The Blunders of Our Governments

Product Information

Behavioural causes lie in the inadequate skills or delinquent behaviour of ministers and officials operating in a sound policy-making system. The remedies include better training, more appropriate experience, increased self- and group- awareness and more compelling incentives and sanctions for performance. Structural causes: (1) the deficit of deliberation Some of the present-day causes for this dissatisfaction are fairly obvious. The global financial crisis that began in 2008 has made almost all the elected governments that it caught unawares very unpopular. In the UK the parliamentary expenses scandal of 2009 left a deep scar. And there are deeper, longer-term factors, in particular the decline of the power of the sovereign nation state in an era of globalisation. The international bond and currency markets overwhelm the national state. Critical problems cross national boundaries and require international solutions: crime, terror, environmental degradation, migration. Governing well is always difficult, far more so than commentators and citizens imagine. But in the current climate it is even more difficult. Some will quarrel with the authors’ allocation of responsibility between human frailty and systemic weaknesses, and between politicians and civil servants. For me, the big omission is a chapter devoted to the Treasury – a self-regarding Whitehall institution that has swaggered from costly blunder to blunder over successive decades.

The most calamitous blunder of modern times came as Britain began to benefit from the huge windfall of North Sea oil. Some argued that, as in Norway, the receipts should be invested for future generations in a sovereign wealth fund. This challenged the Treasury’s absurdly ideological objection to hypothecation. The result? All that money was squandered in booms that led inevitably to bust. I shall not forget my assignment from an Assistant Secretary of State in March, 1964: to draft a speech for Secretary McNamara which would, inter alia,once and for all dispose of the canard that the Vietnam conflict was a civil war. "But in some ways, of course," I mused, "it isa civil war.""Don't play word games with me!" snapped the Assistant Secretary."

Themes

Men who have participated in a decision develop a stake in that decision. As they participate in further, related decisions, their stake increases. It might have been possible to dissuade a man of strong self-confidence at an early stage of the ladder of decision; but it is infinitely harder at later stages since a change of mind there usually involves implicit or explicit repudiation of a chain of previous decisions. To put it bluntly: at the heart of the Vietnam calamity is a group of able, dedicated men who have been regularly and repeatedly wrong—and whose standing with their contemporaries, and more important, with history, depends, as they see it, on being proven right. These are not men who can be asked to extricate themselves from error."

Before I had read the book, I had prepared my own list of relatively recent failures of recent governments. But I too, despite my interest in the subject, found it impossible to identify the proportions of blame to be attributed to Ministers, on the one hand, and officials, on the other. This is of course the heart of the problem. No-one knows whether the blunders and failures were at least partially the result of poor advice from officials, or the result of Ministers not accepting good advice. It is surely unacceptable that this analysis cannot be carried out, and lessons learned from this analysis. But that is, we are told, the result of the system that we put in place nearly 100 years ago. A common feature of the “blunders” is the extent to which policy development gets separated from the realities of the world. In the worst cases policy is developed by small groups of like- minded people in Whitehall who share the same set of assumptions and fail to test those assumptions outside the group. The group often assumes that there is only one way of doing things: a common example until recently was the assumption that the private sector is always superior in know-how and efficiency. They often have little understanding of how people on the receiving end of the policy will behave or react – what the authors call, “cultural disconnect”. the collective inertia produced by the bureaucrat's view of his job. At State, the average "desk officer" inherits from his predecessor our policy toward Country X; he regards it as his function to keep that policy intact —under glass, untampered with, and dusted—so that he may pass it on in two to four years to his successor. And such curatorial service generally merits promotion within the system. (Maintain the status quo, and you will stay out of trouble.) In some circumstances, the inertia bred by such an outlook can act as a brake against rash innovation. But on many issues, this inertia sustains the momentum of bad policy and unwise commitments—momentum that might otherwise have been resisted within the ranks." the numerous blunders that have been committed by British governments of all parties in recent decades. .. [British governments] screw up more often than most people seem to realise. .. Governments of all parties appear equally blunder-prone. .. in spite of government’s incessant blundering, the United Kingdom is in many ways a well-governed country. [The majority of] our political leaders … are genuinely concerned with both the British people’s welfare and the country’s long term future. .. Compared with the political elites of some countries .. most British politicians and civil servants are models of both rectitude and public-spiritedness. .. these very qualities make the frequency with which they commit blunders the more surprising and disappointing.”The other disaster still fresh in many minds was sterling’s exit from the European exchange rate mechanism in 1992 – an event that drained the Bank of England’s foreign exchange reserves and destroyed the reputation of John Major’s government. There are still debates about where blame lay. Suffice it to say that the Treasury did not cover itself in glory. This note lists the policy and delivery failures that suggest the need to reconsider the current relationship between Parliament, Ministers and civil servants. The British public hold its governments and politicians in poor regard. Turnout in elections, membership of political parties and the readership and audience for the political news are all at historic lows. Surveys place MPs alongside estate agents and tabloid journalists as the least trusted occupations. People increasingly think of government and the political process as part of the problem, not the solution.

Underpinning these difficulties were well-documented weaknesses in commercial skills and departmental structures and processes that were not always up to the job. How did it happen? As the authors point out, the ministers who designed the tax were among the brightest in the government. The simple answer is the hubris that arrives when politicians assume they have an entitlement to power. The second problem is what they call ‘musical chairs’ – the tendency for both Ministers and senior Mandarins to frequently change their jobs, so that the senior team in any Ministry rarely lasts for more than a couple of years. This problem compounds another – ‘ministerial activism’. As most Ministers can expect to be in post for no more than one or two years, they have a very little time in which to make their mark with some signature policy or reform. This encourages over-rapid decision-making and repeated reform initiatives. As most serious reforms take 4-5 years at least to bed down, Ministers and Mandarins have often moved on, along with the policy agenda, long before anything has been achieved (or not).

A proposal to increase the ‘discount’ for pleading guilty in serious criminal cases (from 40% to 50%) was abandoned following media criticism.