The writer of a recent article in the Financial Times casts doubt on the ability of Keir Starmer’s government to carry out its programme because the public service has been so hollowed out by austerity and privatisation that there is nothing left to connect the levers of power to the mechanism of government.
Whether in this particular instance you find the inability regrettable depends on the esteem in which you hold the content of any programme that Sir Keir is likely to attempt. Be that as it may, the explanation given by the writer in the FT for the disconnection between the levers and the mechanism is inadequate, to say the least.
To begin with, the word austerity is already a falsehood, deliberate or not. To try to align one’s expenditure a little more closely with one’s income, while predictably failing to do so, is not austerity as commonly understood: and this is so whether you think that such an attempt at closer alignment is advisable or not. (I distinctly remember one of the FT’s pundits, Martin Wolf, arguing that while interest rates were low the government should have been borrowing more, which struck me then as an imprudent suggestion, especially as most British government ministers have difficulty in distinguishing between investment and expenditure.)
There is obviously more to the disconnection between the levers and the mechanism than an insufficiency of personnel or alleged funds. The problem goes far deeper, and at heart is cultural.
A friend of mine, an information technology expert, has been asked several times to assist with ‘projects’ in various ministries. What he found in them appalled him. The level of ignorance and incompetence, the overpromotion and arrogance of inexperienced staff barely out of university having completed a degree of no relevance to the work of the ministry, the overstaffing, and the wastage of all kinds that he found there, appalled him. Several projects costing tens of millions had to be aborted when their unviability became only too patent, though he had warned them months in advance that the projects would never work. People of no knowledge or experience overruled him, and because he was not part of the civil service there was nothing more that he could do.
One instance of this might have been an accident, but it was a repeated pattern.
Furthermore, it was evident to him that staff were not chosen on grounds of merit, but on those of demography: and the general calibre was very low. That Woke-ish targets should be met was more important than that any work should be carried out properly. So what if millions were wasted? There were always more millions available.
What my friend told me was only a particular instance of a general problem in this country, which is that of a spreading and almost wilful incompetence. People are generally so pessimistic, and so fearful for their jobs and the future in general, that they feel, no doubt at some level below that of full consciousness, that only the utmost incompetence can preserve their security. One is reminded of Dickens’ Circumlocution Office:
Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution
Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the
art of perceiving — HOW NOT TO DO IT.
In the public service, every department has its own little Circumlocution Office so that the simplest matters become those of byzantine complexity. Urgent meetings are held to discuss barely perceptible problems and to suggest many more. The resultant paralysis, at length followed by the wrong decision, which throws up new problems, ensures that there is always more work to be done, that jobs are preserved, and personal mortgages can continue to be paid. The pathology has spread to the private sector, especially in large companies.
Bureaucracy, of course, is always vulnerable to this pathology, but my impression is that it is worse now than ever. The political class and its officialdom has only to be offered an alternative to choose the obviously wrong one. Certain preconditions are necessary for the exacerbation of the pathology:
- A loss of any sense of national purpose or unity.
- The substitution for it of balkanised ideologies that can be imposed on the population only by ever-growing bureaucratisation.
- A large oversupply of persons educated out of any possible usefulness.
- A fear of the future so great that only incompetence can secure a slice of the zero-sum economic cake.
Perhaps this helps to explain why it costs twice as much to build 180 miles of high-speed railway in Britain as to build 2400 miles in Spain. Britain, in a wider sense, is incomparably more corrupt.