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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Conservatism - the home for grown up libertarians

 Although you can't, of course, use the actual word 'conservatism':

Many of the failures of today’s America are failures of excess regulation, but many others are failures of state capacity. Our governments cannot address climate change, much improve K-12 education, fix traffic congestion, or improve the quality of their discretionary spending. Much of our physical infrastructure is stagnant or declining in quality. I favor much more immigration, nonetheless I think our government needs clear standards for who cannot get in, who will be forced to leave, and a workable court system to back all that up and today we do not have that either. Those problems require state capacity — albeit to boost markets — in a way that classical libertarianism is poorly suited to deal with. Furthermore, libertarianism is parasitic upon State Capacity Libertarianism to some degree.

This (and the rest of Tyler Cowan's article) describes what I'd call 'institutional conservatism' - if you want to maintain an effective system not only should it be allowed to evolve but it needs to be well managed. What's happened is that essentially liberal-minded people have realised, as Cowan comments, how "...it doesn’t seem that old-style libertarianism can solve or even very well address a number of major problems...". Cowan cites climate change (where a common libertarian response is simply to deny it) but, more importantly in my view, we should look at how the sociological evidence around social infrastructure, communities and families all leads away from a hyper-liberal approach and towards conservatism.

What's important here is that, unlike (almost all) the left, we need to begin with recognising that markets and capitalism remain an essential part of the solution to problems such as climate change but also need what Cowan calls 'state capacity' to ensure social outcomes - from good public transport and nuclear power through to welfare and health safety nets - are secured.

My instincts are impeccably liberal and I don't consider that government should be the first choice for delivering any service but it seems clear that the social damage done by ultra-liberalism requires intervention - from the growth of loneliness and the collapse of the working class family through to violent crime and class bias in educational outcomes there's a case for government to act in the interests of the working person rather than simply to follow the liberal, utility maximising imperative.

I've long thought that, to oversimplify, economics is liberal while sociology is conservative (and the academy for both of them is filled with socialists). And that the division in national priorities flickers between an emphasis on community, family, security - the conservative instinct - and one on growth, progress, wealth - the liberal preference. Moreover, conservatism is the only practical politics able, at its best, to marry these imperatives in a lasting manner. Sadly conservatives, especially in the USA, have become bogeymen to intellectuals - self-interested plutocrats or rednecks with bad teeth and guns. The former is conservatism as the merely the rich preserving their interests while the latter is a modern urban snobbery about those less well-educated folk outside the city.

Rampant liberalism, the 'Thatcherism' that great lady never believed in that young men with cash and good suits brashly proclaim, has damaged the idea of conservatism as much as has the endemic infections of reaction, racism and small-mindedness. Even if burning fifty quid notes in front of the homeless is a bit of a myth, the sentiment - that the poor are solely responsible for their poverty and for getting out of that poverty - remains too common. Just like absolutist approaches to individual choice (witness the trans ID debate), this hyper-liberal idea is a corruption of decency, moderation and good sense. Plus it denies duty, responsibility and community as central parts of our worlds.

So if you've read Tyler Cowan's "state capacity libertarianism" and find its argument persuasive, I'd like to welcome you to conservatism, to a world of compromise, consensus and good government. Then you can join in making better policy for the families and communities that make up the societies in which we live - get them better lives, safer communities and (as Tom T Hall would say) more money.

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Why we need to stop government (and its agents) using facial recognition as surveillance

A big developer at King's Cross plans to introduce facial recognition systems to "ensure public safety" and, while some privacy and data protection concerns have been raised, nobody seems to see just how this represents the normalisation of intrusive surveillance of people going about their everyday lives. It follows on the appalling behaviour of the Metropolitan Police in their trials of using the technology where they assumed that anyone avoiding recognition was guilty.

This is where is ends up:

Within Kashgar, a majority Uighur city, residents must line up to be scrutinized before they can move from place to place. They are legally required to travel with ID cards and to swipe them at each checkpoint. They are also required to expose their faces to cameras that feed their pictures to facial recognition software. At the behest of the national government and regional police forces, Chinese software makers are training their algorithms to distinguish Uighurs from Han, China's ruling ethnic majority. Police officers stationed throughout Kashgar need neither probable cause nor a warrant to detain Uighurs and check their phones for the surveillance software that they're legally required to install.

