24th July 2021
Read this tweet about Whitehall.
Whitehall has been very, very chaotic over the last 48 hours about self isolation. Talking to officials, each department is blaming the other and the centre. Each is asking for exemptions for its part of public services. All agree there’s been so little thinking done about this.
— Lewis Goodall (@lewis_goodall) July 23, 2021
This sentiment also could have expressed many times during the course of Brexit.
This general thoughtlessness is now a feature of political decision-making and (lack of) policy-making in the United Kingdom – at least in that part which is governed from Whitehall and subject to the (lack of) scrutiny of the parliament in Westminster.
How has this come to pass?
One safe assumption is that human nature – even in the context of politics – has not changed.
Politicians – like people generally – will tend to be thoughtless unless there is a reason not to be.
Politicians will tend to seek to get away with what they can.
If this assumption is valid, then the question is what enables politicians to get away with such thoughtlessness.
Perhaps politicians have always been like this – one can think of the Poll Tax or the invasion of Iraq – as illustrations of thoughtlessness in policy-making.
Perhaps it is that Brext and Covid have both been so destabilising, all that has happened is that the general political gormlesssness has been exposed by being thrown into relief.
Perhaps.
But it also can be contended that – as this blog has averred many times – there is an accountability gap within the United Kingdom polity.
This means government departments know there is little or nothing to check and balance misdirections, misadventures and maladministration.
This gap – even if it has always been there – appears to be widening.
Ministers are now open in their disdain for parliament and for serious media scrutiny: they do not even now pretend.
The cabinet office increasingly seems to brazenly revel in being obstructive in respect of freedom of information and parliamentary select committees.
The public ombudsman system – expressly responsible for investigating maladministration – is so impotent that it may as well not exist.
And even those bodies which do show spirit and dedication in holding the government to account – some select committees and the national audit office – are ignored by ministers and much of media.
In between general elections there is no real accountability – and even the policy mandates conferred in general elections are ignored.
In all these circumstances, the wonder is not that we have so much thoughtlessness in the making of decisions and policy – but that we ever get any at all.
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I do hope this comment will not be considered ‘irksome’ ..
Good lawyers are as rare as good politicians, I would aver.
‘Justice’ is far too often what unaccountable judges determine through the flagrant unchecked misuse of precdent…unbeknown, in large part,to the original lawmakers…..
Is that partly because they are convinced that they are right (as well as convinced that they will get away with it)?
At various stages in my career, I have been asked to look things over and identify weaknesses or things people haven’t noticed or have done nothing about. In jargon, it’s the ‘critical friend’ and, occasionally, ‘Devil’s advocate – although not quite so public as that might suggest.
The main point was people knew that it was unwise to waltz things through the system unchecked because of the dual risk of (a) doing something appalling and (b) having to carry the can because you didn’t think things through.
Unfortunately, this Government’s ability to deflect means that it may never carry the can.
Then again, politicians may fail to hold the Government to account but maybe – just maybe – Tyrone Mings or Marcus Rashford may be just the people to do it.
The fact is that the “good chap” assumption of the legislature used to be lived up to, for the most part. The politicians that reached high office genuinely had the best interests of the country at heart (in their mind, at least). However, for some reason, that has changed.
Bearing in mind that ruthless people generally prosper when there are few safeguards (witness who comes out on top immediately following most revolutions), the questions to my mind are: What were the forces that brought the “good chaps” to the top of the political hierarchy? And what has changed?
Some theories, completely without evidence. If you have any evidence in favour or against, please share:
Something in the past encouraged better (or more) people to enter politics. Perhaps there was less disillusion with politics in general, and public spirited people thought they could make a genuine difference? Local party MP candidate selection used to select better, more public-spirited MPs. Why? A bigger pool to choose from? Or better selection?
They in turn, put forward a better pool of candidates for party leader. The party memberships thus could elect better leaders. It is certainly likely that if Labour had fielded a more electable candidate for PM against Theresa May, that we’d be in a very different position now.
Let’s not ignore the Media. The rise of the internet has crippled the media by stealing most of its advertising revenue. This in turn badly affects the ability of the media to commit tome and money to proper investigative journalism.
Finally, something has been driving increasingly polarised partisanship, both in the UK and the US. The newspapers have always been guilty of this but with higher editorial standards, did they use to hold their own side to account better? In the UK, Brexit has been a big driver of this. In the US, issues like gun control, abortion and homosexual rights. Do “filter bubbles” on social media also help drive this?
