Creativity and the Experts: New Labour, Think Tanks, and the Policy Process

 

Philip Schlesinger. The International Journal of Press/Politics 2009; 14; 3. - http://www.sagepublications.com

1. Before reading the article try to answer the following question: «Is it possible for think tanks to be really independent?»

 

Think Tanks in the United Kingdom

The workings of think tanks – along with policy specialists in government, consultants, and lobbyists in the wider “policy community” – may be analysed in terms of a sociology of knowledge and intellectuals in the present phase of modernity. Think tanks are not easily defined, although an extensive literature attempts to offer viable categorisations. For present purposes, I take think tanks to be organisations that describe themselves as such and that are engaged in the production of policy discourses that make claims to knowledge. Those who work in think tanks, as policy advisers or consultants, are a tiny and select segment of the university-educated intelligentsia. They operate within elite circles where the costs of entry to knowledgeable policy discussion are high. Their exclusivity – or as Pierre Bourdieu (1986) would put it, their “distinction” – is based in the claims to expertise made by the ‘thinktankerati.’

In a major study of British think tanks, Diane Stone (1996) suggests that these be seen as “independent policy research institutes.” Whether they are “independent” is a matter of empirical judgement. For as Stone notes, the line between “policy analysis and advocacy does get blurred”, not least because think tanks engage in “building networks within policy communities and tailoring their product to the needs of decision makers and opinion leaders”. Stone argues that think tanks occupy a strategic position in the “epistemic communities” in which knowledge about policy is debated. Such “knowledge based networks... articulate the cause-and-effect relationships of complex problems”. Because think tanks operate within a highly structured market place for ideas, marketing and promotion are central to their quest for influence over government. Consequently, their ability to achieve resonance within the media is of central importance; they are a major resource for journalists. Stone suggests that we conceive of think tanks as having “influence” rather than a direct impact on policy formulation; she argues plausibly that they have changed how policy is “debated and decided” and that “they help to provide the conceptual language, the ruling paradigms, the empirical examples that become the

accepted assumptions for those in charge of making policy.” Indeed, we can go beyond this to note that the terms of the discourse may become so compelling that not to buy into these is tantamount to self-exclusion. If those in charge of policy sing from their own hymn sheet, those who want policy to work for them are obliged to join the congregation in full voice. This is demonstrably the case in the debate over “creativity” that has dominated thinking about the cultural industries for more than a decade in the United Kingdom and that has increasingly been exported elsewhere by its exponents.

Expertise and Government

Michael Schudson has characterised an expert as “someone in possession of specialized knowledge that is accepted by the wider society as legitimate....What defines an expert as a sociological type is willingness to submit to the authority of a group of peers.” Contrary to those who see expertise as a threat to democracy, Schudson sees it – ideally – as speaking truth to power, clarifying the grounds of public debate, and offering a diagnostic service.

Schudson’s optimism needs to be tempered somewhat. The costs of entry to expertise create barriers between those with know-how and those without it. Experts advising those in power may lose their critical, democratic edge when faced by the seduction of power and influence. Furthermore, an educated public may not be able to muster the requisite arguments in forms capable of counterbalancing insider know-how. In short, being able to take one’s critical distance from expertise does still matter, given the continuing – and indeed, growing – importance of expert knowledge for the policy process.

Think tanks, arguably, helped create the climate of ideas that aided the rise to power in the United Kingdom of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1979. In reaction to Thatcherism’s ideologues, the New Labour opposition prepared for the end of its seventeen-year exile from the levers of government by encouraging the growth of its own think tanks. Think-tank formation and reorientation is a lead indicator of impending political change.

Contemporary policy expertise is deeply connected with modern party politics. As Rod Eyerman has shown, “the formation of a new intellectual role – the professional expert” in Britain – as elsewhere – occurred during and after World War I. John Maynard Keynes was an exemplary case of a state expert in the field of economics who exercised global policy influence. He was also the progenitor of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB), the key instrument of cultural policy delivery in the United Kingdom after World War II. Keynes’s model for the ACGB emerged from his longstanding and intense involvement in the artistic and intellectual milieu of the Bloomsbury Group. It also reflected his knowledge of the British state’s bureaucracy and of government’s ability to create intermediary bodies such as the BBC and the University Grants Committee, the models for the “arms length” ACGB (Upton 2004). It was in the post-World War II period that new style Conservative-supporting think tanks emerged: The Institute of Economic Affairs was set up in 1955, the Centre for Policy Studies in 1974, and the Adam Smith Institute in 1977. Although the precise impact of such “New Right” think tanks is a matter of debate, arguably they inflected both the political discourse and shaped the intellectual terrain. Left-oriented analyses, such as the “New Times” arguments elaborated during the 1980s in the left-wing monthly Marxism Today, were deeply influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s conception of the struggle for hegemony. The issue was how to make both discursive and institutional responses to the prevalent neo-liberalism. The goal of recapturing the “nation” as a discursive object, the celebration of popular culture, and the drive for constitutional reform came out of this moment.

