Essay-writing : C. Foster & F Plowden, The State Under Stress (1996)

Résumé du document

Here is a quotation from a book by C. Foster & F Plowden, The State Under Stress (1996) :

[…] the civil service is a more hopeful instrument of changes than politicians can ever be. They are in a better position to retain and restore old notions of good administration and civil service management, at the same time as learning to manage contracts and agencies as efficiently as the best private-sector management, because they
have a long-term interest in government.

But the price of achieving such levels of efficiency is that the role of the minister must be limited. […]

I) What main point about the British system of government do the authors make ?
II) To what extent does this statement match what you know about the British system of government ?

N.B. : ce devoir consiste en un commentaire d'un énoncé concernant le Civil Service – il faut partir de cet énoncé pour en décortiquer les arguments et en profiter pour montrer ce que vous savez sur le Civil Service. Cet exercice a pour but de vous entraîner à formuler des connaissances en anglais tout en bâtissant un raisonnement.

Extraits

[...] Efficiency, that is the capacity to achieve tangible reforms, will result from the distribution of complementary skills between those two categories of actors within the executive. Finally you are asked to give your own point of view about the authors' statement. Nota bene : ce devoir consistait en un commentaire d'un énoncé concernant le Civil Service - il fallait partir de cet énoncé pour en décortiquer les arguments et en profiter pour montrer ce que vous saviez sur le Civil Service. Cet exercice avait pour but de vous entraîner à formuler des connaissances en anglais tout en bâtissant un raisonnement. [...]

[...] Foster & F Plowden, The State Under Stress (1996) : [ . ] the civil service is a more hopeful instrument of changes than politicians can ever be. They are in a better position to retain and restore old notions of good administration and civil service management, at the same time as learning to manage contracts and agencies as efficiently as the best private-sector management, because they have a long-term interest in government. But the price of achieving such levels of efficiency is that the role of the minister must be limited. [...]

[...] The average time that a minister spends at the head of a government department is two-and-a-half-years. Ministers are politicians whose role is to develop ideas of reforms under the supervision of their party leader and with the support of the population. They have the political motivation, but they may not have the specialized knowledge and the technical expertise. The overall role of ministers is to focus on policy-making and leadership so as to convince voters to choose their party to stay in office after the next general election. [...]

[...] In this extract from their book, The State Under Stress, the authors underline the specific role of the British civil service as opposed to that of Government, that is to say of ministers. As a matter of fact the authors have a very positive view on the civil service whose capacity to achieve reforms is much greater than that of ministers. The main reason for such a difference is that civil servants work in a long-term perspective, whereas ministers are short-lived and necessarily work in a much shorter-term perspective. [...]