Accountability (public sector newspeak version) is complexity.

Scrutiny

“Surveyor, in your thoughts you may be reproaching Sordini for not having been prompted by my claim to make inquiries about the matter in other departments. But that would have been wrong, and I want this man cleared of all blame in your thoughts. One of the operating principles of authorities is that the possibility of error is simply not taken into account. This principle is justified by the excellence of the entire organization and is also necessary if matters are to be discharged with the utmost rapidity. So Sordini couldn’t inquire in other departments, besides those departments wouldn’t have answered, since they would have noticed right away that he was investigating the possibility of an error.” Franz Kafka, The Castle

Accountability in public services matters and probably matter more than accountability in traded private services. As consumers we do not get much choice in who provides our refuse collection service, our health care, our social services and much else besides - short of migration, that is.

I don't know about you but I've a suspicion that accountability is talked about more and made more complicated than it needs to be, and because of this the extent to which public services - and servants - are accountable is compromised. You only need look at the contortions engaged in by NHS grandees in avoiding personal accountability for services under their direction, to know there's a problem. And just so you know, the same goes for local councils, for the MoD and for services such as prisons and courts.

Part of this lies in the perversion of accountability as a concept. Here's a paragraph from an interview with academic, Toby Lowe, who specialises in public sector management. I present it in two halves so you can appreciate the point I'm making:

True accountability is not about counting but asking people to give an account of their actions as part of a dialogue in which they explain the decisions they have taken in the specific context they are working in.

This is a pretty good description of accountability and something that happens too infrequently and, when it does, very badly. You only need sit in a typical local council scrutiny committee or watch MPs parade their prejudgements at a select committee to appreciate the problem with our process of holding public servants to account for "...the decisions they have taken in the specific context they are working in."

Lowe chooses, however, to complicate the simplicity of "what did you do, give us the basis for that decision, how did you plan to assess whether your decision was right, what was the review process" - straightforward scrutiny - by producing an elaborate and extended further qualification of accountability:

It’s also not just about the traditional hierarchical relationship. There are multiple accountable relationships. Your peers could ask you to account for your decisions, as could a member of the public who is receiving the service – or an ombudsman or professional body. The main thing is that real accountability involves a conversation.

For sure we're broadly accountable in all these ways (to a greater or lesser extent) but the essence of public sector accountability is that services are accountable, through their representatives, to the public. It's not that, in an purely administrative context, there aren't other relationships involving accountability but that if you don't understand how accountability in the relationship with a colleague is less important than accountability to the public you serve then you've missed - and I suspect Toby Lowe has - the whole point of public accountability.

The problem here is that accountability becomes just a management tool - Lowe talks about 'learning' and 'autonomy' but at no point recognises the central requirement that the service is, first and foremost, accountable to the public. The process becomes personal or management development rather than accountability:

The learning element in particular requires a radical rethink. How within an organisation do you create safe spaces for learning and reflection, where people can talk openly about errors and uncertainty with their peers?

Probably a good thing but we need a further step - if we are to base service delivery on greater autonomy (again probably a good thing) then those delivering the service have to "give account of their decisions" in a place and a manner that allows those to whom they are accountable to make a judgement as to the effectiveness, the ethics and the efficiency of those decisions. Simply saying "it's complicated" strikes me as a cop out and merely provides a screen behind which those who should be accountable are able to hide.

We have a variety of problems with public accountability, from the distance between the theoretical decision-makers and the actual service through to the use of appointed boards to oversee provision without providing adequate space for any real scrutiny of the service's ethics, behaviour, decisions, and effectiveness. This is made worse by the conflation between 'accountability' within the decision-making process (to colleagues, managers and so forth) and real accountability to the public. This not only provides cover for politicians but also allows senior management to bury their responsibility and accountability in a confusing and complicated set of management processes.

Accountability is not complicated. In the private sector, if I don't like the service I get from one supermarket, I can complain and get satisfaction or exercise consumer sovereignty - make the supermarket accountable - by taking my shopping elsewhere. We don't get this option with public services and this is doubly true for vulnerable groups like the ill, the disabled and the homeless. And right now the effectiveness or otherwise of these services - their accountability - is either lost to the point of non-existence in Kafkaesque bureaucracy or else is under the direction of badly chaired, poorly briefed and overly partisan political scrutiny processes. Changing this, not creating "safe spaces for learning and reflection", is what we need but that would require political leaderships and senior managers to accept real accountability and the responsibilities that go with it.

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Hey politicians, write your own quotes don't just take whatever dribble the press office gives you...

A case in point:

“Whilst at this point in the bid development we have not identified specific schemes being proposed within constituencies, do be assured Coun Groves and the team are working closely with district partners and local stakeholders to ensure the content of the bid has the widest possible impact. We will also ensure we continue to keep local MPs informed as the bid develops.”

Nobody - not even the incredibly bureaucratic Cllr Susan Hinchcliffe - talks like this, yet we're supposed to believe that she actually spoke these words (they were in the press release after all, in quote marks and everything).

