In 2010 whilst on the General Election campaign trail, Gordon Brown was memorably taken to task by a long time Labour supporter, Gillian Duffy, about his government's handling of public spending and immigration. Ms Duffy was not best pleased, and the 65 year old gave her view plainly but not rudely. What happened next probably contributed to Labour losing the election as Brown was caught on microphone crossly berating his aides for allowing such an interaction and calling Duffy "that bigoted woman". Those few seconds said more about the remoteness of the political class from those it is supposed to serve than a thousand BBC bulletins ever could or would.
Has the new leader of the Labour party, Sir Keir Starmer, just had his "Gillian Duffy" moment? Fruitily ticked off in Bath by the angry landlord of the Raven Tavern, Starmer allowed himself to be hustled away while his "security" manhandled the publican upon whose premises the Opposition leader had entered. Rod Humphris had every right to be agitated - unlike Gillian Duffy, he has a business that has been under the shadow of ruin for the past twelve months, a direct result of the government's response to the Covid pandemic. Starmer accused the businessman of being a Covid-denier and suggested that it was fine for private enterprises to be faced by possibly permanent closure because the public's safety "demanded" it. As Jonathan Sumption commented, "When democracy becomes a mechanism for mass coercion by governments, with the approval of the opposition, it is surely heading towards its end".
It is perhaps unfair to single out Starmer for some of the more deranged aspects of the government's handling of the pandemic - he is not, after all, in power. But to the extent that he has been complicit in the government's treatment of citizens as mere tools of public policy, Sumption is surely on-the-money.
The past year has shown the true awfulness of the way we are governed. A fantastic amount of resource has been mobilised, and deployed with almost wilful mediocrity and even incompetence; the BBC has been allowed to terrify everyone into compliance, and the citizenry has seen the biggest curtailment of its civil liberties since the 17th century. Parliamentary scrutiny has been negligible and the government has issued over 400 "statutory instruments", basically new orders (such as the £10,000 Covid fines), under the cover of old legislation. It has suited both the UK and devolved governments to pretend that all risks can be eliminated, and that personal privations and economic vandalism are the costs of the slightest chance that any one individual succumbs. It is not the "precautionary" principle, it is tyranny. Not just one, but several effective vaccines have been developed and delivered, yet still the nonsense continues. Indeed, public safety messaging has been ramped up and the government's policies have infantilised everyone.
Anyone who has had direct experience of central or local government or of HMRC knows that public service attracts many types. Among the most common are those individuals who enjoy their moment of authority over their fellow citizens far too often than is good for them. Sadly, these exemplars are usually found at the point of contact with the public and there is a certain glee to be had by them for reporting that the "Computer says No" as a cover for their own lassitude and incompetence. Why does it take a lever-arch file load of correspondence to get your Council Tax band confirmed or for the correct tax code to be applied to your income? For the alert and educated it's just a lot of time wasting but others are seriously bamboozled and treated unjustly by these "processes", many of which assume a familiarity with on-line form-filling that would defeat Alan Turing.
The waste of public money is simply colossal. The figures are now so mind-bogglingly huge that the press can only get its head around the small change - as much ink has been spilt over the needless £2.6m revamp of the Number 10 "briefing" room as on the £37bn (and counting) cost of the Test and Trace program. Naturally, the press has majored on all those features that are nowadays almost constitutionally embedded in government procurement procedures: the appointment of well-connected but otherwise unqualified executives (Baroness Dido Harding) to oversee the inevitable fiasco; the lavish and unfocused use of expensive and unaccountable consultants to do those equally expensive executives' thinking for them ; the giving of contracts to mates and other hangers-on, and the seeming selection of the program's objectives out of a hat.
The money is spent, the "targets" are missed and then some committee of under-informed MPs wonders aloud where the hell it all went wrong. In Harding's case, the parliamentarians made the classic (and usual) mistake of accepting her analysis at face value. She had failed to meet the targets she herself had set, ergo they concluded the thing was a disaster. But no-one questioned what she was trying to achieve in the first place. A mere half hour of careful consideration would have told Harding that the best use of all the money would actually have been to incentivise people to stay at home once notified of infection. Instead, she and her successor are still going for broke on repeated and seemingly purposeless national testing. The Uber driver or chippie who needs to earn a living is not going to self-isolate just because Dido's "App" goes "ping", unless he or she is paid to do so. Infections will continue to spread - but that is inevitable anyway, as anyone with the slightest knowledge of human behaviour knows.
