"Candidly. . ."
We need Dyno-Rod to unblock our governance structures
There’s a reason I’ve been writing less for The Long March over the last few weeks, and I’d like to explain it to you, because I’m going to need your help. To cut to the chase, I’ve reached the entirely depressing conclusion that our establishment, and particularly our civil service no longer has the capacity or willingness to implement the changes we desperately need.
If so, then proposing and imagining solutions to Britain’s economic, social and political problems loses much of its point. Even if the electorate had the good sense and good fortune to vote an SDP parliamentary majority, could the stalled, conflicted and rusted ‘machinery of government’ be managed in a way which could get things done?
The cracks in my confidence first appeared in November’s piece on the National Infrastructure Commission, which identified the way the extraordinary duplication/redundancy of tasks and consequent severing of any clear lines of responsibility, made even something as simple and fundamental as ensuring adequate drainage for housing developments impossible to obtain.
‘Who’s in charge?’ It turns out this problem laps up on at least nine levels of establishment governance: upper tier local authorities; highway authorities; district councils; water & sewerage companies; internal drainage boards; the Environment Agency; the Dept for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs; Ofwat; and flood and coastal committees.’
If something as simple/fundamental as this is sabotaged by the size and complexity of government, what hope for any of the more difficult problems Britain’s children are inheriting?
And it made me hark back to one of the first pieces I wrote for TLM, about the extraordinary size of the Cabinet Office and its almost unimaginably bloated HR department.
When one realizes the sheer impossibility of our governing establishment actually being able to achieve anything positive, the result which we see time and time again, is inevitable. Instead of acting to to increase the supply of anything, it follows that the task of government must be reduced to curtailing demand. And that’s easy - you just ban things or tax people until they stop wanting stuff.
So we see it time and time again, across almost the entire range of public policy. Flood water a problem? Tax people with ‘hard driveways’. Cities getting traffic-bound - OK, institute a 15-minute cities program with mass surveillance and fines to stop people travelling. Of put in ULEZ, again with penalties. Motorways crammed? ‘Smart motorways’ on the cheap, and when they keep killing people because of inadequate investment and management, cut the speed limit.
‘National Insurance’ fraud finally showing its colours? Raise the retirement age. NHS failing? Keep the sick at at home with the (doubtless empty) promise of online surveillance and follow-up visits. (“No, don’t call it ‘Smart NHS.’”) Too few GPs? So what, get pharmacists diagnose and medicate. People fat because the playing fields are all gone? Tax sugar, get some brainwashed drone to invent the curse of ‘secondary cake’ in the office.
National Grid failing? Get the suckers to pay for their own blackouts. Local authorities cash-strapped? Fine the suckers now keeping warm with wood-burners.
So inadequate drains, no urban tram systems, newly dangerous and slower motorways, no proper social insurance scheme, failed NHS with spiraling ‘excess deaths’ totals and a rise in ‘self-dentistry’.
I could go on, and so could you. But the point hammered home time and again by these announcements is always the same: ‘We can’t increase the supply of a public good, but we can punish you for demanding it’. Public demand is, quite simply, the enemy of a constipated, strangulated, paralysed public sector.
If the public sector is a drain on resources, we need to Dyno-Rod it.
This emphases the negative problem - that the civil service is incapable of delivering on new initiatives.
But sadly this coexists with a tremendously powerful positive problem: that once ‘the system’ - that multiform tentacular swirling mass of evaded responsibilities - has made up its mind on a policy, nothing can stop it. For example, any attempt to stop the drive towards ‘net zero’, no matter how expensive, damaging and pointless it is found to be, will involve the most extraordinary fight, even if the government and senior civil service decrees it. For ‘net zero’, and its strange warriors, have colonized the system too thoroughly.
