Corporate gift service

The single most important element of the new-right project of the 1980s and 1990s was a relentless Kulturkampf against the public domain and its culture of citizenship, equity and service. To a large extent, new Labour has continued that attack.

To understand what that means for British politics and society, we have to understand the public domain. It should not be confused with the public sector. It depends on public institutions (notably the rule of law), but it is not confined to them. In principle, a large public domain could coexist with a small public sector, as it did in the 19th century. Government expenditure as a proportion of GNP was lower in 1900 than it had been in 1831. As late as the 1920s, Keynes expected further growth in the public domain (not that he used the term)--not as a result of state action but because privately owned companies would increasingly assume public responsibilities. The Bank of England was already an example. By the 1950s, big private firms--organised hierarchically and run by salaried professionals--did not behave very differently from their public sector counterparts. They increasingly adopted a public service ethic. The ruthlessness of traditional capitalism had largely disappeared; Adam Smith's invisible hand had been replaced, as Anthony Crosland put it, by "the glad hand".

Indeed, the public domain should not be seen as a "sector" at all. It is best understood as a dimension of social life, with its own norms and decision rules, cutting across sectoral boundaries: as a set of activities that can b e carried out by private individuals, charities and even private firms as well as public agencies. In the public domain, citizenship rights trump both market power and the bonds of clan or kinship. Professional pride in a job well done or a sense of civic duty replaces the hope of gain as well as loyalty to family, friends or dependants. Goods are distributed on the basis of need and not of personal ties or access to economic resources. As the Dahrendorf Commission put it: "People act neither out of the kindness of their hearts, nor in response to incentives ... but because they have a sense of serving the community." That deal will not always be followed in practice. But nor are the ideals of the market and private domains. Sellers sometimes collude to do down buyers, and friends are sometimes false.

In the private domain, loyalty to friends and family is a supreme virtue. In the public domain, it is not. EM Forster's assertion that he would rather betray his country than his friends was shocking because he had applied the norms of the private domain to one where they do not belong. Favouritism and nepotism are shocking for the same reason. In the market domain, goods and services are--quite properly--commodities to be bought and sold. But votes, honours, government policies and justice belong to the public domain. They must not be commodified. By the same token, the measuring rods that assess efficiency in the market domain--"throughput", productivity, added value, monetary return on capital--have no place in the public domain. Academics do not become more efficient when the staff-student ratio falls and lectures are overcrowded; the value of a stay in hospital is not enhanced if low-paid contract nurses, with little commitment to the job, replace established nursing teams.

The public domain is both priceless and precarious--a gift of history, always at risk. It can take shape only in a society in which the notion of a public interest, distinct from private interests, has taken root. Unlike the private domain of love, friendship and personal connection and the market domain of buying and selling, the values and practices of the public domain do not come naturally. They have to be learnt and then nurtured.

In the past 20 years, an aggressively interventionist state has enfeebled the institutions and practices that nurtured the public domain. As a result, it is now in crisis. Deregulation, privatisation, public-private partnerships, proxy markets, performance indicators mimicking those of the private corporate sector and a systematic assault on professional autonomy narrowed the public domain and blurred the distinction between it and the market domain. Public functions of all kinds were farmed out to unaccountable, appointed bodies dominated by business interests and managed according to market principles. Intermediate institutions such as the BBC, the universities, the schools, the museums and the health service were forced, as far as possible, into a market mould. So, above all, was the senior civil service, where the frontiers of the public domain had been most zealously guarded, and in which its values bad been most thoroughly internalised.

The dilapidated public services of 21st-century Britain are the most obvious legacy of this Kulturkampf but not the most dangerous one. Incessant marketisation has done even more damage than low taxation and resource starvation. It has generated a culture of distrust that is corroding the values of professionalism, citizenship, equity and service like acid in the water supply. For the marketisers, the professional public-service ethic is a con. Professionals are self-interested rent-seekers, trying to force the price of their labour above its market value. The service ethic is a rhetorical device to legitimise a web of monopolistic cartels whose real purpose is to rip off the consumer. There is no point in appealing to the values of common citizenship. There are no citizens; there are only customers.

The service ethic still has devoted champions, but danger signals are everywhere. The growing interpenetration of politics and business; the dumbing down of the BBC and parts of the broadsheet press; the private sector sponsorship that has invaded Oxbridge colleges, opera compahies and even the police; the diversion of academic energies from the pursuit of knowledge and the education of the young to a scrabble for advantage in mindless assessment exercises--all tell the same story. The dykes our Victorian ancestors built to protect the public domain from invasion by the market domain have been breached at point after point. The notion of a common public interest transcending private interests has all but disappeared.

The consequences go wider than appears at first sight. The threat to democracy once came from overtly anti-democratic movements on the far right and far left. The threat now is more insidious. It comes from what has been called "market-driven politics", from the steady retreat of the civic ideal in the face of the marketisers' Kulturkampf. One manifestation is a decline in public confidence in the whole political process. Another is a marked fall in electoral participation. The most serious is an incomplete but nevertheless unmistakable return to the politics of connection, favouritism and patronage which 19th-century radicals labelled "Old Corruption", and which the early champions of the public domain thought they had banished for ever.

None of this implies a return to the public domain of old days. Upright and conscientious though they were, the elites who ran its institutions were often aloof and condescending. The operational codes and tacit understandings of the central state were saturated with pre-democratic, essentially monarchical assumptions and values that became increasingly out of joint with the attitudes of a better-educated and less deferential citizenry. As the state sank in esteem, the public domain all too often sank with it. These failings gave the marketisers their opportunity. The public domain cannot be reinvented unless the causes of its recent tribulations are understood, and their lessons learnt.