When enough is enough

This will be a bit of a ramble but stay with me as I think we will get to somewhere interesting. Some years ago I was a committed school governor. Then Thatcher brought in People Choice or whatever it was called. Suddenly school governors had a bag load full of obligations and responsibilities and even more than that the local area would expect to hold the governors to account for any consequences. The more I looked into it the more it struck me that the actual controls were all held upstream leaving the governors to manage the dirtyend and to be the front line for complaints. I gave up being a governor. We now have 'The Big Society'. Again this seems to a have a very familiar ring to it. Pass down to the lowest possible level, the dirty coal face of making things work and answering complaints about shortcomings, whilst leaving all the real controls at a much higher level. I could go on but that would be a distraction.

Putting the rosiest picture forward, our politician are not intellectual power houses nor consumed with a passion for a particular view of life. Just regular guys and girls. It could be chance that our new Prime Minister has read the past, learnt the lessons and is reapplying what worked. Possible but implausible. What I am getting here is an over-powering whiff of success management. My definition of success would be to be solely in control of the steering, the brake and the accelerator, to not get my hands dirty doing work and to be well off the line of fire when the spray shots of blame starts. Given that our politician are not those intellectual giants it is the civil service mandarins behind the scenes that actually run and set this countries agenda. Yes they have to work within the constraints of whatever is current political flavour but, I suspect, have long ago acquired the skills to find presentations which match political aspirations but still drive towards their own determined goal.

What I think I am sensing is a civil service that has decided to devolve power to the lowest possible levels whilst ensuring they retain a tight grip on real free decision taking. Why? We are moving towards a totalitarian society. What better confirmation than the images of citizens contained behind wire fences so as to not trouble their elected representatives, this is as cynical take on demcracy working by our leaders as you could wish for. You and I might argue the pace but the direction is irrefutable. When you view the populace as fraudster, cheats, skivers, shirkers, in all a shiftless bad lot, the only possible response is yet more control, more surveillance and more punishments. It trying to tie down and manage free spirit, it is an inescapable consequence, that government gets more and more complex, intrusive and finds it so hard to keep threads together. No wonder then that the mandarins are looking to simplify what they need to exercise that absolute control. We have a long game objective playing out here. Watch out in coming years for its manifestation in several different political disguises!

It is just another example of the glass half full or the glass half empty syndrome. If your starting premise is that citizens are liars and cheats you will readily find all the evidence to confirm it many times over. So justifying yet more control, surveillance and sanction. Sit firmly down on the can of worms. On the other hand of course if your starting premise is that citizens are proudly loyal, hard working, wanting opportunities to show and share their skills you end up with a different style of government. A style that sets out to enable, utilise and harness the energy and talent of the citizens to better themselves. For this view, only the lightest of hands is necessary and to a large extent it will self-discipline itself, leaving a minimalist government that mostly has to follow the will of its peoples. As against trying to suppress the will of the people to its objectives.

Yes of course we can all identify cheats and abusers amongst us but equally we can also identify the honest and self-sacrificing. You have to take a view, are we largely honest or largely cheats, half full or half empty? There is no doubt in my mind listening to the continual justification of measure after measure that relies on scare mongering about stopping cheats and fraudsters getting away with it, how our government see the issue!

Concomitant to the path to totalitarianism is an ever burgeoning bureaucracy that will eventually overwhelm and self-destruct. There are no cost savings down that road, the tools you need to manage grow ever larger and wider. What you save today you will spend double tomorrow. The proportion of government cost against the wealth of nation just rises and rises. We have too much government focused on the wrong end. We as a society need to sit back and rethink how we want go about governing ourselves, starting out with a much simpler model. There is of course a very entrenched and powerful voice that says you will never ever get to realise it.