It may not be as openly racist as the Chinese system but we will get to a point where the widespread use of facial recognition but public and private organisations will destroy the idea that our private activities are not a concern of the public authorities (their agents or those acting in the manner of the King's Cross developer). All of this will be "sold" to the public as being to ensure public safety, to catch criminals or with general wish-wash about 'law-and-order'.

I keep reminding us that the main reason for these intrusive technologies (other than 'they exist and we can use them') isn't public safety but a lack of trust in the public. In surveilling everyone, government and its agents remind us that they don't trust us and signal that, in general, people are not to be trusted. When we talk about the loss of community, the breakdown in social capital and the fragmentation of society, it is this collapse in trust - encouraged by the authoritarian tendencies of government - that is the main cause.

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Conservatives - what sort of society do you want? Some thoughts.

If the Conservative Party in the UK wants to thrive in the future it needs - as I've said before - to start thinking about sociology:

Because social issues now matter more than economic ones, for more people, there is a realignment coming at some point. The offer that the two parties give to the electorate will shift from being rival answers to how to cut (and bake) the pie. It will shift to a contest over which conception of society – diverse versus ordered – wins out. The precise mechanics of how this will happen are uncertain, but that it will happen just reflects the fact that one’s position on the social cleavage now matters to people.

The British political system makes this "realignment" difficult - or at least unlikely to happen in the convenient, media-friendly manner of a new political party or parties. The by-election result in Newport West, even if we apply the usual caveats about such things, show that the chances of another party - left, right or centre - superseding the two main political parties is small.

This doesn't mean, however, that the shift from economy to society as the main focus of public concern won't have a profound effect on our politics. And it does mean that conservatives need to begin to think about the sort of society they want to build while recognising that economic truths remain economic truths and can't be wished away.

When people accuse some conservatives of wanting "to go back to the 1950s", they fail to realise the significance of what this might mean in an actual policy platform. Nobody wants to go back to the real 1950s and lose the central heating, the cars, the mobile phones and the computers (or for that matter to get back the racism, sexism and homophobia) but people would like some things we have less of now that were normal in the 1950s.

What isn't to be liked about a crime rate that's less than a fifth of the rates today? Don't we like the idea of a job for life? And stable communities where people trust each other? When people hark back to better days long ago, these are sorts of things they think about. All of them are about the social environment, about the kind of people we are and the sorts of communities we live in. None of these things are incompatible with free markets, with social mobility or with economic growth. But they are less achievable in the centralised, one-size-fits-all, government by spreadsheet that we have right now.

When the spreadsheet wranglers talk about localism, they think of grand regional mayors wielding (quite vague) "powers" not district councils. And the focus of these mayors isn't community, family or neighbourhood but economic growth, regional competitiveness and the levering of central government decisions into local benefit. It is an entirely utilitarian focus on what Deirdre McCloskey called "Max U" - prudence only - and doesn't respond to those societal concerns about what people can see around their homes and in their lives.

Conservatives (with or without the big 'C') need to start framing their ideas about community and this means getting to grip with housing, with the manner in which the welfare system fails the poorest, with crime and justice. Conservatives need to start talking about buses rather than trains, about care workers rather than tech grandees, and about the environment we live in rather than the abstract finger-wagging of climate change. Above all we need to challenge the idea that everywhere is the same and can be treated the same - the managerialist ideology that has dominated our public administration for three decades. If it is our school, our hospital, our police service then this needs to be reflected in the way people relate to it.

I observed once that, at least in Bradford, the police appear to have retreated to huge, anonymous barracks that look more like something escaped from a Kafka-esque state than a local police service in a democracy. The convenience for operations management of such arrangements has outweighed the idea that the police are citizens in uniform protecting the place where they live.

The same assessment can be done for the NHS, where huge institutions with nameless, faceless appointed boards have replaced community hospitals, where (even in a comfortable place like Cullingworth) the doctors travel in from altogether grander, posher places to do their doctoring, and where the diktats of a distant bureaucracy determine what happens even if it is a really stupid thing to do in some places.

I might be wrong in thinking that the answer lies in a real localism, in actual, practical devolution of control over much of government to local communities. But I do think that, as the pathetic debacle of trying to leave the EU has shown, the current system we have has become so detached from normal society that its prescriptions - prepared by those men and women with spreadsheets - are at best annoying to and at worst actively damaging the neighbourhoods and communities that make up our nation.

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Evidence-free policy-making is the norm

The main point of Chapman's article is that no adequate process of evaluation has been put in place for this policy.

