Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The Brownies and the Illusion of Expertise
The left's frustration with Brown has become obsessive. In the Guardian John Harris was at it last week and today there's Polly Toynbee complaining about Labour's sickly fixation on the rich. She's right about that, but she doesn't get under the skin of this strange neurosis. Blair wanted non-civil service expertise so he turned to wealthy business men - not, on the whole, real ones but management consultants. Brown has continued this (it is his continuance of most things Blair that is the main source of the left's frustration). Now, in David Pitt-Watson we have a fund manager General Secretary of the party, a post once occupied by inarticulate but consoling trade unionists with pleasantly lumpy faces. The illusion of the expertise of the rich and successful is twofold. First, their expertise tends to be either non-existent in the case of the consultants or very narrow. The points about the narrowness has been made many times in the context of the banking crisis. Very few highly paid bankers whose bonuses bear no relation to the success of their businesses could, it has been pointed out, actually get jobs anywhere else so it would be quite safe for shareholders to insist on a cut in their 'packages'. Secondly, expertise itself is an illusion because, in the management of human affairs, a set of skills acquired in one culture will not transfer to another. Running a business is not like running a government; it can't and shouldn't be. There is no magical concept like 'efficiency' that can be frictionlessly transferred from one to the other. You only have to look at the fantastic wastefulness of this and the previous administration to see it's not working. Excessive faith in this kind external expertise is a sign of fear and weakness. Which brings me back to Brown and the frustrated left. Don't you get it? He's weak.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
He is. But also I wonder if he really cares anymore, he knows he's already dead in the water - still, got his portrait up on the stairs at no.10, job done!
ReplyDeletesorry to go off topic but what's this I've been hearing about a Met. clamp down on odd photos - is it true? The end of funny caption competitions. Plain daft. Be careful out there!
Yes, but...the answer is there are good and bad managers in both the public and private sector. I suggest you read Michael Barber's Instruction to Deliver. It starts from a flawed premise in my view (that big government is 'a good thing'), but making Departments work is a real headache. Curiously, Blair always seemed happiest when dealing with the military - appreciating their can-do attitude and ability to improvise. Politicians know that part of the disillusion with Government is its failure to respond to our accelerating consumer culture. In addition you can't get rid of the civil service incompetents as easily. As for the private sector, if Jack Welch was available I'd let him run any department he wanted. I'd charge Labour with being weak on taking on the vested interests in the Civil Service (why did Mark Serwotka spring to mind?) - but not for trying new things.
ReplyDeletePS from above - before anybody takes my remark about Blair and the military to be about gung-ho warmongering, I was thinking more specifically about the Army's involvement in tackling the foot and mouth crisis. They ran absolute rings around Defra.
ReplyDeleteWarren Buffett would be my choice- a pragmatist.
ReplyDeleteThe Army are indeed admirably efficient - but the Ministry of Defence is one of the most fantastically imcompetent handlers of public money, as witness the sudden doubling of the costs of Iraq/Afghanistan, just when they should be going down. Not to mention the billions wasted, for purely political reasons, on 'European' white elephants of one kind and another...
ReplyDeleteIndeed Nige - but you rather prove the point that it is civil service managers who are a problem, not the operationally focussed troops on the ground.
ReplyDeleteSpeaking as a civil servant (not a high faluting one or anything) I think you're right to point the finger at the governments obsession with hiring business experts who are anything but.
ReplyDeleteThe actual grunts doing the work want to do as much as possible for the public (well, most of them)but new "efficiency" initiatives dreamed up by consultants make the job more difficult rather than less.