One fascinating case study of the complex interplay of girl power discourses, celebrity activism and girls’ desire for radical political change can be seen in the recorded videos of the 2020 Girl Up Leadership summit, held online amid the global COVID-19 pandemic and entitled ‘We Need to Talk’. While previous annual leadership summits had been held in the US, with girls responsible for paying their own attendance fee, travel and accommodation, pandemic-related restrictions caused a move to an online format that year. The result was a two-day conference, made accessible to anyone anywhere with an internet connection, featuring reflections from Girl Up members, politicians, celebrities, corporate leaders, sports stars and musicians on girl power, the pandemic and the ongoing worldwide Black Lives Matter protests.

Celebrity feminism and online activism frequently go hand in hand; indeed, perhaps the most well-known example of celebrity feminism was the #MeToo movement, in which a number of prominent celebrities and many millions more women worldwide shared their experiences of sexual violence alongside the hashtag to show just how prevalent the issue is. For scholars interested in both celebrity and digital forms of feminism, there are debates about whether these two phenomena can be seen as co-opted by neoliberalism or ‘actively [renegotiating] feminist politics for a neoliberal age’ (Baer, 2016: 29); ‘a new wave’ of feminist politics, or ‘a triumph of postfeminism’ (Tennent and Jackson, 2019: 226).

Gender, politics and colonialism in Malawi

Gender roles and politics in Malawi, as elsewhere in Africa, are influenced by an incredibly complex array of different forces, religions and phenomena, including traditional and precolonial belief systems, colonialism, Christianity and Islam, and international development agendas largely dictated by institutions in the Global North. Malawi also has in common with many of its neighbours an incredibly diverse population of different ethnic groups and languages, united through boundaries drawn by European colonizers. It is a small country, with a population of around 20 million, with the main ethnic groups including the Chewa, Tumbuka, Ngonde, Tonga, Yao, Ngoni, Sena, Mang’anja and Lhomwe, along with Asian and European migrants and their descendants (Kuwali, 2022: 92, 99).

Introduction

This book has highlighted several political, ideological, social, economic and cultural themes. These have included pressure to rising inequality and poverty, to short-term personal profit, environmental damage, disempowerment, colonisation and alienation. We have also heard about powerful counter-themes: valuing diversity and treating it with equality, struggling against discrimination and for sustainability, for equal individual and collective rights and recognition, and for more say in what happens to us in society. If the politics over us has become harsher and more individualising, the personal politics between us seems set in a kinder direction, with more emphasis on egalitarian roles and relationships. Bottom-up movements continue to challenge top-down formal politics. Pressures for participation battle with the most powerful rekindling of populism since the days of pre-war fascism and state communism.

The plea to connect

Current pressures are also reminders of much earlier calls for change and of one particular form they took. Here we may find clues for achieving change for the future. One enduring strand has been framed in terms of connection and reconnection, highlighting separations and inequalities of their own times. During a period, as now, when the gulf between personal and formal political values seemed ever to be widening, that past precedent may offer insights worthy of reconsideration.

Introduction: The massive contradiction

Something we’ve had to get used to under neoliberalism, for example, in the UK, is that institutions we’ve long valued, supported and defended, like the NHS and BBC, have become contradictory and ambiguous. We fight for the licence fee and public broadcasting because we know that without the BBC, UK broadcasting will suffer and it will be a free-for-all of destructive market forces and empire-building media moguls like Rupert Murdoch. However, we also weep over BBC news shifting to the right and becoming the amplifier of the neoliberal press. It failed miserably over issues like the decades-long Jimmy Saville sex abuse scandal, became over-bureaucratised, kow-towing to government. The NHS remains a jewel in the crown for many, but it's been hollowed out by privatisation, its staff overloaded and bullying endemic.

These realities highlight the issue at the heart of this book – the working through of the struggle now taking place between our personal politics and the formal politics they routinely challenge. As we saw during the pandemic, UK health and care workers struggled unto death – in too many cases – to do their jobs to the best of their ability, while for-profit organisations milked anti-COVID-19 budgets for billions.

Introduction

The civil service represents the administrative interface between the government and civil society (Pierre 1995c; Raadschelders et al 2007) although the extent of powers to control this relationship vary in different countries depending on tradition, the constitution and the role of government. The civil service can propose and advise ministers on government policy and its administration. For less important or routine policy, civil servants are more likely to make decisions. The major change in the civil service in western states since the 1980s has been the extent to which agencies and other privatised systems of administration have entered into governments and, while this was expected to extend the distance between politicians and the administration of their policies, this has not been the case in practice (Hood 1995). There has also been an extension of the role of politicisation in decision making, including the way in which advice is provided to ministers from special advisers (SpADs) that have potentially created distance between the civil service and ministers. Lastly the news cycle has shortened with a potential shift to more short-termism in policy making.