This comment is in response to a local MP, who happens to represent the constituency containing Cllr Hinchcliffe's ward, saying that his patch isn't getting a look in when it comes to doling out the transport money for the Leeds City Region. And it's a fudge because the politician (or rather the anonymous press officer - who used to work for the Labour Party no doubt) doesn't want to say the truth - "sorry Phil but we've looked at all the schemes, they've been assessed to death and the only ones that qualify have been put forward - I'm afraid none are in Shipley."

Instead we get a wiffly statement filled with partners, stakeholders and promises of information that doesn't, when you take it to bits, say anything at all about why some schemes are chosen and others aren't. The reader is none the wiser about how the West Yorkshire Combined Authority decides where to splash cash on boondoggles. I suspect this is deliberate- good grief we can't have regular folk understanding how we make funding decision for heaven's sake!

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Politicians are terrified - that's why they're so keen on regulating the web

Politicians are terrified. Really they are and it explain a great deal about today's politics. And also why those politicians are so keen to regulate content online:

We’ve all been watching this develop for years now: the internet is being slow-choked, not by rapacious ISPs forcing users to pay for “fast lanes,” but by politicians on both sides of the Atlantic who want to have a bigger role in what we’re allowed to do and say online.

"You're really publishers," say those politicians to platforms filled with user generated content. This is, until heavy hints changed things, a complete fiction. A publisher controls - from start to finish - the content of the publication, nothing arrives in front of the reader's eyes or the listener's ears without having been subject to editorial control. So when I post a Tweet, I'm the publisher not Twitter.

And this is why politicians are so scared. They thought they knew where they were with the media - it was limited, they knew the editors and journalists, saw them most days, took them out for dinner, even shagged them. Now it's not like that- there are literally millions of micro-publishers all with the potential power to take one of those politicians down. The game has changed, power has shifted and the politicians want it shifting back.

As some folk point out, some of the big tech oligarchs - Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook - are keen to work with politicians in a ghastly Faustian pact to allow regulatory control but not enough to really damage the tech businesses, just enough to make it really hard for new competitors to challenge the market position of Facebook and Apple. But then, especially in the USA (Europe essentially has no tech industry worth mentioning unless you like legacy corporate IT architecture), these tech moguls are political players - their money, their platforms, their influence will be a big part in who challenges Trump.

Plenty of justifications are rolled out for regulation - trolls, children, fake news, anonymity, racism, misogyny and homophobia. But these things, for all their shock factor, are convenient handholds for the politicians to latch onto in justifying regulation intended to sustain the current political structures, to protect existing politicians, and to make it harder for challenger ideas to get purchase and exercise influence.

I don't think the bureaucrats, legacy media, and establishment politicians will win this - at least in the long run, but the push for regulation will damage the economy, will restrict free speech and will make it harder to do what the web has done best, speak truth to power. You all should resist.

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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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What politicians should be doing...nothing

“Doing nothing is a full-time job. Don’t imagine that laissez-faire means putting your feet up. All officials want to extend their powers; all bureaucracies will grow if they can. To stop it happening you need to be at your desk before the civil servants come in and still be there when they go home.”

Quote is from Sir John Cowperthwaite, than man who let Hong Kong get rich by doing nothing (lifted from Samizdata).

As politicians we should learn from him not play the more common game of indulging lobbies in the manner retiring California governor Gerry Brown describes:

"I did rein in spending. I did—and then that took fortitude against the tendency of the Democratic Party to spend on almost anything that somebody comes up with that, you know, that satisfies all of the key constituencies."

Hardly a day passes without some well-meant lobby rolling out another proposal for new rules, new powers and new taxes to fund the administrators of those rules and powers. And, almost always, those new rules and new powers just feed bureaucratic growth and weaken the liberties of local communities, individuals and families.

Our job as representatives of the people isn't to know better, let alone act as agents of bureaucracy,  but to stop the powerful from extending their power over those people we represent. To do nothing as Sir John put it.

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Comedians aren't public intellectuals. Send them back to tell jokes please.

Back in my youth there were comedians. They told jokes, made sketches and skits, acted in sit-coms and made guest appearances on game shows. I'm not going to indulge in some sort of list-making but there were legions of them - some with peak time shows on TV, some making up the numbers at the end of assorted piers and a whole pile, most I guess, scraping a living on the club comedy circuit. Some of them were achingly funny, the sort of people (Eric Morecombe, Tommy Cooper) who just made you laugh almost without effort, while others less so. It was a job and a very good living for the best.

One place, however, you didn't see comedians was on Question Time. Or indeed anywhere near politics or public affairs. It's not that comedians will have lacked for political opinions - they're mostly sharp, bright people and sharp bright people have political opinions. It's more that, I dunno, we didn't reckon that the political opinions of TV comics were any more valid that, say, the opinion of the solicitor on your high street, the woman who runs the successful boutique or the man opening the batting for Pudsey St Lawrence. It seems this has changed - comedians now (not all of them but a frightening proportion) seem to view their business as essentially an extension of political debate.

In 2015, Megan Garber argued in The Atlantic that comedians were the new public intellectuals. More and more comedy came with moral messaging, she pointed out: “Comedians are fashioning themselves not just as joke-tellers, but as truth-tellers—as intellectual and moral guides through the cultural debates of the moment.” Whereas once philosophers and political theorists held a public role of guiding national debates and parsing the nuances of current affairs, comedians were increasingly taking on that responsibility.

