government incompetence

Last week I had the dubious pleasure of attending a meeting in Portcullis House. Perhaps it is indicative of the almost non-existent esteem in which I hold our political institutions that I felt physically nauseous being in a building so full of meddling, superfluous, smugly self-important functionaries and flunkies.

Having a day off today, and finding myself watching the Queen's Speech shenanigans, I have to say I admire her very much more today that I have for a long time. How she can stomach what must be a three hour preparation and get out, all those flunkies in tights doing silly sixteenth century things, Jack boot Straw in his gold braided robes of office as "Lord" Chancellor which would probably pay for a penny off income tax itself farting around arse backwards and me wishing ever so sincerely he'd fall over and cement for the nation the image of Fool he appeared.

All for what, a five minute speech, telling us all how much more interference in our lives we can expect.

What would really bring Her Maj up in my estimation next year is if she finally decides she's had enough of doing all this for fifty-five years and that it's time she sacked the whole lot of the psychotic, useless megalomaniac and sycophantic twats because she knows full well they never achieve what they tell her they're going to and make a liar of her for forcing her to read such legislative drivel.

"My government has become such a sack of manure that Philip and I have decided this year to have them fertilize the roses at Balmoral and not interfere with the management of my once beautiful and powerful country, which they have signally failed to do properly all the time we've been doing this flummery and ceremony. May God bless you all in your efforts in our stables, potting sheds and rose beds."

Eugh. Vomit inducing stuff indeed. If I were Guy Fawkes, I would ensure Liz and Phil got out and then take advantage of the new proposed legislation of causing a nuclear explosion on the rest of 'em.

Over at "Letters from a Tory", the question has been posed, how would libertarians have protected BabyP. It is something I thought about quite a lot when the story first broke and I've written a long response to LFAT in the comments there. But I thought it was worth posting in its own right:

I go further, in theory at least, than even LFAT's definition of libertarianism (as one who believes the state should enforce the law). I am more of an anarchist. Though people often misunderstand that as meaning absolutely no controls on what people do and no institutions to enforce them. That is wrong; anarchists would say that in doing away with government other structures, such as a “private law society ”, would emerge that are more consenual and explicitly contract and economic incentive driven. Also anarchism rests on the core belief in self-ownership and that everyone has the right to do as they please insofar as it does not affect another’s ability to do the same.

I did think quite long and hard about how the BabyP case ought to affect that perspective. The first thing I found is that there are at least another couple of dozen incidents of the death of a child (half under one and most by parents themselves) in “child cruelty” type incidents (rather than accident or bizarre whole family suicide type incidents I assume) every year in Britain. In other words, BabyP is not the unique case that the (quite justified) moral outrage it has generated seems to suggest. Maybe it’s mostly because Haringay is seen as having “form” on this issue after Climbie. It's a "good story" that "social services gets it wrong again". Not such a good story that at least another two dozen are going on every year around the country and nobody seems to care!

But the message is that whatever various social services and child protection agencies do know they “fail” a lot more than they’re telling us. My suspicion is that this is down to most other cases being completely under the radar of the state protection apparatus until it’s too late (and if so - what use are those state agencies if they are unable to prevent the most egregious abuse because they cannot see it coming?). Determined sadists are often quite good at covering their tracks. Just look at both Fritzl in Austria and our own version in Sheffield the other week. We can be shocked and say someone must have noticed that level of abuse even with the most determined concealing by the perps, but no. It happens and nobody managed to stop it or even recognize it.

Also, even in an anarchist worldview, the care of a child is something that is a joint trust between parents and the rest of society - society would have ended up paying for the effects of his tortured life, as Martin Narey (deliberately) controversially said, if he had grown up to become a “feral yob”. Indeed, as Guido says in the comments on LAFT's post, our welfare and benefits systems include some level of perverse incentive for people to have children who probably shouldn’t; or at least shouldn’t at a point in their lives when they can barely support themselves.

At the moment then we “contract out” to effectively disinterested parties (the state - who get paid in reality whatever the outcome and only get into any bother at all in the most egregious and publicly visible cases of failure) to carry out a function more properly suited to much more local, neighbourhood, and more importantly family, scrutiny. Where, in a “market anarchist” worldview, ought such oversight to lie? Can we imagine on whom there would be an economic incentive to ensure as far as is possible the safety of someone else’s child?

