' which he wrote in four substantial volumes. And thus, for G. M. Trevelyan, the loss of Calais under Mary Tudor was 'pure gain' because it taught the Elizabethans to 'look westwards for new lands'.14 The authoritarian individualist vision of nationhood and identity is as deeply felt, as passionately evoked, as the whig imperialist. But it is an English vision, not a British one: post-imperial, not imperial. Of course, authoritarian individualist politicians, obliged to woo voters in the non-English nations of this island speak, when they remember to, of Britain. But you do not need to have mastered the subtleties of deconstruction to see that when 'Britain' is said, 'England' is generally meant. The myths, the symbols, the iconography are English. One example will have to stand for many. In May 1982, at the height of the Falklands War, Mrs Thatcher addressed the Conservative Women's Conference. First, she referred to 'we'. Then 'we' became 'we British'. But the final peroration gave the game away: 'And let our nation, as it has so often in the past, remind itself and the world: "Naught shall make us rue/If England to herself do rest but true".' 15 Is it altogether surprising that, under her leadership, the Conservative party did not fare as well north of the Border as it used to do? But what of democratic collectivism!? What is the democratic collectivist vision of identity and nationhood? The answer is that there isn't one. The 'poetical trappings' with which democratic collectivists have been comfortable, the solidarities they have sought to evoke have been those of class, not those of nation. I can think of one giant exception, Bernard Crick's hero, George Orwell. In his wartime writings, Orwell tried to find a distinctive democratic collectivist idiom of nationhood. The result was some of the most haunting polemical prose in the English language. But the point about Orwell's achievement is that it stands almost alone. In general, democratic collectivists have been forced back on the whig imperialist language of nationhood and identity, for want of a language of their own. When Hugh Gaitskell appealed to '1,000 years of history' in his great speech opposing British membership of a European Union, it was whig imperialist history that he had in mind. And 14 15

G. M. Trevelyan, History of England (London, 1956 edn), p. 232. Margaret Thatcher, In Defence of Freedom, pp. 72-9.

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when, in the first Commons debate on the Falklands War, Michael Foot accused the government of 'betraying' the Falkland Islanders, it was a whig imperialist chord that he hoped to strike. The visions today These, then, are the visions of the state which my three exhibits were chosen to represent. Of course, they were never the only ones. Of course, they were often less coherent, more inchoate, less sharply differentiated from each other, than I have depicted them as being. But, for all that, they have been the dominant visions of the British state for most of the post-war period. And because they have been so dominant for so long, it is extraordinarily difficult to throw them off. Even now, I suspect, Old Peabottle's majestic Whig river still flows through the collective subconscious of the Athenaeum and the Cabinet Office mess. Even now, if you scratch someone on the left - even a congenital milk-and-water Menshevik like me - you will find at least a vestige of Shaw's disdain for the anarchic waste of private money-hunting. And I am sure that, south of the Border and east of the Severn, millions of people, including millions of Labour voters, have at least a corner in their hearts for Powell's English oak trees. But, in spite of this lingering afterglow, I believe that all three visions are now exhausted. The fate of the whig imperialist vision is brutally plain. You can't be an imperialist if you have no empire. The golden circle of the Crown still keeps its old magic. But the unravelling of Britain's world role, decolonisation in Asia and Africa, the search by the old white dominions for new roles and, not least, entry into the European Community have destroyed the unique and mysterious multiple kingship it once encompassed. In doing so, they have also destroyed the identity and undermined the statecraft that went with the multiple kingship. The democratic coUectivist vision has fared no better. Whatever may be true of left-of-centre hearts, whose head still accepts the Shavian presupposition that the rational and democratic state is, by definition, more efficient than the higgling of the market? Social welfare, yes. Managed capitalism, certainly. A symbiosis between public and private power, some of us hope so. But state ownership? State planning? Even state direction? Those primordial ingredients of the democratic coUectivist vision perished during the upheavals that swept the world economy in the 1970s. That leaves the authoritarian individualist vision. Here matters are more complicated. The exhaustion of the whig imperialist and democratic coUectivist vision in the 1960s and 1970s created a vacuum - a

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vacuum of understanding; a vacuum of sentiment; above all, a vacuum of language and of rhetoric. Into that vacuum rushed authoritarian individualism. Its bleak, late nineteenth-century statecraft was more congruent - or rather less incongruent - with the diverse, disorganised capitalism of the late twentieth than either relaxed, accommodating whiggery or directive democratic collectivism. Above all, it and it alone had an identity to which it could speak, tribal loyalties which it could mobilise. But there was a contradiction between that identity and the state which the authoritarian individualists aspired to rule. The state was Britain. The identity was English. For a while, the contradiction went unnoticed. Authoritarian individualist statecraft swept all before it. Tribal loyalties were mobilised to such effect that, in the 1987 general election, the principal working-class party in the south of England was Mrs Thatcher's. But the better authoritarian individualism played in Penge, the worse it played in Peebles: the more loudly it was cheered in England, and particularly in southern England, the more it grated on everyone else. The results are manifest - the Scottish Claim of Right; the Scottish Constitutional Convention; the commitment by all the Scottish political parties save the Unionists to one form or other of a Scottish Parliament. No one knows what the consequences will be, but one point is clear. Britain is, and always has been, a multi-national state, not a national one. The Scottish nation was incorporated into the state through negotiation, not through conquest. All the signs are that Scotland now wishes to renegotiate the settlement that led to her incorporation. She may opt for separate statehood within the European Community. She may prefer internal autonomy within a more or less federal United Kingdom. The first would mean the disappearance of the British state. The second would transform it beyond recognition. Neither outcome is tolerable from an authoritarian individualist perspective. Yet authoritarian individualist statecraft has helped to force both onto the agenda. A deeper contradiction haunts it as well. As my quotation from Enoch Powell showed, the Dicey doctrine of the absolute and inalienable sovereignty of the Crown in Parliament is even more fundamental to the authoritarian individualist vision than to the others. But we live in a world in which the notion of absolute sovereignty - whether of the Crown in Parliament or of anyone else - has ceased to chime with economic and social reality. In this world, the search for absolute sovereignty is the pursuit of the infeasible by the incorrigible. Government, or at least public power, still has an important role. But the sovereign, nation state - the state which Thomas Hobbes called 'that

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great Leviathan, that mortal God' - has become an anachronism, above all in its European birth-place. No member state of the European Community is still sovereign in the old way. The Community is built on power-sharing. It has to be, because power-sharing among politics is the necessary response to interdependence between economies; and economic interdependence is the Commmunity's hall-mark. And it is not only the Community's hall-mark: it is the inevitable consequence of the de-regulation and liberalisation which are fundamental to the individualist dimension of the authoritarian individualist project. But power-sharing is ruled out by the Dicey doctrine. It is therefore anathema to authoritarian individualist statecraft - as, of course, to any other statecraft based on that doctrine. Authoritarian individualists cannot draw the obvious conclusion and secede from the Community. They wish to maximize the influence of the British state, and they know that it would have less influence outside than within. But nor can they accept the power-sharing logic of Community membership. On that contradiction, Mrs Thatcher was impaled. Thanks to it, she fell. Who can doubt that it remains to plague her successors? Enter Henry Dubb Is there a way out? It is not difficult to devise an alternative statecraft, more suitable for a post-imperial and multi-national state in a slowly federalising Europe. The Dicey doctrine and all that goes with it would have to be abandoned. The British state would have to be reconstructed, with constitutional checks and balances and a federal distribution of power, so as to make possible a politics of power-sharing, both in Britain and with the rest of the European Community. Such a statecraft would have to be underpinned by a pluralist conception of identity and nationhood. Just as it is possible for Catalans to say, 'I am Catalan; I am Spanish; I am European', so it would have to be possible for a British citizen to say, 'I am English, or Welsh, or Scots, or, who knows, a Northumbrian or a Yorkshireman; I am also British; and I am European'. The difficult question is whether such a statecraft is feasible. Is the British political tradition resourceful enough to sustain it? Could it be encapsulated in a vision capable of inspiring political imaginations and of mobilising loyalties? Could it fill the void of sentiment and rhetoric which the authoritarian individualist renaissance seemed about to fill in the early 1980s, but which now gapes even more obviously than it did fifteen years ago? I cannot know the answer, but I offer a thought. My subtitle is 'Henry Dubb versus sceptred awe'. The meaning of 'sceptred awe' should, by

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now, be clear. What do I mean by Henry Dubb? Who was Henry Dubb? The answer, of course, is that he wasn't. He was an invention of the great economic historian and socialist thinker, R. H. Tawney. He was Tawney's ordinary citizen - down-to-earth, sober, unromantic: but still a citizen, imbued with the instincts of citizenship and stubbornly attached to its values. I see him as a symbol of a tradition - elusive fugitive, often half-forgotten, but never quite abandoned - of which Tawney was one of the chief exponents in this century. It is a difficult tradition to distil in a phrase. Tawney caught the essence when he wrote that Britain had accepted democracy, as a convenience, like an improved system of telephones; she did not dedicate herself to it as the expression of a moral ideal of comradeship and equality . . . She changed her political garments, but not her heart. She carried into the democratic era, not only the institutions, but the social habits and mentality of the oldest and toughest plutocracy in the world . . . She went to the ballot box touching her hat.16 What he meant was that the teleologies underpinning both the whig imperialist and the democratic collectivist visions of the state were false; that Britain was not really a democracy after all; that the prerogatives of the Crown had not been mysteriously transmuted into the privileges of the people, or that if they had been, such a transmutation was not to the point; that democratic citizenship must be active, not passive; and that ours was not. To put the point in another way, the Tawneian tradition has insisted that democratic institutions without a democratic culture are like clothes without a body; and that a democratic culture is, above all, a culture of self-government, a culture of the civic or republican virtues. I do not suggest that that tradition is bound to generate reconstructed identities and a refashioned state on the lines I sketched out a moment ago. In England (though not in Wales or Scotland) the very notion of plural identities and plural allegiances is apt to seem perverse or shocking, and the suggestion that identities can be deliberately reconstructed, absurd or fantastic. If that view is right, no alternative statecraft is possible. But I see no reason to assume, a priori, that it must be right. Large numbers of British citizens already have plural identities and plural allegiances: it was because he found this incipient pluralism repugnant that Lord Tebbit framed his 'cricket test' of political loyalty. As for reconstructed identities, if ever an identity was deliberately constructed in the first place, it was the 'British' identity celebrated by 16

Quoted in Ross Terrill, R. H. Tawney and His Times: Socialism as Fellowship (London, 1974), p. 173.

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the whig imperialists. And if the conventional English view is wrong, the Tawneian tradition may have more to say to the late twentieth century than any other. For it is the only tradition available to us that offers the possibility of refashioning the state and reconstructing identities through negotiation and debate rather than through manipulation or force. And if this cannot be done through negotiation and debate, it cannot be done at all. For most of this century, the Tawneian tradition has been submerged. It is, of course, a highly subversive tradition - as subversive of the progressive mandarinate which set the tone of British public policy in the post-war period as of the defiantly reactionary neo-liberals who followed them. The values it bears run directly counter to the values implied by the notion of an absolute and indefeasible Crown in Parliament. As such, it also runs counter, not just to the whig imperialist and authoritarian individualist visions of the British state, but to the democratic collectivist vision, many of whose exponents thought of themselves as followers of Tawney. Yet it is part of our history. I suspect it can be traced back to the civic humanists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There are echoes of it in some of the liberal thinkers of the nineteenth, and in rather more of the popular radicals of the same period. It surfaced in the early Labour movement, notably in the ILP. Oddly enough, there were echoes of it in the robust antiEstablishment rhetoric of Mrs Thatcher - not the least of the sources of her appeal to middle England. Now there are signs that it is beginning to re-emerge. They include the current citizenship debate, which now engages supporters of all three United Kingdom political parties, as well as the cross-party pressure group, Charter 88; draft written constitutions proffered by figures as diverse as Tony Benn and the Institute of Economic Affairs; and opinion surveys recording substantial majorities in favour of constitutional change. So I end with a question. Is Henry Dubb coming in from the cold? If he is, he - and we - may astonish us all.

Thinking about the state and the economy Robert Skidelsky

The great fact, and puzzle, of the last twenty years has been the revival of belief in economic liberalism. By this I mean the belief that economic (and to some extent social) outcomes should be mainly determined by market forces, with its corollary of a contracted role for the state in economic life. This revival occurred after a century of creeping collectivism. A distinction must be made between political and economic liberalism. Western societies, with some backsliding, remained committed to political liberalism, but accepted increasing doses of economic collectivism. Indeed, the latter was widely regarded as a condition of the former. This linkage has now been upset. Political and economic freedom are increasingly seen as indivisible, with encroachments on economic liberty viewed as threatening to political liberty. I want to reflect on this shift in a historical, partly autobiographical, way; to contrast what we - my generation - believed then and what we partly believe now, and to give some explanation for our change of views. The simplest explanation of the revolt against economic collectivism is that experience has shown it doesn't work. But in a sense this experience was always there: it was embodied in the dominant AngloSaxon - I hesitate to say western - tradition of political philosophy and political economy. It might be said that the twentieth-century experience of market failure and the costs of uncontrolled change crowded out the earlier suspicion of state control and cooled the ardour for letting market forces rip. And there is much truth in this. Since the 1970s the spotlight has swung away from the failings of markets to the failings of governments. Perhaps it is starting to swing back a little. There are evidently long cycles at work, as people become disillusioned in turn with the promises held out by collectivist and liberal systems. In the twentieth century, many economists and political thinkers came to regard moderate economic collectivism as an inoculation against Communism. This was certainly Keynes's view. Moderate collectivism 70

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was a perfectly reasonable project: it was the expression of liberalism on the defensive. Its weakness was that it offered no principled statement of where to draw the line. It was vulnerable to Hayek's charge that the state would have to take more and more powers to make it work. Experience seemed to vindicate Hayek. In the 1960s and 1970s efforts were made everywhere to buttress Keynesian demand-management by cost control through incomes policy. This required, logically, far more centralisation of economic power in the hands of the state, which threatened political liberalism. The eventual need of Keynesianism for such 'additional instruments' was an important factor in undermining liberal support for the Keynesian revolution. However, the weakness of the liberal defence against economic collectivism can also be traced to specific errors in intellectual and moral reasoning. An example of the former is the determinist fallacy. Nineteenth-century economic liberalism, it was argued, was inevitably giving way to collectivist arrangements. A classic statement was Lenin's claim that free-trade capitalism was being transformed into monopoly capitalism. Another version of the determinist thesis was Adolph Wagner's Law of Rising State Expenditures. Irreversible, or at least irresistible, economic and social trends determined an enhanced role for the state as 'democratic' controller of private monopoly, stabiliser, planner, and provider of a vast array of economic and social goods. It is now clear that the determinist thesis, in whatever form, is untenable. There has been no consistent trend of events capable of explaining the growth of state control over economic life. Nevertheless it did grow almost continuously from the late nineteenth century to the mid 1970s, by any measure you care to take: public spending as a percentage of GDP, taxation as a percentage of earnings, the size of the public sector, the number of public employees, the number of regulatory laws and agencies, and so on. Why did this happen? In a post-Wittgensteinian world we can no longer accept the earlier historicist assumption that changes in reality determined a new role for the state. Reality directs thought and language, but does not determine it; reality is itself partly constructed by the language we use. The use of the war metaphor, to which I shall return, is particularly significant in this context. We would now want to say that the growth of the state was driven by ideology, culture, and bureaucratic and political dynamics: it was, if you like, endogenously generated by the political process, not caused by the external characteristics of advanced capitalism. What we need to contemplate is a mindset, or a Zeitgeist, not statistics of demography, number of firms, urbanisation, size of the electorate, etc. One-off events, like the two world wars

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or the great depression, can certainly explain temporary increases in the role of the state, but not permanent trends. This seems to be the weakness of Peacock and Wiseman's view that 'the acceptance of new tax levels remains when the disturbance has disappeared 5. 1 The growth of democracy was clearly important, but no important changes in the franchise took place in the most rapid period of state expansion following the Second World War. If you allow for all the lags, you might just be able to discern trends, but they are far from sustaining a determinist thesis. Liberal acceptance of the inexorable growth of the state was facilitated by two further errors. The first I can only call a moral conjuring trick: the redefinition of liberty in terms of 'positive' rather than 'negative' freedom. Thus the question of what Hayek calls the 'constitution of liberty' - how to prevent incremental encroachments by the state on the sphere left to individual enterprise, initiative and choice - was evaded. A further error was the assumption of government omnicompetence: the assumption that the centralised stock of social knowledge, benevolence, and probity in administration was adequate to the new tasks required of government by the Zeitgeist. Let me give two examples of such errors of reasoning. The first is something I myself wrote in New Society on 2 October 1975, under the title: 'The Future of the State: Why It Will Grow', of which I am not proud. Its standpoint was that the scope of state responsibilities is determined by the needs of the time, and that our 'stock of social knowledge' may be sufficient to meet these needs without serious impediment to freedom. I divided the history of the modern state into three epochs: mercantile, minimal and collectivism My conclusion is conveyed by the following quotation: What does seem to me certain is that collective efforts to secure social goals will increasingly replace individual ones. One form of intervention creates both the precedent and the necessity for another . . . Nowhere in the modern scenario, however interpreted, is there to be found an agenda for state withdrawal. The only question is: what kind of state . . . I would suggest that the Keynesian State will be, is already being, replaced by the Corporate State - a system in which collective decision-making in the economic field is shared out between government and the major producers . . . The reason for this development is clear. The state's responsibilities have expanded far more than its authority. Consequently the government is overloaded with demands. The 'new corporatism' is less an attempt to devolve responsibilities than to involve powerful private groups in the state's expanded ones . . . History has set political theory a new challenge. If, through fastidiousness, political theory ignores contemporary life, we may easily 1

A. T. Peacock and Jack Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom (London, 1967 edn), p. xxxiv.

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end up with the worst possible state - one that combines maximum repression with maximum inefficiency. Apart from Keynes, I cited a number of sources which indicate what I was reading at the time: Robert Heilbroner's An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, with its pessimistic conclusion that liberty would have to be curtailed to tackle the problems of the twenty-first century; Harold Laski's The Rise of European Liberalism, an older text, with its quasiMarxist association of liberty with the bourgeoisie, and collectivism with the proletariat; and the equally deterministic work of the sociologists R. Pahl and J. T. Winkler. A quotation from Winkler gives the flavour of their work: 'If the trend of the past fifteen years continues, the British economy will be essentially corporatist before the end of the 1980s.' He rejects as contrary to cany objective measure', the possibility that the state would reduce its intervention 'and trust more in the market'. This was in 1977, two years before the advent of Mrs Thatcher's governments.2 Such unrestrained determinism now seems simply quaint. What horrifies me in retrospect is the way I downgraded the importance of individual liberty, and ignored the role of ideas in defining reality. Yet this was not an atypical expression of the left-of-centre mindset of the time. Take, for example, Harold Wilson's remark in 1973: 'from now on the grasp of national control must extend as far as the reach of government aid', a classic example of the logic of collectivist creep.3 My next witness is Keynes. Keynes remarked in the 'The End of Laissez-Faire' (1926) that the question of the proper spheres of individual and state action cannot be settled on abstract grounds. Each age, he implies, needs to decide for itself what the state ought to do, and what can be left to the individual; or in Bentham's terms, between the agenda and non-agenda of government. 'Perhaps the chief task of economists at this hour is to distinguish afresh the Agenda of government from the Non-Agenda; and the companion task of politics to devise forms of government within a democracy which shall be capable of accomplishing the Agenda.' In Keynes's view, the most important agenda of government related 'not to those activities which private individuals are already fulfilling . . . but to those functions which fall outside the sphere of the individual, to those decisions which are made by no one if the State does not make them'. He gave as one example, population policy, which pays attention to 'innate quality' as well as numbers.4 2 3 4

J. T. Winkler, 'The Coming Corporatism', in R. Skidelsky (ed.), The End of the Keynesian Era (London, 1978), pp. 87, 79. Tony Benn, Arguments for Socialism (London, 1979), p. 48. The Collected Writings ofJohn Maynard Keynes (London, 1972), vol. IX, pp. 288,291-2.

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This method of deciding 'what the state should do' has been at the root of much muddled thinking on the question of the 'role of the state'. It was accepted by the whole of the post-war generation; and large traces of it, I think, inform Professor Marquand's challenging book, The Unprincipled Society (London, 1988). For the simple fact is that we cannot safely lay down the agenda of government in advance of, and apart from, what 'governments in a democracy', and in particular democracies, can successfully accomplish, as was pointed out by Brian Barry in his review of Marquand's book.5 It may be that certain things not being done or done well by individuals should not be done by the state either - because it will do them badly, or because, to do them well, would require giving the state more power or control over our lives than we would like it to have. It may be argued that Keynes's formula, 'forms of government within a democracy', saves us from the latter prospect. Yet what if the agenda of government laid down by economists proves to be inconsistent with democracy, or liberty, or even good government? There is nothing in the formula which guards against this possibility. Keynes was no totalitarian; he thought that the things he wanted to do could be accomplished 'within a democracy', and without endangering liberty. Yet he also thought that they could be done better in a non-democracy. Consider the preface to the German edition of the General Theory: 'the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state'. And the same one may think is true of the kind of 'population policy' which he recommended. Keynes's formula provides no principled barrier to the Hayekian drift - the degeneration of an economically or socially inspired programme of intervention into ever more extensive forms of state control. Keynes's own barriers to the Hayekian drift were implicit rather than philosophically or constitutionally embedded. He relied on expertise, on the notion of disinterested benevolence informing administration. But this was hardly an adequate summary of bureaucratic motives even then. And he was not penetrating on the relationship between the expert and the politician. He confined his intervention to the macro-economy, leaving individualism - and its attached liberties - to reign over the micro-economy. This was a theoretical choice informed by genuine liberal values. But he offered no philosophically based obstacle to the penetration of government into the micro-economy if 'market failure' justified it. Above all, he relied on the community's moral tradition to 5

In The Times Literary Supplement, 26 February-3 March 1988.

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check over-powerful government. 'Dangerous acts', he wrote to Hayek after reading the latter's The Road to Serfdom (1944), 'can be done safely in a community which thinks and feels rightly, which would be the way to hell if they were executed by those who think and feel wrongly.'6 This is an inadequate answer, because the stock of moral capital itself can be depleted by various forms of intervention: e.g., self-reliance can give way to 'dependency'. Keynes's reliance on expertise as a deus ex machina also gave him an exaggerated view of the state's problem-solving capacity. The basic insight of Adam Smith, that the Prince was both corrupt and inefficient, was obliterated. Keynes's view was greatly influenced by new prestige of the social sciences. No doubt he was putting an extreme view when he argued before the Macmillan Committee in 1930 that monetary policy could be reduced to a science 'like electricity'; but the idea that social science provided the key to social salvation was widespread. This notion had its most extensive, and expensive, trial in the 1960s, and proved sadly defective. A century of growing policy-making and administrative discretion has led to the revival of interest in constitutions. Political philosophers and constitutional lawyers are back in business. The discussion has been turned on its head. The starting-point today is not what the economy needs, but what the state can and should (or cannot and should not) do. In a sense the economists have thrown the ball back to the constitutionalists; for it was economists who finally started telling politicians that economies would be more stable and more prosperous with rules-based systems than with discretionary policies. II I have said that, in trying to explain the changing relationship between the state and the economy, we have to contemplate a mindset, not a set of events. This mindset can be characterised as a series of assumptions about the nature of reality. I want to describe the assumptions with which 'our age' - to borrow the term used by Noel Annan for an earlier generation - grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, and how they differ from what some of us, at any rate, have come to believe now. Let me start with a small piece of autobiography. I became a research fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford in 1965, and I still have a copy of The Times of 12 March announcing the appointment. Some of its news stories are directly relevant to my theme. There is a speech, for example, 6

Roy Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes (London, 1951), p. 437.

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by Lord Robbins, saying that unless we achieved our competitors' standards in education and training we were doomed to 'mediocrity and eventual decline'. Plus ga change . . . Another item reads more quaintly: 'The Transport and General Workers Union have at last signed the disputed agreement with the London Transport Board on busmen's hours and schedules. The Board agrees to withdraw or amend certain clauses which a section of the men found offensive. One stated that there would be no ban on voluntary overtime. The men took it as an infringement of their right not to volunteer . . .' This was the great day of Boards and Planning Committees. A body called the London County Council Town Planning Committee pops up on almost every page. It was also the great day of Royal Commissions and Committees of Enquiry. The Times lead story of that day concerned the report of a Committee chaired by Milner Holland QC, recommending a return to security of tenure and rent regulation, coupled with the demand that the attack on London's housing shortage must be 'planned, applied, and directed for London as a whole'. It is only now, I think, that we realise how much of this language was a leftover from the Second World War. The lead letter to The Times, headed 'Need for a Lib-Lab Pact' called for an understanding between the two parties based on 'purposive planning'. There were few doubts yet about the efficacy of planning in the Soviet Union, to judge by the straight-faced reporting of the following announcement: 'A total of 119 big industrial plants in the Soviet Union are to be converted in the next two years to a system of automated production management using electronic computers.' A final item to savour is the headline 'US Troops to Remain in Asia indefinitely' - this, of course, in connection with the then escalating Vietnam war. What do these snippets tell us about the character of the age, the assumptions of those who led the country? The leaders of the 1960s men and women of roughly my age now, perhaps a bit older - were products of the 1930s and 1940s. Someone of 50 in 1965 (Harold Wilson, the prime minister, was 49) would have grown up in the Depression of the 1930s, served in the armed forces or Whitehall in the war, and entered politics, the professions or business life in the heyday of planning and austerity. Such persons would have progressed through the modest liberalisation of the 1950s, perhaps with some impatience at the Thirteen Wasted Years, and come to the top at a time when Wilson's Labour Party, as can now be seen, was deliberately trying to invoke the wartime spirit, with its purposeful imagery of classes pulling together, fair shares and humming machinery to modernise and galvanise Britain to fight new battles against old enemies, now transformed into powerful

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industrial competitors. Problematically connected with this was a new hedonism based on the spread of affluence to the working class and the growth of teenage consumerism, grounded in full employment and easy job availability even to those with minimal skills. Here we have an explanation of the confused picture which the 1960s still present to us: a military model of national regeneration which presupposed structures of restraint, community, trust, even deference, which were rapidly breaking down. All over the world the war, or even pre-war, generation was in power: the rhetoric of Kennedy and Johnson was similar to Wilson's, and both harked back to Roosevelt. De Gaulle was President of France, and Adenauer had only just stopped being Federal Chancellor of Germany. The age of Brezhnev had started in the USSR. Mao Tse-tung in China, Tito in Yugoslavia, the leaders of the newly emerging countries in Africa - all were products of the 1930s and 1940s, steeped in collectivist and military myth. This generation shared certain assumptions which transcended ideological differences between parties, or even, to some extent, between societies. The following seem the most important: 1. The market mechanism, while efficient for certain allocative purposes, had little inherent dynamism. The Australian school's view of the market as a 'discovery' mechanism was hardly known. Economic development should therefore be energised by state action according to a national plan. 2. The production of goods and services could not be left entirely to the market, both because of the existence of natural or artificial monopolies, and because of the requirements of national defence. Therefore the state should own a substantial sector of the economy. The actual continuum ran all the way from the wholly publicly owned economies of the socialist world to the almost wholly privately owned US economy, with most countries somewhere in between. That the state should own at least the major public utilities and strategic sectors of the commercial sector was widely accepted: political debate centred on where exactly the frontiers should be. Ownership of the 'commanding heights' (another military metaphor) was designed, together with planning, to give the state control over economic development. By the 1960s the idea that the state should subsidise those parts of the private sector whose survival was required by the national plan, or otherwise bring about their reorganisation, was widely accepted. Janos Kornai's 'soft budget constraint' was in operation. 3. Unmanaged market systems had a permanent bias to deflation and unemployment. The state should therefore take responsibility for the

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level of employment. This was a consequence of the Keynesian revolution. This is not to say that governments everywhere pursued the same policies. There were periods of passive and active Keynesianism. Keynesian policy also fitted into different national traditions in different ways - into strong planning traditions in France and Japan; into weaker ones in the UK or USA. Also a great deal of what might be called Keynesianism worked through the machinery of the Cold War, and particularly through America's leadership of the western alliance. It never occurred to us that the thesis that unmanaged economies were radically unstable was largely untested, being simply Keynes's generalisation from the experience of the Great Depression; or that government policy might contribute systematically to the instability it was meant to cure. 4. The market system was inherently unfair. It was the state's duty to bring about a more equal distribution of incomes and life chances, by providing for an array of social and cultural services, free or heavily subsidised, supplemented by cash payments. The tax constraint on expanding the 'welfare state' would be overcome by faster growth. 5. The ideological struggle between capital and labour was being replaced by what the historian Keith Middlemas called 'corporatist bias'. It was the task of government to accelerate this trend by persuading or cajoling organised groups into acting like 'social partners' rather than armies arrayed for battle. In Britain, this conception of bargained economic and social policy sat uneasily with the official doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. In politics, it went together with calls for devolution to the regions, and decentralisation to higher-tier local authorities. It was assumed that economic life was inherently political, and would become more so, with the main question being how to reconcile the state's accountability to the electorate with the reality of over-powerful industrial baronies. 6. The economy was divided up, not into markets, but into industrywide combines (of both employers and workers), wielding market power. (The actual organisation in Britain of trade unions on a craft basis, as well as the weakness of employers' organisations, spurred the call for both to organise on an effective industry basis.) The 1960s was the age of the merger boom, partly dictated by the philosophy that Big is, if not Beautiful, at least inevitable. But the roots of this conception of the character of the modern economy go back to the 1920s and even earlier, with the joint stock company and public utility concern emerging as the norm on either side of the private-public divide, the separation of management and ownership, 'Fordist' mass production methods, and the gradual euthanasia of the family firm. The growing corporatism

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of industrial life bred an ideology of managerial autonomy, which fitted the idea of Big Business as a worthy partner of the state in directing national enterprise, and fudged the question of the accountability of managers to shareholders, and producers to the consumer. 7. There would be an eventual 'convergence' between private enterprise and socialist planning, expressed succinctly in Daniel Bell's phrase 'the end of ideology'. It was widely assumed that neither stock exchange capitalism nor state socialism fitted the needs of the societies they purported to serve; and that the path of evolution lay in the approximation of both to a middle way which blurred the distinction between the public and the private; a path characterised by separate autonomies, each responsible for its own sphere, and all displaying a degree of publicness in their activities, arising from legal obligation, or public spirit, or sheer size. It was along some such lines, at least, that reformers on both sides of the Iron Curtain looked to an eventual ending of the Cold War and the ideological and military division of the world. So much for assumptions which were reasonably explicit in the minds of policy-makers in the 1960s, and which can be amply documented in the literature of the time. More difficult to pin down are what may be called the tacit assumptions which influenced these perceptions of reality, without themselves ever being discussed. The following seem to be the most important. The first was the territorial conception of the state. The world economy was seen as a collection of national economies, whose links could be best described as 'external relations'. Increasing lipservice was paid to the notion of interdependence, but the dominant idea was that the national economy should be strengthened for generally peaceful, but occasionally warlike, competition with other national economies. Thus it was considered essential that the state be armed with weapons notice again the military language - appropriate to these tasks. Nationstates emerged from the Depression and Second World War bristling with weapons, defensive and offensive: import controls, export controls, exchange controls, controls on capital movements. Keynes had specifically reserved for national government control over monetary and fiscal policy. Parodied as the dogma that each nation had the right to its own freely chosen rate of inflation, this led inevitably to the collapse, in 1971, of the fixed-exchange rate system set up at Bretton Woods in 1944. In addition there was a whole paraphernalia of subsidies, export incentives and nationalisations mainly undertaken for the purpose of preserving 'strategic industries' and keeping them under 'national control'. None of this stopped the growing internationalisation of

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economic life. But there was a growing conflict between economic forces which ignored national frontiers and the nation-state's claim to economic sovereignty. A second powerful tacit assumption might be called the doctrine of benevolence. It was the view that public spiritedness was a sound working principle on which to build arrangements for the delivery of a wide variety of goods and services. The older idea of the state as predator shifted over the course of the century to that of the state as benevolent guardian of the public weal, though it was rarely expressed quite like this. The attribute of benevolence was tacitly conceded to many other providers of goods and services, contrary to Adam Smith's well-known warning to the contrary. Administrators, managers and professionals were supposed to bring to their jobs a degree of disinterestedness, public spirit and social concern which justified a claim to partial exemption from market disciplines. The state would, to the best of its knowledge and capacity, pursue the public interest, not just because it was constrained to do so by the electorate, but because its officials put public service above private gain. And this same exemption from adequate accountability was claimed by managers, trade union leaders (some of whom were voted into office for life), social workers, architects, lawyers, educators, doctors. The tacit assumption of benevolence was one of the legacies of socialism. Public-service ethics would radiate from the socialised, or non-market parts of the economy outwards to embrace concerns which remained legally private. The view that socialism would have a transforming effect on capitalism by creating a new ethics as well as new constraints on private greed was most eloquently expressed by Anthony Crosland in his book The Future of Socialism, published in 1956, and was used by him as an argument against the need for any great extension of nationalisation. The decay of market, as well as non-market, forms of accountability would never have been allowed to proceed so far had it not been for the tacit assumption of benevolence. Conversely, one of the great themes which has driven the politics of the 1980s - both Right and Left - has been the search for accountability; or in the jargon of our time, responsiveness of producers and providers to the wants and needs of consumers, customers, clients, patients, pupils. A third tacit assumption was that existing social arrangements, being products of history, could not be changed, and that the art of statesmanship was to work 'with the grain' of inherited institutions. An example was the oft-proclaimed British dictum, which Margaret Thatcher was to challenge, that 'the law has no place in industrial relations'. (On the continent of Europe much more attention was paid to

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the explicit legal basis of state and corporate power, mainly because new constitutions were always having to be drawn up following military defeat.) Underpinning the third tacit assumption was a fourth: societies were fragile organisms, and if one pushed too hard in any direction one risked social revolution. It was an axiom of most European policy-makers that persisting high levels of unemployment would spell death not just for the governments which allowed them, but for capitalism. Market forces must not be allowed to rip, or they would rip society to shreds. Fifthly, the explicit philosophy of the middle way rested on a tacit assumption that the world would, for the foreseeable future, continue to be divided ideologically, politically and militarily between two poles of attraction and repulsion. Obviously any middle-way philosophy depends on the existence of two such poles. No one in the 1960s foresaw the collapse of one of them. Subsuming these tacit assumptions was what I would call 'sticky mass' thinking. Keynes coined the phrase in the 1920s. The older economists, he said, thought of economies as liquids, whereas in fact they were solids. So the principle of diffusion, whereby a shock which entered the system at any point produced an ever widening ripple effect leading to a new equilibrium, no longer worked. Everything was blocked. It was integral to the sticky mass view of society that the right unit of social analysis was the group, not the individual. Few noticed that the great class and occupational groupings were fracturing under the impact of affluence, home ownership, greater mobility, technical change, the spatial dispersion of industry, etc. The first politician to act on the contrary assumption was Mrs Thatcher. So much for what we believed, surveyed crudely and without attention to all the nuances and qualifications which characterised actual beliefs. All these beliefs have unravelled to a greater or lesser extent, under the impact of economic and social changes which created spaces for new languages and new political initiatives. These initiatives have created their own irresistible momentum. The most striking changes have been in the language of politics, economics, and administration. The following seem to me to be the most important. 1. The question of what the state should do is now widely discussed, even by thinkers of the Left, in the language of market-failure. The presumption is that permanent state intervention is justified only in those areas where market-failure can be shown to be inherent and extensive. (Temporary interventions to achieve 'deregulation' may be used to improve the working of markets whose failures are contingent -

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i.e., result from legislative impediments to their efficient working.) The language of public goods and externalities has been developed partly to place an analytic boundary round the 'agenda' of government, partly to meet the need for a more rigorous justification of specific proposals to influence market outcomes (in relation to the environment, for example). 2. Much greater attention is now given to the motives of public officials. The effects of government intervention are now widely discussed in the language of public choice theory, whose main purpose has been to establish the theoretical possibility, and even probability, of 'government failure'. Politicians and bureaucrats are depicted as rational power optimisers rather than as disinterested public servants. Such allocations as emerge from the process of political vote-buying and bureaucratic bargaining are further subject to what the Americans call 'pork barrel polities', where the pushiest pigs - public sector employees, special interests, the middle classes - get the largest share of the swill. The upshot of this discussion is that 'authoritative' allocation of goods and services is bound to be inferior to 'market' allocation, in terms of efficiency, liberty and even fairness. The normative proposition is that public (or political) choice should be restricted, and market choice enlarged. 3. The impact of public choice theory has led to much more attention being paid to the problem of accountability of producers to consumers, particularly in those services which remain inherently public. The conceptualisation of the public services in terms of producers and providers on the one side, and customers, consumers, users, clients on the other, illustrates the extent to which market language has replaced the older language of public service, in which benevolent elites provide for the 'needs of the people'. One approach to accountability is to create 'internal' markets in the public services, in which services are purchased by, or on behalf of, users from competing, private or semi-private, providers. The other is to increase what Albert Hirschman calls consumer 'voice' in non-market decision-making. 4. Closely connected with the above is the new emphasis on 'enabling' or 'empowering' people to make their own choices rather than having them made for them by a remote bureaucracy. The main purpose here is to help people escape from a 'dependency culture' in which they become passive 'clients' of the state. Forms of enablement range from the negative income tax or a 'citizens income', through vouchers, to the promotion of various forms of collective self-help. 5. A specific, and many would say distracting, contribution of economics to the discussion has been the so-called 'policy inef-

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fectiveness' proposition, based on rational expectations theory. This was the theoretical response to the failures of Keynesianism, first elaborated by Milton Friedman. Friedman claimed that monetary and fiscal interventions, designed to increase employment or raise growth rates, have no real consequences in the long run. If the government expands the money supply the only result, it is claimed, is higher prices; if the government spends more of a given money supply, the private sector spends less. The underlying logic is that rational agents learn to protect themselves against delusive policies which experience teaches them have real costs and few benefits. Their ability to protect themselves is that much greater in an era when finance has been deregulated and markets for capital are global. Here is another argument for a restricted state. 6. The concern with limiting state power has led to a revival of interest in constitutionalism. In economic policy, there has been much talk of the need for a 'fiscal and monetary constitution' to restrain discretionary action by vote-seeking politicians. But political constitution-making has received a great fillip as well. The Left in particular wants to disperse power to the regions and lower tiers of government. In the European context this goes under the name of 'subsidiarity'. Ill The new language, shot through with suspicion of the state, coexists in our minds with the coUectivist language which still sees the democratic state as the redresser of grievances and the improver of life-chances. We have moved onto a new set of tracks without completely abandoning the old ones. Out of this criss-crossing of lines the political economy of the future is emerging. In conclusion, I want to outline what I think some of us believe today, with varying degrees of conviction and doubt, commitment and scepticism. The mobility of the factors of production, especially capital, has now reached a point when it is unhelpful, for many purposes, to think of nation-states as the primary units of economic action. This is revealed in the striking acceleration of the drive towards European unity. But the debate has moved beyond the stereotypes of nationalism versus European federalism-cum-bureaucracy. For the Delors vision of Fortress Europe, which goes back to Monnet and Hallstein and has its roots in the two world wars and the Cold War, is itself being swept away by the growing integration of Europe, America and East Asia, and the collapse of the Iron Curtain. So the prospect is not for the incorporation of a few nation-states into a new 'European Union', but the embedding of overlapping associations of European states into a cosmopolitan system

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of world economy. Adam Smith will take over from Friedrich List, as indeed List anticipated. But this prospect is far from being certain. Old agenda have a life of their own, and can always be re-animated by dramatic events. The benevolent guardian view of government is now in irreversible retreat. People no longer want guardians, even if they are benevolent: they have too much discretionary spending power, and with that goes a desire for quality and variety of life. It is also widely recognised that the guardians were not so benevolent, and that the issue of the responsiveness of providers to users cannot be evaded by a general appeal to 'democratic choice'. Public choice theory is largely a sophisticated modern revival of the mistrust of the state held by the classical political economists. The discontent with contemporary architecture illustrates both points: people who can afford their own homes want to choose what kind of home to live in; and we are increasingly aware of the alienating quality of much of the civic architecture put up in the 1960s. The same double movement is at work in education and the National Health Service. Unless the public services can be made more properly accountable they will disappear. The real political debate is about how the demand for accountability can be satisfied. I believe that the right (reinforced by the power) of exit is superior to a combination of voice and public audit. Or, to put it another way: given that the exercise of exit and voice both have costs, I believe that, on balance, choice systems for the public services have fewer costs, actual and prospective, than participatory systems. The most difficult problem of the 1980s has been to find ways of enabling the state to fulfil what many of my generation would still regard as its obligations to the poor and vulnerable without violating the principles of a liberal economy and polity or sapping individual selfreliance. The concept of the 'enabling state', developed from an earlier 'new liberal' tradition, is enlightening, though the struggle to make it operational continues. Entitlement should be to a basic income rather than to a specific set of state-provided services. New social techniques for targeting help on those in need, like the negative income tax, may help. But the question of what the state has the right to demand in return for cash assistance cannot be evaded, especially in these budgetconstrained times. The hardest assumption of all for my generation to give up is that the state is responsible for the level of employment. Keynes argued that employment does not automatically recover after a shock - whether the originating cause is a shock to demand or to supply. The experience of the 1980s and early 1990s bears this out. Governments of western

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countries, acting together, could restore something like full employment now - but only at the cost of accelerating inflation and mounting budget deficits or, if these are to be avoided, stringent controls over the money costs of production. But no one wants a re-run of the politics of the 1970s. We have also learnt that long periods of deficient demand can destroy supply, so that the workers can only be re-employed at wages lower than the income support to which they are entitled as unemployed persons. Rebuilding capital and skills is clearly prior to enlarging consumer demand. This means that any full employment commitment will need to be for the long term. And even with the emphasis shifted to improvements in the supply-side of the economy, it is far from clear what the state's role should be. We seem set for a multitude of small experiments rather than the old Keynesian big bang. The real radicalism of the 1980s has been the abandonment of the protective attitude towards institutions. Policy in the 1980s has been both positive and permissive: positive in trade union legislation and educational and health service reforms, permissive in being willing to allow the force of economic change to reshape social arrangements. The proprietary right to go on existing simply because one has been in that business for a long time, and the corollary claim to state assistance to continue in that way of life, is no longer accepted. State subsidy has too often been revealed not as an instrument for reducing the costs of change, rather as a means of entrenching uncompetitive forms of life. Something of the new openness to change is captured in the fashionable concept of 'contestability', invented by Baumol in 1982. A market is said to be 'contestable' if the costs facing new entrants are similar to those of firms already in the market, and when a firm leaving a market is able to salvage its capital costs, minus depreciation. This implies no barriers to entry. The notion of contestability can be applied to social institutions. The new willingness to allow economic forces to reshape institutions recalls the spirit of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Related to the above, there is a more widespread acceptance than there used to be that societies have considerable capacity for absorbing 'damage5 without falling to pieces. Of course, this capacity is not constant over time. It depends on many factors, and leaders of the older generation may well have been right in fearing the effects of too rapid a change on social stability in the circumstances of their time. Today the frontier for change has opened up, partly because of the collapse of communism. As a result institutional optimism has triumphed over institutional pessimism. More things seem possible. When we look at the world today compared to that of the 1960s the most striking aspect is its fluidity. The blocs are breaking up, the sticky

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masses dissolving. In the realms both of ideas and of facts we see powerful rebirths of individualism, nationalism, globalism. This is both hopeful and frightening, but in the new situation all analysis based on static formations is bound to be questionable. Comparing the intellectual forces pressing for liberalisation today with those promoting collectivism in the earlier part of this century, I am struck by the greater vitality of the former. The exception is the Keynesian revolution, a brilliant analytic performance, but basically a defensive one, constrained by fear of the future. The greater fertility of today's ideas reflects a much greater optimism. We do not feel the need to rely on deterministic or teleological arguments. We live in a freer mental atmosphere, which I, at least, find exhilarating.

Part II

The economy

6

The size and scope of the public sector1 Roger Middleton

Introduction The expansion of the public sector and the growth of big government have been common features of all twentieth-century economies and political systems, whether they be advanced western industrial market economies, centrally planned socialist states, newly industrialising countries or less developed economies.2 Although the British case conforms broadly to the experience of the advanced industrial economies, there are important differences. This is particularly true in respect of the comparative size of Britain's public sector, the composition of public expenditure and revenue, and the timing of its critical phases of growth. As a consequence, the British case has been frequently misunderstood. In particular, the focus upon aggregate measures of state activity has resulted in insufficient attention being paid to the composition of public expenditure and the implications of this for equity and efficiency in the British economy and the underlying objectives of public policymakers.3 This chapter thus follows the tradition, which runs from the 1

2

3

This chapter is a preliminary report on work in progress, and is drawn from a larger project on British economic performance and the growth of big government c. 18901979 to be published as Government Versus the Market by Edward Elgar in 1996. Full details of all of the estimates of public sector growth discussed in this chapter are contained in this forthcoming work. I should like to thank the British Academy and the University of Bristol research fund for financial assistance and Drs Peter Wardley and Rodney Lowe, Professors George Peden and Bernard Alford and the editors for their helpful comments on a draft of this chapter. Any remaining errors of fact, analysis or interpretation are, of course, entirely my own. F. L. Pryor, Public Expenditures in Communist and Capitalist Nations (London, 1968); J. A. Lybeck, The Growth of Government in Developed Economies (Aldershot, 1986); and N. Gemmell (ed.), The Growth of the Public Sector: Theories and International Evidence (Aldershot, 1993). It is also the case that the focus upon the conventional measures of public sector growth (the share of public expenditure or taxation in national income) has resulted in insufficient attention being devoted to the long-run growth of government regulation of the private sector, which imposes public and private economic costs which do not show up as public expenditures (P. D. Larkey, C. Stolp and M. Winer, 'Theorizing about the Growth and Decline of Government: A Research Assessment', Journal of Public Policy,

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early twentieth-century German fiscal sociologists through to modern public choice theory, that public finance, by representing the 'hard, naked facts', offers 'one of the best starting points for an investigation of society'.4 The first objective of this chapter is thus to chart the long-run growth of the public sector using a variety of indicators and to assess this in relation to comparable economies.5 With this established, explanations of public sector growth and their applicability to the British case are then examined. Finally, in the concluding section the question of excess bias,6 in particular the influential Bacon and Eltis thesis,7 is considered, that is whether the size of the public sector had become excessive by 1979, the political - though not numerical - watershed in the growth of big government in twentieth-century Britain and the terminal date for the long-run statistical series detailed in this chapter. From the provision of minimal basic services at the turn of the century - guaranteeing property rights and the maintenance of defence, law and order, and financial probity8 - British governments have come to assume a broader role in the allocation of resources, in the provision

4

5

6

7

8

1 (1981), 157-220; J. G. Cullis and P. R. Jones, Microeconomics and the Public Economy: A Defence of Leviathan (Oxford, 1987), pp. 73-5). This issue, together with wider non-financial measures of state growth (C. L. Taylor (ed.), Why Governments Grow: Measuring Public Sector Size (London, 1983), p. 14; R. Rose, 'Disaggregating the Concept of Government', in Taylor (ed.), Why Governments Grow; and Rose, Understanding Big Government: The Programme Approach (London, 1984), ch. 3), is considered in Middleton, Government Versus the Market. J. A. Schumpeter, 'The Crisis of the Tax State* (1918), reprinted in A. T. Peacock, W. F. Stolper, R. Turvey and E. Henderson (eds.), International Economic Papers (London, 1954), vol. IV, pp. 6, 7. More particularly, three comparator groups are used: the European Community (EC), the group of seven largest industrial (market) economies (G-7) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) which currently has twenty-four members. Subsets of these groups are also used where full data are not available or appropriate, e.g. EC-9 refers to the EC at first enlargement (1973). Readers should also note the following conventions: that the pre-war period is taken as 1900-13, the inter-war years as 1920-38, the post-war period as 1948-79 and the two trans-war periods as 1913-24 and 1937-48; that in some tables component parts may not sum exactly to totals because of rounding; that cross-sectional and time-series averages of country estimates are unweighted means including the UK; that all numbers in parentheses in the tables are negative; and that, unless otherwise indicated, annual percentage growth rates are geometric means. See R. A. Musgrave, 'Excess Bias and the Nature of Budget Growth', Journal of Public Economics, 28 (1985), 287-308. R. W. Bacon and W. A. Eltis, Britain's Economic Problem: Too Few Producers (London, 1978 edn). Whilst this is true of the combined public sector, at the local level municipal trading, especially the provision of gas, water, electricity and transport services, had been developing since the 1870s: H. Finer, Municipal Trading: A Study in Public Administration (London, 1941); M. E. Falkus, 'The Development of Municipal Trading in the Nineteenth Century', Business History, 19 (1977), 134-61.

The size and scope of the public sector 50 -i

91

40 30

•

20 10 0

1

2 3 4 5 Indicators of public sector growth

•

6

1900 i l 1979

Fig. 6.1 Summary indicators of public sectors size, 1900 and 1979: 1 Income tax standard rate, year ending 5 April, 2 Public sector employment as % of total employment, 1901 and 1979,3 Government final consumption as % of GDP at market prices, 4 Public sector receipts as a % of GDP at market prices, 5 Total public expenditure as % of GDP at market prices, 6 Outstanding national debt as % of GDP. Note: For this and successivefiguresand tables, Southern Ireland is included for 1900-19; from 1920 onwards it is excluded. Sources: Income tax standard rate: B. R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (Cambridge, 1988), p. 645. Public sector employment: 1901-50: M. Abramovitz and V. F. Eliasberg, The Growth of Public Employment in Great Britain (Princeton, N.J., 1957), table 1; 1960: 'Employment in the Public and Private Sectors of the United Kingdom Economy 1957 to 1961', Economic Trends, 110 (December 1962), app. table 1; 1970: 'Employment in the Public and Private Sectors of the United Kingdom Economy in 1960 and 1970', Economic Trends, 212 (June 1971), xlvi; and 1979: 'Employment in the Public and Private Sectors 1979 to 1985', Economic Trends, 386 (December 1985), 36, 90. Government final consumption and total public expenditure: GDP: C. H. Feinstein, National Income, Expenditure and Output of the United Kingdom, 1855—1965 (Cambridge, 1972), table 3 and CSO, National Income and Expenditure (1981), table 1.1; public expenditure: Feinstein, National Income, tables 1, 12—14, CSO, National Income and Expenditure (1958), table 40; idem., National Income and Expenditure (1964), table 47; idem., National Income and Expenditure (1967), table 52; idem., National Income and Expenditure, 1963-1973 (1974), table 50; and idem., National Income and Expenditure (1981), tables 6.2, 6.3, 9.1. Public sector receipts: GDP - as for public expenditure; public sector receipts - as for public expenditure and, additionally Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom, 18951909, BPP 1910 (5296), civ, 9; Statistical Abstract for the United Kingdom, 1905-1919, BPP 1921 (1246), xl, 2-3; National Income and Expenditure of the United Kingdom, 1938-1945, Cmd. 6784 (1946), table 18; and CSO, Annual Abstract of Statistics, 1935-46, 84 (1948), table 4. National debt: Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, pp. 602-3, 833-5.