This quotation, lifted from Chris Snowdon's article about the limiting of stakes on FOBTs (fixed-odds betting terminals) could apply across a huge range of public policies. Worse than this, there is very often no way in which an evaluation can be better than informed opinion or observation.

Take, by way of example, Bradford Council's planning rules on the opening on new hot food takeaways. These rules ban new takeaways within 400m of a school or place that might be widely used by children and young people. To date the latter part of this definition covers parks, playgrounds, halls and community centres. Within the city proper there is almost nowhere (other than the city centre which is exempted from the regulation) where someone can open a hot food takeaway.

I opposed the ban and was told that, despite me pointing out the complete absence of any evidence linking hot food takeaways to child obesity is was (to quote Bradford Council's leader) "common sense" that there is a link. On a later occasion I asked the leader, via a question at full council, how the planning authority intended to measure the effectiveness of the policy. It seemed that they had no plans to do so but, when I pushed the leader, apparently this is part of a "raft" of policies that taken together will be effective in reducing levels of child obesity.

We're told by public policy folk that what they do is "evidence-based" but it seems that, where controlling public behaviour is concerned, there is no need for evidence or a framework for evaluation. When Bradford Council presented its consultation on a new PSPO (public space protection order) across the whole district meant to deal with 'anti-social driving', it was clear that while the things covered by the order - loud music, car cruising, loitering around cars - might be annoying they are not the things that the public consider the real problem: speeding, aggressive driving, road rage. And, just as with the ban on takeaways and the FOBTs stake limit, there is no indication as to how this PSPO will be evaluated so as to assess whether the limiting of civil liberties is justified by a reduction in car-related anti-social behaviour.

We will be having a 'review' but, like other policy reviews, it will feature how many orders were issued, how many people breached the orders and opinion from senior police officers saying how much they value the additional powers.

Finally, by way of example, lots of august bodies and respected individuals have responded positively to the government's consultation on introducing a register of home schooled children.The evidence for there being a need for this? None. But the LGA is keen for local councils to be de facto in charge of your child:

‘A register will help councils to monitor how children are being educated and prevent them from disappearing from the oversight of services designed to keep them safe.’

This is seen as a loophole by local education authorities (which probably should be abolished) and they are using safeguarding as an justification despite the evidence being that homeschooled children are significantly less likely to be abused than children attending regular schools.

It is clear that 'evidence-based policy-making' is almost entirely a myth - public authorities rely instead of expert opinion, referencing themselves and political popularity to justify intervening in private choices and behaviour.

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Quote of the day - why the EU should be razed to the ground and the earth beneath salted

From Pete North...

"If you want to live in a top down technocracy where politics is reduced to consultative exercises for show, so that we are all free to live obedient little lives with professional politicians closing down ever more freedoms, then the EU is a nice and easy off the shelf answer."

This is the sum of it all really. I commented on a little online video of (mostly) young people marching in Germany over the proposed new EU copyright rules - an example of powerful business and media interests essentially buying protection from emerging forms of communication online.

I appreciate too that our Westminster government is little better and that the manner in which they have emasculated local government leaves it as essentially the agent of central government fiat.

Getting Brexit should be the opportunity to reassert popular control over government - as I wrote at the new year:

So when we leave the EU that should just be the start. The other shibboleths of our state need democratising too - from the House of Lords and the judiciary through the NHS, police and civil service, to the legion of unaccountable local council chief executives, social services directors and planning managers. If you are looking for a 2019 project, this should be that project - Brexit ought to be the launch pad for a renewed democracy. I fear the great and good - those with most to lose from more democracy and more accountability - will do their utmost do make Brexit into a vehicle for less democracy: they should be stopped.

I remain optimistic.

Addendum: from Samizdata...

MEP’s can not create, amend, or reject proposals. They can act as a method of slowing them, requesting changes or rethinks of proposed policies, but if the other (unelected) parts of the EU want to force through a proposal they can just keep pushing it until it gets through in the knowledge that elected MEP’s will not have the power to propose future updates, changes, or abolition of legislation.

The European Commission only has to win once and it can never be repealed without the European Commission wishing it so.

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Today's eternal truth - free markets reduce inequality

This can't be said too often - but too many folk from left, right and centre seem incapable of grasping the cause of inequality:

But extreme inequality is in fact caused by insufficient competition. Given that competition is the lifeblood of capitalism, it follows that inequality is the result, not of capitalism, but of a lack of capitalism.