Ditto the army of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) will fight to the last man/woman/indeterminate zygote to maintain its life the public sector. After all, the NHS and RAF both concur that DEI is at least as important as life and death, if not more so. And since they are parasitic throughout the system, like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey:
If only there was someone with deep experience of the political process who could explain the problem better than I can. Like this:
‘I saw at first-hand during my two years as chief secretary to the Treasury that pessimism and scepticism about the growth potential of the British economy are sadly endemic at the Treasury: serious planning reform was dismissed as not politically deliverable; discussing monetary policy was a taboo; deregulation of financial services and other industries was viewed as undermining the prospects of a deal with the EU; and Brexit was seen as a damage-limitation exercise rather than a once-in-a generation opportunity.’
Forty-four days.
So what to do? My immediate and instinctive response is that what is needed is a start-from-scratch zero-budgeting review of our civil service. That exercise would have a very clear aim: to identify areas of overlapping responsibilities and administrative redundancies, in order to establish crystal-clear lines of accountability and responsibility within the civil service.
Without those, there is little point in electing any political party, let alone one as potentially radical as the SDP, and expect it to deliver. They can’t deliver, they won’t deliver, unless by some happy chance of synchronicity, those plans already align with the system’s revealed preferences. (See above: this is also why it is, apparently, extremely difficult to rewrite EU-written laws in order to align them with British interests. It might involve, after all, an assault on the dug-in interests of the civil service. )
The Russian army’s murderous and atrocious failures in Ukraine demonstrate how conflicting interests and the useless redundancies they sustain, conspire to blur and erase lines of responsibility, to disastrous effect. For more on this, I suggest watching the peerless Perun’s YouTube account of just how effectively these problems has sabotaged what was once a greatly-feared army.
It is not by chance, I think, that halfway through this lecture, the background illustration is from . . . Britain’s seminal comedy about the civil service: ‘Yes Minister’.
A zero-budgeting exercise identifying and eliminating redundancies, and clarifying lines of accountability and responsibility would seem to be absolutely necessary for any political party which actually wants to change policy and achieve things for the British public.
The SDP should want a smaller government not because it doesn’t believe in the necessary power of government, but precisely because it does.
When I quietly floated this idea, it got a very positive response from some within the party but also from some well-connected people who have no affiliation to the SDP but who are friends of The Long March. For a short time, this got very exciting: we could, perhaps, raise funds to conduct just this sort of study, aiming to fully understand and illustrate the complexity and redundancy of government bodies involved with various aspects of policy. It promised to be both back-breaking and mind-numbing, but also of great value in terms of policy development and policy critique.
I got even more excited when I learned that the possible project had been brought to the attention of an extremely senior former civil servant. If anyone could help us unravel the system, this man could do it. I awaited his encouragement with baited breath for days.
And then his response came back. I quote: ‘Candidly, there’s nothing new, let alone audacious, in either his diagnosis or zero based reviews as the solution, particularly of something as tactical as Cabinet Office shared services. If he’s really interested in transforming govt he should look at the problem from the citizen’s end of the telescope and think about digital, identity, incentives etc.’
Ignore for a moment the de haut en bas tone - he was after all an extremely senior civil servant and I, after all, am only a scumbag nobody - and think about this reaction. The notion that the civil service might need to be responsive to democratic decisions, or be accountable to the public, is nowhere to be seen. From the bureaucratic point of view, the problem of governing is that people don’t do as they are supposed to do. Still, given enough individual surveillance backed by ‘incentives’ (ie, taxes and fines) perhaps they can be made to behave. The bureaucratic instinct is not merely not democratic, it is unmistakeably totalitarian.
He might have said more plainly: ‘We’ve looked at it and determined the problem is not the civil service, it’s you. You and people like you.’
This has, for the time being, left me in something close to despair. Despair about the chances of engineering the sort of changes Britain needs. Despair also at our entire political process: of course our two main parties will pursue very similar policies which will address none of our underlying problems, because they have no capacity to foster change. Certainly not capacity to improve the supply of public services or public goods: the solution, officially internalized, really is to crush our outrageous demands. It isn’t even a conspiracy: not an Establishment conspiracy, not a Remainer conspiracy, not even a woke conspiracy, it’s just what’s going to happen.
For someone with my interests, this is a crushing insight.
