Government by headline is always tempting, and always a mistake. Some of the worst such mistakes concern the machinery and cost of politics, where it’s all too easy to announce stuff that sounds good for a day or two yet inflicts long-term harm on the quality of politics and government.
Scrapping and merging Whitehall departments generally falls into the category of ‘things that sound sensible but aren’t’, so reports that such a reorganisation has been canned are encouraging. In any case, there are bigger problems to fix in Whitehall, problems caused by politicians putting appearances before effectiveness.
Public sector pay is a good example. Early in the Coalition days, David Cameron suffered another attack of headline-itis and announced that no one in the public sector could be paid more than the Prime Minister. That was a daft benchmark, not least because no-one bases the decision on whether to be PM on the salary.
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