This is why we need free markets (and why equal societies like Denmark and Sweden have them) - not so evil business people can make bigger profits but because they lead to fairer societies. Big business - you only have to look at the CBI's enthusiasm for mercantilist, protectionist policies - loves the sort of back-slapping, lobby-dominated, regulation-heavy arrangements that the US federal government and the EU are so keen on.

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Why the EU isn't working for ordinary people (Italian version)...

Tim Parks writes about Italy and the problems with its tanking economy and grumpy electorate - and, in doing so, he bashes the EU nail firmly on the head:

There are two logical ways out of this impasse and the irresponsibility and frustration it breeds. One is a move to a genuine political and fiscal union of Europe; the other is a return to increased national autonomy outside the Euro. Present animosities make the first solution unthinkable. There is no appetite for it. Yet the economic power of the markets to punish any move to leave the Euro makes the second solution suicidal; as Greece has shown.

What we can expect, then, is more and more empty rhetoric and clownish behaviour at a national level; more and more people voting in a spirit of defiance, while tacitly accepting that their vote means nothing. It is a system in which you vote for someone because of what they say they would like to do, not what they can actually do. In short, if you don’t rule your country you can’t expect a viable ruling class.

I keep banging on about how the reason for leaving the EU is to allow us - in most areas of life - to govern ourselves, to give us the chance to do the opposite to how Tim Parks describes Italy and elect people because of what they are going to do not for their chasing of rhetorical unicorns.

Earlier today I took part in a brexit debate at Bradford College - my opening remarks were:

I voted to leave because the EU is distant, unaccountable and fundamentally undemocratic. For all the trappings of democracy – flags, anthems, parliaments, five presidents and periodic elections – there’s no way for us – “we the people” as it were – to change who rules us. For me, if we were simply a member of a trade pact, the sort of thing we joined in 1973 (before I could vote), then I’d be arguing to remain a member. But we’re not a member of “just a trade pact” – the EU wants to have a say in how much tax we pay, in consumer choice, in what is taught in schools, and in the organisation of transport, health and welfare. This is not simply a trade pact.

There are down sides to leaving probably including a short-term economic hit but the big gain is that we can begin the long job of restoring trust in government, in saying to those millions who, for probably the first time in their lives, cast a meaningful vote that we hear them and will give them back the some of the control over government that elites in Westminster and Brussels took away.

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Big government is a substitute for trust not the means to achieve it.

People don't trust government. That government is pretty bad at nearly everything it does. Politicians and officials are at best venal and at worst corrupt. Yet government goes on getting bigger. Go figure?

Nick Gillespie reports on how there has been an almost complete collapse in people's trust of the US government:

In 1964, according to Pew Research Center, 77 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that they "can trust the government in Washington always or most of the time." By 2015, that figure stood at just 19 percent.

Gillespie sets out how scandal played its part:

But the most powerful reasons for collapsing trust in government are surely the actions of government. Consider even a smattering of revelations and developments going back to the late '60s. The U.S. failure in Vietnam was bad enough on its own, but the Pentagon Papers, a secret report commissioned by the Defense Department that concluded our involvement was doomed from the start, revealed a government that was incompetent at best and duplicitous at worst. The Watergate scandal and revelations of widespread corruption in the Nixon White House led to the unprecedented resignation of a president who had won re-election by the largest Electoral College margin up to that point in history. (What suckers we were, giving a crook 61 percent of the vote!) High-profile government commissions issued reports showing that intelligence agencies and the military had engaged in illegal surveillance of American citizens and tested would-be mind-control drugs on unsuspecting soldiers and civilians.

Political corruption sits alongside government institutions having an almost complete disdain for the public to the point where they considers it entirely justified to simply lie to the public. Gillespie skims through the most egregious US examples and wonders why, despite government's abject failure it has continued to grow ever larger and to stick its grubby fingers into ever more aspects of folks' lives. And, with almost sublime irony, the loss of trust is the reason why people turn to government for protection even though they know it is "...at best incompetent and at worst corrupt".

Things are a little better here in the UK but, like the USA, we have lost trust in the fundamental institutions of society. We mistrust parliament, consider government essentially incompetent and are cynical about central social institutions like marriage, church and business. Yet no politician is asking how we might restore trust and confidence - in each other and in society as a whole. This is a moral mission rather than something resolvable through a policy platform and, as such, it sits uneasily with the now dominant utilitarian approach - moral leadership isn't about "evidence-based policy" but about helping people to recognise why trust is so important.

