‘My appeal to the Home Secretary is most earnest. I believe that if ever there was a debt due to justice… that debt is one the Home Secretary should now pay.’
That was an impassioned plea by Sir Frank Soskice MP for the reopening of the Timothy Evans case. The home secretary’s reply was that it would serve no useful purpose.
All very unremarkable. Except that the home secretary who rejected the appeal in 1965 was the same Sir Frank Soskice who had made it in 1961. For some reason this was not greeted with the level of public hilarity it deserved, but I remember reflecting that some very strange and potent magic must take place inside Whitehall, some mysterious inverted alchemy that can transmute gold into such base metal. And if you want evidence of how little has changed in 50 years, in 2007 Alan Johnson wrote to the Home Office, making an impassioned ‘life and death’ plea not to send asylum seeker Emmanuel Njoya back to the Cameroon, where he had been tortured. Last year the Home Secretary stated ‘that it would be inappropriate for me to intervene’. Yes, the Home Secretary was Alan Johnson.
Examples of the power of established institutions and the impotence of elected representatives are everywhere. I mention them only because while there has been discussion about what policies a putative Conservative government will pursue, there is a much bigger question that is rarely discussed — never mind what they want to do, what will they be able to do?
What will a couple of dozen temporary, novice Cabinet ministers, professionals in political communication but amateurs in government, be able to achieve in the face of resistance from half a million or more lifelong professional civil servants and nearly six million public sector employees? Those employees may be there to serve the public, but the first priority of any institution is self-preservation. They are eminently co-operative when they are not threatened and when plenty of lolly is sloshing around, but once they sense that cuts are imminent and their survival is in danger a much deeper instinct takes over: resistance à l’outrance.
This is not because of some inherent wickedness in the British people or in government bureaucracies; it is a factor in all human institutions. Members of these structures have seven principal needs that have to be met before they can turn to their prescribed function: security — they need to know that their existence is not challenged; order — people and events must have their allotted roles and predictable functions; independence — as free as possible from interference by superiors or outsiders; reward — nothing massive (unless you can get away with it) but enough to jog along happily with; comfort — not just somewhere warm to work, but a comfortable job; status; and continuity — the knowledge that the institution will still be there in the future.
There is no point in ministers objecting to these civil service priorities because they themselves have the same seven in Westminster, as indeed I had during my nine years at the BBC. We all have them — we would not be human if we didn’t. But once you know about them, you also realise that the stated function of an institution is not an expression of its real objectives. At the deepest level, those seven needs are its objectives. Its stated functions are not objectives but constraints; if it is not perceived to discharge them, its very survival may be threatened, but their achievement does not make the bureaucratic heart beat any faster.
Central governments do not easily relinquish control. By 1832 it had taken over half a century of agitation, culminating in urban riots and the sacking of buildings, to prise political power away from wealthy and powerful patrons and return it to voters and their elected representatives. Since then, central government has been steadily drawing it back, leaving the form intact but removing the reality. What we have now is merely the hollowed out tusk of a moribund democratic system. It is not difficult to trace the steps by which this has happened.
In the first place constituencies have been enlarged. The average number of voters in a constituency in 1832 was around 1,200. They would all know their member, or all about him. Today, with constituencies of 50,000, only a tiny proportion can know their MPs. The MPs are totally dependent on party HQ’s endorsements, and de-selection means the end of their political career. Second, the provision of healthcare and education has been relentlessly drawn away from local people’s control and into Whitehall. The key method used to do this is through tax — the great majority of council revenues are taken from citizens through general taxation and returned with strict instructions and injunctions about what to spend them on. And while some power has been taken from localities, others have been ceded to supranational bodies. Decisions are put beyond the reach of citizens because of agreements, treaties and contract with the EU, the ECHR, the UN, the IMF, the WTO and a host of other acronymic autocracies. Further, there has been an explosion in the number of full-time career officials who easily dominate a very small number of often part-time elected representatives. In turn, these officials have created a unique public sector ethos: in the private sector a hospital that does not satisfy its customers goes out of business. In the public sector it gets a slap on the wrist, says ‘lessons have been learnt’, and carries on as before.
So how will an incoming government implement its reforms with the dice so heavily loaded against it? How will it combat the evil of overmighty, overfunded, overstaffed central government and give us back the smaller, cheaper user-friendly local government? It certainly cannot be done from a sofa in 10 Downing Street; but the alternative, to enlist a great institution in the task of dismantling itself, is even less promising. The one trump card the government holds is authority. It has the legal right to make changes. Unfortunately it is up against masters of the art of agreeing to requests not as a prelude but as an alternative to meeting them (see below).
Can anything be done to bring back voter control and sensible and economical government? Yes it can, and most people in the management world know the solution; indeed it has been known for 100 years or more: push down management control, budgetary discretion and investment decision to the smallest units in which they can be exercised without conflicting with other units. All successful large businesses do it.
The ideal size for government is probably about 6,000 people — a normal size for a market town and about the size served by the myriad small shopping parades scattered round the nation’s suburbs. It is a size that can exploit local knowledge, use face-to-face recognition, and apply common sense. It may seem small compared with the 400,000 or so who form the huge city boroughs which are most people’s smallest political unit, but it is still quite a lot of people. On average 6,000 people contribute and consume £100 million a year of government revenue. These townships would take over all the citizen-level responsibilities; primary schools, secondary schools (perhaps shared with a neighbouring townships), doctors surgeries, benefit offices, play schools, retirement homes, local policing, and have a single budget raised and spent in the town. It might come to half the total annual tax bill. Obviously many government activities are too large and wide-ranging for town councils: central or regional government would still be responsible for oversight of state functions — Defence, Foreign Office, Exchequer; of national communication services — railway, telecommunications, airlines, motorways; of operations too large for townships — universities, major hospitals, power stations, prison, harbours, airports; but the great bulk of administration would be local, with all the savings that local discretion makes possible.
We are not talking about consultation, opinion polls, attitude surveys or focus groups. We are talking about power and money. The townships can only work if they have legal authority and financial resources on a scale that no one in local government is currently even dreaming of. They can however read about it; it is very close to what happened in the 1960s when colony after colony was released from the British empire and set up on its own. Britain’s counties and boroughs have become virtual colonies of the Whitehall-Westminster empire. They are ready for independence.
Sir Antony Jay is a co-author of BBC TV series Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister. A stage version of Yes, Prime Minister opens at the Chichester Festival Theatre on 13 May.
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