Government is useless because government is unaccountable

I’ve been thinking again about government. You know that thing that, if you watch the telly or read the news, seems to screw up all the time. This finding applies regardless of where you are (except that in places like Russia and China government’s screw ups are not reported on the national media) since the ability of government to screw up seems universal.

In the UK we’ve watched with varying degrees of incredulity as the inevitable happened with the 2020 exam results. It’s clearly not about the particular brand of politician since all four varieties in our four nations screwed up (as did unions, bureaucrats and opposition). The events come in a long and dishonourable tradition of government being, as a client of mine once observed about the UK’s biggest building society, “unable to manage their way out of a wet paper bag”. But this, of course, implies that somewhere in the system something is going wrong.

It’s popular, indeed expected, for the media to lay the blame, like a cat with a recently captured mouse, at the door of political and administrative leadership. Like the cat, the recent expertise (gained by a couple of five minute telephone interviews with the first experts on the TV channel’s phone list) of the media is designed to say: “you’re absolutely useless, here’s how it should be done”. The media then launch into an extensive hunt to capture a minister or a director and have their head prominently displayed on a pole outside Broadcasting House while they dance around celebrating a victory for the people.

None of this really solves the problem but it gives the impression that somehow government is being “held to account” by the noble media champions of openness, decency and good ratings. Politics and politicians of course indulge this media pitchfork mob because there’s nothing we like better than seeing our enemies’ heads on those poles.

Government, of course, largely gets away with all this failure. Nobody ever looks seriously at why government is so useless at much of what it does since the media prefer to turn the failure of government into the exclusive failure of whichever politicians oversee government at the time. Or failing that getting some nervous, blinking NHS Trust chair (or one of the myriads of essentially anonymous directors, chairs and presidents of failing government agencies and institutions) to fall on his or her sword.

You see the unconsidered reality here is that government is useless. Not the politicians or the directors or the civil servants or the council chief executives but government. Every year there’s a parade of failure from different parts of government. One month it’s prisons, the next its some part of the Byzantine construct that is the NHS. All followed by a scandal in procurement or local government. We’ve seen crises of administration in benefits, in child protection, in social care, in collecting taxes…everywhere across government, from the highest and grandest parts of Whitehall down to the smallest town council. As I said, government is useless.

The real question we should ask isn’t which head to put on which pole but rather why government is so bad at administering the schemes, programmes and regulations that it creates. How does a simple little control measure or a necessary fix to some perceived problem because a crisis of administrative chaos? It can’t be, at least from my experience, the people who work in government. Such folk are not much different to the people who work in the non-government bit of the economy (some good, some bad, some lazy, some attentive, some creative, most just doing their job as well as they can).

The usual answer (at least from those who advocate for government – lots of government) is that it would all be fine if there was more funding. With that funding going towards more administrators one guesses – there is magic in numbers after all. But as government gets bigger and bigger, as it gets more and more money, there’s little to suggest that the administration improves in equal measure. The parade of failures, crises and disasters continues.

There’s another set of people, mostly but not universally, conservatives, who think the problem is that we don’t have enough good management. You know the sort – “what government needs is a good dose of business sense, get some people in from the private sector and it’ll soon be sorted”. Again, the problem is that this has been tried. The 1980s Conservative governments commenced (and Blair’s New Labour ones continued) a process of turning the operations of government into agencies run on business lines with boards of directors, annual reporting and all the fancy logos, mission statements and virtue-signalling we see in the grander parts of the business world. We dragged businesspeople into government positions with offers of knighthoods and bigger wages than the prime minister and, just like the civil servants and ministers, these people delivered a parade of administrative failures, cockups and disasters.

What government probably realises is that business leadership looks good because bad business leadership goes bust or gets sacked not because there’s something innately superior to that leadership. And badly administered businesses likewise tend to do badly, lose business and disappear into the maw of other better run businesses (unless of course government, as it likes to do, intervenes to protect the bad business from the effect of the market- especially if that competition is some sort of dastardly foreigner). Simply importing “private sector management” doesn’t work unless you import private sector accountability at the same time.

And here’s the thing – it’s the lack of accountability that’s the problem. I know that the “let’s get a minister’s head on a pole” campaign is what the media thinks we mean by accountability but it isn’t because the political corpse of a minister is replaced by a new live one who is served by the same unaccountable system as the unfortunate swinging from the gibbet outside parliament. And once there’s a body the media and opposition aren’t really interested in the subsequent resolution (or more likely non-resolution) of the actual problem.

In most of government’s administrative disasters there are real humans who suffer. Young people unsure about their exam results, soldiers dead on a battlefield or legless in a hospital because vehicles lacked armour protection, people dead in A&E departments through neglectful care, or families with no money for food because the benefits administration cocked up. Government is swift to chase private sector failings that cause such problems (and indeed as fast food restaurants are discovering when there isn’t even a problem) and to load on new regulation, controls and restrictions. Yet the same failings in government seem at best to be ignored and at worst rewarded. This is because the private business that gets it wrong must sort out the problem to its consumers’ satisfaction or they’ll go somewhere else but there's no such consequence for the government agency. Most folk don’t get this choice with government; all we get is an occasional vote that might change who’s in charge at the very top but not much else.

The obvious answer for me to this parade of failings isn’t more government, more funding or more new rules. There may be occasions when something can be sorted with a bit more administrative resource but mostly this is simply buying more mops to clean up after the flood. What we need (and how long have real liberals been saying this) is more choice and less government. I know this wouldn’t get rid of all the cock up and failings or even the desire for the media to have ministers’ heads on poles, but it would begin to offer the ordinary person just a little more protection from those failings. And where you can’t privatise the operation then devolve it to as near the front line as you can get so we can see the whites of the eyes of the people making the decisions that affect our lives.

Government may be useless, but we can make it less so by having it only do what it needs to do and doing that closer and accountable to the people.

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