You don't fix the failures of bureaucracy with more bureaucracy (or as someone said: 'afuera!')

Everywhere we look we see bureaucracies committed to doing as little as possible as badly as possible while blaming everything that goes wrong on a lack of funding.

There was a widely held belief among the great and the good that the failures of British government were the consequence of useless and incompetent Tory leadership (often with an added twist of corruption and sleaze). So, when Keir Starmer sailed into Downing street atop a great wave of new Labour MPs the expectation was that good, or at least competent, government had arrived. We ignored the fact that Starmer didn’t have anything that looked remotely like an approach to governing let alone a plan. Beyond a couple of spiteful lumps of fresh meat thrown to the Labour left, the new Starmer government promised nothing except the vague. And even where, as with housing, a specific promise was made, that promise - “1.5m new homes” - was both underwhelming and without strategy making it a prime candidate for not being delivered.

Since Starmer walked through the door of Number 10 everything has gone awry. Special advisors and civil servants fight like ferrets in a sack. Everything is leaked to friendly journalists or anonymous social media accounts. Ministers are mired in stories about lies, concert tickets and free spectacles. And the plans, such as they were, are rapidly unravelling. Far from Sunak’s Conservative government being a byword for uselessness, Starmer, Reeves and Lammy have conspired to be every bit as useless. 

Perhaps there’s a different story. It isn’t that the politicians are useless, it is that modern governments are simply too big, too wasteful, too unwieldy and too controlling. In short we are badly governed. Just as the Americans, Canadians, French, Germans and Australians are badly governed.

Shortly before America’s presidential election I wrote about how perceptions of bad government were at the heart of why Donald Trump looked likely to win:

“Nobody, in responding to the question - why Donald Trump - asks a different question. Perhaps Donald Trump, like populists in Europe, merely reflects a sort of “fuck you” from Americans fed up with being governed so badly.”

And, as I also observed, the USA is a long way from being the worst governed place. At least the USA has so far avoided electing a government that sees trashing the economy as its number one priority. This is not true of Europe and Britain where Net Zero and ideas of bureaucratic protection combine to make it ever more difficult to build a business and, for some sectors of manufacturing, impossible to carry on. This idiocy is not owned by one or other political side as conservative, liberal and social democratic politicians fall over each other to swing great regulatory hammers at their economies, all in the name of climate change, equalities or supposed human rights. Across government, policies of social and economic control are crafted by expensively educated and well paid civil servants, advisors and their allies in ‘non-governmental organisations’, NGOs. Too often, indeed almost always, thes emake matters worse not better.

It isn’t the politicians that are the problem. The problem is that people thought Ronald Reagan was joking when he quipped that the nine most frightening words in the English language were ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help’. Part of the problem here is that people in government really do believe that improvements to people’s lives only happen because of them, the without their work there’d be no economic growth and that we’d live in a lawless wild west filled with the 21st century equivalent of rapacious cattle ranchers backed by a posse of men with guns. For such people it is a terrifying sight seeing Javier Milei shouting ‘afuera’ as he tears down the names of government departments. How can you operate without ministries for tourism, culture, sustainable development, women and diversity, innovation and education? The bureaucratic class looks at Elon Musk’s ‘DOGE’ and screams. With Trump planning on closing the federal department of education, such people firmly believe that American kids will become feral urchins running wild about the streets. Parents, they will tell you, only educate their children because the state, the bureaucracy, insists that they do so.

People believe we are badly governed. And the numbers have climbed year after year since the 1960s:

A record high of 45% now say they ‘almost never’ trust governments of any party to place the needs of the nation above the interests of their own political party

As many as 58%, also a record high, say they ‘almost never’ trust ‘politicians of any party in Britain to tell the truth when they are in a tight corner’

9% say the system of governing Britain could be improved ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a great deal’

This is from the UK’s 2024 British Social Attitude survey (the 41st in a series) and, while the focus is on the politicians, they are simply a lightning rod for overall attitudes towards government and bureaucracy. People believe government is wasteful, inefficient and run for the benefit of either the rich or the people who work in government. Here’s polling from the USA:

“Today, 85% of the public agree the federal government is “wasteful,” up 15 percentage points from 2022. About three-quarters of respondents say the government is “corrupt,” up from 67%, and two-thirds agree the government is “incompetent,” up from 56%.”

And people wonder why a politician who said that government is wasteful, corrupt and incompetent got elected? Except that the great and the good really do think that the problems with bureaucracy can be fixed with more, different or better bureaucracy:

“While some have sought to exploit this dissatisfaction by calling for the firing of civil servants and the weakening of civil service protections, the better course of action—one far more in line with public opinion—would be to build a well-functioning government that more effectively serves the people. The nonpartisan civil service ensures our government maintains the continuity of knowledge and expertise to achieve this goal.”

This conclusion comes from the same report showing people think their government is wasteful, corrupt and incompetent and is there because the NGO that produced the report and conducted the survey refuses to believe that the problem with bureaucracy is bureaucracy. And that if only there were fewer political appointments and more ‘non-partisan’ civil servants everything would be better. Writing as someone from the UK where we have a “nonpartisan civil service” that “ensures our government maintains…continuity of knowledge and expertise”, I fear that the Partnership for Public Service might just be indulging in wishful thinking.

The public thought that Britain’s problem was ‘the last lot’ and, obviously, Starmer’s government is very keen to stress that this is the case. But we have quickly seen the truth, which is that for all the great brains populating our world class civil services, they seem unable to manage their way out of a wet paper bag. Failures in the NHS, the disaster of immigration, in the courts and with our continuing inability to build anything anywhere - everywhere we look we see bureaucracies committed to doing as little as possible as badly as possible while blaming everything that goes wrong on a lack of funding.

Yesterday thousands of British farmers marched to protest about government proposals to put inheritance tax on farmland. It is an example - like putting VAT on school fees and means testing winter fuel payments to pensioners - of policies that pass the bureaucracy's sniff test but end up both unpopular and pointless. During the march the BBC interviewed Jeremy Clarkson, present in his latest iteration as a celebrity farmer. Clarkson was asked, stood in Whitehall, where the money would come from and his response was:

“See all these offices here? Walk into any of these offices round here and, if you don’t understand what somebody’s job is, fire them”

Or, as Javier Milei would put it, afuera!.