When discussing the role of the civil service in the UK, there are a number of dimensions to be considered, including its purpose and what kind of civil service the country needs. In this chapter, the civil service is considered in an international context that frames a discussion of its purpose in the UK. Five dimensions are used which are drawn from a range of texts on comparative civil service systems, how they operate and the pressures on them for change (van der Meer 2011).

There is a large literature on the civil service, particularly on how it has related to successive Prime Ministers and governments including the various challenges of proposed reforms. The mantra of the civil servant's role is anchored by the Northcote Trevelyan reforms (1854) which provide foundational protection in any debate about change. Subsequent ‘heroes’ of the civil service – Haldane, Fisher, Bridges and their more recent counterparts – Armstrong, O’Donnell and Heywood, have stated that their main objectives in office have been to keep the civil service in the same place as when they started, to see any stretched elastic of reform return to its initial state. Some of these texts discuss how civil servants conduct their practices of advice to ministers and, to a lesser extent, how policies are administered once agreed. This literature mainly encourages the reader to view the civil service from its perspective, providing interviews and access by lifting its veil of secrecy to a few. Those more questioning of its practices and outcomes are frequently ‘othered’ as outsiders, who have insufficient calibre and experience to understand the civil servant's world. It is made clear to those who join after career experience in other spheres, that, once civil servants, their career paths are focused on their exit strategies rather than promotion.

This book is an attempt to view the civil servant's world in a way that considers its culture, learning and competitive instincts but also how it undertakes its work, demonstrating that the cerebral can also be mechanistic. It starts by considering the British civil service in the context of those elsewhere, finding it is not quite as different and distinctive as generally stated as systems have changed and UK exceptionalism has been reduced. It examines how policies are made beyond the visible expectations of Government manifestos to the other short-and long-term pressures that have to be accommodated in the daily policy advice process.

Introduction

The role of the civil service in the constitution, as set out in the Westminster Model (WM), is persistently reinforced despite constant pressure for change. This chapter examines how this is achieved and what effects it has. Some argue that the WM operates too loosely to have any meaning (Bevir 2008; Rhodes et al 2008; Russell and Serban 2021), its flexibility, ambiguity and slipperiness are attributes which the civil service favours and to which it returns after periods of disruption, through different political interventions (Richards and Smith 2016). However, can the WM survive, not least as it has failed to incorporate the growth of special advisers (SpADs), who are ignored in this narrative?

The rhetoric about the quality of the civil service and the way it differs from other countries (Greer and Jarman 2000) is located in its specialism of generalism. There have been successive efforts to change it by those in power (Lowe 2010; Lowe and Pemberton 2020; Maude 2023), through a range of methods including formal inquiries, critical speeches and the insertion of advisers. However, since its foundational reform (Northcote Trevelyan 1854), it role has been reinforced by Haldane on the Machinery of Government (MoG) (1918), Fisher's reform of the Treasury (Greenaway 1983) and Bridges’ view on the power of the generalist (1954). These have created a living tradition of practice (Bevir and Rhodes 2010). None of the proposed and adopted reforms have made lasting changes to civil service practices and powers. Sometimes, regaining lost powers can take time but the continuity and permanence of the civil service compared with shorter-lived governments and Parliaments provides punctuation points for resetting or returning these powers.

Introduction

The introduction of the 1999 Devolution Settlement by the Blair government was a major point of punctuated equilibrium on the UK state, including for the civil service (Thelen 2009). While more attention is paid to the effects of the Northcote Trevelyan reforms (1854), Haldane's Machinery of Government (MoG) dictums including the Westminster Model (WM) (1918), Heath's Reorganisation of Government White Paper (1970) and Thatcher's agencification (from 1987 onwards), the devolution settlement was under-recognised because, as administrative devolution (MacKinnon 2015) or, more correctly, delegation, it was not considered important by the civil service who saw it as a continuation of the British centrist approach of permissive autonomy (Warner et al 2021; Sandford 2023). Like the creation of the Irish State in 1922, when the UK lost more of its territory than Germany after 1918, those parts of the UK distant from Whitehall were regarded as less important and a residual colonial administration culture was in practice (Hechter 2017). Yet the Heath, Thatcher and Blair reconstructions of government all had their provenance in unintended consequences of external of agreements made by the UK state. In 1971 and 1999 these were as a direct consequence of the UK's membership of the EU and in 1987 of the UK's membership of the WTO's Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) (see Chapter 2). As these reforms of the way in which the state conducted its business were external in their origins and bound by treaties, they had to be implemented and their requirements persisted through changes in government.

Introduction

We’ve talked a lot about communication, connection and information. All have a key part to play in gaining wider support against the reactionary formal politics that have been dominating our lives for too long. Now we turn to knowledge and knowledge production; how they’ve been captured by neoliberalism and the pioneering progress being made to reverse that and reconnect them with our lives and experience.