All our current approach to government and politics does is to provide new sets of rules - often in the form of bans and taxes - intended to manipulate public behaviour and to prevent the negative affects of mistrust from being realised. So the lack of trust becomes embedded - government doesn't trust people (and is entirely comfortable with not telling the whole truth) and creates an environment where mistrust is seen as normal. Yet lack of trust makes doing business harder, acts as a drag on economic growth, and rewards those who would hobble choice and opportunity while casting out those who would liberate people from such tyranny.

Gillespie concludes that we need "...policies that increase local control and individual autonomy..." - what we in the UK would call devolution and I think this to be the right place to start. Our obsession with sameness, with avoiding the postcode lottery, has pretty much destroyed the autonomy of local communities and the most approachable and accountable politicians - local councillors - have been reduced to powerless caseworkers through centralisation, local government reform and intervention-based inspection systems.

There's a tendency to see libertarian ideas as a sort of crash capitalism but perhaps we should look to voluntarism as a way through the sickening darkness of a trust-free society:

That means more work is needed putting together serious, detailed policy plans that give more autonomy to individuals and communities; highlighting examples of markets and voluntary organizations succeeding in building trust, self-regulation, and common purpose; and appealing to a broad, positive vision of a strictly limited government whose goals revolve around ensuring basic fairness, equality of opportunity, continued economic growth, and rising living standards.

Everywhere we look we find examples of voluntary action - whether for profit or for reasons of charity or community spirit - that provide this common purpose. Those ideas of mutuality, commonweal and co-operation that created so much good in the 19th century need refinding and reimagining. Whether it's free schools or new mutual financial institutions, these sorts of bodies provide approachable, accountable services to a defined community or a specific neighbourhood. And, at the heart of such organisations' mission is always the idea that most of the time you really can trust your neighbour.

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Quote of the day - on the loss of trust in government

We are seeing this play out in places other than the USA - here in Britain, in France, Spain and Germany - levels of trust in government have falled significantly. And the driver may simply be bad government and the manner in which the media reports government:

Starting with the Vietnam War and Watergate, a series of governmental actions served to diminish public trust. Bad behavior by elected officials—including the Clinton impeachment, after the President was accused of lying under oath; the Iraq War, which turned out to have been launched under false assumptions; a failure to defend against foreign interference in elections; and the gridlock that seems to have dominated U.S. political processes in recent years—provided ample grounds for Americans to doubt the effectiveness of their government. And news media that emphasize conflict, scandal and dysfunction could well be contributing to the loss of trust.

You could each write your own list of government's failings and they can apply from the supranational (the capture of the WTO by activists and pharma-funded lobbyists, the corruption of EU decisions around everything from olive oil subsidies to vaping, and the use of UN rapporteurs as political tools) right dow the the local city council (dodgy planning decisions, direction of money to pet schemes, the protection of union interests over services).

Quite how you resolve this is unclear - the Knight Foundation from where that quote comes have, with the Aspen Institute has a valient stab at what might be done through improving journalism, better citizenship education, more open and robust protections online and some work to reduce 'filter bubbles'. But what's missing is what, for me, is the central challenge. Our politicians really aren't good enough, have sub-contracted leadership and administration to the unelected preferring instead the soundbite, the virtue-signally but pointless political initiative and an endless round of carefully staged media events.

The Brexit shambles - lack of planning, endless posturing, personal vendettas, tactical policy positioning purely for party or factional advantage - sums up, for me, this problem. Quite how we get better politicians I'm not sure but boy do we need them.

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Government wants to control you, business just wants to flog you stuff. I know which I prefer.

 Rich people running large companies don't want you to be poor. Really they don't. Those people want you to be rich because when you're rich you're going to buy more stuff. And when you buy more stuff, these folk can buy yachts, footballs clubs and space programmes helping make the world still more spiffy than it was before we started.

Some of those rich people run technology companies - the dark evil of Facebook, Google and so forth. We're told (mostly by politicians or by people who know there's more book sales in imaginary demons than in truth) that these big technology companies are bad because of algorithms, machine learning, profiling, psychographics and other scary things we don't really understand. The message of these politicians (and the people with books to sell) is that without some controls these tech companies will become the 21st century's robber barons impoverishing us so they can have more power and money. For the answer I refer you to the first paragraph above - rich businessmen and big businesses are really not interested in you being poor.

