The Governmentality of New Labour

The Governmentality of New LabourWilliam Davies, Institute for Public Policy ResearchIn a recent analysis of New Labours record in office, Anthony Giddens, traditionally referred to as Blairs favourite intellectual, made a rare criticism of a regime that he had done much to shape during its formative stages. New Labour, he argued, has failed to develop a robust definition of the public sphere and of the essential importance of citizenship. Labour has not found a persuasive enough vocabulary to express the difference between citizen and consumer (Giddens 2006). The critique was perhaps more noteworthy for its author than its content, for this has become a refrain of the social democratic intelligentsia and those Brownites who believe their man to be less enamoured by markets than Tony Blair.

The complaint is likely to fall on deaf ears, be they Blairite, Brownite or, for that matter, Cameronite. The rapidly emerging consensus among our political class is that the Victorian notion of a national public sphere must cede to a new, more local and participatory type of political space, less a public than a community. Environment Secretary David Miliband has spoken of the Governments plans for double devolution, from Whitehall to local authority, and from local authority to neighbourhood. The Conservative Partys Built to Last policy document states that political power should always be exercised as close to people and communities as possible (p 10). And Gordon Brown has been at pains to refute claims that he is an instinctive centralist.

When any leading politician is attacked for ceding too much power to the market, their defence no longer comes framed in the language of the public, but of the community. We are no longer presented with twentieth century choices of state versus market, central versus local, but twenty-first century choices between devolving to the market and devolving to the community, whatever the latter might actually mean.

And yet interspersed with these aspirations to distribute power are some dramatically countervailing policy ideas. Tony Blair has suggested that the state might soon intervene to impose disciplinary measures on troublesome children before they are born. Limitations on the states right to share data about people between separate departments look likely to be swept away. This is all in addition to the somewhat separate issue of anti-terror legislation and its perceived assault on certain civil liberties. On the face of it, New Labours attitude towards power is schizophrenic: it can point to Bank of England independence and its emerging neighbourhood governance agenda as proof of its decentralising tendencies, while at the same time, the Home Offices remit of surveillance and punishment is extended further.

I want to suggest that there is nothing innately contradictory about this strategy, although there is something distinctly new about it. To explore New Labours attitude to power, I will borrow the concept of governmentality, as conceived in the later work of the French social theorist, Michel Foucault, and developed extensively by a number of British sociologists in the 1990s. Governmentality refers to techniques of governance, existing both inside and outside the state apparatus, and there is, I will argue, something original about the current mode of governmentality that distinguishes it from that of conventional liberalism.

There are three stages to this argument. First, we need to explore critically the claims of those social democrats and liberals who believe that a free public sphere is being undermined by market or state forces. This is something that a considerable amount of research on governmentality has already been dedicated to. Second, I introduce the two elements that distinguish New Labours techniques of power, namely its strategy for double devolution and the new, more nakedly coercive forms of social regulation that have emerged under New Labour such as anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs). I conclude by querying whether the process of devolving power can work, given the lack of scientific or expert basis for doing so, and the potential this raises for continued reliance of communities upon state powers such as the police.

The decline of the public

Probably the most impassioned social democratic defence of the public sphere in Britain of recent years, and by corollary the angriest critique of Thatcherite and Blairite policy, belongs to David Marquand (2004). Marquand argues that the public sphere is a fragile and precious gift, defined in terms of norms that are neither economic nor private, but something else altogether. When acting in the public interest, individuals are not doing so in order to profit financially, or to help out friends and family, but according to values of citizenship, equity and service (Marquand 2004: 27). There is a strong sense in which the public sphere presumes an equality of status or inclusivity, which manifests itself in the fact that relations of domination are absent: In the public domain, market power is overridden, and private clientelism forbidden; citizens bow the knee to nobody (ibid: 33). Political equality is therefore the condition of freedom, as rights-based arguments have long held.