Colin Leys (2006) has argued that given regimes provide key background conditions for understanding how expertise is mobilised and articulated. Thus, in liberal/social democracies, a generalist civil service may call upon various kinds of public inquiry to provide external advice. Leys holds that state interventionism engendered the development of research departments and policy centres and a shared commitment to objectivity “in the sense that policy proposals should be judged on the basis of rational argument and sound evidence”. The public domain is one in which “professionals” hold sway. Post-1974, monetarist thinking dominated during the global financial crisis, and there was a marked shift to a neoliberal policy regime. “Its key feature,” argues Leys, “is that policy is now fundamentally about national competitiveness and responding to global market forces”. Private sector secondments to government, special advisers, and communications experts displaced the career civil service, which has been “radically reorganised on business lines, following the doctrines of the ‘new public management’”.

According to this argument, more policy-making opportunities have been created for the ‘thinktankerati’ and other experts. For Leys, the new ideal type is the entrepreneur rather than the rational Weberian bureaucrat.

According to this argument, the rise of think tanks in the United Kingdom is part of a broader, long-term movement in the mobilisation of expertise for purposes of government and, in particular, for winning public policy arguments. “Professional” policy expertise has counted at least since the early twentieth century. The composition of such expertise and the use made of it takes different forms according to the regime conditions in place. Alongside the evolution of institutionalised expertise in the broader policy community have come changes within government itself. The first think tank expressly installed at the heart of British government came at the behest of Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath. Set up in 1970, the Central Policy Review Staff (“the Tank” to insiders) was situated in the Cabinet Office and deployed a wide-ranging strategic agenda, working as an “outside consultant” and “external catalyst”. It survived until 1983. As an alternative to this Conservative-inspired body, also situated in the Cabinet Office, the Policy Unit was established in 1974 in Number 10 Downing Street to support Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Two of the economic experts in the Policy Unit, Andrew Graham (b1942,adviser from 1974 to 1979 and later a member of the Channel 4 TV board) and Gavyn Davies (b1950, adviser from 1974 to 1976 and 1976 to 1979, and later chairman of the BBC from 2001 to 2004) had an impact on broadcasting policy and practice, Davies particularly so (cf. Graham and Davies 1997). The Policy Unit is an instrument for the prime minister’s power operating, in one Cabinet Office insider’s words, “like the court of a king.”

Labour was out of power from 1979 to 1997. From the late eighties, it began to equip itself for the battle of ideas. After a disastrous 1983 general election campaign, the party began to follow the painful road of “modernisation,” first under Neil Kinnock (who lost the 1987 and 1991 general elections) and subsequently under John Smith. Smith’s premature death in 1994 ushered in the present New Labour phase under the, often tense, duumvirate of Tony Blair as Prime Minister and Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Brown replaced Blair at Number 10 in June 2007.

New Labour’s “Policy Generation”

Like their Conservative predecessors, New Labour-supporting think tanks have provided a cadre of recruits for advisory posts in government and also for ministerial careers. Second, they have been a space in which a new generation of politicians has been formed. As Ron Eyerman has observed, “ Intellectual generations... because of the linkage with cognitive traditions and the need for public expression connected with the role, exhibit particular characteristics.” The group examined below has been shaped by all or some of the following: attendance at elite universities (mostly Oxbridge), early association with Labour’s “modernising” drive to achieve success at the polls, policy analysis and development to fit in with this objective, time spent in the worlds of policy advice and/or management consultancy, and – often profound – exposure to cultural and communications policy and strategy issues.