I don't know when all this started - maybe with Ben Elton unfunnily shouting "Thatch" a lot on Saturday Live - but it really isn't a good look. Especially when, as some appear to do, actually being funny, maybe telling a joke or two gets lost in the essential objective of sticking it to the (old, white) man. Occasionally down the pub us grumpy old folk mumble into our pint about how there's sod all in the way of good comedy these days because the sort of stuff we laughed at in the 1970s has been banned by the social justice warriors in their quest for a perfectly fair, equal and (it seems) spectacularly boring society.

This bowdlerising of comedy is fine (unless, that is, you want something on telly to laugh at) but it still does not explain why anyone thinks somebody telling jokes - regardless of how right-on they are - is any sort of moral guide let alone someone we should have on TV to pontificate on current affairs, foreign policy and the government of the day. Yet this is what we do, people whose job should be to take the piss out of the government, politicians and self-righteous social justice campaigners are paid to come on telly and make serious commentary about these things. With precisely no qualification at all beyond being in the producer's address book (do they have these things now-a-days or is it all on the phone), having a smiley demeanour and several hundred thousand followers on Twitter.

TV current affairs programming has become little more than an extension of the entertainment business - folk get invited on because they're box office (lots of social media supporters, a penchant for safe controversy) not because they know anything at all about the subjects being discussed. Even the favourite politicians of these shows - Farage, Rees-Mogg, Abbott, Flint - are there because they provide that box office in a way that regular front bench politicians don't. Name recognition matters more than the ownership of a brain cell - this is why comedians get onto current affairs programmes not because what they say is helpful, thoughtful, insightful or intelligent (said comment could, of course, be any or all of these things but this is a happy coincidence not something planned for).

This confection results in news and current affair programmes designed to focus on what's trending on Twitter (or at least in the 'Blue Tick' Twitter the programme makers look at) and a preference for celebrity over analysis - just look at how two TV chefs have essentially written Britain's food policy on the back of a couple of shows and a book. Debate around important topics is boiled down to sound bites, slogans and lame jokes provided by comedians, media-friendly academics, gobby pundits and politicians whose shtick is controversy for controversy's sake.

Comedy isn't made better by its providers looking over their shoulder at the political effect of their jokes - the humour should be enough. Eddie Izzard - pretty much the trendy political comic's trendy political comic - was incredibly funny talking about rotting fruit and whether le singe est dans l'arbre. I'm not sure being snarky about politics much improved his oevre. For sure, you can't say no comedian can ever appear on a current affairs show but we have to start asking whether what we want is entertainment shows for that (pretty small) part of the public that enjoys politics as a blood sport or programming that has a degree of depth, analysis and intelligence. If we want the latter (and I'm sure the grandees of the BBC will pretend this is the case) then we need to send the comedians back to do comedy shows.

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"Tell 'em I lied". Why politicians aren't truthful.

It's usually attributed to Huey or Earl Long both, back in the day, Governor of Louisiana. Presented with the truth about a campaign pledge and after deciding to go back on this promise, the Governor says to his advisor, "tell 'em I lied". It sort of reinforces the public's opinion about what politicians will say to get elected - I'll fix that, stop this, build something, make something. Promises that, like April snow, vanish at the first ray of sunshine.

Seems there's a reason:

We know from public choice theory that lying is more rational for a politician than for individuals in other walks of life. A politician's lies are less likely to be noticed or remembered by the "rationally ignorant" voter. Rational ignorance means that the individual voter has little incentive to invest time and money in gathering and analyzing political information because he will not be able, with his single vote, to change the election result. The politician running for office also has an incentive to lie when deprecating his opponents' character. If he wins, there will be no way to know whether or not his opponents would have been as bad as he claimed. And since the politician has no property rights in his office, the discounted value of his political reputation over time is very low, giving him an incentive to trade long-term credibility for short-run victories.

This observation (from a super article by Pierre Lemieux) is compounded by two additional problems. The first is that the voter wants to be lied to, wants to believe that government can solve whatever problems that voter has in his or her life. And as politicians we are only to happy to indulge this delusion by saying "of course, do you want that in green or blue?". The second problem is that truth is, as anyone looking at 'fact check' websites will know, often a matter of degree or emphasis. There's a lot of shouting about 'post-truth' and 'fake news' but this anger is limited - it doesn't touch on things that aren't true but that the public really believes are true. Here's Tim Worstall:

Perhaps a red flashing cop light beside an article which contains any of the following lies?

The minimum wage does not cause job losses.

Corporations should pay more tax.

Global inequality is rising.

US child poverty is over 20%.

We have widespread poverty in the UK.

17% of UK families cannot afford enough food.

What? You think these things are true? You read angst-ridden articles about them in the Guardian? Us politicians lie because you think things like imports being bad and exports good, that 'dumping' steel or solar panels is bad for our economy, and that regulation supports markets.

If you want truth then the most grown up thing you can do as a voter is to assume that the government is not interested in making your life better, is not concerned about the things that you're concerned about, and has the primary function of sustaining its current size, structure and powers regardless of their actual value to society. And, that politicians lie because you want and expect them to lie.

