BULPITT'S ACCOUNT OF THE CENTRAL STATE

Unlike much Anglo-American writing about politics, with the exception of the Marxists, a conception of the state is central to Bulpitt's analysis of territorial politics. The central state – or centre – is the entity that has the protection of territorial and economic interests of the UK as its main goal. The centre is represented by the powers and institutions of central government and by the elite that occupies commanding positions in the state hierarchy. The centre ‘equates territorial centrality and governmental authority and political power’.Footnote ¹ Bulpitt's concept of the centre is similar to the state and overlaps with it, but it may be better thought of as the central state and its personnel. Whereas the state may be thought of as the whole caboodle, including all public authorities, Bulpitt's centre or central state is the entity at the centre of power, commanding the institutions of the state and looking after its interests. Whatever the difference, the terms ‘centre’ and ‘state’ are very closely allied, and one is not comprehensible without the other.

The UK centre is distinctive because London emerged at the nexus of economic, cultural and political networks, possibly having a higher degree of agglomeration than capitals in other nations. London was the place where different kinds of elites lived, did business and socialized, and this sustained the identity and purposes of the ruling political elite. All the elites in the capital had an interest in maintaining the dominance of the institutions that facilitated economic accumulation and embodied social superiority. The centre was not attached to a particular institution, though core institutions gave it power and legitimacy. Bulpitt argued that in the nineteenth century the centre moved from the court to the Cabinet and then diffused into the political-administrative community of senior minsters and top civil servants. For Bulpitt, the bureaucracy was especially important, in particular the principal departments of state. He referred to its key members as the ‘men between’.Footnote ² It was a cohesive elite, partly because it was small, but also because it was consensual: the centre ‘was managed by “chaps”, “sound chaps” in London’.Footnote ³ It had an inner and an outer circle, with the former the senior officials from the Treasury, Foreign Office and service departments, Cabinet secretariat and prime minister; the latter comprised those from the spending departments. The inner centre was closed to the public and even to the media, ‘an “efficient” secret understood by a few’.Footnote ⁴

The centre had access to resources that made it powerful – a supportive political culture that legitimated the authority of the state, access to legal powers and considerable freedom over the allocation of public finance. But Bulpitt believed the power of the centre was limited. There are four reasons for this surprising claim. The first is that the centre found it hard to achieve its ambitions with such a complex set of institutional structures operating below it. Other elites controlled local-level institutions, which meant that central directions were not necessarily obeyed, the classic implementation problem of modern states that have chains of command across separated organizations. Second, the limited use of state power may also have reflected a particular kind of intelligence on the part of the central elite: its members realized there were costs to an authoritarian or interventionist strategy in the form of opposition and the likely reputational damage of making drastic decisions based on limited or incorrect information. It was better to stand aloof, to let others govern on behalf of the central state and to try to manipulate them from afar. The third reason was about capacity. This is about the time that central elites paid to international affairs and grand politics, which distracted them from domestic matters. The fourth reason was preference – a stance that sought to avoid the micro-management of domestic affairs so that the elite could concentrate on what it liked doing best. As Bulpitt wrote, ‘Maintaining the external support system became the highest of “high politics”. Although these external preoccupations began as an essential instrument to achieve domestic tranquillity, ultimately they became an end in themselves’.Footnote ⁵

The central state wanted to have autonomy in a particular kind of politics, leaving aside what the elite considered to be boring local issues, an approach to political management that is summed up by the terms Bulpitt is most associated with: high and low politics. The state attempted to create a set of activities that it alone controlled: defence, foreign affairs and taxation, and later the economy. Local and territorial matters – low politics – were offloaded and bargained away, partly because they were considered to be less important. As a result the centre did not intervene in detailed matters in the periphery, and Territory and Power is replete with examples of how the central elite simply gave way and handed over responsibilities and activities to less-powerful elites in the territories of the United Kingdom. Far from pacifying the country in the long term, this practice of offloading may have given these peripheral elites the organizational bases and legitimacy to challenge the authority of the centre at a later date. Such elite tolerance was even extended to cultural affairs, such as permitting the formation of national football teams in Scotland and Wales. The defence of this strategy was that it preserved the autonomy of the state, making the UK centre appear more tolerant of diversity than it in fact was. It ensured that the different parts of the UK were semi-self-governing, but not in such a way as to threaten the legitimacy of the centre, at least at first. The stance of the central state appeared to be of magnanimous detachment; in the end this strategy may have created the conditions that later forced it to intervene directly in the politics of the periphery – but from a position of weakness.