In what follows, I sketch connections between two key think tanks – Demos and the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) – and New Labour to demonstrate how, for individuals now highly prominent both in political and public life, these links have facilitated their career paths. I shall first focus on those who have mostly worked on media, cultural, and communications policy issues and second, by way of a case study, go on to delineate how these connections – and the use of expertise – have played into shifts in creative industries policy over the past decade.

The first New Labour-sympathising think tank was IPPR, established in 1988. Following Labour’s electoral defeats in 1983 and 1987, “the impetus for establishing the IPPR came out of the need to recreate a modernising left-wing intellectual community, able to suggest new policies to solve problems caused or ignored by free marketeers, without alienating a moderate electorate”. Patricia Hewitt (b1948), previously director of Liberty (the civil liberties lobbying group), was IPPR’s deputy director from 1989 to 1994 and was said to be the organisation’s driving force. Hewitt had earlier been press secretary for Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock from 1988 to 1989 and involved in the first stage of the party’s “modernisation.” She then headed research at Andersen Consulting from 1994 until elected to Westminster in 1997. She subsequently occupied several ministerial roles in the Blair governments, including Minister for Small Business and E-Commerce and Secretary of State for Trade and Industry. At the Department for Trade and Industry (DTI), Hewitt had presided over the creation of the new-style communications regulator, Ofcom, the Office of Communications. She left the Cabinet in June 2007 and while still an Member of Parliament (MP) was appointed a non-executive director of telecommunications giant BT in March 2008.

The world of consultancy and think tanks impressed itself even more on the careers of a subsequent New Labour generation. Matthew Taylor (b1961) directed IPPR from 1999 to 2003. From IPPR, Taylor went on to the Number 10 Policy Unit as Chief Adviser on Strategy to Prime Minister Tony Blair in September 2003. An Observer profile commented, “His decision to move to number 10 will confirm the widespread view that IPPR is merely ‘the New Labour civil service.’” Taylor moved on in November 2006, becoming Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts, the civil society and innovation fellowship. Even more than Hewitt, Taylor had a considerable Labour Party hinterland: From 1994 he ran the party’s “rapid rebuttal” operation and centralised the policy-making machine. He was Director of Policy in the 1997 general election campaign and then the Party’s Assistant General Secretary until December 1998.

IPPR was also the starting point for the career of David Miliband (b1965), who became Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs in June 2007, in Gordon Brown’s post-Blair 2007 cabinet. Miliband was a research fellow at IPPR from 1989 to 1994. He had been Labour’s Head of Policy when Blair was the Leader of the Opposition, then becoming Head of the Prime Minister’s Policy Unit when Labour came into power. He was rapidly promoted in government.

There are other parallels to this career path. James Purnell (b1970) became Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in July 2007 in Gordon Brown’s new cabinet. He had previously been Minister for the Creative Industries. Purnell’s tenure at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) was short-lived, as he was reshuffled due to a ministerial resignation in January 2008. However, while at the DCMS, Purnell was widely seen in policy and industry circles as extremely well qualified to undertake the post in virtue of his knowledge of media and communications policy and wide cultural interests. Purnell had worked as a researcher for Tony Blair, when in opposition. Later, he was Head of Corporate Planning at the BBC “before heading back as special adviser on the media in Tony Blair’s office... and there he helped outline the Communications Act.” Purnell played a role in the IPPR research project that crystallised the idea of Ofcom as a “converged regulator”.

Purnell’s successor at the DCMS was Andy Burnham (b1970), also with a background in the policy field, having worked “as a research assistant to [Culture Secretary] Tessa Jowell and special adviser to Chris Smith, Labour’s first Culture Secretary, and the work he did paved the way for the Communications Act 2003 that transformed the regulation of the media industry.” Burnham has been a longstanding friend of Purnell’s, both having played for the New Labour football team.

