Bright ideas that are wasted on our cynical civil servants
Policy Exchange this week published a paper by a Christopher Bickerton, a Brexit-supporting Cambridge politics lecturer, who argues that Britain suffers from an oversupply of labour from the EU and underinvestment in training the people we have.
On hand to critique its conclusions at the launch was Nicholas Macpherson, former permanent secretary of the Treasury. Nick Mac, as he’s known in Whitehall, was unimpressed. “This isn’t novel,” he drawled.
In his many, many years in government, he reminded us, he has seen ministers come and go like weather forecasts, and has read many a “skills strategy” aimed at training the workforce or an “industrial strategy” that tries to rebalance the economy. These useless schemes never achieve anything except to waste money, he said – and, he implied, his very, very precious time.
He’s right of course. But
Mandarins ought to leave before they succumb to cynicism
also deeply wrong. The UK economy has a chronic problem of under-trained workers and it’s difficult to fix. It’s so difficult, in Baron Macpherson’s view, that we shouldn’t bother – thereby showing how a clever public servant can pass his sell-by date. Mandarins ought to leave before they succumb to cynicism. Unfortunately, they have often infected their replacements with the same malaise.
As Baron Macpherson shows, one way to understand a country’s political culture is to consider who composes its civil service. In Britain, it’s full of smart-arse Oxbridge graduates with humanities degrees. In Germany, lawyers dominate, particularly in the foreign office.
This might give us a clue as to why Brexit has been so difficult. In Britain we tend to work out the plan, then tell the lawyers what we want to do and they find a way to do it. But if you start with the lawyers, they’ll tell you what’s possible, and then you have to work out whether your goal is achievable. Hence, the current state of the Brexit negotiations.