So, if the motives of businesses are clear ("we want to make money") how is it that we now have an escalating moral panic about tech? This sort of thing from one futurist person on Twitter - "...and if we don't start now, we will be nothing but pawns of large tech companies."

The thing for me with all of this is that the alternative to us being pawns of large tech companies (who essentially want to flog us goods and services) is to be what exactly? It does seem that those riding the moral panic of techno-fear - a sort of 21st century luddism - are proposing that the power is shifted from those terrible people selling us stuff and folded into the caring, sharing arms of government.

This is the government that wants to tax, ban and regulate you into changing your lifestyle to their official prescription (for your health, to protect, for the children). This is the government that demands identification from you for the most mundane of ordinary activities, from voting or opening a bank account to buying some glue to fix the shelf in the den, This is the government that, without democratic authority, is testing face recognition systems and enhanced surveillance. The government that installs cameras to track your every move and introduces Public Space Orders to give them power to arrest and punish you for things that aren't a crime. And this is the government that's introduced new blasphemy laws - supposedly to combat hate crime - allowing them to police our words and punish us for 'wrongthink'.

You should be a lot more scared of government and its agents than of businesses that just want to sell you stuff. Government exists only for the purpose of power and control - some of that is necessary but most of it suits the tidy organised minds of the bureaucrats (who, of course, know so much better what's good for you that you do). And all wrapped up in the hollow reassurance of "if you've done nothing wrong then you've nothing to fear".

As with all actions of government - and so much of it is beyond the scope of democratic accountability as to be essentially beyond control - you have to imagine these tools of  surveillance and restriction in the hands of a more authoritarian government. And we have a little glimpse of it with places like Singapore (how it makes me mad to see supposedly freedom-loving Tories telling us that South East Asia's pseudo-democratic and authoritarian city state is marvellous) and, of course, the ex-communist autocracy of China which is introducing a Social Credit system straight out of Brian Aldiss's "Primal Urge".

You've a choice folks - live in a free consumer society or else run from the imaginary demons conjured up by the great and good to scare you back under their control. For me this is a simple decision - if the price of freedom is me getting ads with my online searches directing me to things I might like to buy then it's a really cheap deal. And the motive of government, in so far as it is clear at all, has always been to control and direct what you do, the very antithesis of freedom.

“Institutions become political weapons, wielded forcefully by those who control them against those who do not. This is how elected autocrats subvert democracy—packing and “weaponizing” the courts and other neutral agencies, buying off the media and the private sector (or bullying them into silence), and rewriting the rules of politics to tilt the playing field against opponents. The tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy—gradually, subtly, and even legally—to kill it.”

Choose freedom.



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Trust the people doesn't mean the people are right, it means that people can be trusted

Lack of trust is a major barrier to making civic life more meaningful and inclusive. Although the majority of Interested Bystanders described civic engagement as being actively involved and present in one’s community, there was a large distrust of and lack of attachment to local community and government, which deters engagement.

This is one of the headline findings from research done by the Knight Foundation in Charlotte, North Carolina and it reinforces the challenges in marginal and deprived communities where levels of trust in community institutions and public sector agencies is much lower. The term 'Interested Bystanders' refers to residents who are interested in what's happening in their community by not engaged - "people who are paying attention to the issues around them, but not acting on those issues".

We're very familiar with this sort of disengagement because we see it in every community. Partly it persists because it's easier to let other people get on with the activism and, anyway, nobody ever asks these folk for help, so why should they bother? Some of it relates to issues with race, policing and the manner in which segregation is problematised. But perhaps the biggest reason - something the Knight Foundation focus on - is a lack of trust especially in local and national government or its agencies as well as also a more widespread distrust in community and neighbours.

There are a lot of things that fuel this mistrust ranging from the media narrative about crime especially fraud, through public heath or police campaigns targeting young people as a social problem, to the widespread convenience for all agencies, public and private, of demanding identification before service is received. In a world where the TV, radio and newspapers report each day on how ordinary people are ripped off, how violence happened to people 'in the wrong place at the wrong time' and how young people are running riot, it's easy to see how people become mistrustful of others (most notably where, as can be the case, the negatives on crime seem to focus strongly on minority groups - black people, refugees, travellers, Roma and so forth).

This media narrative does not reflect the real situation where, for most people most of the time, the streets of an urban community are perfectly safe and entirely welcoming. Nor does that narrative ever show how nearly all - over 99.9% of consumer transactions are done safely and honestly. Or that most of those transactions had no need for any person to formally identify him- or herself before receiving goods or services.

