The End Of Government As We Know It

Well, I told you so. Today a brief item slipped into the news mentioned that there is to be a hurried recruitment of 24,000 people to beef up security for the Olympics. Quite who they will be is not clear but added costs of £271 million are flagged.

Also, not clear is how they are to be organised, trained and deployed. This is not looking good. The costs admitted are probably only the calculation of what will be paid out. What will not be admitted is all the other hidden costs. Think half a billion or so and you may get close.

Was it on Tuesday 12 May 2009 when I posted a longish think piece on Olympics Security, never mind other later items referring to this? How come the vast number of civil servants, consultants and those in all the agencies and organisations who were charged with running the show did not realise what would be needed?

It is just another gross example of the gathering collapse of government and administration in the UK. “The Mail” today had an item in its money section that has been picked up on the web. Within the HMRC tax authority there is now a group of whistle blowers called “Dissent” campaigning against what they call the endemic corruption, ineptitude and mismanagement in that department.

So we have a financial crisis in which fiscal policy is a critical area and where the government needs to raise its revenue effectively and fairly. Yet the HMRC staff is up in arms against the failures of their bosses to run the revenue collection either fairly or properly.

Add to this some of the other blunders and barmier passages of events in the last few months, there is a long list of them and it raises the question of can this lot do anything right or trusted with any of our money?

Last night, Robert Peston in the first part of a two part series “The Party’s Over, How The West Went Bust” attempted an explanation of the present troubles. At least he was not being optimistic. One striking aspect of this was when he was talking to people in China about their urge to save.

The message was simply that they needed to have money in hand in the event of illness, to pay their way without credits and for their old age. China may be communist but there is a singular lack of social security or cheap health facilities.

The inference, which was not picked up, was that we can no longer continue to have open access and provision on demand for either social security, pensions or health. In short the implication is that we cannot afford to have a National Health Service of the kind we have had in the past.

So what kind of mess will our government make of the transition from a society which has come to expect so much to one that is going to get so little?

Taking The Wheel

On the garage forecourt yesterday to top up the petrol tank at vast expense I saw next to my car a 1973 Morris Marina. Once in a fit of unwise patriotic fervour I decided to buy British and chose one of those. The outward design may have been decent for the period but the build quality and performance were shockers.

The revelations that major meetings between the Prime Minister and key staff of the Civil Service who taking crucial decisions during the period of the last Labour government were neither minuted nor recorded are being cited as a prime example of the breakdown of UK government and the collapse of the Civil Service as a reliable and effective body of administration.

In the debate on this and how government should be conducted we are being given the old tale about how the Civil Service was once a “Rolls Royce” service in comparison. This notion is a polite fiction.

During the 1970’s sharing a teapot and plate of biscuits with Roy Mason and others when he was under the cosh as Defence Secretary someone remarked about our Civil Service being a “Rolls Royce” to which Mason muttered “More like a Morris Marina”. He had good cause at the time having realised that the UK was by now unable to defend itself without American support.

At this I was grinning and nodding having had my own run-ins with high level civil servants. Their documents, the prose, the command of language, the structure and the sense of authority may have first class but the essential thinking behind it was often total rubbish.

One issue was a medical matter and the related support that might be given. It was a condition that was thought to be rare and few cases had been identified. We were being told exactly how many cases we should have on the basis of calculations made by a handful of civil servants and medical men.

The difficulty was that none of them knew anything about statistics and especially the problems when dealing with small numbers in a field that was clearly complex and little known or understood at the time.

But they had come up with some figures and they were “the experts” and could not accept the many questions that arose, let along the impossibility of calculating what the exact figure was likely to be anywhere.

The idea peddled in the mid 20th Century that “Whitehall knows best” is one of the major reasons for the disastrous course of policy in this period from economic to foreign policy to financial management to social reform.

The Civil Service was running a machine that existed as a beautiful concept of self but largely out of touch with either reality or the changes that were in train.

It is a commonplace of the history books that the central administration of state in the early 19th Century was antique weak and unreliable. The reforms that were put in place took decades not years to take effect.