This model of a disinterested space, heavily indebted to the liberal philosophical tradition of Kant and Habermas, does not map neatly onto any specific set of political institutions. Against those who defend New Labour on the basis that it has overseen large government spending increases, Marquand is keen to point out that the public sphere is not the same as the public sector. It can exist in public, private or voluntary sector, and it is damaged in all three by a growth in contractualism and managerial target-setting. The institutions on which Marquands public sphere is most dependent are those that cut between sectors, intermediaries between the state and individual that permeate various social spheres. Judicial processes and political parties are two examples of these, but it is professions that Marquand reserves the greatest privilege for.

As intermediary expert bodies with a strong sense of the public interest, professions mediate between the state and the citizen. Their initial vocation, as born in the Victorian era and maintained through most of the twentieth century, was to distribute expertise in a decentralised and inclusive fashion, thereby enabling orderly social relations to persist that are dependent neither on state nor market. But here Marquands argument runs into a thorny problem, what he calls the paradoxes of professionalism. Part of the professions unique capacity lies in the fact that:

The client has no option but to trust the professional It follows that professionalism is symbiotically related to authority. For trust and authority go hand in hand. I trust a professional because, and in so far as, I accept the authority of the professionals office and the authority of those who certified her as competent to exercise her professional functions. We pay professionals for their services, and we offer them status and autonomy, because in their own field they know more than we do; and therefore we defer to them. No elites, no professions; and no public domain either. (Marquand 2004: 77).The earlier claim that citizens bow the knee to nobody suddenly looks rather weaker.

Marquands critique of New Labour rests on the allegation that it has systematically set about dismantling such intermediate institutions, through a centralised system of target-setting and auditing. This process, begun under Thatcher through privatisation and attacks on local government, has been extended under New Labour in the form of more elaborate devices such as public private partnerships and more aggressive forms of target-setting, with the latter often shrouded in the rhetoric of earned autonomy for local bodies. Battles with teaching unions over schools targets, or with doctors over the NHS IT programme, are two quite prominent examples of this shift.

Whether one shares this lament for lost professional values depends heavily on how one responds to the paradoxes of professionalism. The social democratic defence of the public sphere must assert that citizens experience a higher level of autonomy when deferring to professions than when deferring to state-sanctioned, target-oriented bodies. The New Labour defence of public service modernisation, meanwhile, is likely to be blind to the distinction between the two, indeed, as Marquand himself points out, contemporary attitudes towards professions tend to see them as simply another managerialist tool, akin to an insurance policy. If a private contractor, say, can be made accountable and inclusive in their provision of a service, then the outcomes that it delivers are likely to be just as public in nature as those of a profession. This assumes that values do ultimately reside in outcomes, and that there is otherwise nothing to choose between the rival modes of achieving them the famous what matters is what works creed.

The concept of governmentality potentially offers a fresh perspective on this dispute; or rather, it enables us to sidestep it altogether, and to move beyond the most palpable distinctions between central and local, and between top-down and bottom-up. The concept originally arose in lectures given by Foucault towards the end of his life, and was later seized upon and developed into a theoretical and empirical body of social and political science in the 1990s. Foucault traced the emergence of modern government to the rise of social statistics in the 17th and 18th centuries, which enabled the perspective of population to develop and for society to appear as an objective phenomenon to be governed. While the use of law remained (and remains) a key means of exercising power over a population, what preoccupied Foucault and his followers were the other techniques of governance that are mediated by bodies not traditionally viewed as political at all. As two of those followers argued:

Central to the possibility of modern forms of government, we argue, are the associations formed between entities constituted as political and the projects, plans and practices of those authorities economic, legal, spiritual, medical, technical who endeavour to administer the lives of others in the light of conceptions of what is good, healthy, normal, virtuous, efficient or profitable. (Rose and Miller 1992: 175)

Far from being a check on intrusions of power into the private and local lives of citizens, a profession would be an absolutely essential accomplice to it. Along with the social sciences, institutionalised philanthropy and the emergence of the welfare state, the growth of professions in the 19th century looks from this perspective like an advance in techniques of governmentality, rather than any form of block to them. It would be simply impossible to regulate mass society according to norms such as health, enterprise, hard work and family cohesion without the cooperation of experts capable of penetrating society, and representing it scientifically and statistically.