If we want to restore trust - and as a conservative I consider this imperative if we are to restore community and the social capital that makes it work - it must start with public authorities and the government. Yet - as witnessed by Public Space Protection Orders, ASBOs and the ever-extending list of things that require some sort of ID - government really doesn't trust its citizens, all these things assume that in entirely innocent circumstances people (especially poor people, young people or black people) are up to no good.

Trust the people is a popular slogan (I know this because only the other day Matthew Parris was saying what a bad idea it is) but I've a feeling that we're not really thinking through what it might mean - choosing something akin to Rousseau's "general will" rather than appreciating that nearly everybody, nearly all the time can be trusted to get on with things undirected by government, unlimited by bans and restrictions and entirely honestly. Our problem is that government - and the courtiers of media, law and bureaucracy who clatter and bluster round the state's castle - really doesn't believe people can be trusted, especially the poor, the less skilled, the minority and the provincial. The result of this mistrust is what the Knight Foundation uncovered in Charlotte - lots of interested but disengaged people and a bunch of dysfunctional communities.

Trust the people doesn't mean the people are right, it means that people can be trusted. We should maybe try a bit of it.

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Are the motives for taxation to blame for poverty?

Government needs revenue to do the things that governments do. And, without getting into the slightly loopy world of magic money tree beliefs, the only source for that money is the taxpayer. This, not the stuff about austerity or ridiculous arguments about 'punishing the poor', is why lower taxes are desirable. Only a relative few anarchistic folk actually believe that there shouldn't be any tax (or government for that matter) and this means we have to put up with politicians making decisions about who to tax and how much to tax them.

It's also true that in the UK's modern liberal democracy part of that taxation is intended to relieve poverty. And this is right and proper - the criticism of the very bad report by some law professor from New York wasn't that there's no poverty but rather that the chap seemed to think poverty was deliberately created by an evil government (I paraphrase his risible 20-odd page report). The report also ignored the self-evident fact that the reasons for poverty are not entirely external economic, fiscal or environmental forces acting on individuals. Simply using taxation for redistribution does not resolve the problem - P J O'Rourke, in 'All the Trouble in the World' pointed out that, when you add up the poverty (the gap between what people have and what we think they should have) and subtract from it the money spent by government on relieving that poverty, there is no poverty in the USA.

The same goes for the UK - we spend over £100 billion every year on projects and programmes intended to alleviate poverty and for some reason this has failed to get rid of that poverty. It could be that £100 billion isn't enough (I doubt this) but it is more likely that, as with a great deal of what government does, that money is badly spent - we give money to people who don't need it (wealthy pensioners, for example) and take money away from those who probably do (homeless young men maybe). We behave like the operators of Victorian workhouses towards some groups (those unemployed young men again) punishing them for minor mistakes, disorganisation and oversight whilst we lavish money without question on others (middle class mums perhaps).

It seems to me that the problem here isn't simply that government is bad at spending money efficiently (it probably is) but more that the motive of the people levying the taxes and managing the handouts is about punishing wrong behaviour or choices not the effective collection of the cash needed to provide the services and support people require. It's like this:

The avowed point of the taxes, according to Macron, is not just to subsidize environmental programs, but to force people to "change habits" by making fossil fuels more expensive.

Now you might be nodding and saying "absolutely, climate change y'know" but the reality is that this is the same mindset as that which asks the benefit system to withdraw cash from some 30 year old recovering drug addict who forgets an appointment. It's a short journey from nudge to freezing in a tatty sleeping bag in a Manchester shop doorway. Government really does believe that its purpose is to shape us into better people - thinner, less drunk, without nicotine-stained fingers, quietly employed. In the civil servant's (and too many politician's) mind we should be Mr Potter's 'thrifty working class' living in homes kindly rented from grand organisations, municipalities and supposed charities. Look at the great and good of local government as they get all excited at the prospect of building more council houses to cram the poor into - a new generation dependent on the state for the roof over their head. It may be better than Potterville's slums but it's not inclusive, optimistic or aspirational.

It makes me angry that conservatives don't say this, choosing instead to treat most of the poor as Mr Doolittle - the undeserving poor to be controlled or managed rather than people who, given better incentives, will stop being 'undeserving' and become the sort of aspirational citizens government keeps telling us they want ! The motives for taxation - changing bad habits as often as raising revenue - are the problem and government needs to focus its efforts on actual social outcomes rather than on vain attempts to create the perfect man through fiat, order and direction.