In the UK, Brexit partisanship is definitely responsible for the type of Conservative MP and cabinet member foisted on us.
All good points. Would also add that the fear of reputational damage seems to have disappeared entirely. The days when a minister would resign when having misled parliament, even unwittingly, have long gone. 24 hour news creates a boredom with yesterday’s overworked titbits unless there are new revelations. Shamelessness becomes a badge of honour worn by all from the PM down.
I think Brexit, and the anti-bureaucracy mindset that is one of the features of Brexit “thinking” (“feeling” might be a more suitable word), supported by the existence of a growing non-Civil Service bureaucracy of SPADS, has something to do with it. Instead of taking advice from the collective knowledge of the professional Civil Service, ministers find it more congenial to take advice from, and have their Departments dominated by, close coteries of the politically committed. The organised thinking and evaluation that the professional Civil Service has traditionally been good at is therefore discounted and not valued or nurtured.
This is not to say that SPADS are altogether a bad thing. Modern government is extensive and complex: ministers need political support to carry their political aims across large and complex departments and it is helpful to large bureaucracies to have channels of communication with their ministers that are broader than ministers alone. But I suspect that not all involved are skilled as using such channels in optimal ways, and too often in the process bureaucratic historical knowledge gets discounted as I’ve outlined.
Politicians like to suck up to support groups. Whoever sat on Boris last – that is the policy.
Covid is a real drag and not going away. For now the vaccines are working, that may or may not last. There is some political value in pushing the Covid/Brexit envelope if only to placate the rabid media. Boris is like a kid riding a bike – ‘look no hands’ – but reassured there is ointment and nurse(s) just around the corner. The actualite is that those pudgy hands dare not leave the handlebars for more than a short newsreel moment.
As things stand Boris is lumbered with Brexit and Covid, has no way of delivering Green or electric cars or hydrogen fuels or houses or new industries. He is in a tight corner. His only hope is to kick the can down the road a bit longer and hope something will turn up. Eventually Boris will recognise he is doing no good, he will resign and go and make some money. As for a replacement – someone equally useless and equally unable to chop our Gordian knots will be found.
i don’t believe the problem is that the don’t think, they do.
They are just not telling what.
And the biggest riddle of our Lifetime will be why Brexit.
I know you think it could have been done properly
but it wasn’t. And what we have witnessed the last 6 years looks like a lot not thinking. But do you really give them the benefit of the doubt, that they just make it up wile they go along, changing the whole of the UK by accident for decades. I just can’t believe that.
PS I would pay some money to see how the French would handle a Gov like this
I do not think the problem is thoughtlessness, rather the lack of competence in the Prime Minister. I witnessed at first hand Blair’s handling of the Foot and Mouth crisis in 2001. (To be clear I am not seeking to compare the scale of that to the pandemic – my point is about management). Prior to Blair attending various meeting in Cumbria a succession of Ministers had visited. None of them was empowered to make a decision.
Blair arrived and made decisions. I privately dubbed him as President Blair. Now here is the difference. Blair was (whatever his faults) very hard working, did the detail and decisive. He thought about the implications of his decisions before he made them.
In contrast, assuming that we have a similar “presidential” power arrangement at the moment, the current incumbent has none of those skills. And, if Cummings is to be believed, spends much of his time worrying about his coverage in the Daily Telegraph.
The self isolation fiasco was entirely predictable. I predicted it to my partner on the day Sajid Javid said there could be as many as 100,000 new cases a day. Assuming each had close contact with five others that takes out of circulation 500,000 a day (if test and trace is working). The app might take out another 50,000. Not all will be workers of course. But if the majority are then about 5m workers would be self isolating in a rolling 10 day period.
It was blindingly obvious that that would cause chaos in the economy and the PM should have been working on his contingency arrangements at that point. Instead he was testiculating (thanks to Susie Dent for that word) about a loyalty app to tackle obesity and he will (according to the Sunday Express) testiculate further on Tuesday about “beating crime”.
It’s not thoughtlessness – it is stupidity and incompetence.
Cock-up or conspiracy? Is there poor thinking in government because those in charge are poor at thinking, or because they don’t care because they expect to get away with it? Or is it both?
Trying to end a unique 40-year relationship with the EU is demanding. Trying then to also cope with a devastating pandemic at the same time would tax the finest minds.
