ABSTRACT
Writing in The Economist in September 1996,1 Tony Blair said that ‘the challenge facing us is to take a working constitution, respect its strengths, and adapt it to modern demands for clean and effective government while at the same time providing a greater democratic role for the people at large’. The reference to ‘clean’ government is a response to the accusations of ‘sleaze’, which dogged the Conservatives in their last years in government. What I want to focus upon is the relationship between making government more ‘effective’ and making government more democratic. Both are included in New Labour’s aspiration to ‘modernize’ government in Britain. For Blair and his colleagues, they are compatible, they go together. But for others, there is a basic contradiction in the way New Labour has gone about ‘modernizing’ government since winning office in 1997. On the one hand, considerations of effectiveness have led to a substantial centralisation of power; on the other hand, the Government has initiated a whole series of major constitutional reforms and changes in government, which appear to constitute a substantial decentralisation of power.