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of public and merit goods,9 in guiding the market to reduce income and wealth inequalities and in economic management. All three of Musgrave's functions of the public economy - allocation, distribution and stabilisation - have thus expanded,10 but to different degrees and at varying times. This is evident from the summary measures of public sector size for 1900 and 1979 detailed in figure 6.1 (which are drawn from the longer-run series used later in this chapter): a tenfold rise in the standard rate of income tax, a near fivefold increase in the public sector's share of the working population, a more than fourfold increase in the ratio of public sector receipts to GDP, an increase in the ratio of public expenditure to GDP of between two and three and a half times (depending upon which definition is considered) and a rise of nearly one and a half fold in the ratio of outstanding national debt to GDP. There have also been important changes in the structure of Britain's public finances. On the expenditure side, social services have replaced defence as the largest budgetary item (the former increasing from 17.6 to 52.2 per cent of total public expenditure; the latter falling from 45.8 to 10.3 per cent), whilst, on the receipts side, there has been a marked shift in the tax mix: from a clear bias towards taxes on expenditure to a position in which taxes on income dominate (the former falling from 68.0 to 37.3 per cent of total receipts; the latter rising from 10.3 to 45.2 per cent). In addition, we should note the quantitative significance of the state trading sector. In 1907 this had contributed 4.5 per cent of the UK's gross output and accounted for 7.4 per cent of total employment.11 By the later 1970s, after the nationalisation programme of 1945-51 and the steady acquisition of bankrupt leading companies (the so-called 'lame ducks') in the 1970s, public enterprise accounted for nearly 13 per cent of GDP, 12 7.7 per cent of the working population and 16.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Fixed Capital Formation (GDFCF) (figures 6.5 and 6.6). 9

10

11

12

Pure public goods (such as defence) have certain characteristics such that their consumption by any one economic agent does not reduce the amount available for others; merit goods (such as public education, health and welfare services) assume that individual economic agents have distorted preferences (for example, insufficient appreciation of the benefit of education) and that government provision is required to ensure a socially optimal level of consumption. R. A. Musgrave, The Theory of Public Finance: A Study in Public Economy (London, 1959). J. S. Foreman-Peck, 'The Privatization of Industry in Historical Perspective', Journal of Law and Society, 16 (1989), table 1. R. Pryke, The Nationalised Industries: Policies and Performance since 1968 (Oxford, 1981), table 1.1.

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70 -,

"1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 | Capital formation

m Transfers

flUm

1960

1970

Current expenditure

Fig. 6.2 Public expenditure as a percentage of GDP at current market prices, 1900-79. Notes and sources: As fig. 6.1.

The long-run growth of the public sector The overall course of expenditure

An examination of long-run trends in public expenditure, the conventional indicator of the growth of the public sector,13 is extremely difficult. 13

It should be noted that both the expenditure and tax ratios are much affected by varying practices in definitions and calculation. Thus, for the former, the numerator is much affected by the definition of public expenditure (whether current or total expenditures, general government or the public sector), while the denominator may use GDP or GNP at market prices or factor cost (A. Gillie, Measuring the Government Sector: Size and Productivity (Milton Keynes, 1979), figure 6; A. Pedone, Tublic Expenditure', in A. Boltho (ed.), The European Economy: Growth and Crisis (Oxford, 1982), p. 407; D. Heald, Public Expenditure: Its Defence and Reform (Oxford, 1983), figure

2.1). For Britain, in the crisis year of 1976, a wide (narrow) definition of the numerator (denominator) yielded a public expenditure ratio of 60 per cent, prompting Friedman's dire warning that 'the odds are at least 50-50 that within the next five years British freedom and democracy, as we have seen it, will be destroyed', and undoubtedly contributed to the loss of overseas confidence in sterling later that summer: M. Friedman, 'The Line We Dare Not Cross: The Fragility of Freedom at "60%"', Encounter, 47 (November 1976), 9; see also L. Pliatzky, Getting and Spending: Public Expenditure, Employment and Inflation (Oxford, 1984 edn), ch. 5; and K. Burk and A. K. Cairncross, 'Goodbye, Great Britain': The 1976 IMF Crisis (London, 1992). On

the SNA definition employed by the OECD-UN as a standardised measure the 1976 ratio was 46.1 per cent, with an EC-9 average of 47.1 per cent, G-7 average of 40.1 per cent and OECD average of 37.7 per cent (Heald, Public Expenditure, p. 15 and table 2.3).

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There has been very little data collection or empirical work since the pioneering studies of Hicks, Veverka, Peacock and Wiseman, and Feinstein.14 The published data for the period before 1900 are fragmentary, of questionable consistency and insufficiently detailed for a fully informed appraisal of both the magnitude and composition of British public expenditure.15 Thereafter, the data improve in reliability, but there are still problems in reconciling Feinstein's series for the period 1900-65 with later Central Statistical Office (CSO) estimates in order to bring the account up to date.16 14

15

16

U. K. Hicks, British Public Finances: Their Structure and Development, 1880-1952 (Oxford, 1958 edn); J. Veverka, 'The Growth of Government Expenditure in the United Kingdom since 1790', Scottish Journal of Political Economy, 10(1963), 111-27, reprinted in A. T. Peacock and D. J. Robertson (eds.), Public Expenditure: Appraisal and Control (Edinburgh, 1963), pp. 111-27; A. T. Peacock and J. Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom (London, 1967 edn); and Feinstein, National Income. There has been some recent work on the eighteenth century (P. K. O'Brien, 'The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660-1815', Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 41 (1988), 1-32; R. V. Jackson, 'Government Expenditure and British Economic Growth in the Eighteenth Century: Some Problems of Measurement', Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 43 (1990), 217-35; J. V. Beckett and M. Turner, 'Taxation and Economic Growth in Eighteenth-Century England', Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 43 (1990), 377-403; and P. K. O'Brien, 'Power with Profit: The State and the Economy, 1688-1815', inaugural lecture (London, 1991), much of it prompted by N. F. R. Craft's revision of the story of Britain's 'industrial revolution' (British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985)). The nineteenth century, however, continues to languish, though there is a useful comparative survey in D. E. Schremmer, 'Taxation and Public Finance: Britain, France and Germany', in P. Mathias and S. Pollard (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. VIII, The Industrial Economies: The Development of Economic and Social Policies (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 315—493; and the following are of some use: J. F. Rees, A Short Fiscal and Financial History of England, 1815-1918 (London, 1921); E. L. Hargreaves, The National Debt (London, 1930); and F. W. Fetter and D. Gregory, Monetary and Financial Policy in Nineteenth Century Britain (Dublin, 1973); see also M. W. Wright, Treasury Control of the Civil Service, 1854-1874 (Oxford, 1969) which contains much useful detail (though his estimates in app. V are incorrectly labelled public expenditure); L. E. Davis and R. A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860-1912 (Cambridge, 1986), esp. chs. 4, 8; and the budgetary studies of B. Mallett, British Budgets, 1887-1913 (London, 1913); B. Mallet and C. O. George, British Budgets, Second Series, 1913/14 to 1920/21 (London, 1929); Mallet and George, British Budgets, Third Series, 1921/22 to 1932/33 (London, 1933); and B. E. V. Sabine, A History of Income Tax (London, 1966). Full details of the procedures necessary to obtain consolidated accounts of the public sector 1900-79, together with the definition of total public expenditure used, are contained in Middleton, Government Versus the Market, app. I. In essence the estimates here reported conform to the CSO's pre-1977 definition: current and capital expenditure by central and local (i.e. general) government including the national insurance funds, capital expenditure by public corporations and debt interest paid by general government and public corporations to the private sector. This excludes the operating expenses of the public corporations, but includes their trading surpluses, along with those of central and local government, in the income side of the account ('Government Income and Expenditure in the National Accounts: A Change of Presentation',

The size and scope of the public sector

95

Table 6.1. The growth of public expenditure, 1790-1900

A. Public expenditure basic indicators 1790 1800 1810 1820 1830 1840 1850 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900

Expenditure at constant

Expenditure per capita at constant prices

prices (£m)

£

Index (1790 =100)

Government expenditure as%ofGNP

18 36 44 44 49 46 61 72 74 100 126 265

1.2 2.3 2.4 2.1 2.0 1.7 2.2 2.5 2.4 2.9 3.4 6.4

100 180 191 169 164 140 179 202 191 232 272 519

12 22 23 17 15 11 11 11 9 10 8 14

B. Elasticity of government expenditure with respect toGNP

1790-1830

1850-1890

Total expenditure

0.95

0.76

By function: Administration Debt service Defence Social services Environmental service* Other

0.85 1.05 0.80 0.70 1.40 —

1.08 0.38 0.92 1.42 1.23 —

By economic category: Transfers Goods and services

1.05 0.90

0.08 1.12

1790-1830

1850-1890

1.8 2.4

1.5 2.9

C. Percentage annual average real rate of growth Central government Local government

Note: Public expenditure is here defined in line with Peacock and Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure: net expenditure by central and local government including the social insurance funds. Sources: Veverka, 'The Growth of Government Expenditure', table 1; and R. Bird, 'Wagner's Law of Expanding State Activity', Public Finance, 6 (1971), table 1.

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Figure 6.2 charts the growth of total public expenditure as a percentage of GDP at market prices over the period 1900-79. It also shows the overall composition of expenditure: goods and services, gross capital formation and transfer payments (items 3—6 of table 6.2). Explanations of this transformation in public expenditure are deferred until later in this chapter (pp. 124-38). For the present, we concentrate upon its overall magnitude and composition, the latter itself being an important basis for such explanation. Over the period as a whole the share of public expenditure in GDP (the expenditure ratio) rose by very nearly three and a half times, though it should be noted that the public sector's direct claim upon resources (expenditure on goods and services and gross fixed capital formation) increased by far less: from 11.2 per cent to 26.5 per cent of GDP. From the outset, therefore, we can see that it was transfer payments which fuelled the growth of public expenditure. It is clear also, given the major peaks associated with the two world wars and the minor peaks of the Boer (1899-1902) and Korean (1951-2) Wars, that war has played an important part in this process, though whether we can ascribe to war a displacement effect, as has been done by Peacock and Wiseman,17 remains questionable.18 As table 6.1 suggests, the trend of public expenditure was very different in the nineteenth century. The elasticity of public expenditure with respect to GNP 19 was consistently below unity over the century 1790-1890. Indeed, the half century or so following the ending of the Napoleonic Wars witnessed a declining expenditure ratio. It was only from the 1870s that the ratio began to rise, though the estimate for 1900 in panel A of table 6.1 gives a slightly misleading impression as the numerator was strongly affected by the Boer War.20 Over the century

17 18 19

20

Economic Trends, 281 (March 1977), 89-90; 'Public Expenditure: Definitions and T r e n d s ' , Economic Trends, 361 (November 1983), 138-51; and 'Measuring Public Expenditure', Economic Trends, 382 (August 1985), 94-110). T h i s definition differs in important respects from that of general government which has been used, with modifications, since 1977 and which relates more to financial control than to resource use. Since our interest is the growth of the public sector, the pre-1977 definition was considered to be preferable. Middleton, Government Versus the Market, app. I also contains a comparison of the series used here with the C S O series for 1890-1986 ('Long T e r m T r e n d s in Public Expenditure', Economic Trends, 408 (October 1987), chart 2 and table 2), which uses the post-1977 definition. O n average our series is 1.4 percentage points of G D P above the C S O series. Peacock and Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure, p p . xiii-xv, 2 7 - 8 . See p p . 125-32 below. Elasticity measures are a standard means of measuring the sensitivity of one economic variable (in this case, public expenditure) to changes in another (in this case, G N P ) . T h u s if the elasticity of public expenditure with respect to G N P is greater than 1 it is said to be elastic; unitary if equal to one; and inelastic if less than 1. Defence expenditures were £134.9 million in 1900 as against £43.1 million in 1895 and £63.1 million in 1905 (Peacock and Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure, table

The size and scope of the public sector

97

1790-1890 the annual percentage cumulative rate of growth of public expenditure was 1.9 per cent, as against rates of population and GNP growth of 0.9 per cent and 2.3 per cent respectively.21 Further insights into the growth of public expenditure are provided by decomposing the aggregate figures. In modern studies this is typically pursued at five levels: by economic category (e.g. direct expenditures or transfers), by function (the purpose of spending), by spending authority (the tier of government spending and control), by the department responsible for the expenditure and by the spatial pattern of expenditures across the regions of the British economy.22 Unfortunately, information for the whole of our period is only available for the first three. The structure and composition of public expenditure Long-term trends in public expenditure by economic category and functional classification are shown in table 6.2 for selected years using the CSO pre-1977 definition of public expenditure discussed earlier. As is well established,23 the expenditure ratio (and also that for receipts) is highly sensitive to changes in both the numerator and the denominator. The former is much affected by the endogeneity of the budget,24 the latter by the business cycle. Accordingly, the dates chosen for this exercise are all years of high capacity utilisation (with 1903 being included as an alternative initial date to 1900 as defence expenditures had returned to more usual levels after the Boer War), 25 and, with the exceptions of 1900 and 1951, ones in which public expenditure was not

21 22

23

24

25

A-7). Taking the average of 1895 and 1905 defence expenditures as a proxy for non-wartime expenditure in 1900, we obtain a hypothetical expenditure ratio for 1900 of 9.9 per cent of GNP as against the recorded ratio of 14.4 per cent. Veverka, 'The Growth of Government Expenditure', p. 116. T h e r e are n o historical data for t h e latter, b u t see J. S h o r t , Public Expenditure and Taxation in the Regions ( F a r n b o r o u g h , 1981) for m o r e recent estimates. F o r e x a m p l e , T . S. W a r d a n d R. R. N e i l d , The Measurement and Reform of Budgetary Policy ( L o n d o n , 1978); a n d W . A. Eltis, ' T h e G r o w t h a n d Influence of E x p e n d i t u r e : T h e U n i t e d K i n g d o m , 1 9 6 1 - 1 9 7 9 ' , in T a y l o r (ed.), Why Governments Grow, p . 7 3 . P u b l i c e x p e n d i t u r e t e n d s to vary inversely w i t h G D P , b e c a u s e , for e x a m p l e , as u n e m p l o y m e n t rises, outlays o n u n e m p l o y m e n t ( a n d o t h e r welfare) benefits rise, while tax receipts are positively related t o G D P , taxes o n i n c o m e in p a r t i c u l a r b e i n g sensitive to t h e business cycle. Business cycle reference dates from R. C. O . M a t t h e w s , C. H . F e i n s t e i n a n d J. C. O d l i n g - S m e e , British Economic Growth, 1856-1973 (Oxford, 1982), table 10.1. Strictly, t h e first business cycle peak should b e 1899, b u t F e i n s t e i n ' s m o r e detailed data d o n o t b e g i n until 1900 a n d , in any case, 1900 is t h e peak year for G D P ( E ) ( F e i n s t e i n , National Income, table 1.6), t h e major series u s e d as t h e d e n o m i n a t o r in s u m m a r y m e a s u r e s of p u b l i c sector size.

Table 6.2. Public expenditure as a percentage of GDP at market prices, by economic category and functional classification, selected years, 1900-79 1900 1903 1907 1913 1920 1924 1929 1937 1948 1951 1955 1960 1964 1968 1973 1979 A. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Economic category: Current goods and services Gross capital formation Current grants to personal sector Subsidies Current grants paid abroad Debt interest Total

9.3 8.5 18 19 05 0 4 0.0 00 0.1 0.2 2.0 1.6 13 3 12 9

7.6 13 03 00 0.0 1.8 10 9

8.2 9.0 8.1 17 22 12 09 27 39 0.0 2 1 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.0 1.7 5.7 7.9 11 9 20 5 23 6

9.2 26 44 05 0.1 7.7 24 5

11.7 33 50 06 0.1 5.4 26 0

15.0 16.8 16.6 76 57 69 58 60 54 1.8 49 32 0.4 0 3 0.5 4.8 4.7 5.1 37 0 37 5 37 0

16.3 16.4 73 90 65 72 1 9 1.6 0.4 0.5 4.6 4.2 37 1 38 9

17.8 10 8 85 2.1 0.4 4.4 43 9

B. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Functional classification: Public administration and other Debt interest Law and order External services Defence Social services Economic services Environmental services Total

0.7 0.9 16 20 0.4 0 5 0.1 0.0 6.0 4.0 2.3 3.0 16 19 0.5 06 13.3 12.9

0.8 18 0.6 0.1 2.7 3.1 14 05 10.9

0.8 0.8 1.1 17 57 79 0.6 02 05 0.0 0.1 0.0 2.9 3.1 6.1 3.7 4.9 8.0 14 24 24 0.6 03 07 11.9 20.5 23.6

1.0 77 06 00 2.6 9.2 27 07 24 5

1.0 54 05 0.0 4.9 10.5 27 09 26.0

1.2 1.2 51 47 05 06 0.2 0.6 6.3 7.6 17.6 14.1 48 71 13 17 37 0 37.5

1.0 48 0.7 0.4 8.0 13.9 62 1.9 37.0

1.0 0.9 4 6 4.2 0.7 0.8 0.8 0.5 6.3 6.1 15.1 16.5 69 71 1 9 2.5 37.1 38.9

0.9 0.9 41 44 0.9 1.0 0.7 0.9 5.6 4.8 20.2 21.2 65 78 3.6 34 43.9 42.9

18.3 19.9 93 66 8 8 10 9 2.0 2.3 0.5 1.1 4.1 5.1 42 9 45 9 0.9 51 1.2 1.2 4.7 23.9 57 3.1 45.9

Notes: (1) Full details of the calculation of these series are given in Middleton, Government versus the Market, app. I. (2) The distribution by economic classification is more accurate than that by function for the years to 1948; thereafter they use identical sources. Sources: As figure 6.1 and, additionally, U. K. Hicks, The Finance of British Government, 1920-1936 (Oxford, 1938), app. tables 1-5; CSO, National Income and Expenditure, 1946-1952 (1953), tables 32-5; National Income and Expenditure (1955), table 42; National Income and Expenditure, 1962 (1962), table 44; National Income and Expenditure, 1963-1973 (1974), table 51; Peacock and Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure, table A-15; Feinstein, National Income, tables 33, 35; K. Hartley, 'Defence with Less Money? The British Experience', in G. Harries-Jenkins (ed.), Armed Forces and the Welfare Societies: Challenges in the 1980s. Britain, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and the United States (London, 1982), table 2.1; R. Parry, 'United Kingdom: Institutional Synopsis', in P. Flora (ed.), Growth to Limits: The Western European Welfare States since World War II, vol. IV: Appendix (Synopses, Bibliographies, Tables) (Berlin, 1987), tables 2-3.

The size and scope of the public sector

99

inflated above trend by high defence outlays. Dividing the century into sub-periods, the following trends are observable. The expenditure ratio exhibited a slight downward trend in the pre-war period. This followed from a slight reduction in the public sector's direct claim upon resources (dominated by reduction in defence expenditures after the Boer War), with transfer payments remaining largely unchanged. However, there were important compositional changes: the major social welfare legislation was beginning to have its effect, with expenditure on social services rising from 2.3 to 3.7 per cent of GDP between 1900 and 1913, thereby replacing defence as the principal budgetary charge. Thus the establishment of welfare services in the years immediately preceding the First World War was already beginning to transform the functional composition of expenditure, with the upward trend in expenditures being masked by the strong business cycle recovery from 1907. The First World War saw a near doubling of the expenditure ratio between 1913-20. There was some increase in the direct command of resources but this was dwarfed by the increase in transfer payments. These increased from 2.6 to 10.7 per cent of GDP, with one half of this increase being associated with the massive rise in debt payments which was a consequence of the First World War (see figure 6.7 for the growth in the debt/GDP ratio). There were, however, also significant rises in current grants to the personal sector and subsidies, indicative of a more permanent impact of war on the social wage and also on governmentindustry relations. The expenditure ratio continued to rise between the wars, but was much more evident in the increasing direct claim upon resources, both current and capital. We will see later that the inter-war period was historically a period of very rapid expenditure growth, with compositional changes being determined by the reduced debt charge once cheap money had been instituted in the early 1930s. We can also observe the diminished share of total public expenditure taken by administration and by law and order, a trend which in part derives from economies of scale in the provision of such services, but also lends support to the view that in the long run modern states become less preoccupied with internal control and more with the provision of social benefits.26 Indeed, this is reflected in the shares of social, economic and environmental services 26

See, for example, R. Rose, 'On the Priorities of Government: A Developmental Analysis of Public Policies', European Journal of Political Research, 4 (1976), 247-89. However, for some schools of thought, social expenditures should be conceived of as a form of social control: see J. Higgins, 'Social Control Theories of Social Policy', Journal of Social Policy, 9 (1980), 1-23.

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which increased from 37.1 per cent of total public expenditure in 1920 to 54.2 per cent in 1937, with the most pronounced growth occurring in the 1920s and in welfare services.27 This period sees the establishment of the modern budget structure with expenditure on welfare functions far outstripping expenditure on economic and environmental services, whereas they had been approximately equivalent at the beginning of the century. Finally, until rearmament began in earnest in the mid-1930s, defence expenditures were much reduced on the pre-war period, creating a partial peace dividend which was allocated to the growth of social expenditures. The Second World War was associated with a far less dramatic rise in public expenditure and more moderate changes in its composition than the earlier conflict. Between 1937 and 1948, the expenditure ratio only rose by 11 percentage points, almost equally divided between the public sector's direct claim on resources and transfer payments. A major part of the explanation for this lies with the stability of debt payments in GDP, a reflection of the very different financial policies pursued in the Second World War. It is also the case that over the trans-war period expenditure on economic and environmental services began their upward climb. Finally, the post-war period has seen a further upward trend to the expenditure ratio: from 37 per cent in 1948 to 45.9 per cent of GDP by the end of the period, although the peak had been realised in 1975 at 49.9 per cent and had fallen thereafter. This is usually explained in terms of 1976 being 'the year in which government policy with regard to the public sector changed from a Keynesian to a classical approach due to a new belief by British governments that extra public expenditure would crowd out private investment expenditures'.28 Over the period as a whole, the direct claim upon resources led the way, a predictable outcome given the nationalisation programme of the late 1940s. These, however, peaked in 1967, with gross capital formation, in particular investment in infrastructure,29 falling away heavily from the mid-1970s. We should also note that defence expenditures remained relatively high through to the mid-1950s. With approximate stability in the expenditure ratio until the late 1950s, the share of expenditure on social functions does not begin its rapid phase of growth until the 1960s, a beneficiary of the declining shares taken by the military and by debt interest. Indeed, Judge has described the relative decline in the defence budget 1955-74 27

28 29

For general accounts, see B. B. Gilbert, British Social Policy, 1914-1939 1970); and A. Crowther, British Social Policy, 1914-1939 (London, 1988). Eltis, ' T h e Growth and Influence of Expenditure', p. 73. O. Simon, 'Investing in the Infrastructure', National Westminster Bank Review (May 1986), 2 - 1 6 .

(London,

Quarterly

The size and scope of the public sector

101

as the most important enabling factor in 'providing] fiscal space for the development of the welfare state'.30 In one important respect the trend of public expenditure in the twentieth century differs from that in the nineteenth. In the earlier period it was local government which was increasing its share of the total, from 17.4 per cent to 50.4 per cent between 1790 and 1910.31 During the twentieth century, however, local government's share has, for the most part, fallen: from the pre-war peak down to 35.3 per cent by 1932 and 23.0 per cent by 1951,32 indicative of a concentration of expenditure by central government with local authorities assuming client status in financial matters.33 The trend since 1951 has been less clear cut: from 23.0 per cent in 1951 the proportion rose to a peak of 34.2 per cent in 1973 (the last year of the old local government system), before falling back to 28.7 per cent by 1979.34 International comparison of public expenditure

In our review of the growth of public expenditure, it remains to compare Britain's experience with that of comparable economies. Again, however, the data is most incomplete for the earlier periods. Table 6.3 presents some estimates for five of the G-7 countries (plus the Netherlands). It reveals that in terms of the public expenditure ratio there was nothing that was distinctive about the UK public sector before the First World War. Thereafter, the expenditure ratio rose in all of these states in the inter-war period. However, the proportionate rise was greatest for Britain between 1913 and 1929; other G-7 economies experienced their critical phase in public sector growth in the 1930s. The explanation is most likely the differential experiences of unemployment as between Britain and other OECD states, with the 1920s being relatively worse 30

31 33

34

K. Judge, 'State Pensions and the Growth of Social Welfare Expenditures', Journal of Social Policy, 10 (1981), 505; for more detailed accounts of post-war public expenditure growth, see R. Parry, 'United Kingdom', in P. Flora (ed.), Growth to Limits: The Western European Welfare States since World War II, vol. I I , Germany, United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy (Berlin, 1986), pp. 157-240; Parry, 'United Kingdom: Institutional Synopsis', pp. 357^406; and M . Mullard, The Politics of Public Expenditure (London, 1987). 32 Veverka, ' T h e Growth of Government Expenditure', table I I I . Ibid. B. Keith-Lucas and P. G. Richards, A History of Local Government in the Twentieth Century (London, 1978), ch. V I I ; see also A. E. Holmans, ' T h e Role of Local Authorities in the Growth of Public Expenditure in the U n i t e d Kingdom', in A. K. Cairncross (ed.), The Managed Economy (Oxford, 1970), pp. 151-5. Parry, 'United Kingdom: Institutional Synopsis', app. table 2; see also G. C. Baugh, 'Government Grants in Aid of the Rates in England and Wales, 1889-1990', Historical Research, 157 (1992), 2 1 5 - 3 7 , for the long-run decline in rate income of local authorities and thus increased dependence upon grants and loans.

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Table 6.3. Total government expenditure as a percentage of GDP at current pricesy selected yearsy 1880-1950

France Germany

Japan Netherlands UK US Average

1880

1913

1929

1938

1950

11.2 10.0 9.0 — 9.9 —

8.9 17.7 14.2 8.2 13.3 8.0

12.4 30.6 18.8 11.2 23.8 10.0

23.2 42.4 30.3 21.7 28.8 19.8

27.6 30.4 19.8 26.8 34.2 21.4

10.0

11.7

17.8

27.7

26.7

Sources: Derived from A. Maddison, 'Origins and Impact of the Welfare State, 18831983', Banca Nazionale del Lavorno Quarterly Review, 37 (1984), table 1; idem. Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development: A Long-Run Comparative View (Oxford, 1991), table 3.17.

than the 1930s in the case of the former,35 and the British downturn beginning in 1929 being far less severe than was the case with most OECD economies.36 In terms of public sector size the inter-war period can be characterised as exhibiting a process of catch-up and convergence - to borrow the terminology now applied routinely to describe post-war economic growth in the OECD37 - with a lower coefficient of variation38 for 1937 in relation to both 1929 and 1913.39 Fortunately, the data are much fuller 35

36

37

38

39

U s i n g B. J. Eichengreen and T . J. Hatton's data ('Interwar U n e m p l o y m e n t in International Perspective: A n Overview', in B. J. Eichengreen and T . J. Hatton (eds.), Interwar Unemployment in International Perspective (Dordrecht, 1988), table 1) the following results for the ratio of the mean unemployment rate for 1930-8 to the mean unemployment rate for 1921-9 can be calculated: U K 1.37, France 2.7, Germany 2.36 and U S 3.62. It should be noted that there are major problems with, for example, the German data, although these would tend to magnify the deterioration vis-a-vis the British case. U K real G D P fell 5.1 per cent between 1929 and 1932 as against average falls for E C - 9 of 6.7 per cent, G - 7 of 12.9 per cent and O E C D - 1 6 of 8.2 per cent. Quantitatively, the two most significant depressions were Germany and the U S , with real G D P losses of 15.8 and 28.2 per cent respectively (calculated from Maddison, Dynamic Forces, table A-7). See, for example, C. H . Feinstein, 'Benefits of Backwardness and Costs of Continuity', in A. Graham and A. Seldon (eds.), Government and Economies in the Postwar World: Economic Policies and Comparative Performance, 1945—85 (London, 1990), p p . 284—93. T h i s statistical measure is denned as the standard deviation divided by the arithmetic mean, where the standard deviation is a measure of dispersion around the mean. For a fuller discussion of inter-war European trends, see R. Middleton, ' T h e Economic Role of the State in Interwar Britain', in S. Groenveld and M . J. Wintle (eds.), State and Trade: Government and Economy in Britain and the Netherlands since the Middle Ages (Zutphen, 1992), app. table 2.

The size and scope of the public sector

103

Table 6.4. OECD: general government expenditure as a percentage of GDP, selected years, 1950-79 1950

1960

1968

1973

1975

1979

G-7: Canada France Germany Italy Japan UK US

24.4 36.0 32.0 22.2 — 32.1 24.4

28.9 34.6 32.4 30.1 — 32.4 27.5

33.0 40.3 39.1 34.7 — 39.2 31.3

36.0 38.5 41.5 37.8 22.1 40.7 31.3

40.8 43.5 48.9 43.2 27.3 46.4 35.6

39.3 45.5 47.6 45.5 31.2 42.9 32.9

Other OECD: Australia Austria Belgium Denmark Finland Greece Iceland Ireland Luxembourg Netherlands New Zealand Norway Portugal Spain Sweden Switzerland Turkey

18.8 18.0 22.6 19.0 28.6 — — 32.1 25.0 26.5 — 27.6 — — 16.2 19.8 —

22.1 35.7 30.3 24.8 26.6 17.4 28.2 28.0 30.5 33.7 — 29.9 17.0 — 31.0 17.2 —

25.1 40.6 36.3 36.3 32.8 23.5 33.8 35.2 37.3 43.9 — 37.9 20.9 21.3 42.8 20.7 21.9

26.8 41.3 39.1 42.1 31.0 21.1 36.7 39.0 36.1 49.3 — 44.6 21.3 23.0 44.7 24.2 —

32.7 46.1 44.5 48.2 36.1 26.7 38.5 46.5 48.6 56.6 — 48.4 30.3 24.7 48.9 28.7 —

32.9 48.9 49.4 53.2 36.6 29.7 33.4 46.8 52.5 55.8 — 52.9 36.2 30.5 60.7 29.9 —

27.5 28.5 25.0

30.8 31.0 27.9

38.0 36.3 33.1

40.5 35.4 34.9

47.4 40.8 40.5

48.8 40.7 42.5

Averages: EC-9 G-7

OECD

Note: Because of the different source used for the 1950 and 1960-79 estimates, the 1950 and 1960 figures are not strictly comparable. The average difference amounts to less than half a percentage point of GDP and there are no significant differences for either the EC or G-7 groups. Sources: 1950: B. G. Peters, The Politics of Taxation: A Comparative Perspective (Oxford, 1991), table 3.1; 1960-79: OECD Economic Outlook: Historical Statistics, 1960-84 (Paris, 1986), table 6.5.

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and of better quality for the post-war period. Table 6.4 shows the overall position for Britain in relation to the EC-9, G-7 and OECD states using the SNA definitions for 1950-79. Whilst Britain's expenditure ratio was consistently above that for the G-7 and OECD, it remained around the EC-9 average, so that 'If increases in the public expenditure/GDP ratio count as evidence of sin, there are many sinners.'40 Indeed, by 1979, when public expenditure stood at 42.9 per cent of GDP and exceeded both the G-7 (40.7 per cent) and OECD (42.5 per cent) averages, it was well below the average for EC-9 states (48.8 per cent). Britain's public sector, by this measure, was thus not out of step with suitable comparators. Indeed, it was between 3 and 5 percentage points of GDP smaller than the other large - and more successful - European industrial economies (France, Germany and Italy) and between 10 and 18 percentage points smaller than the Scandinavian economies (Denmark, Norway and Sweden), though of course it was larger than either Japan or the US. Moreover, Britain's relative position had changed markedly over the preceding twenty years, though not in the direction that a knowledge of the political debate of the 1970s, much of which was occasioned by the supposed crisis of public expenditure, might lead one to suppose. In 1950, Britain had one of the largest public sectors in Europe (32.1 per cent of GDP as against the EC-9 average of 27.5 per cent), so that over the intervening years it had the slowest rate of growth of the public sector by this measure of the EC countries. The data in table 6.4 suggest an approximate inverse relationship between the public expenditure ratio in 1950 and the rate of growth of the public sector to the mid- to late 1970s.41 Clearly there was a process of catch-up and convergence in the 1950s as the coefficient of variation is reduced for the G-7 and EC-9 though not the EC grouping. Thereafter, the experience of individual countries is more diverse,42 with the British case being distinctive in that there was a very marked reduction in the public expenditure ratio between 1975 and 1979 after an equally marked rise in the years 1973-5, the initial years of the OPEC I price shock. It was noted earlier that public expenditure growth since 1900 was dominated by the expansion of transfer payments, principally welfare expenditures. The question naturally arises whether there was anything distinctive about the pattern and composition of British expenditure 40 41

42

Heald, Public Expenditure, p. 32. A regression of t h e proportionate growth in t h e expenditure ratio 1950-79 on t h e expenditure ratio for 1950 for t h e twenty O E C D states for which there are available data (see table 6.4) yielded a R 2 of 0.38. T h i s is a lower-bound estimate since 1960 data were substituted where a 1950 figure was n o t available. J . - E . L a n e a n d S. Ersson, Comparative Political Economy ( L o n d o n , 1990), table 6.5.

The size and scope of the public sector

105

growth relative to comparator groups. This is extremely difficult to answer for the pre-war and inter-war periods where there is only very fragmentary cross-country evidence about the functional classification of public expenditure.43 For the pre-war period, there has been much recent debate about the heavy burden of defence expenditures, which were largely determined by empire commitments;44 the latest evidence suggesting that on average between 1870 and 1914 it was the French and not the British economy which carried the largest defence burden (as a percentage of national income and as expenditures per capita), with British expenditures approximating to those of Germany, save for the rearmament programme of the 1890s and the Boer War period.45 There is, however, quite clear evidence that there was a much lower level of investment in education relative to comparators.46 There is also evidence that whilst in terms of the implementation of social welfare programmes it was the newly unified German state that was in the vanguard in Europe, Britain was distinctive in having a phase of very rapid expansion rather than a period of more steady growth and, with the exception of Sweden, had developed social programmes with the widest coverage in Europe by the eve of the First World War.47 Despite contemporary concerns about the rising burden of personal taxation,48 and the potential disincentive effects and moral hazards associated with the new welfare programmes,49 the modest and piecemeal nature of change makes it difficult to sustain the argument that the pre-war period posed the potential for all but a minimum of crowding-out of private 43

44

45 46

47

48 49

Public Finance data have been compiled by P . Flora, J. Alber, R. Eichenberg, J. K o h l , F . K r a u s , W . Pfenning a n d K. Seebohm, State, Economy and Society in Western Europe, 1815-1975: A Data Handbook, vol. I , The Growth of Mass Democracies and Welfare States (London, 1983), chs. 7 - 8 , b u t t h e coverage is very incomplete a n d many of the data are questionable. Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, ch. 5; P . K . O'Brien, ' T h e Costs a n d Benefits of British Imperialism, 1846-1914', Past and Present, 120 (1988), 163-200; O'Brien, 'Reply', Past and Present, 125 (1989), 192-9. P . K e n n e d y , ' T h e Costs a n d Benefits of British Imperialism, 1846-1914', Past and Present, 125 (1989), 186-92; and A. Offer, ' T h e British E m p i r e , 1870-1914: A Waste of M o n e y ? ' , Economic History Review, 46 (1993), 215-38. Offer, ' T h e British E m p i r e ' , figure 1. A. Fishlow, 'Levels of N i n e t e e n t h - C e n t u r y Investment in Education', Journal of Economic History, 26 (1966), tables 3 - 4 has estimated that by 1900 private a n d public sector educational expenditures in the U K amounted to 1.3 per cent of G N P as against 1.7 p e r cent for the U S a n d 1.9 p e r cent for G e r m a n y . P . Flora a n d J. Alber, 'Modernization, Democratization a n d t h e Development of Welfare States in Western E u r o p e ' , in P . Flora a n d A. J. Heidenheimer (eds.), The Development of Welfare States in Europe and America (London, 1981), figure 2.4. F . Shehab, Progressive Taxation (Oxford, 1953), chs. 12-14. B. B. Gilbert, The Evolution of National Insurance in Great Britain: The Origins of the

Welfare State (London, 1966), pp. 270-2.

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sector economic activity or the disbenefits that have come to be associated with welfare expenditures in more modern times. Our statistical base for examining the inter-war period is little better than for the preceding sub-period, though we have a fuller record of contemporary reactions to the growth of the public sector,50 and some interest by economic historians in the possible economic consequences of enlarged welfare provision: for example, the arguments for benefitinduced unemployment adduced by Benjamin and Kochin,51 which are now rather discredited.52 The available cross-country evidence does not permit of a comparative analysis of the functional distribution of public expenditure for most of the major European economies. However, there is sufficient data to be reasonably confident that Britain was not at a possible disadvantage relative to its major trade competitor, Germany, in respect of public finances. Indeed, for the years for which there are common data (1925-35), general government expenditure in Germany on social functions averaged more than double the British figure as a percentage of GDP. 53 The low priority afforded to investment in education, as exhibited in the composition of British public expenditure, continued into the inter-war period; indeed, education, and in particular secondary schooling, was very vulnerable to the periodic Treasury economy campaigns.54 The weight of defence expenditures on average approximated to that carried in the immediate pre-war period, and whilst it did increase heavily from the mid-1930s it remained lower than was the case in Germany.55 By the eve of the Second World War, however, Britain had one of the most developed welfare sectors of the advanced industrial nations, though as is well known there had been no underlying grand design, 'policy [having] evolved, like the British empire, in a fit of absence of mind'.56 It was thus during the inter-war period that the pattern was set of a state committed, in so far as the burden of defence permitted, to the easing of social tensions created by unemployment and structural adjustment. This now involved, in budgetary terms, very substantial welfare programmes (10.5 per cent of 50 51

52

53 54 55

56

Middleton, 'The Economic Role'. D . K. Benjamin and L . A. Kochin, 'Searching for an Explanation of Unemployment in Interwar Britain', Journal of Political Economy, 87 (1979), 441-78. See, for example, the balanced assessment in M . Thomas, 'Labour Market Structure and the Nature of Unemployment in Interwar Britain', in Eichengreen and Hatton (eds.), Interwar Unemployment, p p . 128-35; c.f. K. G. P. Matthews and D . K. Benjamin, US and UK Unemployment between the Wars: A Doleful Story (London, 1992). Calculated from Flora, et ah, State, Economy and Society, vol. I, pp. 387, 444. Crowther, British Social Policy, p. 35. M . Harrison, 'Resource Mobilisation in World War T w o : T h e U S A , U K , U S S R and Germany, 1938-1945', Economic History Review, 2nd ser. 41 (1988), table 3. Gilbert, British Social Policy, p. 308.

The size and scope of the public sector

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Table 6.5. Functional distribution of OECD-Europe general government expenditures as a percentage of GDP, decennial averages, 1950s—1970s Final government consumption

Social security expenditures

1950s

1960s

1970s

1950s

1960s

1970s

Austria Belgium Denmark Finland France Germany Greece Ireland Italy Netherlands Norway Portugal Spain Sweden Switzerland UK

13.1 12.1 12.0 13.8 11.6 13.6 12.1 12.5 11.8 13.6 11.2 10.0 8.9 14.9 9.6 17.5

13.6 13.2 15.6 15.1 14.6 13.2 12.0 13.1 14.5 15.2 14.1 12.7 8.2 18.0 10.2 17.1

16.2 15.7 22.6 18.8 16.7 14.0 13.9 18.3 15.7 17.3 16.8 14.2 9.2 24.6 11.7 19.7

9.7 9.5 6.8 12.0 — 12.5 5.1 5.8 9.5 7.8 5.7 2.4 — 6.2 5.6 5.9

11.5 12.0 9.3 11.0 5.9 14.3 6.9 7.1 11.3 13.1 9.5 3.2 4.6 8.5 5.9 7.0

12.3 17.4 12.9 12.4 6.9 17.3 7.8 11.9 15.4 20.7 13.7 5.8 9.3 13.5 8.7 9.0

Averages: EC-9(1) OECD-Europe

13.1 12.4

14.6 13.8

17.5 16.6

8.3 7.5

10.0 8.8

13.9 12.2

Measures of dispersion: Coefficient of variation Eta-squared (E2)

0.17 0.86

0.18 0.84

0.24 0.83

0.38 0.93

0.38 0.87

0.36 0.83

Note: (1) No data available for Luxembourg. Source: Derived from Lane and Ersson, Comparative Political Economy, table 6.5.

GDP by 1937 as against 3.7 per cent in 1913 - see table 6.2). Thus a new balance between social equity and economic efficiency had emerged by the outbreak of the Second World War. For the post-war period we have sufficient cross-country evidence to investigate the distinctiveness of the functional composition of British public expenditure. One perspective on this is provided by table 6.5, which in addition to a functional breakdown of expenditure by decade reports two summary measures which can be used to explore whether there was a convergence in the post-war public finance systems of the

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OECD member states.57 The concept of convergence has a long history in the sociological literature,58 a more recent one as regards public finance. Briefly, the convergence thesis states that cross-country variations tend to reduce over time as all advanced countries come to regard the provision of semi-public and merit goods as citizens' rights. It can be seen from table 6.5 that the British case was distinctive, but that it was final government consumption rather than social security expenditures which were above the average of the two comparators reported. Whilst, proportionately, the share of social security expenditures in Britain rose more than was the case for final government consumption, which is what would be predicted as government expenditure was increasingly allocated to semi-public and merit goods, these characteristics were more evident elsewhere in Europe. Examination of the summary statistics reveals that in the 1950s there was little variation between the nations' spending patterns; this was to come in the 1960s arid particularly the 1970s where the rising coefficient of variation (for final government consumption) and the reducing E2 statistics (for both categories of expenditure) indicate that the crosscountry variations were not as stable as they had been in the early post-war period. The convergence hypothesis, therefore, remains unproven as regards final government consumption,59 but a possibility in respect of social security expenditures where the high coefficient of variation and E2 scores indicate, respectively, that there were considerable cross-country differences in the degree to which 'redistributive ambitions' were manifest in spending programmes and that crosscountry variations were larger than the variations within the nations over time.60 However, the distinctiveness of British experience lay not in the high relative growth of social security expenditures, and further avenues need to be examined to understand the post-war development of the British public sector.61 The overall course of public sector receipts

Long-run trends in the growth and structure of government revenue 57

T h e coefficient of variation was defined above, p. 102; the E 2 statistic is as follows: (TSS-WSS)/TSS

58

59 61

where TSS = total sum of squared deviations; and WSS = within group sum of squares. The higher the E 2 the greater the variation between the groups than within the groups. See, for example, C. Kerr, J. T . D u n l o p , F. Harbison and C. H . Meyers, Industrialism and Industrial Man: The Problems of Labour and Management in Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass., 1960). 60 Lane and Ersson, Comparative Political Economy, pp. 157-8. Ibid., p . 158. See pp. 137-8 below.

The size and scope of the public sector

109

50 i

40 / *••., .

£30 20

10 -

0

1900 1910 1920 '1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 — Taxation

• Total receipts

Fig. 6.3 Public sector receipts and total taxation as a percentage of GDP at current market prices, 1900-79. Source: Asfig.6.1.

and taxation are even more difficult to discern than those of expenditure. There are no comparable studies to Veverka, and Peacock and Wiseman,62 and we have no satisfactory data before 1900, though there are a number of useful studies of taxation policy both in the short and longer run.63 Accordingly, as with public expenditure, it has been necessary to reconcile Feinstein's data for 1900-65 with later CSO estimates. Figure 6.3 shows taxation and public sector receipts as a percentage of GDP for 1900-79, the growing gap between the tax and receipts ratios reflecting the trading activities of the public sector which became important from the inter-war period. As with expenditure, the influence of war upon the receipts ratio is 62

63

Veverka, ' T h e Growth of Government Expenditure' and Peacock and Wiseman, The Growth of Public Expenditure. Mallet, British Budgets', Mallet and George, British Budgets, Second Series and British Budgets, Third Series', U . K. Hicks, The Finance of British Government and British Public Finances', Sabine, A History of Income Tax and British Budgets in Peace and War, 1932-45 (London, 1970); A. Dilnot, J. A. Kay and N. Morris, 'The UK Tax System, Structure and Progressivity, 1948-1982', in F. R. Forsund and S. Honkapohja (eds.), Limits and Problems of Taxation (London, 1985); and J. A. Kay and M. A. King, The British Tax System (Oxford, 1978).

Table 6.6. Public sector receipts and total taxation as a percentage of GDP at market prices, selected years, 1900-79

1900 1903 1907 1913 1920 1924 1929 1937 1948 1951 1955 1960 1964 1968 1973 1979

Taxes on income

Taxes on expenditure

Taxes on capital

National insurance contributions

1.0 1.9 1.5 1.8 10.2 7.9 6.2 6.2 13.7 13.4 12.1 10.7 10.7 12.9 12.5 13.0

6.6 7.3 7.2 7.0 8.3 10.0 10.6 11.6 17.2 15.7 13.9 13.3 13.6 15.7 13.9 15.7

1.0 0.9 0.9 1.1 0.8 1.4 1.7 1.8 1.8 1.3 1.0 0.9 0.9 1.0 1.2 0.6

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.8 0.5 1.4 1.7 2.0 2.9 3.1 3.1 3.6 4.4 5.0 5.4 6.0

Source: As figure 6.1.

Gross trading surplus

Rent, interest and dividends

Current grants from abroad

Total

0.4 0.6 0.7 0.8 0.3 0.9 1.1 1.3 1.9 2.6 2.2 2.8 3.1 3.4 3.0 3.0

0.7 0.9 1.0 1.0 0.7 1.4 2.0 1.7 1.3 1.5 1.9 2.6 3.1 2.7 3.8 3.8

0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.1 0.2 0.5 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0 0.0

9.7 11.5 11.2 12.4 20.9 23.3 23.8 24.5 38.7 37.8 34.5 34.0 35.8 40.7 39.8 42.1

The size and scope of the public sector

111

50 -i 40 30 -

20

10

0

1900 1910 1920' 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 Years ending 5 April Fig. 6.4 Standard rate of income tax (percentage), financial years 1900-80. Source: Calculated from Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, p. 645.

dramatic. In particular, the First World War saw a near doubling of the ratio, from 12.4 per cent in 1913 to 20.9 per cent in 1920, largely as a result of the increased yield of taxes on income (table 6.6). While public expenditure was rigorously curtailed in the immediate post-war period, no such development occurred on the taxation side of the account, and the ratio rose gradually- though pro-cyclically - to 24.5 per cent by 1937. The Second World War caused a further, but less dramatic, upward shift with the receipts ratio reaching 38.7 per cent in 1948. The following decade then saw a fall in the ratio as Conservative governments sought to reduce tax rates for political and economic reasons, followed by the resumption of its upward trend through to a peak in 1970. Finally, the ratio then varied quite considerably in the 1970s as a consequence of discretionary tax policy and the characteristics of the fiscal system. 64 The structure of taxation The changing structure of public sector receipts for selected years is clear from table 6.6. Throughout the century the upward trend of the 64

Ward and Neild, The Measurement and Reform, ch. 4.

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Roger Middleton

receipts ratio has resulted from increased rates on existing taxes and a widening of the tax base. Of these developments, the most important concerned the income tax which 'changed out of all recognition' as a consequence of the First World War.65 The standard rate of income tax is charted in figure 6.4, though because of earned income relief until 1972/3 this is not equivalent to the effective rate of tax on earned incomes.66 In 1899/1900 the standard rate of income tax stood at 3.33 per cent (see figure 6.4). By 1913/14 it had risen to 6 per cent, and progression had been introduced into the system in 1909 with the introduction of supertax (later surtax). By 1918/19, however, the rate had reached 30 per cent; and whilst it was reduced in the early 1920s it was to fluctuate in the range 20-25 per cent for the remainder of the inter-war period until rearmament in the late 1930s once more forced large increases.67 The Second World War saw the standard rate of tax rise to 50 per cent and sharp reductions in allowances, such that, for the first time, almost the entire working population became subject to income tax. The rate was reduced slightly in the first post-war budget (October 1945) to 45 per cent, increased in 1951 to finance the rearmament programme and then reduced very slowly but progressively to 38.75 per cent by 1959.68 Thereafter, the rate operated within the range 30 to 38.75 per cent. However, over the post-war period, although the income tax has been an important instrument of short-term economic management, discretionary changes focused more upon allowances than alterations in the standard rate. It was these which determined the effective rates of tax on personal incomes. Table 6.6 shows clearly the transformation in the structure of taxation and thus the tax mix over the century. In 1900 taxes on income were 1 per cent of GDP, on a par with taxes on capital, and raised less than one-sixth of the revenue of taxes on expenditure. By 1979 taxes on income and national insurance contributions, which should properly be treated as a direct tax, together represented 19 per cent of GDP as against 15.7 per cent for taxes on expenditure, whilst taxes on capital at 0.6 per cent raised less relatively than in 1900. Moreover, the proportion of total taxes on income paid by businesses had fallen sharply, from 51 65 66 67

68

Sabine, A History of Income Tax, p. 154. Kay and King, The British Tax System, p. 20. See Mallet, British Budgets, table V I I ; Mallet and George, British Budgets, Third Series; Sabine, British Budgets; and R. Middleton, Towards the Managed Economy: Keynes, the Treasury and the Fiscal Policy Debate of the 1930s (London, 1985), ch. 4. J. C. R. D o w , The Management of the British Economy, 1945-60 (Cambridge, 1964), p. 199n.

The size and scope of the public sector

113

Table 6.7. OECD: total tax receipts as a percentage of GDP at market prices, selected years, 1950-79 1950

1955

1960

1965

1970

1975

1979

G-7: Canada France Germany Italy Japan UK US

— 20.6 29.3 17.2 — 31.1 22.8

21.7 — 30.8 30.5 17.1 29.8 23.6

24.2 — 31.3 34.4 18.2 28.5 26.6

25.9 35.0 31.6 27.3 18.1 30.8 26.5

32.0 — 32.8 27.9 19.7 37.5 30.1

32.9 — 35.7 29.0 21.1 36.9 30.2

31.0 41.2 37.3 30.1 24.8 34.0 31.2

Other OECD: Australia Austria Belgium Denmark Finland Greece Iceland Ireland Luxembourg Netherlands New Zealand Norway Portugal Spain Sweden Switzerland Turkey

— 16.6 — — — — — — — 21.8 — 16.6 — — 22.0 — —

22.6 30.0 24.0 23.4 26.8 — — 22.5 — 26.3 26.8 28.3 15.4 — 25.5 19.2 —

23.5 30.5 26.5 25.4 27.7 — — 22.0 — 30.1 27.3 31.2 16.3 — 27.2 21.3 —

23.8 34.6 31.2 30.1 30.1 20.6 — 26.0 30.8 35.5 24.3 33.2 18.6 14.7 35.6 20.7 14.9

25.5 35.7 36.0 40.2 32.2 — — 31.2 — 39.9 26.4 39.2 23.2 — 40.9 23.8 —

29.1 38.5 41.1 41.1 36.2 — — 32.5 — 45.8 30.0 44.8 24.8 — 44.2 29.6 —

29.8 41.4 44.7 44.1 35.0 27.7 — 33.8 46.2 47.4 31.2 46.1 25.8 23.3 50.3 31.1 20.8

Averages: EC-9 G-7 OECD

9.3 17.3 7.3

17.3 21.9 18.4

18.7 23.3 19.5

27.1 27.9 26.3

22.5 25.7 24.4

24.3 26.5 26.4

34.9 32.8 34.6

Notes: (1) Because of the different sources used for the 1950 and 1955-79 estimates, the 1950 and 1955 figures are not strictly comparable. (2) The 1950 US estimate (12.8), recorded in Peters, The Politics of Taxation, table 2.2, is assumed to be an error and 22.8 has been substituted. Sources: OECD, Long-Term Trends in Tax Revenues of OECD Member States, 1955-1980 (Paris, 1981), tables 1-2; Peters, The Politics of Taxation, table 2.2.