The management of foreign policy is a particularly important activity for the centre. In part this is because it needs to be kept at bay. One of the centre's projects is to create an external support system to minimize the impact of international events and pressures on domestic policy. In Bulpitt's view, the period of the ancien régime of the dual polity in the twentieth century was when the centre had managed to stabilize the external support system through surviving the economic and political crises of the 1930s, having a successful Second World War, negotiating long-lasting international agreements and fostering a positive relationship with the main superpower, the USA. This gave the centre enough domestic prestige to help it manage intergovernmental relations. But this was not easy to maintain, and the external support system came under pressure during the 1960s, causing problems in the management of territory, as in Northern Ireland and then in Scotland. Just as there is a virtuous circle of effective foreign policy, sustained prosperity and stability of territorial politics, so there is a vicious circle when times are not so good.

The central state is not just made of up institutions and individuals, important though these are. Its members have a common set of understandings or habits of thinking that guide political action and inaction. These are referred to throughout the book by various shorthands. One is ‘the official mind’, a term Bulpitt found in histories of empire. This might be thought of as the values that embody the overall project of the central state. They are inbuilt instincts the elite has acquired to ensure its survival and the stability of the political system. The official mind was often juxtaposed with another term, ‘the operational code’– sometimes referred to as the elite operational code – which Bulpitt defined as the rules and procedures for running the machinery of government, similar to the new institutionalist term ‘standard operating procedures’.

Bulpitt regarded these ideas as peculiar to England, reflecting its historical development. He did not sum up their content directly, but they may be thought of as essentially pragmatic and conservative reflexes. The elite preferred short-term fixes and feared systematic reforms. It avoided foundational and principled solutions to constitutional and territorial problems. Even in crisis, the centre tried to carry on as before and hoped things would get better. It was a cynical practice of politics: the centre thought it could buy territorial elites off, at least in the short term. It was not one for the long drawn-out battle, recognizing that resistance to strong peripheral interests is futile, when it is better to compromise and retreat. This lack of will is part of the reason for what Bulpitt saw as the centre's weakness. In short, he described a very English temperament or at least one version of that myth.

These values were sustained in time because of the gradual and adaptive experience of the English state. The very beliefs that emphasized survival meant that the system did indeed survive through slow adaptation – perhaps embodying a Whiggish conception of history. But in fact Bulpitt's account of the centre was not static. First, there was the transfer from court to Parliament, then the expansion of the civil service. In the late nineteenth century, the centre became more powerful, acquiring legal sanctions, especially over local government. Over time it formed a larger bureaucracy to administer the welfare state. Then there was the decline of the autonomy of the centre from the early 1960s, but the changes are part of the same theme – the centre remains the same kind of entity in different periods, with even this later more interventionist centre holding back, constrained by its culture and structural position in managing the external support system. This is largely because the overall approach was conservative: the elites were mainly interested in managing the system, in making small changes to the status quo, and were reluctant to innovate. Both of the main political parties in this period bought into this general approach. One interesting side comment is that the very cohesiveness and tight nature of the elite culture meant that when the state wanted to change policy it could, partly because it did not feel beholden to any interest group. It is possible that the very club-like character to British government may have contributed to the lurches and policy experiments of the later period.

LOCAL REPRESENTATION

One puzzling aspect of this story of the central state is the account of the interpenetration of centre and periphery. In spite of all the focus on the importance of territory for understanding the politics of the UK, for the story to work, the centre has to be above territorial politics, at one remove from it, both in terms of its objectives and in the composition and personal relations of its elite. The centre was dragged into the politics of the periphery rather than being part of the story. A fully territorialized account of politics would suggest that centre and periphery were part of the same system, with local elites represented at the centre and central elites seeking local objectives. Such an account would have suited Bulpitt's functionalist leanings, and would be consistent with some lines of argument in the book. But Bulpitt stuck to his ideas of centre autonomy and separation. This argument creates a natural tension in the story, a gap between ambitions and the difficulty of realizing them: while at times the central elites did succeed in detaching themselves from matters of the periphery, they kept being dragged in again as the system they created was inherently unstable and subject to challenge.