Much of the work done on governmentality places an implicit emphasis on challenging the assumptions of both social and economic liberalism. In this respect, it is equally perturbing for the social democratic left as for the free market right. In each case, the withdrawal of the state from areas of society is contemporary with a systematic extension of other strategies of power. For instance, the emergence of a free market in the 19th century required careful political management, in the way that factory owners were imbued with political power in the workplace, and concepts such as unemployment developed so as to represent social phenomena in market-based terms.

Strategies for achieving these behaviours necessarily extend well outside the bounds of the state, and into the marketplace, the community, and the family. As Rose puts it, political rule thus had to concern itself with the procedures for shaping and nurturing those domains that were to provide its counterweight and limit (Rose 1999: 49). Power, by this account, is not simply something that imposes restraints on behaviour, as understood by conventional political theory; it produces behaviour, including what many would deem desirable traits such as entrepreneurship, neighbourliness and sporting prowess. Power does not only act upon people, but through them, harnessing their desires and choices to achieve the sought-after social order.

Turning a Foucaultian eye towards Marquands argument, we arrive at the following suspicion. It is not clear that professional expertise is an antidote to power inequalities; in fact it may well be an important means of extending power and regulating behaviour on an unprecedented scale. Arguably and this would be the New Labour line as much as the Foucaultian one the growth in auditing and target-setting is the consummation of professional logic, rather than its death-knell, given that professions exist to produce and handle social knowledge.

The fact that McKinseys or the Office of National Statistics are now instrumental to governmental strategies means that the state is developing stronger forms of intermediary institutions, rather than weaker forms. Moreover, strategies of social control must always operate via intermediary institutions of one sort or another, each with its own expert system for analysing and altering social behaviour. A close inspection of the Thatcherite and Blairite state will confirm that it, like its social democratic or Victorian predecessors, is neither centralist nor decentralist, but always a subtle combination of the two. This paradox is what underlies Marquands own latent anxiety about the role of professions in the public sphere, namely that equality is dependent on elitism, autonomy on deference.

New Labours governmentality

This Foucaultian approach steps outside of debates about the appropriate size of the state, and the balance between central and local government. Instead, it raises empirical questions about the concepts and types of expert knowledge that are mobilised to achieve a political settlement of one sort or another. Concepts such as society, the public or community are projections of collectivities that never quite come into existence, but perform an important political function in the way that they are used. Government is a congenitally failing operation in that its social vision never quite corresponds to anything that actually exists, but the projection of that vision is nevertheless a means of asserting power (Rose and Miller 1992: 191).

Whether a government chooses to use the language of society or of community reflects little on social relations as they actually are, but a great deal on the dominant strategy for regulating and producing them. What can we say about modes of governmentality since 1997?

I have suggested that modern government is always a complex negotiation between centralism and devolution, no matter what guises are used to promote different combinations. The first thing to notice about governmentality during the Blair era, as alluded to earlier, is the dominance of the language of community. Community often refers to neighbourhoods where the context is crime (safer communities), but can also refer to much larger diasporic groups (the muslim community) or simply the moral majority (we want to reassure the community). Corresponding to this jargon is a significant shift in policy towards localism and greater interaction between suppliers and users of public services. Foundation Trust Hospitals and the promised double devolution are examples of the latter.

There has thus been a reorientation in both discourse and policy under New Labour. Government must always proceed on both fronts at once. Rose and Miller argue that before one can seek to manage a domain such as an economy it is first necessary to conceptualise a set of processes and relations as an economy which is amenable to management (Rose and Miller 1990: 6). The same is true of community: it has to be produced in order to be governed, or rather, it is produced and governed at the same time. Rose refers to this as government through community, whereby a fresh set of concepts are mobilised in order to regulate social behaviour (Rose 1996: 332). Government through society or through the public realm involved its own set of concepts, including equality, justice, human rights, freedom and so on. Today, these have largely been replaced by concepts such as inclusion, citizenship, active communities, and their enemies such as anti-social behaviour. Political discourse is refashioned as a component part of a new era of governmentality.