As others have mentioned, institutions such as the RSPCA (though I think they have been ceded too much power often) and the RNLI, already carry out an effective job in their respective fields. Something like the NSPCC would emerge as the champion of the most vulnerable in the last resort and would in a private law society be likely to take action to defend the “self-ownership” and freedom from aggression and coercion of a child, even against its parents (if it became apparent). Should a hospital say even allow a child born to someone who has not the means or willingness to make proper provision for bringing up a child (which could probably be evidenced from their pre-natal attitude or lack of attempt to make provision) to be taken home in the first place without much more scrutiny as to how good care they’re going to get?

Remember too, that we believe that in the absence of state-capitalism and the grossly distorted playing field that creates through privilege and patronage to the detriment of the poorest, even those poorest would be better equipped economically to make provision through friendly societies and such like for health care and so on. So I’m not suggesting that the poor should not be allowed to take their babies home. Just that in such an environment it would probably be more noticeable, not less, as to which parents had even made an honest attempt to make provision or establish a support network of family first, community second and paid for assistance third, and perhaps the economic incentive might fall on the delivering hospital at least to ensure that such prima facie support was available. They could then even at that early stage alert an organization such as NSPCC or find themselves on the receiving end of a negligence claim if anything bad happened.

Finally (I think), in such a more human scale society, I suggest it would be easier, not harder, for friends and neighbours to intervene earlier. It is in most of their economic interests often too not to be supporting or fostering in their midst the sort of home circumstances in which these sort of psychotic evil doers can function with impunity. Would the mother’s partner’s sadistic friend really only have been a problem for the child? Would not neighbours and other family members have an interest in ensuring they were driven from their midst? At the moment everyone is too tied up in making ends meet in an unfair world perhaps to care too much what happens next door until it spills over more obviously into their lives.

In summary, I’m not sure I can see how in an anarchist, private law type society, it could be any worse than relying on the economically disincentivised civil servants to whom we contract out our social and neighbourly awareness “duties”. And the altogether more humane, less oppressed society that ought to result from such freedoms may well be able to intervene earlier and more consensually in order to protect their own interests as well as those of the child.

...a society made up almost entirely of mendacious megalomaniacal psychopaths, do declare that the causes of the current economic crisis are basically nothing to do with us:

3. During a period of strong global growth, growing capital flows, and prolonged stability earlier this decade, market participants sought higher yields without an adequate appreciation of the risks and failed to exercise proper due diligence. At the same time, weak underwriting standards, unsound risk management practices, increasingly complex and opaque financial products, and consequent excessive leverage combined to create vulnerabilities in the system. Policy-makers, regulators and supervisors, in some advanced countries, did not adequately appreciate and address the risks building up in financial markets, keep pace with financial innovation, or take into account the systemic ramifications of domestic regulatory actions.

4. Major underlying factors to the current situation were, among others, inconsistent and insufficiently coordinated macroeconomic policies, inadequate structural reforms, which led to unsustainable global macroeconomic outcomes. These developments, together, contributed to excesses and ultimately resulted in severe market disruption.

God it makes me sick. Lying miserable tossers. Understand this well. Maintaining low interest rates, in order to get more people borrowing more to put into a land price bubble which would enable others to borrow to spend our way out of a mini-recession at the beginning of the century was DELIBERATE PUBLIC POLICY. Deliberate public policy the effects of which were to make the poorest and weakest in society attempt to take on unacceptable levels of debt and risk just to prevent themselves from being ripped off even more in the future.

Not only that, but they knew at the time it would lead to problems later (Eddie George said: "My legacy to the MPC, if you like, has been 'sort that out',"). They simply hoped their successors could get us out of those problems. I think we should take their prescriptions for recovery with all the salt in the world's oceans.

The emotional outpourings of grief and anger at the case of Baby P (as evinced on this Lib Dem Voice thread for example - h/t Alix too!) are to be expected. It is truly a galling case with a litany of failures on the part of those supposed to protect the vulnerable and unutterable cruelty by those who should have been closest to the child.

This was to have been a rant that leaving things up to "the authorities" is a recipe for disaster. I was going to say that these sort of incidents are mercifully rare. So I looked around for some statistics (a PDF file) to back up my assertion and I found that, whilst we are still talking about small numbers (child homicides have hovered between about 60 and 100 a year for a long time)what is clear is that there *ought* to be a story like Baby P's every month or so somewhere. There is, it would appear, about one death a month of a child under one by its parents under the category of "acts of cruelty" (as opposed, I suppose, to whole family suicide incidents or throwing them off an hotel balcony). There's about one other of a child between one and four, again by parents, and about half as much again over all a month by strangers or less closely related family.