Of course, Bulpitt knew that local and national elites were interdependent and could be on both sides too. He also recognized that central–local relationships changed over time, with the development of mass parties and the decline of patronage politics marking the decline of these linkages at the end of the nineteenth century. The creation of the Irish state also reduced the role of peripheral elites in UK national politics. It was the change in relations between central and local elites that helped create what Bulpitt calls the ancien régime, which lasted from 1926 to 1961. Even with these qualifications, the account still relies on the centre being distant from the interests of local elites, such was its focus on international affairs and the economy. Bulpitt gave the example of the tilt in the centre's policies toward favouring the City of London and neglecting the interests of industrial capital often located outside the centre, where in spite of protests, the centre blithely carries on. He also regarded the impotence of local government as a consequence of the system of dual politics. The lack of interpenetration of the centre and local interests suited a particular way of carrying out politics, where the localities got enough autonomy to run their own affairs without needing to bother central elites; the centre lost control, but it was a good deal that allowed it to follow its policies. For local authorities, one of the reasons was the lack of a political executive in local government, which could advance local interests, as well as the weak public support and comprehension for elected local government. He described how the parties became national organizations without much territorial representation within them. Bulpitt also related the nationalization of interest groups and forms of representation across the UK, which limited territorial as opposed to interest group representation. To this it may be added the weak territorial role of MPs, who regarded constituency interests as a kind of surgery rather than a form of representation. The territorial departments were weak and there was no ministry of the interior to represent territorial interests.

A BULPITTIAN ACCOUNT OF CENTRE POLITICS

Bulpitt prided himself on being conversant with social science theory, and much of the book is taken up with a discussion of the deficiencies of contemporary theories as he saw them. Thus the account of central state politics should not just stand up as a description, but it should be an explanation for the key decisions of UK politics, which may be applicable elsewhere. That would be a fair assessment of Bulpitt's objectives as well as the criteria by which his account could add value to political science and the study of comparative politics more generally. Naturally, it might be possible to incorporate Bulpitt's account into other established theoretical perspectives in political science, and there are links to other theories, such as the new institutionalism, and to the role of ideas in policy formation. But the claim here is that the account is original, even though it is possible to see its links to fashionable theories.

Bulpitt focused on some stylized facts. There are core power holders in a nation-state: those that surround the court and who are the fount of political authority, and in particular they have the task of managing the bureaucratic organizations of the state. Sitting in the capital, they have a particular outlook and set of objectives. This perspective is partly generated by the functions of office, which are to run the nation-state, to keep it in business by protecting its territorial integrity, to ensure its interests are followed internationally and to facilitate the conditions so that its citizens are able to accumulate wealth. The outlook also comes from culture as inherited from history, the legacy of previous decisions and the built-up knowledge about how the governing system works, which created a tacit knowledge and informed the operating code of the system, its official mind. It is here that Bulpitt almost becomes a new institutionalist. His institutionalism is very particularist, where historical forms of explanation take their role, making the UK unique as a nation-state. It does not take much of a leap of imagination to consider that every nation-state has a central governing code that comes from the past. It is probably the case that a large federal state such as the USA, which replaces many of its bureaucrats with each new president, may not have this governing culture, but the long-established states of Europe probably do.Footnote ⁶ Even though nations may differ in the way they see the core objectives of the state, it is likely that these values are passed on in the central elite. Moreover, every state faces the same problems that concentrate the minds of central elites: managing the political system as a whole, reconciling the contradictory interests in it, dealing with territorial interests that threaten to blow up, keeping a cool strategy in international affairs and dealing with the tendency for the economy to depart from prosperity into crisis. In spite of grand ambitions, such as the kind that incoming governments might have, the room for manoeuvre is generally narrow. Further, it is not a feasible strategy to micro-manage the periphery: as Bulpitt writes, ‘all centres have to rely on indirect rule techniques to some extent.’Footnote ⁷

The account depends on the persistence of a core bureaucratic elite. It is an elitist account of politics. There was little discussion of the powers of institutions, merely what the elite does. It is not a pluralist conception either – the public does not get much of a look in, nor do interest groups. The elite is not divided, but neither does it get its own way all the time. There are limits to its power. Even though the governing culture is not instinctively democratic, the central elites have to swim with the tide.