This is not to say that these phenomena are not real, or that they are ideological inventions. The purpose of tracing this shift is to understand how these social categories are related to their political circumstances. Just as macro-economic policy would have been impossible without the emergence of a concept of the economy as a whole in the 1930s (Mitchell 2005), the double devolution agenda is partly dependent on certain social scientific categories to frame the phenomena to be governed. Citizenship classes might therefore be considered a key element in the communitarianism of recent years, while a concept such as social capital produces and codifies a new object of study (local social networks), which is then also a potential object of policy intervention.

Nor is this to say that the devolutionary and localist ambitions of New Labour are not what they seem. The strategy for giving away power to communities and empowering the users of public services is no less authentic than the strategy of deregulating the market both require a considerable amount of central government effort. This does not mean that the free market is a lie, any more than double devolution will be a lie once Miliband, Brown, Cameron and others have succeeded in their efforts to push political power downwards. When asked on the BBCs Today programme whether he was prepared to let communities take so much power that they might use it badly and suffer as a result, Miliband said that of course there would still be mechanisms available to central government to gauge when a neighbourhood was abusing its autonomy or needed government help. To those who share Marquands distaste for auditory culture, this immediately pollutes the policy with centralism. But the Foucaultian view is that devolution and deregulation can only ever operate in such a fashion.

The difficulty when trying to govern through community, however, is that community is rarely a very scientific category and it is virtually impossible to specify what community expertise might mean, or who might be in possession of it. The governance of health can operate through a complex chain of command linking the Department of Health, universities, doctors surgeries and so on, while the governance of unemployment can operate through the Department of Work and Pensions, labour market economists, Jobcentre Plus and more. Thanks to these systems, the unhealthy person and the unemployed person develop an awareness of their problems, and become active participants in trying to solve them.

Institutionalised expertise is the conduit of governmentality. But how is community to be translated from a political ambition to a self-governing, active body, when there are no obvious domains of expertise on the ground that are qualified to oversee it? Community development workers might be one candidate, as may religious leaders or school teachers. But still, the problem remains that the Government is engaged in a strategy of governmentality that lacks expert systems to underpin, generate and regulate it. Successful governance of a social domain first requires that that domain be fixed as an object, and represented as something stable; the sheer flexibility and obscurity of the term community makes one nervous about what it might mean once it becomes active or self-governing.

It is this shortcoming of New Labours devolutionary agenda that might explain the second manifest trait of its mode of governmentality: the growing nakedness of state coercion. The central insight of governmentality research is that modern governmental power does not only operate through the traditional Hobbesian means of sovereignty plus coercion, but draws increasingly on a range of non-coercive techniques of manipulation. As Foucault himself argued, governmentality points in various directions at once:

We need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of a disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and as its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security. (Foucault 1991: 102)

However, a number of New Labour policies have reversed a 200-year-old trend towards governing through the free will of individuals, and shifted back towards governing upon individuals, against their will. One can make a strong case that ASBOs and parenting orders are beneficial for children and local communities, and at a stretch one can claim that they are beneficial for the individuals who receive them. But they are nevertheless forms of restraint from without; they do not co-opt the individuals free will in order to work, but utilise old fashioned state sovereignty to change behaviour through force. This is in stark contrast to something like the Governments Sure Start programme, which works in a consensual and productive fashion, but ultimately has a very similar social goal to those of ASBOs and parenting orders.

In addition, New Labour has explored and developed various ways of influencing behaviour that are somewhere between the normative and the coercive. For instance, CCTV has been used very successfully to keep bus lanes clear, dramatically improving public transport in London and elsewhere. This is a use of a disciplinary measure in order to improve public services. Elsewhere, growing opportunities to access and share data mean that pre-emptive interventions into peoples private lives can be justified on the basis that their behaviour is being altered for their own benefit. The states surveillance functions and its welfare functions operate increasingly in concert, with the withdrawal of benefits now used as a punitive measure in certain instances. Libertarians may have long objected to the welfare states invasion of privacy, but there has been a qualitative shift in recent years, as it has teamed up with institutions that exist explicitly to surveill and punish.