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MPs and Syria - a defence of politicians

Events in Aleppo shock us all and, as we do when such things happen, we look around for people or organisations at which we can point a finger. "You should have done something," we cry. "Why didn't you act." "Blood is on your hands," "Something must be done."

The most common target for these cries, for this opprobrium is the politician:

Shame on you, Ed Miliband. Look at the “complete meltdown of humanity” that (according to the UN’s spokesman) is Aleppo today. Look at the footage of terror, trauma and dislocation. Then, if you dare, ask what you might have done to prevent it.

I hold no particular love for Ed Miliband and don't consider him the finest example of the political class but I believe this sort of attack illustrates a problem. It is very easy for someone who is not a politician, in this case the journalist Matthew d'Ancona, to lay into the choices that a politician makes about war. Mr d'Ancona - or for that matter, any other commenters - did not have to spent hours thinking through the consequences of a decision to put lives at risk. And in the case of Syria - as we've seen with Iraq and seen with Afghanistan - the decision makers are damned if they do and damned if they don't.

I refuse to indulge in this attack on politicians for making difficult - life and death - decisions. I am grateful that, back in August 2013, I was not one of those MPs charged with the decision to approve military action in Syria. One part of me looks at the events in Syria before that date and cries for justice, for someone to stop the atrocities visited on innocent Syrians - I recall a work colleague who spoke of how her brother-in-law's family had been exterminated for being seen as on the wrong side of a line they didn't know about.

But another part of me remembers thinking this about Iraq and Afghanistan. Innocent civilians dying beneath our bombs however carefully targeted those bombs might have been. And British servicemen killed and maimed fighting a humanitarian war in a place they'd never heard of before they'd signed up to defend their country.

I don't know how I would have voted had I been an MP that day but, as a politician of sorts, I'm not ready to condemn Ed Miliband or anyone else for making the decision they made back in 2013. Away from the actual decision-making it's very easy isn't it.

"Launch the bombers!"

"Send in the troops."

Yet in making these decisions we condemn people to die - either because we did act or because we didn't act. So when MPs sat and debated Syria - including many now focused on the terrible scenes unfolding in Aleppo - they had to weigh up what might be the consequences of action or inaction knowing that, however much pundits like Matthew d'Ancona might shout, there is no obvious and right course of action.

Instead of finding some politician to blame let's think of the majority of MPs, from whichever party, sitting with a cup or tea or a glass of beer thinking about how to vote on committing Britain to war. For some there'll be family and friends to help (or perhaps hinder) their thoughts, for others it's entirely lonely. A few of the gung ho or ideologically-driven will, uncaringly, find the decision easy but most MPs will waver and haver over whether to drop British bombs on Syrian targets.

Perhaps we should have decided to bomb Syria in August 2013. Maybe the events of the last few days are the consequence, in part, of us deciding not to drop those bombs. Whatever, with the sunlight of glorious hindsight, seems to be right or wrong, we should not blame MPs for hesitating before committing to risk the lives of British servicemen and Syrian civilians. Above all we were not sat in the House of Commons that day charged with the horrible task of choosing between death and destruction or death and destruction with British involvement. We do not live with that decision, with those dead bodies - politicians do.

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Quote of the day - on the consequence of political decisions

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From the incomparable Dick Puddlecote:

My personal favourite was a story of a politician who was offered a drink late at night and chose a single malt. His companion went to the bar but was told he couldn't be served that particular drink because it counted as a shot and the law said they were illegal after midnight in order to tackle binge-drinking. "What a stupid law that is!", raged the politician, to which his friend replied, "yes, but you voted for it".

Thus we are reminded that firstly many politicians are stupid and, secondly, that Australia has some of the most controlling, nannying and downright offensive government in what we still call the free world.

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Members of the House of Lords are politicians - however you get them there

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A chap from You Gov wants a 'politican free House of Lords':

So the answer is clear: to make the House of Lords a politician-free zone. By all means keep the bishops, the former generals, scientists like Lord (Robert) Winston. But anyone who has stood for election, or worked in politics, should be automatically disqualified. The Lords should be chosen from leaders across all other walks of society – what is referred to in Westminster as ‘real life’ – with the express mandate of keeping the political class in check.

There are two problems with this idea. Firstly, Freddie Sayers should check the definition of politics (and therefore of politicians). Politics describes those circumstances where we require - or believe we require - a collectively agreed policy but have people advocating mutually exclusive options for that policy. It is the means by which we make that decision. So anyone involved in deciding between mutually exclusive policy options is, ipso facto, a politician. So those great and good drafted in under Freddie's scheme cease being lawyers, doctors, generals and vicars becoming in short order good old politicians.

The second problem is that we assume that members of the great and good are not attached in any way to any party political or ideological position. This is plainly nonsense for all that the great and good protest about this, laying claim to a grandness raising them above such petty distractions as party political discourse. After all, for all his eccentricity, Lord Winston sits as a Labour peer - I presume this indicates his adherence to that Party's essential ideology.

Just because you have followed some other course in life and (since this is the House of Lords) not bothered with such risky and time-consuming things like actually getting elected, doesn't mean you aren't a politician. Once you become engaged in the process of determining, administering or scrutinising public policy you become a politician - no different to those strange creatures who inhabit the House of Commons.

