Archive: The State is Running at Capacity

In 2011, I attempted to critique “The Plan” by Carswell & Hannan. After 3 installments I’d had enough…

First Published on Luikkerland website, Tue, 20 Sep 2011

This is the third instalment of section-by-section criticism and reaction to The Plan – the book co-written by Douglas Carswell and Daniel Hannan. The second instalment is here.

In the third section of their book, “The Plan”, Hannan and Carswell (H&C) try to identify why the government and wider public sector is incompetent. They decide that it is due to its own great bloated size and unwieldiness. They are partially correct, but they do not mention the true cause; if they did, it would draw attention to the political philosophy that is now engrained in their own Tory brand (and the instrumental part they themselves have played to make it happen). Even though they are Statists, H&C need to demonize the State in order to make their own “solution”, Localism, appetising. Meant as a means to create cantons in the UK under EU governance, even implementation of Localism in an independent UK would not necessarily be a sound proposition.

With a long list of governmental failure that was contemporary to the writing of their book – such as the child benefit data of 15 million people lost in the post, the delay of student loan payouts, and the loss of 5 million tax self-assessment forms – H&C document the all too evident incompetence of the public sector. Although there is less in the press these days about this sort of hopelessness, just because of their mode of operation, we can be sure that government still suffers from the malaise of which those many embarrassments during the last years of the Labour Government were a symptom. (The lateral-thinkers amongst us might suspect that, at the time, the Establishment wanted a new head for the Westminster Triumverate, and in an effort to end Brown’s tenure at Number 10, made such fiascos happen, or at least turned them loose into the realm of public consciousness).

H&C claim that public sector incompetence is not due to “intrinsically wrong policies” (and thus excuse their own Conservative Party for the part it has played in bringing us to the state of affairs we now find ourselves in), rather it is due to “straightforward failures of management” and to the fact that

Modern government is already running at capacity. It has taken too much on. It is literally unable to assume new functions and discharge them efficiently.

In short, the problem seems to be that the government is so large that it cannot be managed properly.

Please note that it is essential for H&C, in order to form a foundation for their own proposition, to confuse the notions of area and volume, or “large” and “dense”. The British public sector and corporate government is large, but more importantly, it is dense. It is not impossible to manage over a large catchment area of control, or a giant organisation, but when the command structure is dense, it certainly makes it harder.

Another key factor in avoiding management failure is to have good, common sense procedures and practices, and have as few of them as possible. Procedure in the public sector comes down from government, and it is full of non-operational requirements for consideration of political doctrine such as Equality and other Progressive strategies. It is the kind of stuff that creates non-essential branches of the public sector, their management and staff, which in turn produces additional layers of unnecessary density. The work practices are derived from the doctrinal requirements that staff are meant to adhere to. Everyone in the organisation then has many more non-essential tasks to carry out before they do the job they are actually paid to do.

Then there is straight-forward corruption when a layer of staff is injected into the public sector to provide additional non-essential service – especially consultancy. At the top where the deal is brokered you could expect to find a government minister creating an initiative that, while it is supposed to look favourable to the electorate as a piece of action to fortify some area of the public sector, is really about rewarding an old school pal or lobbyist with an opportunity to make money out of the public purse.  The private companies owned by the “school pals” then take up the contracts for the newly created services, but at the coal face the new staff do very little extra.

The problem with the government is not that it is has too much to do (though I am not saying that this is a good thing), but that the people in it are corrupt, and the philosophical mindset that permeates it will lead to waste and failure. Delegating bits of what national government used to do to local government will not remove the corruption or the political philosophy. Small government can still be dense, and therefore rendered inadequate.

The other thing that H&C do in this section is endeavour to explain why UK government is bloated. They understand – just as has been written about countless times on this site – that the country was collectivised after World War II when Britons had become reliant, during a period of unified national struggle that could not have been achieved any other way, on a government knowing what was best for all. What was essentially a power grab by government during those years was never reversed, and new abuses could be got away with by appealing to a public mentality that had suffered much war time propaganda to the effect “that we all had to make sacrifices” and “that it was unpatriotic to complain”.

H&C point out that since World War II the uninterrupted “expansion [of the State] has not been accompanied by any rise in doctrinal support for central planning” – i.e. not many politicians of any political colour would, these days, call for nationalisation of the economy.  They put the reason for this paradox down to “institutional inertia, vested interests and fear of change” – all passive or non-intentional reasons for why the State has bloated. However, none of these excuses can in any way be called objection and principled opposition to the growth of government. The truth is, the British government have found it much to its liking to be in charge of the British people, even if the rhetoric pretends the opposite.

Besides which, the actual doctrine of the British political elite at least since the 80s has been of corporate government – where government is enacted through private multinationals that act as the centralised repositories of wealth (as per a variation of the Marxist model). Britain is collectivised in the derived Fascist form, and H&C themselves note – without acknowledging Britain’s actual status – that the “corporatist state was incompatible with personal freedom”.

This is the reality that H&C don’t want to explain to their readers, because Localism will involve the same model at the local level with corporations like Tescos working with local government to provide public services. The British political elite – H&C included – have wanted and worked for a fascist dictatorship, and now, with the impenetrability of any gaps between the LibLabCon, they have one. They have what they desire in terms of the waste and non-productivity of a large public sector which engenders the loss of middle and working class wealth through tax revenue (an idea that our elite must have been aware of during the war because Orwell makes it a key device that sustains the dystopia in “Nineteen Eighty Four”). What our elite are now engaged in, through its vanguard policy makers such as H&C, is making it look like the fascist dictatorship doesn’t exist – just like the devil makes it look as though Hell is a fantasy.