Table 6.8. OECD: structure of taxation as a percentage of total tax receipts and social security contributions, and total taxation and social security contributions as a percentage of GNP at factor cost, 1979 Tax receipts and social

As a percentage of total taxation and social security contributions Social

Taxes on income

contributions

Households

Corporations

contributions

1 aACs UI1

1 aACb Uil

a« o % nf fiMP Impacts and Influences: Essays on Media Power in the Twentieth Century (London, 1987), pp. 145-56; N. Pronay, 'The Newsreels: The Illusions of Actuality', in P. Smith (ed.), The Historian and Film (Cambridge, 1976).

British national identity and the First World War

273

athletic prowess. Then the March 1918 offensive begins in earnest, and almost immediately Lt. Raleigh is hit, and dies in Stanhope's arms. Stanhope ascends the stairs, after which an explosion caves in the dugout, ending the play, and presumably Stanhope's life too. This brief summary of the plot gives only a hint of its popular appeal. The reviews highlighted the redefinition of bravery, meaning fortitude, and the profound Englishness of the story. As a tale of 'English' values transcending the carnage of war, Journey's End struck a very deep chord. On the stage, rewritten as a novel, or on the screen, Journey's End was a major commercial success, the sources of which are apparent. Journey's End both commemorated the dead and glorified their values. But 'their' values were those of the officer class. The men in the ranks appear only in caricature: a forelock-tugging comic cook, Mason, who can never get the pudding right, and a brawny sergeantmajor. In effect, Sherriff's play celebrated class, schooling, breeding, athleticism, loyalty, courage, the masculine affinity for arms. All the cliches of the English Home Counties echo in his work. Above all, the power of Sherriff's play resides in the fact that it did not ignore the pain, the stress, or the harsh choices faced by British soldiers in the front lines. But he resolved them in a manner which suggests the stubborn survival of the English way of doing things. Stanhope is a very English tragic hero. He had served for four years in the thick of things, when most officers had either died or found a safe way home. He could have taken sick leave to get away from the shelling. He refused to do so, which was brave, but could only cope by sustained drinking, which was human. His shame at seeing Raleigh was born out of fear that the news of his alcoholism would reach Raleigh's sister, a 'topping girl', informally waiting for him to return to England. He needn't have worried. Raleigh worshipped him at school, and continues to worship in the trenches. Sherriff treats Stanhope - played in the original stage version by the young Lawrence Olivier and in the film by Colin Clive - as a slightly mad embodiment of all the English schoolboy virtues. Journey's End is, in essence, a tale of heroism; not the heroism of swagger, but of the English front-line officer's suffering and persistence in the arts of survival through the nightmare of trench warfare. Sherriff himself was a lower-middle-class writer become celebrity through his worship of the public school ethos and its products. It is ironic that when he offered his manuscripts and personal papers to his old school, it turned him down.30 Service to the system occasionally is 30

They are deposited at the Berkshire Record Office, Reading.

274

J. M. Winter

not enough. But Sherriff had done his best in reviving the cult of heroism and character under the tragic circumstances of trench warfare. The English way of warfare

I have dwelled on Journey's End partly because of its phenomenal success, and partly because it is the best instance of the link between the celebration of Englishness at war in middlebrow fiction and in film. In the inter-war years and after, other films followed the path of Journey's End. Anthony Asquith, son of the Prime Minister, and whose brother Raymond was killed in 1916, directed a film version of Ernest Raymond's Tell England in 1931. Nurse Edith Cavell, starring Anna (later Dame Anna) Neagle in Herbert Wilcox's 1939 film, is another mundane British cinematic treatment of doomed and noble courage in wartime. Here the woman wears the uniform, and faces death, in the idiom of the time, just like a man. Once the Second World War started, the film industry provided dozens of celebrations of English national character. Indeed, since 1939 the theme of the gallant, martial Englishman has been a mainstay of the cinema. Four notable examples among many are Olivier's patriotic rendering of Henry Fin 1942; Noel Coward's very middle-class English naval officer in In Which We Serve (also 1942); The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp (1943), directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger; and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), directed by David Lean. All are character portraits of recognisably English types: following the public schoolboy turned unwilling hero in Journey's End are Olivier's immortal Henry V at Agincourt; Colonel Blimp, who has entered the language as the symbol of British gentlemanly pompousness and anachronism; and Lawrence, the mysterious, charismatic desert-wanderer, whose very elusiveness helped provide the silent space in which something of a cult was built. For our purposes, these figures of Englishmen at war and after provide fine examples of the British cinematic treatment of English national character in the period since 1918. Ronald Colman in Lost Horizon (1937) embodied this stereotype in the non-military setting of Shangri-La. But films that were set in war made the same point repeatedly in this period. Courage and character are what Henry F, Colonel Blimp and Lawrence of Arabia are all about. The first is every schoolboy's dream of English masculine military prowess. The second is a lovable portrayal of a professional soldier so wedded to a code of honour that he falls prey to the ungentlemanly tricks of the new generation of harder soldiers of the Second World War. While contemplating

British national identity and the First World War

275

the apparent redundancy of his values, he muses over the contours of his life, and the resulting film is a powerful and entirely romantic celebration of English decency and decorum. The film breathed life and dignity into what was known to a wide public through the press cartoons of David Low. In his hands Blimp was the ideal caricature of the conventional.31 Powell and Pressburger made him a much more interesting and attractive man. After 1945, the British film industry continued to propagate traditional images of national identity. Indeed, in a number of ways, the First World War has become a familiar home for such explorations of Englishness first in fiction, then on stage, and now on television. Note the popularity of the 1989 BBC comedy series 'Blackadder', a sequence of which is set in the trenches of the Great War. The comedy has all the stock figures in it, but an entirely sober (and devastating) final scene, where the cast goes over the top, frozen in time, as their predecessors were perched on war memorials seventy years ago. Consider too the case of Lawrence of Arabia. From the mid-1920s, a cult of Lawrence was fashioned by a host of journalists and soldiers. Biographies, articles, exhibitions all contributed to the legend of the conqueror of desert sands in the name of King and Country.32 After the Second World War, the filmic version of the legend gave it new life. David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962) carries on where the inter-war filmic presentation of Englishness left off. The essential link is romanticism. Just as Captain Stanhope and Colonel Blimp show public school virtues triumphant over adversity, Lawrence provides all the glamour of a quixotic, daring, slightly mad upper-middle-class gentleman, presented with nostalgia just as Britain's relinquishment of any military presence east of Suez stripped away the last remnants of Imperial power. Conclusion Arguments about the refashioning of national identity must remain speculative, since we know much more about iconography than about its reception. It still may be useful to suggest that historians ignore at their peril the ways in which the visual arts and popular literature in Britain developed and deployed a powerful array of images of Englishness. The chief features of that imagined national Pantheon were never 31

32

D a v i d L o w , Low on the War: A Cartoon Commentary of the Years 1939-41 ( N e w York, 1941). B. H . Reid, ' T . E . Lawrence and H i s Biographers', in B. Bond (ed.), British Military Historians and the First World War (Oxford, 1991).

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fully elaborated. They rarely are, since definition leads to the disclosure of embarrassing omissions and exclusions. For instance, unlike on the continent, English women may have been identified with the race and its biological perpetuation rather than, like Marianne, with the political nation and its institutional life.33 They were vessels through which 'Englishness' poured. But more importantly, the conservative myth of Englishness was based on a conjuring trick. It ignored the vast majority of the population. It both appealed to a common heritage and located its 'true' expression not in the 80 per cent of the population working in manual occupations, but in the sons of the privileged, whose decency, courage and self-confidence took them to war, largely because they were Englishmen. Thus if you asked in 1918 or 1958 or 1993 what was Englishness, you would receive the answer that English upper middleclass men find when they look in the mirror. That message can be found in poetry, in prose, and in the most revolutionary of the contemporary arts, in film. In the inter-war period, the resurrection in film of the romanticism of English martial traditions occurred at a time when other voices were reformulating images of national identity in similarly traditional ways. The main reason to believe that these cultural products are historically (rather than artistically) significant is their success in the market, a success which, with some notable exceptions, escaped pacifist art, film or literature. These images were full of cliches. But this fictional 'imagined community5 of Englishmen and women, poorly expressed and full of contradictions as it was, nonetheless sold.34 What did the people who saw these films or read these novels get for their money? Entertainment, escape, adventure, to be sure; but they took in other messages too. After the shock of the 1914-18 war and the losses it entailed, these works celebrated the survival of 'traditional' English virtues and values, generalised to the whole population during the war and in the immediate post-war period, but which came to mean the values of the officer class. Inter-war art, fiction, theatre and film presented a vision of 'Englishness' the central features of which were, in effect, its attachment to the habits of an identifiable social stratum - the educated urban middle class, from which the bulk of officers serving in the British army was drawn. The selective image of Englishness which emerged after 1918 was 33

34

J. Mackay and P. Thane, 'The Englishwoman', in Colls and D o d d (eds.), Englishness, pp. 191-229. O n Marianne, in contrast, see M . Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: trans, by J. Lloyd Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France 1789-1880, (Cambridge, 1981), and Marianne au pouvoir: I'image et la symbolique republicaine de 1880 a 1914 (Paris, 1989). O n publishing, 'print culture' and national identity, the locus classicus is n o w Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London, 1983).

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propagated above all by the British Broadcasting Corporation. The voice of the BBC was emphatically not regional. It was a southern voice, certainly Home Counties, rather than identifiably London. Its cadences were neither working-class, nor the more florid versions of public school English, although radio announcers wore dinner jackets for evening broadcasting.35 If only their listeners knew. Some broadcasters, like J. B. Priestley, reminded listeners of the variety of accents and rhythms which survived the period of war and depression. Provincial identities did not vanish, but from the 1920s they retreated into quaintness and caricature. The air waves were national, not provincial. And most BBC voices (then as now) inhabited a part of England which doesn't appear on the maps. It is an England of the mind, polite, civilised, and always in control. This class-specific 'national gallery'36 of sounds and images, produced in many forms, reached through radio, literature and film a wide audience, much larger than any which attended political meetings or exercised the right to vote. To a considerable degree this profoundly traditional culture in Britain after 1918, full of deference to an imagined past, underwrote the inter-war social contract, and helped ensure the enduring power of conservative appeals at moments of political and industrial conflict. As Orwell's The Lion and the Unicorn suggests, the Second World War shook - at least for a time - the power of cultural conservatism.37 But he or she who seeks to find it today should just come to Britain, look around and listen. 35

36 37

I owe this point to Bill Garside. See also Paddy Scannell and David Cardiff, A Social History of British Broadcasting, vol. I, 1922-1939: Serving the Nation (Oxford, 1991). K e n Inglis tells m e that the Australian broadcasters adopted the same dress code. See Inglis and Jan Brazier, This is the ABC: The Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1932-1983 (Carlton, Victoria, 1983), p. 70. Raphael Samuel's phrase, in Samuel, Patriotism, vol. I I , p. xi. Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius (London, 1941). O n the weakness of left-wing interpretations of patriotism, see Miles Taylor, 'Patriotism, History and the Left in Twentieth-Century Britain', Historical Journal, 3 3 , 3 (1990),

981-7.

13

A state of siege? The state and political violence Charles Townshend

You do not declare war against rebels. (Lloyd George)

It is probable that most British 'statesmen', politicians or functionaries, would politely distance themselves from Weber's famous characterisation of the state - possessor of the monopoly of force in a political community - as being both too theoretical and too foreign for our case. In modern times, at least, the British state has clothed itself in a comfortably shapeless outfit which has served to disguise its fundamental powers.1 But it has differed little from any other modern state in its determination to vindicate its monopoly of force, and in reacting to violent challenges it has provided at least an oblique definition of itself. A battery of legislation, including two major Public Order Acts and a dynasty of Emergency Powers Acts, together with Race Relations Acts, an Incitement to Disaffection Act, a Treachery Act and the Prevention of Terrorism Act, bears testimony to the uncongenial fact that the legitimacy of the state's monopoly of force has been contested at many levels and in many areas during the course of this century. If there is still no consolidated law of civil emergency, no definition of public order or public security, no 'state of siege', this is due at least as much to the ingrained common law tradition of resistance to codification as to the fact that political violence has so far - just about - been contained by this loose legal skein. Though one may ransack British public security laws in vain for any definition of their central concepts - 'serious disorder', 'sedition', 'terrorism', even the elementary 'breach of the peace' - some attempt must be made for analytical purposes to codify the threats to which the state has responded. Strict legalism cannot take us very far down this path, because laws have a way of bending and melting as they approach the core of state power. Constitutional law textbooks have tended to skirt 1

Cf. G. E. Aylmer, 'The Peculiarities of the English State', Journal of Historical Sociology, 3, 2 (1990), 91-108.

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such matters and indicate that they are marginal.2 There was, indeed, no textbook on public order law until the publication of Ian Brownlie's Law Relating to Public Order, revised and expanded in 1981 as Law of Public Order and National Security.3 This yoking together of two vital concepts was a path-breaking attempt to identify and fix the state's centre of gravity, but for all its remarkable qualities Brownlie's book does not quite succeed in this. Or rather, it succeeds in making clear that the centre is hollow. For instance, Brownlie could not come up with a workable definition of 'sedition', much less of 'subversion'. This is not surprising in the case of the latter, which - for all its central importance in the angst of twentieth-century states - has never been legislated upon. Sedition, on the other hand, is an ancient common law charge with a grand freight of case law. The problem is that most of it is obsolete, but it is impossible to be sure how much and how far. What is quite clear is that sedition has not been a politically attractive charge in recent times.4 Indeed, the one piece of modern statute law to start life as a 'sedition bill' was deliberately (if no less obscurely) renamed the Incitement to Disaffection Act, and the government was loud in its complaints against the opposition's insistence on continuing to call it by the older name. Yet it would be a rash commentator who pronounced it legally dead: as Brownlie cautioned, 'in time of crisis an uncertain executive might resort to it again as it has done in modern times in areas of British colonial rule'.5 The central point in this is that the law of public security is essentially political. It can only be read historically, as a function of changing perceptions of the tasks and perils facing the state. This is especially true of reactions to political violence. On a superficial view, violence could be measured objectively, by its scale. Thus local, small-scale, episodic street-fighting might be less of a threat to the state than, say, a large-scale armed assault on the capital city. The view becomes more complex, however, when political intention and political impact are taken into account. Political violence is a matter of interpretation: as Hawkins insisted in the early eighteenth century, one does not have to be a full-blown revolutionary to be a threat to the state: Those who make an insurrection in order to redress a public grievance, whether it be a real or pretended one . . . are said to levy war against the king, though 2

3

4

5

A fairly representative example is the handful of pages allotted to emergency powers at the very end of Wade and Phillips, Constitutional Law (8th edn, London, 1970), pp. 717-24. Brownlie's Law of Public Order and National Security, 2nd edn, by M. Supperstone (London, 1981). The Law Commission (Working Paper no. 72, 1977, para 76) pointed out its virtual disappearance in the twentieth century. Brownlie's Law of Public Order, p. 239.

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they have no direct design against his person, for they insolently invade his prerogative by attempting to do that by private authority which he by public justice ought to do, which manifestly tends to downright rebellion.6

Thus the illegitimate use of force for a public purpose was rebellious. In Hawkins's day, this proposition remained fairly straightforward, partly because the repertoire both of force and of purposes remained quite small. By the twentieth century, both were vastly expanded. The everenlarging institutional scope of the state multiplied its vulnerability to resistance at many levels, while a formidable battery of oppositional theories - nationalist, anarchist, communist, fascist - offered the prospect of an inexhaustible supply of rebels. The result was a dramatically heightened sensitivity to the danger of subversion. In such circumstances, every manifestation of violence was to be taken much more seriously than before. Hence to grasp the significance of an incident we need to locate it in a complex matrix of values. Beyond the three dimensions of measurement used by Gerhard Botz, for instance, in his lucid study of political violence in Austria between the wars - scale, duration and level of organisation7 - we need to incorporate perceptions of public insecurity. A medium-sized, averagely destructive riot may be construed as a freakish aberration, or as a symptom of social breakdown. An 'unsigned' explosion in a city centre will almost certainly be read as 'terrorist', but any more precise message will be debatable. 'Unlawful drilling', a rather quaint-sounding offence prohibited by a statute of 1819, which receives a brief mention in Brownlie (under 'miscellaneous offences'), actually created one of the most acute political crises of modern British history when it provided the mechanism for the growth of paramilitary movements in Ireland in 1913-14. The lineaments of political violence may usefully be traced by adapting Botz's model to the British experience. Thus, for instance, the tradition of non-state court (Vehmgericht) executions (Fememord) did not exist in England; in Ireland it was erratically followed by the agrarian secret societies of the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth became the exclusive prerogative of the IRA. The principal categories whose shifting meanings will be the subject of this essay are assassination, bombing, street-fighting (Zusammenstoss), insurrection (Aufstand), riot and disturbance, under Botz's general notion of 'latent civil war'. Gradations of scale are important in distinguishing these categories, but 6 7

Pleas of the Crown (1716). G. Botz, Gewalt in der Politik: Attentate, Zusammenstosse, Putschversuche} Unruhen in Osterreich 1918-1938 (Munich, 1983), p. 15.

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the question whether a terrorist campaign taking place over a long period requires the participation of over 500 people to qualify as an insurrection is one which cannot be simply answered. Indeed, my argument will in part be that the British state has devoted much ingenuity to avoiding the confrontations logically entailed by some categories of violence. It is probably safe to say that political violence was not perceived as a significant public problem at the beginning of the twentieth century. This was loosely related to the Victorian 'conquest of violence', in which a novel kind of domestic peace had been achieved, or at least imagined (imagination being the controlling sense in matters of public security). The fit was loose, however, because while the domestic peace - the suspension of violent crime and public disorder - was broadly maintained through to the 1970s, the political peace expired rather suddenly in what George Dangerfield indelibly labelled the 'strange death of Liberal England'. This has remained a resonant notion because it rests on a vision of liberalism which has been close to the heart of British public culture. When Sir John Simon introduced the Public Order Bill in parliament in November 1936 he flourished the banner of tolerance, 'the grand characteristic of British political life': 'All the things which we prize - freedom of opinion, freedom of speech, and freedom of meeting- are based on our conception of political and civic toleration.'8 If Douglas Hurd's introduction of its successor fifty years later was less rhetorical, this was due as much to the executive's ingrained impulse to deny the novelty of new legislation (presenting it as merely an adjustment of a tried and true law) as it was to a shift in political fashion.9 Tolerance, known to political science as pluralism, remained the grand characteristic, or the most frequently invoked aspiration, of the British system. Geoffrey Elton's attempt in 1992 to reassert the authoritarian foundation of English political culture went as much against the grain as Fitzjames Stephen's work had once done.10 Political violence represents the most calculated assault on this culture of reasonableness. The three principal elements of Dangerfield's 'death' - the Irish conflict, the suffragette movement and the industrial 8 9

10

HC Deb. 5th series, vol. 317, c. 1350. Though Hurd's declared aim of 'quiet streets and a peaceful framework for our individual lives' had a strong individualist cast, he later invoked Burke's 'little platoon' to specify the Conservative social vision. HC Deb. 6th series, vol. 89, c. 792 (13 January 1986); D. Hurd, 'Freedom Will Flourish Where Citizens Accept Responsibility', The Independent, 13 September 1989. G. Elton, The English (Oxford, 1992); cf. Ferdinand Mount's review in The Times Literary Supplement, 16 July 1993; also Mount's comments on John Patten's version of 'balance', The British Constitution Now (London, 1993), pp. 33-5.

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struggle - were connected, if at all, only in their tendency to push the tolerances of the system to breaking-point. The suffragette agitation was the most transient, but its violence presented a fierce enough challenge. Though estimates vary, upwards of £250,000 damage was caused by suffragette incidents in 1913, and the same amount again before August 1914.u It is doubtful whether the shock effect would have been much greater had the militants not deliberately confined their actions to attacks on property. The real affront lay in the violent defiance of convention, and its most corrosive implication was a larger contempt for the political process itself.12 The same subversive implication was present in the intensification of industrial conflict into what Dangerfield capitalised as 'the Unrest'.13 An acute crisis in the mining industry was the fountainhead of a widespread fear, or hope, of imminent revolution. The mind of the establishment had been sensitised to the impending threat by the notion of 'social treason' identified in the work of W. S. Jevons, The State in Relation to Labour, in 1882. The imagined importation of syndicalism screwed up the pitch of apprehension, so that when the South Wales coalfield riots broke in November 1910 the Chief Constable of Glamorgan was instantly convinced that 'the strike is totally different to any one I have previously experienced'. Similarly, during the transport strikes of 1911 The Times suggested that 'we are assisting at the absolute decomposition of society into its elements'. But though the whiff of syndicalism was to hang about the labour movement through the inter-war years, there was little serious suggestion of any deliberate or systematic use of violence in pursuit of fundamental change. British labour disputes hardly began, even in 1926, to take on the characteristics of general strikes. But they necessarily brought into sharp focus the sense of internal vulnerability of complex modern societies, a sense which powerfully reinforced the more traditional international fears mobilised by the outbreak of war in 1914. In combination they unlocked a new strain of state response. The 1914 Defence of the Realm Acts (DORA) were declaratory laws investing the 1l

12 13

A. Rosen, Rise Up Women! The Militant Campaign on the Women's Social and Political Union 1903-1914 (London, 1974); estimates discussed in B. Harrison, 'The Act of Militancy: Violence and the Suffragettes, 1904-1914', in Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1982), pp. 26-7. Harrison, 'The Act of Militancy', p. 76. G. Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (2nd edn, London, 1966), pp. 195-291; there is a concise modern evaluation in R. Geary, Policing Industrial Disputes: 1893 to 1985 (London, 1986), pp. 25-47, and a lucid analysis in J. Morgan, Conflict and Order: The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales 1900-1939 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 148-87.

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executive with almost limitless powers in the name of public security. The elaboration of these delegated powers by a dramatically expanded bureaucracy was a temporary expedient, but its central point was conserved in the post-war Emergency Powers Act. The overriding claim to protect 'the life of the community' was inscribed in terms which pulled internal and external security closer together. The compound term 'national security' was still waiting to be born, but the outbreak of the Second World War brought it very close.14 The two former laws were fused in the Emergency Powers (Defence) Acts whose purpose was 'securing the public safety, the defence of the realm, the maintenance of public order and . . . maintaining supplies and services essential to the life of the community'. This was not yet the 'national security state', nor the 'strong state' of later crisis theorisers, much less the 'garrison state' of which Harold Lasswell warned in 1941.15 But it marked a fair distance travelled from Edwardian reticence. We may be reminded just how far if we consider the difficulty the government found in coming to grips with the most recalcitrant of Dangerfield's three elements, the Irish conflict. The restraint of suffragist violence and the spontaneous local form of industrial clashes did not, when the chips were down, present insuperable problems. If Tonypandy deserves its reputation as a high point of class war, it is in part because it was met by new methods which carried the state a stage further towards relative autonomy. General Macready's remarkable success - however narrow - in acting as the neutral arbiter between the two sides of the South Wales conflict prefigured a tendency which (despite occasional contrary appearances) was maintained through to the 1980s.16 The Irish case was very different. The difference could not be measured simply by the level of violence. In the years before the First World War, in fact, the Irish conflict generated somewhat less personal violence and a great deal less property damage than the other elements in the crisis. But the political threat was of a different order, whether viewed from the unionist standpoint - the destruction of the United Kingdom - or from the nationalist - the use of 14

15

16

Cf. B. Buzan, People, States and Fear (London, 1973, 1983); R. J. Spjut, 'Defining Subversion', British Journal of Law and Society, 6 (1979), 254-61; E. Grace and C. Leys, 'The Concept of Subversion and its Implications', in C. E. S. Franks (ed.), Dissent and the State (Toronto, 1989), pp. 62—85; S. P. Saltstone, 'Some Consequences of the Failure to Define the Phrase "National Security'", Conflict Quarterly, 11, 3 (1991), 36-54. H. D. Lasswell, 'The Garrison State and the Specialists on Violence', American Journal of Sociology, 46 (1941), 455-68. To judge from D. Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (London, 1978), Lasswell's argument never got beyond the sphere of academic social science. Geary, Policing Industrial Disputes, p. 47.

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Charles Townshend

armed resistance to the will of parliament. The outstanding feature of the Ulster crisis was the more or less spontaneous emergence of a large-scale paramilitary organisation. The long-term consequences of this were so severe that some account of it is required. During three successive campaigns against Irish Home Rule legislation, in 1886,1893 and 1911, the Ulster Unionist organisation gradually grew in size and complexity. The construction of a formal militia may not have been inevitable, but it was quite forseeable in the context of deep-rooted loyalist habits of public banding and demonstrative marching. The government's failure to foresee it produced a destructive hesitancy and indecision when the final crisis broke. This failure was partly political it was committed to the Irish nationalist view of self-determination but partly also cultural. Liberal ministers plainly did not want to confront the possibility that the opposition might be prepared to resort to violence. Asquith and Birrell relied on the ruggedness of the culture of tolerance - underpinned, certainly, by Dicey's doctrine of parliamentary supremacy - to smother the storm of resistance. Thus for two years the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) was permitted to grow into a formidable simulacrum of an army: much the same size as the British Expeditionary Force. The simple legal device through which this happened was an obscure provision of the Unlawful Drilling Act permitting drilling on the authority of two justices of the peace to make people 'more efficient Citizens for the purpose of maintaining the Constitution and protecting their rights and liberties thereunder'. Not until late 1913 did the Attorney General suggest to the cabinet that such authorisation would not 'amount to "lawful authority" [i.e. within the terms of the 1819 Act] in a case where the whole proceeding is a seditious conspiracy'. Even then, no action was taken.17 When the government at last found itself staring into the abyss of civil war, the instruments of state power were revealed as being unexpectedly fragile. The 'Curragh mutiny' perhaps owed more to ministerial carelessness than to a real rupture in the convention prohibiting political action by the army, but it had alarming potential.18 And what could be more subversive than the Leader of the Opposition's assertion that 17

18

Unless one follows the (still current) Unionist view that there was a ministerial plot to provoke the UVF into rebellion, which misfired thanks to the resolution of the Curragh cavalry officers. C. Townshend, Political Violence in Ireland: Government and Resistance since 1848 (Oxford, 1983), pp. 266-70. I. F. W. Beckett (ed.), The Army and the Curragh Incident, 1914 (London, 1986), provides a rich collection of documents.

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'there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities'? There is considerable irony in the fact that Dicey himself, who had done more than anyone to cement, if not invent, the belief in the supremacy of parliament as the cornerstone of the English constitution, was driven by the 'monstrous iniquity' of Home Rule not merely to echo Bonar Law in saying that Ulster's moral resistance 'might rightly be carried . . . to extreme lengths', but further to hint rather loudly that it was time to ponder 'what are the limits within which the tyranny either of a king or of a democracy justifies civil war'.19 This pregnant question has overhung the Irish conflict for the remainder of the century. Although the Great War provided a temporary respite, it was evident that the state as formerly imagined was vulnerable to the establishment of pockets of alternative legitimacy where its writ might not run. For a couple of years in the early 1970s these were to take spectacular physical form as 'no-go areas', but in a sense the whole of British policy has been hedged by no-go areas of a political kind. This became clear in the aftermath of the Great War, when persistent delays in implementing Home Rule permitted the emergence of an armed republican movement prepared to use a wide range of violent methods to neutralise the British state's agencies and assert its own legitimacy as a counter-state. The epochal achievement of the IRA was to find a distinctively modern form of rebellion. Trial and error, reinforced by instinct, played a bigger part in this than theorising.20 The failure of open insurrection in 1916 left the adherents of the 'physical force tradition' with the alternatives of either admitting the failure of violence, orfindinga more viable mode for it. Those who took the latter path assembled a new strategy of insurgency out of a collection of limited violent actions targeted principally upon the semi-military Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) and the political division of the (otherwise unarmed) Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP). This repertoire of violence fairly quickly exhausted the available catalogue of legal classifications. To describe both the assassination of individual police officers, like the RIC District Inspector shot in Thurles in June 1919 or the DMP G Division (political) detectives shot in Dublin later in the year, and the killing of policemen (and later soldiers) in ambushes or organised assaults on 19

20

A. V. Dicey, A Fool's Paradise: A Constitutionalist's Criticism on the Home Rule Bill of 1912 (London, 1913), p. 127. T h o u g h a 'hedge-fighting' strategy had been proposed by some members of the Irish Volunteer staff before 1916, modelled on the Boer experience, its direct influence is impossible to trace; likewise that of T . E . Lawrence in Arabia.

286

Charles Townshend

barracks simply as 'murder' was to forgo any policy gradation or, in effect, choice.21 Indeed, it might be argued that IRA action went off the British legal chart at the outset by picking up from the previous generation of agrarian conflict the device of the boycott, against which the government had wrestled rather inconclusively in the 1880s to find a judicial remedy.22 From the perspective of the twentieth century, the boycott was the archetypal form of civil resistance: within it each individual act was easy and harmless (in a legal sense), but cumulatively the process was as lethal as a physical assault.23 It was never clear how far the 1887 Crimes Act had been instrumental in bringing the agitation under control. The Act remained the Irish government's principal resource in 1918, even though DORA had meanwhile provided vastly greater putative powers, and the government publicly connived in the popular belief that martial law remained in force. This legal cornucopia actually testified more to the indecision than to the determination of the authorities, as Lord French found when as Viceroy he tried to suppress the surviving physical-force Volunteers. French and Walter Long, who was that rare thing, a cabinet minister with an enduring interest in Irish policy, concluded in 1918 that the only way of eliminating the hardline gunmen who had noiselessly merged into the newly enlarged Sinn Fein party was to crush the whole Sinn Fein organisation.24 Long's colleagues jibbed at such a departure from pluralism. The ingrained conviction that the great majority of people were reasonable, moderate, and law-abiding produced a more optimistic analysis: in this case, extremist politics were being imposed on the majority by terrorist methods - so that if 'terrorism' could be excised, moderation would return. French's hands were tied, and he reaped the full odium of being perceived as a military ruler, without being able to implement a military policy. In this his fate was subsequently echoed and amplified by the British government as a whole. The one consistent feature of British policy throughout this crisis, and, it may be suggested, the Ulster crisis which re-erupted after 1969, 21

22

23

C. T o w n s h e n d , The British Campaign in Ireland 1919-1921: The Development of Political and Military Policies (Oxford, 1975), pp. 97ff. E. O'Halpin, The Decline of the Union: British Government in Ireland 1882-1920 (Dublin, 1987), ch. 7 passim. A. V. D i c e y , ' H o w is the L a w to be Enforced in Ireland?', Fortnightly Review, 179 (1881), 5 3 7 - 5 2 ; cf. T o w n s h e n d , Political Violence in Ireland, pp. 173-^, 195, 2 0 5 - 6 , 209. Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen, 'On the Suppression of Boycotting', The Nineteenth Century,

117(1886). 24

R. H o l m e s , The Little Field-Marshal: Sir John French (London, 1981), pp. 343ff.; J. Kendle, Walter Long, Ireland, and the Union, 1905-1920 (Montreal, 1992),

pp. 164-9.

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was what is now called the doctrine of minimum force. This is an administrative rephrasing of the common law rule that force must be met with exactly the level of force necessary to overcome it.25 It has always been an uncomfortable doctrine for those who have to use it, but there is no doubt that it represents an historic definition of state power in Britain. Though it has no logical connection with the doctrine of civilian supremacy (or military subordination), the two have merged imperceptibly in modern emergencies. The key to this was the political abandonment of martial law. Martial law had a long history of opprobrium in Britain, but in spite of the opinion of a few lawyers (notably at the time of the Jamaica case) that it was actually illegal, there was no doubt that it occupied a necessary place in public law, as the ultimate guarantee of public safety: the suprema lex of salus populi (or, in the alternative formulation, salus reipublicae). The logical necessity for supplying some form of law enforcement, however arbitrary, in circumstances where the ordinary legal process was unworkable, was clear enough.26 The problem lay in the political implications of the admission that the law could not be enforced. These became far more damaging for the modern liberal state than they had been for its predecessors. Traditionally, the most likely cause of legal breakdown was war, a reasonably unambiguous concept involving well-understood kinds of military forces and operations. But modern warfare changed all that. The Boer War alerted lawyers to the fact that the impact of military action was no longer local, and the Great War hammered home the lesson that the outcome of a total war was a function of dismayingly far-reaching processes.27 Even in the light of this experience, nobody was quite prepared for the diffuse form of 'low intensity' war elaborated by the IRA. The legal logic of the Boer War suggested that the use of martial law would increase in modern conflicts, and this seemed to be confirmed by the dramatic and unprecedented declaration of martial law throughout Ireland during the Dublin rising in 1916.28 But this ostensible departure from tradition was clearly a product of war pressure. The heterodox attraction to the declaratory value of martial law (in reassuring loyal citizens) quickly faded at the end of the war, and traditional attitudes to military rule were reasserted with undiminished confidence. The result 25 26 27

Charge to the Bristol Grand Jury, 1832; Brownlie's Law of Public Order, ch. 10. R. F. V. Heuston, Essays in Constitutional Law (London, 1964), pp. 150-3. See C. T o w n s h e n d , 'Martial Law: Legal and Administrative Problems of Civil Emergency in Britain and the Empire, 1800-1940', Historical Journal, 25 (1982),

174-83. 28

C. T o w n s h e n d , 'Military Force and Civil Authority in the U n i t e d K i n g d o m , 1 9 1 4 1921', Journal of British Studies, 28 (1989), 2 6 2 - 9 2 .

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was a tenacious refusal to read IRA violence as other than marginal and criminal, and an insistence that violence could be controlled by the civil authorities. Not until the decision to negotiate with Sinn Fein had been taken in June 1921 did a senior minister publicly accept that what was going on in Ireland was 'a small war', and that war had been lost militarily.29 In the interim, however, the tenacity of the political will to preserve the mantle of the civil power was not expressed in operational consistency. As so often, no front-rank ministers were involved in formulating policy. Lloyd George himself made erratic but crucial interventions, as when he instructed the cabinet (on one of the rare occasions when French was permitted to attend) in April 1920 that 'you do not declare war against rebels', and when he reasserted in June 1921 that 'the Irish job is a policeman's job . . . So long as it becomes a military job only it will fail.'30 Walter Long, whose power was waning along with his health, never secured real control of policy. His most important initiative was characteristically indirect: the idea of recruiting British ex-soldiers to strengthen the RIC. The creation of the 'Black and Tans' went ahead because it was politically uncontentious, unlike increasing the power of the military authorities. This was a decision which more or less made itself. There can be no more forceful testimony to the power of the idea of 'police primacy' than the fact that it survived the experience of the Black and Tans unscathed.31 Indeed, the surviving Tans themselves were optimistically exported to Palestine when their Irish role was wound up, along with the legal framework in (or around) which they had operated.32 The carefully titled Restoration of Order in Ireland Act of August 1920 was the most distinctive statement of the British way through civil emergencies. Though it conveyed immense powers to the executive, on the model of DORA (whose formal lapse brought it on), these were not enough in the circumstances of actual guerrilla conflict or 'small war'. Indeed, one appeal court judge was to take the view that the Act placed some tangible restrictions on the executive's common law powers, and nullified its attempt to apply martial law in southwest 29 30

31

32

Townshend, British Campaign in Ireland, pp. 191, 203. Cabinet Conversation, 30 April 1920. C A B 2 3 20; Cabinet, 2 J u n e 1921. T . Jones, Whitehall Diary, vol. I l l , p. 73. T. Bowden, Beyond the Limits of the Law: A Study of the Police in Crisis Politics (Harmondsworth, 1978), pp. 180-^1; C. Townshend, 'Policing Insurgency in Ireland, 1914-23', in D. M. Anderson and D. Killingray (eds.), Policing and Decolonization: Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917-65 (Manchester, 1992), pp. 3 4 - 8 . C. Townshend, 'The Defence of Palestine: Insurrection and Public Security, 19361939', English Historical Review, 103 (1988), 931.

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Ireland.33 This potential disaster, which came about after the July 1921 truce, showed the possible costs of avoiding an explicit 'state of siege'. But similar statutes were to proliferate through several imperial emergencies over the next half century. In all of them the unresolved tension between civil and military functions reflected the unavailability of clear descriptive categories of internal war. This was not only a British problem, but it was especially acute for Britain. Those who had absorbed the common law tradition were impelled to see peace and war as mutually exclusive conditions, and to dodge military requests for definition of the powers and methods appropriate to such projects as 'the restoration of order'. Britain has coped (or not) with a remarkable range of insurgent violence during this century without ever reaching a consistent view of what it was up against.34 An exasperated commentator on British attempts to pacify Palestine in the 1930s, H. J. Simson, demanded that 'British rule be brought up to date, and a system of emergency rule devised, capable of bringing the extremist up with a jerk should he venture to resort to force'.35 He recognised that the British state-building project was much more demanding than mere 'pacification'; it was to achieve 'obedience to the principles of peace'. Unfortunately he did not go so far as to specify the content of the kind of system he advocated, though he did at least propose a generic term for the problem to be addressed: 'sub-war'. Convergent synonyms emerged around the same time from official sources: military reports described the situation in Palestine variously as 'virtual rebellion' and 'incipient rebellion'. While such notions might modify attitudes, they never achieved any formal status. Thirty years later, a leading military specialist in the (then still unfashionable) field of counter-insurgency proposed a framework of 'low intensity operations', which spawned a large search for dogma - but in the USA, not Britain.36 Forty years on, an academic 'terrorism expert' like Paul Wilkinson would be suggesting that 'severe, prolonged and widespread campaigns marked by higher intensities of violence' need to be seen as 'incipient or suppressed civil wars'.37 This brings us round again to Gerhard Botz's formulation 'latent civil war'. 33 34

35 36

37

Evan v. Macready, [1921], 1 I R 265. Wade and Phillips, Constitutional Law, p. 412. See C. Townshend, Britain's Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London, 1986), passim; but cf. T . Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919-60 ( N e w York, 1990). H . J. Simson, British Rule, and Rebellion (Edinburgh, 1938), p. 328. F. Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency and Peacekeeping (London, 1971). Cf. e.g. S. Sarkesian and W . L . Scully (eds.), U.S. Policy and Low Intensity Conflict ( N e w Brunswick, N J , 1981); D . M . Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, N J , 1989). P. Wilkinson, Terrorism and the Liberal State (London, 1977), ch. 10.

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The incipient civil war which Wilkinson had foremost in mind, of course, was the Northern Ireland conflict. When this broke back into British consciousness in 1969, the state was perhaps at the apogee of its legitimacy. The 'profound, pervasive but cryptic crisis' detected by seers of the new left in the early 1960s still lay below the surface.38 The 'immensely elastic and all-embracing hegemonic order', capped by the 'supercharged religion of monarchy', had so far seen off all revolutionary challenges.39 Political violence had receded steadily from the alarms of Dangerfield's strange death. Liberal England had been through two total wars, waves of strikes and unemployed marches, supplemented by the flurry of Fascist and - more violently - anti-Fascist activism in the 1930s.40 In the process it had lost eight of its nine lives, maybe, but it was still generally believed to be living. Indeed the 'wind of change' which had accelerated the withdrawal from empire might be thought to have restored it to a more authentic liberal course after a century's deviation. Instead a rising tide of political violence boiled up through the fissures opened by the civil rights agitation and the protest movements of the late 1960s. Symptoms of the unwonted strain on the state's defences were to appear in the proliferation of sensational studies of 'Britain in Agony' or (on the other side) 'The Coercive State'.41 The sense of general political crisis was certainly forged, first and foremost, by the terrorist campaign. It was this which extorted a sequence of jolting constitutional measures whose reach quickly spread beyond the confines of Northern Ireland: the adoption of internment without trial, the restoration of direct rule, the indefinite suspension of trial by jury, the 'Draconian' Prevention of Terrorism Act, and - as telling as any the 'broadcasting ban'. 42 The Northern Ireland crisis, protracted over almost a quarter of a century, has been a 'low intensity' conflict of the most elusive kind. 38 39 40

41

42

Perry Anderson, 'Origins of the Present Crisis', New Left Review, 23 (1964), 26. Ibid., pp. 35, 39. G. D . Anderson, Fascists, Communists and the National Government: Civil Liberties in Britain 1931-1937 (Columbia, M o . , 1983); S. M . Cullen, 'Political Violence: T h e Case of the British U n i o n of Fascists', Journal of Contemporary History, 28 (1993), 2 4 5 - 6 7 . R. Clutterbuck, Britain in Agony: The Growth of Political Violence (London, 1978); Clutterbuck (ed.), The Future of Political Violence: Destabilization, Disorder and Terrorism (London, 1986); P. Hillyard and J. Percy-Smith, in The Coercive State: The Decline of Democracy in Britain (London, 1988), offer only a hint of this groundswell. By 1989 the idea of a general crisis was sufficiently well established to be the subject of an Open University textbook: J. Anderson and A. Cochrane (eds.), A State of Crisis (London, 1989). Even before 1969, an interesting sketch of the corrosive relationship between 'English Law and the Irish Question' was provided by Paul O'Higgins, The Irish Jurist, 1 (1966), 59-65.

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Apart from a period of sustained IRA activity in the early 1970s, and sporadic flurries thereafter, the level of violence has never been high enough to force the issue into the British political arena.43 No significant movement of public opinion has disturbed the 'bipartisan' nature of government policy. This silence, as much as deliberate political choice, may account for the reluctance to label the conflict a civil war. As the years have passed, official descriptions of the situation have become steadily more anodyne, and early attempts at realism like the notorious 'acceptable level of violence' have become conspicuous by their absence. The marginalisation of the issue argues, however, that the level of violence has indeed become acceptable. The point sometimes made about the relatively heavy weight of violence in the small world of Northern Ireland44 is made precisely because that weight is not felt in the larger space of the United Kingdom. Lack of public pressure, perhaps even of public opinion, has permitted the state to develop flexible, unfamiliar and covert methods of dealing with violence. Whether these comply with traditional constitutional constraints is a question which ought to be addressed. It will be approached here on two levels, that of legal powers and that of operational methods. The problem of defining terrorism has vitiated most writing, and all legislation, on the subject. For our purposes, however, it is not necessary to tackle this difficulty, simply to note that the state's definition of terrorism is inevitably political. The form of words used in the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA), the use of violence for political ends, would plainly include international war, but is evidently not intended to do so: the definition is rather one which operates through shared assumptions about the illegitimacy of certain kinds of violence.45 In practice, there is no dispute that violent actions for which the IRA 'claims responsibility' are terrorist, or that a special meaning is given to IRA terrorism — as a calculated threat to public security and the state by contrast with loyalist terrorism, which is routinely labelled (one might say dismissed as) 'sectarian'. However deplorable, it represents an indirect challenge to the state, in its monopoly of force, rather than a 43

44

45

O n the crudest index, that of fatalities, over half the twenty-year total occurred by 1976. B. O'Duffy and B. O'Leary, 'Violence in Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1990), p. 320; a more complex set of indices is presented in B. O'Leary and J. McGarry, The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland (London, 1993), pp. 4 0 - 4 . There is an excellent comparative analysis in O'Leary and McGarry, The Politics of Antagonism, pp. 9 - 2 2 . G. Hogan and C. Walker, in Political Violence and the Law in Ireland (Manchester, 1989), p. 5, observe that the Irish republic preferred to follow the (perhaps more traditionally English) path of specifying 'scheduled offences' in which motivation is irrelevant, a concrete rather than rhetorical 'criminalisation' of paramilitary action.

292

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direct one. 46 The reason for this is straightforward: the PTA was a response to a particular kind of violence, the indiscriminate bombing of public places, and in effect to a single instance of such violence, the 1974 Birmingham pub bombing. There can be little doubt that in 1974 the PTA was a reflection of intense public outrage. Its 'temporary provisions' were generally seen as a necessary reaction to a clear and present public danger - and the Home Secretary took care to invoke this American formula. Only with the passage of many years, and many official reviews, and the ultimate permanency of the Act, did the difficulty of such emergency laws become clearer: while their upholders could not demonstrate that they were effective in preventing terrorism, their critics could not demonstrate that they were not; and nobody was prepared to take responsibility for terminating them as long as any kind of terrorism went on. Thus Britain has arrived at a set of state powers which are farreaching but not amenable to the kind of interrogation implicit in the old principle of necessity. Such a situation is created by the stretching of common law traditions in a wholly modern campaign of violence, where the formal declaration of a state of emergency is politically unacceptable. The same process can be seen in the less spectacular but equally far-reaching provisions of the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Acts. The fundamental issue addressed by the Diplock Commission was the operability of traditional legal procedures in a situation of endemic intimidation. The irresistible conclusion at that time (1973) was the temporary suspension (to 'forestall' the breakdown of the jury system) of jury trial together with other, equally entrenched, aspects of 'due process' affecting powers of arrest and pre-trial procedures.47 Twenty years on it has become hard to envisage the possibility of restoring what was once regarded as a central pillar of civil liberties. It is hard to measure the corrosive effect of these emergency measures on the legitimacy of the constitutional system as a whole. 48 Academic commentators have suggested that 'human-rights costs . . . have had incalculable negative effects on public trust in political institutions in the British Isles and upon the legitimacy of the Westminster model of 46

47

48

L. J. Macfarlane, Violence and the State (London, 1974), pp. 4 7 - 5 0 ; S. Bruce, The Red Hand: Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland (Oxford, 1992), pp. 268ff. Report of the Commission to Consider Legal Procedures to Deal with Terrorist Activities in Northern Ireland, 1972 Cmnd. 5185, para. 37; G. Wilson, Cases on Constitutional and Administrative Law (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 749ff.; J. E. Finn, Constitutions in Crisis: Political Violence and the Rule of Law ( N e w York, 1991), pp. 8 6 - 1 1 8 . See, e.g. The Review of the Operation of the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act 1978, 1984 Cmnd. 9222: Review of the Operation of the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1984, 1987 Cm. 264.

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government'.49 The real question is, is there any alternative? A recent legal analysis holds that emergency powers could be made to comport with 'the constitutive principles of constitutionalism' by a few technical changes - the most important being the introduction of independent judicial review. 50 Whether or not such reform is politically likely (in fact it would run counter to one of the most strongly marked tendencies in the modern history of the British judiciary, assertion of the executive's right to determine the actions necessary to maintain public or 'national' security),51 its effect would however be indirect. It would not make juries safe in Ireland. The legitimacy of legal institutions rests on, as much as it sustains, the legitimacy of the institutions of enforcement. Hard though it may be to frame appropriate laws to counter political violence, it is harder still to construct forces capable of implementing them. The Northern Ireland crisis has demonstrated the formidable difficulties generated by the coupling of what may rightly be regarded as the constitutional principle of 'necessary force' (or its cosmetic reformulation, 'minimum force') with an array of less binding but politically potent conventions, of which the most salient is still the notion of civil supremacy, habitually rephrased as 'police primacy'.52 This notion has always become problematical when the police force is paralysed or overwhelmed by an outbreak of violence, and the British conventions governing the use of military force 'in aid of the civil power' (MACP) are grounded on the assumption that military action will be brief, and that normal conditions will be rapidly restored.53 Any outbreak of violence larger or more protracted than a riot will exhaust the available repertoire of MACP and begin to generate stresses between the military and police organisations because of the differences in their operational logic. Moreover, if normality is not restored quickly, the tendency to militarise the police (in self-defence if for no other reason) is likely to be accelerated. The result is a system of forces whose functions are blurred 49

50 51

52

53

O'Leary and McGarry, The Politics of Antagonism, p. 47. A. Jennings (ed.), Justice Under Fire: The Abuse of Civil Liberties in Northern Ireland (London, 1988). Finn, Constitutions in Crisis, p. 134. T h e leading twentieth-century case, Liversidge v. Anderson, has recently provided the focus of a fine study, A. W . B. Simpson, In the Highest Degree Odious: Detention without Trial in Wartime Britain (Oxford, 1992); see more generally J. A. G. Griffith, The Politics of the Judiciary (London, 1991), ch. 9, and, for a celebrated recent case, C. Ponting, 'R. v. Ponting', Journal of Law and Society, 14 (1987), 366. For a concise analysis, see K. Jeffery, * Security Policy in Northern Ireland: Some Reflections o n the Management of Violent Conflict', Terrorism and Political Violence, 2 (Spring 1990), 2 1 - 3 4 . A. Babington, Military Intervention in Britain: From the Gordon Riots to the Gibraltar Incident (London, 1990), provides a useful, if hardly detached, general survey.

294

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and whose chances of securing legitimacy reduced. Any operational error exacerbates this tendency, which itself makes errors more likely by inhibiting the public co-operation on which normal policing depends.54 In Northern Ireland the situation was complicated by the fact that the 'normal' police structure was itself highly contentious, being the product of a pervasively denominational state system. The professional police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), was armed and organised in the style of its predecessor, the RIC, and was supplemented by a part-time force whose Protestant nature was unambiguous. Only briefly, at the time of the Hunt Report, did the possibility arise of 'normalising' the RUC by British standards.55 This would have been an imaginative policy with immense potential benefits, but it was also, and more obviously, immensely risky, and the risk was refused. Instead, the Special Constabulary was replaced by (in practice, if not principle, turned into) a garrison regiment, the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR), thus ostensibly swinging the balance of force substantially towards the military side. The history of the UDR, which can now be seen whole, offers an acute commentary on the capacity of the state to find a neutral role in Northern Ireland. Though it was clearly a compromise, and not a specialised 'third force' (whatever the arguments for or against such forces), it offered a real prospect of mobilising the community in self-defence, providing the vital intelligence base whose lack has always been the principal handicap to internal security operations.56 Everything would depend on its capacity to enlist support from the Catholic minority as well as the Protestant majority. In retrospect, we may suggest that its doom was fixed at a very early point. Until the introduction of internment without trial on 9 August 1971, the new force was recruiting something like 20 per cent Catholics. In the subsequent upsurge of violence, the force was fully mobilised for the first time, and the position of Catholics within it became increasingly difficult.57 If any chance remained of preserving the regiment's cross-community viabi54

For a characteristically acute essay on the double-edged effect of even 'successful' operations, see D . McKittrick, 'House Raids Earn Security Forces N e w Enemies', The Independent, 6 February 1989; Despatches from Belfast (Belfast, 1989), pp. 196-202. Also Maire N i c Suibhne, ' T h e Lawless Roads', The Independent Magazine, 17 July 1993, pp. 16-22.