Overall, the account does not operate at the level of high theory. It is a selective description of the aspects of the political system that Bulpitt considers important for determining the system's outcomes: the importance of past decisions, the longevity of elite culture and the stability and cohesiveness of the central elite. This is more of a guiding framework for analysis that depends on the functional needs of the system and the ability of the elites to manage it. The added value comes from the particular values from running the complex and fragmented territory of the UK where its civil servants adopted a particular approach to governing. As well as providing a particular take on the UK's territorial management, Bulpitt's approach suggests other states have their own central value systems that constrain what happens to policy and to their constitutions.

TERRITORY AND POWER: THE EVIDENCE ABOUT THE CENTRAL STATE

Territory and Power synthesized much of the existing literature on British politics, even if it gets the territorial twist. It would not be surprising to find that many of the conventional wisdoms in studies of central government are embedded within the book. In fact, one problem of looking at the record is that it would confirm what Bulpitt read, a rather circular argument. In any case, an empirical verification of his scheme is unreachable – his was an interpretation of British politics, which is not refutable. Like many functionalist writing, and rather like Marxist accounts of the state, the system is still partially intact when it breaks down, as it reveals its internal contradictions and lives on in a different form. To be fair to Bulpitt, he admits that the system of central guidance may have eroded irrevocably when he wrote the book, but the nature of his project makes empirical validation of even that claim very hard to carry out.

The other difficulty is that, in contrast to some aspects of UK politics, such as electoral behaviour or even local government, there are few studies of the central state, which is partly obscured by its secrecy and by the tastes and fashions of those who study administrative politics. Most studies of the civil service concentrate on the formal features, where it is hard to get the feel of who makes decisions and the nature of its elite. In fact, it is in the classics of the study of British politics that it is possible to find a more political account, often published before Territory and Power. The closest – and one that has insider status – is Heclo and Wildavsky's interview-based study of the Treasury, carried out in the 1970s,Footnote ⁸ not long after the golden age of the dual polity, though Bulpitt only cited it once and that was in reference to Parliament.Footnote ⁹ There is much in the North Americans' treatment that is familiar in Territory and Power: the closed world of Whitehall government and the importance of personal relationships, usually between men, who share the same values. Heclo and Wildavsky use the term ‘political administrators’, ‘the assemblage of ministers and senior civil servants, who preside over the work of cabinets and departments’.Footnote ¹⁰ They describe these policymakers rather like Bulpitt's chaps: ‘this intimate group of able men’.Footnote ¹¹ The Private Government of Public Money is a sociological analysis, rather like Bulpitt's, based on dissecting the belief systems of the elite. It shows the institutional superiority of the Treasury as the premier department of state, just as Bulpitt said it was – though this is largely common knowledge. But there are important differences. The private government account is of a wider bureaucratic elite, including principal financial officers as much as the inner core of senior policymakers. It stresses the narcissistic and self-absorbed character of the central elite as much as its outward-facing orientation. Nor is there a sense of grand politics being addressed. Moreover, there is very little on territory in the book, and what there is concerns local government finance rather than political relationships.

Another major book about policy-making in British government is Richardson and Jordan's.Footnote ¹² Both similar and different to Heclo and Wildavsky, it also mapped out decision-making in British government from interviews of key civil servants and other decision-makers in the policy communities of UK government. There are again some similarities to Bulpitt, with the emphasis on stability, the rules of the game and the underlying conservatism of the system. Policymakers approached new events cautiously and tried to gain consensus with the various interest groups at play. But Richardson and Jordan described a wider range of decision-makers than those in the Bulpittian inner centre. They were functionally defined and included interest groups, often separated from each other in sub-governments. There is a sense of the key decisions being taken away from the centre, although this could be a function of the topics that Richardson and Jordan chose to study (water and agriculture).

