The official history of the cabinet secretaries. The cabinet office, 1916–2016: The birth of modern government

All democracies struggle with the challenge of ensuring that the exercise of power by governments fully respects constraints which are designed to protect the state and the citizen.A separation of powers and the rule of law are critical to this end.So too is a system of administration which in its values, practices and culture embodies the proper constraints on government and guides political leaders to exercise power with a strong sense of the common good.An impartial civil service, recruited and promoted on merit and insulated from pressures which might inhibit its willingness to speak truth to power, has been at the heart of the British constitutional settlement.The Whitehall model, quite as much as the Westminster model, has been a British legacy to its former colonies across the world.British civil service and parliamentary structures have shaped values and practices in Ireland, no less than elsewhere, even if common origins and nomenclature belie radical divergences.Within that broad framework, however, there are potentially many ways to structure the machinery of government to provide both coherence and legitimacy.How is good-quality political decisionmaking to be supported by the machinery of government?How are the headline goals of political ambition to be secured through coherent thinking and consistent action across the institutions of government?Beesley and Seldon & Meakin go a considerable way to illuminating how this has been done in the British system.The twin institutions of cabinet secretary and cabinet office have been the human and institutional focal points for the teasing out of answers to

Abstract licence: CC BY-NC-ND

A person counts once a day per paper. We keep no cookie and no address: a reader is a hash that changes every day. Any month under five reads shows no number.