WHY SHOULD THE CHINESE PAY ANY ATTENTION?

I’ve been reflecting on my last 50 years of efforts at reforming public service systems – seeing if there was anything I could add to what I’ve already written, particularly about one of my last projects - in China.

Initially I belonged to the school which felt that the bureaucracy had too much power. A combination of Thatcher, “Yes, Minister” and New Labour saw my attitude swing back to the political system. More recently, the technocrats seemed to have wrested power back – only for Trump and Brexit to remind us that “the people” also have a voice.

The grand old man of this field is B Guy Peters whose The Politics of Bureaucracy first came out in the 1970s, is now in its 5^th edition and is considered the bible on this issue. He has been an inspiration and active presence since 1990 in the network of schools of public administration in central and eastern Europe (NISPAcee) – Politico-Administrative Relations – Who Rules? (2001) very much showing his influence. That this is still an important issue in the region is evident from recent publications such as The Principles of Public Administration produced by SIGMA (OECD) in 2016 and Quality of Public Administration – a toolbox for practitioners (EU 2017).

A lot of what the global community preaches as “good practice” in government structures is actually of very recent vintage in their own countries and is still often more rhetoric than actual practice. Of course public appointments, for example, should be made on merit – and not on the basis of family, ethnic or religious networks.

· But civil service appointments and political structures in Belgium and Netherlands, to name but two European examples, were – until very recently – influenced by religious and party considerations. Rules were set aside to keep religious and political blocks (or pillars) happy.

· In some countries indeed such as Northern Ireland (until recently). the form and rhetoric of objective administration in the public were completely undermined by religious divisions. All public goods (eg housing and appointments) were, until the end of the 20^th century, made in favour of Protestants.

· The Italian system has for decades been notorious for the systemic abuse of the machinery of the state by various powerful groups – with eventually the Mafia itself clearly controlling some key parts of it. US influence played a powerful part in sustaining this in the post-war period – but the collapse of communism removed that influence and has allowed the Italians to have a serious attempt at reforming the system. At least for a few years – before Berlusconi scuppered it all

These are well-known cases – but the more we look, the more we find that countries which have long boasted of their fair and objective public administration systems have in fact suffered serious intrusions by sectional interests.

The British and French indeed have invented words to describe the informal systems which perverted the apparent neutrality and openness of their public administration –

· the “old boy network” which was still the basis of the senior civil service in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s a century after the first major reform.

· And the elitist and closed nature of the French ENArque system has, in the new millennium, become the subject of heated debate in that country – the system of senior civil servants moving to business was known as “pantouflage”. And Macron recently decided to close the school

It is clear that national european systems are becoming more politicised. This trend was started by Margaret Thatcher who simply did not trust the senior civil service to do what she needed. She brought in individuals who had proved their worth in the private sector and came into government service for a limited period of time (sometimes part-time and unpaid) to do a specific task which the Minister or Prime Minister judged the civil servants to be incapable of doing. Her critique of the UK Civil Service was twofold –

- first that those at the top were so balanced and objective in their advice that they lacked the appetite to help lead and implement the changes she considered British society needed; and

- second that those further down the ladder lacked the management skills necessary to manage public services. The Labour Government since 1997 inherited a civil service they considered somewhat contaminated by 18 years of such dominant political government – and had more than 200 such political appointees.

Such trends are very worrying for the civil service which has lost the influence and constraining force they once had. The two decades since then have seen national reputations for integrity challenged – the British judicial system, for example, took a battering after a series of revelations of judicial cockups and its policing has always been suspect. But it was 2015 before a book with the title ”How Corrupt is Britain?” ed by D Whyte appeared – followed a few years later by “Democracy for Sale - dark money and dirty politics”; by Peter Geoghegan (2020).

Conclusion; Too much of the commentary of international bodies on transition countries seems oblivious to this history and these realities – and imagines that a mixture of persuasive rhetoric and arm-twisting can lead to relevant, rapid and significant changes in the behaviour of the political and administrative elites. A bit more humility is needed – and more thought about the realistic trajectory of change. To recognize this is not, however, to condone a system of recruitment by connections – “people we know”. Celebration of cultural differences can sometimes be used to legitimize practices which undermine social coherence and organizational effectiveness. The acid test of a State body is whether the public thinks they are getting good public services delivered in an acceptable way!

The first wave of enthusiasm, in global bodies and academia alike, for anti-corruption (or “good governance” as it was more diplomatically called) strategies ended in the new millennium – when a note of realism became evident. It was at that stage that I realized that some of the best analyses were coming from the anthropologists

Bill Clinton was famous for his election mantra – “economics, economics, economics”. In similar vein, instead of “best practice”, consultants should be repeating “CONTEXT, CONTEXT, CONTEXT”

Further Reading

Shifting obsessions – 3 essays on the politics of anti-corruption Ivan Krastev (2004) Bulgarian political scientist exposes the hypocrisy behind the rhetoric

Syndromes of corruption – wealth,power and democracy Michael Johnson (2005) An American political scientist who has been involved with the Transparency International work does good comparative work here

Corruption – anthropological perspectives edited by D Haller and C Shore (2005) quite excellent collection of case studies

Confronting Corruption, building accountability – lessons from the world of international development advising L Dumas, J Wedel and G Callman (2010)

Unaccountable – how anti-corruption watchdogs and lobbyists sabotaged america’s finance, freedom and security ; J Wedel (2016) another anthropologist

Making Sense of Corruption; Bo Rothstein (2017) one of the clearest expositions – this time by a Scandinavian political scientist

comment from Patrick Cockburn on the corruption of the British political class

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/09/the-power-elite.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2021/03/corruption-outsiders-overview.html

Send in the Clowns

The new deadline of 31 October fixed by the EU at Wednesday night's Summit proves that the UK has indeed “lost control”..... 
John Harris, out on his illuminating Brexit travels again, visited the Prime Minister’s constituency of Maidenhead - and is left almost literally tearing his hair at one Conservative activist's refusal to moderate his charge that the Prime Minister was a "traitor"......