For the first part of the 20th Century the Civil Service struggled to make sense of anything in a world in turmoil. During World War 2 it was forced to become more effective but its wartime role made it unready for peacetime.

What it did do within the Service was to make the procedures and structure reliable and to maintain records and keep itself organised properly with a role in relation to politicians that was fairly clear.

When all that was dumped at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st Centuries at the very same time that “big” central government was being inflicted on us by both Whitehall and Brussels then chaos and uncertainty were bound to follow.

One of the central functions of government should be to retain the integrity of the currency. When I recall what my Morris Marina cost in the 1970’s and the price of a gallon of petrol then and look at the prices now for equivalent motoring it is clear that there has been a conspicuous failure of government in the last forty years.

And it is getting worse by the year.

Is Anybody There?

As followers of the US National Hurricane Centre know, storms are not predictable in incidence, nature, direction and effects. If the pre-conditions are right then one storm may follow another quite quickly.

Quite where the present media storm will take us is not clear. The level of public disgust at some of the stories is apparent. Gordon and Sarah Brown have every reason for anger and dismay.

But as some are pointing out, this is very bad indeed but there are a number of other very worrying developments happening which are going to need a lot of work and attention and about which the public should be properly informed.

This is at a time of year when for two months or more Parliament will not be sitting and its members, including Ministers will be dispersed and taking some holiday although all are likely to be catching up or doing other business.

Meanwhile in the senior ranks of the government departments and all the agencies and other non-government but official organisations desks will not be occupied, calls will not be taken and mail and other communications will wait for replies. Work in progress will be slowed or stalled.

An effect of all the improvements in the conditions of employment both in the Civil Service and other bodies means that longer vacations can be taken as well as other time taken out. Posts are taking longer to fill now and if there are a good many early retirements leaving, many will have “saved” entitlement to have a “free” summer.

It is my view that the situation in the second half of the 21st Century is quite different from that of a generation ago and that was different from the generation before that. We may be looking at almost two months when in effect the Civil Service and others are not functioning to level that is needed for ordinary business.

So what happens if other major political or financial storms come rolling in that are highly complex, very dangerous and require extraordinary inputs of work and activity? It is likely that there simply may not be enough people there to cope.

It can happen and it has. During a severe heat wave in the period of Les Vacances in France several years ago, thousands died, notably amongst the aged because the services needed to deal with crisis were severely undermanned because so many people were away.

Perhaps we will get away with a couple of clear months before more trouble arrives. But we may not and given the fragility of international finances let alone the situations in many countries at present anything could happen. In the present day can we really afford to have so many in the offices of state off work?

Both the First and Second World Wars began at this time of the year and both arose from crises that went out control. I have not forgotten the blundering about in 1956 of the Suez Crisis which critically went wrong during August. I was there.

This is only the short term matters, we are still going nowhere on the longer term key problems and we can no longer afford the start stop management of public affairs to suit the lifestyle requirements of those who govern.

It is not just the unemployed who need to get back to work; it is the higher ranks of government and the Civil Service.

Who Rules The UK?

In Open Democracy today is a long article by Anthony Barnett over the matter of the way LSE got into bed with Gaddafi and the objections made by Fred Halliday.




The first part is about the people involved but if you scroll down to the sub heading Gaddafi’s Calculations it will tell you how and why the Libyan regime was able to insinuate itself into a major UK institution.



The moral here is that not only was it very easy to do this but that so many of our political leaders and businessmen could not wait to take the money and hand over access and to a degree control.



So what else and where else have people with money and access laid there hands on or put themselves into controlling situations in UK politics, business, academia and the civil service?



http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/anthony-barnett/fred-halliday-david-held-lse-and-independence-of-universities?utm_source=feedblitz&utm_medium=FeedBlitzEmail&utm_content=201210&utm_campaign=Nightly_2011-03-31%2005:30



Whoever rules, it is not the Parliament we elect nor those appointed under the Crown who are in charge of and managing our futures, it is those they go begging to for favours.



1n 1999 I was at the LSE for the occasion when JK Galbraith was given his Honorary Doctorate for services to economics and government. That there should now be a need for a formal enquiry about how the School makes its awards tells us a great deal.