In February 1974, a frustrated Ted Heath, unable to achieve anything in government against constant opposition by the mighty trade unions, called an election. One basic question was front and centre of the campaign: ‘Who governs Britain?’ Soon the answer came back: ‘Not you, mate.’ In fact, it would take Margaret Thatcher’s victory to clip the power of the unions – but only after enormous political and economic risks were taken.
With the collapse of public infrastructure, a lingering sense of decline, and Britain looking embarrassed (and embarrassing) on the world stage, comparisons to the 1970s abound today. Another similarity is the presence of an all-powerful caste. This time, however, it isn’t the unions but the consultant management class – the lanyardistas – holding national life in its grip.
You know the sort: they tend to have completely baffling job titles but are paid more than those who do the actual work. They self-identify as ‘stakeholders’, ‘change enablers’ and ‘directors of strategic transformation’. They use endless consultations, HR, compulsory training and a ceaseless stream of jargon to baffle Britain into a situation where they hold all the levers. Very little challenges their dominance.
This is not just occurring in Wernham Hogg-style offices in industrial estates in the Home Counties, but at the heart of the British state. Take the long-awaited renovation of the Palace of Westminster. After years of delay, Parliament’s ‘Restoration and Renewal programme’ has finally released several ‘fully costed’ scenarios for the project, ranging from £11 billion at the ‘cheap’ end to a staggering £39 billion. The latter sum would cost more than the first estimates of the entire HS2 rail project.
Yet a little digging shows that the cost isn’t only about improving fire safety or stopping Victorian masonry falling on people. Inevitably, much relates to demands dear to the stakeholder caste who have been bolted onto the project, including accessibility to almost every inch of the Palace, a new ‘education centre’, a futuristic visitors’ centre below central lobby and a stringent adherence to net zero. In its infinite wisdom, the parliamentary ‘Delivery Authority’ vows to rip out the existing boilers and heat a cavernous, leaky Victorian building via heat pumps. Compare these plans to the cost and speed of renovating Notre-Dame, and this seems a peculiarly British phenomenon.
Everyone who approaches high office in Britain eventually reaches this realisation about the nature of the managerial caste. Keir Starmer’s former head of political strategy, Paul Ovenden, recently wrote an article lamenting the power of the ‘stakeholder state’. His analysis is strikingly similar to that of Dominic Cummings, despite their political differences. Even Starmer, one of the blobbiest prime ministers we’ve ever had, has moaned that when he pulls a governmental lever nothing happens.
This time it isn’t the unions but the consultant management class holding national life in its grip
Stakeholderism has caused particular damage in the realm of large-scale infrastructure and explains Britain’s uniquely high costs. The construction head of the Spanish infrastructure operator Ferrovial, asked to diagnose the astronomical costs of high-speed rail in Britain (estimated at £200 million per kilometre, compared with £32 million per kilometre in continental Europe), blamed the complexity of conducting environmental studies and obtaining stakeholder consents. There has been a recent explosion in the volume of documentation required in all planning decisions, large or small. According to the campaign group Britain Remade, the Lower Thames Crossing application cost £267 million and ran to a staggering 60,000 pages. The Jubilee Line extension environmental statement in the 1970s ran to fewer than 400 pages. Sometimes the mooted impossibility of a project becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: high cost estimates and a tendency to spiral become an own argument against proceeding. Stasis begets stasis.
Reducing the volume of paperwork to a sane level is vital, yet it will surely be opposed by the make-work stakeholder class. After all, who runs the environmental surveys, ensures compliance and manages the projects? I strongly suspect more people are involved in these aspects of infrastructure than ever lay a rail or a brick or pour concrete. Unless we address this, many more projects will go the way of HS2.
This caste is not only throttling business and government efficiency via pork-barrelling; it is profoundly ideological too. Nowhere is this clearer than in another crisis facing the British state: small boats. There exists a whole network of charities and NGOs whose raison d’etre is challenging the government’s flagship immigration policies, yet these same people were, paradoxically, awarded vast sums in state grants and contracts. Again, Britain is in the hands of a perma-class who never have to face the consequences of their actions among the electorate, while those who do lack the wit, courage or inclination to resist its demands.
The constant rejection of the needs of Britain and of the views of the general public is a mark of the stakeholder caste. Yet the political class remains reluctant to challenge it. This is due in part to the cross-pollination with politics. A cursory look at the background of many Labour MPs in particular shows considerable overlap between these groups. Shortly before the last general election, I studied the CVs of Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidates and lost track of how many I found whose career trajectories involved a few years in comms for an NGO or charity before entering parliament. Oh, for the days of the union barons – at least they’d actually done a day’s work.
Even now, this group cannot and will not learn. Who has Labour chosen to fight off Reform in the Gorton and Denton by-election? A woman who describes herself thus: ‘I am a strategic stakeholder engagement leader with extensive experience across infrastructure, transport, energy, water and regeneration, working at the intersection of policy, politics and communities. I help organisations navigate complexity, rebuild trust and deliver outcomes in highly scrutinised and politically sensitive environments.’
Given that the managerial class seems incapable of learning, changing or acting in the national interest, the only possible route forward is its destruction. This means stripping funding from the bodies that do its intellectual business, repealing legislation which empowers them and, above all, simply saying ‘no’ rather than accepting their mandates as inevitable. It is a matter of national importance, as it was in the 1970s.
Ferdinand Mount, in a confidential paper prepared for Mrs Thatcher in 1983, referred to the unions as ‘a politicised mafia’. I can think of worse epithets for the managerial perma-class whose necrotic grip on the country is strangling growth and harming democracy. Once again, it’s time to ask: who governs Britain?
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