As Marquand complains with regard to auditing and contractualism, many of the methods used to regulate social behaviour are gradually becoming stripped of their normative clothing. Where the authority of the professions and the welfare state would be defended on the basis that they serve the individual or the publics own interest, and thereby win willing cooperation from those they governed, a good deal of New Labours social policy does not rely heavily on winning support from its recipients, but can be imposed by the state simply on the basis that it is the state. This is sovereignty, not governmentality. There may well be talk of serving the community, the sort of platitude that can be seen written down the side of a police car, but the amorphousness of community makes it difficult for this subject to become actively engaged in regulating itself.

As such, community is only plausible on the basis of regular coercive interventions by the sovereign state. This explains the apparent schizophrenia of a government that flips constantly between communitarian and authoritarian rhetoric.

Conclusion: the absent science of community

New Labour is famous for its pragmatism: policies are to be assessed in terms of their outcomes, not in terms of their means of delivery. As a result, popular and ideologically attractive policies such as Sure Start have suffered setbacks when empirical evidence fails to demonstrate that they have any impact. The primary question on double devolution that this government will want an answer to is not is it right? but will it work?. Although Marquand does not use this defence in his attack on New Labour, one thing that can be said for the era of the welfare state, professions and the public sphere is that it was extraordinarily successful in its ambitions. Poverty was cut, health levels rose, social peace was more or less achieved. In Foucaultian terms, power was successfully exerted beyond the reaches of the state, to produce a stable object known as society.

How well is community being produced as a stable object? Given the alleged levels of anti-social behaviour in our cities, it would seem that it is still some way off, especially if one takes into account the binge-drinking and more hedonistic forms of consumption that are pervasive in Britain. At present it is difficult to conceive of power being decentralised, especially in cities, without the constant presence of the states disciplinary and coercive functions. Marxists always believed that the passage from capitalism to communism would have a transitory totalitarian phase the dictatorship of the proletariat before power was devolved to workers councils, and the state would wither away. The Soviet Union proved unable to move out of this transitory phase. Will double devolution suffer an analogous obstacle, with communities never quite able to wean themselves off the supporting hand of sovereign powers? One solution to this is to include a more radical devolution of police and judicial powers to the community, a communitarian measure that might prove too illiberal for this government.

A Foucaultian analysis suggests the following problem. Community is not an empirical object about which we can produce scientific data. The most scientific mechanisms for understanding local community are those used by social capital researchers, but this is a relatively new and very labour-intensive area of social science. If community is to be produced, measured and governed with the same effectiveness as public health, say, then an army of sociologists and statisticians will be needed to collect and analyse information on strategies for community building.

But the additional problem is that the management and generation of community is far from scientific; a policy toolkit exists containing anecdotal evidence on which forms of intervention work better than others, while architects and planners offer some expertise on how social cohesion can be designed from the bottom up, but little more. Successful devolution of power requires that intermediary institutions are empowered first. As Marquand argues, a decentralised public realm requires greater authority for professional elites. As Saskia Sassen has shown convincingly, processes of globalisation require highly localised points of coordination, the cities in which business services cluster to manage the processes of decentralisation (Sassen 2001). The question for New Labour is this: who is to oversee its devolutionary ambitions, if it is ever to move beyond a reliance on surveillance and coercion?

References

Conservative Party (2006) Built to Last: The aims and values of the Conservative Party London: Conservative Party

Foucault M (1991) Governmentality in Burchell G, Gordon C and Miller P (eds) (1991) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Giddens A (2006) Europe: teaching us a lesson, New Statesman, 25 September

Marquand D (2004) Decline of the Public, Cambridge: Polity

Mitchell T (1999) Economists and the economy in the twentieth century in Steinmetz G (ed) State/Culture: State-formation After the Cultural Turn, New York: Cornell University Press

Rose N and Miller P (1990) Governing Economic Life, Economy and Society 19: 1: 1-27Rose N and Miller P (1992) Political power beyond the State: Problematics of government, British Journal of Sociology, 43 (2) 173-205

Rose N (1996) The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government Economy and Society, 25: 3: 327-355

Rose N (1999) Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Sassen S (2001) The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton: Princeton University Press

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