But we don’t have the finest minds. We have a government led by someone whose key skills are apparently salesmanship, deception and bluster. Not a lot of thinking skill for decision-making or administrative competence there. We have a government where many of the minsters with most experience were forced out in 2019 for what might be called ‘insubordination’. So those with some capability at running government departments – whether that represents actual thinking or not – are gone.
We have a government that has decried ‘experts’. So expert thinking may not be readily available. (Compare Ivan Rogers to Lord Frost, for example.) We have a government that apparently demanded, in effect, pledges of loyalty to the executive from its MPs. So independent thinking from MPs is discouraged because, apparently, all wisdom will come from the top.
We have a government where the one person at the top who apparently was doing some thinking, possibly for the whole government (whether you liked that thinking or not), Dominic Cummings, is now gone. (And who claimed much of his thinking was ignored or rejected in any case.)
Thinking is a skill but you have to be motivated to want to do it.
So my guess is that there’s probably not much forethought about possible sanctions in the future or about getting away with things, but just a lack of adequate thinking upfront, in the context of unprecedented challenges. After all, consideration of possible consequences is a key aspect of good thinking.
“The public ombudsman system – expressly responsible for investigating maladministration – is so impotent that it may as well not exist”. To this we can also add the Information Commissioners Office.
This is an inescapable fact David and, as we know, the most significant Ombudsman is the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman (PHSO) as his ‘service’ cuts across most government departments as well as health.
Your followers will find plenty of information in the book “What’s the point of the Ombudsman” published by PHSOtheFacts in June 2020 and now also very cheaply available as an e book. The content demonstrates all that is wrong with the system and accountability. Following the last PACAC (Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee) report, Michael Gove, Cabinet Office, stated there are no plans for Ombudsman reform before and including up to 2023-24. Yet the same party in Government place a bill before parliament five years ago (introduced by Chris Skidmore). This was an ill thought out attempt to amalgamate PHSO and the Local Government Ombudsman (LGO) and I, for one, was glad it ran out of parliamentary time in the hope that later legislation might bring about more positive change to accountability.
I have been going through the Health and Care Bill which has now entered the Committee stage of its passage through Parliament. As far as I can see, this has a number of accountability holes in it. I will send you my thoughts separately David for consideration of your legal mind.
In the meantime, I hope it will not be long before you start a detailed expose on this site of PHSO and all its faults which PHSOtheFacts are identifying on their blog PHSOthetruestory.
I’m not sure of the motivation for that random drive-by, but;
Nearly twenty years of pretty much day-to-day experience of dealing with the ICO (as a DPA “Subject Matter Expert” for one of the largest UK government departments – almost certainly the largest holder of personal information in the UK);
Seeing on a daily basis the effect across the entire department – top to bottom – of the mere existence of the ICO, on commitment to compliance (on both the DPA and the FoI sides of the business);
And knowing the terror among the most senior officials of the very prospect of a negative ICO decision;
I can say with some authority and much first-hand knowledge, that you’re wrong, David.
Indeed: https://icosearch.ico.org.uk/s/search.html?collection=ico-meta&profile=decisions&query&query=
https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/
Not sure what else you expected of the ICO. They will be first to tell you that they want the teeth (and the resources) to do more, but the lack of either is a political matter, not a failure on behalf by ICO.
Thank you for reading my post Keith. I was referring to David’s initial blog which questioned the potency of the Ombudsman organisations. I share your view these organisations, including ICO, need teeth and resources and the lack of both is a failure of political will going back many years. The PHSO annual report just released includes how the organisation reported itself to the ICO for a major data breach and the outcome.
I can only demonstrate the ’roundabout effect’ using my own experience. I lodged an information complaint with ICO about PHSO. The last line of the ICO decision invited me to complain to PHSO if I was dissatisfied with the outcome!
I fail to see how this enhances public confidence in the quasi-judicial systems we currently endure.
There is one measure of accountability that the incumbents take notice of, and that’s polling of the leader and governing party’s popularity and voting intentions. So long as this stays positive they will continue with anything they feel they can get away with. Voters can only form their opinions from their choice of media, hence attempts to control the small section of ‘unfriendly’ (I.e. truthful and non-sycophantic) media.
But the fact remains, despite the torrent of sleaze and the piling up of the results of the failed decisions, and the mounting death toll, the current government’s numbers are still positive. Is the majority truly credible of the transparent government spin parroted by the friendly media, or does the majority truly not care?
Corrupt or inept? The idea of bumbling politicians messing up decision making diverts attention from the high level of corruption which now pervades our national institutions. They are inept by design – serving an alternative agenda whilst purporting to serve the public.