The Trojan horse

In Chapter 1 we focused on the political dimension of administrative law, an unfashionable approach in 1983, when the first edition of this book appeared. At that time we felt the need to assert at the outset our view of administrative law as neither neutral nor objective but as reflecting the expectations that society has of ‘the state’. We did not, on the other hand, feel the need to include in our book a structural account of British government. We were writing for readers who were relatively informed about British history and politics, many of whom had undergone a course in public law or British government. This could, we felt, be relied upon as a satisfactory foundation for the study of administrative law. Moreover, British government seemed to us at the time relatively simple. We thought of the state as unitary and highly centralised. Central government was made up of the great departments of state, some like the Home and Foreign Offices with eighteenth-century roots, others modern statutory additions. A few major public services were operated directly by central government, notably the National Health Service (NHS), but more usually, as with housing or social services, they were the responsibility of local government, the only democratically elected competitor to Parliament. Some nationalised industries were, like British Rail, still on the scene but most were on their way out. Few concessions were made to regionalism, regional government was not on our radar screen and although the European Communities Act was on the statute book, to have looked outside the territorial boundaries of our nation state would not have crossed our minds!