ABSTRACT
The greatest political challenge for the Civil Service between 1966 and 1981, as intimated in Chapter 6, was the collapse of consensus. This threatened both the relative continuity of policy and the respect for ‘big government’, upon which it had depended since the War. Its core values and character, however, were also threatened by two more specifi c political pressures: the rising demand for more ‘open government’ and the onset of what political scientists were later to term the ‘hollowing out of the state’.1 The former refl ected decreasing deference and a consequent demand for the lifting of the secrecy under which public policy had traditionally been cloaked. In practice, it meant two potentially contradictory things: greater accountability of the Executive to Parliament and greater public participation in policy-making. Both, in any case, meant an effective transfer of power from Whitehall. The ‘hollowing out of the state’ involved a similar transfer of power, to either Brussels or Edinburgh. In addition, membership of the EEC (planned at length throughout the 1960s and fi nally achieved on 1 January 1973) raised fundamental questions about both the Service’s national integrity and traditional working methods. So too did Scottish devolution (equally long-planned throughout the 1970s albeit ultimately frustrated by the narrow referendum ‘defeat’ of March 1979). The impact of each of these challenges will be examined in turn.
