Centralisation: An Iron Law?

The New Digest is pleased to welcome back Mr Stephen Webb. He is the Director of Programmes at the think tank Fix Britain. Stephen was previously the Head of Research on Government Reform and Home Affairs at the Policy Exchange. Prior to this, he served in senior positions in the British civil service, in the Home Office and Cabinet Office. He writes at his substack Wallenstein’s Camp. All views are the author’s own.

He is now working on a book on the collapse of British state capacity and how it can be rebuilt, Make Bureaucracy Great Again, due to be published by Polity Press.

Everybody supports localism and devolution in principle. But is everyone a centraliser on things they care about? And is any attempt to maintain ‘subsidiarity’, still less to encourage greater devolution, swimming against an inexorable tide?

In the UK, political parties routinely include in manifestos promises to end the excessive centralisation of Whitehall. Governments since 1997 have implemented devolution, local mayors and Police and Crime Commissioners. Sometimes this is about devolving legal competence, as with Scotland and Wales. Within England, devolution is often more about localising policy and spending decisions (with tax often seen as a bridge too far).

The outcomes have varied. The mayors have been a mixed story. PCCs are widely felt to be a disappointment, with almost none of them taking up the opportunity of genuinely trying something new . Even in London, citizens seem automatically to assume crime is the fault of central government, rather than the Mayor’s responsibility.

There are some brave Fabian voices who express scepticism about the whole idea of devolution. They cite Bevin’s quote that the government should centralise power in order to give it away. Whatever the merits of the argument, the long view seems to suggest that centralisation is a pretty iron law anyway (though giving power away is as distant as ever).

The history of England is one of more or less unbroken gradual centralisation since the time of the Tudors. Thomas Cromwell extinguished autonomy in Wales (the Marcher Lords) and in holdouts like the Palatinate of Durham. Over the period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, even as the power of the monarchy faded, the combination of the King in Parliament created a small but ever more tightly integrated central state, with developing national institutions like the Bank of England and the Excise comprising a formidable revenue raising machine that repeatedly overwhelmed France’s fiscal capacity, despite the latter being a much bigger country and economy.

Throughout the modern period, the state gradually grew, first directing local authorities and then increasingly aggregating its powers, rationalising its borders and breaking the links with other previously local functions like police and fire. Ever more central agencies were created to take on functions previously belonging to local authorities. Only the ancient Corporation governing the City of London survives the deluge.

This process was echoed all over Europe. In France, Tocqueville argued the techniques adopted by the Ancien Régime to increase its power locally were adopted and built on after the Revolution, with France ending dominated by Préfets governing the Départements, direct descendants of the Ancien Régime’s Intendants. Meanwhile, centrally dictated education almost completely rooted out the local languages and dialects which most French had previously spoken. In Bernadette’s vision at Lourdes, the Virgin Mary spoke Gascon, a language more or less dead in the village within a couple of decades of Bernadette’s death.

This process of homogenisation is a curious one. Years ago, I was hiking through Northern Germany and crossing the border into the Netherlands. At once the language changed, of course. But a few hundred years ago, the inhabitants of a German village would better have understood someone ten miles over the border in Holland than someone twenty miles away in Germany. Now radio, television and a unified national language taught in schools makes those on the continent immediately comprehensible to a compatriot hundreds of miles away but incomprehensible to a close neighbour, creating sharp lines where none previously existed.

Germany in the Imperial period saw a steady increase in central power, which continued during Weimar. The biggest single piece of work needed for Nazi domination of Germany had already been done for them by the last Conservative Weimar government - the Preußenschlag, dissolving the Prussian government which had been a stronghold of opposition to Naziism. After the war, the victorious allies imposed a new federal system. Even then, the states didn’t recover the tax autonomy of the Weimar constitution, and the balance of power has shifted rapidly in the 80 years since the foundation of the Republic. Under the Federal constitution, the states swapped local autonomy for the right to co decision in Federal policy through the upper house, the Bundesrat. Competences have steadily drifted to the Federal level, including issues like education and culture, originally envisaged as wholly matters for the states. Reforms in 1969 and 2006 have formalised this process. In the meantime, local government below state level has seen successive waves of consolidation, with the number of municipalities reducing by about 75% since the foundation of the Federal Republic.

The United States prides itself on the strength of its states and the scope this gives for diverse local political cultures. Tyler Cowen frequently argues that the quality of local and state government in the US argues against claims of declining state capacity. But the last 100 years has seen a truly massive transfer of power from the state to the Federal government. Many argued at the time that the New Deal institutions and departments were of dubious constitutional legality. In the civil and criminal law the definition of ‘crossing state lines’ has enabled a huge extension of Federal jurisdiction for things like ‘wire fraud’. And where legal powers were lacking, the purse strings were enough to force compliance, like the withholding of Federal road building funds enforcing a move across all 50 states to raise the drinking age to 21.