55

Report of the Advisory Committee on Police in Northern Ireland, 1969 Cmd. 535; D . G. Boyce, '"Normal Policing": Public Order in Ireland since Partition', Eire-Ireland, 14 (1979), 3 5 - 5 2 . Denis Healey in fact went further, arguing in the House of Commons on 19 November 1969 for 'the role of the services as an instrument of social integration'. C. Ryder, The Ulster Defence Regiment: An Instrument of Peace? (London, 1991),

56

57

pp. 44-7.

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lity in face of Catholic distrust, it was lost by a small but steady flow of incidents displaying its sectarian streak.58 A study of the UDR published in 1991 remarked, soberly enough, that 'it cannot be a matter for continued complacency or evasion by government that an arm of the security forces is significantly more lawless than the community which it is charged with protecting'.59 The failure of the UDR experiment cast a shadow over the general framework of Britain's anti-terrorist policy. Since the winding-up of internment, the dogma of police primacy has been given the additional gloss of 'Ulsterisation', a somewhat inelegant and imprecise term designed to indicate a degree of military disengagement - not enough to hearten the 'Brits out' party or dismay the loyalists, but enough to reduce the political odium of a deeply un-British military 'presence'. But this has laid on the RUC a weight of responsibility which it is hardly able to bear. Indeed it is hard to see how any police force, even without the tradition of semi-isolation bequeathed by the old RIC - and now aggravated by the general foreclosure of public accountability in the quasi-war situation - could establish its moral credentials in such circumstances.60 The relative stability of death rates and incident totals over the last fifteen years - the acceptable level of violence - may have served to neutralise the Irish question as a political issue, but it has hardly disguised the absolute dependence of the union on an open-ended commitment of military force. The army remains the keystone of the security system in Northern Ireland. Though operations on the scale of Demetrius and Motorman, and catastrophes on the scale of Bloody Sunday in Derry, may be a thing of the past, parts of the province continue to bear an uncomfortable resemblance to occupied enemy territory, if not actual war zones. And whilst the grosser abuses, notably in interrogation methods, imported with the initial military intervention have been replaced by more carefully calculated techniques, serious problems in the style of security operations have repeatedly surfaced.61 58

59 60

61

Ryder's not unsympathetic account balances, surely rightly, a chapter on 'Commitment and Sacrifice' with a (slightly longer) chapter called ' T h e "Bad A p p l e s ' " . Ibid., p. 184. D . Walsh, ' T h e Royal Ulster Constabulary: A Law unto Themselves?', in M . T o m l i n son et al. (eds.), Whose Law and Order? Aspects of Crime and Social Control in Irish Society (Belfast, 1988), pp. 9 2 - 1 0 8 . O n the still unresolved issues raised in the Stalker affair, see T . Hadden, 'The Law in T h e i r Hands', The Times Literary Supplement, 4 - 1 0 March 1988. For a sympathetic but very revealing study of the force, see J. D . Brewer with K. Magee, Inside the RUC: Routine Policing in a Divided Society (Oxford, 1991). Irish Information Partnership, 'Cases allegedly involving British Army Undercover S A S U n i t s , 1981-1988'; C. P. Walker, 'Shooting to Kill: Some of the Issues in Farrell v. Secretary of State for Defence', Modern Law Review, 43 (1980), 591^1.

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Indeed it seems likely that public disquiet about the constitutionality of British methods has tended to increase rather than to diminish over the decades of quasi-emergency rule. At the same time, the government has experienced little short-term difficulty in smothering occasional surges of concern, as over the so-called 'shoot-to-kill' policy, under the blanket of national security. Public opinion has remained unfocussed, a fact which appears to suit the authorities, so that it would be unwise to suggest that there is a gulf between the public view and the state project. But if, as two academic lawyers have put it, 'it should now be clear that civil liberties in Britain are in a state of crisis',62 it is important to consider whether this is the inevitable fate of a liberal democracy in face of persistent political violence. There can be no doubt that the English common law provides government with ample power to deal with emergencies, and that special statutes - even such far-reaching ones as the Defence of the Realm Actare merely declaratory. Equally, there is no doubt that English public culture was traditionally jealous of state power, and hostile to the notion of a formal 'state of siege' codifying emergency powers. In modern times this has produced the perverse effect that, as emergencies have become more extensive and the distinction between peace and war has eroded, the state has been impelled to enlarge the sphere of official secrecy and of covert action in the name of national security. The campaign of the Irish republican paramilitary organisations, and the loyalist organisations which exist to oppose them, have led to the creation of the closest approach to a formal state of siege in modern British history. But because the process has been piecemeal and ad hoc, there is a pervasive lack of clarity in the structure and function of the emergency regime. This may be an even more seriousflawthan the lack of accountability, in a state whose constitutive principles incorporate some notion of openness.63 The justification of arbitrariness in responding to 'extremism' is all too easy to understand. Against it needs to be set the tradition of upholding freedom even in times of extremity, lest the constitution be subverted by the very measures taken to defend it. 62

63

K. D . Ewing and C. A. Gearty, Freedom under Thatcher: Civil Liberties in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1990), p. 255. See, e.g., the cogent critiques in W. L. T w i n i n g , 'Emergency Powers and Criminal Process: T h e Diplock Report', Criminal Law Review (1973), 4 0 6 - 1 7 ; J. Jacob, 'Some Reflections on Governmental Secrecy', Public Law (1974), 2 3 - 4 7 ; and more recently, the Conclusion of C. K. Allen, Law and Orders (London, 1956).

PartV

Religion and morality

14

Survival and autonomy: on the strange fortunes and peculiar legacy of ecclesiastical establishment in the modern British state, c. 1920 to the present day 5. J. D. Green

The progressive, and seemingly inexorable, decline of the Church of England - as political body, social institution and moral medium - is no more than a commonplace of contemporary British cultural criticism. Scarcely less obvious is the increasing, and apparently irreversible, process of separation between Church and state in the formal arrangements of the British constitutional regime.1 So much indeed have decline and separation, whether strictly defined or informally assumed, become part of what might be called the educated orthodoxy in modern British intellectual life that even the most cursory consideration of the remaining ecclesiastical dimensions, or - more daring still - of the shifting religious boundaries of the later twentieth-century British state, might almost be construed as precious, even as eccentric. For organisational decline, whatever else it means, has always implied decreased significance. And political separation appears only to have been wrought at the price of diminished protection. As a result, the aura of a body of a marginal, even of exiguous, importance is today unmistakable. This appears at once an invitation to pass on to more pressing concerns, and an injunction to pass over the afflicted in polite silence. 1

Trevor Beeson, The Church of England in Crisis (London, 1973); Charles Moore, Gavin Stamp and A. N. Wilson, The Church in Crisis (London, 1989); and most recently, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, The Church Hesitant: A Portrait of the Church of England

Today (London, 1993). More thoughtful is Michael De-La-Noy, The Church of England: A Portrait (London, 1993). The underlying issues are incisively analysed by Stephen Sykes, 'The Genius of Anglicanism', in Geoffrey Rowell (ed.), The English Religious Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism (Wantage, 1992), pp. 221-AX', and

Edward Norman, 'Church and State Since 1800', in Sheridan Gilley and W. J. Sheils (eds.), A History of Religion in Britain: Practice and Belief from Pre-Roman Times to the

Present (Oxford, 1994), pp. 277-91. 299

300

S. J. D. Green

Yet in what follows, neither of these ostensibly rigorous and respectful imperatives will be obeyed. In part, this is as a protest against any conception of the modern state, British or other, which would view it as no more than the sum of its transfer payments; still worse as the mere product of its macro-economic management. For states, whether they like it or not, embody profound principles about how their citizens properly should live. And, in the overwhelming majority of states, those principles have been religious in origin and by expression. Moreover, if this has been explicitly true in the past, it actually continues to be true, more subtly, in the present, even amongst many of those regimes such as the United States of America, states formally defined as secular.2 Certainly, it remains the case of the British state. It is now, and has been since time immemorial, a religious state. For more than four hundred years, first England, and then the United Kingdom, has been a reformed religious state. One church, the Protestant Church of England, is exclusively established by law in the greater part of the land. As such, it enjoys a privileged status in the life of the nation. Its bishops sit, ex officio, in the upper house of the legislative assembly. Its courts are an acknowledged part of the judicial system. Above all, an Anglican monarch is bound both by custom and statute law to sustain its predominance in the realm.3 True, neither its authority nor its privileges are what they once were. After all, Establishment holds no writ either in Wales or Northern Ireland. It exists, but it means something rather different, in Scotland. The episcopate forms a distinctly uninfluential part of the nation's parliamentary strength. Ecclesiastical jurisdiction has persecuted no one in a very long time. Even the monarchy, notwithstanding its continuing legal obligations towards the Church, now executes little of striking significance in the state. More important still perhaps, the civil and cultural privileges pertaining to membership of the Church of England, and correspondingly the penalties exacted for refusing such membership, have steadily declined since 1828, to the point where they are now virtually negligible.4 So much is obvious, indeed scarcely worth 2

3

4

Compare the First Amendment, or at least Thomas Jefferson's reading of it, with today's culture wars: Adrienne Koch and William Peden (eds.), The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jeff erson (New York, 1944), p. 381; James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America (New York, 1991), ch. 10. For a concise historical and legal summary, see Peter Hinchcliff, 'Church-State Relations', in Stephen Sykes and John Booty (eds.), The Study of Anglicanism (London, 1988), pp. 351-63. On the nonconformist experience, see Alan Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1750-1914 (London, 1976), pt 2; the Catholic view is outlined in Adrian Hastings, Church and State: The English Experience (Exeter, 1991), ch. 3.

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repeating. The point at stake is different. It is this: what is truly noteworthy about the formal and informal standing of the Church of England today is not its historic decline, but rather its continuing survival. By the same token, it is arguable that the progressive separation of Church and state over the past two centuries is now of lesser moment than their continuing connection; and in this connection, it is the autonomy of the Church and not the freedom of the secular arm that commands, or should command, our attention. For the survival and autonomy of the Church, so denned, really do matter. This is because, so far from pointing merely to what is residual in the British state, they now highlight what was always essential to it, and what it may never wholly succeed in transcending: its religious basis. II One thing, however, must be made absolutely clear at the outset. To argue for the significance of survival is not to deny the evidence of decline in the fortunes of the Established Church. And, in exactly the same way, to highlight the importance of ecclesiastical autonomy is not to repudiate the facts of increasing separation from, and residual subordination to, the secular arm. Rather, it is to attempt to shift our perspective in these matters, just a little. If this should seem so modest an aim as to question the worthiness of the end, then it may be pleaded that even this simple goal is no mean task, given the strength of contemporary images of decline and irrelevance. Such images, of course, are for the most part justifiably strong. This is because they reflect a good part of the historical fact. By any reasonable measure, the Church of England has declined during the twentieth century. Whether as the privileged vehicle of the most cherished beliefs of the people, as an all pervasive social institution, as a mechanism of political solidarity, or even as an instrument for individual ambition, the Church simply is less important than it was in 1900; or, for that matter, in 1950, even in 1970.5 Similarly, both the formal and informal relations between Church and state are less significant than they were even twenty years ago. Today, the state does not construct economic or even social policy with reference to ecclesiastical sentiment. Vice-versa in the synod.6 5

6

A reliable guide here is Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianityy 1920-1990 (2nd rev. edn, London, 1990), chs. 3, 14, 26, 29, 37 and 39. For the most recent evidence, see Alexander Wedderspoon, Grow or Die (London, 1981), pp. 1-4. Exemplified by the Faith in the City debate. Compare the original, Faith in the City: A Call For Action by Church and Nation: The Report of the Archbishop of Canterbury's Commission on Urban Priority Areas (London, 1985), esp. pt 3; with the reaction documented in Peter Catterall, 'The Party and Religion', in Anthony Seldon and Stuart

302

5. J. D. Green

Yet it is more than a purely pedantic qualification, at least judged in the context of Britain's continuing ancien regime, to note that decline does not, in itself, entail fall; similarly, that increasing separation need not necessarily lead to utter dissolution. After all, Britain's hereditary monarchy and its mixed - aristocratic and democratic - parliament survive. So does its Established Church. To a degree, they have survived, and yet may fall, together. But the Church of England, alone amongst the characteristic institutions of the old order, has actually succeeded in increasing its formal powers, specifically the autonomy of its institutional administration, in matters of ecclesiastical doctrine, liturgy and organisation, during the twentieth century. This peculiar good fortune has, however, been little noted. Constitutional changes which would have been regarded as extraordinary, and even dangerous, if permitted to the Crown and to the Lords have passed almost unnoticed to the benefit of ecclesiastical establishment. Why? Because they have been deemed unimportant. And that this should have been so is owed less to any collective neglect in matters ecclesiastical than to a general presumption about the dynamic and direction of social change in the advanced societies suggesting that such questions, whether relating to a specific Establishment or to the churches in general, are simply of less significance than they once were. This is the presumption of secularisation. The theory of secularisation is too well known to need repetition here.7 Its relevance for the British case similarly so.8 Moreover, the validity or otherwise of the arguments that sustain it is not, strictly speaking, our concern.9 What is important is to appreciate how the very notion of the decline of the Church of England, first within British society generally, and then more particularly of its standing as part of the British State, makes little or no sense if viewed in isolation from this general, theoretical, perspective. This is because the decline of the

7

8

9

Ball (eds.), Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 657-64. The relevant literature is voluminous. No bibliographical footnote could do justice to it. Perhaps the best single exposition and analysis of the idea remains that of David Martin, A General Theory of Secularisation (Oxford, 1978); see esp. ch. 2. For which, see Bryan Wilson, Religion in a Secular Society (London, 1966), ch. 1; Martin, A General Theory of Secularisation, pp. 27-36; and most recently, Grace Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945: Believing Without Belonging (Oxford, 1994), chs. 2 and 3. An otherwise endless debate succinctly summarised in Daniel Bell, 'The Return of the Sacred?', British Journal of Sociology, 28 (1977), 419-50; Bryan Wilson, 'The Return of the Sacred', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 18 (1979), 268-80; and Philip E. Hammond and Mark Shibley, 'When the Sacred Returns: An Empirical Test', in Eileen Barker, James A. Beckford and Karel Dobbelaere (eds.), Secularisation, Rationalism and Sectarianism (Oxford, 1993), pp. 37^15.

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Church of England during much of the twentieth century has not been caused by the advance of any other denomination - or faith - over the same period. Quite simply, there has been no such advance. Rather, it has been an aspect of a decline in the social significance of religion in Britain, tout court, over the course of all but the most recent years. In this respect, it has differed quite markedly from the Victorian crisis of Establishment. This was caused by an assault on privilege, conceived in an environment of intense inter-denominational competition, within an apparently expansive religious economy.10 The decline of the modern Church is, accordingly, normally understood to be part of the decline of the churches generally. And, as such, it has characteristically been traced to general causes, quite beyond the powers of any particular church to change.11 This is not to say that the contemporary fate for Establishment has been entirely the product of impersonal, apolitical forces. Few argue that. So, if 1829 really was a great betrayal - the Tractarians thought so then the 1944 Education Act may have been, from the Church's point of view, a great mistake; certainly, its famous progenitor, R. A. Butler, came to think so.12 Nor is it to suggest that secularisation has been the sole exogenous factor in the declining fortunes of the Church of England. On the contrary, many of those less controversial aspects of institutional pluralism, whether of the growth of democratic accountability, or even of the spread of an essentially mundane doctrine of social welfare, have acted to the diminution of the state Church, and of its wider role in British society, as much if not more in the twentieth century as during the nineteenth.13 It is, however, to insist that the secularisation of British society during the twentieth century - the progressive diminution of the social significance of religion in British life in that period - is the essential context for understanding the decline of the Church of England and the separation of Church and state in the British constitution. For here lies an important paradox. Within the general context of secularisation, the particular decline of the Church of England turns out to be rather less momentuous than at first appears. True, little more than 2V2 per cent of the population today attend the weekly religious 10 11

12

13

Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Churchy Part 1 (London, 1966), ch. 1. Robert Currie, Alan Gilbert and Lee Horsley, Church and Churchgoers: Patterns of Church Growth in the British Isles Since 1700 (Oxford, 1977), ch. 5. On 1829 as betrayal, see the Rev. John Keble, National Apostasy Considered in a Sermon Preached at St. Mary's Church, Oxford, Before His Majesty's Judge of Assizes, on Sunday, 14th July 1833, ed. by Alan Stephenson (Abingdon, 1983), passim; on 1944 as a mistake, see the remarks in R. A. Butler, The Art of the Possible (London, 1971), p. 124. Bryan Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford, 1982), esp. ch. 6.

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services of the Church. But scarcely much greater a proportion attends the worship of any other (Christian) church either. So there is nothing peculiar about the fate of Anglicanism in this respect.14 Moreover, it is by no means clear that there is anything special about the fate of organised religion in this regard either. Certainly, these, at first seemingly derisory, figures actually look quite healthy when compared with the health of secular social organisations. For instance, active members of the major political parties, attending even monthly associational meetings, today constitute no more than 2 per cent of the population. Moreover, their relative decline has been faster, and steeper, than that of comparable religious organisations since the war.15 From another perspective still, the contemporary minority standing of the Church of England can be shown to be no new thing. True, more Roman Catholics today probably attend Mass on a Sunday than Anglicans celebrating the Eucharist. This may cause consternation in official circles. But it excites none of the passion which its bare predominance, proved by the 1851 Religious Census, aroused in an earlier age.16 This is because the Church for a century and more has successfully survived its unpopularity. Indeed, it might almost be said to have transcended it. To some degree, this is because its formal authority in the land was never defined by the numbers of its active adherents. The Thirty-Nine Articles, after all, never appealed to popular consent. (For some at least they do not still.)17 It is also partly because its informal influence over the nation has been continually sustained through intelligent concession to the feelings of its most vocal opponents. In regions where its standing was controversial, like Wales and Ireland, over institutions where its privilege was increasingly untenable, like the ancient universities, even around economic relations where its ancient rights seemed more and more inappropriate, like the tithe, the Church invariably gave way, and in these concessions secured a respect, or at least a tolerance, that it might otherwise have been denied.18 14

15

16

17

18

The best account of the data, based on the figures for 1989, is found in Peter Brierley, 'Christian* England: What the English Church Census Reveals (London, 1991), ch. 2. Geraint Parry, George Moser and Neil Day, Political Participation and Democracy in Britain (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 3. For a discussion, see Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850-1914 (London, 1995), ch. 1; for a contemporary figure, see Brierley, 'Christian' England, p. 27. Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, Theology of the English Reformers (London, 1965), pp. 19ff. For a later assertion of the principle, see C. H. Sisson, 'Church and State', in his Is There a Church of England? (Manchester, 1993), p. 26. The best history of these concessions can be found in G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches of Great Britain, 1869-1921 (Oxford, 1987), esp. chs. 2, 3, 6 and 7. There is a list, complete to 1898, in Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, p. 163.

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But possibly the greatest part of the Church's contemporary 'success5 may be traced to its relatively healthy performance in the modern ecclesiastical numbers game, rightly understood. Here, rightly understood means interpreted comparatively. Seen in this way, it can be appreciated how a supposedly declining Establishment actually saw off its principal (Christian) denominational rivals during the twentieth century. In part, this was because it declined more slowly than they did over the same period. Hence it gained in comparison with them; this was especially true for the major nonconformist churches after 1944. In part, too, it was also because their challenge, in the end, proved to be rather less significant than had been morbidly anticipated; this was notably the case for the Roman Catholic Church after 1960. For these reasons, together, the national Church of early nineteenth-century Britain, in a confessional state, remained the national Church of later twentieth century Britain, in a democratic society. It did so by default perhaps, but nevertheless to a greater extent than could possibly have been predicted.19 The challenge of nonconformity to the Established Church was, throughout the nineteenth century, explicitly a numerical threat. Not only a numerical threat, of course; it can be traced also to prevailing doctrines of social equality, passing notions of individual liberty, a purist's defence of the Protestant faith, correctly interpreted. But the real, effective impact of its criticism of Anglican privilege was, at all times, profoundly related to its mundane associational strength. That meant numbers. It meant comparatively favourable numbers in 1851. 20 So too as late as 1906.21 But not after 1918. The First World War may or may not have had a deleterious effect on the Established Church. But it certainly did for the numerical health of Britain's Free Churches.22 At least two of the major Methodist churches, the Primitives and the United Church, endured an absolute decline in numbers during and immediately after the war; the Primitive diminishing from 205,000 to 199,000 in England, down to 1932; and the United Church contracting from 143,000 to 139,000 over the same period.23 To be sure, the largest group, the Wesleyan Methodists, held their own - at least in crude 19

20

21 22

23

On which see the concluding remarks of Hastings, A History of English Christianity, ch. 42; also Hastings, Church and State, 'Epilogue'. Possibly the high point of nonconformist advance in England; see Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England, chs. 4 and 5. On the significance of this election, see Machin, Politics and the Churches, p. 275. Currie et al., Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 113-14; Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (London, 1978), ch. 10; R. T . Jones, Congregationalism in England, 1662-1962 (London, 1962), pp. 355-61. Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, p. 143.

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figures - over this period, rising slightly, from 432,000 in 1914 to 447,000 in 1932. Similarly, Methodism in Wales held its own; the corresponding figure rising from 39,000 to 42,000. So too in Scotland, where it crept up from about 9,500 to around 11,000.24 Perversely, full union, in 1932, undermined these areas of residual prosperity too. Nowhere in England and Wales did the new, united Church enjoy even so much as one year of non-adjusted associational prosperity.25 The English Church, claiming some 769,101 members in 1933, had contracted to under 700,000 by the end of the war. It fell by another 100,000 over the next twenty-five years.26 The Welsh Church, 52,000 strong in 1933, had dipped below the 50,000 figure in 1945; twenty years later, it was at little more than 40,000. The smaller Scottish Church did have a brief flourish in the 1930s, creeping up from 13,000 to 14,000 in 1942. And, after a post-war dip, it rose again in the 1950s. But thereafter it moved downwards, below 13,000 by the mid-1960s.27 What was true for Methodism proved similarly the case for Congregationalism, and for the Baptist Church, in post-war Britain. The Congregationalists avoided absolute decline, in all three kingdoms, to around 1930. Then, their numbers stood at 290,000 in England, 160,000 in Wales and just under 40,000 in Scotland.28 But thereafter they went into a slow decline throughout the land. This seepage was never reversed. By 1970, the corresponding figures were 151,000, 105,000 and 25,000 respectively.29 The Baptists began crude decline even earlier in England, around 1911, when the figure began to fall from its peak of nearly 270,000. Despite one good year - in 1926 - it had slipped to under 240,000 by 1940, little more than 200,000 by 1950, and actually less than that figure - at 198,000 - by I960.30 The pattern for Wales was exactly the same: from 130,000 in 1926, to 115,000 in 1940, 105,000 in 1950 and 93,000 in I960.31 In Scotland, by contrast, Congregationalism did enjoy something of a revival during the 1930s. But this inspiration did not 24 25

26

27 28

29 30

31

Ibid. R u p e r t Davies, 'Since 1932', in R u p e r t Davies, A. R a y m o n d George a n d E. G o r d o n Rupp (eds.), A History of the Methodist Church in Great Britain, vol. I l l (London, 1983), p p . 362-4. Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, p . 144. See also t h e interpretation offered in Robert Currie, Methodism Divided: A Study in the Sociology of Ecumenism (London, 1968), p p . 305-16. Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, p. 144. Ibid., p . 150. O n t h e experience, see Jones, Congregationalism in England, p p . 387—8, 390-1 a n d 4 6 1 - 2 . Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, p. 151. Ibid., p p . 150-1. F o r t h e contemporary sense, see A. C. U n d e r w o o d , A History of English Baptists ( L o n d o n , 1947), p p . 273-^1. Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 150—1.

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outlive the Second World War. Congregationalism fell from nearly 40,000 in 1940 to 35,000 in 1950 and 34,000 in I960.32 The gradual eclipse of nonconformity over the two generations from the end of the First World War probably had much to do with the general processes which were undermining organised religion generally in twentieth-century Britain: the growth of democratic politics, the increasing diversity of urban life, even the insidious indifference of domestic existence. Yet these forces, such as they were, seem to have hit dissent rather harder than the Establishment. Certainly that was what contemporary observers understood. Denis Brogan, for instance, thought it 'the . . . greatest. . . change in the English social and religious landscape since . . . 1906'.33 Precisely why this should have been so remains unclear. It may have been a function of nonconformity's wider role as the expression of provincial identity, a feature of British society which has been, for most of the century, subject to inexorable demographic decline.34 It may also have been a product of its particular association with the spirit of Victorian puritanism, a religious and moral sensibility which came under increasing attack after that time.35 Whatever the cause, that comparative disadvantage left the Church progressively more secure in British society and better in fact, as a recognisable part of the British state, in the years after the end of the Great War. This was by no means universally recognised at the time. Indeed, a sense of unprecedented post-war crisis was, if anything, stronger in the contemporary Church of England than amongst most of its Protestant rivals. So much was this so that, for instance, a short-term decline in candidates for holy orders led Crockford's anonymous prefator to lament, in 1927, that it is not too much to say that if the history of the last ten years is continued for another ten the effective maintenance of the parochial system will . . . become . . . impossible and [an] ything that can fairly be called the Church of England will have ceased to exist.36 But none of this happened; not, at least, in that way or at that time. And, from something of a numerical low in 1917, at 2,097,000 Easter Day communicants, Anglican figures held up relatively well during the 32 34

35

36

33 Ibid. D . W . Brogan, The English People ( L o n d o n , 1943), p . 1 2 1 . H a s t i n g s , A History of English Christianity, p p . 2 6 5 - 6 . F o r a l o n g e r - t e r m view, see Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth 1870-1930 (New York, 1982), ch. 7. A grievously underdeveloped subject. For a pioneering effort, see Raphael Samuel, 'The Discovery of Puritanism: 1820-1914', in Jane Garnett and Colin Matthew (eds.), Revival and Religion since 1700: Essays for John Walsh (London, 1993), pp. 201^17. A n o n . , 'Preface', Crockford's Clerical Dictionary3 1927 (Oxford, 1927), p . vii.

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inter-war years. Indeed, there were 2,245,102 communicants, an absolute if not a relative growth in the faithful, in 1939. Numbers on the electoral diocese rolls rose similarly, from 1924 (their first year of calculation) through to 1933, and remained pretty steady thereafter, at around 3V2 million, again until the outbreak of hostilities.37 Even the number of clergymen rose, albeit briefly and marginally.38 So, contrary to general expectation, contrary even to common apprehension, the Church of England flourished, comparatively, in inter-war Britain. At much the same time, the Catholic threat to Anglican Establishment disappeared. This, however, had little to do with institutional failure; not at least before 1960. In fact, the Catholic population of England and Wales rose, unspectacularly but quite significantly, from just under 2 million to something around 2% million between the wars.39 And that in Scotland stayed steady at about 600,000. 40 It was much more a product of decisive political change. The United Kingdom changed its effective boundaries in 1922. And the cessation of the Irish Free State did an ecclesiastical good work for the Church. At a stroke, some 4 milion less than wholly reconciled Roman Catholics were removed from amongst its enemies in the land. With them went upwards of seventy MPs. Britain, or the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, suddenly became an unambiguously Protestant country again. True, mainland ghetto Catholicism remained. And in cities like Glasgow and Liverpool, even in parts of London, it continued to be politically significant, albeit principally as a means of sustaining Protestant political activity. But not elsewhere; and not, in truth, as part of the religious map of the United Kingdom - at least outside Ulster.41 The strangulation of political nonconformity (a function of its diminished numerical significance) and the abstraction of nationalist Catholicism (a function of its fulfilled ethnic purpose) together permitted the Church of England after 1920 to become, in R. H. Tawney's words, once more something like 'the religious aspect of the whole 37 38

39

40 41

Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, pp. 128-9. Ibid., p. 198. For contemporary reactions, see E. O. James, A History of Christianity in England (London, 1949), p. 177; and, for the peculiar case of the rural clergy, see A. Tindall Hart, The Country Priest in English History (London, 1959), ch. 9. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 134, 276; Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, p. 153. Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, p. 153. For a summary of the 'Ulster Version', see Donald Harman Akenson, God's Peoples: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster (Ithaca, N Y , 1992), chs. 6 and 9; and for the 'regional' factor in British religious politics since 1850, see John Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland (London,

1994), esp. pp. 140-53.

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42

nation'. To be sure, this was scarcely an uncontested resumption of national duties. By no means everyone applauded, or even recognised, it as such. The Liberation Society still existed, albeit as 'inactive . . . as the Giants Pope and Pagan in Bunyan's Allegory'.43 Nor was it achieved painlessly. Concessions, major and minor, had to be made for it to be possible. Yet it was clearly recognisable in the ecclesiastical and political life of inter-war Britain.44 It was observable within contemporary ecclesiastical organisations, where for instance the Church took the lead in the earliest experiments in ecumenical co-operation.45 Above all, it was highlighted by the Church's increasingly detached view of, and influential judgements upon, social and economic disputes in the new democratic regime which recent political change had inaugurated.46 This took the form of what might be called an assumed ethical authority; that is, of a notion that the Church, as the most concrete, lasting and popular embodiment of Christian morality in the country, might now properly become the appropriate vehicle for the dissemination of a general, Christian influence in the affairs of an increasingly popular (and thus inherently divided) and also increasingly secular (and therefore inevitably rudderless) system of government. This new and enhanced moral role for Establishment has recently been traced to Archbishop Davidson's intervention in the miners' strike of 1926. There is some merit in that view. Strictly limited though that intervention was, it certainly created a stir at the time. Durham (Tory) MP Cuthbert Headlam was only the most eloquent in denouncing 'damned bishops . . . talk . . . that the miners' leaders had a case' which 'queer[ed] the pitch and disturbed] public opinion'.47 He was also unusual in enjoying the full (if more circumspectly expressed) support of his local bishop, Hensley Henson, in doing so.48 Yet this may miss the 42

43 44

45

46

47

48

R. H . T a w n e y , 'Speech' (no title), probably to Conference of Christian Social M o v e ment, no venue, no date, p. 5, T a w n e y Papers, L o n d o n School of Economics, 20/7/4. Augustine Birrell, The Nation, 9 February 1929. Acknowledged, significantly, by the most important contemporary Anglican proponent of disestablishment, Hensley H e n s o n , in his The Church of England (Cambridge, 1939), pp. xii-xiv, and ch. 10. J. W. C. Ward, Anglicanism in History and Today (London, 1961), ch. 7, offers an early assessment - and vindication - in this respect. For the most detailed study of the phenomenon, see E. R. Norman, Church and Society in England, 1770-1970 (Oxford, 1976), ch. 7. For a rather more sympathetic account, try John Kent, William Temple (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 115-34. Stuart Ball (ed.), Parliament and Politics in the Age of Baldwin and Macdonald: The Headlam Diaries, 1923-1935 (London, 1992), p. 95; entry for 17 July 1926. T h i s view of the significance of Davidson's intervention is advanced in Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 186-7. It is partially corroborated in the near contemporary account of G. K. A. Bell, Randall Davidson (Oxford, 1938), pp. 1307-8. Ball, Parliament and Politics, p. 121; entry for 14 M a y 1927.

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point. For the real significance of the archbishop's act (such as it was) was almost certainly much more symbolic than practical. Above all, it was more a question of timing rather than of content.49 To be sure, the idea that there was a Christian perspective to be brought upon social and economic issues was scarcely a discovery of 1926. Yet Tawney for one believed it to be something of a rediscovery, a restatement of 'the practical implications of the social ethics of the Christian faith', all but lost in the 'line of division [drawn] between the spheres of religion and . . . business [during] the nineteenth century'.50 Moreover, the notion that the Church of England, traditional instrument of aristocratic privilege in the land, might be its appropriate and generally acceptable vehicle, so much so that its judgement might as often support the perceived interest of labour as of capital, unquestionably was very novel at the time.51 What specific right the Church had to assume this role neither was nor is clear. It was unclear in Christian doctrine generally. And it was unclear in the peculiar standing of the Established Church particularly.52 Anyway, it clearly demanded political neutrality; that is, a specific willingness not to take party sides. This, despite continual accusations to the contrary, the Church has rigorously maintained since then.53 And it implied a certain social ambivalence; that is, a willingness to be in favour of generally progressive contemporary moralisms which did not, however, endorse any particular institutional understanding of their best promulgation. Nothing, perhaps, better exemplified that ambivalence than the Church's response to the extension of the welfare state in Britain after the Second World War. Thus J. W. C. Ward hailed it as 'an expression at the national level of the humanitarian work of the Church'.54 But Cyril Foster Garbett worried about its effects in diminishing individual responsibility, or even local autonomy.55 Yet Garbett was not opposed to the principle.56 And even Ward was not an 49

50 51

52

53

54 55 56

H e n c e Baldwin's caustic reaction; on which, see Keith M i d d l e m a s a n d J o h n Barnes, Stanley Baldwin (London, 1969), p . 433. F o r his capacity for forgiveness, see Stanley Baldwin, 'A Toast to an Archbishop', in This Torch of Freedom (London, 1935), p p . 221-7. R. H . T a w n e y , Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1926), p . 2. Most famously, perhaps, in Christianity and Industrial Relations: Fifth Report of The Archbishop's Commission ( L o n d o n , 1918), passim. M o s t strikingly, t h o u g h , in V. A. Demant, The Miner's Distress and the Coal Problem (London, 1929), passim. For some of the answers, see V. A. Demant, Religion and the Decline of Capitalism ( L o n d o n , 1952), ch. 6. By contrast, for instance, with t h e R o m a n Catholic C h u r c h in Italy prior to t h e fall of C o m m u n i s m ; or m a n y evangelical churches in t h e U S A today. J. W . C. W a r d , God and Goodness ( L o n d o n , 1952), p . 56. Cyril Foster G a r b e t t , The Church of England Today ( L o n d o n , 1953), p . 114. See, for instance, his earlier work, The Church in an Age of Revolution ( L o n d o n , 1952),

at p. 151.

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apologist for every fact in its development. Only a maverick Methodist, like Donald Soper, actually invoked the deity in support of its every rampart.57 In this way, the Church left itself free both to commend the state in its continuing ethical purposes and to admonish passing governments for their continual lapses in the fulfilment of the nation's most morally ambitious contemporary task. Of course, the notion of the Established Church as the legitimate organ of independent ethical judgement in the community presumed the continuing existence of an essentially Christian people. More importantly, it required the unprecedented development of an essentially unified Christian people. And both of these things held true together only after 1920. This is not to say that Britons suddenly started going to church in vast, and unprecedented, numbers. They did not. Nor is it to claim that an unchurched majority suddenly acquired the fundamentals of biblical Christianity and applied them, more rigorously than ever, to their daily lives.58 Rather it is to acknowledge that the very same people who, ironically, increasingly ceased going to church after that time, nevertheless retained a profound sense of their (different) denominational identities well into the 1950s. That kept them, in their own eyes at least, Christian.59 And, holding on to those loyalties which had once so grievously divided them, they now additionally nurtured through them an altogether more amorphous, and increasingly undifferentiated, Christian sensibility within their midst. This was what Geoffrey Gorer described as the God-centred, universalist, essentially benevolent, and above all profoundly personal Christianity; an ethereal moralism which, to a considerable extent, defined the passing of the Puritan ethic and heralded the growth of a philanthropic latitudinarianism within the general population.60 It was a religion which was increasingly difficult to define; certainly to render coherent. It was also one which was probably more difficult to place; and unquestionably more difficult to measure. Finally, it was not necessarily an especially admirable form of faith. Indeed, many concerned and committed contemporaries lamented it even condemned it.61 57 58

59

60

61

Douglas T h o m p s o n , Donald Soper (London, 1971), p. 150. Contrast the view expressed in A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945 (Oxford, 1965), p. 168. Geoffrey Gorer, Exploring English Character (London, 1951), pp. 137-8 (based upon a questionnaire survey of 5000 persons). Ibid., pp. 2 5 1 - 9 . Corroborated in B. Seebohm Rowntree and G. R. Lavers, English Life and Leisure (London, 1951), pp. 3 6 0 - 7 2 (based upon a detailed study of two towns, H i g h W y c o m b e and York). Rowntree and Lavers, English Life and Leisure, p. 372. N o t e , however, the rather more indulgent, contemporary, Anglican view expressed in the Rev. A. T . P. Williams,

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But its development was crucial to the evolution of what can only be termed 'a public atmosphere' in which a continuing minority, privileged Church meaningfully could, and did, openly appeal to what it rightly took to be common 'Christian' sensibilities, and in the realistic hope of finding there some resonant echo amongst non-churchgoers and nonChurchmen alike. That echo did not imply much admiration, either for the institution, or for its personnel. But it did entail something akin to support, and this support enabled the Church to retain for a generation and more both a powerful belief in its own doctrinal, organisational and indeed spiritual superiority over all other churches, and a confident sense of its growing political, social and even intellectual claim to a place in the mainstream of national life. 62 Of that sense of superiority there can be no doubt. Hence William Temple, remarking upon 'our Special Character', in 1930: and, as we believe, our peculiar contribution to the Universal Church, [which] arises from the fact that, owing to historic circumstances, we have been enabled to combine in our one fellowship the traditional Faith and Order of the Catholic Church with that immediacy of approach to God through Christ to which the Evangelical Churches especially bear witness, and freedom of intellectual inquiry, whereby the correlation of the Christian revelation and advancing knowledge is constantly affected.63 Yet of the capacity of seemingly so precious an institution to converse with common concerns, there was relatively little fear. So C. H. Sisson, a noted if idiosyncratic apologist, put it like this: The Church of England is . . . more than just another voluntary organisation with private objects which amuse its members . . . it is . . . the most numerous and deep-rooted ecclesiastical organisation in England . . . the Nonconformist churches . . . are ancillary and derivative . . . The Church of England in a sense fights their battles for them, and is the voice of Christianity in the State.64 This was not just fantasy. Rather, it contained an important kernel of truth. And, in so far as it was true, it became still more so during the period between Temple's assertion and Sisson's observation. Certainly, the experience of war profoundly reinforced the notion of the inter-

62

63

'Religion', in Ernest Barker (ed.), The Character of England (Oxford, 1947), pp. 56-84 at pp. 82-3. W a r d , Anglicanism, 'Conclusion', offers a contemporary flavour. E d w a r d Carpenter, Archbishop Fisher ( L o n d o n , 1991), p t 5, recreates an almost forgotten past. Cited in William Oddie, The Crockford's File: Gareth Bennett and the Death of the

Anglican Mind (London, 1989), pp. 117-88. For an historical analysis, see Ward, 64

Anglicanism, ch. 6. Sisson, ' C h u r c h a n d State', in Is There a Church of England?, p p . 2 4 - 5 .

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dependence of religion and the civil order in Britain.65 Thereafter, public life resumed a notably more Anglican hue. This was particularly so on the Conservative front benches, where Harold Macmillan, Lord Salisbury and later Alec Douglas Home reasserted a latent Church bias.66 But such piety was not limited to their party. When Billy Graham began his London Crusade in 1954, his first rally was attended by 250 MPs, of all political complexions.67 Moreover, public forms, whether traditionally defined or informally assumed, seemed to express at least some of the reality of private concerns in this respect. Hence the decade after 1950 actually witnessed an increase in adult confirmation, a rise in student religion and, more strikingly still, enlarged congregations and Sunday school attendance.68 In such a climate, the claim to a legitimate predominance actually made quite good sociological, as well as traditional and historical, sense. The social revolution of the 1960s is often supposed to have killed all this. It cannot be stated too strongly that it did not. On the contrary, both the belief in the superiority of the Establishment version and a sense of the congruity of Anglicanism in English life largely survived the great cultural and moral upheavals of that decade. Some may doubt this view. Certainly, it goes against the grain of many concerned memories. For them, the authority of the Church seemed to be more under assault at this time than at any moment in recent British history, either before or possibly since. And this may have been true. But there is a real danger in confusing an intellectual history of the justification or otherwise of the traditional authority of the Church - as understood by Churchmen with a cultural history of its wider influence in and for society - as experienced by laymen. To be sure, the traditional authority of the Church was indeed attacked, and probably was diminished, at this time. Theological foundations definitely were questioned. Dean Robinson was only the most successful of these questioners.69 Similarly, ethical taboos once closely associated with the hierarchy of the Church were cut away in many areas of family and sexual law; and not always with even 65

66

67 68 69

Hastings, A History of English Christianity, ch. 26; cf. Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, p p . 1 1 3 - 1 5 . O n T e m p l e , see F . A. I r e m o n g e r , William Temple ( L o n d o n , 1949), ch. 2 6 . F o r a corroborative c o n t e m p o r a r y a c c o u n t , see G . S t e p h e n S p i n k s , ' W o r l d W a r I I a n d A f t e r m a t h ' , in Spinks (ed.), Religion in Britain since 1900 ( L o n d o n , 1952), p p . 2 1 5 - 3 0 . H a s t i n g s , A History of English Christianity, p p . 4 2 5 - 6 ; P e t e r Catterall, ' T h e P a r t y a n d Religion', p p . 6 5 - 7 . Hastings, A History of English Christianity, pp. 4 5 4 - 5 . N o r m a n , Church and Society, p . 395. J o h n A. T . R o b i n s o n , Honest to God ( L o n d o n , 1963); for t h e e n s u i n g d e b a t e , see K e i t h

W. Clements, Lovers of Discord: Twentieth Century Theological Controversies in England

(London, 1988), ch. 7.

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the tacit consent of the incumbent episcopacy.70 Ancient social deference dissipated. With it religious deference too. The bright young things of TW3 characterised religion as just another household commodity. The Beatles espoused Buddhism.71 All of this was reflected in - if scarcely a significant cause of- a certain falling away of the faithful. The number of Easter Day communicants dropped quite substantially, from 2,159,356 to 1,631,506 in England, between 1960 and 1970; and from 182,369 to 123,925 in Wales during the same period. On the other hand, the electoral rolls, in England at least, remained fairly steady, falling marginally from 2,861,887 to 2,558,986.72 More important still, the real effects of these assaults and of that decline, considerable though they were felt to be in many quarters at the time, can easily be exaggerated. This was because such measures of social importunity poorly reflected the religious culture to which the Church of England was in fact continuing - successfully - to appeal at that time. Hence, to suppose that theological liberalism really undermined the faith of the majority is to presume that their religion, prior to about 1960, really was that of biblical Christianity. But we know that was only very marginally the case. And to assume that contemporary ethical relativism truly affronted Anglican prestige is to conceive of it as the institutional bulwark against creeping permissiveness which it had really ceased to be after Archbishop Fisher's retirement. Finally, to conclude that satire - or indifference - killed Christianity at this juncture is simply to ignore the fact that its real targets, and the real victim of the demise of deference during the 1960s, was the political elite, not the religious Establishment. It was, after all, the social anachronism of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, not the spiritual piety of Michael Ramsay which really offended the self-consciously progressive in 1963.73 Moreover, in all this presumed anti-establishmentarianism, it was actually the ecclesiastical competition which suffered most. Free Church losses at this time were truly dramatic. Congregationalist membership fell by 20 per cent in the decade; the Presbyterian figure by almost as much.74 Their union, in 1970, was a case of the ecumenicalism 70

71

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On Archbishop Ramsey's personal ambivalence, see Owen Chadwick, Michael Ramsey (Oxford, 1990), pp. 152-5, 1 6 ^ 5 . Best captured in contemporary journalistic accounts; see Bernard Levin, The Pendulum Years: Britain and the Sixties (London, 1970), passim. Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, p. 129. On the continuing and contingent in Anglicanism's historical morality, see Paul Elmer, 'Anglican Morality', in Sykes and Booty (eds.), The Study of Anglicanism, pp. 325-38. On the social and political anachronism of Alec Douglas-Home and the 'liberating' effect of Harold Wilson, see Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson (London, 1992), p. 395. Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, p. 151.

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of mutual decline if ever there was one.75 Methodist membership dipped from about 733,000 in 1960 to 557,000 in 1975, a diminution of 24 per cent in fifteen years. Even the Baptists lost around 13 per cent of their numbers in the ten years from 1960 to 1970.76 More pointedly, if less obviously, the Roman Catholics did not advance. Everything, in 1960, suggested that they were going to do so. Catholic infant baptisms peaked between 1959 and 1964, at something like 15 per cent of the nation's live births. Catholic marriages hit their highest total, 44,000 or nearly 13 per cent of the whole, in 1961. Catholic conversions soared to 13,735 in 1959.77 But these were all high points, never to be repeated. Annual average conversions to Roman Catholicism slumped to fewer than 4000 by 1972.78 The number of mixed marriages exceeded purely Catholic unions as early as 1963, and by 1971, at 25,000 to 19,000, was well ahead.79 Baptism into the faith declined similarly, and accordingly; indeed, still more strikingly so as the traditional injunction to bring up children of mixed marriage in the Roman faith waned. This, in itself, pointed to the wider significance of Catholic decline. For whilst, in Professor Hastings's words, the Anglican and Free Church crises of the 1960s 'could be seen as essentially the reinforcement of a tendency that had been present since 1910', the Roman Catholic reversal of that later decade 'was in contrast to a steady rise over the previous century'.80 That pointed to a rather different, and more profound, cause of Catholic troubles: to the break-up of the Irish ghettoes; to a decline in the special loyalty of Roman adherents; finally to the special inappropriateness of the Church's teaching in an age of increasing permissiveness.81 Hence the supreme social and theological paradox of the 1960s. It may be stated simply. The moral and cultural revolution of the era actually left the ecclesiastical Establishment in some ways stronger than ever before. Certainly, a greater proportion of the population now identified themselves as Anglicans, by comparison with any other Christian denomination, than at any time in the recent past. Moreover that association, institutionally weak though it unquestionably was, itself reflected an eclectic popular faith, and a comfortable conventional 75

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O n its a n t e c e d e n t s , see J o n e s , Congregationalism in England, p p . 4 3 2 - 3 ; o n t h e t h e o r y of e c u m e n i c a l i s m as a r e s p o n s e t o decline, see W i l s o n , Religion in a Secular Society, pp. 126-8. For a critique of this theory, see David M. Thompson, 'Theological and Sociological Approaches to the Motivation of the Ecumenical Movement', in Derek Baker (ed.), Religious Motivation: Biographical and Sociological Problems for the Church Historian, Studies i n C h u r c h H i s t o r y 15 (Oxford, 1978), p p . 4 6 7 - 7 9 . Currie, Churches and Churchgoers, p. 151. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p . 552. 79 80 81 Ibid., p . 5 6 1 . Ibid., p . 580. Ibid., p . 5 6 3 . Ibid., p . 580.

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practice, easily capable of withstanding reasoned theological criticism or passing social unrest. For it was increasingly a sensibility, and an activity, which neither especially depended upon the Establishment, nor was particularly offended by it. As such, it took what it conceived to be the good of Establishment - national unity - and quietly ignored what it understood to be otiose - a public doctrine. So the Establishment survived, and indeed prospered, during that otherwise treacherous decade because it had, in effect, become an instrument of popular social

III But it was a rather different Church which emerged from these later shadows. That was because it was the Church which really changed during the 1960s; certainly more, not less, than the society which surrounded it. Such a view no doubt defies the contemporary image. But it accords with the organisational facts of the matter. And it is vitally important to an understanding of the current precarious position of Establishment. During those years the Church underwent something like a doctrinal, liturgical and institutional revolution. This was true both of its 'internal' affairs and of its 'external' relations with the state. And it was especially true of, and in, the higher echelons of the Church. In its colleges and seminaries, traditional Anglican theological method all but disappeared. The historic balance of 'Reason, Scripture and Tradition', pursued in the context of 'the corporate life of the Church', gave way to a thoroughgoing alienation of theology from religion, increasingly exercised according to the canons of secular scholarshp alone. The virtual disappearance of the Book of Common Prayer, and its effective replacement by the so-called 'Alternative Service Book', was one of the results.83 Another was the rise of political episcopacy, as the bishops seemed to make more public pronouncements on matters of state than on questions of the soul.84 82

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F o r confirmation, see t h e surprisingly favourable statistical a c c o u n t in Church and State: Report of the Archbishop's Commission (London, 1970), Appendix D , pp. 106-20, esp. pp. 107-10, 117-20. T h e real p o i n t of G . V. B e n n e t t ' s ill-fated Crockford's 'Preface', first p u b l i s h e d in 1987. T h i s essay is best c o n s u l t e d i n its r e p u b l i s h e d form in B e n n e t t , To the Church of England, e d . b y Geoffrey Rowell ( W o r t h i n g , 1988), p p . 1 8 9 - 2 9 9 , e s p . p p . 1 9 0 - 4 , 1 9 7 - 2 0 1 , 2 2 3 - 5 ; also c h . 10. F i r s t exposed a n d excoriated in E d w a r d N o r m a n , Christianity and the World Order (Oxford, 1979), ch. 1; for the particular context of the bishopric and Mrs Thatcher's government, see the essays in Digby Anderson (ed.), The Kindness That Kills: The Churches' Simplistic Response to Complex Social Issues (London, 1984); also, and

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The real extent, and true significance, of such a recent alteration in the Anglican way of doing things was, naturally, a matter of considerable disagreement amongst participants and observers. So too is the question of its merits. Neither controversy need detain us here. We may simply observe, for the moment, that something has happened, and that its value is continuously disputed. 85 What is more important is the context of that debate. For it has been an argument conducted almost entirely by Churchmen and committed laymen. That is, it has taken place largely outside the principal channels of political communication. Moreover, it has scarcely addressed the religion, or the morality, of the mass of the population of Britain at all. And that is because it has taken place within a Church, and about a Church, which increasingly operates as an autonomous institution with the state; more specifically, as an autonomous religious institution within the state. Institutional autonomy did not develop overnight. It has a long pedigree. In a sense, it can be traced back to the revival of Convocation, in 1855. That restored the deliberative functions of the Church. 86 In a wider sense, it gained a real purpose from the inauguration of the Lambeth Conferences, in 1868. These gave the Church an unprecedented, international dimension.87 It first assumed recognisable form in the Church Assembly, established in 1919. This established a representative voice within its ecclesiastical purposes. 88 But synodical self-government, as recommended by report in 1966, and inaugurated by royal authority in 1970, was something different. If earlier concessions to ecclesiastical independence were designed to strengthen the Church, to bolster its spirituality, to reflect its dominion, even to infuse its democratic urges, the later arrangements were designed to reflect an altered, even a diminished, institutional standing for the Church in the state; more cynically, to rid the secular arm of an ecclesiastical authority which no longer won it kudos or brought it strength. In direct consequence, as Professor Hastings puts it, the character and working of the General Synod quickly came to dominate the Church from this moment and to provide an ethos noticeably different from that

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pointedly, Brian Griffiths, Monetarism and Morality: A Response to the Bishops (London, 1985), p p . 19ff. Recognised in Stephen Sykes, The Integrity of Anglicanism (London, 1977), passim. See also his remarks in ' T h e Genius of Anglicanism', p p . 232^10. O n t h e churches generally in this respect note t h e partisan observations in Catterall, ' T h e Party a n d Religion', p p . 664—5. F o r a full account, see Chadwick, The Victorian Church, p p . 309-24. A. M . G . Stephenson, The First Lambeth Conference (London, 1967). Roger Lloyd, The Church of England, 1900-1965 (London, 1966), p p . 232, 2 4 3 - 5 ; K e n n e t h A. T h o m p s o n , Bureaucracy and Church Reform (Oxford, 1970), ch. 6.