A personal word first

I should perhaps start by saying that Trumpian ideas like ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ don't really feel new to me. My father killed himself when I was four and left my older sister and me with a mother who could be terrifying. She never told us he’d died. I didn't discover he had killed himself until I was an adult! Among the things she did tell us was, ‘If I say something's black and it's white, then it is black’. It was really only when I was grown up and talked about this with my partner that I began to realise the magnitude of what she was doing. While I would resist statements like this at the time, challenging them with her and in my own head, for a small child it was pretty difficult to escape their power! I don't think I really did. The issue was more about being able later to break away from the power exerted over us. I don't think my poor sister ever could. However, I got an early apprenticeship in understanding broader issues of knowledge manipulation!

Introduction

Administering policy into effect is considered to be less important than its formulation by the senior civil service (SCS) both in the core executive and functional departments and can be of less interest to some ministers. The extent to which governments place emphasis on the implementation of policy varies, with the Thatcher and Blair governments regarded as most active in this approach (Urban et al 2024). Governments also use different strategies to frame policies at the point of implementation, so the Coalition government (2010– 15) wanted to reduce public delivery and did this directly through Osborne's austerity programme that removed funding (Gamble 2015).

There have been discussions and reviews about the effectiveness of the civil service in administering policy during most governments since 1918, related to tensions between the political and administrative interface in the Westminster Model (WM) (Richards and Smith 2016). Even those governments not focused on the detail of policy delivery and outcomes want to demonstrate to the electorate what has been achieved during their period in office as they progress towards the next general election. For civil servants, this is regarded as the administration of policy and those who surround ministers will not have this as their highest priority. They pass policy administration further down the organisation or to external agencies. As part of their 3-year postings, they do not have any long-term career commitments to achieving the outcomes included within these policies. They will expect to leave their post before policy can be evaluated and will not obtain their next post based on the successful administration of policies for which they have been responsible.

Disconnecting us from each other – introduction

Under neoliberalism, divisiveness operates at every level and while this may be true of all nationalist and tribalistic ideologies, neoliberalism majors in it at every level. There are many ways it alienates us from each other internationally.

Tourism – a case study of division

This is true of at least three of the dominant ways our paths may cross across nations and continents. These are war and conflict, international working, tourism, and often more closely linked with the latter than acknowledged, the ‘gap years’ of more privileged students. The rise of international working is a further expression of globalisation's neocolonialism – not to confuse with another – the plight of ‘economic’ migrants.

Modern international tourism is a perfect storm of all that's wrong with neoliberal ideology, politics and economics (Jeffries, 2022). Ultimately, its emphasis on the exotic may ultimately be as alienating as the other side of the coin; the neoliberal stress on the migrant threat. The Global North further exploits Global South impoverishment, encourages unsustainable tourism-based economies, and is key to expanding destructive trends like jumbo cruise ships and intense air travel.

Introduction

That 20th-century mantra, ‘only connect’ is about many things but, ultimately, it has to be about communication – at least initially.

The paradox of current communication

Ironically, in a period headlined an ‘age of communication’, in an ‘increasingly interconnected world’ (Edwards et al, 2019), ‘bringing us together’, where innovation has been breathtaking in scale and pace, we’re still talking about the problem of connecting. Why? I’m suggesting that at its heart is the increasing 21st-century aspiration to connect on inclusive and equal terms and that our communication systems are failing to do this and may actually be obstructing it. This is the starting point for our examination of reconnection as key to renewing formal politics. Generally speaking, ‘we’ – the majority – don't own the means of communication and may be unable to change that, but we can rethink how we might challenge this in future.

This draws us back to the issue at this book's heart: the growing gap between our personal and formal politics, specifically between our need to communicate and the prevailing politics of communication.

The technological leap

At one level, the capacity for human communication is unparalleled. In a world of laptops and smartphones, mass intercontinental travel, Zoom and Teams, most of us have an unprecedented capacity to be in touch with each other.

Reading Peter Beresford's new book, especially Parts II and III, reminds me of the hope that so many of us had at the height of the pandemic that those dark days could lead to us ‘building back better’, as the cracks in our society became horribly evident. Debates about what a good or better society might look like helped to keep us going. Even the editorial board of the Financial Times wrote that ‘Radical reforms – reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades – will need to be put on the table. … Policies, until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix’. Referencing the Second World War and the Beveridge Plan, ‘the same kind of foresight is needed today. Beyond the public health war true leaders will mobilise now to win the peace’.1 Alas, it was not to be. Poverty worsened, public services became ever more threadbare, and the carers for whom we had clapped weekly during the pandemic did not receive any tangible recognition.