Finally, a comment on this part of Freddie's nutty idea:

Impossible though it may be for our MPs’ political brains to compute, a politician-free appointed chamber could actually be the most democratic solution.

Excuse me but precisely which part of being appointed to a political position by virtue of some panel of grandees constitutes democracy?

If you want a creative and different House of Lords - how about a lottery?

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Academic qualifications are no substitute for political experience - the case of Dr Varoufakis

This post is not really about Yanis Varoufakis. OK so it is a bit - mostly because, as tyro politicians go, he is the owner of the most incredible sense of destiny (some might describe this as an ego larger than Greece). However, Dr Varoufakis is the owner of a splendid set of qualifications - degrees in economics and statistics culminating in an economics doctorate from the University of Essex. - and an established and successful academic career. Various folk have drawn a flattering comparison between Dr Varoufakis and what we might term his 'opponents' (and Dr V did spend a year or two as a consultant to a gaming company).

The question we need to ask here is whether Dr Varoufakis' undoubted academic success is in any way an indicator that he would make a successful politician or government minister? And, indeed, to ask the much wider question as to what sort of qualification, background or experience makes for a good political leader. All this is in the context of Dr Varoufakis showing himself to be a very poor political leader indeed.

My qualification in all this is that I've spent most of a lifetime - best part of 40 years - in and around the business of politics. And I am convinced that the core skills of a successful political leader cannot be captured through looking at either previous (or parallel) careers or in higher academic qualifications. Nor is owning a brain comparable to Marvin's a sufficient qualification especially since higher academic qualifications reflect a very narrow interest - a doctorate in economics reflects research in a specific and tightly-drawn field not a generalist expertise in economics itself.

Academic excellence - at the level we are talking about with Dr Varoufakis - isn't an indicator that, placed in the world of political decision-making, an individual will succeed. This is because, in the grubby world of practical politics, there isn't a right answer, nor even an answer that can be successfully modelled. The problem with academics (especially in social science subjects like economics) is that they really do believe the answer can be worked out. The truth is (as us old hands know) that the decision will be made in the end on the basis of a mix between expert briefing, electoral or political calculation and gut feel.

Dr Varoufakis went from being an academic who briefly advised a government to being a minister. This would have been OK if Greece had been in a normal situation - plenty of time to learn the ropes, to discover how the political game works - but sadly for that country, it wasn't. Indeed Greece faced a huge challenge and crisis, partly of its own making and partly a consequence of decisions made elsewhere in Europe. From the outside it seems that Dr Varoufakis strode into the meetings wrapped in his own confidence and the electoral mandate from Greece. The problem was that, as Dr V discovered quickly, his 'opponents' were not impressed with his academic achievements - to them he was a baby politician to be toyed with, confronted and taught a lesson. And the mandate of Greek voters matters to Greek politicians not their counterparts in Germany, Holland or Belgium - such politicians care about the German, Dutch and Flemish voters not voters in Athens.

It could be that the analysis from Dr Varoufakis and his colleagues was spot on. But the tactics adopted were almost guaranteed to ensure Dr V and co lost the argument. Fancy media coverage, confrontational speeches and ultimata all have their place in politics but when faced with a stony-faced and negative response to such grandstanding the proper response isn't to indulge in more of it but to start on the boring task of seeking compromise and consensus. To succeed at this you need those political skills that Dr Varoufakis so clearly lacks. The Greek government - newly elected and excited - placed huge responsibility for the national future in the hands of a man with less political experience than the average parish councillor. And his opponents ate him alive - costing Greece the chance of a decent deal and a chance to get out from under its crisis.

Just as many of my colleagues on the right of politics seem obsessed with getting business leaders into politics (despite the appalling track record for such people), many on the left are captivated by academics like Dr Varoufakis. Yet the evidence for academics succeeding as politicians is just as lacking as that for businessmen. Politics is a business filled with particular skills and behaviours that aren't learnt in grad school - this isn't to say that politicians aren't brainy but that their success can't be predicted on the basis of how many higher degrees they've got or what class they achieved in their first degree. Compare the qualifications of Matteo Renzi with those of Dr Varoufakis and you begin to understand that political achievement rests on something other than those exam results.

Because you don't need anything other than a sufficiency of votes to become a politician, we seldom consider that politics is a business requiring a distinct set of skills and attributes. I spend a lot of time reminding colleagues that we are politicians and should act politically - not just because of the currency of votes but because political decision-making is very different from decision-making in business. And the same applies to negotiation, leadership and marketing - some of the skills transfer but the core business of politics is conducted in front of audiences that react differently to business audiences and which are contrary rather than co-operative.

Debate between academics can be very vigorous but, in the end, it is about the content of academic research. The same goes for business negotiation. But for politicians there is no audience that wants debate for the sake of debate and many audiences who want to pull the politician down rather than support them (we see these in both political opponents and in the media - even supposedly friendly media). The academic robustness of your case and the quality of your presentation mean nothing to the 'opponent' who wants you to fail. To succeed such opposition has to be neutralised.

