We can’t go into this economic crisis with an outdated, broken administrative machine
The machinery of state is malfunctioning. Its pistons are rusty, its tubes and chambers leaky. Nannying, priggish and woke in normal times, government agencies turn out to be hopeless in a crisis.
Last week, at Ditchley, Michael Gove made a beautifully crafted and intelligent speech about how to improve the performance of our bureaucracies. Although few took issue with his recommendations – better training, wider intellectual diversity, more transparency – many questioned why he was even talking about administrative overhauls during an epidemic.
For an answer, consider how our executive bodies have acquitted themselves over the past three months. Look, for example, at the way they responded to the mass protests.
For nine weeks, the lockdown had been strictly – indeed, officiously – enforced. The police ticked people off for sitting in parks, buying luxury goods and even, in one notorious case, being in their own garden. But when hundreds of thousands congregated in the name of Black Lives Matter, Official Britain applied very different criteria.
BLM activists were indulged, not only when they ignored the social distancing rules, but when they attacked property. Who indulged them? Not the general public, which remained calmly and resolutely in favour of both social order and statues. Nor yet the Prime Minister, who likewise defended both. No, the special pass was issued by, so to speak, those in between. By BBC editors, police chiefs, university administrators, quangocrats – by, in short, that large class of people who are paid by the state without being answerable to the nation.
The episode revealed how far removed our officials are from the country at large. Many of them have come to see “the inclusiveness and diversity agenda”, not as a complementary obligation, but as an end in itself. In their eyes, the purpose of a university is not to educate, but to have a representative intake; the role of a company board is not to maximise profits, but to meet ethnic quotas; the point of a film is not to entertain, but to provide opportunities for minority actors, and so on.
Naturally, when the BLM protests began, they saw them not as illegal demonstrations but as a cry for justice. Grievances counted for more than public order. Feelings trumped facts.
Oddly, “inclusiveness and diversity” does little for either inclusiveness or diversity. Public bodies exclude swathes of the population – hardly any civil servants voted Leave, for example. “Diversity”, in officialese, now means “people who look different but think the same”. Groupthink is never good for any organisation.
If we were simply talking about woke quangocrats, the problem might not be so urgent. The trouble is that political correctness distracts our agencies from what ought to be their core functions.
This is most obvious in the case of Public Health England, which spent years campaigning against pizzas and fizzy drinks, often wrapping its arguments in the language of identity politics, but which proved worse than useless when faced a genuine public health challenge. We are conflicted in our attitude to the administrative state. We say “let the professionals get on”; but when those professionals let us down, we blame the politicians.
We cheer the NHS from our doorsteps, for example. We scrawl messages of thanks and stick them in our windows. Yet, at the same time, we complain about the slowness of the testing regime, the failure to provide enough medical gowns, the decision to send patients, unscreened, into care homes. We moan about how much better the Germans or the Norwegians or the Singaporeans have managed. But it doesn’t occur to us that we might learn anything from how they organise their healthcare systems.
In order to maintain this contradiction, we engage in a language game. Whenever we want to criticise a failure of the NHS or PHE, we refer to them as “the government”, as in “the government is not getting enough protective equipment to front-line workers”.
It is technically true, of course, that the officials who work in health procurement are state employees. But calling them “the government” is a cop-out. It suggests that, somehow, any problems are the fault of politicians – whose motives are never quite explained, but who are vaguely assumed to be malevolent. It lets us maintain a distinction between “the professionals” (pure, selfless, incorruptible) and “the government” (shoddy, dishonest, calculating).
As long as we think that way, we give state agencies little incentive to raise their game. They might be staffed by the best, wisest and most industrious of people. But, being immune to public opinion, they are bound to underperform.
This problem won’t be solved by appointing better officials – though that might help a little. What is needed is a radical diffusion and democratisation of decisions. Power should be shifted from unelected functionaries to elected representatives – whether by making quangos plead annually for their budgets before the relevant Commons committee or by transferring their function to local authorities. The competences that are coming back from the EU should not be hoarded in Whitehall, but passed down to county and metropolitan councils or, better yet, to private citizens.
Plenty of politicians mull such ideas when they are in opposition, but they tend to be distracted in office, so the changes rarely get made. That, in large measure, is why we are in this mess. We can’t put reform off any longer.