The other main think tank to provide New Labour policy personnel was Demos, set up in 1993. Geoff Mulgan (who has a PhD in communications) developed the Demos idea along with Martin Jacques (once editor of Marxism Today). Mulgan worked as chief adviser for Gordon Brown in the early 1990s, then Labour’s trade and industry spokesman. IPPR was already on the scene and Demos’s founders “decided that it should deliberately eschew too close an identification with the left of the party-political spectrum”. In its heyday, Demos was seen as having an “effective media presence” with access to the opinion-forming quality press that “would make the average university social scientist more than envious”. From 1997 to 2004, Mulgan “had various roles in the UK government including director of the Government’s Strategy Unit [for four years] and head of policy in the Prime Minister’s office.” Mulgan has described the government’s strategy units as internal departmental think tanks. Despite his background in communications research, he did not work directly in this area when in government. However, the Strategy Unit’s policy research on “public value” – intended to provide theoretical underpinnings for public service reform – did have a major impact on the debate about the BBC and public service broadcasting more generally, as well as shaping much current discourse about the rationale for cultural policy. Mulgan left government in 2004, becoming director of the Young Foundation, a social innovation institute. Mulgan has argued that “parties are now more clearly defined as users rather than generators of ideas.” He has deemed both the universities and the civil service to lack policy firepower. Consequently, Mulgan suggests that “straddling institutions” such as think tanks, consultants, and major accountancy firms have become key advisors in government reform and public sector restructuring. Think tanks, Mulgan maintains, have secured a position in “intellectual arbitrage”: “Successful and rising think tanks can convert political access into money, money into ideas, and ideas into legitimacy, and by doing so they can attract ambitious contributors”.

And indeed, access is key. The public face of think tankery is concerned with airing ideas, in particular through media coverage. A much more discreet exercise of think-tank influence lies in an ability to attract ministers and other key policymakers into seminars, thereby seeking to shape the terms of debate and provide personnel to advise on policy formation. Expertise may also be gained by working in the policy machinery of a major communications body, such as the BBC or Ofcom. The career paths of Ed Richards and Stephen Carter illustrate other options open to the New Labour policy generation. Inside Labour in opposition and later at the BBC, James Purnell worked alongside Ed Richards (b1966) – another member of the New Labour football team – who became Chief Executive of Ofcom in October 2006. Before Ofcom, where his first job was Chief Operating Officer, Richards had been Senior Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Tony Blair for media, telecoms, Internet, and e-government. He took that role in 1999 after having been Controller of Corporate Strategy at the BBC.

As Number 10’s media adviser (working with Burnham and Purnell), Richards helped draft the Communications Act that set up Ofcom. Before that, Richards had worked in consultancy for London Economics and – like Mulgan – also for Gordon Brown (Ofcom 2008). In 2002, when Richards was still at Number 10 Downing Street, the MediaGuardian listed him as Number 15 in the roll call of media movers and shakers. By 2007, Richards was in eighth place in the list, being described as a “quintessential New Labour man”; he retained that position in 2008.

Richards’s predecessor as Chief Executive of Ofcom, Steven Carter (b1965), became Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Chief of Strategy and Principal Adviser. After leaving Ofcom, Carter – who had always worked in the communications sector – became chief executive of Brunswick, the City of London public relations and lobbying firm from which he transited to Downing Street. His role at Number 10 was to reshape Labour’s communications strategy, in deep trouble when he was appointed in January 2008. The shift from Blair to Brown did not change the fundamental New Labour belief in political communications management.

A New Labour creation, Ofcom has been a noteworthy source of specialist expertise on communications, drawing in personnel who would otherwise work in academic research, think tanks, agencies, or consultancies. Aside from providing pertinent experience for Carter’s transition to Number 10, as its experts have headed back into the market place, Ofcom has spawned second order expertise, for instance in the shape of Ingenious Consulting, which is focused on selling policy and regulation know-how.

To sum up, the New Labour policy generation has taken different (but closely related) routes to power. Four ideal typical career patterns look like this:

1. Labour party research/activism – think tank/policy adviser/BBC strategist – MP-Minister (Purnell, Burnham)

2. Labour Party administration/senior adviser – think tank/consultancy – MP-Minister – MP/company director (Hewitt)

3. Labour Party activism/administration – think-tank director/media intellectual – PM’s policy adviser – civil society organisation director (Mulgan, Taylor)

4. Labour Party – communications company CEO – Ofcom CEO – communications company CEO – PM’s strategy adviser (Carter).

From the Creative Industries to the Creative Economy

My argument so far has been that a New Labour policy generation has emerged, strongly shaped by its origins in think tanks. Some of these became key players in the evolution of creative industries policy. Moving focus, we shall next consider the shift in policy conception from the “creative industries” to the “creative economy” over more than a decade of New Labour in power. Particular emphasis will be placed on the role of expertise in the Creative Economy Programme (CEP), from its initiation in October 2005 to the unveiling of the U.K. government’s action plan for the creative industries in February 2008.