More generally, the policy network school of writing on public policy emphasized the diffusion of power in British government and the lack of direction from the centre,Footnote ¹³ which in some ways coheres with the Bulpittian polity, where the centre cannot really control what is going on, and leaves large chunks of public administration in the hands of local authorities and other agencies. But it does suggest that the network is diffused and extended rather than centralized in London. Some recent accounts seem to back up the differentiated, decentred character to UK government, which prevails in spite of the unitary character to its constitution and the power of the executive to get things done.Footnote ¹⁴ A study of the governance of London and the south-east of England shows the lack of cohesion of the London-based elite, which appears to lack a strategy and a clear sense of its interest when forming a policy for the most prosperous part of the country. The centre appears absent or indecisive over large areas of decision-making, with occasional decisive interventions when its attention is directed to a problem, such as the funding for mega-transport projects.Footnote ¹⁵

It may be the case that the literature on policy networks cannot evaluate Bulpitt properly, partly because it takes the analysis outside the centre. Better is the core executive approach that emerged in the 1990s.Footnote ¹⁶ The core executive may be defined ‘as cabinet (including the prime minister), cabinet committees, the cabinet office, the prime minister's office, parts of the treasury, the major government law offices and those central elements engaged in managing the governing party's parliamentary support base’.Footnote ¹⁷ This approach to policy-making was designed to take the study of the executive away from the sterile debates about the power of the prime minister as opposed to the Cabinet, to look at the entity that was really driving policy. Here there is something close to what Bulpitt described, if a bit broader. But it would seem to be fair that the study of British government, having formerly been either concerned with just the formal roles in the system or the diffusion of power in policy networks, has converged on a definition of the centre, which appears as the driving force in Bulpitt's analysis. It is probably a more divided entity than it appears in Bulpitt, and many of the studies of the core executive examine the conflicts within it.Footnote ¹⁸ But the term is really inspired guesswork: there exists no comprehensive study of the core executive based on interviews or the collection of data. It provides a concept for a review of the literature and to assess the executive success of particular governments and their prime ministers.Footnote ¹⁹ It has, however, inspired more subtle accounts of Cabinet government that appreciate the complexity of the machinery at the top. The main example is Burch and Holliday's study of Cabinet government.Footnote ²⁰ They outline the formal structures but they also examine the networks and values that underpin the workings of the Cabinet. These values ‘have developed cumulatively, and are therefore characterised by substantial inertia. They express in a very strong sense established ways of doing things, and reflect in some detail the historical traditions of the British state.’Footnote ²¹ As with other works on British central government, it does not show the cohesive elite in quite such a pronounced way as it appears in Bulpitt's account. Perhaps the administrative and political worlds are more complex and diffused than the grander narrative supposes. Here machinery, practices, informal codes and rules matter as much as the insider club that is supposed to look after the interests of the state.

Another complementary line of work is on club government. The term has been advocated by Marquand.Footnote ²² He writes:

This club did not seek democratic or constitutional legitimation: it existed because it worked, which is a very similar proposition to Bulpitt's. Moran develops the term to characterize a type of decision-making that dominated British government, which led to a conservatism in policy-making, even a stagnation during the post-war period, which he regards as unique in the Western world.Footnote ²⁴ This was club government because it relied on informal rules and personal knowledge to make policy, such as on regulation of key industries. It is probably the case that the club Moran discusses is rather outside the core executive, but it probably reflects the same culture of government that extended from the top all the way down.

It seems that the case studies and general accounts of British core policy-making offer support to Bulpitt's analysis of the centre, or at least are consistent with it. But there may be self-referential consensus about policy-making in these writings that is hard to evaluate without any solid facts. Is there any evidence of change in policy-making? A few quantitative studies show a different picture to this cosy portrayal of elite management. John and Margetts show that budget-making was highly punctuated in the period since the Second World War.Footnote ²⁵ John and Jennings also show that the executive policy agenda as represented by the speech from the throne (the queen's speech) was also highly punctuated, with many changes in attention to policy issues occurring at the height of the period of the dual polity in the 1950s.Footnote ²⁶ It may be the case that the 1950s were more changeable and less pragmatic than the conventional wisdom suggests. The centre was interested in radical policy changes, such as local government finance and education, which affected the periphery.