The Syriza government in Greece might have been better served appointing a horny-handed old trade unionist as finance minister - a person who could get drunk with the Germans, eat with the French and hug the Belgians: an operator. And then used Dr Varoufakis' undoubted talents as a thinker about the economy to provide the bullets for that operator to fire. Instead Dr V managed to irritate bureaucrats and upset politicians making it all the more difficult for Greece to make its case for further support on Syriza's terms rather than on Angela Merkel's. I've no doubt that the main reason wasn't Dr Varoufakis' ego, lack of tie or motor bike but his almost complete lack of political experience.

Many may not like politicians and politics but when the crunch comes, we really need experienced politicians (you can call them statesmen if you want to watch them preen) to deal with the dirty business of politics. And just being clever - in book larnin' terms - is not a sufficient qualification to do that business. Dr Varoufakis is a case study of the consequences that stem from this mistake.

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Why pubs (and publicans) matter

Many years ago I trained as an agent in the Old Bexley & Sidcup (member one Edward Heath) constituency. The full time agent, Tom Jolly, used to organise what he called 'opinion former' events - inviting certain groups to meet Heath, listen to him and have the opportunity to raise questions. There were three groups Tom focused on - doctors, vicars and publicans. This isn't a random or arbitrary selection but one driven by the belief that these three sets all speak to a lot of people and that their opinion is given more credence than that of others. The aim wasn't to have the doctors, vicars and publicans act as mouthpieces for policy but rather for them to say "Heath's OK, when I met him last week...".

Now it's true that there are a lot of pubs (although far fewer than there were before politicians started mucking around with the industry through beer orders, smoking bans and a mountainous duty on beer) and MPs can't spend all their time popping in for a pint but the figures above tell us that, for all the rhetoric about 'community pubs' some MPs aren't giving enough attention to these important businesses. Some are even falling out with them!

My ward - Bingley Rural - has 13 pubs (plus four Conservative clubs and a working man's club) and there are only three or four where I'm seen other than infrequently. But making the effort to visit is important - even if you don't have a drink. I know that Philip Davies, my teetotal MP, has visited pubs both privately to discuss their concerns and publicly to talk to regulars. Seeing pubs as a problem (all too common among some politicians not to mention the new puritans of the public health industry) is the wrong approach.

The pub industry provides lots of jobs - from highly skilled crafts through to casual bar and restaurant work - and in many places is at the forefront of improvement and regeneration. The 'craft beer revolution' has seen an explosion in both variety and quality resulting in a new generation of pubs and a different - more savour less volume - approach to drinking. Yet some MPs still rail against the 'concentration' of pubs, about 'drink fuelled' violence and on the 'chaos' in A&E departments because of the industry. They ignore the fact that 99% of drinkers go out, have a great night and go home without causing anybody any bother. And it is these people who the anti-pub brigade are attacking not the tiny minority who get into or cause trouble.

None of this is to say that pubs are never a problem but politicians - if that statistic is correct - need to change their attitude. Not by mouthing platitudes about "community pubs" but by talking to the industry about how lawmakers can help make it better, safer and more exciting that it is already.

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Trust me, I'm a (local) politician!

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I haven't seen the details of the polling but there will be a load of grinning councillors reading this:

The poll, carried out on behalf of the Local Government Association (LGA), showed that when it comes to making decisions about local services and the local area only 9% of people trusted MPs and a meagre 6% of people trusted government ministers. However, 77% of people trusted their local Councillor to fight for the local area. This figure has risen from 71% in October, while the number of people who would not trust MPs or government ministers dropped from 16% to 8%.

And all this rather gives the lie to those who see the solution being fewer community politicians - local councillors, parish councillors and the like - and more professional, manager-like regional, national and supra-national politicians.

The reverse is what we need.

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On corresponding with politicians...

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The other week the people who make sure Bradford Council complies with data protection rules and regulations popped along to talk to the Conservative Group. Not specially as they'd planned visits to other groups too with the aim of explaining what we could and couldn't do, what permissions we needed and how we should keep stuff (electronically and otherwise).

The discussion raised a few splutterings - we were told that, without the person's permission, we couldn't share a constituents letter with our ward colleagues or, technically, with an officer, which until you think about it seems a little daft. But, as anyone dealing with the public's interaction with politicians knows, people do not always behave rationally or indeed contact us with wholly benign purpose.

And, as I'm sure all the journalists and such like know, data protection trumps freedom of information - the letter that Mrs Smith wrote to me isn't governed by those rules, it's governed by data protection rules. And unless she has given me permission to share your FOI request will fall on stony ground.

Indeed why should you believe you have some sort of right to see a private exchange of correspondence between me, as a politicians, and a person who chooses to write to me? It really is - in the true meaning of the phrase - none of your business. It seems reasonable for me to say, if asked, that I have corresponded with Mrs Smith but the content of the letters is a matter between me and Mrs Smith not between me, Mrs Smith and the whole of humanity.

And this is as it should be. Those who believe that every last exchange that every single public official has with anyone and everyone should be made public are not only wrong in law but damage the proper delivery of public service, whether it's the MP or councillor responding to the concerns of a resident about her noisy neighbour, a minister fielding letters from people who think they're more important than they are, or indeed a public official dealing with a complaint about his department.

