The Development of British Defence Policy: Blair, Brown and Beyond by David Brown

Author:David Brown [Brown, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781409499916
Google: 9xEG2d_OMiwC
Goodreads: 17552949
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The ‘Joined Up Government’ Agenda: Wider Context

From 1997, when Tony Blair first used the term ‘joined-up government’ at the launch of the Social Exclusion Unit (Mulgan, 2005), it has become a key motif of the two Labour administrations. However, unlike previous attempts at enhancing co-ordination within government, Labour has sought to elevate a policy of administrative ‘coordination’ from a simple driving principle of bureaucratic organisation to a radical political objective at the heart of a much broader agenda of government reform and renewal. Consequently, the 1997 Labour manifesto (Labour Party, 1997) set out a broad programme of change, involving enhancements to the accountability of institutions, their decentralisation and the elimination of bureaucratic secrecy. The strength of the emphasis placed on ‘joining up’ government lay partly in a sense that complex domestic, social problems, such as social exclusion, drug addiction and crime, could not be resolved by any single department of government, requiring instead a coordinated approach that harnessed all of the instruments available to central and local government, as well as non-traditional partners drawn from the private and voluntary sectors. However, before considering the broad range of factors that led to the imperative to ‘join’ being extended into other policy areas, principally defence, development and foreign policy, there is a need to explore this wider bureaucratic context.

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