Poverty is a scourge but, given the money we (supposedly) put towards its relief, it should not persist. That it continues isn't a failure of capitalism or the market, it is entirely the failure of government - bad policy, misplaced priority and the inevitable buying of votes by promising free stuff to people - wealthy pensioners, middle class mums, public school kids heading to university - who really don't need it. The sad truth is there's no votes in eliminating poverty, no incentive to get rid (what would the growing poverty industry of think tanks, 'campaigning' charities and consultants do?) of its curse, and every incentive to carry on blaming the poor for being poor rather than government for putting its efforts into looking like it cares rather than seeing less poverty as a measurable, achievable outcome from over £100 billion in public spending.

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It's government's use of data we should fear not the private sector's algorithms

There's data everywhere. Piles and piles of lovely data. Wherever you look there's more of the stuff - from what we've clicked, from where we've visited, from words we've used and, just occasionally, from what we've bought. And because vast dunes of this data have accumulated, clever computer folks have started to mine the data. With the result that bloggers, journalists and politicians begin to get fretful abut these algorithms.

Just a day or so ago Angela Phillips, a journalism professor from Goldsmiths was calling for "a new search engine based on public service ideas of what an algorithm should be" reminding us that people with tenured positions at respected universities really don't know what they're talking about. Professor Phillips said the idea would be mocked but that Labour should put it in their manifesto anyway. Which brings me to fennel:

The most significant item, the chief data officer told me—the one that gives you away as a responsible, house-proud person more than any other—was fresh fennel.

You see (or so this chief data officer from an unnamed insurance company would have it), buying fennel is a sure indicator you're a 'home cook' and home cooks are less likely to make insurance claims. Using this vital knowledge, we are now being cunningly manipulated by crafty chief data folk with their algorithms (wicked ones based on private sector ideas of course).

I'm reminded of one of my database marketing golden rules - do you know why those people want that information from you? If they're a business, the answer is easy - they want to flog you something (or flog the data to someone else who wants to flog you something). It's all very straightforward, honest and open - businesses use data to improve their business which is pretty much the least sinister thing you can do with data.

It's much harder to answer the question when it's the government (or one of its agencies) wanting the data. Sometimes there's a good answer - it's needed to deliver a service, for example - but mostly the reasons for the government wanting enormous warehouses of data about us is at best opaque and often quite sinister. Most commonly the rationale is about 'protection' (hence the reluctance of police services to dispose of DNA data from people when they conclude enquiries) but you'll also see arguments about 'developing better policy', 'planning' or even 'equalities'.

The arguments for building huge comprehensive data sets, however, are dominated by a belief that government is only possible these days with this sort of information about people. And the purpose isn't to make folks' lives better by selling them good things but rather to make it easier for government to control what you do (they call this regulation most of the time but sometimes it gets mixed up with taxation or a new-fangled control system call "nudge").

The end result (and remember that the British are the most surveilled, spied on and watched people in any democracy) looks like this:

But in 2020, when the citizen scoring system becomes mandatory, people with low scores stand to feel the repercussions in every aspect of their lives. The government’s own document on the system outlines examples of punishments that could be meted out to anyone deemed disobedient: “Restrictions on leaving the borders, restrictions on the purchase of… property, travelling on aircraft, on tourism and holidays or staying in star-ranked hotels.” It also warns that in the case of “gravely trust-breaking subjects,” it will “guide commercial banks… to limit their provision of loans, sales insurance, and other such services.” Loyalty is praised. Breaking trust is punished.

Your behaviour is scored, your activities are ranked against some sort of "socially acceptable" board and citizens are rewarded or punished on the basis of their conformity. This is, in case you missed the point, precisely what an algorithm based on "public service ideas" delivers because the purposes of government are (in origin with good reason) to control what we do, to protect us and to support us. Even when we think we don't need controlling, protecting or supporting. And it doesn't matter that the data is often fennel-like in its rubbishness.

It is because government's motives are unclear (and sometimes sinister) that we should resist their growing accumulation and exploitation of data, It for these reasons that the convenience of ID numbers and cards must be opposed. And it's for these reasons that the whipping up of sinister conspiracies by agents of government (just look at the nonsense about Cambridge Analytica, for example and the manner in which a (relatively) few Russian 'bots' caused such moral panic) should not be used to justify regulating the Internet.

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