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of former decades . . . [specifically,] I t . . . served to distance [the Church] from the State . . . The Church [was] permitted, very largely, to rule itself, with its own quasi-parliamentary procedures . . . [And,] a mounting sense of ecclesiastical power [was allied] to a reduced sense of dependence on Crown and Parliament [as] the political establishment no longer bothered very seriously about this section of its former empire.89 Not quite; when Synod acted upon the Report of the Chadwick Commission on Church and State to demand ecclesiastical exclusivity in the selection of bishops, the Prime Minister of the day baulked, and settled for reserve powers over a choice of two names.90 But not far off either; so a bill, introduced into parliament in April 1981, and designed to ensure that, subject to certain conditions, at least one main service per month in Church of England parishes should be in the form prescribed by the Book of Common Prayer, was widely denounced and subsequently defeated.91 Moreover, it was the Church in Synod, and the Church so constituted alone, which finally decided upon the ordination of women priests, in 1993.92 In all this, probably few on either side at the time fully appreciated, or even now wholly apprehend, what the two arms of state had, in effect together, done. One who possibly did, whilst resisting the implications of his own analysis and the force of contemporary change, was Enoch Powell. Remarking on the rejection in the Commons of a minor measure passed by Synod in July 1984 - the first such rejection in many years he observed that It is possible to have an internally self-governed church in this country, but it will not be the national church, it will not be the Church of England. The Church is the Church of England because of royal supremacy - and that is to say, lay-supremacy. It is for that reason that it is the church of the people and the Church of the nation, and can never be converted into a mere sect or a private, self-managing corporation.93 This was and is true, constitutionally speaking. But it reflected neither the arcane significance of contemporary symbolic gesture, as the bishops placed their names above the Crown in the new prayer book, nor 89

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Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p . 606. Chadwick, ' T h e F r e e d o m of t h e C h u r c h ' , in Michael Ramsey, ch. 7, section 6; Gavin W h i t e , ' " N o - o n e is Free from Parliament": T h e Worship and Doctrine Measure in Parliament, 1974', in Stuart Mews (ed.), Religion and National Identity, Studies in Church History 18 (Oxford, 1982), p p . 557-65. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 607; Church and State, pp. 37^14; Proposal *B' (Proposal ' A ' suggested t h e retention of the t h e n status quo). Sisson, 'A G e n t l e W a r n i n g ' , in Is There a Church of England?, p p . 147—9. W h i c h is n o t to say that parliament would n o t have voted for t h e measure, prior to t h e 1970 arrangement. Cited in Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 608.

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the practical realities of daily church life, as doctrine and liturgy were altered by synodical fiat.94 The Church, in effect, had won, and now wields, its freedom in all but the residual authority of parliament in matters doctrinal, liturgical and organisational. Moreover, it had won that freedom from a state which continued, at least formally, to be its ally and within a society which continued, at least implicitly, to be its friend. But with what effect? For Professor Hastings, that change represented, and now constitutes, a workable compromise between a general aversion to disestablishment and a similarly undirected attraction to a residually religious state.95 For Mr Sisson, it is the simple, and all too specific, proof that the Church of England has effectively ceased to exist.96 Yet it may be that neither conclusion is true. For the notion of a minimal Church, itself highly problematic, should not be confused with the ideal (if such it is) of an inoffensive Establishment.97 It may be that the Church significantly continues and that, increasingly, it offends. And this may not only have to do with what the Church is, or is seeking to be, but also with what British society has become, or is trying more and more to be. Certainly, there are those who now see it that way. Why? IV Establishment, whether for a Church which seeks the greatest possible comprehension of the religious beliefs of the nation, or for a liberal Protestant sect intent upon asserting its peculiar opinions at public expense, was, and is, a privilege. That privilege was once justified, above all by the 'judicious Hooker5, in the name of religious truth and civilised politics.98 Subsequently, it was sustained, even by atheist philosophers, through the argument of social stability.99 Paradoxically, the gradual 94

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I owe this insight to Sisson, ' T h e Alternative Service Book', in Is There a Church of England?, p. 143. Hastings, A History of English Christianity, p. 608. T h e flavour of t h e whole of Is There a Church of England? W e m a y assume that t h e question m a r k is rhetorical. For this view, see Peter Cornwall, The Church and the Nation: The Case for Disestablishment ( L o n d o n , 1983), passim; for a defence, see J o h n H a b g o o d , Church and Nation in a Secular Age ( L o n d o n , 1983), esp. ch. 6. A balanced s u m m a r y of the a r g u m e n t , ' p r o ' and 'con', is presented in Davie, Religion in Britain since 1945, ch. 8. Richard Hooker, On The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in The Works of That Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. J. Kebb, 3 vols., 7th edn (New York, 1970), Preface, b k 1, bk 5, chs. 1-2, 62, 65, 76, b k 7, b k 8, chs. 1-4, 6, 8. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, 4 vols., 1765 (facsimile edition, Chicago, 1979), bk 3 , ch. 7, bk 4, chs. 4, 8, 28; David H u m e , Essays: Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F . Miller (Indianapolis, 1985), p p . 65—7; A d a m

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secularisation of British society during the twentieth century did little or* nothing to undermine the utilitarian case. Indeed, in many ways, it strengthened it. For the real force of secularisation in this country over that time (perhaps even the true content of secularisation) was to take religion out of the realm of public affairs. This unquestionably enfeebled the political impact of religious sentiments in the land. It also rendered public dispute much less dangerous for the nation. Anyone who doubts either of these observations should consider the history of Northern Ireland since 1922, where neither of these developments had any significant local effect. At the same time, the Church has enjoyed a virtually unopposed security of tenure in British society, or at least in England, since 1920. In effect, neither its Christian nor its post-Christian people has offered much of a threat to its continuing existence. Indeed, for the most part, they have been curiously, and continuously, supportive.100 But Britain's supposedly secular society has changed - considerably during the past twenty years. For whilst it has become arguably less Christian during that time, it has assuredly not become more secular. True, church figures, traditionally measured, have continued to fall.101 But the 'religious' population of Britain has almost certainly risen. This may be true even within the Church itself. Certainly, the committed, evangelical wing is more important than ever before. Externally, the processes of revival and renewal, particularly the latter, have spawned a myriad of new religious movements which, if they do not as yet figure prominently in national life (few even aspire to do so), unquestionably account for an increasing number of actively religious persons.102 Finally, new commonwealth immigration, cultural differentiation and simple conversion have forged the dynamic existence of new and powerful non-Christian religious minorities in Britain. The most significant of these is its Islamic population.103 There are at least one million Moslems in Britain today. There may well be more.104 Moreover, their numbers

100

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Smith, An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 2 vols., ed. R. H. Campbell et al. (Indianapolis, 1981), bk 5, ch. 1, pt 3, art. 3, pp. 792-3. Though the Liberal Democrats voted for disestablishment in the Annual Conference, September 1990. Neither of the major parties has recently pursued the matter. Wedderspoon, 'Introduction', pp. 1-4; Brierley, 'Christian' England, chs. 2 and 6. John V. Taylor, 'Signs of Growth in the Church of England', and John Gray, 'Signs of Growth in the Church of Scotland', chs. 1 and 2 of Wedderspoon, Grow or Die', Keith Ward, The Turning of Tide (London, 1985), ch. 1; Eileen Barker, New Religious Movements: A Practical Introduction ( L o n d o n , 1989), passim. For a fuller discussion, see S. J. D. Green, 'The Revenge of the Periphery? Conservative Religion and the Dilemma of Liberal Society in Contemporary Britain', in Ralph Mclnerny (ed.), Religion and Modernity (South Bend, Ind., 1994), pp. 89-115. All available figures a r e estimates. Best guesses come from Social Trends ( L o n d o n , 1989-) a n d Labour Force Survey Data ( L o n d o n , 1985-).

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are growing, and fast. It is in no sense fanciful to conceive of Islam as the most popular practised religion in Britain within a generation. Nor is it merely alarmist to predict that the way in which it will be practised will differ quite markedly from the manner in which the indigenous mainland population has recently gone about its religious business. This is because Britain's Moslem population is made up largely, but not exclusively, from its Asian-origin community. And that section of society is both more reproductively fertile and more culturally conservative than the rest of the population. Together, these two factors make its religion altogether more of a challenge to Anglican Establishment, and for the British state, than any indigenous development whether towards post-Christian religion, or indeed towards further secularisation.105 The essence of that challenge is its anti-secularism and, to a lesser extent, its anti-liberalism. Put simply, Britain's Moslem community, in so far as it can be judged and characterised as a whole, professes quite different standards about the permissible limits of profane speech (witness the Rushdie case), about the proper basis of educational instruction (see its reaction to the Swann Report) and concerning family values (including domestic law) than the rest of the population.106 In asserting these different standards, whether in matters of human rights or on questions of prevailing custom, and across such wide-ranging concerns as sex, gender roles, arranged marriages, mixed marriages, female dress, family authority and honour, extended family and the preservation of cultural identity, it necessarily comes up against, and is continually rebuked by, the norms of British law.107 It also confronts the peculiar privileges of Anglican Establishment. So too those of Christian preferment more generally. It was, and is, the Christian, more specifically the Anglican, understanding of the divine which is protected by English blasphemy law.108 And it is Christian (also Jewish) schools which are subsidised by denominational definition in this country.109 105

Aspects of this 'cultural conservatism' are summarised in Tariq Modood, 'British Asian Muslims and the Rushdie Affair', Political Quarterly, 61 (1990), 143-60, esp. pp. 145—52. For a detailed survey, see Alison Shaw, A Pakistani Community in Britain (Oxford, 1988). 106 Education For All: The Report of the Committee of Enquiry into the Education of Children from Ethnic Minority Backgrounds (London, 1985); for a trenchant critique, see Mervyn Hiskett, Schooling For British Muslims: Integrated, Opted-Out or Denominational (London, 1989). 107 M o d o o d , 'British Asian M u s l i m s a n d t h e R u s h d i e Affair', p . 147. 108 T a r i q M o d o o d , 'Religious A n g e r a n d M i n o r i t y R i g h t s ' , Political Quarterly, 60 (1989), 2280-5. 109 J u r g e n S. Nielsen, 'Islam in E d u c a t i o n in Britain', Research Papers, n o s . 3 0 - 1 , J u n e / S e p t e m b e r 1986, Selly O a k Colleges, B i r m i n g h a m , p p . 29ff.

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Moslems are excluded on both counts.110 Or, as Swann so gloriously puts it, 'minorities may maintain their individual cultures only insofar as they are not in conflict with rationally shared values5.111 That these are examples of religious discrimination there can be no doubt. And if the specific justification for their continuance is invariably articulated in terms of secular reasoning (this was specifically the case in Swann), then its historical basis lies in Anglican Establishment (clearly so for the blasphemy law). That latter fact leaves the Church vulnerable to the criticism of unjustified privilege. For it suggests an unsustainable differentiation of religious favours by the state, benefiting as it clearly does one faith over another and one branch of that faith over all its other variants. And for an increasingly secular state, this points to the quick panacea of disestablishment, rather than to the arduous task, and seemingly futile purpose, of differential justification.112 It is not difficult to think of circumstances in which it might become almost irresistible. But, and this is the point, it is next to impossible to think of any set of conditions in which such an action would render the British state thereby more legitimate to its increasing number of religious critics. For what they seek is not disestablishment at all, but the extension of the privileges and the purpose of establishment to their own faiths: not creeping secularism, but real multi-culturalism.113 Hence the current dilemma of the British state. Its authority is increasingly questioned by its sustenance of a privileged Establishment. And yet its patronage of that Church is maintained largely because of the diminished influence, and through the autonomous administration, of this body. Put another way, the contemporary British state supports an Established Church, and permits that Church so considerable a degree of freedom of action, precisely because it is weak. But its most recent critics, quite contrary to their nineteenth- and twentieth-century (Christian) forbears, demand not that such weakness be carried to its logical conclusion, but rather that it be stemmed; and that the logical conclusion be reversed.114 There is no sign to suggest that the state has any intention of responding. It is difficult in the prevailing political 110 111 112

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Cited in Hiskett, Schooling For British Muslims, pp. 26-7. The assertion in Stewart Lamont, Church and State: Uneasy Alliance (London, 1989), ch. 7. The question of speed is a moot one. Informed guesses suggest that even the legislative mechanisms of disestablishment could take an entire parliamentary session. It is unlikely that any foreseeable administration would be willing to devote that much time. The view explicitly advanced in Tariq Modood, 'Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship', Political Quarterly, 65 (1994), 53-73, esp. pp. 67ff. M. H. Farqui, 'For Muslims, the Law of Indifference', Impact International, 21 (1991), 5-9, esp. at p. 7.

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climate to see how it reasonably could do so. The surviving Church, far from 'doing quite a lot of good and very little harm', has become its albatross.115 What of the autonomous Church? It cannot truthfully be accused of being unaware of the issues of cultural nuance involved. But nor can it be credited with any intellectual coherence in the matter. For institutional independence had been gained, paradoxically, to the accompaniment of increased intellectual uncertainty. And the Church, it seems, is currently altogether keener to retain the former than to dispel the latter. Indeed, to ponder the recent writings of a wholly representative figure, Archbishop Hapgood, is immediately to pass into a kind of cultural relativism where the force of the Church's message for contemporary society might almost be judged directly as a function of its willingness to comprehend the view of other religions, and other cultures, within its stated vision of the whole. Consider the General Synod report, produced under his chairmanship, which appeared in July 1987, under the title Changing Britain: Social Diversity and Moral Unity. This document argued that the best response which the Church might give to the question of religious truth, and its proper application in an increasingly morally and socially 'diverse' society, would necessarily be 'broad' if it was to be 'accessible to people of different religious convictions'. And it concluded that this broadness of approach would not be limited to 'a clear Christian message', in so far as it was directed towards 'the moral unity . . . of society' urged by the commission.116 Naturally, it neither envisaged the possibility of a principled abandonment of theological and ethical comprehensiveness by the Church; nor urged the desirability of the conversion of those beyond its auspices to the timeless truth of its biblical teachings. It should come as no surprise to learn that this kind of ecumenical approach to religious truth, even of the Christian message, has generally outraged Anglican traditionalists.117 It was perhaps more of a shock to the authors of the report that it has so signally failed to engage the sympathy of other religious groups in British society. In the main, this was because they have been unimpressed by its quasi-secular tone. And, to a very considerable degree, they remain unwilling to countenance the extent of doctrinal dissipation which it would require. So it has, in effect, become a report without readers, at once pandering to the worshipful indifference of the many whilst it simultaneously insulted 115 116 117

Hastings, Church and State, p. 76. Cited in Oddie, The Crockford's File, at pp. 57, 124ff. E.g. Gareth Bennett; see his 'Ecumenism and Catholic Concerns', in To the Church of England, pp. 183-8.

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the religious sensibilities of the few. In this way, the autonomous Establishment threatens to become the kind of widely perceived social abuse its seemingly dependent predecessor always avoided. For, in abandoning the assumption of superiority, it actually becomes more anomalous, not less, as a privileged body in the British state.118 This is because it effectively ceases to be the religious expression either of the state or of the people; merely of itself. Of course, that, in many ways, is a tribute to the reality of its autonomy. But it cannot be an apology for its public preferment. This story has no obvious moral. Nor does it suggest a clear solution. It points only to the degree to which the state's current dilemma is the product of historical circumstances, specifically the forces of a very specific form of historic continuity which have determined the extent to which it has not become a model, liberal, democratic and secular system of government. Its failure to do so (another way of describing the survival of the Church of England) was certainly not inevitable. Many intelligent commentators believed disestablishment to be 'inevitable' as early as the Prayer Book controversy of 1927-8.119 The late Bishop of Durham still does. But the Church continued, and continues, having won a degree of autonomy in the state which would have been the envy of its pre-war leadership. In recent years, it has become apparent that this mutually contrived compromise has had and will have consequences that go far beyond 'doing quite a lot of good and very little harm'. Whether these consequences have been, or will be, benevolent or malignant is more a matter of personal opinion than of legitimate historical judgement. But the question can no longer be avoided in the language of banal bromide, either by those who would have the Church established or those who seek its disestablishment. It will remain a serious question for as long as British society remains even residually religious. And it may well become a more, not less, pressing question in the years immediately ahead. Perhaps one might be permitted one paradoxical prediction: it would be a revival, or a resurgence, of religious feeling in Britain which would really endanger the Church, not its decline. 118

For two eloquent expressions of this paradoxical view, see Jonathan Sacks, The Persistance of Faith: Morality and Society in a Secular Age (London, 1991), pp. 97-8;

119

Modood, 'Establishment, Multiculturalism and British Citizenship', pp. 67ff. Ball, Parliament and Politics, p. 141; Henson to Headlam, 5 March 1928; reasserted by Henson in his The Church of England, p. xvi; also note the caustic remarks of Sisson, 'Church and State', Is There a Church of England?, at p. 19.

15

Religion and the secular state Bryan Wilson

That Britain is, effectively, a secular state brooks little prospect of contradiction. This may be said despite the persistence of a variety of constitutional and legal arrangements which entrench certain religious facilities, and which protect and privilege a church that is established by law. Beyond the specific provisions which affect the Church of England, there are others which recognise and facilitate the exercise of religion more generally. The Church of England is still the residual legatee of a policy which, as Hooker put it, 'there is not any man of the Church of England but the same is also a member of the commonwealth, nor any man a member of the commonwealth which is not also of the Church of England'. If that Erastian formula is no longer warranted, none the less the spirit it exudes is still sufficiently in evidence to confer on the Church legitimacy and primacy in religious affairs. Its temporal head is the monarch, its senior officials are appointed by the Prime Minister in the name of the crown; its legal affairs are intimately bound up to the general legal system, and courts, presided over by regular lay lawyers, govern its practices, furbishments and the discipline of its personnel. It enjoys automatic financial concessions granted only on supplication to other religious bodies, and, perhaps above all, it is accorded the presidency on all state and civic occasions in which religious ministrations are called for - from mercifully rare coronations to regular daily prayers in parliament, from the launching of battleships and from armistice day parades, down to the opening of local civic buildings. Yet all of these are but the forms bequeathed by history. In the event, governments have lost all real interest in the right to appoint bishops, whose political views are no longer depended upon in parliamentary votes, and among whom mavericks may now readily be tolerated perhaps more readily than earnest and conventional figures, in that they add spice to political debate and social comment without carrying much if any influence. Parliament has unreluctantly surrendered most of its legislative powers over the Church to church synods, relieving itself of 325

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what many had come to see as irrelevant if not irritating and unimportant matters which, none the less, might at times become politically divisive. Beyond the specific provisions affecting the established Church, there are enactments which - despite the growing secularity of the state maintain some specific defence of religion. One such measure is the law against blasphemy, thought to have fallen into desuetude - since so much blasphemy, even on public media, goes unheeded - until reactivated by Mrs Whitehouse in the action that she brought against Gay News. Originally, blasphemy was an offence not merely against God, and the law proscribing it was a defence not only of religion, but also of the state against subversion, since the Church was established by the law of the land. But from the middle of the nineteenth century, gradually the law became more concerned with vulgar abuse of religion rather than with reasoned arguments launched against it (the Holyoake prosecution notwithstanding). From the early 1920s, no blasphemy cases were brought, and by 1959, the secularist case appeared to be so much taken for granted that the Society for the Abolition of the Blasphemy Laws was disbanded, content no longer to seek the repeal of laws which, though remaining on the statute book, had apparently become dead letters.1 But in 1977, Gay News was successfully prosecuted for publishing a poem, 'The Love That Dares Not Speak Its Name'. The poem was not, in any sense, an assault on religion. It was not calculated to promote disbelief, nor written in abusive language. Its actionable feature was that it attributed homosexual practice to Jesus. The prosecution was successful because the poem was deemed to shock those with strong religious sentiments, and publishing matter offensive to religionists was in itself held by the House of Lords to be sufficient to contravene the law. But the law protects only Christian religion - indeed, more specifically only Anglican religion. Lord Scarman raised the point that the law did not go far enough, since it protected only Christianity.2 The Law Commission, in a paper in 1981, took up the question of whether the law should not prohibit incitement to religious hatred. The Commission feared that such an extension of its scope might endanger free speech. They also believed that such a provision might lead to the protection of sects and cults, and opined that 'it is very much in the public interest that the beliefs and practices of particular religious sects should come under sharp criticism' although this alleged desideratum clearly was not seen as applicable to more established forms of religion.3 1 2 3

St. John A. Robilliard, Religion and the Law (Manchester, 1984), pp. 25-6. Ibid., p. 35. Law Commission Paper No. 79, para. 8.15, cited in ibid., p. 40.

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Clearly some of the state's agents are still disposed towards religious discrimination. Blasphemy is, however, little more than a notional defence of religion by the state, and scarcely a primary concern, and this despite the debate on the Salman Rushdie affair which persuaded some commentators to reiterate the views advanced by Lord Scarman. A second defence of religion was entrenched in the requirements of the 1944 Education Act, and its successor of 1988, concerning the teaching of religion in schools with the provision that the dominant emphasis in that instruction should be on the traditional religion of the land. The occasion of the new enactment was, of course, seized upon by the Christian lobby. They were successful in entrenching the teaching of traditional religion as a requirement of the act. This was an attempt to reverse the trend for schools to teach religion in comparative and academically neutral terms in the 'multi-faith society'. The trend had alarmed Christians, at a time when Christianity was seen to have suffered serious and increasing erosion in its influence on the national life; and that not merely by the incursion of immigrants of other religious faiths, but by a continuing process of steady secularisation of the social system and of the cultural and moral climate. Religion in general, beyond the Church of England, and indeed beyond Christianity, is also the beneficiary of certain legal provisions. In the spirit of the various provisions according tolerance to diverse religions, embodied in the various items of legislation proceeding from the original Toleration Acts of 1688, and gathering their full impact in the mid-nineteenth century, religious bodies may establish trusts for particular purposes which are eligible for charitable status. These various provisions may be tested at law in particular instances, and even though the acquisition of charitable status puts all religions formally on a par, it does not of course accord quite the automatic rights enjoyed by the Church of England.4 Similar arrangements affect the rating of church properties and the registration of places of religious worship. All of these provisions indicate the concessions that have been made to nonAnglican religion in the past which still remain in force even in a largely secularised society. The protection of religion and the exemption of religious bodies from fiscal obligations borne by other non-state agencies should not, however, obscure the fact that, at this structural level, the erstwhile functions of the churches have to a very considerable extent been taken over by secular institutions, and often directly by the state itself. 4

See Eileen V. Barker, 'The British Right to Discriminate', in Thomas Robbins and Roland Robertson (eds.), Church-State Relations (New Brunswick, NJ, 1987), pp. 269-80.

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Nowhere is this more evident than in public education, a sphere in which the churches - Anglican and established nonconformist denominations - had a particularly prominent role from the very beginnings of formal instruction. Once the state relied virtually entirely on the churches to provide education, the content of which was also to a very considerable extent religious. At the turn of the last century, there were more church schools than state schools, and even in higher education, a high proportion of university teachers were in holy orders. Today, the state concedes generous terms to those remaining religious school foundations that it recognises (Anglican, Catholic, Methodist and Jewish) but, as the government's cautious - almost reluctant - approach to according similar financial arrangements to Muslim school indicates, it is clear that the state does not seek to increase its dependence on religious bodies for the provision of education. There are over 4000 voluntarily aided religious schools (the vast majority divided almost equally between the Church of England and the Roman Catholic Church), but such evidence as we have suggests that the ethos of church schools does little, especially as children grow older, to differentiate their pupils from those in state schools with respect to the moral dispositions of the pupils - such is the pervasiveness of the secular influences in the wider society beyond the school portals, and perhaps even, at least informally, also within them. The growth of secular education is reflected in the replacement of religious agencies in other social services which once were religiously controlled but are now run by the state at national or local level. Such is the case with social work activities like child welfare and district visiting. A variety of other voluntary welfare functions have passed from the hands of the churches to central or local government control. These shifts in institutional provision reflect the easily documented process in which religion has lost its former functions.5 At one time religion was an agency of social control with effective sanctions, not least in its teachings of post-mortem reward and punishment. It was the source of knowledge about the natural and social world. It provided legitimacy not only for social, and eventually state organisation, but also for the course of social policy, and its blessings were invoked for decisions which ranged from the private contracting of matrimony to the state's declarations of war. It socialised the young, sought to civilise the mature, solaced the dying, and solemnly dispatched the dead. Except for this last item, little today remains of this panoply of On secularisation generally, see Bryan R. Wilson, Religion in Sociological Perspective (Oxford, 1982), pp. 148-79.

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religious performances: those which do persist are essentially in the private domain. For the society at large, where these functions are still performed they are in the hands of professional agencies established and licensed by the state. The role of religion has shrunk and the sphere of influence and presumed competence of its functionaries has been reduced to its core concerns of ritual performance, exposition of scriptures (and not so much of that, either) and amateur counselling. Whether this process is taken as the decline of religion or as its appropriate divestment of secular involvements is not my immediate concern. Rather, I seek only to indicate how, in relation to social structure, religion has retreated from former activities and functions as the secular state has consolidated its boundaries and evolved diverse spheres of technical expertise in the various departments of social life. If religion has lost significance at the structural level, it has also experienced diminution of influence on the cultural plane. Government in the nineteenth century was much more concerned about religious affairs than is the case today, as royal and prime-ministerial correspondence of the time testifies. Today, politicians avoid religious issues in general and pay scant heed to the pronouncements of the clergy. Since the 1902 Education Act and the 1906 General Election, the strong relationship that then prevailed betwen religious affiliations and dispositions towards public and political affairs has very considerably weakened. A decade or so ago, the government was embarrassed by the attempts of traditionalists to ensure one Prayer Book service a month in local churches, in a measure introduced into the House of Lords in 1981, and resisted the attempt. Their resistance was not prompted by hostility to the Prayer Book, but rather sought to prevent a waste of parliamentary time on tiresome, potentially divisive and politically inconsequential intrusions into the affairs of state. Although the churches retain a larger following than any other mass organisations - whether it be those active in the trades unions or those larger numbers who pursue the activities of the Football League - it is very doubtful whether today this following could be mobilised for political causes in Britain. In the major churches, commitment is segmentary, by which I mean limited and partial, taking its place among the many other diversified interests and persuasions of a heterogeneous public. Although the churches are more or less evenly distributed throughout society, although they claim special preoccupation with ultimate verities and values, and although they assert the primary of religion over all other causes, their clientele is largely passive. If church people are active, they are active generally in expressive rather than instrumental directions, and hence they have very little impact on the operation of the state.

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Despite the persistence of formal establishment, the Church of England has become increasingly dissociated from the operation of society and the functioning of the state. Notionally, such a liberation from erstwhile functions in support of the secular authorities has freed the clergy to assume a critical role, challenging secular procedure and values. But such criticism has been only random and occasional, and certainly of little, if any, consequence for the operation of the social system. Faith in the City was perhaps the most trenchant of such commentaries, but this, together with the doubtful voices raised about church commemoration of the Falklands Campaign and the Gulf War, have scarcely disturbed the political processes of an increasingly secular society. Church criticism has been of government policy rather than of the constitution of the state, and despite periodic murmurings about disestablishment, the Church as a whole appears in no mood to challenge this particular boundary with the state. At the same time, the open acknowledgement of church poverty both by the state church and by the largest of the Free Churches, the Methodists, indicates the decline in real support - financial support - of the churches by the people, and hence the very insecure basis from which the major churches might address the affairs of the state. It might well be supposed that, in a multi-faith society, there would be challenges for a historically Christian state from the growing numbers of adherents of immigrant religions - Muslim, Sikh and Hindu - since all of these traditions embrace different assumptions about the structure of society and espouse customs and norms that are essentially alien to the traditional British way of life. There have been some demands for such things as segregated schooling for the sexes, and pressure for exemptions from, for example, compulsory school or work uniforms. And there has been some skirmishing with animal rights groups with regard to the ritual slaughter of animals, which could become the occasion for Muslim groups to challenge the state. But by and large, the millions of adherents of these alien religions have settled into their own enclaves within the secular British society without serious systematic attempts to change or challenge existing social patterns, government policies or the existing framework of legal order. Perhaps because these religions lack coherent hierarchical structure and centralised organisation such discontents that their adherents may feel remain largely mute and unarticulated (although cognizance must be taken of the newly instituted, so-called Muslim parliament, unrepresentative of the majority of Muslims as it may be). Alternatively, immigrants may themselves be adjusting to a secular social system, and may be allowing their own religious dispositions to be infected with the pervasive

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secularity of our society, most especially perhaps among the younger generation. The modern state is not only effectively secular; it has largely sloughed off its former religious prescribed official endorsement of a specific code of morals.6 In many non-criminal matters it has become ethically neutral and increasingly permissive. Even old laws protecting public decency - as we have observed in the case of blasphemy, although it is far from being the only instance - have been allowed to fall into desuetude. Acts against the profanation of the Sabbath (the Sunday trading laws, are an example), acts prohibiting foul language, and even acts protecting the person of the monarch, are no longer enforced, while definitions of what constitutes obscenity or pornography have been progressively liberalised. The permissive ethic of contemporary society, initially affecting public attitudes and behaviour, has extended its influence on just what the state might require of its citizens - and 'citizens' are what, in the changed climate, erstwhile subjects have become, with the attendant rights pertaining to that status. Given this extension of civic liberties, it is not surprising that wider breaches should open up between what the state will tolerate and what certain religious bodies would like the state to disallow. Almost all traditional Christian bodies which retain anything like their pristine rigour draw tighter parameters around the arena of acceptable public conduct than does the state. Some are content with such moral scrupulousness as a prescript only for their own (putatively saved) members, but others would like such moral rules to be part of the general civic order, with the force of law behind them. Such religious bodies - and the point would hold for Muslims and perhaps others, were they in a position to claim something like traditional cultural influence - would like the state to enforce morals, and their own moral code in particular. Whilst such religious organisations do not overstep the boundaries of the state in the sense of contravening the law, they do demand that the laws should, in particular respects, become increasingly restrictive. At one time, this area of concern would have been drawn to embrace the widest range of matters. But times have changed. The nonconformist temperance lobby has grown virtually silent, and even one-time staunch advocates of teetotalism, such as the Methodists, have succumbed to allow their members the occasional glass of sherry. In an age of football pools, clerical tipsters, premium bonds and a state-sponsored lottery, the Calvinist legacy of opposition to gambling appears to have 6

See Bryan R. Wilson, 'Morality in the Evolution of the Modern Social System', British Journal of Sociology, 36 (1985), 315-32.

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suffered a demise. Even the demand for moral rigour in matters pertaining to sexuality, marriage, reproduction and death is not what once it was. Such has been the public's relaxation of attitudes, and, following that, the steady attrition of the moral content of the law (in favour of more technical regulation),7 that within this area pressure with respect to, for example, the easy availability of birth-control techniques, has largely ceased to be an issue on which the churches now press the state for action. The increasing evidence of homosexuality among priests, and the overt campaigns by homosexual priests for toleration within the clerical profession, has perhaps done much to diminish formal pressure on government to maintain (or restore) legal prohibition of homosexual acts. But the churches, and especially the Roman Catholic Church, continue to voice hostility to official permissiveness in matters of abortion and the prospect of increasingly liberal attitudes (and perhaps even legal change) in the matter of mercy-killing and euthanasia. The churches may make representations on such matters when legislation is in process of formation, and their more militant members, following the raucous and sometimes violent forms of public protest of our time, may seek to disrupt the state-provided facilities for what is, after all, legal practice. In so doing they challenge the boundaries of the state, but the nature of their conflict is with what they see as an insufficiently paternalist state - not with what they themselves are prevented from doing or are obliged to do, but with the rights and facilities accorded to all, which they deem inappropriate and immoral. Allowing for this exception, the boundaries of the state are not persistently assaulted by the religiously orthodox of any tradition, Christian or immigrant. All of the mainline faiths appear, except in rare instances, to accommodate the secular culture, and the immigrant religions among them may, indeed, thrive better in an effectively secularised state than in a state committed to the defence of religion - that is, of a particular religion. The real challenge to the authority of the state comes, tiny minorities though they may be, from sectarians. The sect dissents from the dominant religious tradition of the society, and the religious dissent of sectarians is often paralleled by attempts to dissociate themselves from the purposes of the state. Christian sectarians in particular often define themselves in radical terms as citizens more of a world-to-come than of this temporal sphere, and in consequence claim exemption from some of the demands which the state makes of citizens. At the same time, as religious bodies they often claim the benefits which the state accords by way of concessions to all religions. 7

On this issue, see Christie Davies, Permissive Britain (London, 1975).

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Sects obviously differ one from another, and the specific issues on which they confront the state vary; and even on the same issues, the particular legitimations and the grounds on which argument is engaged are no less differentiated from one sect to another. Thus, generalisations are always subject to qualification, but certain common themes can be discerned. Adventist sects, which proclaim the early return of Christ and the subsequent establishment of God's kingdom and a return to the paradisial conditions of government that prevailed before the fall of man, generally seek to absolve themselves from political affairs of contemporary society. The state is as much the focus of opprobrium as the Church - both are testimonies to apostasy, and the sectarian should distance himself fully from both. Sects which fall into this category include the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Christadelphians and the Exclusive Brethren. All of these groups enjoin their members to be scrupulous in fulfilling their legal obligations in such matters as payment of taxes, the orderliness of their comportment and the avoidance of whatever the state deems criminal - indeed, their moral stance is far more rigorously sustained than what the law imposes or what other citizens, orthodox Christians or unbelievers, maintain. Part of distancing themselves from the wider society, is the determination to keep to a minimum all involvement in its political systems: thus, they do not exercise the vote, do not stand for political office, and in general avoid all civic occasions. Witnesses also refuse to make such symbolic gestures as saluting national flags and singing national anthems - abstentions which have led them into desperate situations in countries as diverse as the United States and Malawi, but which have not occasioned them civic or social condemnation in Britain.8 Nor, in a country where voting is not compulsory, do these self-imposed restraints lead to direct confrontation with the law, even though, implicitly, they impugn its legitimacy. Congruent with these deliberate dissociations, the sectarians of this general type claim exemption from civic obligation to the society in which they voluntarily deny themselves participation. Thus the Exclusive Brethren and the various fellowships of Christadelphians have had long-running brushes with the law courts in which they have been summoned as jurors - a civic obligation from which they seek exemption. Technically, judges are empowered to excuse conscientious objectors from jury service, but the courts have repeatedly made plain that adherence to a particular religious body does not in itself constitute an adequate ground for such excusal. The matter is one of discretion for the 8

For an account of this matter in the United States see David R. Manwaring, Render Unto Caesar: The Flat-Salute Controversy (Chicago, 1962).

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judge or court officer, and, in recent years, not all judges have been accommodating, notwithstanding the fact that it is virtually impossible to compel an unwilling individual to act as a juror. Attempts to introduce rights of excusal in Clause 16 of the Justice Act of 1988 failed by only four votes, and in consequence the matter still rests within the discretion of the judge in each particular case. A more celebrated and perhaps the most salient instance of sectarian civic dissent has arisen during periods of compulsory military service from which the members of various sects have sought exemption on conscientious grounds. Refusal to defend the realm has always been seen as a highly serious defection from civil, legal and perhaps also moral obligation. Sectarian morality has dictated otherwise, and steadily the ground has been gained, by Quakers, Seventh-Day Adventists, Christadelphians, Witnesses and Brethren among others, that rights of conscience transcend obligations to the state. Their case has been complicated because of the diverse doctrinal legitimations employed by sects, and the differences among them about the actual point at which the tender conscience is seared. Thus, Quakers and Adventists will generally undertake non-combatant military services, and so, too, will the Brethren: Christadelphians and Witnesses have taken a more radical line, even refusing to serve as special constables, and, in the former case, throwing into doubt the justifiability of working in the armaments industries - a serious matter for a sect for which Birmingham has always been a major centre. Less direct confrontation has occurred when the state has permitted 'closed shop' arrangements for trades unions in particular industries. The members of various sects object to trades unions, and the members of some sects - Exclusive Brethren and Jehovah's Witnesses, for example - deliberately avoid employment where there is an obligation or even strong encouragement to belong to a union. The Brethren object to membership of any organisation of which Christ is not the head, and the Witnesses refuse to be 'unequally yoked with unbelievers'. There have, however, been cases in which sectarians have had jobs in which closed shop arrangements have, at some stage, been implemented in an industry with at least the acquiescence of the political party in government. Christadelphians who were employed in the British railway industry successfully challenged in the European court the obligation to belong to a union, and in this sense won a victory for the maintenance of civil rights on this issue.9 The same right has not yet been won with respect to membership of students' unions in universities (although recurrently 9

Robilliard, Religion and the Law, p. 176.

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promised by Conservative politicians), and one reason, among others, which led the Exclusive Brethren to withdraw their young people from higher education was the fact that membership of students' unions was obligatory for all students. In the field of education at lower levels, the state has become increasingly prescriptive with respect to just what shall be taught, which has led to some sectarians coming increasingly to demand rights of exemption for their children from classes which conflict with their conception of what children need to know. The issue has been raised most strenuously by the Exclusive Brethren who object both to the inclusion of sex education in the school curriculum, and the use of computers in the newly introduced subject of communications technology. The Brethren believe that the family, and not the state or its educational agencies, is the place in which instruction and advice on sexual matters should be provided. The modern state seeks in various respects to protect citizens from practices and commodities which it deems potentially or actually baleful: the illegality of drugs, the obligation of tobacco companies to warn consumers of the risk they run in smoking, and the licensing laws restricting the places at which, and the age groups to which alcohol is available, are examples of the protective state. None of these specific issues affects Christian sects, of course, although prohibition of drug use (specifically of marijuana) might have some application to some branches of the Rastafarians were the authorities to choose to take cognizance of their practices. There is an adjacent area, however, in which similar considerations obtain; this is in the matter of public health, and most specifically in the medical care of minors. Some sects, including some New Age bodies, practise alternative medicine or embrace medical theories that conflict with the canons and the techniques of orthodox medical practice. Where minors are concerned, the state has taken powers to override sectarian scruples or preferences by instituting procedures which, in certain instances, allow children in medical care to be declared wards of court, thus enabling medical treatment to be administered without parental consent. The rule applies most particularly to the children of Christian Scientists in respect of all medical treatment, and to the children of Jehovah's Witnesses regarding blood transfusions to which, on the basis of their interpretation of the scriptural prohibition on ingesting blood, Witnesses object. In the past, there have been prosecutions of Christian Science practitioners for failing to call for medical attention in cases in which their 'patients' - both children and adults - have died. The courts have, however, sometimes drawn back from the government's efforts to impose general regulations,

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as the exemptions obtained by Sikh motor-cyclists from the general legal requirements to wear crash helmets demonstrates. Another aspect of consumer protection amounts to a re-drawing of part of the boundaries of the state relative to religion. A government may be persuaded, particularly by the campaigns of anti-cult groups, that the public may be in need of protection not only with respect to a specific aspect of belief and practice, as in these foregoing cases of therapeutic preferences, but with regard to the entire life-style, ideology and modus operandi of, particularly new, religious movements. Some of these bodies are alleged to be guilty of deception, charlatanism, exploitation or mind-control, and the state is urged to act against them, although by and large thus far, despite some strong judicial pronouncements, particularly against Scientology and the Unification Church, and parliamentary allegations against the Family of Love, governments have preferred to leave conflicts concerning new religious movements to be settled in the civil courts. In these various ways, among others, sects and new religious movements have come into conflict with one or another agency of the state, whether in the political or judicial realm. Sectarians generally pride themselves on being law-abiding, only adding that in circumstances where there is a conflict of laws - God's and man's - then, for them, God's law must prevail. Yet the sects themselves sometimes find need to have recourse to the courts, distasteful to them as this concession to state power may be. They do so to make good their claims to enjoy the privileges which the state makes available to religious organisations in general, and which they have been denied, or concerning which they are threatened with denial. One issue on which the courts are not infrequently obliged to decide occurs when - particularly among Witnesses and Exclusive Brethren - one parent leaves the sect and a struggle ensues for the parental custody of children. Not uncommonly in such cases, the court is asked by the defecting parent to declare sect allegiance inimical to the well-being of children, and sometimes judges have complied with such requests. The state does not take power to intervene in such matters when both parents are practising sectarians; curiously it sometimes does so when one parent challenges the sect, and this in spite of the fact that sect members generally claim to maintain very strong family commitment, and that all the available evidence tends to confirm such claims. The state specifically supports religion by the fiscal concessions already mentioned in ways not extended, for example, to the arts or sports, by tests which, in the case of charitable status, purport to establish whether a movement's teachings are religious, whether those

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teachings are subversive of all religion and morality, and whether it is for the public benefit. The case law by which these criteria were instituted, and on which judgements rest, is archaic and, if not actually internally contradictory, certainly lacking in coherence.10 For exemption from local government taxation, the criterion employed is whether a building is appropriately described as for 'public worship'. Recent judgements have, perhaps surprisingly, required that that worship must be available for the public at large (and not merely to the self-selected public of a specific sect or denomination).11 These criteria and the empirical evidence that satisfies them are rooted in the particular Christian tradition of English history. They turn, respectively, on just what is defined as religion, and on just what can be said to constitute worship. In each case, the established instances that have been approved are narrowly applicable to the Christian, or perhaps to the Judeo-ChristianMuslim tradition. Thus, whatever else may be counted as 'religion', and the law is extremely vague about that, certainly monotheism counts as religion, and may be the only thing which with absolute certainty does count. But of course, the law would have to be tested to see whether a polytheistic system (such as Hinduism) or an atheistic system (such as Buddhism) would formally qualify. Again, in the case of worship, the courts, working on precedents, acknowledge worship as dispositions of reverence, praise and humility before a god, although this leaves out the practices of various groups that lack anthropomorphic conceptions of the supernatural. As with the question of 'what is religion', many groups benefit from ad hoc decisions about local rates which, however, scarcely conform to the stereotypical instances of what constitutes worship which have hitherto actually been tested at law and been granted formal acknowledgement. When sects experience internal difficulties, such as schism, which has occurred in the case of the Exclusive Brethren, the trusts, which, in the past, they have established to administer their properties, have sometimes been denied charitable status: such a movement is thus effectively penalised in relation to other religious bodies. Similarly, when new movements come into being, if they have unconventional conceptions of deity or unusual practices of celebration, they may be denied recognition as occupying premises registered as a place of religious worship. Scientology provides a case in point. A likely consequence of not being allowed to register premises as a place of religious worship may be the 10 11

For a discussion, see Bryan R. Wilson, The Social Dimensions of Sectarianism (Oxford, 1990), pp. 87-102. SeeiWd.,pp. 67-86.

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denial of exemption from local taxation and perhaps also of a licence to solemnise marriages according to their preferred procedures. Over all, the effect of the existing legal arrangements is to rigidify conceptions of what constitutes religion according to patterns recognised by the state and modelled, at least in origin, on conceptions exemplified by the established Church. A basis for discrimination is built into the law which, although not actively applied, and liable to come into operation only when a specific legal process is brought forward by a supplicant sect (or its opponents), lies dormantly entrenched as a testimony to somewhat atavistic images built into the state apparatus of the law. Given such a situation, periodic confrontation between sects and the state is clearly predictable. Yet here, the state must tread warily. Charitable status turns very much on the definition of religion, and religion as conceived has a close approximation to what Christianity exemplifies. Any attempt to deprive a movement of charitable status - as was canvassed by politicians after the Moonies lost their 1981 libel action against the Daily Mail, and as was proposed by the Attorney General in the mid 1980s - might easily turn into a 'heresy trial'. It was in recognition of this prospect and the embarrassment that such a process would occasion which led the government to drop the case after having briefed lawyers to prepare the action over a period of more than two years. Fiscal concessions, such as the granting of charitable status and the facility to exempt religious premises from local taxation, were initially introduced to accord a measure of greater (but not total) parity of status between nonconformist religious bodies and the Church of England. They were a tangible evidence of an enhanced commitment to religious toleration. Inevitably, the right to grant concessions embraces the right to withhold them, and withholding indicates the boundaries of toleration. The state is not, of course, a monolithic system in the administration of the legal provisions governing such fiscal relief, as the hiatus at different times, between the decisions of the Charity Commissioners and the preferences of the Attorney General, or the diverse judgments of tribunals, appeal courts and the House of Lords on various occasions, all serve to illustrate. But the state, represented as the more conscious political entity which is government, may sometimes act more decisively and with less prospect of contradiction from judicial agencies. This occurs when a minister - usually the Home Secretary, but on occasion another ministry, such as the Secretary of State for Health -. intervenes to make orders relevant to the practices of one or another religious body. Such action has been urged on various occasions, not only by groups opposed to particular religions (especially anti-cult groups which

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monitor the activities of the new religious movements active in Britain) but also by MPs. Several were vociferous in seeking to persuade the Home Secretary to prohibit the entry into Britain of James Taylor, Jnr, the American leader of the Exclusive Brethren, in 1964. A few years later, an order was made against L. Ron Hubbard of the Church of Scientology as persona non grata, restricting his right of entry to the country, and similar prohibitions were exercised against the Rev. Sun Myung Moon of the Unification Church, and the Bhagwan Rajneesh.12 In 1968 a more embracing order was made refusing entry to foreign citizens whose stated intention was to pursue Scientology courses at the British centres of the movement in East Grinstead and Edinburgh. The rhetoric of modern politics, from the pronouncements of international assemblies on human rights to the economic policies of privatisation, suggests that the state divests itself of much of its power over individuals, and implicitly thereby over the groups that individuals voluntarily bring into being. The reality in many areas appears often to be different as state and super-state bodies acquire an increased capacity and tendency to intervene in private concerns. Certainly, in one form or another, and sometimes by local as well as by central government agencies, the state has taken on many of the erstwhile functions of religion. At the same time, in challenging the state on such matters as the closed shop, compulsory military service and the obligations of citizens for jury service, sectarian bodies have in some measure succeeded in prompting the expansion of areas of human rights and the rights of conscience. Such concessions, perhaps not surprisingly, given the relative powerlessness of minority religions and their abstention from political processes, have been effected only gradually, piecemeal and often with ill grace by courts and governments, and certainly with little evidence of the application either of coherent policy or philosophical principle. Pressure on the boundaries of the state from religious bodies is, in total, not great, but if the regulations of the state, or of the European community, continue to intervene increasingly in the affairs of private citizens and their religious practices, we may expect to see minority religions, and perhaps also immigrant religions, seeking further exemptions and concessions. There is also the prospect, with the growing privatisation of religious belief, and the decline of religion as public cult, 12

James A. Beckford, 'States, Governments, and the Management of Controversial New Religious Movements', in Eileen Barker, James A. Beckford and Karel Dobbelaere (eds.)j Secularization, Rationalism, and Sectarianism (Oxford, 1993), p. 137. For a

comparative discussion of the response of governments to new movements, see James A. Beckford, Cult Controversies (London, 1985).

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for new forms of deviant religion to multiply. A privatised world, and a world in which laissez-faire principles prevail in economic life, must also imply the likelihood of a world of laissez-faire in religion. It heralds the probability of more diversity within religion generally, and hence stronger demands for parity of treatment among religious bodies. Such a development may well call for a body of law freed from the concrete and specific concepts and assumptions of Christian - indeed Anglican provenance. Whether the entrenched clauses that allow the Church of England to enjoy privileges over and above those of other faiths can be retained in such a climate of free, unconstrained and equal religious choice in what is effectively a secular society remains an open question.

16

The British state and the power of life and death Christie Davies

One of the few striking abdications of power by the British state in the twentieth century has been the abandonment of its power to execute individual citizens. In some measure this was a continuation of a nineteenth-century trend in which the death penalty had been abolished step by step for a large number of offences, so that from 1861 civilians could only be executed for four offences; murder, high treason, piracy with violence and the destruction of naval dockyards and public arsenals.1 Executions for the latter offences have been somewhat rare in the twentieth century and in general the execution of civilians in peacetime has been confined to those found guilty of murder. The conventional view is that no further major changes took place until the Homicide Act of 1957 which divided murder into capital and non-capital murder, the majority of murders being rendered non-capital.2 In 1965 capital punishment for murder was suspended for five years and at the end of that period abolished altogether. Since then several attempts have been made to restore capital punishment, either for all murders, or for particular types of murder, but none has succeeded. In each case, except for the 1957 Homicide Act, changes in the law, or attempts to change it, have been initiated by individual Members of Parliament and decided by a formally free vote, unlike government-sponsored legislation, which usually involves strictly controlled voting along party lines.3 Even the Conservative government's 1957 Act was put forward (as a compromise) in response to a free vote in favour of the complete abolition of capital punishment for murder in the House of Commons in 1956, a measure which the Government did not favour, but which had the support of a majority of individual MPs, including a number of its own supporters.4 1

2 3 4

See Sir Ernest Gowers, A Life for a Life? The Problem of Capital Punishment (London,

1956), pp. 26-7; Arthur Koestler and C. P. Rolph, Hanged by the Neck: An Exposure of Capital Punishment in England (Harmondsworth, 1961), pp. 42-3. For details see Christopher Hollis, The Homicide Act (London, 1964), pp. 54—5. See Peter G. Richards, Parliament and Conscience (London, 1970). See Hollis, The Homicide Act, pp. 5CM.

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The account given above is a summary of the conventional liberal wisdom concerning the abolition of capital punishment in Britain. It omits5 one extremely important phase, vital to a full understanding of the restriction, indeed in practice the withdrawal, of the state's power to execute, namely the abolition of capital punishment for military offences in the decade before and including 1930. It is striking how these two closely related twentieth-century phenomena, the abolition of hanging for murder and of execution by firing squad for military offences are never discussed together. However, it makes little sense to discuss each in isolation. The employment by the state of its monopoly of the legitimate use of force to shoot a soldier condemned to death by court martial for a purely military offence, or come to that for murder, or to hang a civilian convicted of murder by a jury in an ordinary criminal trial are not two radically different phenomena. In each case the state executes an individual, according to a set procedure, for what are perceived to be valid and adequate reasons. Between 1900 and 1964 (the year when capital punishment for murder was abolished) 780 civilians were hanged in Britain after being convicted of murder, i.e. on average between 11 and 12 individuals per year.6 During the same period 278 men were shot for purely military offences, while serving with the British army, nearly all of them during the First World War,7 when there was on average an execution every week, i.e. soldiers were executed more than three times as frequently as civilians. Even if the frequency were to be calculated over the full thirty years 5

6

7

See for instance Koestler and Rolph, Hanged by the Neck, pp. 43-6; Harry Potter, Hanging in Judgement (London, 1993), pp. 120-31; Elizabeth Orman Tuttle, The Crusade Against Capital Punishment in Britain (London, 1961), pp. 45—54. These authors may justifiably feel that military executions lay outside the scope of their work. My point is that they were mistaken in drawing the boundaries of their studies in such a way as to exclude the case of the military. Capital punishment is capital punishment. See Report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment 1949-53 (London, 1953), Cmd. 8932, Appendix 3, Statistical tables pp. 298-9 and 302. Between 1900 and 1929 inclusive, i.e. over a 30-year period, 413 persons were executed in England and Wales and nineteen in Scotland. A further 312 persons in England and Wales and sixteen in Scotland were condemned to death but the sentence was commuted. The corresponding figures for 1900-49 are 633 executed and 506 commuted in England and Wales and twenty-three executed and thirty-two commuted in Scotland. There were a further ninety-five executions in 1950-6 inclusive (i.e. prior to the 1957 Homicide Act) and twenty-nine executions in 1957-64, making a total of 780 executions for murder in Britain during the twentieth century. Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire during the Great War 1914-20, War Office (London, 1922), p. 648. Military executions for ordinary offences such as murder have been excluded (arguably they could even be added to the Royal Commission's civilian total) and so have the executions of soldiers and labourers in units drawn from other countries even though operating under British military discipline; one execution for desertion from the Boer War has been added. Cases of civilians condemned to death for treason have not been included in either total.

