Blair’s lack of ‘process’

What is really wrong with the Blair government? The unease it excites is at least as strong on the articulate political Left as on the Right. Indeed the grounds for anxiety may overlap across the political spectrum. Until now it has been difficult to verbalise this sense of malaise. The citation of particular policies that are disliked, or even of the Downing Street style, is not sufficient.

It is only after looking at Amartya Sen’s new book of essays that the penny suddenly dropped for me. Unlike his earlier book, Development as Freedom, which I reviewed here on 31 January 2000, this is a technical volume containing some of the papers for which he received his Nobel prize. It is concerned with major issues of freedom, welfare and human achievements, but at the rarefied level where political and economic theory and formal philosophy all meet. Yet unlike so many writers in this field, who are mainly concerned with their reputation among academics, Sen never forgets the more general reader looking over his shoulder. It is not an accident that one can skip most of the equations. In many of the essays, they are deliberately segregated to smoothen the path of the reader more concerned with substance than technique.

The last three chapters of this book are a revised version of the Arrow Lectures he gave in 1995 and which have never been previously published. It is here that he divides the goals of public policy into two aspects. The first is what he calls ‘opportunities’. This refers to the range of choices that people have and corresponds roughly to the traditional idea of economic welfare, but goes much beyond what is usually measured in estimates of Gross Domestic Product. The second aspect consists of what he calls ‘process’ – matters such as the constitutional and legal system, which determine how decisions are taken and the scope of personal freedom.