The final aspect where the empirical record may be examined is the degree of interaction between centre and periphery. As with the studies of the centre, the empirical record is meagre. Most studies of centre–periphery relations concentrate on administrative contacts or are desk based.Footnote ²⁷ There is almost nothing written that either refutes or substantiates Bulpitt's claims. Academics do know there was a great deal of administrative contact between central and local government, and also much detailed interest in the centre in matters of local administration. Bulpitt admits that central intervention was a characteristic of the modernization of British government in the 1960s and 1970s, which he regards as evidence of the decline of the dual polity. Yet overall the record supports Bulpitt's general claim: central government left local authorities with much discretion to get on with local business of government. This was very much the style of centre–local relations from the 1940s to the 1980s, as many reviews of the period conclude.Footnote ²⁸ But the level of political contacts is much harder to address. In support of the dual polity claim, it is common knowledge that local government politicians usually stand down as councillors when they become members of Parliament, which is usually their aspiration, even when they are prominent local figures, even long-standing leaders of local councils. The short tenure of British local leaders and their fear of being unseated by their opponents limit their ability to wield a local coalition to lobby the centre for resources.Footnote ²⁹ Yet local influence on central policies has occurred, partly through the prevalence of pork-barrel politics,Footnote ³⁰ which is carried out through the influence of members of Parliament. It may be the case that the portrait of local activities of members of Parliament as mainly case-workers for their constituents is not entirely accurate. Backbenchers are part of the political network, and the central state's policies are rarely uniform across territory. Even Bulpitt referred to pork-barrel politics during the 1974–79 Labour governments.Footnote ³¹

The level of representation contrasts with other political systems, which appear to entrench local interests much more. The relative lack of access in the UK may explain why local government is held with such contempt by central government politicians and civil servants. A Bulpittian view of the centre appears in Jones and Travers's interview-based study of central government attitudes to local government, which shows that the ignorance and contempt of the centre is alive and well.Footnote ³² The lack of lobbying power of local government in the face of central government legal power in the 1980s and 1990s is further evidence of its impotence with an independent centre. Overall, the limited evidence does seem to support Bulpitt's thesis. He was probably right, particularly as he was an expert on local party politics in England.

Overall, much of Bulpitt's account of the centre receives support from both contemporary and current studies of British central government. This is especially the case with his characterization of the central governing system and the sense of who is in charge. But there is less evidence about the strategies of the central state in managing the periphery.

THE DECLINE OF THE BULPITTIAN CENTRE?

In Bulpitt's view, the centre continued to rule as before, even when the world it sought to manage changed beyond recognition. Moreover, it had to deal more directly with the peripheral elites when the UK state moved to crisis in the years since the 1960s. But there is no indication in Territory and Power that ‘government by chaps’ had really diminished. In fact, the drift of the chapter on Thatcherism was the attempt by a new administration to engage in a set of reforms that would get the centre back to where it once was: powerful in foreign policy, governing a prosperous economy and leaving the periphery to get on with the job of governing its own affairs. Bulpitt claims the centre wanted to sort out local problems such as public expenditure and taxation, and then leave well alone. The fact that such interventions meant it could not leave alone at all might be seen as either a rejection of the Bulpitt scheme or confirmation of it, depending on the point of view.

Since the publication of the book, however, there have been many changes to the British style of government, to the civil service, to the club nature of governing and to the elite more generally, which may mean that the Bulpittian close-knit world of the centre no longer exists in the same form. Policy network studies claim that the quiet world of policy-making had been successfully challenged by more activist interest groups and an intrusive media, and had been succeeded by a more open and less predictable type of government. British government experienced a series of reforms from a more politically directed civil service, which some believe show that the Whitehall model has gone forever.Footnote ³³ The new public management has changed the composition of the higher civil service, recruiting more of them from outside, promoting more ‘can-do’ civil servants and gradually diluting the elite character of its recruits. Party politicization may have shortened the time horizons of the central bureaucratic elite. The world of government is far more complex than before, with devolution to the nations of the UK, power ceded to London government and with the rest of the local government system integrated into the Whitehall pattern of administration. King describes the decline of constitutional conventions and habits of governing that had sustained the Westminster model of government.Footnote ³⁴ Moran outlines the decline of the club world, with its replacement by legalized and publicly scrutinized forms of control. The result is a tendency to promote rapid policy initiatives. Moreover, the elite world of London government has gone into decline with social changes in the wider society, transferring power, wealth and status away from the upper classes and the Oxbridge-educated elite to the new moneyed classes that did not share the value systems of the old elite (though the accommodation of these new classes is a very old English story).