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during which capital punishment for military offences existed, it must be remembered that the soldiers who were shot had to be members of an army, which even during the First World War consisted of about 4 million men, of whom only the 2 million at any one time on active service with the British Expeditionary Forces8 were liable to be executed. By contrast the executed murderers were drawn from the entire adult population, which was several times greater, the total population of Britain (excluding Ireland) at the time of the First World War being 41 million, of whom about 26 million were aged over 18 and thus liable to capital punishment. 9 When allowance is made for this difference, it is clear that proportionately far more individuals have been shot by a British army firing squad in the course of the twentieth century than have been hanged for murder following a conviction in the British courts. It is clearly necessary, then, to discuss the repeal of military and civilian capital punishments together. Also, a study of the successful moves to abolish capital punishment for purely military offences during the 1920s, and of the opposition to these changes, provides useful insights into the much later abolition of capital punishment for murder. In particular, it focuses attention on, and suggests an explanation for, two key aspects of this important social and political change. First, there is a very strong link between membership of a particular parliamentary party and attitudes to capital punishment. Even when Members of Parliament have a free vote on this issue, it is overwhelmingly the case that, throughout the twentieth century, Conservative MPs have voted in favour of capital punishment, whether in the army or for murder, and Labour and Liberal MPs have voted against. Yet, even when the number of MPs voting contrary to the majority of their party colleagues is utterly trivial, the pretence that it is an issue that cuts across party lines tends to be maintained on both sides. It is in point of fact a non-party issue only in the narrow sense that the party whips are not usually used to direct the votes of individual MPs, but the informal pressures to conform to one's party's general view are strong, and few MPs defy them. By tacit agreement the parties did not and do not debate this issue at election time and it may seem to have little in common with the more central and explicit ideological controversies as to whether the 8

9

See Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire, pp. 29-33, 62. The number of soldier-days spent in the various military theatres during the war was 3,199,303,499 (ibid., p. 739). See the Report of the Royal Commission on Population (London, 1949), Cmd. 7695 and Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire, p. 363. The total number of adult person-days involved for 1900-30 is about three hundred thousand million i.e. 100 times the army figure.

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economy should be run on capitalist or socialist lines, or what the balance between unions and employers or taxation and welfare should be. Public opinion, which was almost certainly against executions for purely military offences but definitely in favour of hanging murderers,10 has been kept at bay, something that is regularly referred to for legitimation, but never unleashed. However, the study of the collapse of capital punishment for military offences points to a difference in ideology and in social background between the parties and their respective politicians, that helps also to explain why they differed so strongly over capital punishment for murder, and indeed to some extent over other moral issues as well. A second, and in some ways related, point follows from the insulation of the debate about capital punishment from normal politics and its portrayal as a matter of individual conscience rather than ideological disagreement. In the case of those wishing to retain capital punishment, it led them on two quite separate occasions to lose the debate, because they failed to realise the weakness in a twentieth-century democracy of arguments based purely on deterrence and on the need to maintain order, if these are not buttressed by a widely shared sense that the particular individuals being executed deserve their fate. Yet in later years, the very same insulation of parliament from public opinion assisted the abolitionists, who felt that they could ignore the voters' view that wilful and wicked murder deserved to be punished by execution and yet not damage their party's electoral prospects. The first World War had a drastic and dramatic effect on British society in many different ways. Before the war most ordinary British citizens had little to do with the armed forces. There was no conscription and only a small professional army. The regular officers tended to be drawn from aristocratic or gentry families or were the sons of Anglican clergymen, and the enlisted men were recruited from those who had found it difficult to find a satisfactory social and economic niche in civilian life.11 The army was seen by the lower middle classes and by the respectable workers, by nonconformist chapelgoers and by trade unionists, as a world apart, to be disregarded, except on the rare occasions when it impinged on their lives. They might, in some contexts, be proud of it as a national symbol and institution, but they also mistrusted the army as a cause of high taxation and a means of forceful 10

11

See James B. Christoph, Capital Punishment and British Politics (London, 1962), p. 44; Hazel Erskine, 'The Polls - Capital Punishment', Public Opinion Quarterly, 34, (1970), 290-307; Potter, Hanging in Judgement, pp. 143-5; Tuttle, The Crusade, p. 71. See Anthony Babington, For the Sake of Example: Capital Courts Martial 1914-20 (London, 1983), p. 34; Ernest Thurtle, Military Discipline and Democracy (London, 1920), p. 27; Ernest Thurtle, Time's Winged Chariot (London, 1945), p. 66.

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intervention in industrial disputes, and often despised those who enlisted in its ranks. 12 During the nineteenth century, parliament had forced a reluctant army to relinquish some of its more savage penalties such as flogging (in 1881), but brutal modes of field punishment had been retained or substituted.13 Capital punishment existed for many military offences, but it was not often employed. During the Boer War, there were no executions in 1899-1900 and only two in 1901, one for desertion and one for murder. 14 In 1902, though, two prominent Australian officers were executed for murdering Boer prisoners as a reprisal, during the last and bitter phase of guerilla warfare. As a result the Australian government, unlike those of the other Dominions, Canada, Newfoundland and New Zealand, refused in future wars to allow Australian soldiers fighting under overall British command to be subject to the death penalty.15 During the First World War, the British had to create a new mass army of several million men, initially from volunteers and after 1916 by conscription. For most of those enlisting it was a new, strange and frightening experience, casualties were high, and the stress of fighting a static trench war, involving the massive use of artillery, machine guns and even poison gas, was very great. Many individuals cracked up under the strain and exhibited 'shell-shock'. Two and a half years after the Armistice, 65,000 ex-servicemen were drawing disability pensions for neurasthenia and 9000 were receiving hospital treatment for it.16 During the course of the First World War 3080 men were condemned to death by court martial while on active service with the British Expeditionary Forces, and 346 of these were actually executed, i.e. 11.23 per cent. Of those executed 291 were British troops, the others being Canadians, New Zealanders, members of the Colonial forces, the Chinese labour corps, etc.; 266 of the 346 executions were for desertion, eighteen for cowardice, seven for quitting one's post without orders, six for striking a superior officer or other violence, five for disobeying orders, three for mutiny, two for sleeping at one's post and two for 12 13 14

15

16

See Babington, For the Sake of Example, p. 34; Thurtle, Military Discipline, p. 28. See Babington, For the Sake of Example, p. 1. Ibid. There were many cases of undetected desertions; for an acute and sympathetic comment see Kipling's 'Wilful Missing' from The Five Nations: Rudyard Kipling, War Stories and Poems (Oxford, 1990), pp. 181-2. Babington, For the Sake of Example, p. 1. Desmond Morton, 'The Supreme Penalty: Canadian Deaths by Firing Squad in the First World War', Queen's Quarterly (Kingston, Ontario), 29 (1972), 345-52, at pp. 350-1. See also William Moore, The Thin Yellow Line (London, 1974), pp. 150-4. Report of the War Office Committee of Enquiry into Shell Shock (London, 1922), Cmd. 1734, p. 24; see also Robert Harris and Jeremy Paxman, A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare (London, 1982).

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casting away one's arms in the face of the enemy. In addition, thirtyseven soldiers or labourers under military discipline were executed for murder following a trial by court martial.17 The army leaders argued both during and after the war that the executions were necessary for the sake of example. Deserters were shot in order to deter deserters. Even when the rate of desertion was low, as in the winter of 1916-17, the fear of desertion on the part of senior officers was high and Anthony Babington quotes one Brigade Commander's opinion at the time that 'offences of this kind are now prevalent and ought to be dealt with severely to discourage others'. 18 It is clear, however, that the members of the War Cabinet, together with many army officers, were uneasily aware that this view was not acceptable to public opinion. In order for an execution to have the maximum impact as a deterrent, there would be a special parade of the condemned man's unit on the evening before the execution, with the prisoner present under escort, and the adjutant or another officer would read extracts from the evidence together with the findings and sentence of the court and the order of confirmation. Indeed, some senior officers urged that as many men as possible should be present.19 In contrast to this the next of kin of the man executed were often deceived as to the cause of his death20 and this deception was carried over into reports in the local press and the casualty records of the regiment.21 In part this was to spare the feelings of the relatives and to save the honour of the regiment, but it also served to prevent local anger and controversy. Indeed, those who unofficially changed the content and softened the tone of the notifications sent to the next of kin of men who had been executed may well themselves have felt uneasy and ambivalent about military executions in general, or this particular execution. Throughout the war questions were frequently asked in parliament about the number of executions and how the next of kin were informed, but the official answers given tended to be evasive.22 In November 1917 the War Cabinet decided to alter officially the mode of formal notification of the next of kin of a man's death by 17 18 19 20

21 22

Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire, pp. 648-9. Babington, For the Sake of Example, p. 110. Ibid., p. 17. Julian Putkowski and Julian Sykes, Shot at Dawn (London, 1992), pp. 217, 224, 229, 257. Hansard: Official Reports of Parliamentary Debates, vol. 216, col. 52. (All references to Hansard except where otherwise specified refer to Hansard House of Commons 5th series.) Putkowski and Sykes, Shot at Dawn, pp. 229, 258-9. For example Hansard, vol. 80, col. 1553, 8 March 1916; vol. 8 1 , col. 30, 21 March 1916; vol. 8 1 , cols. 2204-5, 18 April 1916; vol. 82, cols. 128-9, 4 May 1916; vol. 82, cols. 656-7, 10 May 1916. See also Moore, The Thin Yellow Line, pp. 75-83, 121-4.

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execution. Ambiguous phrases such as 'died in service' or simply 'died', without specifying a cause, were deliberately employed, in an attempt to prevent them knowing that he had been executed. Lord Derby objected that this could in fact increase the distress caused to relatives, should they find out inadvertently, but the War Cabinet insisted on the change.23 They probably wished to avoid public disapproval of, or even political agitation against, the execution of particular individuals, who may not have particularly deserved their fate, but had been used as a means to an end. At the same meeting on 21 November 1917, the War Cabinet further acknowledged the peculiar moral quandary it was in, by deciding that the relatives of soldiers executed for military crimes should receive pensions in the same way as the relatives of those who had died in action. Furthermore, these pension rights were made retrospective to cover the cases of men executed earlier in the war. Disputed claims about pensions would, of course, have revealed the details of particular executions, as happened in Canada.24 Contrary to what has sometimes been argued,25 the British government was more concerned to preserve appearances and play down the executions than to save money. It was, at one and the same time, committed to announcing and publicising executions at the front, so as to achieve the maximum of deterrence, and to concealing them at home to avoid popular criticism and possible political protest. When news of particular executions did emerge, it shocked even those Members of Parliament who accepted that they were an inevitable part of war. Philip Morell, MP commented on 20 February 1918: The stories that come to one of these death penalties and sentences are quite poignant. Of all the horrors of war, I think nothing is more horrible than that men are condemned to be shot, and are actually shot by their comrades, in many cases for failure of nerves or it may be sleeping at their posts - something which does not necessarily show moral delinquency but only grave neglect of duty.26 As soon as the war ended, the executions ceased. General Milne, the Commander-in-Chief in Salonika, had written to the War Office, to ask whether soldiers convicted by post-war courts martial of deliberate desertion during the war should be shot. A secret letter was issued four days after the armistice, saying that no further executions, except for murder, should take place without the sanction of the War Office.27 Also 23

24 25 26 27

W a r Cabinet M e e t i n g N o . 279 on 21 N o v e m b e r 1917 (Wo. 32/4675), cited by Putkowski and Sykes, Shot at Dawn, p . 83. See also M o o r e , The Thin Yellow Line, p . 124. M o r t o n , ' T h e S u p r e m e Penalty', p . 350. See B a b i n g t o n , For the Sake of Example, p . 58. Hansard, vol. 103, col. 847 (see also cols. 8 4 6 - 5 5 ) , 20 F e b r u a r y 1918. Putkowski a n d Sykes, Shot at Dawn, p . 2 6 3 .

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no disciplinary action was taken against returning British prisoners of war who had committed serious offences against military discipline prior to being captured. As soon as the wish to deter became irrelevant with the ending of the war, the will to punish by execution collapsed.28 There was also a strong feeling that there should be no further or retrospective stigmatising of those who had been executed; on the contrary it was urged that the slate be wiped clean. On 29 July 1919 Colonel Lambert Ward, MP, who had sat on wartime courts martial at which men had been sentenced to death and who believed in the necessity of having such a death penalty, said in parliament: I should like to obtain an assurance from the Secretary of State for War that there shall be no difference made between the graves of those men who were killed in action, or died of wounds, or disease, and those unfortunate men who paid the penalty of their lives under Sections 4 and 12 of the Army Act, or who, in other words, were tried by court-martial and shot for cowardice or desertion in face of the enemy. I bring this forward because it has been on my conscience for some time . . . I ask the House not to dismiss this petition by the remark that these men were cowards and deserved their fate. They were not cowards in the accepted meaning of the word . . . These men, many of them, volunteered in the early days of the War to serve their country. They tried and they failed . . . In many cases they were the victims of circumstances . . . I should like to ask him [the Secretary of State for War] for a further assurance, and that is that all the records of these trials shall be destroyed and not kept permanently as records of the War Office. Now that the War is over and we have got peace, I do not want people in this country to think that tucked away, stored in some dusty corner of the War Office is a record of how their husband, their father, their brother or their son was tried by court-martial and shot for cowardice or desertion in the face of the enemy.29 Since Colonel Ward's magnanimity coincided with the government's wish for secrecy, it has until recently been difficult to know exactly who was executed during World War I. The names of men who were executed often appear on local war memorials and rolls of honour, or on municipal Certificates of Glory, treasured by their families, and they have been buried in Commonwealth War Graves alongside those killed in battle. 30 Only the use of ambiguous phrases such as 'died on service' or 'died' reveal to the initiated (in some cases) how they died. 31 After the First World War, the doubts of public and politicians alike about the wartime executions led to the setting up of a 'Committee to Enquire into the Law and Rules of Procedure Regulating Military 28 29 30 31

Ibid., p p . 2 6 3 - 4 a n d 270; M o o r e , The Thin Yellow Line, p . 183 ( b u t see also p . 281). Hansard, vol. 118, cols. 2 0 4 0 - 2 , 29 July 1919. Putkowski a n d Sykes, Shot at Dawn, p p . 2 5 7 - 9 . Ibid., p p . 2 5 8 - 9 , 272.

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Courts Martial' by the Army Council, which reported in 1919 that most courts martial had been conducted in an exemplary fashion and no major changes were necessary. The report did little more than restate the standard view of the military leadership that they must have the power to inflict severe punishments when an army was on active service, for 'unless discipline in armies be preserved, such forces are but a mob dangerous to all but their country's enemies'.32 Significantly the evidence taken by the Committee has never been published and three of the five Members of Parliament on the Committee refused to sign the report. It was signed by only two MPs, both Conservative (one with minor reservations), by three military members, by the army's Judge Advocate General and by the Chairman, Sir Charles Darling.33 This politically divided perception of the report was followed in the 1920s by a strong, sustained and successful campaign against capital punishment in the military by Labour and Liberal radicals, with the army leaders and the Conservatives retreating in good order, but conceding position after position, without any confidence that they would ever be able to hold the line against their critics. Indeed, each time they conceded that a particular penalty, which they had previously argued was essential for military discipline, could now be safely abolished, their opponents, sensing that they had them on the run, argued that those penalties still held to be vital by the military were equally unnecessary, and could also be dispensed with.34 At no stage were the Conservatives able to appeal to public opinion for support, as they were to do later in the case of capital punishment for murder. There was no reservoir of popular moral indignation and desire for retribution on which they could draw. Also, since the First World War had supposedly been the war to end war, and there was no discernible external threat to the country's security, a peacetime mentality remote from the exigencies of war had developed. Advocates of the severe punishment of military offences to maintain army discipline through deterrence, therefore, lacked credibility. The attacks on capital punishment in the military began soon after the end of World War I and during the 1920s amendments were regularly proposed to the annual Army Bills, which would have restricted the use 32

33 34

Report of the Committee Constituted by the Army Council to Enquire into the Law and Rules of Procedure Regulating Military Courts Martial (London, 1919), Cmd. 428, p. 108. Report of the Committee Constituted by the Army Council, p. 110. O n the theme that retreat led to further retreat, see Hansard, vol. 162, cols. 1512-15, 1519-21, 12 April 1923; vol. 182, col. 1381-2, 1 April 1925; vol. 194, cols. 1235-6, 1246-7, 21 April 1926; vol. 216, cols. 3 2 - 5 , 4 6 - 7 , 17 April 1928 and vol. 237, cols. 1583-4, 1611-12, 3 April 1930.

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of capital punishment, or enhanced the legal rights of those threatened with execution. The Labour Government of 1924 referred a list of proposed disciplinary amendments relating to military capital punishment to an Interdepartmental Committee, but they lost the election of November 1924 and the new Conservative government replaced the Committee's original Labour chairman, J. J. Lawson, MP with one of their own MPs, Captain D. King. Most of the other members were military men. The Interdepartmental Committee once again declared that the death penalty was necessary for morale, discipline and the safety of the army and 'enforced on the troops the lesson that complete self-sacrifice is demanded by military duty in war'.35 It was, they stressed, seen by military men 'not as vindictive but simply as deterrent'.36 They were, however, willing to allow the death penalty to be abolished in peacetime, except in the case of mutiny, and even in wartime for certain offences for which the death penalty was very rarely employed, such as impeding the provost-martial in the execution of his duty, violence against persons bringing up supplies, and the irregular detaining or appropriating of supplies proceeding on orders somewhere else.37 In 1925 the abolitionists again tried to amend the Army Bill to abolish the death penalty for most military offences, this time with the official support of the Labour Party.38 They pointed out that Australian soldiers had not been subject to the death penalty in World War I, but had performed as effectively as their British counterparts.39 It was a difficult argument to answer, for the Australian army had fought bravely and effectively, despite lower standards of formal discipline and the absence of a deterrent death sentence for those who stepped out of line. The next major change came in 1928, when the Conservative government's Army and Airforce Bill, with the full approval of the Army Council, removed the death penalty for a further eight offences including sleeping on post, disobedience and striking a superior officer, so that only cowardice, desertion, leaving a guard or post without orders, mutiny and treachery remained as capital offences.40 The Labour Party 35

36 38 39

40

Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Proposed Disciplinary Amendments of the Army and Air Force Acts (London, 1925), Cmd. 2376, p. 5, para. 13. 37 Ibid. Ibid., p. 6, paras. 14 and 16; Hansard, vol. 182, col. 1350, 1 April 1925. Moore, The Thin Yellow Line, p. 207; Thurtle, Time's Winged Chariot, p. 93. For contemporary, earlier and subsequent uses of this argument, see Hansard, vol. 162, col. 1581, 12 April 1923; vol. 182, cols. 1358, 1392, 1 April 1925; vol. 216, col. 69, 17 April 1928. For details of awards for bravery and distinguished service made to Australians see Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire, p. 763; Moore, The Thin Yellow Line, pp. 149-158, 208. Hansard, vol. 216, col. 34, 17 April 1928; Moore, The Thin Yellow Line, pp. 209-10.

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proposed that it be abolished for all military offences except mutiny, treachery and desertion but without success.41 After the election of 1929, there was once again a Labour government, but it had no overall majority and had to rely on Liberal support. In 1930 the new government further restricted capital punishment in its first annual Army and Air Force Bill, by doing away with the death penalty for cowardice and for leaving a post or guard without orders. The military members of the Army Council opposed these changes, but their advice was disregarded by the government.42 Ernest Thurtle, MP, the leader of the abolitionists, wished to go even further and proposed an amendment to the Bill making penal servitude, not execution, the maximum penalty for desertion on active service in wartime. Thomas Shaw, Labour's Secretary of State for War, opposed this on behalf of the government, saying that more time was needed for discussion and consultation with the military, but Thurtle called a special meeting of Labour MPs, at which there was almost unanimous support for immediate abolition.43 The government now allowed a free vote on the issue and the death penalty for desertion was voted out of existence by 219 votes to 135.44 The House of Lords, in a debate dominated by the views of ennobled World War I generals such as Allenby and Plumer, voted to restore the death penalty45 for all three offences of cowardice, desertion and leaving a post without orders by 45 votes to 12, but the members of the House of Commons refused to compromise on the issue, and the Lords permitted the entire Bill to become law. They presumably realised that it was not a good issue on which to provoke a constitutional conflict with the House of Commons, which might well have led to a further curtailing of their powers in the name of democracy, as had happened after they rejected the Lloyd George budget. During the Second World War, at the time of the North African campaign, some of Britain's senior military men wanted the death penalty to be restored for military offences, but the matter was never pursued, as it would have met intense opposition from people and parliament alike.46 Clearly the changes that had taken place had proved 41

42

43 44 45

46

Hansard, vol. 216, cols. 3 2 - 8 2 , 17 A p r i l 1928; M o o r e , The Thin Yellow Line, pp. 210-11. Hansard, vol. 237, col. 1577-80, 3 April 1930; B a b i n g t o n , For the Sake of Example, p . 2 1 1 ; M o o r e , The Thin Yellow Line, p . 212. Moore, The Thin Yellow Line, pp. 2 1 2 - 1 3 ; Thurtle, Time's Winged Chariot, p. 110. Hansard, vol. 237, cols. 1226-30, 3 April 1930; M o o r e , The Thin Yellow Line, p . 2 1 3 . See Hansard ( H o u s e of L o r d s ) , vol. 2 7 , cols. 1 5 1 - 2 1 , 15 April 1930; B a b i n g t o n , For the Sake of Example, p. 2 1 1 ; M o o r e , The Thin Yellow Line, pp. 2 1 4 - 1 6 . Moore, The Thin Yellow Line, pp. 2 2 4 - 5 ; Thurtle, Time's Winged Chariot, p. 111.

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to be secure and irreversible; what, then, were the issues that led to such a total change in the laws relating to military discipline and the death penalty? Ironically one of the main problems facing those who sought to defend the use of capital punishment by the military was that it had been used so sparingly. During the war 266,784 British soldiers had been convicted of a military offence, including 7361 for desertion, which could be a capital offence, but only 2675 death sentences were passed and only 276 carried out, of which a very high proportion (240, i.e. 87 per cent) were for desertion.47 The justification of these executions that was given by those defending the retention of military capital punishment in the post-war years was almost entirely in terms of deterrence.48 However, as has often been pointed out and was pointed out forcefully in 1923, a severe penalty that is only applied to a small proportion of those offending tends to lose its deterrent effect.49 Only 9.7 per cent of those sentenced to death for purely military offences were executed, and many of those convicted of committing offences which could carry the death penalty were given a lesser or suspended sentence. Also many military offences carrying the death penalty were never recorded, either because they went undetected, or because the officers detecting them decided not to press charges, sometimes out of consideration for the offenders, sometimes to avoid disgracing the good name of the regiment,50 or again because they had more urgent duties to attend to.51 In many cases the officer in charge chose to substitute a lesser, noncapital charge, such as absence, instead of charging a man with desertion.52 For all these reasons the chances of any particular offender being executed were extremely small. Despite the zeal with which the army's leaders informed the troops that they could be executed, or that a particular execution had been ordered to take place, the possibility of being shot at dawn must have 47

48

49

50

51 52

See Statistics of The Military Effort of the British Empire, p. 649 and Hansard, vol. 162, col. 1509-10, 12 April 1923. See Report of the Interdepartmental Committee on Proposed Disciplinary Amendments, p. 5, para. 13 and Hansard, vol. 162, col. 1580, 12 April 1923; vol. 182, cols. 1357, 1380, 1390, 1 April 1925; vol. 194, cols. 1245-6, 1261, 21 April 1926; vol. 216, cols. 49, 50, 5 6 - 7 , 17 April 1928; vol. 237, cols. 1570, 1576-7, 3 April 1930. See Hansard, vol. 162, col. 1588, 12 April 1923 (Captain Benn). (Cesare) Bonesana Beccaria, Of Crimes and Punishments (published with Alessandro Manzoni, The Column of Infamy, L o n d o n , 1964), p p . 6-96, and especially p p . 5 7 - 8 , and Koestler and Rolph, Hanged by the Neck, pp. 5 0 - 1 . See Hansard, vol. 182, col. 1383-^, 1 April 1925; vol. 194, col. 1234-5, 21 April 1926; vol. 237, col. 1571, 3 April 1930. See Hansard, vol. 237, cols. 1616-17, 3 April 1930. See Hansard, vol. 182, cols. 1373, 1375, 1 April 1925.

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appeared a very remote possibility to those tempted seriously to break the army's more significant regulations. Only a very few soldiers could say that one of their immediate comrades had been shot, but most of them would know men who had committed serious offences in the past, who quite clearly had not been executed. The theory that military capital punishment offered waverers a stark choice between possible death in battle or certain execution53 is difficult to sustain in respect of a war that saw only 276 executions for purely military offences, but in which over 700,000 British servicemen lost their lives in action.54 The deterrence model may well apply to, and draw its plausibility from, the occasional but well-documented cases of officers shooting, or ordering their men to fire on, soldiers who were at that instant running away from or tamely surrendering to the enemy,55 but these irregular instances have little in common with an execution following a court martial. It is also striking that those officers in the House of Commons who argued that the deterrent effect of capital punishment was necessary for army morale and discipline in general always saw it as applicable to units other than the ones that they themselves had commanded. The defenders of military capital punishment in the 1920s, however, dared not argue that it should be used more frequently and rigorously in the future, for that would have inflamed public opinion against them. On the other hand, if executions are very uncommon, how can they be an effective deterrent? In 1928 Major-General Sir Alfred Knox argued against the abolition of capital punishment for striking or offering violence to a superior officer, saying: In future if any man wants to get sent to the rear, all he has to do is hit his commanding officer in the eye. Supposing there is a big 'push' coming up and a man does not want to go over the top. All he has to do is to hit his commanding officer and he will be sent to the rear.56 Clearly, for the Major-General a vital safeguard and deterrent was being lost. Yet (as his opponent Ernest Thurtle pointed out on another occasion) there had been several thousand recorded cases of men being 53

54

55

56

T h i s opinion tends to be held or at least expressed by military leaders seeking to retain a particular penalty and by radical critics of the military. See Thurtle, Military Discipline, pp. xiii-xiv. T h o s e in the 'centre', between these two groups, disagree. Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire, p. 237; Babington, For the Sake of Example, p. 1; Hansard, vol. 194, col. 1238, 21 April 1926 (Morison). See Hansard, vol. 194, col. 1294, 21 April 1926 (Captain King); vol. 216, cols. 7 0 - 2 , 17 April 1928 (E. Brown) and vol. 237, col. 612, 3 April 1930 (Thurtle). BrigadierGeneral Frank Percy Crozier, The Men I Killed (London, 1937), pp. 4 8 - 9 , 5 4 - 5 , 6 4 - 5 and 287. Hansard, vol. 216, col. 5 0 , 17 April 1928 (Knox).

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court-martialled for this offence during World War I, but only four were actually executed.57 An ever bigger difficulty that faced and faces those administering a system of punishments, where only a very small proportion of those guilty of 'capital' offences get executed, is the problem of selection. How do you decide which individuals to execute? In an autonomous military system, as the army was to some extent in World War I, it will be left to the discretion of the military commanders, who will be mainly concerned with the morale and discipline of particular units. Thus, whether a particular soldier was executed or not would depend not only on his own past record, but on whether the offence with which he was being charged was, or was becoming, prevalent in his particular units.58 A soldier with a good record might thus be executed for (say) desertion because several other men from his unit, possibly worse offenders,59 had deserted earlier, but had received more lenient sentences or had had harsh sentences reduced or commuted on review. Alternatively the entire matter may be left to chance, either by default or, as in the more distant past, by the selection from a much larger guilty number of a token number of soldiers, chosen by lot, to be executed. In a democracy neither procedure is satisfactory, as it is felt that all citizens have the right to be dealt with in an equitable way, that takes into account their personal circumstances and gives them their just deserts. As soon as the British army became a mass army of the entire nation, composed of a mixture of conscripts and patriotic volunteers 'for the duration', it was inevitable that there would be demands that courts martial should conform to the ideals of procedural and substantive justice prevailing in civilian life60 and in the ordinary courts. Accordingly, both during the First World War and during the 1920s, the entire process of court martial followed by a review of finding and sentence by the higher military authorities, that could lead to a man being executed, was severely criticised, for it was alleged that: (a) some 57

58

59 60

Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire, p. 649 records four persons being executed out of 7116 cases of conviction for the offence. Thurtle, in Hansard, vol. 237, cols. 1611-12, 3 April 1930, claimed two were executed out of 6000. Hansard, vol. 162, col. 1579, 12 April 1923 (Captain Benn); vol. 194, cols. 1233-4, 21 April 1926 (Thurtle); Morton, 'The Supreme Penalty', p. 346; Putkowski and Sykes Shot at Dawn, p. 34. Hansard, vol. 162, col. 1579, 12 April 1923; vol. 237, col. 1571, 3 April 1930. For example see Hansard, vol. 162, col. 216, 9 April 1923. See also Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire, p. 649 note. A degree of official uneasiness on this score may be inferred from the note to the table of death sentences, which stresses, somewhat irrelevantly in the context, that of the 324 soldiers and others under military discipline executed by sentence of Court Martial, ninety-one were under suspended sentences of w h o m forty had been previously sentenced to death, one on two occasions.

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at least of those executed had not been properly represented and advised of their rights; also, although there was a lengthy and thorough process of review, there was no right of appeal to an independent court against a finding of guilty and a sentence of death;61 (b) there was a lack of uniformity and equity, indeed a degree of capriciousness, in sentencing and review that led to arbitrary severity in one case and leniency in another,62 sometimes with the aim of finding a scapegoat for the failure of a particular military operation;63 (c) insufficient attention had been paid to mitigating factors in particular cases, such as shell shock, cumulative stress or the fact that the offender was of a weak temperament or very low mentality;64 (d) officers were treated with much greater consideration and were much less likely to be sentenced to death and executed than enlisted men. Of the 261 executions for military offences, only two were of officers and none of these had a rank higher than (army) lieutenant.65 In the era of Admiral Byng, senior officers who failed were shot pour encourager les autres, but by the time of Viscount Byng, they were either cashiered and dismissed the service or quietly transferred to another post far from the front line. While it is true that British officers directly involved in combat tended to lead bravely from the front and suffered proportionately more casualties than in other armies,66 there was not a vast difference in the overall British casualty figures between officers and men. There were 21.4 other ranks for every officer on the main battle-front in France and the ratio of other ranks' casualties to those of officers was about 21 to I.67 If commissioned officers had been executed with the same frequency as NCOs and privates, twelve officers would have been shot at dawn for military offences rather than two, i.e. an enlisted man was about six times more likely to be executed than an officer was. These four sets of issues were repeatedly raised by those critical of the imposition of capital punishment by the army on a few individuals, drawn from an enormously greater mass of offenders. It is interesting to note that when the US Supreme Court was, at a much later time, faced 61

62

63 64

65

66 67

Hansard, vol. 162, cols. 1 6 0 9 - 1 1 , 1 6 1 6 - 1 8 , 9 April 1923; Moore, The Thin Yellow Line, pp. 175-7. Hansard, vol. 118, cols. 2 0 3 1 - 2 , 20 July 1919; vol. 182, cols. 1355-6, 1 April 1925; vol. 194, cols. 1233 and 1258, 21 April 1926; vol. 237, col. 1571, 3 April 1930. Hansard, vol. 162, col. 1565, 12 April 1923. Hansard, vol. 162, cols. 1568 and 1582, 12 April 1923; vol. 182, cols. 1353-5, 1 April 1925; vol. 194, cols. 1237, 1256 and 1299, 21 April 1926. See Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire, pp. 6 4 8 - 9 ; Hansard, vol. 162, cols. 1560 and 1576, 12 April 1923; vol. 182, cols. 1351-2, 1355, 1365, 1 April 1925; Moore, The Thin Yellow Line, p. 124. Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire, p. 358. Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire, pp. 245, 248, 2 5 2 - 3 .

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with a similar problem in regard to murderers condemned to death under the criminal law of the individual states or the federal government, it came to essentially similar conclusions as the British critics of military capital punishment in parliament in the 1920s, though, of course, justifying these conclusions by reference to the American constitution. In the early part of the twentieth century the American murder: execution ratio was estimated at between 70:1 and 85:1, but by the 1960s it had risen to 504:1, with a murder:death sentence ratio of 92:1, so that less than one person in five sentenced to death was executed.68 This may be contrasted with the figures for England and Wales for the period between 1900 and 1949, when the murder execution ratio was 12:1 and well over half of those sentenced to death were executed.69 Even when the very much higher murder rate in the USA is allowed for, the proportion of American murderers and even of those condemned to death who were finally executed was and is very low indeed. When individuals scheduled for execution appealed to the US Supreme Court, the justices of the Court decided in case after case that defendants had been denied their constitutional guarantees of 'due process of law' (i.e. trials and appeals characterised by fairness and rule-bound procedural justice) and 'equal protection of the laws' (i.e. uniform treatment of all like-situated individuals). The Supreme Court insisted that defendants in such cases must be properly represented and defended, and that death sentences could only be imposed within a framework of standards and guidelines that would assist and compel courts to make reasonably rational and equitable choices, based on the heinousness of the crime and the culpability of the accused. Where such a procedure had not been followed, the imposition of death sentences was held by Justice Stevens to be unconstitutionally 'cruel and unusual, in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual . . . the petitioners are a capriciously selected random handful, upon whom the sentence of death has been imposed'.70 Justice Douglas ruled further that the death penalty was being applied in an unconstitutionally selective way against accused persons who were 'poor and despised and lacking political clout'.71 All these principles were supposedly derived from the American 68

69 70

71

Author's calculations based on data in H u g o Adam Bedau (ed.)j The Death Penalty in America ( N e w York, 1983, 3rd edn), pp. 3 0 - 1 . See also Rt. H o n . Lord Darling, Crime and Insanity, Murder and its Punishment, Musings on Murder (London, 1925), pp. 28—9. Report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, pp. 3 2 6 - 7 , 3 3 4 - 5 . In the case of Furman v. Georgia (1972), 408 U S 238; 92 S Ct 2726; 33 P.Ed 2d 346 (at 390). See also the comments of Justice White in the same case, at 392. In Furman v. Georgia, at 358. See also Gregg v. Georgia (1976), 428 U S 153; 96 S Ct 3235; 50 L . E d 2d 30.

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constitution, and the justices decorated them with the rhetorical phrases of that document, but they were equally cited in the British parliamentary debates of the 1920s and 1930, i.e. they are simply a set of general objections derived from liberal ideology to the erratic and expedient use of capital punishment as a deterrent. Neither in Britain nor in America was it possible to avoid the generally held moral principle that no one should be punished more than they deserve. Capital punishment for murder has survived and its use even increased in America, because appropriate criteria related to the moral standing of the offender were devised, that enabled courts, legislatures and people alike to believe that, when they chose to execute one murderer and reprieve another, they were acting justly. In Britain, by contrast, attempts to create clearly denned sub-categories of cowardice or desertion in wartime, characterised by obvious and outrageous moral turpitude, that would merit capital punishment in the eyes of the public, failed. Consequently the death penalty for military offences was abolished, except for treachery, mutiny and deliberate desertion to the enemy, which clearly did involve personal wickedness rather than mere weakness of will. Whilst it is clear which arguments prevailed, it still remains to be explained why, even when there was a free vote, the issue of whether there should be capital punishment for military offences divided MPs so strongly along party lines. In particular, why were so few Conservatives willing to support the changes, even though they sensed that they had lost the entire argument and made no attempt to reverse them when their party was in power? The breakdown of the formally free vote in 1930 on Ernest Thurtle's amendment, adding desertion to the list of offences which should no longer be liable to capital punishment, is particularly striking (Table 16.1). There is clearly a very close link indeed between party affiliation and voting on this issue, even though this was in principle a free vote, and despite the claim by speakers on both sides that it cut across party lines. Nonetheless it is not immediately obvious why the Conservatives should be so overwhelmingly on one side of the issue, even though only half of them took the trouble to vote, and Labour and Liberal MPs on the other. A clue is provided, if the party affiliation of those voting on Thurtle's amendment is matched against the military titles enjoyed and employed by those gallant Members of Parliament who had held commissions in the regular army and/or served as officers in the First World War (Table 16.2). The Conservative and Unionist Party was clearly the party of those who had exercised the power to command and who, it may be inferred,

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Table 16.1. Voting on capital punishment for desertion, by party Labour

Liberal

195

20

2

Total number voting Total number of MPs by party

Abolish capital punishment for desertion Retain capital punishment for desertion

Conservative

Other

Total

2

2

219

4

129

0

135

197

24

131

2

354

287

59

260

9

Source: Based on data from Hansard, vol. 237, cols. 1625-30, 3 April 1930.

Table 16.2. Numbers of MPs with military titles, by party Labour Number of voting MPs using a military title Number with no military title (or not using it) % of total voting MPs with military title

Liberal

Conservative

Others

4

3

55

0

193

21

76

2

2.1%

12.5%

42%

0%

Source: As for Table 16.1.

saw the power to execute as a necessary corollary of this. That this was the case can be shown by a comparison between the voting behaviour (on the issue of whether deserters should be executed or not) of Conservative MPs using military titles with that of Conservative MPs who did not (Table 16.3). Clearly the experience of having been an officer had an independent effect on individual Conservative MPs, influencing them in the direction of voting to keep capital punishment. Yet at the same time the members with a military identity strongly shaped the dominant outlook of the Conservative Party overall. Only two of the non-military-titled Conservative MPs dared to break ranks and actually vote for abolition. There is a slight degree of inconsistency over the use of military titles by MPs in different contexts and some of the very few Labour MPs who possessed a military title chose not to use it at this time, such as Major Clement Atlee, who later became an Earl. Many Conservatives by contrast even proudly added their military rank to their other titles as knight, baronet or non-House or Lords aristocrat. The latter differences

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Table 16.3. Conservative voting on capital punishment for desertion, by military title

Voting to retain capital punishment for desertion Conservative MPs using a military title Conservative MPs without, or not using, a military title Total

Not voting, or voting to abolish capital punishment for desertion

Total

55

26

74

105

179

129

131

260

81

[Chi-square = 15.72, p < 0.001; Tschuprow's T = 0.15] Sources: Based on data from Hansard, vol. 237, cols. 1625-30, 3 April 1930 and 'The Times' House of Commons 1929 (London, 1929).

in choice of nomenclature and identity further reinforce the view that the two parties identify themselves with different categories of people, as defined by their relationship to the British state's use of force. In Britain and many other complex societies where the state has a monopoly of the use of legitimate force, this is controlled and administered by particular groups of people, such as the officers of the army, navy and airforce, senior police-officers, the judiciary and the senior civil servants of the relevant departments of state, and in the past colonial officials and administrators. They belong to the category of the 'dominant', who exercise immediate or indirect authority in regard to the use of legitimate force over those whom we can class as the 'subordinate'. Whether we treat these categories as dichotomous, or treat 'dominion' as a continuous dimension along which individuals and groups are located, is a matter of convenience, according to what kind of question we wish to ask and answer. Dominion should not be confused with power or authority in general, for it is only one kind of power and authority, that based on and specialising in the disciplined use of force. It is analogous to, but quite distinct from, the forms of economic and social power that give rise to classes and status groups respectively. The existence of such a dimension of power and stratification is obvious in societies controlled by military men, such as pre-war Japan, or stratified by party, as in the former Soviet Union and its brutal socialist satellites in Eastern Europe. In such societies the most important form of inequality is often not economic or social, but the division between those who can command the use of force and those who have to obey. One expression of this was

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Christie Davies

the frequent use of capital punishment in the former Soviet Union to punish 'economic' crimes involving state property, such as embezzlement. In Britain this division is far less central, in part because there is little chance that the military would seek to overthrow or seriously defy the government, or would be needed to defend it against a popular uprising. Also, in the 1920s, those who exercised dominion on behalf of the state tended to be drawn from backgrounds of wealth and high status, factors which have received far more attention from the sociologist. Yet to neglect the 'dominion' dimension in the stratification of British society is, for instance, to isolate and to render incomprehensible the imperial and Irish issues that have provided so much symbolic division and drama in British politics. As the party of dominion the Conservatives have been able to count on popular support for imperial success and assertiveness. By contrast the Liberal and Labour Parties, which even when in power have felt themselves excluded from, and in opposition to, 'the Establishment', have espoused an ideology of 'underdoggery', that has led them to criticise and restrain the state's powers of life and death, not excluding the case of capital punishment. In the case of capital punishment for murder, support for abolition was an unpopular line to take. In the case of capital punishment for military offences, by contrast, it was the Conservatives who were at a strong disadvantage, for those who had lost their lives were neither enemies of the state, nor morally deplorable individuals, and this accounts for the Conservative retentionists retreat and defeat on this issue. Both parties, though, exploited the fiction that it was a non-party issue, for the Conservatives did not wish to appear hard-faced and hard-hearted, given the peacetime sympathy for those executed, and the Labour Party did not want a public, head-on, official clash with the army leadership. For the military leaders and their Conservative supporters the abolition of their power to execute was the loss of a symbolically important prerogative and a retrospective undermining of the legitimacy of their actions in the past. Also, those who exercise military command may at any time have to make rapid decisions on behalf of the state and its security, that may result in unintended or unjustified loss of life. Under such circumstances, questions of whether justice has been done to particular individuals may appear irrelevant, or even trivial, even though such questions are seen by the public and by politicians as vital aspects of the democracy that is being defended. At the very same time as the clash between the parties representing the 'dominant' and the 'subordinate' respectively was occurring over military capital punishment, the issue of capital punishment for murder was dividing in very similar ways those MPs who were members of the

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Select Committee on Capital Punishment. This committee, which had taken evidence during 1929-30, reported unanimously in favour of suspending, and thus in time abolishing, capital punishment, but only after all six of its Conservative members had resigned.72 Had the recommendations of the Report of the Select Committee been voted on in Parliament, while the Labour and Liberal members still outnumbered the Conservatives, it is possible that the abolition of capital punishment for murder would have followed soon after its abolition for desertion. However, the Labour government deliberately avoided any debate on the issue of capital punishment for murder, because, unlike the military case, abolition would be very unpopular with the electorate. An indication of what could have happened, though, is given by the unanimous vote in favour of abolishing execution for murder at the Labour Party Conference in 1934. However, the formation of a National Coalition government by the Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay Macdonald, in 1931 split the Labour Party, and in the resulting general election a large majority of Conservative MPs were returned. It was only after the Second World War, when the Labour Party gained a large overall majority, that there was any real chance of the abolitionists succeeding. In 1948,147 abolitionist MPs of whom 135 were Labour members added an amendment suspending capital punishment for five years to the government's Criminal Justice Bill; the amendment was carried by 245 votes to 222 on a free vote (except for the actual members of the Labour government).73 The voting was overwhelmingly along party lines, despite claims of bipartisanship by both sides during the debate, the apparently high Labour vote in favour of capital punishment being the result of the instruction given to ministers to support retention or else to abstain, lest it appear that the government was officially in favour of abolition. Also the government was anxious that a row over capital punishment might impede the passage of the Criminal Justice Bill, which incorporated many urgent changes, some held over since before the Second World War (Table 16.4). Because the debate about capital punishment now concerned murder, which involves moral culpability, rather than military offences characterised by mere fear and failure, the themes of retribution and desert were strongly emphasised in these debates, in contrast to those held twenty years earlier on capital punishment in the military. However, once again wartime events had a strong influence on the debates. For the 72

73

Report from the Select Committee on Capital Punishment (London, 1931); Tuttle, The Crusade, p. 40. G o w e r s , A Life for a Life?, p . 72; P o t t e r , Hanging in Judgement, p . 145 (of t h e seventytwo government ministers, forty-four abstained).

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Table 16.4. Voting on capital punishment for murder, by party, in 1948 MPs voting for abolition in 1948

MPs voting for retention in 1948

Labour Conservatives and allies Others

215 16 14

74 134 14

Total

245

222

[Chi-square = 12.72, p < 0.01; Tschuprow's T = 0.138] Source: Hansard, vol. 449, cols. 1094-8 (tellers not included).

abolitionists, the willingness of Britain's wartime enemies to use state power to kill on a massive scale confirmed their moralist view that capital punishment was always wrong.74 The supporters of capital punishment argued that, if Britain's support for retributive punishments in the war crimes trials in Nuremburg and Tokyo was morally justified, so too was the employment of retributive capital punishment for murders committed at home.75 The abolitionists were uneasily aware that several countries which had abolished capital punishment or allowed it to fall into disuse, such as Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands and Belgium, had reactivated a sleeping penalty or even restored capital punishment and applied it retrospectively, in order vindictively to execute those who had collaborated with the German invaders occupying their countries.76 It could hardly be argued that this had been done to deter potential collaborators in future wars; rather it was seen as an act of justice such that they got what they deserved. The abolitionists, however, stressed that, after the wartime collaborators had been tried and executed, there was no wish in these countries to retain capital punishment for the routine murders of peacetime.77 Either way the effect of the Second World War and its aftermath was to strengthen the moralist convictions of those on either side of the debate. The abolitionists won in the House of Commons, but lost heavily in the House of Lords, by 181 votes to 28. Most of those voting for abolition were Labour peers; only three Conservative peers, one Liberal 74

75 76

77

For instance Hansard, vol. 449, col. 1015 (John Paton) and col. 1093 (R. T . Paget), 14 April 1948. Hansard, vol. 449, cols. 1017 and 1066, 14 April 1948 (Quentin Hogg). See Hansard, vol. 449, col. 1034,14 April 1948. (For details see Amnesty International, The Death Penalty (London, 1979), pp. I l l , 121, 122.) See for instance Hansard (House of Lords), vol. 156, col. 132, 2 June 1948 (Bishop of Chichester, George Bell).

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78

peer and one bishop voted with them. The government now sponsored a compromise clause that would have restricted but not abolished capital punishment, and this was passed by the House of Commons. The compromise clause was again decisively rejected by the House of Lords and thus all attempts to abolish, or even to whittle away, capital punishment failed. In 1930 the House of Lords had refrained from blocking the abolition of the death penalty for military offences, when the House of Commons had twice passed a clause in a Bill to this effect; it was clear to them that their continued opposition to this measure would receive no popular support and would be seen as undemocratic. By contrast, in 1948 the members of the House of Lords were encouraged by Conservative leaders such as the Marquess of Salisbury and Sir Winston Churchill to believe that they had public opinion on their side, and this was reinforced by opinion polls showing that at least two-thirds of the British people thought that murderers should be hanged.79 A clash between the two Houses of Parliament on this issue, far from putting the House of Lords' future in jeopardy, would have enabled the House of Lords to pose as the true voice of the people, embarrassed the Labour government and possibly led to a general election, which the Conservatives might well have won. Many of the key Conservative defenders of capital punishment were men whose lives had been spent exercising a disciplined and regulated use of force on behalf of the Crown. In the House of Lords in particular, it was often those who had had successful careers in the armed forces, the colonial service or the judiciary who defended capital punishment most strongly. What these military leaders, colonial rulers and senior judges had in common was that they had had to order the taking of life on behalf of the state, within a tightly constructed framework of rules and discipline that excluded or constrained private wishes and personal emotion. They saw murder as the anarchic antithesis of their way of life, as an act of undisciplined passion, or a deliberate attack on the established order. Murder was for them an infringement of their monopoly of the use of force, and a defiance and contradiction of the values of impersonal obedience and discipline which were at the core of their way of life. For such men, the appropriate response to such an outrage lay in the state reasserting their values, by deliberately and ritually condemning and executing the offender according to a fixed and unchanging set of rules. The abolition of capital punishment would, directly or indirectly, have retrospectively undermined the legitimacy of their own 78 79

Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p. 151; T u t t l e , The Crusade, p. 73. Christoph, Capital Punishment, p. 44; Erskine, ' T h e Polls'; Potter, Hanging in Judgement, pp. 143-5; Tuttle, The Crusade, p. 71.

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infliction of death on others in defence of state and society, through legal executions or just wars. What may not be done in the future must have been wrong in the past. The senior judges in the House of Lords used an argument in these debates that had not been available to the military defenders of capital punishment in the debates of the 1920s and 1930; they stressed the personal wickedness of those who had been tried and convicted of singularly horrible murders in the courts over which they presided or whose cases they had examined on appeal. In this way, the fate of the murderer was linked backwards in time to the destruction of a particular known person, the innocent victim. This provided a necessary supplement to the argument from deterrence, which deals with the more nebulous, unknown, statistical persons, whose lives will be saved if an execution deters other people from committing murder in the future. Indeed, the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard, in his speech in favour of retention, did not stress questions of policy, expediency or deterrence at all, but justified capital punishment for murder in purely moralist and retributive terms: 'Murder is a crime sui generis — it stands by itself; the man who commits the supreme crime should pay the supreme penalty.'80 Following the defeat by the House of Lords of the Labour government's compromise clause restricting capital punishment to certain types of murder, a Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, with Sir Ernest Gowers as chairman, was set up, to consider whether the law relating to capital punishment could be improved. The Commission reported in 1953, stressing three main points. The first was that the main defect of the law as it stood was that it provided a single punishment, namely death, for a crime whose culpability varied enormously from one case to another. Second, that it could not be proven that capital punishment had a uniquely deterrent effect in preventing murder. Third, that they had found it impossible to grade murders into capital and non-capital categories, as they had been instructed to do.81 The Conservative government then in power rejected the report, but in 1956, on a free vote, the House of Commons voted in favour of abolition.82 For the first time a substantial number of Conservative 80

81

82

Hansard (House of Lords), vol. 156, col. 1 1 6 , 2 June 1948. See also Arthur Smith, Lord Goddard: My years with the Chief Justice (London, 1959), p. 143; Gowers, A Life for a Life?, pp. 5 2 - 5 . (This is a twentieth-century judicial view. Earlier judges had been content to apply and uphold the death penalty for minor property offences and to justify this purely in terms of deterrence.) Report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, pp. 2 1 2 - 1 4 , paras. 6 0 4 - 1 1 . See also Gowers, A Life for a Life?, pp. 3 3 - 4 2 , Tuttle, The Crusade, pp. 8 6 - 9 . Potter, Hanging in Judgement, p. 173.