Any vestigial Republican commitment to states’ rights seems to have been abandoned by the Trump administration. It’s one roll back of Federal institutions, the planned abolition of the Department of Education, is motivated more by ideology. But Trump seems very happy to use Federal law to extend influence over cities and states – notably contemplating in his Vision 47 programme using the Civil Rights Act to bear down on Soros-supported radical prosecutors. Trump has also escalated the willingness to cut all Federal funding to enforce compliance with Federal law (eg on sanctuary cities), but also to influence what have traditionally been seen as local competences (eg using the same Federal powers as Obama to reverse Obama’s position on trans participation in sport).

The same trend can be seen in two polities probably seen as at opposite poles; the Roman Catholic Church and the Swiss cantons.

The Catholic Church saw a steady process of centralisation from the Gregorian reforms of the eleventh century towards the final articulation of the doctrine of Papal Infallibility in the 1860s. The papacy saw off the challenge of the Conciliar movement in the fifteenth century, and Sixtus V reorganised the Roman Curia and clarified the Pope’s preeminence over cardinals in two key constitutions, Postquam Verus of 1586 and Immensa Aeterni Dei of 1588.

The Swiss cantons, by contrast, are famously fractious and independent. Pre 1914, cantons retained near-total sovereignty over taxation, education, police, and social policy. The federal government was weak by design — a deliberate reaction to the brief Sonderbund civil war of 1847. In practice, however, the expansion of the state and social security has seen a progressively more centralised welfare system and Federally administered fiscal transfers between cantons. Most of all, perhaps, the relationship with the EU led to centralised negotiating powers, and cantons have lost autonomy in a huge range of areas touching the bilateral treaties; notably labour, transport and the movement of persons.

Looming over all of this is the example of ancient Rome. In the early days of the Empire, the government was done by an extraordinarily thin layer of officials and actually a pretty small army – maybe representing less than 1% of the Empire’s population. The trick was to overawe enemies or potential rebels and entice in the local elites. This saw a huge period of flourishing. Trade and industry prospered across the empire. Safe from the need to compete militarily locally, elites competed for glory through leadership roles in their cities which they embellished with grand buildings, aqueducts and temples.

Over time, however, this faded. The sham of local independence became ever more obvious, so standing out in local cities became seen more as a financial burden and, perhaps, a personal risk. By the end of the third century, the Emperor Diocletian was having to force reluctant local elites to take up political offices, while real local powers like the ability to issue their own coinage was removed. Diocletian was passing laws seeking to regulate prices and wages, and building up nationalised industries for manufacturing arms. The legal code got ever larger in the latter years of the Empire even as the real grip over the population weakened.

We tend to look at historical processes through a Marxist eye – who is dominating whom, and treat processes of centralisation as planned from the top. While this may sometimes be the case, the role of the final adjudicator attracts power whether the holder is particularly looking for it or not. Sometimes, indeed, the pressure comes from below. The English Common Law came about because local plaintiffs trusted the King’s law more than they did local manorial courts. Stendahl’s Vie de Napoléon argued that the Napoleonic Code was popular for being strictly objective, even if remote from the facts on the ground. Arguably Diocletian’s measures and the growing central bureaucracy was at least as much a reaction to developments below as an imposition from above – responding to the decay of local administration and the risk of a vacuum emerging.

Ironically, even strong opponents of centralisation cannot resist furthering this process. Liberal critics of the infallible Papacy and proponents of ‘conciliarism’ (who demand a greater role for local bishops’ conferences) were among the first to criticise Rome for not stepping in to impose a tougher disciplinary approach on local conferences once the child sex abuse scandals broke. Whatever the motivation, once power has shifted, it tends to stick. And in modern democracies, the obsession with equal treatment and fairness works against any system of real devolution. There is no criticism of a public service in the UK seen as more damning than the claim that it is a ‘post code lottery’ – though this is almost the definition of how a devolved system ought to operate. If people cannot make different choices on spending and services in their area, it is hard to see what the point of devolved power is.

There are obviously exceptions to this trend – states like the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth or the Holy Roman Empire. More recently, several countries have made determined efforts over recent decades to decentralise. The most dramatic is Spain, which went from a hyper-centralised state under Franco to a radically devolved, but also unstable, constitution now. France has decentralised administratively but not fiscally. Italy has decentralised on paper while remaining operationally incoherent.

It remains to be seen if any of these initiatives are capable of resisting the deeper currents. I think the rule is that any entity that can assert its authority to be the final court of appeal will attract ever more power to itself and hollow out the entities below. If it cannot assert such authority, it will wither away and true power will devolve to subordinate bodies like the German electorates which, as the Holy Roman Empire decayed became kingdoms, only to be subsumed in turn by the Second Reich. This may be the ultimate test that determines whether devolution in Spain or for Wales and Scotland within the UK fades away or leads to national break up.

Where will all of this end? The fragility and inflexibility of centralised power is rightly lamented. Jared Diamon’s Guns Germs and Steel argues the fragmented and competitive world of Europe gave it long term civilisational advantages that ultimately enabled it to overtake China. De Tocqueville’s description of the American township are justly famous. ‘Subsidiarity’ lies at the heart of much Catholic social teaching. Restoring that local dynamism would be a huge prize. It feels like an experiment that has to be attempted, though proceeding, perhaps, with the optimism of the will, the pessimism of the intellect.