So, the big question for me out of this now becomes less "what happened to Baby P", so much as "why don't we have this horrific outrage a couple of times a month?" Of course the fact Baby P had been seen more than sixty times makes the failure all the greater, and it may be that these other couple of dozen cases a year are completely below the radar of the relevant child protection agencies.

But that on its own begs the question "why"? Even if they are not known to local authorities, these deaths represent a failure of the system simply because they have never come to anyone's attention before it's too late. A failure just as egregious as that of Haringey. Perhaps more so - for we know that people go to all sorts of lengths to conceal the sickest secrets - just think of Joseph Fritzl, as if you could forget.

So, is Haringey a victim of its own previous failings - making a death under their watch a more significant failing? Or is the real symptom of systemic failure the fact that this sort of thing is not all over the media twice a month elsewhere?

Over the years the government's regional governance strategy has been a complete and utter shambles. The Regional Development Agencies are QUANGOs unaccountable to anyone other than within what was then the Department of Local Government, Transport and the Regions. Then a layer of pseudo accountability was added in the form of not directly elected Regional Assemblies(most members were at least appointed by local authorities to which they had themselves been elected). Their attempt to give the regions more "autonomy" by setting up directly elected assemblies foundered at the first attempt in the North East referendum. And justifiably - there was very little additional power being devolved to them and to all intents and purposes they appeared to be designed to accrete more power from lower level tiers of government like counties and districts.

So when they abandoned that idea they decided to replace the half-democratic Regional Assemblies with a minister and parliamentary select committee for each region. So what a surprise to see the results of yesterday's Commons' debate on the establishment of the regional committees. Yup, you guessed it, they have somehow contrived to make a practically undemocratic system somewhat less democratic and accountable.

The government has decided that, unlike with local government or even the half-bakedelected Regional Assemblies, they are going to keep a majority on every committee, irrespective of the proportion of MPs each party holds at Westminster for each individual region. Not only that, but they will allow the importing of MPs from other regions whose constituency responsibilities have nothing to do with the region they are going to be deliberating about.

So, a region in which the party of government holds the fewest number of Westminster seats will have a committee with a majority of members from the governing party scrutinizing the decisions and plans of a minister from that governing party which that region rejected when given the chance.

Democracy eh? Dontcha just love it! Here's the story from the Lib Dem newsfeed:

The Liberal Democrats yesterday accused the Government of abusing the opportunity to provide decent regional accountability by imposing its parliamentary majority on new regional Select Committees, even in areas where they have the fewest MPs. Shadow Leader of the House, Simon Hughes MP, challenged the proposed make up of the new committees in a House of Commons debate, as MPs voted in their favour yesterday. The need for the Committees to reflect voting patterns was, he said, a "central obligation" of devolution and something the Government had "failed to grasp". Simon illustrated the problems with the proposal by highlighting the situation in the south-west region...(read more)

I don't normally get to see the Daily Politics, but I'm on a week off at the moment and saw today's after PMQs. There was Yvette Cooper being grilled by Brillo who was asking whether Britons' status as the most personally indebted population in the G7 was anything to do with our current travails.

She kept avoiding the point, as usual, insisting that it was an American thing from which we had got infected. For your benefit, Yvette, you lying cow, here's what Eddie George said just eighteen months ago:

"In the environment of global economic weakness at the beginning of this decade... external demand was declining and related to that, business investment was declining," he said. "We only had two alternative ways of sustaining demand and keeping the economy moving forward - one was public spending and the other was consumption.

"We knew that we were having to stimulate consumer spending. We knew we had pushed it up to levels which couldn't possibly be sustained into the medium and long term. But for the time being, if we had not done that, the UK economy would have gone into recession just as the United States did."

He said he was "very conscious" that stimulating consumer demand could give rise to problems in the future. "My legacy to the MPC, if you like, has been 'sort that out'," he said. Under Lord George's governorship, rates were slashed from 6 per cent in 2001 to 3.5 per cent in 2003, pushing house price inflation above 25 per cent and high street spending growth to its highest since the late-Eighties boom.

I hardly expect tomorrow's papers to cover the news of Mrs Balls's resignation - but she is deliberately misleading the public and that would be the honourable course. I understand that you can only really begin to tackle a problem if you admit to it in the first place. Eddie George did; it's time this government did too. Disgusting, lying bunch of shit-crocks.