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MPs, forty-eight of them, voted in favour of abolition, more than three times as many as in 1948, which may well have reflected the changing social composition of the party in Parliament. The Bill abolishing capital punishment was passed by the House of Commons, but once again rejected by the House of Lords. The Conservative government now passed the Homicide Act of 1957, which divided murders into capital and non-capital. Only those in the former category, which consisted of murders in the course or furtherance of theft, murders by shooting or causing an explosion, murders committed in the course of resisting arrest or of escaping from custody, murders of police or prison officers executing their duty or of persons assisting them, or the committing of two or more murders on separate occasions were subject to the death penalty;83 the majority of murders were rendered non-capital. The division between the two categories rested on two principles clearly enunciated by the Lord Chancellor Viscount Kilmuir: 'The death penalty is to be retained for those cases where murder is most dangerous to the preservation of law and order and where the death penalty is likely to be a particularly effective deterrent.' 84 He pointed out that the capital murders were in no sense denned by reference to moral guilt, for they were neither the most abhorrent of murders, nor those that had been most clearly and callously premeditated. 85 This deliberate attempt to avoid questions of retribution and degrees of culpability86 was, as will be indicated later, in keeping with a new trend of the times in regard to legislation on moral issues. However, precisely because it was so narrowly based on the principles of deterrence and of maintaining order, the Homicide Act, which had been portrayed by its supporters as a stable and lasting compromise,87 was open to attack and demolition along the same lines that had led to the drastic curtailing of capital punishment for military offences by 1930. It is possibly the case that many more lives would be saved by executing those responsible for fatal accidents of any kind, than by having capital punishment for deterrable murders. However, such a measure would not be acceptable to public opinion, because causing accidents, like desertion or cowardice in the army, is not seen as directly and deliberately 83 84 85 86

87

Hollis, The Homicide Act, p p . 5 4 - 5 ; T u t t l e , The Crusade, p p . 157-61. Hansard (House of Lords), vol. 2 0 1 , cols. 1168-9, 21 February 1957. See Hansard (House of Lords), vol. 2 0 1 , col. 1169, 21 February 1957. See Hansard (House of Lords), vol. 198, col. 751, 10 July 1956 (Archbishop of Canterbury: Geoffrey Fisher). See for instance t h e conclusion of the Archbishop of C a n t e r b u r y , Geoffrey Fisher's speech o n t h e H o m i c i d e Bill. Hansard (House of L o r d s ) , vol. 2 0 1 , col. 1194, 21 F e b r u a r y 1957.

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Table 16.5. Voting on capital punishment for murder, by party, in 1964 Voting for abolition

Labour Liberal Conservative

Voting for retention

Numbers ofMPs

% of MPs

Numbers ofMPs

% of MPs

268 8 81

84.8 88.9 26.6

1 1 170

11.1 55.9

0.3

Sources: Hansard, vol. 74, cols. 1002-10, 21 December 1964; Richards, Parliament, p. 180 (the tellers are included in the numbers given in the table).

wicked in the way murder is. Likewise, those responsible for fatal accidents, like those whose nerve has failed in wartime, or deserters, are seen by the public as persons like themselves, who have proved fallible in a crisis; murderers, by contrast, are seen as morally set apart. The Homicide Act thus contained an inner contradiction, in that the accepted reason for having capital punishment for any kind of murder, but not for other dangerous and deterrable forms of behaviour, was contradicted by the manner in which capital murders were held to differ from non-capital murders. In 1964 the Labour Party came to power again with a small overall majority and it must have been decided that priority should be given to the abolition of capital punishment. As in the past it was formally treated as an issue of individual conscience, but only one Labour MP voted for retention on the Second Reading (Table 16.5). Among the Conservatives the greatest support for retention came from those MPs who had been educated in military and naval establishments for a career as an officer in the armed services. Three-quarters of them (twenty out of twenty-eight) wanted to retain capital punishment and only 18.5 per cent (five out of twenty-eight)88 supported abolition. It was presumably among this group that the principles of deterrence and order as the bases of punishment received their greatest support. A different but complementary pattern of opinion was expressed in the House of Lords, where abolition was now approved by 204 votes to 104. It is particularly striking that the senior judges, who had previously been strongly in favour of capital punishment, now voted in favour of abolition because they did not wish to continue operating the 1957 Homicide Act, with its distinction between deterrable capital 88

Richards, Parliament, p. 185; see also pp. 190-1.

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versus non-deterrable non-capital murders. Since they had previously supported capital punishment as being a just retribution, they were disturbed by a system in which the wicked were often more severely punished than the very wicked. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker of Waddington, speaking on behalf of most of the senior judges, said: I suppose it is probably true that no one, perforce and not by choice, has seen more of the many types of murder and of the circumstances in which they are committed than the holder of my office. I am sure that my noble and learned friend Lord Goddard would agree. For this simple reason, that nearly every murderer, certainly every capital murderer, appeals to the Court of Criminal Appeal, over which the Lord Chief Justice is the almost constant presider. Therefore, I hope you will bear with me if I express my views - and I am afraid rather strong views - on this proposal for the further abolition of the death penalty . . . I confess, looking back eleven years, that if anybody had then said that I should come out as a full-blooded abolitionist, I should have been surprised. But during that time, and particularly during the last seven years . . . I have seen the complete absurdities that are produced, and have been completely disgusted at the result. . . They (the judges) sit in court; they see where the shoe pinches; they see where justice does not appear to be done, and when it is not done. I think I can say that the Judges are quite disgusted at the results produced by the Homicide Acts89 . . . For seven years I have presided in the Court of Criminal Appeal, to whom almost every capital murderer appeals, and for the last four of those seven years I have been so disgusted (if I may put it that way) with the anomalies that arise, with the injustices that are done as between man and man - one man is hanged and another, equally blameworthy, imprisoned for life - that I determined four years ago that something ought to be done and I was in favour of abolition.90 The upholders of capital punishment would, as we shall see later, have lost anyway in 1964-5, even if the 1957 Homicide Act had been drafted according to different principles. Nonetheless, the defeat they suffered in 1964r-5 was, in many respects, a re-run of the long retreat over military capital punishment of the 1920s, that culminated in final abolition in 1930. In each case the aims of deterrence and order were not enough in themselves to justify capital punishment, when the supporting principle of moral turpitude had been removed. Not only the judges, but many of the Labour abolitionists (in their case often expediently and disingenuously) argued forcefully that it was not possible to justify the execution of less culpable murderers, when the law did not permit the 89

90

Hansard (House of Lords), vol. 268, cols. 4 8 0 - 1 , 19 July 1965. Second Reading of the Murder (Abolition of D e a t h Penalty) Bill. Hansard (House of Lords), vol. 269, col. 5 4 1 , 26 October 1965. Third Reading of the Murder (Abolition of D e a t h Penalty) Bill. H e is explicitly recapitulating what he said on the Second Reading (see note 89). See also speech by Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest, Hansard (House of Lords), vol. 268, cols. 5 3 5 - 8 , 19 July 1965.

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application of capital punishment to others, who had committed far more heinous crimes.91 This seems not to have bothered the former military men, who stood firm in defence of order and deterrence. However, there were now fewer of them, and they had less influence, even among their Conservative colleagues whose background and outlook were very different from their predecessors in the 1920s. In 1929 a large proportion of the Conservative MPs who had served in World War I were still using their military titles ten years later. In 1955, ten years after World War II, most of the Conservative MPs who had held commissions in that war did not use a military title; most of those MPs who did had been career soldiers. In 1922 the British Empire had reached its greatest extent and the defeat of Germany in World War I had temporarily removed Britain's most aggressive rival. Nonetheless, the decline of Imperial Britain was already underway. By 1964 the once powerful British Empire had been dissolved and replaced by a cosmetic Commonwealth, and Britain was reduced to being an off-shore island of Europe. The sacred hierarchies of the military and the established churches, though still respected, had been pushed from the centre to the margins of society. They had neither the power nor, in the case of the Anglican bishops, the will and desire to block reforms, such as the abolition of capital punishment or the decriminalisation of male homosexual acts.92 At an earlier time they had successfully opposed these charges, which they saw as inimical to the ethos of their all-male, disciplined hierarchies, with strong internal and external boundaries,93 whose central concern was matters of death and life. The sacred hierarchies had been superceded by the bland bureaucracies of production and welfare, staffed by members of both sexes, driven by short-term material considerations, and, perhaps ironically, less greedy94 of their members' time, loyalty and autonomy. The argument presented here, that the fading away of Britain's 91

92

93

94

See for instance Sidney Silverman, Hansard, vol. 704, cols. 879 et seq., 21 D e c e m b e r 1964. See Christie D a v i e s , 'Religion, Politics a n d " P e r m i s s i v e " L e g i s l a t i o n ' , in P . B a d h a m (ed.), Religion, State and Society in Modern Britain. T e x t s a n d Studies in Religion 43 ( L e w i s t o n , 1989), p p . 319^10, a n d Hansard ( H o u s e of L o r d s ) , vol. 266, col. 660 et seq., 24 M a y 1965 a n d vol. 268, cols. 7 1 1 - 1 4 , 20 J u l y 1965. See Christie D a v i e s , 'Sexual T a b o o s a n d Social B o u n d a r i e s ' , American Journal of Sociology, 87, 5 (1982), 1 0 3 2 - 6 3 ; D a v i e s , 'Religious B o u n d a r i e s a n d Sexual M o r a l i t y ' , Annual Review of the Social Sciences of Religion, 6 (Fall, 1983), 4 5 - 7 7 ; a n d D a v i e s , From the Sacred Hierarchies to Flatland: A Sociological Account of Moral, Social and Legal Changes in Twentieth Century Britain, with Particular Reference to Capital Punishment, Homosexuality and Abortion ( C a n t e r b u r y , 1990), P a m p h l e t 12. See Lewis Coser, Greedy Institutions: Patterns of Undivided Commitment ( N e w York, 1974).

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military and imperial position and outlook made the abolition of capital punishment possible, receives some support from comparisons with other countries. Among the western democratic countries there seems to be a historic link between a state's ability and willingness to use force outside its own borders and its retention of capital punishment. The existence of capital punishment in a state is thus a measure of national power and ambition. The earliest states in Europe to abolish capital punishment were the small, neutral pays faineant who hoped, often in vain, that they could stay out of the wars of their more powerful neighbours. These countries, with the dates of their de facto and/or formal abolition of capital punishment, are the Netherlands (de facto abolition 1860, formal abolition 1870), Belgium (de facto 1863), Denmark (de facto 1892 , formal abolition 1930), Sweden (de facto 1910, formal abolition 1921), Norway (de facto 1875, formal abolition 1902), Iceland (1928). The second group of countries to abolish capital punishment were those one-time powerful, or would-be powerful, countries, whose deliberate careers of wanton aggression ended in total defeat and disgrace. In Italy the death penalty for civil offences was abolished in 1944 by legislative decree and in Germany the abolition of capital punishment was part of the basic law of the new Federal Republic of Germany set up in 1949.95 Capital punishment had been abolished earlier in Italy in 1890, but restored under Mussolini, and likewise it had fallen into disuse in Weimar Germany by 1928 and in some German states had been abolished altogether.96 The final group of countries to abandon capital punishment were those that had been great imperial powers, but had declined in power and withdrawn from empire, notably Britain (1965) and France (1981).97 The United States, now for a brief time the world's lone super-power, is the only major western industrial democracy to retain capital punishment, in the laws of many individual states as well as the federal government. Arguments in favour of capital

95

96

97

Data from Amnesty International, The Death Penalty, and Amnesty International, When the State Kills (London, 1989); the Report from the Select Committee on Capital Punishment and the Report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment. Regarding the pays faineant it is worth quoting a German official's account of an alleged conversation he had with a member of the Danish government, when their country was under German occupation during the Second World War. T h e Dane boldly declared, 'You see there is the heroism of the lion, which you, as the great German nation have, and then there is the heroism of the hare, who has to know when to flatten his ears in danger, and we are a small nation, and for us the heroism of the hare is appropriate' (cited in Norman Longmate, If Britain had Fallen (London, 1972), pp. 256-7). Report from the Select Committee on Capital Punishment, pp. lxxxii-lxxxiv, paras. 372^1 (Germany) and paras. 3 7 4 - 8 3 (Italy). Amnesty International, The Death Penalty and When the State Kills.

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punishment, based on the need to provide deterrence and promote order, still carry a great deal of weight in a country with 25,000 homicides a year and in the throes of the oddly but aptly named 'war against drugs', which combines forceful law enforcement within America with the use of the military in, and against, the countries of the drug suppliers and traffickers. The final criteria for execution are, however, based on desert and must satisfy the guidelines laid down by the US Supreme Court, that stipulate the weighing up of the aggravating and mitigating factors involved in each particular case.98 Had the upholders of capital punishment in Britain likewise tried to define the differences between capital and non-capital murder in the 1957 Homicide Act in terms of moral culpability, with order and deterrence merely providing a general overall justification for the use of such a strong penalty, they would have retained the support of the judges, but they would still have lost in 1964. The public and the judges were still in favour of retributive capital punishment based on desert, but among the legislators generally the morality of guilt and innocence, and of blame and desert, was losing its force. Indeed in order to understand why the 1957 Homicide Act was based on deterrence and the preservation of order, rather than degrees of heinousness, it is necessary to look not only back to the First World War, when the security of the state took precedence over the degree of culpability of individuals, but forward to the changes in the law relating to divorce and abortion that were to take place in the 1960s." Previously divorce had been seen as wrong in itself, but it could be awarded to the innocent party who could prove in court that he or she was the victim of a matrimonial offence such as adultery, cruelty or desertion. The innocent parties were the victors and also could, if they chose, justly deny a divorce to their guilty partners. Fairness was seen as the distribution of rewards and penalties according to the moral worthiness of the parties. According to the new Act of 1967 by contrast the 'irretrievable breakdown of marriage' became the basic reason for divorce and innocent partners could be divorced against their will. The key question ceased to be 'who is to blame?' but became rather 'what course of action will cause the least harm to the sum total of the parties concerned, quite regardless of individual desert?' This negative, short-term, utilitarian principle,

98

99

See for instance W o o d s o n v. N o r t h Carolina (1976), 428 U S 280; 96 S Ct 2978; 4 9 L . Ed 2d, 944 and Lockett v. Ohio (1978), 438 U S 586; 98 S Ct 2954; 57 L Ed 2d 9 7 3 , cases which established the necessity of individualised sentencing. See Christie Davies, Permissive Britain: Social Change in the Sixties and Seventies (London, 1975).

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371

100

which I have elsewhere termed 'causalism', also prevailed in the case of abortion. Previously abortion had been forbidden, as wrong in itself, except when the mother's life was in danger, though the principle had been stretched as a result of a noted case, in which an abortion given to a young and innocent victim of rape was ruled to be legal. Now the view was taken that the prohibition of abortion by law merely forced women into seeking dangerous back-street abortions, and that less harm would be caused overall if these operations were performed safely and legally by qualified doctors. The test of legality was not the innocence that could be claimed by those who had not consented, or who could not consent, to the act that had made them pregnant, such as rape victims, under-age girls or the mentally defective; indeed parliament discussed each of these cases and explicitly refused to specify them as reasons for abortion in the Abortion Act of 1967. Rather the key criterion laid down to tell doctors when an abortion might be legally performed was based on an assessment of the harm that would be suffered by the woman and her existing children if she were denied an abortion.101 Once again the aim was to minimise harm regardless of a person's moral status. For the supporters of the reform of the law relating to abortion, the foetus could be disregarded, since it lacked a capacity for suffering and could not be regarded as inviolable, since it was not a full individual person with plans, expectations, fears and a self-conscious identity; the argument put forward by the opponents of reform that the foetus was 'innocent' was regarded as irrelevant by the reformers. Whilst such arguments were successful (and still prevail) in the case of divorce and abortion, where the state was retreating from the exercise of its power to enforce private morality, they proved less certain in the case of capital punishment. It can be, and was, argued that to retain capital punishment only for deterrable murders is also an act of 'causalist' harm minimisation,102 for such rules ensure that a person may only be executed, if it can be argued that this will save lives in the future. However, in permitting divorce and abortion, the state was and is minimising harm in the short run, by allowing individuals an immediate escape from an unwanted situation, regardless of what the long-term consequences for society may be. By contrast, in the case of capital 100

101

102

Ibid., pp. 3 - 7 and Christie Davies, 'Moralists, Causalists, Sex, Law and Morality', in W. H . G. Armytage, R. Chester and John Peel (eds.), Changing Patterns of Sexual Behaviour (London, 1980), pp. 13-14. See Davies, Permissive Britain for a fuller account. See also Hansard, vol. 732, cols. 1 1 1 8 - 1 9 , 1 1 3 7 , 2 2 July 1966; vol. 749, col. 934, 29 June 1967; vol. 750, cols. 1180 et seq., 13 July 1967; and Sir John Hobson et al., Abortion: A Conservative View (London, 1986), p. 6. See Davies, Permissive Britain, pp. 2 7 - 3 0 .

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punishment, when it is viewed purely as a deterrent, it is necessary for the state to inflict immediate harm now on a particular individual, in order to produce an uncertain benefit in the future for unknown 'statistical' persons, as would-be murderers are deterred. In the moral climate of modern Britain, where harshness is deplored, doubts about deterrence were bound to prevail. Thus in the end, the state withdrew from exercising its powers to prohibit and punish in regard to capital punishment as well as divorce and abortion. The coercion and control of the morally suspect in modern Britain has not shifted in the direction of becoming a more subtle, finely tuned and measured pattern of surveillance; it has merely become less rigorous and more permissive. By the 1960s the traditional established upholders of the majesty of the state could no longer successfully justify the exercise of capital punishment in terms of moral desert nor in terms of the need for order and deterrence, for both of these arguments had lost their force. What we have seen in Britain in the twentieth century is a major change in our understanding of the sanctity of life, away from the idea that society is sacred and towards a view that upholds the inviolability of each particular individual. The state has been substantially divested of its powers of life and death over the individual, for it can no longer claim to exercise such powers in the name of a sacred social order. It is now the person and autonomy of the individual citizen that is sacred. Accordingly the infliction of not only capital but corporal punishment by the state or by state institutions has been to all intents and purposes abolished. Members of the medical profession are now in some respects the managers and gatekeepers of abortion and euthanasia, but they do not have a mandate to act as the agents of an explicit, shared, collective morality, for they have to take into account the autonomy and individual wishes of their patients, whose movements or choice of other medical advisers they can do little to constrain. The overall pattern of change can be seen particularly vividly in the papers of Geoffrey Fisher, who was Archbishop of Canterbury between 1945 and 1961. He lived in an era of transition and desperately sought to find durable compromises, that would preserve the core of the old outlook, while making concessions that would satisfy those pressing for change. In 1948, when addressing the issue of capital punishment, which he generally felt should be exercised in a 'wise' and 'expedient' fashion, he used the occasion to assert the sanctity of human life against 'modern denials of it', such as a growing tolerance of suicide and euthanasia.103 103

See Hansard (House of Lords), vol. 156, cols. 42-9 and esp. 48, 1 June 1948, and papers of Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Palace Library, 1949, vol. 55. See also Tuttle, The Crusade, pp. 72-3.

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Only the state, representing society, could morally take away a person's life, not the person him or herself. Accordingly he was horrified when, in the course of giving evidence to the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment in 1950, he was asked whether a person who had been condemned to death by the courts should be allowed to commit suicide. Not only did the archbishop see suicide as the sin of self-murder, but he also insisted in his reply that it was important that society itself should inflict the death penalty, rather than permitting condemned persons to choose how they wished to die.104 The extraordinary lengths to which those guarding persons under sentence of death went to prevent them from committing suicide, or to resuscitate those who attempted to do so,105 reveal and indicate that capital punishment is designed to demonstrate the power of the state over the individual. Such prisoners were deprived of any articles of clothing, such as ties, belts, laces, that could be used to commit suicide, and even of their false teeth and spectacles,106 lest like Dr Crippen they should break a lens and use the sharp fragments of glass to slash open a blood-vessel. Should a prisoner succeed in thus 'cheating the gallows', by committing suicide in prison as, say, Hermann Goering did, it was regarded as a major scandal and disgrace.107 Even though in such cases the condemned person was equally dead, the power of the authorities had been defied and set aside and their right to the symbolic use of force, through the ritual of execution, denied. In 1956 Archbishop Fisher was again faced with the issue of capital punishment and he became one of the keenest supporters of the Homicide Act of 1957, by a somewhat convoluted process of reasoning. However, he was in no doubt that the principle of the sanctity of life was closely tied to a belief in the supremacy of society over the individual. In an early draft of the speech he was to make in the House of Lords about the death penalty, he wrote: There are only two moments at which society says to every one of its members 'take note of the dignity of life5. One is in war when society says to itself 'members, you have this precious possession of life - we ask you to sacrifice it for 104 105

106 107

Report of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, pp. 2 6 6 - 7 , para. 769. Courtney Browne, Tojo, the Last Banzai (London, 1969), pp. 2 3 0 - 3 . Christie Davies, 'The Ethics o f Certain Death: Suicide, Execution and Euthanasia', in Arthur Berger, Paul Badham, Austin H . Kutscher, Joyce Berger, Ven. Michael Parry and John Beloff (eds.), Perspectives on Death and Dying: Cross Cultural and Multi-Disciplinary Views (Philadelphia, 1989), pp. 149-62; Syd Dernley with D a v i d N e w m a n , The Hangman's Tale: Memoirs of a Public Executioner (London, 1990), pp. 8 9 - 9 0 . Courtney Browne, Tojo, pp. 2 5 2 - 5 . Douglas Botting, In the Ruins of the Reich (London, 1986), p. 343; F. T . Grossmith, The Cross and the Swastika (Worthing, 1984), pp. 8 3 - 4 .

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us all.' The other occasion is murder where society says to a murderer 'y° u have deprived a fellow man of his life; that is such an indignity that you must pay for it with your own life'. In both these occasions society is recognizing that life is a matter of tremendous importance and responsibility. To call for its sacrifice is one way of showing it. Abolish war - abolish the death penalty and society is left with no single manner in which it declares its witness to the dignity and solemn responsibility of life. It is treated as one of the trivial things and the death»toll on the roads becomes a measure of how it is valued. Thus I defend the death penalty on the grounds that it stands for the dignity of human life.108

Even at the time the archbishop's chaplain109 felt that these sentiments were anachronistic and advised him to make changes to his speech. Today it is a reminder of a social and moral world we have lost and of the strange death of Conservative England, despite the decisive victory of capitalism over socialism. Indeed it had been lost by 1964 when the bishops in the House of Lords, for the first time, voted together against capital punishment. It is perhaps significant that this occurred soon after the repeal in 1961 of the law that made suicide a crime. The law had long since ceased to reflect public attitudes towards suicide, but its repeal at this time was symbolically significant and was seen as such.110 It was one more step in the retreat of the state from its position as the arbiter of life and death. In most human affairs the British state has become more powerful and more interventionist over the course of the twentieth century, but, while it has come to regulate institutions and individuals more and more in the name of efficiency and equity, it has retreated from the task of enforcing a shared morality. In particular the state has relinquished its power over life and death, for it no longer imposes death111 on individual citizens, however culpable or dangerous they may be, nor does it react as certainly and decisively as it once did to prohibit and penalise the taking of one's own life or that of one's neighbour. 108 109 110

111

Geoffrey Fisher's papers, 8 March 1956, vol. 167, 201. Geoffrey Fisher's papers, 12 March 1956, vol. 167, 204. See for instance the comments of the Bishop of Carlisle, Hansard (House of Lords), vol. 229, cols. 258-62, 2 March 1961. The change is not yet quite complete. It is still possible for the British state to execute a civilian for treason, though the power has not been exercised since 1946; also the death penalty is in principle available, though not mandatory, in the case of piracy or arson in a naval dockyard. Furthermore there is in Britain no 'right to death' for those who wish to end their own lives.

17

Conclusion: on the past development and future prospects of the state in modern Britain 5. J. D. Green and R. C. Whiting

The 'Thatcherite' revolution in the British state is over. Its passing was symbolised in the failure of her successor to secure the legislation necessary for the privatisation of the Post Office, in November 1994. To be sure, this was an ironic funereal symbol. For it represented defeat at the hands of a public, ancient institution to which the eponymous hero of denationalisation was intensely loyal. But the sense of a changing order was, and remains, unmistakable. The idea of an unambiguous direction in public policy - towards an ever smaller state - has died. And with its demise, it is becoming easier to view the events of the last two decades as in some way ephemeral, as the malignant products of a transitory ideology now discredited, or errors inspired by a malevolent view of the state now shown to be false and, presumably, soon to be subject to suitable reverse. This temptation, we believe, should be resisted. To some extent, that is because it attributes too much of the events of the past twenty years, at least as they have affected the state, to the impact of doctrine, and too little to the force of circumstances. But, still more, it is because it fails to recognise the real significance of what has actually happened to the British state - smaller and larger - during that time. Not only is relatively little of it reversible in the forseeable future. More importantly, the very question of its reversal will become less and less meaningful - less and less worth the asking - in the immediate years to come. To understand why this will be so, it is first necessary to clear our minds of one of the most widely held misconceptions about modern British politics: the chimera of consensus. No false perspective, perhaps, so distorts our understanding of the state in modern Britain as the image of an essentially post-war growth, the happy (or negligent) product of a mid-century political consensus, then the helpless victim (or deserving recipient) of a Thatcherite challenge, hence the pitiful object (or proper ground) for divisive contemporary intellectual disagreement. It is not, of course, that there is no evidence to support such a view. There is. Many aspects of the modern 375

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state are exclusively post-1945 in origin. And some have only been abandoned or revised in the last ten years or so. It is rather that too much evidence is thereby ignored: too much history, too much debate and too much uncertainty and confusion; both before 1945 and after.1 For the banal truth about the outward expansion of public competence, and indeed about the inward constriction of statist pretension during the twentieth century has been its essentially piecemeal nature, or the relative gradualness with which it has all happened. And the striking fact about how that growth (and diminution) have been acknowledged in contemporary British society has been neither the supposed arcadia of mid-century consensus nor even the plausible scenario of fin de siecle division, but rather the muddy reality of continuous incoherence. So much so that it might be more appropriate to identify the later twentieth-century state rather than the Victorian empire as that which was truly acquired in 'a fit of absence of mind'.2 This is not mindlessly to denigrate the various visions either first of the Edwardian, and then of the inter-war, state-builders. Still less is it to pass partisan judgement on the many achievements of the Attlee governments.3 Least of all is it to claim that the opposition which they severally faced at the time - and they did face a lot of it - was grounded in a continually coherent social doctrine of individual responsibility.4 1

2

3

4

Now an orthodoxy; see, e.g., David Dutton, British Politics since 1945: The Rise and Fall of Consensus (Basingstoke, 1991), passim; for the 'Thatcher effect', see Denis Kavanagh, Thatcherism and British Politics (Oxford, 1987), esp. chs. 2-\\ ironically corroborated, albeit with different purpose and emphasis, in Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London, 1993), pp. 7—8. For the beginnings of a critique, see Ben Pimlott, 'The Myth of Consensus', in Pimlott, Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks: Writings on Biography, History and Politics (London, 1994), pp. 229—39; and for a salutary raspberry, see Alan Watkins, A Conservative Coup (London, 1991), pp. 34-5. J. R. Seeley, The Expansion of England (London, 1885), p. 8. 'There is something very characteristic in the indifference which we show towards this mighty phenomenon of the expansion of our race and the expansion of our state. We seem, as it were, to have conquered . . . half of the world in afitof absence of mind.' A short account is offered in W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, vol. I, The Rise of Collectivism (London, 1983), pp. 28^12; for an alternative view, see James E. Cronin, The Politics of State Expansion: War, State and Society in Twentieth-Century Britain (London, 1991), esp. chs. 4, 5, 8 and 9. On the deliberative aspects of Asquith's social reforms, see Colin Cross, The Liberals in Power, 1905-1914 (London, 1963), esp. chs. 7 and 9; of Attlee's, see Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945-51 (Oxford, 1984), ch. 4. On some of the less deliberate aspects, respectively, see Jose Harris, Unemployment and Politics: A Study in English Social Policy, 1886-1914 (Oxford, 1972), esp. p. 351; and Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, vol. I, Britain in Search of Balance, 1940-61 (Basingstoke, 1986), ch. 3. For such principled opposition as there was, see Matthew Fforde, Conservatism and Collectivism, 1886-1914 (Edinburgh, 1990), ch. 1; and John Ramsden, The Making of Conservative Party Policy: The Conservative Research Department since 1929 (London, 1980), ch. 6. And, from the contemporary record, see Lord Hugh Cecil, Conservatism (London, 1912); and Quintin Hogg, The Case for Conservatism (London, 1947). Con-

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But certain historical qualifications to the myth of continually purposive advance can be made. It is far from clear, for instance, that Lord Beveridge would have found much to favour in the modern welfare state.5 And we may reasonably doubt that those who promoted the great liberalising reforms of the 1960s - concerning capital punishment, marital relations and sexual behaviour - either wholly anticipated or have since entirely approved of their subsequent social consequences.6 To a greater degree than is commonly appreciated, ignorance and uncertainty characterised those who advocated the growth of the state in our time. Equally, they invariably described those who opposed it. But if not all, if perhaps not even very many, of the apocalyptic visions of its opponents came to pass then so did relatively few of the Utopian dreams of its advocates. Anyone who doubts that should consult the contemporary literature.7

5

6

7

servative 'concession' to the welfare state is treated at length in W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, vol. II, The Ideological Heritage (London, 1983), ch. 7. Contemorary 'concessionaries' worth consulting include H. Bentinck, Tory Democracy (London, 1918), pp. 77ff.; and R. A. Butler, Our Way Ahead (London, 1956), pp. lOff. Beveridge's view was clearly set out in his 'Three Guiding Principles of Recommendations', in Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, Cmd. 6406 (London, 1942), pp. 6-7, esp. 'The third Principle . . . that social security must be achieved by co-operation between the state and the individual. The state should offer security for service and contribution. The state in organising security should not stifle incentive, opportunity, responsibility; in establishing a national minimum, it should leave room and encouragement for voluntary action by each individual to provide more than that minimum for himself and for his family.' For an amplification of Beveridge's view, see Karel Williams and John Williams (eds.), A Beveridge Reader (Hemel Hempstead, 1987), esp. pp. 53-4, 62-4, 92-100 and 151-67. On the progressive rejection of his principles by successive post-war governments, in and through the practical development of the welfare state, see Rodney Lowe, 'A Prophet Dishonoured in His Own Country? The Rejection of Beveridge in Britain, 1945-70', in John Hills, John Ditch and Howard Glennester (eds.), Beveridge and Social Security: An International Perspective (Oxford, 1994), pp. 118-33. For his subsequent demonisation, see Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (London, 1986), esp. pp. 276-304. For a vigorous defence, see Jose Harris, 'Enterprise and the Welfare State: A Comparative Perspective', in T. R. Gourvish and A. O'Day (eds.), Britain since 1945 (Basingstoke, 1993), pp. 39-58, esp. pp. 48-51. Jose Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford, 1977) remains the standard life. Though little evidence of this, it must be acknowledged, can be found in the memoirs of the various protagonists. See, inter alia, Roy Jenkins, A Life at the Centre (London, 1991), pp. 180-1, 199-201, 208-10 and 397-8; or David Steel, Against Goliath: David Steel's Story (London, 1989), pp. 62-6; or for an ambiguous proponent of social liberalism and opponent of cultural permissiveness, Frank Pakenham, Earl of Longford, The Grain of Wheat (London, 1974), parts 3 and 4. An early critic, later active Conservative politician, was John Selwyn Gummer, The Permissive Society: Fact or Fantasy (London, 1971), see esp. ch. 10. The phenomenon of 'permissiveness' is most authoritatively treated in Christie Davies, Permissive Britain: Social Change in the Sixties and Seventies (London, 1975), passim. For some of the most eloquent expressions of the hopes, see L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism (Oxford, 1911), ch. 7; Sidney and Beatrice Webb, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain (London, 1920), esp. pp. 200ff.; R. H. Tawney, Equality (London, 1931), chs. 4 and 7; R. H. S. Crossman et ah, Keep Left (London, 1947),

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None the less, one way or another, the British state did come to assume a quite unprecedented degree of at least ostensible competence for the management of the economy until the mid-1970s.8 It also acquired a major interest in the organisation and well-being of society, especially over families and their material provision. Moreover, it consciously adopted social policies which had profound, if indirect, consequences upon many such matters. And in some areas of emerging cultural concern - ethnic relations and sexual politics, for instance - it determinedly adopted statutory legislation, administrative authority and public resources in order to direct individual attitudes and effect collective outcomes. In other words, it became an economic planner, a social engineer and an ethical leader in the land; leading, indeed, even in its insistence that, in some areas of life, no-one should lead and that individual choice should count for all. In this latter vein, it gradually retreated from many of its erstwhile and specific responsibilities in matters of life and death, marriage and sexual behaviour, moral standards and personal conduct.9 passim; Aneurin Bevan, In Place of Fear (London, 1952), chs. 2 and 4-6; and C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1956), passim. For the fears, see W. H. Mallock, A Critical Examination of Socialism (London, 1908), esp. ch. 7; F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (London, 1944), passim; T. S. Eliot, Notes Towards a Definition of 8

Culture (London, 1948), ch. 5, esp. pp. 93-^1; and Michael Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (London, 1962), ch. 1. For a general account, see Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, vol. I, ch. 3. For a specific analysis of the intensification of control between 1974 and 1979, see Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, vol. I l l , The End of the Post-War Era:

9

Britain since 1974 (Basingstoke, 1991), chs. 3 and 4. And for an intriguing account of what might have been, an even more enveloping 'corporate conservatism' which almost was, see John Campbell, Edward Heath: A Biography (London, 1993), pp. 471-8. The significance of 1979 as a turning point in British economic management has become a matter of debate; for the view that something of a 'silent revolution' in this respect began around 1976, see Power, Competition and the State, ch. 5, p. 165; for the argument that there was such a break in 1979, see Kathleen Burk and Sir Alec Cairncross, 'Goodbye Great Britain': The 1976 IMF Crisis (London, 1992), pp. 227-8. There was, of course, little or nothing peculiar about the British state in this respect; certainly, the managerial/permissive axis it describes is appropriate to common contemporary western European or North American experience. On which see, inter alia, James Simmie and Roger King (eds.), The State in Action: Public Policy and Politics

(London, 1990), esp. parts II and III; or, more broadly still, Ali Kazancigil (ed.), The State in Global Perspective (Aldershot, 1986), part 2, esp. chs. 7-11. Nor was, or is, there anything peculiar about the subsequently perceived crisis, and supposed diminution of the British state during the 1980s. For the most recent comparative account see Wolfgang C. Muller and Vincent Wright (eds.), 'Special Issue on: The State in Western Europe: Retreat or Redefinition?', Western European Politics, 17, 3 (1994), 1-197. One significant difference between Britain and other western European nations, though one rarely discussed, is in their respective states' patronage, and projection, or otherwise, of national culture; for the contrasting British and French experiences, compare Janet Minishan, The Nationalization of Culture: the Development of State Subsidies in the Arts

in Great Britain (London, 1977), ch. 7; with Marc Fumaroli, UEtat culturel: essai sur une religion moderne (Paris, 1991), part 2.

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These developments, wanted or not, understood or not, controlled or not, really have happened in our century. And the overwhelming sense, shared even by those who remain essentially in favour of them, or who have since denounced them, is that they have had truly significant consequences, and will continue to have profound implications for the future; more still, they have had and will have consequences and implications that no-one fully anticipated, and that no-one, whether Utopian innovator or sceptical resister, wholly delights in. Which is to say that the state has been a widely acknowledged disappointment in our time. For it has succeeded in satisfying neither those who had hoped for very much from its expanded provision - the radical proponents of social justice - nor those who had banked on relatively little from its increased interference - the conservative apologists for social peace. We might almost call this a consensus. But if so, it is a consensus of disillusion, not of expectation. No doubt everything disappoints the children of rising expectations to some extent. But the generally perceived failure of state either to deliver the material goods it once apparently promised or to maintain the moral standards it once seemingly upheld goes far beyond that normal (or inexorable) form of institutional short-changing. Put bluntly, the shifting boundaries of the state have forged a public authority in this country which today fails something more than either our present expectations, or our nostalgia for the past. It has become the witting and unwitting focus of our different discontents; with each other, as overt social and ethnic conflict has gradually been squeezed out of the traditional polity; and against the rest o? the world, as neither distant empire nor proximate enemies have remained to assume a vicarious responsibility. Yet it has shown itself to be increasingly unable to bear that burden, less effective in masking the real conflicts that lie behind its seemingly benevolent intercessions, and less willing to take the flak for the mutual failings they inevitably uncover.10 Some of that focussing of discontent on the state has actually been consciously wrought. To observe so much is not to be perverse. Nor, indeed, is it even necessarily to be critical of the state. For the very idea of the state as principal economic planner in modern society actually 10

Perfectly mirrored in the rise, fall and virtual disappearance of the concept of 'corporatism' in British political science. See, inter alia, W. L. Weinstein, 'Is Britain Becoming a Corporate State?', in R. I. Tricker, The Individual, the Enterprise and the State (Oxford, 1977), pp. 137-69; Keith Middlemas, Politics in Industrial Society (London, 1979), esp. ch. 13; Otto Newman, The Challenge of Corporatism (London, 1981), esp. part 2; Sarah Vickerstaff and John Sheldrake, The Limits of Corporatism: The British Experience in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 1989), esp. chs. 6 and 7; and Peter Barberis and Timothy May, Government, Industry and Political Economy

(Buckingham, 1993), esp. pp. 92-103, and 131-70.

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presumes, in so far as it is realised, that whilst the state might reasonably take credit for any subsequent economic success it must, by the same token, bear an unusually great responsibility for failure. And this is exactly what has happened. Governing parties have claimed success, rhetorically. Exasperated electorates have punished failure, psephologically. Hence, to the degree that the British economy has, in some conclusive degree, 'failed' in the twentieth century, and to the extent that this failure may properly be traced to the ways in which it has been publicly planned, an attitude of disappointment, or a feeling that public performance in so crucial a matter has not been up to scratch, can be nothing more than appropriate.11 In this sense, we may simply compare the standing of the post-war British state with its French counterpart. Gaullism (or anyway Monnetism) worked. Butskellism did not.12 More subtly, we may also observe that the increasingly neo-corporatist state of the post-war era positively concentrated criticism upon itself in its determination to act as the 'honest broker5 between capital and labour, thereby enabling both to conceal their struggle behind its seeming incompetence.13 And to the degree that pre-1979 corporatism 11

12

13

Within a truly vast literature, the most important accounts include J. C. R. Dow, The Management of the British Economy, 1945-60 (Cambridge, 1964), esp. chs. 1, 14 and 15; F. T. Blackaby (ed.), British Economic Policy, 1960-1974 (Cambridge, 1978), esp. ch. 14; and Sir Alec Cairncross, The British Economy since 1945: Economic Policy and Performance, 1945-1990 (Oxford, 1992), esp. chs. 6 and 7. A succinct analysis is offered in Jim Tomlinson, British Macroeconomic Policy since 1940 (Beckenham, 1985), part 2. A summary of some of the other explanations for British economic decline is offered in Royce Logan Turner, The Politics of Industry (London, 1989), part 2. On 'Monnetism' see Stephen S. Cohen, Modern Capitalist Planning: The French Model, 2nd edn (Berkeley, 1977), esp. ch. 2 (for a comparison of British and French growth rates, see p. 290). The phenomenon of 'Butskellism' is well treated in Philip M. Williams, Hugh Gaitskell (London, 1979), pp. 312-18; see also Neil Rollings, 'Poor Mr. Butskell: A Short Life Wrecked by Schizophrenia', Twentieth Century British History, 5, 2 (1994), 183-205. The more prosaic matter of contemporary British economic performance is dealt with in M. W. Kirby, 'The Economic Record since 1945', in Gourvish and O'Day, Britain since 1945, pp. 11-37. On the role of the Ministry of Labour in this practice, at least to the Second World War, see Rodney Lowe, Adjusting to Democracy: The Role of the Ministry of Labour in British Politics, 1916—1939 (Oxford, 1986), passim. Aspects of its post-war role are discussed, inter alia, in Robert Shepherd, Iain Macleod (London, 1994), pp. 106-13. On the formation of NEDC see Keith Middlemas, Industry, Unions and Government: Twenty-One Years ofN.E.D.C. (London, 1983), esp. ch. 1 and passim. On the post-war rapprochement of government and unions (and its decline) see Chris Wrigley, 'Trade Unions, the Government and the Economy', in Gourvish and O'Day, Britain since 1945, pp. 59-87. On the ill-fated DEA, see Frank Blackaby, State Intervention in British Industry (London, 1969), chs. 2, and 6—8. Changing labour law is summarised in Hugh Armstrong Clegg, The Changing System of Industrial Relations in Great Britain (Oxford, 1979), ch. 8. The most sympathetic analysis of the 'Thatcherite' repudiation of an intermediary role is offered by Shirley Robin Letwin, The Anatomy of Thatcherism (London, 1992), ch. 6. An alternative, Marxist, account of the same is found in

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really did sacrifice future investment for the sake of present equality, it seems to have done so in a way that brought relatively little credit upon itself.14 Paradoxically, the state in this era really did help the little man against the big institution. But the little man seemingly remained profoundly ungrateful for its actions. Perhaps he expected it to do more still. Perhaps he simply did not notice what had been done in his name. Perhaps he did not even particularly approve of it. To be sure, this last possibility should be treated with caution. There is, after all, a great deal of evidence (albeit rather woolly evidence) that the British public quietly came to approve of most, if not all, of the basic tenets of the welfare state, notably its national health provision and, rather less uncritically, its social security arrangements during the years after 1945.15 Yet some of the latter especially were always contested, notably in the arguments about universal or targeted benefits. And all are now increasingly challenged by a revived sense of the (proper) distinctions which should be made between the deserving and the undeserving poor.16 Most important of all, many of these 'disappointments' are connected. The failure of the planned state has reflected badly upon the limitations of the technocrats. The decline of the corporate state has demonstrated the exiguous powers of organised capital and labour to exercise mutual restraint. And the crisis of the welfare state has suggested to us that we are not quite as 'good' a people as we once thought we were. Anti-statism in our time has built upon such shifts in general sensibility - against experts, against social institutions and even against our nebulous sense of the masses - as much as it has pointed to objective accounts of national performance. This is not to say that such accounts are of no importance. They are. The battles over nationalisation of key

14 15

16

Werner Bonefeld, The Recomposition of the British State during the 1980s (Aldershot, 1993), pp. 186-249. See Roger Middleton, above, ch. 6, p. 143. Jose Harris, 'Society and the State in Twentieth-Century Britain', in F. M. L. Thompson, (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950, vol. Ill, Social Agencies and Institutions (Cambridge, 1990), p. 116; citing Ann Cartwright and Robert Anderson, General Practice Re-visited: A Second Study of Patients and their Doctors (London, 1981), pp. 178-9. Interestingly, Beveridge believed that something like this was already accepted by 1942; see Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, p. 13. On the idea, see Mark Almond, 'Discretion: Quietly Discriminating between the Deserving and the Undeserving Poor', in Digby Anderson (ed.), The Loss of Virtue: Moral Confusion and Social Disorder in Britain and America (New York, 1992), pp. 201-10. For a contemporary history, see David Vincent, Poor Citizens: The State and the Poor in Twentieth Century Britain (London, 1991), ch. 4, esp. pp. 193-4. For an example of discretionary practice - vigorously criticised - see Eileen Evanson, Les Allamby and Roberta Woods, The Deserving and the Undeserving Poor: The Social Fund in Northern Ireland (Derry, 1989), chs. 1 and 3.

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industries were as much about efficient direction as about social justice. And the question of precisely how well the major primary and secondary industries actually performed under public ownership after the Second World War is an open one. It is by no means clear that they were all unambiguous failures.17 What, however, is apparent from all the relevant and generally acknowledged data is that in taking on such responsibilities the British state assumed altogether more obligations for economic performance (and social relations) in this country than it acquired economic and social competence to fulfil those duties. And this was true regardless of how much technical expertise came into government at the time.18 The state was thus rendered immediately and increasingly vulnerable to the economic (and social) effects of organisational complexity. At the same time, it also became necessarily associated with certain prognoses about economic and social priority in Britain's industrial structure which time could, and increasingly did, render more and more problematic. As a result, it was also rendered immediately and increasingly vulnerable to the economic and social effects of organisational change. That vulnerability, both to the complexity of the organisational forms over which it had assumed responsibility, and to the propensity for change within them, was mirrored in the state's increasing involvement in the minutiae of British social well-being. For in establishing a 'welfare state', however slowly and circumspectly, British public authority effectively assumed the responsibility for an acute form of moral hazard.19 First, the state assumed primary responsibility for the social 17

18

19

A brief account is offered in Terry Gourvish, 'The Rise (and Fall?) of State-Owned Enterprise', in Gourvish and O'Day (eds.), Britain since 1945, pp. 111-34. A more critical analysis may be found in William Ashworth, The State in Business: 1945 to the mid 1980s (Basingstoke, 1991), esp. chs. 5 and 6. The 'political' dimension is covered in Peter Hall, Governing the Economy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France (Cambridge, 1986), chs. 3 and 4. The beginnings of the disentanglement are charted in Dennis Swann, The Retreat of the State: Deregulation and Privatisation in the UK and the USA (Hemel Hempstead, 1988), chs. 6-8; and interpreted, from the point of view of economic analysis, in John Vickers and George Yarrow, Privatisation: An Economic Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), see esp. part 2. On which see: Geoffrey K. Fry, Statesmen in Disguise: The Changing Role of the Administrative Class of the British Home Civil Service 1853-1966 (London, 1969), ch. 5; also Fry, The Administrative 'Revolution3 in Whitehall: A Study of the Politics of Administrative Change in British Central Government since the 1950s (London, 1981), ch. 10; and Gavin Drewny and Tony Butcher, The Civil Service Today (Oxford, 1988), chs. 10 and 11. On specifically 'economic' expertise, see Leslie Hannay, 'Economic Ideas and Government Policy on Industrial Organisation since 1945', in Mary O. Furner and Barry Supple (eds.), The State and Economic Knowledge: The American and British Experiences (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 354-75. The classic definition of 'moral hazard' is found in Kenneth Arrow, 'Insurance, Risk and Resource Attrition', lecture 3, in Arrow, Aspects of the Theory of Risk-Taking

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insurance (e.g. against the loss of breadwinner, ill-health, unemployment) of a hugely increased number of individuals, themselves attached to increasingly complex and often fast-changing households. Secondly, it did so under conditions which were peculiarly stacked against the principal; for its policies presumed, quite contrary to historic and continuing private practice, no economic penalty for their use - put simply, no matter how many times the policy-holder claimed his or her premiums never went up. Rejecting not only a 'means tests' of basic eligibility, but also the price mechanism for subsequent usage, the state created a panoply of perverse economic incentives for insurers and their families. Of course, it did so for the best humanitarian reasons. But, inevitably, it paid a price. So too did at least some of its seemingly fortunate beneficiaries, in the privileging of short-term gain over longer-term stability which such incentives inevitably entailed. Precisely what sort of price, and specifically whether a price worth paying or not, remain matters of considerable dispute, both for Britain and in general. What seems less disputed is that the price, however defined or measured, has risen. And it is undoubtedly clear that fewer and fewer national governments - Britain's emphatically but not especially included - are unambiguously willing to pay it. 20 That the welfare state could never have been anything other than an increasingly expensive concern requires and (despite Beveridge's famous rhetorical enormity) required no great genius to discern. 21 The mere fact of healthier people living longer in a regime of increasingly

20

21

(Helsinki, 1965), and reprinted in The Collected Papers of Kenneth J. Arrow, vol. 4, The Economics of Information (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p . 85. ' T h e insurance policy itself might change incentives and therefore the probabilities on which the insurance company has relied.' T h e argument was developed in M . V. Pauthy, ' T h e Economics of Moral Hazard', American Economic Review, 58 (1968), p p . 531-7, and K e n n e t h J. Arrow, ' T h e Economics of Moral Hazard; F u r t h e r C o m m e n t ' , ibid., p p . 537-9. See the remarks of T h o m a s C. Schelling, Choice and Consequence (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), p p . 7 - 8 : 'there is no getting away from it . . . any compensatory program directed towards a condition over which people have any kind of control, even remote and probabilistic control, reduces the incentive to stay out of that condition, and detracts from the urgency of getting out of it. T h e r e is n o use in denying it in defence of social programs . . . Principles conflict. T h e r e is nothing to do b u t compromise.' T h a t such a 'compromise' might actually be rational is argued for in Nicholas Barr, The Economics of the Welfare State, 2 n d edn (London, 1993), part 4, chs. 2, 3 and 6 and passim. T h a t it might not be is suggested in H e r m i o n e Parker, The Moral Hazard of

Social Benefit: A Study of the Impact of Social Benefits and Income Tax on Incentive to Work (London, 1982) esp. ch. 3. The debate cannot be resolved here. Beveridge estimated social security expenditure in 1945 at £697m. He believed this would rise to £858m. in 1965, the twenty-year projected period with which his report dealt. However, he envisaged no increase in the cost of 'health and rehabilitation services' over these years, 'it being assumed that there will actually be some development of the service, and as a consequence of this development a reduction in the number of cases requiring it': Social Insurance and Allied Services, p. 105.

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inflexible working lives ensured that there were always going to be more pensioners. Similarly, the exponential growth of medical costs coupled with the inflation of social expectations determined that health provision would become progressively more expensive. And, in truth, it has been these two virtually unavoidable financial imperatives which have driven most of the (world-wide) reappraisals of public health, welfare and pensions provisions.22 Yet what has sometimes proved more striking, and what certainly has been more noticed and more argued about - if actually less significant in proportionate financial terms - has been the growth of a seemingly new poverty, that is, of a publicly subsidised poverty, the 'dependency culture', a culture which has arisen within the framework of, indeed has seemingly been created under the auspices of, the welfare state. For this apparently new phenomenon has suggested, to some of its critics anyway, that the welfare state may actually have been a positively bad and burdensome, not merely a necessarily expensive and increasingly cumbersome, thing. And that proved quite a salutary thought.23 Such a pessimistic conclusion is, of course, by no means widely accepted in Britain; neither amongst the 'welfare experts', nor within 22

23

O n ageing, a n d its effect o n public welfare services, see Paul Johnson a n d Jane Falkingham, Ageing and Economic Welfare ( L o n d o n , 1992), esp. chs. 5 - 7 . Another perspective is offered in David T h o m s o n , Selfish Generation? The Ageing of the Welfare State ( L o n d o n , 1993). F o r Beveridge's prescience in this regard, see Social Insurance and Allied Services, p p . 8 - 9 , 9 0 - 1 0 1 . O n t h e inflation of medical costs in post-war Britain, see Michael H . Cooper, 'Economics of N e e d : T h e Experience of t h e British Health Service', in M i k e Perlman (ed.), The Economics of Health and Medical Care ( L o n d o n , 1974), p p . 89-107; for m o r e recent trends, a n d an accessible statistical digest, see J o h n Appleby, Financing Health Care in the 1990s (Buckingham, 1992), esp. ch. 3 ; and for comparison with t h e U n i t e d States, ch. 6; or West G e r m a n y , ch. 7. T h e general question of t h e strain o n 'welfare state' tax bases is considered in B. G u y Peters, The Development of the Tax State (Strathclyde, 1985), p p . 2 5 - 6 . I t is important, here, to distinguish between those who were always opposed, a n d those who changed their m i n d , during this period. Root a n d branch opposition originated with Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, esp. chs. 3 a n d 9. I t was continued in such works as Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty ( L o n d o n , 1960), p t 3 , a n d Law, Legislation and Liberty ( L o n d o n , 1982), ch. 14. T h e importance of t h e 1960s in rendering such views respectable is acutely observed in t h e essays reprinted in A r t h u r Seldon, The State is Rolling Back: Essays in Persuasion ( L o n d o n , 1994), esp. p p . 177-216. Subsequent 'converts' included J o h n Vaizey, see esp. In Breach of Promise: Gaitskell, Macleods Titmussj Croslandy Boyle; Five Men Who Shaped a Generation (London, 1983), passim and National Health (London, 1984), ch. 10; and, rather more grandiosely, Hugh Thomas, see esp. An Unfinished History of the World (London, 1979), pp. 586-7. At the same time, a shift in popular attitudes, away from the public provision of welfare services and towards their private allocation, was discerned in Peter Saunders and Colin Harris, Attitudes to State Welfare Services: A Growing Demand for Alternatives? (London, 1988), esp. pp. 11-25. Perhaps the most eloquent, and cogent, contemporary intellectual defence was Robert E. Goodin, Reasons for Welfare: The Political Theory of the Welfare State (Princeton, 1988), esp. parts 1 and 2.