What this book does is not try to flesh out what a better society might look like but explore how we might do politics differently to get there. It emphasises the importance of means as well as ends, underlining that they are intertwined so that ‘both need to be based on the same inclusive and egalitarian values’. It chimes well with the closing message of a recent pamphlet from Compass, the pressure group for a good society: ‘We can't wait for the perfect government. We need to start making that society now and showing politicians what needs to be done’.

It seems as though everybody is talking about girl activists. From Malala Yousafzai speaking at United Nations (UN) summits to Greta Thunberg mobilizing millions of young people worldwide to march and strike for action on climate change, newspapers frequently show us spectacular images of girls changing the world. But how much do we really understand the politics of everyday girls? For centuries, girls have been excluded from formal politics both because of their age and their gender, and though many girls are politically active, they are rarely taken seriously as such or afforded platforms to speak from. Girls are held up as figureheads of political change, and yet most girls still struggle to make the kinds of changes they would like to see in their communities. In this book, I explore some of the experiences of girl activists in the UK, the US and Malawi as they attempt to raise awareness about gender inequality, challenge sexism in their schools and participate in the global feminist movement through their participation in the UN Foundation's Girl Up campaign. Contrary to spectacular depictions in the media, these girls do not feel able to save the world all by themselves. But they do find ways to educate themselves and others and to express their politics with creativity, humour and pragmatism, despite the many barriers adults put in their way.

Girl Up is one of many campaigns that have emerged in recent years with the aim of empowering girls in the Global South through formal schooling. Launched by the UN Foundation in 2010, it encourages girls in the Global North to set up clubs and raise money for the education of the world's ‘hardest to reach girls’ in the Global South (Girl Up, nd a).

Introduction

I only realised this chapter needed to be written after finishing the book. I should have understood sooner that if I wanted to explore what we can learn from our personal roles and relationships to develop more helpful formal politics, then ultimately, I would have to think about intimacy. I’ve been helped by the new social movements’ (NSMs’) constant reminder that the two Ps – politics and the personal – are inseparable; each connects deeply with the other, whether we recognise it or not and however antagonistic they might seem. James Baldwin is one of the most powerful messengers reminding us; counter-pointing his writing of hate with the writing of love; cruelty, with kindness, encompassing the biggest and smallest things and making us rethink which is which. He has been an essential guide in thinking about the kind of connection in which I have been especially interested here. As we saw at the beginning of this chapter, Baldwin never fights shy of reminding us of the importance of love and intimacy any more than he underplays their cruel US context (Baldwin, 1962).

Intimacy is a benchmark for the personal, demarcating one of its highest expressions.

In 1990, Cynthia Enloe's pioneering book Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics asked ‘where are the women’ in global politics? Women, she argued, were central to every aspect of global politics, even if they were largely absent both from positions of power and from scholarly analyses of global phenomena (Enloe, 2014). While in the more than 30 years that have ensued, feminist scholars of IR have taken up Enloe's call to shine a light on how women's everyday and personal lives are shaped by, and shape, global political and economic processes, there is still much work to do in asking: ‘where are the girls?’ Girls are doubly silenced by their gender and their age, excluded from participating in decision-making processes and seen as largely irrelevant to the study of IR. And yet, like women, girls and our understandings of girlhood are fundamental to every aspect of global politics. Girls study, they labour, they care, they farm, they fight, they migrate, they consume, they advocate and they agitate. They are active in national and global campaigns to end racism, combat climate change, recognize indigenous rights, control access to weapons, demand access to sexual and reproductive rights, and many more. In recent years, with the high-profile campaigns of the likes of Malala Yousafzai and Greta Thunberg, we have seen a ‘girl powering of international politics’ (Loveday et al, 2023: 246; Walters, 2024), in which the girl activist ‘has become a compelling figure’ in media and policy discourse as well as in the popular imagination (Taft, 2020: 2). However, we still know little about the politics and activism of most girls.

Introduction

Neoliberalism's success is difficult to understand. How can an ideology preoccupied with the interests of a very narrow group regularly win democratic elections? This broader issue – of people apparently supporting politics that go against their own interests – has long commanded intellectuals’ and activists’ attention internationally. That hasn't stopped it but has certainly helped us understand it! Subverting democracy is an ever-developing activity – especially now in an age of major technological advances. New techniques have emerged as old ones continue. Psychological, sociological, economic, cultural and political strategies abound – whatever gains people's support.

False consciousness

Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's collaborator, coined this term in the late 19th century to explain why a ‘subordinate class’ internalised the ideology and interests of ‘the ruling class’ (Engels, 1949, p 451)). Such consciousness was ‘false’ because it was antagonistic to the ‘class interest’ of those concerned, which they neither knew nor understood. He understood ‘consciousness’ as a class's ability to identify its interests and assert its political will.