Recent posts have explored whether novelists or social historians have the better skill-set to make sense of what is going on these days in England’s green and pleasant land.

I had clearly forgotten about comedians – with the Little Britain characters (of a decade ago) being obvious contenders for the award of those who best exemplify the country….Except there is stiff competition from the Frankie Boyle New World Order insights – let alone the classic Basil Fawlty (of 40 years ago).

Fawlty Towers was, above all, an ensemble piece about isolation. It was a portrait of rage and frustration, an exploration of the impotence that results when the world as we wish it to be is so agonisingly at odds with the world as it is.

It was the Brexit mindset incubating in the shabby surroundings of a down-at-heel hotel that had seen far better days.What is Basil Fawlty, beyond the proprietor of this macabre hotel? Well, he is a snob, for starters: in the first ever episode, "A Touch of Class", he abruptly reverses his customary hostility on learning that a prospective guest is a lord, clearly hoping that a visiting toff will magically improve the hotel’s social standing (one of his first conversational gambits is to rave to Lord Melbury about the properties of fields of wheat, which may perhaps have stuck somewhere in Theresa May’s psyche). 

A man of somewhat mysterious origins, Basil Fawlty is acutely class conscious, at once mistrustful of the working classes and a Labour party that he sees as encouraging their propensity for industrial action, and anxious about his own lack of social status. Professionals – experts, one might say – frighten him; rules and regulations intimidate him; the need to ingratiate himself to foreigners infuriates him. 

The put-upon Spanish waiter, Manuel, is, for Basil, there to receive a last kick – usually up the backside – from imperial Britain. He is another outsider to be pushed, prodded, poked and communicated with through a loudhailer. But the British empire to which Basil wants to return is already a thing of the past; the world more complicated than his blinkered mind can admit. Watch Fawlty’s visceral horror as young people flaunt their sexuality, as the common people dare to holiday in sedate Torquay, and – in a moment that causes Fawlty to literally jump in disbelief – the NHS is staffed by doctors who are black.

Basil’s most celebrated meltdown comes, of course, when he is confronted with a touring group of well-to-do, articulate, friendly Germans. His psyche splits: he knows he must be welcoming, but cannot find the mental space or language that allows him to forget the second world war…….
 If only we had picked up that Basil – far from being a glimpse into the past – was a snapshot of the future, we might have been able to do something about it.

For the more cerebral amongst us, however, there is another, equally hallowed and longer running, series which captured the belief system at the heart of this blessed land – Yes Minister – which graced our television screens for most of the 1980s. There indelibly is Perfidious Albion in drag – the foibles of the political class exposed for all to see

What we didn’t know at the time was that the brilliant creator of the series – Anthony Jay – had based his script on the theories of the “public choice” economists who promulgated the view that all “public servants” were serving….their own interests…..

In  other words, the series was laying the ground for the neoliberal doctrine which has led to such cynicism about politics….(the last link is to a powerful short article supporting this thesis)

Despite this, I am a great admirer of Anthony Jay’s work which encompassed some great non-fictions books. “Management and Machiavelli” (1969) enthused me no end (I was battling a traditional bureaucracy at the time) - and he “almost single-handedly resurrected the academic study of that 15^th century genius. And Jay followed it up with an equally brilliant book – “Corporation Man” – based on his observations of the BBC…… His talents even extended to tossing off elegant guides to running an effective meetings! Indeed some of my more regular readers will know that I have been known to use his “Democracy, Bernard, it must be stopped” when discussing the workings of the political class. For my money, the article can’t be bettered…

I once found an edited transcript to the entire Yes Minister series which I left behind in Sofia but was delighted to find the entire work here for my permanent perusal!

Update

The role of the comic or jester in politics seems to be in the air these days since there were a couple of learned discussions of the issue this month – on both sides of the Atlantic. First, the NYR Daily gave us this nice walk down Memory Lane - What Koestler knew about jokes

William Davis is a very serious policy wonk whose The Funny Side of Politics also came to my attention only after this post. It surprised me in making no reference to Arthur Koestler who famously explored the dynamics of the joke in 1949 in the first part of Insight and Outlook – an inquiry into the common foundations of science, art and social ethics and updated his thoughts in The Act of Creation, (1964) devoting 100 pages to an exposition on The Jester. It mist have been the second book that I read in the 1960s and remember being bowled over by it.

His approach continues to attract attention as can be seen in this nice comparison with Bergson a few years back and this rather more ponderous  25 page analysis of his theory from the 1980s  

And, while we’re on the subject of politics as entertainment, let’s not forget Neil Postman’s brilliant Amusing Ourselves to Death; (1985) and Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the elimination of television;  (1978).

LRB also gave us a few years ago this great overview of the English satiric tradition - Sinking into the Sea - which took as its cue a little book entitled "The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson" edited by Harry Mount