| dc.description.abstract | This thesis anatomises the high watermark of belief in administrative and
institutional remedies to the deeply-felt relative economic and absolute military decline of
Britain in the years after the Second. World War. It analyses the second half of the
Macmillan years, the administration of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the first two
premierships of Harold Wilson (but not the period from 1974-76 which saw little
reformist activity) and the three-and-a-half years that Edward Heath occupied No. 10
Downing Street. The approach has been to look at the prime ministers' plans, examine
how these were embraced by the Civil Service and analyse the results.
The period 1960-74 saw a great many major reforms to the machinery of
government, all of which are analysed. Significant new findings include the struggle over
the demarcation `concordat' between the Treasury and the Department of Economic
Affairs in 1964; the way that the Prime Minister's Principal Private Secretary acted
against the senior civil servant handling the reception of the Fulton Report; the fact that
Harold Wilson developed a keen interest in the `hiving off' of parts of the public sector in
1969; how, after the Heath Government was elected in 1970, the Civil Service took the
massive political planning undertaken prior to government and effectively cherry-picked
what it wanted, turning the dynamism for reform to its own advantage; the remarkable
lack of interest in Programme Analysis and Review; and the way that the Central Policy
Review Staff was sidelined in Heath's last weeks. | en_US |