Harding is of course entirely unrepentant. Given her associations, she can be sure of remaining in orbit no matter what calamity results from her stewardship of public money. As can the consultants who were paid £3,000 a day for two months for a team of 4 of them to produce a new "Anti-bullying protocol" for the London Ambulance Service at the height of the pandemic. It's not the consultants' fault : in today's public sector, the process IS the outcome.
In the autumn of 2019 the Chancellor stood up and announced that the NHS budget for 2020/21 would be £145bn. So much for austerity, the health service had been in continuous receipt of real spending increases for over two decades, even after the surge to re-base funding during Blair's second term in office. The budget for 2021/22 is £230bn. Within that increase, a 2% increment for nurses on the average salary would cost £177m. That is less than a fifth of what Dido and her "team" spent on something called "prevalence testing" last year - basically sticking a swab up some Scouser's hooter three times a day and then sending it to some crazily bored and overworked lab assistant for "analysis". The English nurses have just been offered 1%. Yet the NHS is still under-recruited for medical staff and the number of administrators continues to exceed the number of nurses across the UK by some margin. Even Sturgeon is not that stupid.
Sir Humphrey is surely turning in his grave with embarrassment. But the real killer here is not the waste of money, the stupidity and the cock-ups: these have always been a feature of over-reaching and over-stretched governments. The new and deadly feature is the graft.
Sasha Swire's memoir of the Cameron years was one of 2020's publishing "sensations", complete with insights such as David Cameron wanting to push her into a bush near Polzeath and "shag" her. Sadly, the revelations were enough to shrink her and her MP hubby Hugo's social circle by quite a circumference. Anyone reading them however should be appalled, not by the actual behaviour so much as its sheer naffness. Cameron and chums come across as amiable, self-satisfied, shallow and vacuous: fine for a Joanna Trollope novel, but government?
Dave went on to become a non-executive of the now defunct Greensill, in which capacity he held the prospect of "earning" £60m (!) if all went well. The denouement was hardly surprising - after all various ex-PM's have been embarrassed by their post-political-retirement associations with financial "corporations", even Thatcher. The new element was that Greensill was already embedded in government courtesy of Cameron (before he left office) and the "much revered" then Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood. Lex Greensill had an ace wheeze to convert the mundane function of invoice factoring into a seriously lucrative business. In this case he was employed by HMG to pay their bills for a fee and the opportunity to arbitrage the difference between what the government owed and what the supplier was prepared to accept for prompt payment. What is amazing is how useless the apparat was/is at paying its bills; even more amazing when you consider its "Gilt" credit; absolutely astonishing when you consider this is an era when the Bank of England effectively prints the money the government spends at the point of disbursement.
You might wonder why the government needed to use factoring at all - indeed, one G Brown brought in a law against corporate late payment back in 1997/8. But Greensill leveraged his triple A rated government connection to persuade other credulous financiers to provide funds to his expanding empire of somewhat dodgier transactions, such as a steel company issuing invoices to itself to gain instant factored "credit".
O dear. Carillion had been using similar techniques to massage its cash flow when it too went pop, losing many their blameless livelihoods. Both Lex Greensill and Sir Jeremy Heywood had been at Morgan Stanley at the time when this useless and dangerous alchemy was dreamt up and was then later transferred seamlessly into the heart of government, complete with an office and business cards when Sir Jezza was Cabinet Secretary. The corporate advisers to Carillion? Why Morgan Stanley of course ! Happily, HMG is no incipient Carillion as the taxpayer ultimately picks up the tab - which is exactly what the chipper-looking Mr Greensill was always relying upon. Meanwhile, Dave's already slender reputation for anything other than affability is toast but Lady Heywood's circle is unlikely to scoff. After all it's not the widow's fault and she still gets an index linked pension.
The famous Anarchist Prince Kropotkin said that "Revolutionary government is a white Blackbird". But isn't that looking just a tad attractive right now?
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