In a complementary study, I have analysed creative industries discourse as a product showing how it has acquired the look of an increasingly closed ideological system. In what follows, drawing on interviews with policy insiders, I shift the focus to the production of creative industries discourse and the use of various kinds of expertise to underpin ministerial needs for a policy “narrative.” I shall also illustrate how outside expertise may become subject to the stratagems of bureaucratic politics.

Launching Creative Industries Policy

The U.K. government appears to have pioneered the idea of the creative industries in a European context. When New Labour entered office in 1997, the DCMS was set up to replace the Conservatives’ Department of National Heritage. The first Secretary of State was Chris Smith (1997–2001), a protagonist of the new policy turn, who adumbrated some of the underlying thinking in his book Creative Britain. Behind the scenes, key influences were the film producer David (later,Lord) Puttnam and John Newbigin, a special adviser to Smith from 1997 to 2000. Andy Burnham was also working closely with Smith.

Creative industries policy had its antecedents, particularly in earlier Labour “cultural industries” thinking – to which Geoff Mulgan had contributed – which was heavily focused on economic and urban regeneration. The new shift, however, replaced culture with creativity. New Labour’s definition, first aired in the Creative Industries Mapping Document, published by the DCMS, proved astonishingly durable and has been widely exported. In 1998, creative industries were defined as those activities that have their origin in individual creativity, skill and talent and which have a potential for wealth and job creation through the generation and exploitation of intellectual property. These have been taken to include the following key sectors: advertising, architecture, the art and antiques market, crafts, design, designer fashion, film, interactive leisure software, music, the performing arts, publishing, software and television and radio.

Despite the more recent development of arguments about the “creative economy,” the thirteen sectors identified in 1998 remain an obligatory point of departure for debate in the United Kingdom and further afield.

From the start, the logic of economic policy has prevailed. The core purpose of the Task Force set up by the DCMS was “to recommend steps to maximise the economic impact of the UK creative industries at home and abroad”. The Task Force’s membership included representatives of thirteen government departments or public bodies. Nine prominent “industry advisers” came from publishing, music, advertising, design, television, and film. Creativity policy became a national project, “branding” the United Kingdom as at the global cutting edge. Two key policy nostrums have been in play from the beginning.

First, the United Kingdom is imagined as a competitive nation for which developing a “knowledge economy” is key. Over the past decade, this line has become increasingly emphatic with the realisation that the “BRIC” countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) present an increasing threat to high-end “creative” activities. Education and training and their articulation with the creative industries, therefore, have become key policy arenas.

Second, government intervention in the market, especially in establishing conditions that enhance company performance, is justified as helping to secure the knowledge base. “Creativity” – like innovation – has become a generalised value in itself, still largely unquestioned. It is supposed to inform education at all levels and, indeed, to become part of the warp and woof of organisational and personal life everywhere.

 

1. to blur – запятнать (репутацию), запачкать

2. to tailor – специально приспосабливать

3. epistemic – эпистемический, относящийся к знаниям

4. quest – поиски

5. tantamount – равносильный, равноценный

6. congregation – скопление, собрание, совет

7. to muster – собирать, проверять

8. to impend – нависать, угрожать, надвигаться

9. progenitor – прародитель, предшественник; источник, оригинал

10. milieu – атмосфера, среда, обстановка

11. terrain – местность, территория

12. to engender – порождать, вызывать

13. to hold sway – удерживать власть, влияние

14. at the behest of – по приказанию, велению кого-либо

15. to usher – проводить, вводить

16. to facilitate – содействовать, способствовать, продвигать

17. to delineate – очерчивать, обрисовывать

18. impetus – движущая сила, стимул, импульс

19. hinterland – район, удалённый от промышленного центра

20. rebuttal – опровержение (обвинения и т.п.)

21. tenure – (срок) пребывания (в должности)

22. to eschew – сторониться, воздерживаться, остерегаться

23. heyday – зенит, расцвет, лучшая пора

24. underpinning – подкрепляющий, поддерживающий, фундаментальный

25. straddling – колеблющийся, двойственный

26. noteworthy – заслуживающий внимания

27. pertinent – уместный, подходящий

28. to spawn – порождать, вызывать

29. stratagem – хитрость, уловка

30. to adumbrate – описать в общих чертах

31. antecedent – предшествующее

32. nostrum – излюбленный приём, панацея

33. the warp and woof – основа основ