Just what did she study at Balliol, Harvard and the LSE?  Does she really believe we will just think she is stupid or mistaken?  What the fuck have the people of Pontefract done to deserve her?

When Gordon Brown came to power last year he promised a "government of all the talents". A year or so on and with what, 45,000,000 adults to choose from (most of whom of course would not touch his government, probably any government, with a very long barge-pole), one has to wonder just what talents he had in mind to bring this motley crew together:

Come to think of it, there's probably not one talent between them. These three, and this choice by the "dear leader" to bring them into government, just highlights for me how hopeless the very idea of state government is. There is no way that these people are somehow uniquely capable, any more than anyone else in the country, to make the momentous decisions we stupidly cede to the state to take on our behalf.

Courtesy of the Libertarian Alliance blog, I am drawn to a commentary on the Libertarian Party UK blog about an article by someone called Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. at mises.org (how's all that for being damned by the company I keep, or in this case the blogs I read!) about the relationship between the "state", the politicians who try to make us believe they are "running" it and the people in whose name they are supposed to be doing so.

It introduces me at least to the idea of the "personal" and the "impersonal" state.

The personal state is where the regime in power for the time being is synonymous with the state. Most obviously this is an absolute monarchy for example. The monarch is the state. When the monarch dies the regime dies with them and another replaces it. It may be largely the same but it is still a personal fiefdom if you like of the monarch in charge.

In the impersonal state, the predominant form for the past several centuries (ironically in Britain probably traced to the "Protectorate" or at least the Restoration), the state, its bureaucracy, apparatus and most of its policy direction go rumbling on from one regime to the next. The leader is the manager not the owner, if you will.

He says the political system, of parties, elections and so on, are a chimera, making us believe we are in a personal state. That is we elect a manager who cocks up somehow we just elect another one and everything will be different. But who is really in control?

I'm sure most of us active in politics used to chuckle at "Yes, [Prime] Minister", but we all know there is more than a grain of truth in the message that the bureaucracy just rumbles on, sometimes even deliberately frustrating the will of the current elected managers, knowing that if they hold out for long enough another lot of managers will come along who may be more to their tastes.

And I don't mean that this is a personal thing - that there is some conspiracy between individuals wielding power in smokey rooms and dark corridors. It's just the way the thing works in a big state. Look at the comment the other day by a Labour minister that she thought that by the time of the next General Election the ID card system would be so far down the line that it would be impossible for any new government, even one elected purely on a platform of opposing ID cards, to stop it.

Okay, I think, I hope at least, we can take that example with a large bucket of salt - after all, unless it's been designed by Cyberdine Systems to become "self-aware" on or before 5th May 2010, there will still be an "off switch" on the mainframe! But you get the idea. And if you've been a local councillor, you see it every day in the workings of your council bureaucracy - the same old surly faces, sometimes frustrating the ideas of the politicians and so on. We have come to know some of that as the "can't do" culture.

Rockwell's conclusion is that the political "game" is futile. Ideas can move the world, but they can't shift the bureaucratic apparatus of the state at the same rate. And I have to say, since I combine my party political presence with real action on alternative structures such as Community Land Trusts and social enterprise, that bears out. Indeed, whenever we need the imprimatur of the state, such as in planning issues and so on, the byzantine apparatus seems to do its utmost to frustrate or delay us.

I tend to disagree. Obviously, I suppose, since I remain involved in party politics. But I do recognize that for all the "change" we talk about, Nick Clegg talks about, Obama talks about, whoever talks about, it does seem that most things will just grind on the way they always have. We will complain about them. We may even blame Gordon Brown or someone else for them personally. But if we continue to play that same game we will never really change them.

I am in politics because I believe those big ideas can be introduced through the political system. So did our political forebears like Lloyd-George with his 1909 budget - he at least had the balls also to go head to head with the establishment that rejected his big ideas but still, essentially, lost. I don't advocate violent revolution, though at times it seems that little short of that will actually achieve the change necessary. But I do want us to grow the cojones to be radical, to propose the "ideals" not the "manageables", to aim high and be different. And to demolish this all powerful leviathan and start from the ground up again.

I return again to the idea that we are in an age of epochal change. Of the unprecedented ability for us individually to communicate with others all round the world. We have to begin to ask just how much of that "impersonal state" we need any longer. Cobden had it about right when he said that "peace will come to the earth when people have more to do with each other and governments less." Politicians, let humanity grow up. Realize your limits. Let go and do something productive for a change instead!