There's a debate to be had about transparency but it isn't about private correspondence but about the manner in which policy decisions are made and the information on which those decisions are taken. At no point does private correspondence between the politician or official and someone outside government come within the scope of that transparency.

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On by-elections...

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His Grace asks us to:

Consider the turnout - 28%.

So taking his exhortation I shall do just this - try to understand why nearly three out of four electors in  Wythenshawe and Sale East didn't bother to vote in yesterday's by-election.

His Grace suggests that this abstention gives greater credence to the Russell Brand argument against voting (which, I understand, is that voting only encourages them and let's have a revolution instead, so much more fun). And that the lack of public interest in voting yesterday - despite having had a waste bin full of leaflets rammed through the letterbox - reflects public disillusionment with democracy.

For my part I take a different lesson from His Grace's text, the low turnout simply reflects the wisdom of the population. After all yesterday's by-election was in a safe Labour seat, its result would change nothing for the electors and certainly not the nature or direction of government. So, given that Manchester yesterday wasn't a place to venture out into without good reason, people went about their normal day and, in the evening, chose to stop in and watch telly rather than stagger down to the church hall for voting.

Indeed, had there not been over 10,000 postal votes (much to the chagrin of Mr Farage), the turnout would have been even lower!

The point we all ignore is that people had the option. I'm pretty sure that most of the 72% not voting knew full well there was a by-election. And they chose not to go and vote. It simply wasn't something that was important to them.

This is wonderful. Really wonderful - people are comfortable enough in their lives that they do not feel the need to play their tiny little part in democracy. And when we go and ask them why they didn't bother they'll give those familiar answers - politicians are all the same, voting doesn't change anything, Labour always win here so no point in voting. Or perhaps just the simple statement - I never vote.

Some people are bothered that the act of voting doesn't really change anything (I would argue that this isn't really true but that doesn't matter for this discussion) and fret about raising turnout - hence the easy to corrupt postal voting system. They are wrong, the fault doesn't lie with electors but with us politicians. We have lost control of things we used to control. We too often raise our hands and shrug, "nothing I can do really" when faced with a real problem for real people.

So people are wise. They know that replacing one politician with another at a by-election isn't really a big deal. And they stay home in the warm doing something that isn't politics.

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The motives of politicians

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It is common for us to question the motivation of those who hold a different view. We are too seldom prepared to accept honest or honourable reasons - whether ideological or practical - for that person to wish to do something we would not do.

And the more passionate our commitment to the cause, the more we are unable to accept that someone simply doesn't agree with us or that this disagreement is principled not cynical or driven by some sort of base motive.

So it is with public service reform. I have read some of the thousands of comments, tweets, facebook posts and carefully crafted infographics that impugn the decisions of government. Rather than, for example, accepting that private sector options in delivering health are used because people believe it will lead to better health outcomes, we get the accusation that ministers do it because of personal gain.

And rather than see that reforming welfare helps make work pay and can improve peoples lives, we're told that those proposing change are uncaring or, worse, are motivated by 'hatred of the poor'. Instead of seeing the point (you're not obliged to agree with it) that the prospect of a life on welfare is something to be discouraged, we're fed stories of how changes are proposed to "punish" the poor or the sick.

There may be the occasional person whose motives are questionable but I don't believe the motives of current ministers are anything but decent and honourable. At least not in policy decisions. Nor for that matter do I think that the motives of ministers in Gordon Brown's government - a tragic train crash of ignominious failure - were anything but decent and honourable. I just think they were wrong.

Too much of our discourse is conducted on the basis of trying to destroy the reputation of decent men and women trying to do what they think is the right thing to do. We poke around at where they went to school, at who they are married to, at their friends and at things they might have done twenty or thirty years ago at university. We make sweeping statements - "Tories don't care", "Labour hates business" - as the basis for our arguments without realising how petty, how shallow and, frankly, how nasty it makes us seem.

You're welcome to point out when I have done this - I'm sure I have - and to suggest on this basis that I am a hypocrite. But in the end, if we are to have a politics that people think worthy of respect, we need to try and deal with policy choices on the assumption that the reasons for doing them are decent and not motivated by venality, greed or base political advantage.

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Life in the castle: Politicians, bureaucracy and accountability

“You’re very severe,” said the chairman, “but multiply your severity by a thousand and it will still be as nothing compared with the severity that the authorities show toward themselves. Only a total stranger could ask such a question. Are there control agencies? There are only control agencies. Of course they aren’t meant to find errors, in the vulgar sense of that term, since no errors occur, and even if an error does occur, as in your case, who can finally say that it is an error.”  From Franz Kafka, "The Castle"

People really don't like politicians. We've known this for years, it should come as no surprise to any observer. And maybe it's a problem:

The research, which explores the reasons behind the precipitous drop in voter turnout – particularly among under-30s – finds that it is anger with the political class and broken promises made by high-profile figures that most rile voters, rather than boredom with Westminster.

But for as long as I can remember people have said that politicians don't keep promises. The problem is that, in the political game the making of promises is part of the currency. This is because the nature of democracy - the election thing especially - is for that currency to be votes rather than money.

For some the issue is fundamental:

This is no recent trend but is, in my view, the outcome of many centuries of shift away from deference to collective authority towards the free choice of the individual. At one stage, parliamentary democracy was a major consequence of this shift as feudal elites in charge by virtue of force and divinity made way for democratic elites chosen by free voting individuals. Now this historic shift is swamping parliamentary democracy itself.

