Neil Obrien

Little platoons online

Cameron’s ‘big idea’ is for a ‘Post-Bureaucratic Age’ enabled by the internet. Will it work? Peter Hoskin and Neil O’Brien aren’t sure

Cameron’s ‘big idea’ is for a ‘Post-Bureaucratic Age’ enabled by the internet. Will it work? Peter Hoskin and Neil O’Brien aren’t sure

The future: it’s all about computers. Anyone could tell you that. But not everyone gets quite as evangelical about it as David Cameron. Put the Conservative leader in a room full of tech-heads, web freaks and assorted blue-sky thinkers, and he soon starts to preach his gospel. Computers will catalyse our political evolution, he says. Armed with only an internet connection, the public will start seizing back control from an overreaching state. Everything will be cheaper, faster, better — and we’ll all be happier to boot. Burke’s Little Platoons have just gone digital.

Yet beyond this the narrative fizzles out — and rapidly. This bright future has been saddled with a name that only a management consultant could love: ‘The Post-Bureaucratic Age’. And, worse, the Conservatives are more than a little uncertain about what it will look like. They have launched the occasional initiative here and there, but the party’s brightest policy wonks admit that it is still a work in progress. With the election fast approaching, that’s something of a problem for them.

This is the point at which most readers would switch off, taking it as proof that the Cameron agenda is essentially cosmetic. But the struggle to formulate a post-bureaucratic age takes us to the very core of today’s Conservative party. The Cameroons regard it as their Big Idea, their guiding light; just as Tony Blair had his Third Way, and Thatcher had her copy of Friedrich von Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty. Understand it, and understand how the probable next government sees itself and its role.

So where to start? Well, Exhibit A is George Osborne’s plan to publish online every major item of government spending. It has an unforeseen cousin in the form of MPs’ expenses data, which various politicians and parties have started including on their own websites.

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