And then I remembered Fox’s injunction to “walk cheerfully over the world”, and realize that I have it in me to jog the necessary change a little further down the path.
The idea of zero-budgeting the British government, of carefully and ruthlessly identifying and costing the levels of redundancy and duplication, and of honing the lines of responsibility until they are inescapably clear, needs doing. It needs doing, not only because an incoming SDP government (inshallah) will need it on Day One, but because any government willing to take the risk of challenging our deplorable stasis, needs it.
And quite possibly my decades of experience of observing and analyzing governments around the world, my deep involvement in data and systems of all sorts, my independence, and my unshakeable belief that the job needs doing, makes me a prime candidate to carry it off.
But it is a monster of a job, not only through the sheer size of the machinery to be audited, but because of the multiplicity of publicly available resources to be marshalled, and the likelihood of multiple obstructions needing to be surmounted by freedom of information requests. It will take time, pig-headed determination, an ability to work with allies, and, frankly, an iron will to carry it out in the face of official opposition.
It is a truly monstrous task, and frankly, not something I can do in my spare time: it would ruinously divert me from the essential task of earning a living. So I need support: to be blunt, I need to raise the money to allow me at least to initiate this project, to demonstrate what can be achieved.
Can it be done? Can we raise the money for this project? What is the best approach? Does any TLM reader know of anyone who might be inspired to sponsor this work? Should I perhaps make it a ‘Subscription’ project, with those generous enough to sponsor the work identified in the final publication? Or should I try the ‘crowdfunding’ route.
Or should I simply forget it, and abandon hope of helping enable a better future for British politics, British government, economy and society?
Please give some thought as to this project can get funded, and let me know your thoughts, confidentially, at my email mjtcoldwater@fastmail.com
(To avoid doubt: The Long March is currently subscription free, and I intend to keep it that way. The idea of a subscription model funding the Zero-Based Budget project is quite separate.)
Steve Keen has a patreon site where he is explicit that he is raising funds so that he can spend more time working on his Minsky model and indeed hire an assistant. Subscribers can purchase access to his blogs and podcasts - he’s still doing it so it is presumably having some success.
On that note, I would love to hear proper arguments between economists and other people who actually know stuff about how to solve particular problems that we have in our country. I recently wrote how I find levelling up a fascinating concept in response to a different blog. To kick things off, you could do a series where you invite two economists with opposing ideas to discuss how they would level up, say, teeside, and then Norfolk and then another region etc. what seems to work well on other podcasts (see the rest is history and we have ways) is starting out free and gaining a lot of followers and then over time adding subscribable extras. Both of those podcasts actually have two presenters who get on well and crack jokes. Both have won tremendous success.
Meanwhile, in terms of other sponsors. I imagine there are people who might sponsor something like this, but you can’t go to them with the claim that you’re going to zero base the entire government. They won’t believe and it’s too vague. I think you would need to pick a particular outcome that is broadly agreed upon as a good thing so that the project doesn’t attract mass opposition from the off (social care? A central provident fund as a good but “impossible” idea, making the railways work**) and work out how to zero base the administration in the current civil service around that. Firstly it’s believable that this can be done. Secondly, You can aim at particular people who want that particular problem solved.
So if the goal is social care being properly dealt with, there may be people in the insurance industry willing to sponsor a sensible review of this type because any sensible reform will result in people making proper savings for this. That is separate from the administrative ability to deliver it, of course, but I suspect the only way to get anyone interested is to link administrative arrangements to the actual outcomes to be delivered. Then the administration to deliver a different kind of outcome may require a different sponsor.
Sorry for waffling. Hope there are some gold particles you can sieve from all the mud.
** as a fellow SDP member, this is a particular point of interest. It doesn’t bother me if government gets involved in this. There are evidently models around the world that can be copied where state run railways work well. But simply nationalising the railway, as ourdear leader suggests, doesn’t actually fix anything. What changes to the administration of the railway are required, to make the thing work properly, whoever owns it?
Great idea - afraid I haven't got a clue how you'd go about getting that off the ground.
But have you tried thinking about digital?