The strange thing is that, while we get more detached from politics (perhaps because of the "shift away from deference to collective authority"),  that 'collective authority' gets more and more powerful and less and less accountable. We do not have 'feudal elites' but we do live in a world where government and its agents dominate large parts of life and interfere in the rest, mostly for some supposed 'common purpose'. The collective persists but it does so in a manner where any control or influence we have as individuals happens more by accident or good fortune rather than by design.

In the simplest of terms the management of our public services is largely unaccountable. And the reasons for this lack are many - from my near twenty year experience in local government here are a few:

• The sheer size of government - look at the NHS, at higher education or at planning and ask how it could be possible for a few ministers (mostly buried in paperwork) and an inefficient select committee of parliament to hold these departments to account?
• Resistance to change - for all that political leadership demands (and legislates for) change, the response of the bureaucracy, unions and academia is to organise the reform so as to secure the minimum possible actual change
• Professionalisation - everything must be 'professional', which means that those who aren't professionals in the given area are probably unqualified to comment and certainly unqualified to hold those professionals to account. As a result boards of professionals are used resulting in an inevitable closing of ranks.
• Secrecy and cover up - we hear every now and then about terrible things that happen in public agencies but only ever thanks to leaks and whistleblowers never through the usual processes of scrutiny or appraisal. The default position for government, for its agents and for the courts is always secrecy, always the gag.
• Centralisation, command and control - Anne Widdecombe observed how this was inevitable so long as the Minister has to go on the Today programme in response to things that go wrong. But this merely reinforces the chimera of ministerial control and prevents other forms of scrutiny working

I've resisted talking about more politically contested areas such as the role of trade unions, the impact of contracting and outsourcing and the role of the media in sustaining the myth of government's accountability. These few examples are not addressed by well-meaning attempts to improve public accountability, for example the apple pie and motherhood that is "the Nolan Principles", the creation of statutory officer positions in local government or the new Health & Wellbeing Boards (with a completely damaged and dysfunctional governance system imposed by an ignorant central government bureaucracy).

Public services in the UK are only accountable by happy and occasional accident - the conscientious local manager, the especially honest council leader or the whistle-blowing doctor - but in the main the way in which essential services are planned and managed is not accountable to the public who pay the bills.

Far too often as citizens we find ourselves waiting on the often arbitrary, certainly value-judged decisions of bureaucratic managers. The planning decision so we can open our cafe, a choice as to what care or treatment grandma will receive or some or other seemingly random ban, restriction or injunction imposed with no chance for challenge by some public official - we are powerless to stop this, we might through the efforts of a local councillor or the anger of a lawyer get the system bent enough to allow us to do our innocent business, but mostly we just bow our heads and mutter "jobsworth" before moving on.

And we blame the politicians. We blame them for promising accountability where there is none (nor hope of any) and then failing to deliver. We blame them for the breaking public systems, the uncaring public officials and the lousy results at our children's schools.

And the politicians promise to fix it all. The problem is that we can't, we're not allowed to.

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On trusting politicians

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For the regular daily political fare we never trusted politicians - you know the drill:

"It's a politician, his lips are moving. He must be lying."

"Why do politicians never answer the question?"

"They'll say anything to get elected."

And so on - as Huey Long (legend claims) told his advisors: "tell 'em we lied."

However, when it came to the serious stuff - war, death, tragedy - our politicians put on their statesman clothes and lived up to that description: honourable. On these grave and important matters we trusted our leaders to be honest, thoughtful and considered.

Then a man came along who was so great and grand, so superior he thought he could exploit that decency. We went to war on a lie. People like me supported that war because we didn't believe a leader would lie about something as serious as sending men to war.

Tony Blair killed that trust.

And no matter how subsequent leaders profess their decency, honour and honesty - or indeed whether they actually are decent, honourable and honest - we will never believe them again.

In some ways this is the very worst thing - among a catalogue of horrors - that Tony Blair did.

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When did it all go wrong?

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These are the people in change - no wonder we're in a mess with little prospect of escape:

The road to a job as a public intellectual now increasingly runs through a few elite schools, often followed by a series of very-low-paid internships that have to be subsidized by well-heeled parents, or at least a free bedroom in a major city. 

This accurately describes how nearly all our leaders arrived in their elite positions - and not just the political leaders but those in the media, in academia and in the world of think-tankery. But it is in politics that I worry most - we really need fewer bright young things who've done nothing and rather more folk who've worked for a living out in the hard old world.

Politicians are only ever "in touch" because:

1. The public seek their mercy and assistance to negotiate round the castle

2. Acolytes (low low-paid internships) provide them with briefings and cuttings

3. Others in the elite share stories about what the public are up to

4. Opinion polls

And the is little or no prospect of any political party being led by anyone not from this elite background so long as we have the education system we have and the political structures we're cursed with.

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Oh the gorgeous, indefatigable irony of it!

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One has to smile:

George Galloway, the founder of the Respect party, ironically appears to be Britain's least respected politician. His overall net respect score is -67 points.

Miaow George!

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