Bad Piano? Bad Music? A Response to Comments on Lowe and Pemberton,The Official History of the British Civil Service,Volume II: 1982–1997

The reforms made to the civil service during the premierships of Margaret Thatcher and John Major were unparalleled in scope in peacetime. Undertaken in the name of efficiency and better management, they served to Balkanise the service, shrink the number of civil servants, subordinate them to the will of ministers, and effectively privatise a swathe of public services. Their legacy, however, was a relatively weak centre struggling to cope with a fragmented and extremely complex governmental machine, an overly managerialist senior civil service sometimes side‐lined from policy making, and a system lacking slack as a consequence of the quest for ‘efficiency’ and dependent on private contractors of sometimes dubious worth. Over the past five years that legacy left the country poorly placed to triumph over the challenges of Brexit and then of Covid‐19.     

“If You've Got Friends and Neighbours”: Constituency Voting Patterns for the UK Labour Party Leader in 2010

Most attention in British electoral studies has been paid to the pattern of voting for parties, with relatively little to that for individual candidates. In intra-party elections, however, candidates may perform better in some areas than others, illustrating V. O. Key's well-known “friends and neighbours” effect. This paper explores whether that was so at the election for the leader of the UK Labour party in 2010, expecting each of the five candidates to perform better in their own constituency and its environs and also with those constituency parties whose MPs supported their candidature. The results are in line with the expectations, especially for one of the candidates who ran an explicitly geographical campaign.     

Book reviews

John R. Davis, Britain and the German Zollverein, 1848–66 (London: Macmillan, 1997). x + 238 pp. £45. ISBN 0–333–67828–1.

Martin Thomas, Britain, France and Appeasement: Anglo‐French Relations in the Popular Front Era (Oxford and New York: Berg. 1996). xi + 268 pp. £29.95 hb; £12.95 pb. ISBN 1–85973–192–9.

Peter Lowe, Containing the Cold War in East Asia: British Policies Towards Japan, China and Korea, 1948–53 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997). xii + 288 pp. £40. ISBN 0–7190–2508–7.

David M. Barrett, Uncertain Warriors: Lyndon Johnson and His Vietnam Advisers (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press, 1994). xii + 279 pp. £11.95 pb. ISBN 0–7006–0631–9.

Rhodri Jeffreys‐Jones, Changing Differences: Women and the Shaping of American Foreign Policy, 1917–1994 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997). x + 275 pp. £14.50 pb. ISBN 0–8135–2449–0.

Philip M. Taylor, Global Communications, International Affairs and the Media Since 1945 (London &; New York: Routledge, 1997). xx + 248 pp. £45 hb. ISBN 0–415–11678–3; £15.99 pb. ISBN 0–415–11679–1     

“Our Respective Empires Should Stand Together”: The Royal Dimension in Anglo-Japanese Relations, 1919–1941

In the inter-war period court diplomacy played an important role in Anglo-Japanese relations. Both governments saw the exchange of high-level royal visits and the conferment of decorations, such as the bestowal of the Order of the Garter to Emperor Hirohito in 1929, as a useful means of indicating respect and the desire for continued co-operation. Even as late as 1937 Prince Chichibu’s attendance at King George VI’s coronation was intended to lead to closer ties. This article demonstrates that the neglected field of court diplomacy and diplomatic protocol can provide a useful parallel commentary on more overtly political events.     

A Policy Delphi study in the socialist Middle East

The Delphi Method has been applied to a wide variety of predictive and consensus building problems in the West. It has achieved mixed success in its ‘native’ environment. This paper reports on the successful use of the Delphi by an interdisciplinary, international team of English-speaking consultants in an Arabic-speaking country, politically dominated by a centralist regime. In the sixth year of the Iran-Iraq war, a group of international consultants proceeded with the development of a master plan for the development of the City of Baghdad, the Greater Baghdad Area and Central Iraq. Work on the plan had begun in 1982 but had been slowed by the war and its effect on the Iraqi economy, a lack of consensus on the part of the Iraqi government and a substantial degree of uncertainty in the government's confidence in the consulting team's perceptions. An accelerated form of the Delphi was structured and applied over a period of three weeks, employing high ranking members of the Iraqi technocracy. The results indicated a good degree of consensus on a number of material issues. The consultants obtained a clearer picture of the client's desires, and the client was left with greater confidence in the consultant's perceptions of the planning problems and solutions. There was a notable reduction in the level of uncertainty and disagreement among both Iraqi and expatriate members of the planning team. Finally, there was an increased acceptance of the resulting master plan due to the demonstrable participation of senior government officials in its formulation and the credibility they attached to the process of the Delphi. At the time of writing, the plan has been accepted by the government of Iraq.     

Policy Networks and Policy Learning UK Economic Policy in the 1960s and 1970s

Policy networks are advanced as an alternative to the Westminster model of the UK polity but the theory lacks an internal dynamic and has typological problems. This article applies Peter Hall's (1993) concept of 'social learning' to policy networks and maps the networks found in two case studies of British economic policy making: Hall's own study of the shift from Keynesianism to monetarism in the 1970s and the author's research on the advent of 'Keynesian-plus' in the early 1960s. The article advances three main propositions. Firstly, that integrating the concept of social learning can dynamize the policy network model. Secondly, the case studies suggest that different network configurations are associated with different orders of policy change but that Hall's definition of 'third order change' may be too restrictive. Thirdly, policy networks can be much more complex and fluid then is generally claimed, sometimes becoming so extensive that they might be termed a 'meta-network'.