It is common to bemoan a lack of competence and trustworthiness of British policy makers. They don’t know what they are doing, and few trust them to get the results they promise. This argument is common to simplistic popular accounts of British politics and more thoughtful stories in policy studies, but each approach provides very different conclusions.
In popular accounts, many claims are based on the idea that elected politicians are not up to the job. They connect to the lazy argument that all politicians are untrustworthy or incompetent, or the partisan argument that a change of government would bring in competent politicians with better ideas. The book is already written on the former (Clarke et al, 2018). The latter is misguided but important. It forms part of the Westminster story in which a small number of senior ministers are in control. This story asserts how British politics should work: if UK government ministers are in charge, we can hold them to account for policy. If they do badly, they can be replaced. It does not describe how British politics actually works.
Policy research provides a more useful story: the British state is too large to be controlled by a small number of powerful individuals, and the complexity of policy problems and processes ensures that they are beyond anyone’s full understanding. The phrase bounded rationality describes the inability of policy makers to pay attention to, or understand, more than a tiny proportion of policy problems, while policy making complexity describes their inability to control the outcomes that emerge from the British political system. These limits apply to policy makers regardless of their competence, sincerity or trustworthiness, and we do a disservice to democracy if we ignore them in favour of simplistic stories of bad politicians.
That said, the Westminster story remains important and our alternative account – the complex government story – has its own problems. Therefore, throughout this book, we invite you to bear the following qualifications in mind.
First, UK government ministers might not be in control, but they remain very powerful and can still do damage (King and Crewe, 2014). One useful analogy is with people working with their natural environments: the environment constrains and facilitates their success when they try to grow crops or trees, but humans are much more powerful when it comes to their destruction.
Second, the Westminster story still underpins British political traditions and key functions of the British state (Duggett, 2009). Think of British politics as a confusing conflation of two different stories: of the concentration and diffusion of policy-making power. UK government ministers have to juggle these images to project an image of governing competence based on the sense that they are in control (how else would they win elections?) and that they share responsibility with many other policy makers (Hay, 2009).
There is no escape from these confusing contradictions, but research can help us understand them. ‘Policy studies’ generate concepts, theories and research to understand policy processes (research of policy). This understanding is crucial to policy analysis – the identification of policy problems and possible solutions (research for policy) – where we use our knowledge of policy making to examine the feasibility of solutions to major problems. We seek the right balance between accepting policy-making complexity and the limits to policy-maker control and believing that well-designed policies, taken forward by key people and organisations, can improve people’s lives. The cynical stoic is no better than the naïve optimist, but the stoical optimist might see some reward.