The British Labour Party and the Civil Service in the Twentieth Century

The dominance of a centralist and statist approach in the British Labour Party’s political thinking and practice in the twentieth century gave a vital role to the civil service and the Whitehall bureaucratic machine in the transformation of society and the achievement of socialism. However, Labour has generally not paid much serious or sustained attention to the civil service and the Whitehall machine. Certain lines of criticism of civil service organisation, management, power and accountability recur through the party’s history, together with proposals for reform. In practice, however, Labour governments made only patchy progress towards the implementation of Whitehall reforms from the 1920s through to the 1970s.