There are also indications of a lack of change at the centre. Recent studies seem to show that the worldview of senior bureaucrats and politicians remains attached to the Whitehall ethos.Footnote ³⁵ One study shows how the civil service interprets the new public management in terms of its tradition, using it to further its own aims.Footnote ³⁶ Such values influence the civil service in its management of the decentralization to next-steps agencies, for the reforms may have been a way of protecting the policy-making core of the bureaucracy.Footnote ³⁷ If the values within administrative systems are very powerful, it follows that it would be hard to see the centre shifting in its fundamental outlook. Indeed, there is much continuity in the management of the state, even in the post-devolution period, with incremental strategies. The lack of a principled and well-thought-through constitutional settlement under Labour since 1997 has a very Bulpittian feel to it. As ever in politics, it is possible to observe continuity as well as change.

CONCLUSIONS

The message of this article is that Bulpitt's account of the centre offers contemporary scholars an insightful framework to help understand policy-making and political development within nation-states. The centre – through its elites – has a unique perspective, not shared by many other political actors. These are key power holders in the form of the senior bureaucrats and the politicians who occupy high office, who form a cohesive and integrated elite or core of decision-makers. The elite's overriding desire is to keep the overall project of the state in business by balancing out the contradictory elements within it. It needs to reconcile the need to create a stable external support system, the demand to manage the economy so economic accumulation may continue and to adjudicate between the many demands placed upon it, not least from powerful elites located in territorial strongholds. Given the tasks involved, it is best to have service delivery and territorial management administered by other actors so that it can concentrate on its core tasks. Reality may not live up to this ideal as the centre endlessly meddles in the detail of administration and local management, but it remains an aspiration and a place the centre wants to be. This powerful set of considerations helps the central elite steer the state, and influences how governments refine their statecraft. So it is no surprise to see Bulpitt examining these strategies of governments in his later work.Footnote ³⁸ In Bulpitt's view, this assessment owed much to the particular history of the UK state, in particular its messy territorial settlement and the unique prominence of London. But the tenor of the argument presented so far is that this analysis does not need many tweaks to be more generally applicable, for it rests on a functional necessity and the universal finding that there is always a centre of power and people at the top who seek to guard the core interests of the state. By seeking to explain what makes these central elites tick and to see the constraints and opportunities they face during the course of history, political scientists can understand much about how policy is formed and what keeps nation-states as both radical policymakers and constitutional and system conservatives. The members of the central elite are truly anchors in a potentially chaotic system of governance, but they come with a price. Their very flexibility and pragmatism helps ensure that the status quo is hard to change without massive regime shifts.

The academic record of studies of the central machine of government appears to bear out Bulpitt's thesis. It also is likely that Bulpitt's account remains a powerful description of politics and decision-making today. Of course, the cohesiveness and unity of the old centre elite has been eroded by social change, the decline in traditional public institutions and has been challenged by the practices of the new public management. But the ideas and social norms of the elite are hard to stamp out: such is the core claim of the new institutionalism as values pass from generation to generation and new elites face the same constraints and options as their forebears. Thus the exigencies of managing the UK economy in an international global market and of maintaining the country at the centre of international decisions still preoccupy central elites today as much as they did in the past. The foreign adventures of the early years of the twenty-first century show this neatly, as does the elite's response to the economic downturn from the end of 2008. In spite of Bulpitt's work, knowledge about what goes on at the core of the UK state is still limited. With such a blind spot existing, it will be hard to understand the nature of British politics, how the big decisions are made, how political parties' choices are limited and how the public does not get much of a say.