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the general public. And it may, in fact, be wrong. Certainly the image quite common in the mid-1980s - of a particularly pernicious British welfare state, especially generous and thereby particularly burdensome, finds little corroboration in detailed, comparative analysis.24 But, even in its error, it points to two observations which are probably incontestable. First that any non-discretionary, that is non-behaviourally discretionary, welfare system, however sophisticated, necessarily creates perverse economic incentives. This is true, theoretically, for all persons. It is also true practically, for all classes. It most certainly is true, theoretically and practically, for the not so poor, as well as the poor.25 The British experience has been no different in this respect.26 Secondly, and whether or not it has been markedly influenced by such dubious stimuli, social change in contemporary Britain, particularly changes in household structure, has wrought social consequences in which a large and seemingly increasingly dependent population can at least be seen to have emerged, quite regardless of concomitant economic growth and rising living standards; a population exemplified by, but not limited to, the most publicised phenomenon of unemployed single mothers. 27 The pincer movement of ever rising (and increasingly widely distributed) costs, allied to the effect of seemingly more ambiguous (and increasingly well-publicised) results, robbed the welfare state of much of its earlier ethical sheen by the late 1970s. Not all of that sheen, and not in every part of state welfare. But it would be simply foolish to deny that a general sensibility - almost a new consensus - emerging not just in Britain but throughout western Europe and North America, that all was not well with the welfare state, that it was costing even more to do what 24

25

T h e central a r g u m e n t , p e r h a p s , of B a r n e t t , Audit of War, ch. 14; convincingly refuted in H a r r i s , ' E n t e r p r i s e a n d t h e Welfare S t a t e ' , p p . 43—5. Schelling, Choice and Consequence, p p . 7 - 8 . See also, t h e e n o r m o u s l y influential critiques of welfarism for t h e ' n o n - p o o r ' in J u s t i n le G r a n d , The Strategy of Equality: Redistribution and the Social Services ( L o n d o n , 1982), p a r t 2; a n d R o b e r t E . G o o d i n a n d

Justin le Grand et al., Not Only the Poor: The Middle Classes and the Welfare State 26

( L o n d o n , 1987), e s p . c h s . 2, 5, 7, 8 a n d 10. T h o u g h it m i g h t b e typically bad; t h e a r g u m e n t , essentially, in R a l p h Segalman, The

Swiss Way of Welfare: Lessons for the Western World (New York, 1986), esp. chs. 2 and 3; and for the supposedly peculiar, and admirable, case of Japan, see Arthur Gould, Capitalist Welfare States: A Comparison of Japan, Britain and Sweden (London, 1993), part 1. 27

O n t h e n o t i o n of 'welfare d e p e n d e n c y ' , see e s p . Charles M u r r a y , Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1950-1980 ( N e w York, 1984), p p . 1 8 - 2 2 , 3 6 - ^ 0 , 1 5 0 - ^ , 2 2 7 - 3 5 ;

and Lawrence M. Mead, Beyond Entitlement: The Social Obligations of Citizenship (New York, 1986), pp. 19-20, 40-5; for a debate, in the British context, Charles Murray, Frank Field, Joan C. Brown, Alan Walker and Nicholas Deakin, The Emerging British Underclass (London, 1990), passim. For a wholesale rejection of the idea, see Hartley Dean and Peter Taylor-Goodby, Dependency Culture: The Explosion of a Myth (London, 1992), passim.

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did not always even seem wholly good, took hold quite widely during that decade.28 Certainly, it explains the increasing hold which various (often half-baked) notions of welfare efficiency, whether of seeking better value for money or of more careful targeting of putative benefits or even of more exact policing of public provision, exerted over all three of the major British political parties from the 1980s. It also furnishes a more convincing context for the substitution of entrepreneurial for idealistic means of provision, along with the intrusion of more strictly technical, into once ethical, standards about who might properly be provided for. No longer a self-confidently good state providing for a self-evidently good people, the welfare state is being gradually transformed into a purpose-made bureaucracy tending to the contingent circumstances of the changing labour force. True, many of the changes to date have been as much rhetorical as substantial in this respect. On the other hand, there is every reason to believe that any reversals, under a future Labour government for instance, will be more superficial still. The dye of the real dynamic, it seems, is cast.29 It is often difficult to see how it could have been otherwise. For the British state is today quite self-consciously and increasingly less of a good state. That is, it has become less and less of a state which publicly sustains any explicit, coherent and integrated notion of the good in British society. This is not to say that the British state today professes no notion of the good life. It does. It can be derived, albeit now with some considerable difficulty, from a careful reading of its many political, ecclesiastical, legal, even educational and other charitable functions. It is to argue that such a notion has become increasingly blurred. And it has also become obvious that the penalties which the state is prepared to exact from its subjects for any individual failure to follow its implied norms, over almost the whole spectrum of life, from birth through marriage, family, sexual and moral (also religious) habits - even up to death - are fast diminishing; so too, the rewards for conformity. In effect, the choice of British subjects to behave as they wish, subject to 28

29

T h i s process has been acknowledged by some of those who most strongly disapprove of it. See, inter alia, Michael Sullivan, The Politics of Social Policy (Hemel H e m p s t e a d , 1992), chs. 5 a n d 6. N o r was it confined to Britain at this time; see M a r y S. G o r d o n , Social Security Policies in Industrial Countries: A Comparative Analysis (Cambridge, 1988), ch. 16. A s u m m a r y of the limited results is offered in Julian le G r a n d , ' T h e State of Welfare', in J o h n Harris (ed.), The State of Welfare: The Welfare State in Britain since 1974 (Oxford, 1990), p p . 338-60. F o r some of the political a n d other reasons for inertia, see A n t h o n y Seldon, 'Conservative C e n t u r y ' , in A n t h o n y Seldon a n d Stuart Ball (eds.), Conservative Century: The Conservative Party since 1900 (Oxford, 1994), p p . 17-65, at p. 60; also G o u l d , Capitalist Welfare States, ch. 9. O n t h e limited possibilities for real reversal, see D a v i d M a r q u a n d , The Progressive Dilemma ( L o n d o n , 1991), ch. 16.

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the laws of economic exchange and social development, has increased. And, more strikingly still, the willingness of the British state to define precisely what are the proper parameters of these choices has significantly declined. Ironically, even in those areas of life where the state has increasingly intervened to impose its own vision of the good life upon its subjects - notably in the pursuit of ethnic and sexual equality it has done so through mechanisms which have specifically bypassed its ancient institutions, parliament excepted, and in a way which has added little, if any, lustre to its traditional forms.30 It might be argued that none could have been added in this way. For perhaps those 'historical forms' are part of the problem itself. Certainly it is the case that the British constitution retains a unitary structure in the face of profound, national division.31 Equally, it maintains a formally aristocratic polity within an increasingly democratic culture.32 And last, but not least, it supports an Established Church within an increasingly multi-religious society.33 These are anomalies. It would also be easy to argue, though possibly very difficult to prove, that they contribute towards a common sense of a state without either an explicit or a sustainable ethical foundation.34 It would be more to the point to conclude that, even to the degree to which they continue to win public affection and collective respect, they must necessarily do so more as a 30

31

32

33

34

I n fairness, they may n o t have been designed with this e n d in m i n d ; indeed, in so far as they were designed to p r o m o t e t h e moral neutrality of the state in such matters, at least as they pertain to t h e good life, it may b e argued that they were designed contrary to this end. T h i s was generally u n d e r s t o o d to have been a n important aspect of the 'delegitimation' of the British state in t h e mid-1970s; see, eg., Jack Brand, ' F r o m Scotland with L o v e ' , and M i l t o n J. E s m o n , 'Erosion of t h e P e r i p h e r y ' , in Isaac K r a m n i c k (ed.), Is Britain Dying? (Ithaca a n d L o n d o n , 1980), p p . 169-99. A n d , for t h e continuing problem, see Michael Keating, 'Regionalism, Devolution a n d t h e State', in Patricia L . Garside a n d Michael H i b b e r t (eds.), British Regionalism, 1900-2000 ( L o n d o n , 1989), p p . 158-72; also Garside and Hibbert (eds.), State and Regional Nationalism: Territorial Politics and the European State (Hemel H e m p s t e a d , 1988), esp. p p . 174-200. The Labour Party is currently pledged to end the voting rights of hereditary peers. Such a commitment has been tried, and failed, before. See Janet Morgan, The House of Lords and the Labour Government, 1964-70 (Oxford, 1975), chs. 7 and 8. T h o u g h this has never been otherwise, a n d it is altogether m o r e u n p o p u l a r with avowed secularists t h a n t h e excluded faithful. F o r a brief history of establishment, see Peter Hinchcliff, ' C h u r c h - s t a t e Relations', in Stephen Sykes a n d J o h n Booty (eds.), The Study of Anglicanism ( L o n d o n , 1988), p p . 3 5 1 - 6 3 ; a n d for continuing, non-Anglican support of Anglican establishment, see J o n a t h a n Sacks, The Persistence of Faith: Religion, Morality and Society in a Secular Age (London, 1991), pp. 97-8; also Tariq M o d o o d , 'Establishment, Multiculturalism, a n d British Citizenship', Political Quarterly, 65 (1994), 5 3 - 7 3 , esp. p p . 67ff. Hence, presumably, the point of organisations such as Charter 88. For a recent, and important, consideration of some of these issues, see Ferdinand Mount, The British Constitution Now (London, 1992), esp. chs. 3 and 4.

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function of the customary 'dignity' their historical connotations possess than of the moral 'efficiency' which their continued existence guarantees. Whatever the case, the moral authority of the British state actually does seem to have declined since the war. It is not a reactionary illusion, for instance, to insist that lawlessness has increased. By any sensible measure it has.35 Nor is it mindless nostalgia to observe that its functionaries are not accorded the deference they once took to be their due. Quite simply, they are not.36 For good or ill, the British state is less frequently obeyed and more widely criticised by its subjects than ever before. Rising material expectations have met diminishing spiritual indulgence and forged a contemporary state from which many demand much, but to which relatively few permit unfettered authority. To be sure, that decline is not necessarily traceable to the slow abdication of the state from a coherent defence of an identifiable good life. Certainly, we cannot presume that there was any causal link between the former and the latter. Yet, at the same time, it would be merely fanciful to conclude that there has been no connection between the two. For the liberalisation of the state in our time has rarely, if ever, been wrought through the conscious replacement of one notion of the good by another. More usually it has been achieved through a successful appeal to 'changing social attitudes' or the like, whether or not such manners and mores have actually changed at all. In doing so, it has rendered the state ever vulnerable to those (real or imagined) changes; never fully representing them, always in all probability either behind or ahead of them, possessed - in effect neither by its own ideal nor of a common consensus. It is precisely because its moral vulnerability matches its material insecurity that the British state is so beleaguered in our time. And it is that sense of crisis that points, most surely, to its probable future development. Let us call this the regime of managed, and selective, withdrawal. There is no reason to believe that this will be spectacular. The growth of the state during the twentieth century has rarely, if ever, been spectacular. Nor have its various retreats.37 But there is 35

36

37

T e r e n c e M o r r i s , Crime and Criminal Justice since 1945 (Oxford, 1989), ch. 7, see esp. p p . 9 1 , 96, 104. T h o u g h this m a y b e a n aspect of progressive contemporary egalitarianism, rather than assumed contemporary decline. See William J. G o o d e , The Celebration of Heroes: Prestige in a Social Control System (Berkeley, 1978), ch. 14; Samuel H . Beer, Britain Against Itself: The Political Contradictions of Collectivism ( N e w York, 1982), ch. 4. Public attitudes to politicians actually remain surprisingly sanguine; for t h e evidence, see Peter Riddell, Honest Opportunism ( L o n d o n , 1993), p . 277. F o r the 'progressiveness' of government growth see Greenleaf, The Rise of Collectivism,

pp. 31-42.

Past development and future prospects of the state

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every reason to believe that it will be dictated much more by that multifaceted sense of institutional vulnerability than it will driven either by 'new' libertarian doctrine, or indeed by any revived collectivist dogma. This is not to say that such vulnerability and its necessary alleviation will be any more the product of political consensus as, in truth, was the earlier development of the state. But it is to say that common exhaustion, fear and indifference now increasingly point in much the same way. To a considerable extent, they already have done so. For instance, the much-fabled privatisation of large parts of the public productive sector can be interpreted in many ways: as a genuine attempt to halt the economic decline of Britain by the re-establishment of entrepreneurial imperatives into its critical manufacturing sectors; as a related, but rather ambitious attempt to break trades union monopoly power in large tranches of the British economy, reintroducing the laws of supply and demand into once protected niches of British social life; or as a much less bold and impressive attempt by government to abstract itself, its resources and its authority from huge swathes of British economic, social and political life in which it had, during forty years or more, achieved relatively little, lost much, and stood in danger of ceding still more of its international credibility and local prestige. None of these explanations is mutually exclusive. But we tend to the last version.38 Similarly, the recently heralded citizens' charters, supposedly examples of state-sponsored standards infieldsof life (especially but not exclusively that of welfare services) where the public monopoly provision has all but universally been ceded, are just as credibly - we think more credibly - interpreted as examples of the British state seeking to define, thereby to limit, the full extent of its responsibilities in relation to the citizen. This is not to accuse its architects of bad faith. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that such responsibilities should be defined and limited. Part of the problem of the British state in recent years has stemmed from the fact that they were not. And much of the moral and political crisis which has wracked its welfarist arm is traceable to recent practices of establishing those limits through specific resource allocation rather than by prescriptive definition. Charters, even rather mean charters, which define these limits more by long-standing 38

For a suggestion that the roots of this loss of confidence might be related to the retreat from empire, see K. O. Morgan, 'The Rise and Fall of Public Ownership in Britain', in J. M. W. Bean (ed.), The Political Culture of Modern Britain: Studies in Memory of Stephen Koss (London, 1987), esp. pp. 294-5.

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civil standards than through annual budgetary distribution might well be an improvement in this.39 Ironically, that kind of state, that is, a state seeking to define and limit its economic and social responsibilities, would also be better adjusted to its, slowly emerging, pluralist moral form. For the essence of a moral pluralism which is not simply moral anarchy is institutional limitation: a drawing-up of the boundaries of legitimate interference, of the definition of areas of life, spiritual as well as material, into which government will simply not intrude, either because it literally cannot, or more likely because it is generally perceived that it should not; most probable of all, because of a mixture of the two. Such a state would not necessarily be a small state. Indeed, there is every likelihood that as a continuing provider of so many legal, social and welfare services it would continue to be a very large state. But it would be a less ambitious one. Some will find this an implicitly ideological and, correspondingly, an ideologically unacceptable conclusion. They will argue that the state in Britain has been an instrument of social emancipation (most notably of the elderly, the infirm and the unemployed) and that, simply given the political will, it could become the mechanism of, for instance, still greater ethnic and gender equality too. In this way, it could strike down inequalities that have remained in British society up to the present date. To argue that it will not in fact do so in the future is tantamount to asserting that it should not do so, which is no more than to engage in partisan politics under the pretence of historical analysis. Still worse, for being still more historically inept, it is to mistake current government policy for readily conceivable political change. Yet this accusation is surely, in turn, to confuse particular political aspirations for a general re-evaluation of proper administrative capabilities. To be sure, the issue of exactly what sorts of legal and social initiatives are required to establish the legitimate rights of ethnic minorities or the female half of the population is, irreducibly, a political question. Hence the answers too will be political. And they will differ from interpreter to interpreter. Some will call for much more state activity in these specific (if not necessarily in any other) areas. Some will call for less. But, and this is the point, none will successfully demand a wholly planned economy, a limitlessly managed society, and a precisely ordered moral community. At least, in so far as they do, they will almost certainly fail. And that, we believe, is not to make a partisan political prognosis under the pretence of historical analysis. For it is historical analysis, 39

For two different perspectives on this question, see Clive Bone, Achieving Value for Money in Local Government: Meeting the Charter's Challenge (London, 1992), passim,

and Madsen Pirie, The Citizen's Charter (London, 1991), passim.

Past development and future prospects of the state

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above all, which demonstrates how the British state grew in the twentieth century, what that growth entailed and why, during our own lifetimes, that growth produced a peculiarly vulnerable central authority and a notably unsatisfied general public. It is also historical analysis, much more than ideological commitment (one way or the other), which suggests that this institution, motivated as much by the thought of its own survival as by the doctrinal colouring of the party in power, has already reduced and will go on in the future seeking to reduce the areas of its own vulnerability. And finally it is historical analysis again which suggests precisely where those areas will be: at the points at which administrative temptation and public expectation meet; in major industries, the most significant social services, around the most symbolically important moral exemplars in our culture. Put rather cynically, any 'partnership' which the state chooses to contract with the people under any future administration is likely to be couched in terms which make it a good deal less likely that the state will emerge further diminished by the encounter. And this means fewer commitments - however defined and not more. This is not to say that any particular change is predictable. To take just one instance, it is entirely conceivable that, some time during the next fifty years, the Church of England will finally be disestablished. It is also entirely conceivable that it will remain the Established Church of the land. The peculiar convergences of particular political imperatives will determine its fate, one way or the other, and in the short term. It is to argue that the pace and direction of such change, conceived generally, has been marked during the last generation. The pace will surely be slow, if for no other reason than the incontrovertible (surely uncontroversial) fact that the state has involved itself in no aspect of British life during the twentieth century from which it would be particularly easy, still less expeditious, to extract itself (an argument which, ironically, applies with the greatest of force to the example of the Church of England). And the direction will be towards that degree of definition which allows for limitation, if only because we now know definitively - that the state cannot satisfy every expectation its potential or actual involvement in a complex economy, society, or even system of moralities, inevitably involves. Again, this is not to say that there will be a 'rolling back of the state' in Britain in the near future. For what it is worth, our opinion is that this will not happen. More: that it will not happen regardless of which of the major parties happens to be in power during the next few years. One reason for this is the simple unpredictability of political will. Such unpredictability affects all governments, even those blessed with a

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combination of the accepted weakening of the state in its traditional domain, general support for economic and political liberalism, and the opportunity provided by electoral success. The limits to withdrawal of the state are located at both ends of the spectrum. They are to do with the recent political experience of the state on the one hand, and with the 'empowerment' of individuals on the other. To take the first: while it is true to say that there has been a continuing sense of hostility to the state in twentieth-century Britain, it is equally important to recognise the very specific events which gave the re-statement of political and economic liberty its opportunity. The Thatcher years were prefaced, so we are often told, by the work of think-tanks and the like, many of which have been operating from the later 1960s. But what gave them their opening was not a long-term build-up of pressure but a rather more immediate crisis over the funding of public debt in the mid-1970s and difficulties with public sector unions.40 As has been acutely observed, there was, in fact, a close similarity between the containment of the state in the early 1920s and the same 'project' at the end of the 1970s, based on fears of inflation.41 Successful deflation required the state to bear down on the power of interest groups, and especially, but not exclusively, that of the trade unions. But the state did not withdraw from economic life in any general sense. On the contrary, it remained a guardian of certain interests. More: it became their guardian once again.'Insider' accounts show how particular middle-class interests had to be protected in the Thatcher period from the full logic of private responsibility and economic liberalism.42 As if to illustrate the untidiness of the state's role in particular conditions, Mrs Thatcher's successors have actually been less respectful of middle-class concerns since 1990, yet have replaced that seeming negligence with an interest in moral issues and wider institutional concerns which has itself been supportive of a continuing role for the state, and indeed its extension into areas which it had apparently vacated in earlier periods. Anxieties about the fragility of society which previously concentrated on unemployment now seem to be switching to moral and behavioural issues rather than being displaced altogether. 40

41 42

O n t h e ' t h i n k - t a n k s ' , a n d t h e i r intellectual l a b o u r s , see R i c h a r d Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, 1931-1983 (London, 1994), esp. chs. 5—8; on the debt crisis, see Keith Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State,vol III, The End ofthe Post-War Era, Britain since 1974 (Basingstoke, 1991), ch. 5. A n insider's a c c o u n t is p r o v i d e d b y E d m u n d D e l l , A Hard Pounding: Politics and Economic Crisis 1974-76 (Oxford, 1991), esp. p a r t 4. J i m T o m l i n s o n , Public Policy and the Economy since 1900 (Oxford, 1990), p . 3 3 1 . Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London, 1993),

pp. 667-8,819-21.

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Current Conservatism appears unable to emulate the outwardly nerveless touch of Peel in the far greater moral crisis of the 1840s, where the competence of the state was the touchstone of where to act and where not to. And so while the loss of authority of governing institutions may be the reason why the state should be more limited in its expectations, the anxieties which this very development induces actually encourages politicians to be more assertive about its role. This has had some bizarre results. Take the example of education. The effect of the removal of some intermediate layers of administration and authority has been to increase the role not only of individuals but also of the state. School governors have far greater powers and responsibilities than they possessed formerly, but some have been struck by an ambiguity of purpose. Are they there to support a local school, the direction and ethos of which have been established over many years, or are they allies of the state in curbing an educational establishment out of touch with popular feeling? Certainly, the responsibilities of governors to ensure that the national curriculum is carried out and that religious education is provided suggests that the intention is the latter, but in practice the former has had a countervailing influence. Precisely because the state wishes to intervene in many areas of education, individuals are given more responsibility simply as citizens, but whether this can be interpreted as greater freedom is quite another matter.43 In other, similar circumstances - given the greater responsibilities facing individuals - the state may also find that it has little choice but to maintain a level of activity even though its nature has changed. Pensions may prove to be a good example here. As both large companies and the state find traditional pension provision increasingly burdensome, so individuals may have to take greater responsibility for their own arrangements, or may choose to do so. While some may be able to turn to employment organisations - especially trade unions - to help in the negotiations with the private sector and the oversight of pension funds, others will not have the same opportunity. But how far the state will wish to envisage the possibility of real failures in decisions which are of long-term significance and are potentially irretrievable, is questionable. It may be that the state will in future actually help people not so much because it does things for them, but because it provides very powerful regulatory powers and abilities to make sure that individuals are not let down by the private sector. Thus it might move from nanny state to the night-watchman state less through a single diminution of effort than by emphasis on the different kind, rather than 43

'You Join to Help, Not to Sack Teachers', The Independent, 19 May 1994, p. 34.

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different level of activity, namely from executive to regulatory functions. In that way, the development towards increasing regulation may actually be desirable. For through it, the state might in fact secure the conditions for greater individual decision-making. In the present jargon, it might bring about the 'empowerment' of the individual, At its most desirable, this would mean some degree of freedom from the state, rather than the exertion merely of 'consumer' pressure upon it. The latter has had limited value, and is very often a way of the state limiting its obligations. Empowerment of the 'exit' variety is a genuine expression of freedom, which might be welcomed equally by right and left. Two conditions would seem necessary to exercise this choice and discretion: real resources at private disposal, widely distributed among the population; and perceived low taxation. 'Perceived low taxation' is hard to define; views in the past that taxation should only take a certain percentage of national income cannot be used as reliable guides, since the tolerance of tax levels is so variable across time. It may be simpler to connect taxation to the levels of prosperity required for a market society to function successfully. Absolute levels of income are clearly significant for determining the degree to which people suffer frustration from being unable to fulfil the functions of provision and choice asked of them. An historically low-growth economy like Britain's may generate problems in this respect. Apart from the halcyon periods of the 1950s and 1980s, there have been few occasions since 1945 when a sense of prosperity was broadly diffused. Without this condition it is hard for governments to sustain 'low perceived taxation'. Once taxation becomes controversial so the services which governments provide come under scrutiny, which makes 'rolling back' all the harder.44 But 'empowerment' need not only rest upon the general conditions of economic prosperity and low taxation which characterise a successful market society. It also requires individuals to have capital resources which they can call their own. This is the counterpart, at the individual level, of proposals to give certain state-dependent organisations their own capital endowment, as a condition of independence and responsibility. It is seen as the only way of giving certain groups independence from the state, yet accountability to the individual, who becomes a fee-paying user of the service. It has been associated particularly with the aim of giving universities necessary freedom yet a measure of 44

For the degree to which tax grievances also express more general political discontent, and the connection between taxation and services, see B. Guy Peters, The Politics of Taxation (Oxford, 1991), pp. 55-6, 188ff.

Past development and future prospects of the state

395

accountability which an 'arms-length' public body could not achieve.45 For individuals this may seem a far-fetched idea, yet a genuine prospect for it lies in the near future. As the extension of home ownership is converted into inheritances in the near future, many individuals will acquire real resources of their own for the first time, which will give them command over a wide variety of 'goods'. But will the state tolerate this, without trying to take its share, as it always has, at the time of death, when property rights in peacetime are at their most contingent? Death duty or inheritance taxation has hitherto been weak in its effectiveness, but the temptation of a much larger number of inheritances providing the opportunity to broaden the tax base from its politically sensitive areas of income tax and VAT might be too great to resist. Moreover, there is the fear of inflation. Britain's inflation, whether high or low in its own terms, has always been in the upper reaches of international bands. The very real freedom to consume out of capital at a time of one's own choosing is one which a state in conditions of inflationary pressure might fight hard to tolerate even though the methods by which it is contained may vary. The longer Britain remains an economy in which the aspirations to consume outrun the productive resources to meet them, the more these constraints may continue to operate. In other words, at the moment when the population begins to see itself as being on the threshold of 'freedom' of a genuine kind, so the state, in the hands of either the left or the right, might be caught at its most squeamish. All this is only to say that, even as the state's role is much modified under pressure of its own shortcomings, political debate will still reign. There is no reason to expect any consistency of approach either. Some initiatives, like Post Office privatisation, have been resisted. Others, like the break-up of the nationalised railway, may be reversed. On the other hand it will not be possible to assume that certain functions, because they seem to have been so fundamental to the role of the state for so long, shall remain unchanged. Some of the most recent examples of the 'rolling back' of the state have been unlikely enough. Few would have suspected the privatisation of prisons ten years ago. Others, soon to be recommended in a Home Office Review will appear more remarkable still: forensic work, the summoning of defendants, the executing of warrants, custodianship of criminal records, licensing functions, deportation, the policing of public events and the provision of crime preven45

Elie Kedourie, Diamonds into Glass, Centre for Policy Studies Paper no. 87 (London, 1988), pp. 30-1. For the idea of a 'national bounty', namely a lump sum payment to each individual, see Cedric Sandford, Economics of Public Finance, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1984), pp. 361-2.

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tion advice.46 They point to a state relatively undeterred by the diminution in its moral authority and yet desperately concerned to fulfil its public duties at minimal social cost. And this hints at an ethical order in which the fact that a task is fulfilled has become more important than the identity of the actors who are fulfilling it. As such, it cannot be entirely inappropriate to see them as a perfect example of the subtly but significantly changing boundaries of the state in modern Britain. 46

David Selbourne, 'Citizens Must Protect the Civic Order', The Times, 11 August 1994, p. 14.

Index

accountability, 82, 84 Acts of Parliament Abortion Act (1967), 371 Defence of the Realm Acts (1914), 282-3, 286 Divorce Act (1967), 370 Education Acts: (1902), 237, 329; (1918), 237; (1944), 238^10, 303, 327; (1980), 254; (1986), 236; (1988), 237, 327 Homicide Act (1957), 341, 365, 370, 373 Justice Act (1988), 324 Maternity and Infant Welfare Act (1918), 222 National Assistance Act (1948), 195 Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Acts (1978), 292 Prevention of Terrorism Act (1974), 290, 291-2 Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (1920), 288 Toleration Acts (1688), 327 Addison, Christopher, 230 agendas of government, 73-4, 82 Aid to Families with Dependent Children, 209 Aircraft Production, Ministry of, 180 Allen, Sir Douglas, 185 Allen, Maurice, 174 Anti-State Church Association, 39 Army Bills, 349-51 Army Council, 348-51 Arnold, Matthew, 257 Arnold, Thomas, 31 Ashley, William J., 176 Attlee, Clement, 358 Austin, John, 36, 37, 41, 42 authoritarian individualism, 60, 62, 65-7

Brownlie, Ian: Law of Public Order and National Security (1981), 279

Bacon, R. (and Eltis, W.), 90, 139, 140-1 Baker, Kenneth, 233-4, 256-7 Baldwin, Stanley, 55, 153, 310 n.49 Our England (1926), 266

Buchan, John, 29, 51 Buddhism, 314, 337 Burke, Edmund, 33 Burt, Cyril, 238, 239, 242 Butler, R. A., 60, 231, 303

Ballard, P. B., 238 Bank of England, 174, 187 Banks, Olive, 244 Barker, Sir Ernest, 22, 50 Baumol, W. J., 134 Beatles, the (and Buddhism), 314 Bell, Lady, 236 Bernstein, Basil, 244 Bevan, Aneurin, 63, 218-19, 228 In Place of Fear, 63

Beveridge, William, 21, 194-6, 203, 210, 227, 377 Report, 193-4 Bevin, Ernest, 178 n. 26, 196 Birdwood, George, 237-8 Black and Tans, 288 Black Papers, 249-51 Blackadder (1989), 275

Blackstone, Sir William, 32-3 blasphemy, 321, 326-7 Booth, Charles (and Rowntree), 235 Bosanquet, Bernard, 18, 23, 51 Philosophical Theory of the State (1899), 51 Botz, Gerhard, 280, 289 boycott, 286 Boyle, Sir Edward, 250 Boyson, Rhodes, 249-50, 254 Bridges, Sir Edward, 172, 186 British Broadcasting Corporation, 173 British Medical Association, 216-18, 229-30 British Overseas Aircraft Corporation, 173 Brittain, Sir Herbert, 186 Brittan, Sam, 185

397

398

Index

and Butskellism, 55, 380 Caird, Edward, 42 Callaghan, James, 252-4 Campbell, Janet, 223, 226 capital formation, 96, 100, 118 capital punishment, 341-74 abolition in other countries, 369 categories of murder, 365 deterrence, 353, 362, 364-5 dominion soldiers, 345—6 executions, 342-3, 352-3 ratios (USA), 356 views on (and military title), 357-9, 363-4 Carlyle, Thomas, 33 Castle, Barbara, 23 Central Economic Planning Staff, 180 Central Electricity Board, 173 Central Policy Review Staff, 248, 254 Centre for Policy Studies, 248 Chamberlain, Neville, 152, 179 Chapman, Sydney, 176 Charity Organisation Society, 192 Christadelphians, 333, 334 Christian Scientists, 335 Christian Socialism, 197-8 Christianity, 201, 327 Chrystal, K. (and Alt, P.), 127 Church of England, the Anglicanism, 36, 55, 313-14, 316, 340 Book of Common Prayer, 316, 318, 329 Changing Britain: Social Diversity and

Moral Unity (1987), 323 Church Assembly, 317 Convocation, 317 decline, 299-308, 314 dissociation from society, 330 ecclesiastical establishment, 299-324 education, 233, 321, 327-8 erastianism, 35, 39, 55, 325 Faith in the City (1985), 330

Church of Scientology, 337-8, 339 Churchill, Winston, 44, 55, 58, 175, 177, 232, 363

citizens' charters, 389 citizenship, 68-9 City, the, 171, 174, 179-80 City Technology Colleges, 257 civil service, 172, 185 Clark, Colin, 125, 139 Clark, Jonathan, 61 Clay, Sir Henry, 174 Cole, G. D. H., 20, 176, 179 Coleridge, Samuel, 34, 38 Collingwood, R. G., 15, 22

comprehensive schools, 247, 250 Confederation of British Industry, 171, 187 Conservative governments, 134; (1924—9), 350; (in National government of 1930s), 173; (1951-64), 111; (since 1979), 143, 145, 203 Party, 23, 141, 185, 250, 255, 343, 349, 357-8, 368

see also Thatcher, Margaret constitutionalism, 75 consultants (medical), 219 Consultative Council on General Health Questions, 225 counter-insurgency, 289 courts martial, 345, 348-9, 353-4 Cox, Brian (and Dyson, A. E.)} 249 Cripps, Stafford, 148, 161, 180 Crosland, Anthony, 27 n. 37, 155, 197, 245 The Future of Socialism (1956), 80

Crossman, Richard, 21, 24 Curragh Mutiny, 284 Custom and Excise, Board of, 171 Dalton, Hugh, 154, 178 n. 26 Principles of Public Finance (1923), 186

Dangerfield, George, 281-2 Darwin, Charles, 32, 38 Davidson, Archbishop Randall, 309 Dawson Report (1920), 219 democracy, 20 democratic collectivism, 61, 64-5 dependency, 191-5, 210-12, 384 Derby, Lord, 347 Dicey, A. V., 63, 64, 65, 66-7, 284-5

Disraeli, Benjamin, 55 dominion (as a dimension of power), 359-60 Donoghue, Bernard, 252-3 Douglas, J. W. B. All Our Future (1968), 247 The Home and the School (1964), 244

Douglas-Home, Sir Alec, 313, 314 Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), 285 Dublin Rising (1916), 287 Durham, Bishop of, 324 Economic Advisory Council, 176 Economic Journal, 171

Economic Section, the (of the Cabinet Office and later of the Treasury), 177 Education, Board of, 231, 232, 234, 237, 238 Reports of the Central Advisory Council

Index Children and their Primary Schools (Plowden, 1967), 245, 249 Early Learning (1954), 244-5 Half Our Future (Newsom, 1963), 245 Higher Education (Robbins, 1963), 245 Reports of the Consultative Committee On the Education of the Adolescent (Hadow, 1926), 239 Of the Mental Deficiency Committee (1929), 239 On the Primary School Child (1931), 231 On Psychological Tests of Educable Capacity (1924), 238 On Secondary Education (Spens, 1938), 239 Education, Department of, 252-3 educational psychologists, 235-9, 242-3 educational sociologists, 243-8 educational theory, 234, 257 eleven-plus, 239^0 Elton, Geoffrey, 281 employment, 84-5 public sector, 117-19 'empowerment', 82, 393-4 Englishness, 262 anti-catholicism, 265 anti-Germanism, 268, 271 anti-Semitism, 264 BBC, 277 Conservative Party, 266 death, 266-7 film,271-2 heroism, 269, 271, 273-4 equality education, 253 war, 262, 269-70 welfare, 198-9 equity efficiency, 137, 143 redistribution, 138 tax, 146-7, 149, 153 eugenics, 240 Europe (and European Community), 7, 65-7, 83

public sector, 101-8, 113-19, 140-5 Exclusive Brethren, 333, 334, 335-7, 339 Family Expenditure Survey, 167 Feinstein, Charles, 94, 97 n. 25, 109 Fichte, J. G., 34 Figgis, J. N., 17,50,52 films Henry V (1942), 274 In Which We Serve (1942), 274 Journey's End (1930), 272-4 Lawrence of Arabia (1962), 274, 275

399 Life and Times of Colonel Blimp (1943), 274-5 Lost Horizon (1937), 274 Tell England (1916), 274 Fisher, Archbishop Geoffrey, 314, 372^ Floud, J. E. (and Halsey, A. H., Martin, F. M.)' Social Class and Educational Opportunity (1956), 244 Forestry Commission, 173 French, Lord, 286, 288 Friedman, Milton, 83, 139, 183-4 Gaitskell, Hugh, 64, 148 n.6, 187 and Butskellism, 55, 380 Garbett, Cyril Foster, 310 Gay News, 326 Glasgow, 308 General Elections: (1906), 329; (1929), 351; (1987), 66 General Household Survey, 167 General Medical Council, 219 general practitioners (GPs), 216-18 genetics, 240-1 Gilbert, Desmond, 186 Godber, George, 215 Godwin, William, 33 and An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), 33 Goodenough Report (1944), 219 Gorer, Geoffrey, 311 Goschen, George, 186 Theory of Foreign Exchanges (1863), 186 Government Economic Service, 177, 178, 187 Graham, Billy, 313 grammar schools, 245-6 Green, David, 211-12 Green, T. H., 17, 18, 42 Greenway, Harry, 250 Gregg, Sir Cornelius, 159 Griffiths, Brian, 256, 257 Hall, Robert, 177, 180, 181 Hapgood, Archbishop John, 323 Harrod, R. F., 147, 177, 183 Hastings, Adrian, 317-19 Hawtrey, Ralph, 171, 177 Hayek, F. A., 22, 36, 43-5, 55, 71, 72, 74-5 The Road to Serfdom (1944), 23, 75 Haynes, E. S. P., 53 Headlam, Cuthbert, 309 Healey, Denis, 156 Health, Ministry of, 215-18, 223-5 Heath, Edward, 43 Hegel, G. W. F., 42, 51

400

Index

Heilbroner, Robert, 73 An Enquiry into the Human Prospect (1974), 73 Henderson, Hubert, 176, 177 Henson, Bishop Henley, 309 Herbert, Auberon, 49-50, 52, 55 Hibbert Journal, 19,22 Hicks, J. R., 160 Hinduism, 337 Hobbes, Thomas, 31, 32, 41, 66-7 Hobhouse, L. T., 20 Hobson,J. A., 17, 19, 150 Hogben, Lancelot, 241 home ownership, 163-4, 395 Home Rule, 284, 285 Hooker, Richard, 319, 325 Hopkin, Sir Bryan, 177 Houghton, Douglas, 147 n. 3, 157, 165 House of Commons, 353, 362-5 House of Lords, 351, 362-5 housing, 191 Hubbard, L. Ron, 339 Hurd, Douglas, 281 Huxley, Julian, 240 idealism, 18, 19, 20, 22-3, 52 Imperial War Graves Commission, 270 individualism, 33, 34, 38-9, 43, 74, 203 industrial conflict, 281-2, 283 inflation, 156, 163, 395 Inland Revenue, Board of, 146 n. 2, 154, 157, 166, 172 Institute of Economic Affairs, 184-5, 202, 248 Institute for Fiscal Studies, 167 Institute for Public Policy Research, 248 intelligence testing, 237, 240-3 Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration (1904), 213, 235-6, 263 interest groups BMA, 216-18, 229-30 women, 220-8 International Journal of Ethics, 19, 22 Irish, 263-5 and Catholicism, 304 and conflict, 281, 283-95 and marginal character, 291 and nationalism, 284 Irish Republican Army (IRA), 280 forms of rebellion, 285-95 Jehovah's Witnesses, 333, 334, 335 Jenkins, Roy: Fair Shares for the Rich (1951), 160 Jevons, W. S.: The State in Relation to Labour (1882), 282

Jewkes, John, 177 Jews, 321, 328 Joseph, Sir Keith, 183, 248, 255-7 Kant, Immanuel, 20, 42 Kay, John, 167 Keynes, J. M., 60, 70-1, 73-5, 81, 150, 154-5, 170-1, 176, 181, 182, 183 'The End of Laissez-Faire' (1926), 60, 73 General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), 182, 186 Tract on Monetary Reform (1923), 181 Keynesianism, 27, 71, 78, 83, 100, 119, 120-2, 136, 172, 175 Keynesians, 183 Kipling, Rudyard, 236 Knox, Sir Alfred, 353 Labour governments, 143; (1924), 154, 350; (1929-31), 176, 361; (1945-51), 165, 167, 194, 361; (1974-9), 122, 134, 145 Party, 148, 150, 157, 161-2, 261 capital punishment, 343, 349, 351, 357-8, 360-1 Laski, Harold, 20, 50, 53-4, 55, 73 Authority in the Modern State (1919), 53 Rise of European Liberalism (1936), 73 law blasphemy, 321, 326 common law, 287, 288, 289, 296 lawlessness, 388 martial, 287 public security, 278-83 sedition, 279 subversion, 279 terrorism, 291-3 Lawson, Nigel, 147 n. 4, 257 Layton, Walter, 176, 179 Leijonhufvud, Axel, 183 Leith-Ross, Frederick, 176 Lester-Smith, W. O.: Education: An Introductory Survey (1957), 233 Liberal Party, 39, 43 capital punishment, 343, 349, 357-8, 360-1 liberalism, 43 economic, 70-86 individual, 73 political, 70 Liberation Society, 309 Liberty and Property Defence League, 48-9 Lindsay, A. D., 22, 50

Index Liverpool, 308 Lloyd George, David, 179, 181, 228, 278, 288,351 Local Education Authorities, 233, 237 Locke, John, 31, 32, 41 Lond, Walter, 286, 288 Longden, Sir Gilbert, 250 Macauley, T. B., 30, 35, 237 MacGregor, Ian, 173 MacDonald, J. R., 20, 179 MacDougall, Donald, 177, 181 Macmillan, Harold, 313 Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry (1931), 172 Madge, Charles, 159-60 Maine, Sir Henry, 41-2 Ancient Law, 41 Malthus, T. R., 181 market, the, 61, 65, 77-8, 81 Marquand, David: The Unprincipled Society (1988), 74 Marshall, T. H., 25, 197 maternal mortality campaign, 226 Maud, Sir John, 237 Mead, Lawrence, 192, 207-9, 211 Beyond Entitlement (1986), 207-9, 212 Meade, James, 154^5, 177, 186 Medium Term Financial Strategy, 184 Miall, Edward, 39-40 Military Force in Aid of the Civil Power (MACP), 293 Mill, John Stuart, 17, 37-8, 46, 181 miners' strike (1926), 309 monetarism, 83, 182^1, 187 Moonies, see Unification Church Moore, John, 191 moral hazard, 105, 383 Morell, Philip, 347 Muirhead, J. H., 19 Mulley, Fred, 253 Murray, Charles, 192, 203-7, 210, 212 Losing Ground (1984), 204-6, 212 Muslims, 320-1, 330-1 Mynors, Humphrey, 174 National Assistance Board, 158, 195 National Blood Transfusion Service, 200 national debt, 119-22, 151-5 National Economic Development Council, 175, 180-1 National Health Insurance (NHI), 213-18, 220, 223-8, 230 National Health Service (NHS), 55, 84, 136, 213-19, 227-30 National Union of Mineworkers, 173

401 National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, 224 National Union of Teachers, 252 nationality, 62, 65-8, 261-77 Nettleship, R. L., 42 New Age groups, 335 New Society, 72 Newman, George, 222 nonconformity, 305-7 Baptists, 306, 314-15 Congregationalists, 306-7, 314-15 Methodists, 305, 314-15, 328, 329 Northcote, G. P. (and Trevelyan), 237 Oakeshott, Michael, 24, 62 organicism, 18-20, 32-3, 51 Orwell, George, 64 The Lion and the Unicorn (1941), 277 'Oxbridge', 18, 248 Oxford University, 269 Palestine, 288-9 Palmer, Randell, 1st Earl of Selburne, 40 Parker, Lord Chief Justice, 367 Parliament, 63-4, 66, 69 patriotism, 261 Peacock, Alan (and Wiseman, Jack), 72, 96,125-6, 127 Pearson, Karl, 236 Penrose, Lionel, 240 pensions, 384, 393 Pethick-Lawrence, Emmeline, 226 Pethick-Lawrence, Frederick, 151 Phillips, Frederick, 181 Pigou, A. C , 17, 19 Plato, 19, 21 Plowden, Edwin, 180 pluralism, 50-2, 67-9, 390 Policy Unit (Downing Street), 252, 254, 256-7

Post Office, 375 poverty, 19-20, 196, 199, 384 Powell, Enoch, 59-60, 61, 318 Priestley, J. B., 277 privatisation, 389 Home Office, 395 post office, 375 prison service, 5, 395 progressive schools, 251 public choice theory, 82, 84 public expenditure, 93, 96-108, 175, 180 administration, 99 convergence of, 107-8 defence, 100, 106, 127, 136 education, 106 Europe, 104-5

402

Index

growth, 132-8 law and order, 99 local government, 101 political determinants of, 125, 134, 136-7 ratios, 96-100, 104, 126-7 social services, 92, 99, 105, 106-8 transfer payments, 96, 99, 104-5, 127 public revenue, 109—17 receipts ratios, 109-11 tax structure, 111-17 expenditure, 112 income, 112-16 capital, 111 puritanism, 307, 311 Quakers, 334 radicalism, 48, 151-3 Ramsay, Archbishop Michael, 314 Rathbone, Eleanor, 223, 225 redistribution, 138, 162 religion civic obligation, 333-4 education, 327-8, 351 fiscal questions, 336, 338 trade unions, 334 welfare, 328-9 Report (Taunton) of the Schools Enquiry Commission (1867), 238 Rhondda, Lady, 225 Ricardo, David, 181 Ritchie, D. G.: The Principles of State Interference (1891), 42 Robbins, Lionel, 23, 76, 177, 182 Robertson, D. H., 176 Robinson, Sir Austin, 158, 177 n. 23, 183 n. 41 Robinson, John, 313 Roman Catholic Church, 304-5, 308, 315, 328, 332 Rousseau, J. J., 19, 20, 42 Royal Commissions on Capital Punishment (1953), 364, 373 on Health Insurance (1926), 224 on the Poor Law (1905), 211, 214 on Secondary Education (1893-5), 238 Royal Irish Constabulary, 285, 288 Royal Ulster Constabulary, 294-5 Ruskin, John, 33 Russell, Bertrand, 21 Salisbury, 3rd Marquess of, 40, 45, 46, 49, 55,62 Scotland, 66, 68, 300, 306

Select Committee on Capital Punishment (1931), 361 Shaw, George Bernard, 58-9 Shaw, Thomas, 351 Sheriff, R. C , 272-4 Shonfield, Andrew, 185 Sidgwick, Henry, 36, 46 n. 50 Sikhs, 336 Simon, Brian, 242 Intelligence Testing and the Comprehensive School (1953), 242 Simon, Sir John, 281 Simpson, James Hope, 179 single mothers, 191, 205, 385 Sinn Fein, 286, 288 Smith, Adam, 75, 84, 181 Adam Smith Institute, 248 social biology, 241 social sciences, 18-19, 25-7, 75, 152, 198 Social Service Review, 19 Sociological Review, 19 Solihull Parents for Educational Equality, 255 Soper, Donald, 311 sovereignty, 62-3, 67-9 Spencer, F. H., 232 Spencer, Herbert, 17, 38-9, 43, 47, 53 Spender, Stephen, 23 Stamp, Josiah, 176, 179-80 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 41 n. 36, 281 Strachey, Ray, 226 suffragettes, 281-2, 283 Supplementary Benefits Commission, 202 Swinton Journal, 250 Tawney, R. H. Christianity, 20, 198, 201, 310 Church of England, 308-9 education, 232-3, 235 political thought, 68-9, 161-2 unemployment, 196 taxation administration, 146-7, 156-7 avoidance, 149, 167-9 capital levy, 120, 151-5, 160 class, 158 inheritance tax, 157 Pay-As-You-Earn, 123, 164-8 post-war credits, 159-61 Special Contribution (1948), 148, 161 Technical and Vocational Education Initiative, 254 Temple, Archbishop William, 196, 210 Tennant, May, 223 Thatcher, Margaret, 45, 57, 73, 81, 173, 261

Index anti-establishment rhetoric of, 69 Centre for Policy Studies, 248 Conservative Party, 66 education, 254—7 European Community, 67 Falklands War, 64, 261 F. A. Hayek, 35, 43, 55 the individual, 81 the state, 62 Thatcherism, 29, 248, 375 Thomson, Geoffrey, 238 Thurtle, Ernest, 351, 353, 357 Titmuss, Richard, 19, 25-6, 192, 193, 209-11 The Gift Relationship (1970), 200-1 the Titmuss tradition, 197-203 Tomlinson, George, 237 Trade and Industry, Department of, 174 trade unions, 233, 389, 393 Transport and General Workers Union, 76 Treasury, 150, 154, 176-7, 181, 182, 186, 187, 216, 229 Tropp, Asher, 244 Tuckwell, Gertrude, 223 Ulster Defence Regiment, 294-5 Ulster Unionism, 284-5 Ulster Volunteer Force, 284 unemployment, 106, 195-6, 203, 204 Unification Church, 336, 337, 338 United States, 134, 137, 200 capital punishment, 355-1, 369-70 religion, 300, 333 welfare, 204-10 universities, 18 Urwick, Edward, 18-19 Value Added Tax, 147 n. 3, 168-9 Vernon, Philip, 243 Wagner, Adolph, 71, 126-7, 132 Wales, 300, 304, 306 Walkden,A. G., 151 Wallas, Graham, 51 war, 71-3, 120, 125, 132 Boer, 96, 97, 99, 105, 125, 235, 287, 345 Chinese, 120 Falklands, 56, 64-5 First World, 71-3, 99, 105, 111, 119, 123, 127, 149, 154, 163, 174, 261-77, 283, 285, 305, 343, 354, 368

403 Gulf, 120 Korean, 96, 125, 136 Napoleonic, 119 Second World, 96, 100, 107, 111, 119, 121, 127, 136, 149, 154, 158, 163, 174,283,310,351,368,382 Vietnam, 76 war cabinet, 346-7 war novels, 271 war poets, 270-1 Ward, Dudley, 179 Ward,J. W. C , 310-11 Ward, Colonel Lambert, 348 Webbs, 17, 219 Beatrice, 192 Sydney, 61, 236 Weinstock, Arnold, 251 Weldon, T. A., 22 welfare state, 25, 27, 227, 383-5 'classic', 193-6 in USA, 204-10 mothers and married women, 227-8 provision, 191 Wemyss, Earl of, 48-9, 50 Whig imperialism, 60, 62, 64 Whitehouse, Mary, 326 Wildavsky, A., 132, 137 Wilkinson, Paul, 289-90 Willetts, David, 211 Wilson, Harold, 73, 76, 122, 168, 178, 187, 249 Wilson, John Dover, 234 Wilson, Tom, 177 Winkler, J. T., 73 women boards of guardians, 221 health, 220-8 local councillors, 221-2 maternal mortality, 223-7 MPs, 225-6 'new feminism', 223-7 Women's Co-operative Guild, 222, 224, 225 Women's Freedom League, 224, 225 Women's Labour League, 222 x-inefficiency, 135 Young, Hilton, 178, 237 Zimmern, Alfred, 29