Managerialism Is Incapacitating Good Government In The UK

The UK awoke this week to news stories of demonstrations and agitation in the capital alongside a review of the overrunning and overspending on the HS2 rail project. These seemingly disparate stories tell another story, however, when linked together. 

In part, the reason we have creaking sclerotic bureaucracy capable of blowing £100bn on – well, it is hard to say what exactly is being delivered in return – is the same reason extremist groups are able to galvanise large numbers of the population around narratives that the government does not serve the people of the UK. 

This disease of government is managerialism, the organisational and corporate culture that privileges not experience or merit in the running of an area of government, but slick generalists that are operationally naïve in the relevant area. These Pied Pipers float from institution to institution, having no special ability but preying on under-resourced departments desperate to demonstrate strong performance. 

Managerialism promises results by alienating internal policy-creation, target-setting, and result-reporting from other groups of professionals and technicians in their arena, and then gatekeeping these functions within the organisation. Outcomes can then be managed, predicted, and presented by the managerial class much more flatteringly, atomised and taxonomised into targets, indicators, and one-dimensional proxies. 

Treating the real world as a complex of reducible metrics capable of being externally ‘managed’ allows for all manner of data massaging. Fetishising parsimonious interpretations of the work of government erases detail from the picture and divorces the bureaucracy from lived reality. Yet managerialists remain able to justify their existence so long as they can sustain their constructs of spurious quantitative apologia. 

As a socio-economic phenomenon, the managerial class has its germ in the separation of ownership from management that came with the growth of publicly traded companies in the early twentieth century. Eventually, the increasingly technical nature of production threatened to shift control within companies from capitalist owners to technical workers, but this coincided with a growing class of educated and unskilled operatives looking to said captains of industry for positions to accord themselves status and money. 

Keen-eyed satirists found good source material in such characters; in Wodehouse’s 1947 Full Moon, for example, Lord Emsworth’s son, Freddie – who had in his father’s eyes, “just about enough intelligence to open his mouth when he wanted to eat, but certainly no more” – has to everybody’s surprise taken on the air of a go-getter thanks to being handed a management position by his father-in-law in his firm in the USA. Wodehouse got the measure of the managerial type in the following dialogue between Freddie and his old friend Prudence:

‘…Do you mean to say you really are a success in business, Freddie?’

‘Well, considering the big chief has entrusted me with the task of gingering up the English branch, I must be fairly… Well, figure it out for yourself.’

‘And you had no previous experience.’

‘None. It just seemed to come to me like a flash.’

Prudence drew in her breath sharply.

‘Well, this settles it. If you can become a business man, anyone can.’

‘I wouldn’t say that.’

‘I would… ’

With the entrenchment of neoliberal orthodoxy in the West in the 1980s and 1990s, the state became more permeable to the commercial and managerial practices of big players in service industries. Then, a globalising world economy and an information technology revolution meant that the consulting world’s biggest international players – those like McKinsey from the USA – could become entrenched in many modern states’ bureaucracies and strategic industries, or create a ‘transition industries’ for exporting  “practices from centres of neoliberalism in North America and Western Europe.” 

In the UK, though use of consultancies has been historically commonplace, the DNA of the managerialist creed replicated within the cells of government as it evolved, and degrades the capacity to perform effectively today. The Institute for Government noted in 2023 for example, that recruitment on merit was a “cornerstone” of the civil service but that “there are serious doubts about whether the civil service is currently achieving that… there are too many sham processes where the successful candidate has already been tapped up.”

This is mirrored in HS2. It has consistently been slammed for the way its “top-down vision of building a railway” has “dramatically increased cost” and has struggled with (using a twee euphemism) “a capability issue… particularly with commercial and delivery experience.” In other words, HS2 “did not have the right skills, structure or culture to deliver a programme of this scale successfully.” Though major, HS2 is just one of a host of symptoms of the institutional dysfunction into which the UK is locked. 

The extremist violent frauds leading the UK’s populist nationalist front were able to summon 60,000 followers to London for a march directing their anger towards a declining state. They make use of such narratives in the knowledge of the dissatisfaction associated with the state today and the hope it could eventually hand them the keys to power on a wave of popular support that sees the institutions of government as bankrupt and fit for disposal.

In response, decent citizens must support the remedying of the managerial malaise at the heart of UK institutions, perhaps best epitomised by (fictional) British General Melchett in Blackadder: “If nothing else works, then a total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face will see us through.” As so often before, this mentality will be the UK’s undoing.

Image: Flickr/mwmbwls

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