SUBSTACK ENCOURAGES EASILY-BRUISED EGOS

I’ve just been thrown off a substack to which I was a paying subscriber for daring to make a negative comment about Ian Leslie’s latest post which was about a member of the gilded elite I had never heard of and which read to me like a typical entry in a celebrity columnist. This is what Leslie said in his reply -

This is absurd. The piece concerns one of the biggest financial news stories of the last year and the ethical questions surrounding it. I can't help it if you haven't been paying attention but just because you haven't heard about the story doesn't mean it's not important. The piece is quite clearly critical of the elites it describes; hardly brown-nosing. I will now voluntarily cancel your subscription for being such a dick

For anyone actually interested in the contretemps and Leslie’s stupid reaction I suggest you try to access https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/can-we-blame-sam-bankman-frieds-parents

The irony is that Ian Leslie wrote a (good) book called "Conflicted" in which he extolls the benefits of disputation - something which he clearly can't now bear!!

My blogger friend Boffy was kind enough to send me a note of support, making the good point that substack people tend to develop their little bubble which brooks no criticism – except that he put it rather more eloquently viz

Typical of the intolerance of a lot of discourse, nowadays, fuelled by the fact that large sections of the petty-bourgeois Left have closeted themselves away in "safe spaces" so as not to have to justify their arguments and behaviour, and can simply massage their ego by only talking to sycophants in their own tiny silos, whilst "no platforming", i.e. bureaucratically excluding any alternative view. It is actually the basis of totalitarianism.

So, even when they could simply defend their arguments, they now choose, often, not to do so. The whole atmosphere generated by the idea of "safe spaces", is also one that generates paranoia, particularly in the era of the Internet/social media, in which anyone, as with you, in this case, who simply posits an alternative view, even if based on a lack of knowledge/information, is immediately identified as being a cunning "bad actor", to be excluded without further ado. No good will come of it, and the Left certainly will only go backwards rather than forwards on that basis, much as happened with Stalinism in the 20th century.

UPDATE; And Ian Leslie is simply wrong in saying that "this is one of the biggest financial news stories", since there is a far more important issue – namely the US prosecution of Google for its monopolisation - see John Naughton’s latest article https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/30/google-antitrust-us-department-of-justice-court-case-monopoly

THE PIC - is of some French bookmarks I bought in a flea-market a decade or so ago. The ones at the top are wooden; those at the front plastic. And they are on the oak desk in my Carpathian mountain house

A Change from my usual technocratic reading

My normal reading tends to be on technical matters – about, for example, the dangers facing democracy; clinate change; development; or reform – in which a problem and possible causes are identified and solutions floated. I often get bored and impatient with the dryness with which an important tale is told – so it came as a great delight when I stumbled on At Work in the Ruins – finding our place in a time of science, climate change, pandemics and other emergencies by Dougald Hine (2023). Instead of the usual dryness, I find an almost poetic originality – a baring of the soul. Let Hine introduce his work

When we start to talk about climate change, we enter into a conversation that is framed 

by science. How could it be otherwise? Climate change is a scientific term. It refers to a 

set of processes that are described by the natural sciences. Yet climate change also asks

 questions that science cannot answer. Some lie downstream of the work of science. When 

it comes to what to do about climate change, responsibility passes from the scientists to the 

engineers and the economists, while psychologists and marketing experts are brought in to 

figure out how to ‘deliver the message’ and ‘drive behaviour change’. 
In the rooms where I was brought together with religious leaders and artists and Indigenous 

elders, it mostly felt as though we were being enlisted in this downstream effort. The hope 

was that we had some wisdom or experience or practice that might help the news from the 

climate scientists to reach the wider public imagination. But the point that I would make in 

those rooms – and that often seemed to land and lead to fruitful conversations with the scientists 

present – is that there are also questions that lie upstream of the work of science and take 

us beyond the frame it draws. These are not about what needs doing and how, but about 

how we got here in the first place, the nature and the implications of the trouble we are in. 

Such questions might sound abstract compared to the practical concerns of those who want 

to find solutions, but how we answer them has consequences. It shapes our understanding of 

the situation, what kind of problem we think we’re dealing with and, therefore, what kind of 

solutions we go looking for.

You could hear this vulnerability in the voices of those at the heart of the climate movements 

that erupted in 2018 and in the quieter conversations going on within the local groups that 

formed during that moment. Yet all this talk was still taking place within the vessel of science,

 and this produced strange contortions and contradictions. The language of science is 

understated by design. It is hardly suited to speaking in prophetic tones, but this was the 

signature of these movements. The strangeness of the shift in register applied as much to 

Greta Thunberg, who was fiercely careful to keep her statements within the bounds of the 

scientific consensus, as it did to Extinction Rebellion’s Roger Hallam or to Jem Bendell, the 

Cumbria University professor whose self-published paper ‘Deep Adaptation: A Map for 

Navigating Climate Tragedy’ – based on his alternative interpretation of the scientific data 

– went viral that autumn. Whether in alliance with or antagonism to the actual climate scientists

, the calls to action were increasingly framed in the name of something called ‘the science’. 

An understandable shorthand for the consensus over the key processes of climate change 

built up over decades of research by thousands of teams around the world, this way of talking 

also had the effect of invoking a singular authority whose implications remained to be seen. ‘

Unite Behind the Science’ read the placards and the hashtags, and the more this message 

was repeated, the stronger the frame of science around our climate conversations became 

and the less room there would be for looking beyond that frame.

It may seem odd to be calling a book premised on the world ending
shortly “delightful” but it is one of these rare ones which makes
you look at the world differently.There’s an excellent video discussion here for 

those of you who prefer to see the interaction and how people deal with difficult 

questions

Two things happened next to change the context of anything that any of us 

might have to say about climate change. First, in the time of Covid, the political 

invocation of science took on a new colour. Faced with a novel threat about which 

there was far less scientific understanding or consensus than climate change, politicians 

nonetheless discovered the effectiveness of introducing radical policies in the name of 

‘following the science’. Meanwhile, the implications of the demand to ‘Unite Behind the 

Science’ became clearer. I saw the people who had taught me to think carefully about 

science and the questions that it cannot answer on its own, when they attempted to 

address the questions raised by the pandemic, being told by angry, frightened readers 

to ‘Just shut up and take the fucking vaccine!’ Or being scolded by their peers for drifting 

towards ‘conspiracy theory’. In the name of ‘the science’, it is possible to decree what 

should be done and to close off the possibility of further public conversation.

And I particularly liked his image of a fork in the road

Here is what I’m seeing, then: the political contours emerging from the pandemic 

foreshadow a fork in the road for the politics of climate change. We would always have 

come to this fork, one way or another. As long as the goal was to have climate change 

taken seriously, this could unite us, however different our understandings of what taking 

climate change seriously might mean. As we near that goal, though, the differences in 

understanding come more sharply into focus. But we have reached that point, or something 

like it, under conditions in which the authority of ‘the science’ has been supercharged.
Two paths lead from here: one big, one small. The big path is a brightly lit 

highway on which many lanes converge. It unites elements of left and right, 

from Silicon Valley visionaries and Wall Street investors, through a broad 

swathe of liberal opinion and in some form it will constitute the political orthodoxy 

\of the 2020s. It sets out to limit the damage of climate change through large-scale 

efforts of management, control, surveillance and innovation, oriented to sustaining a 

version of existing trajectories of technological progress, economic growth and development.

The small path is a trail that branches off into many paths. It is made by those 

who seek to build resilience closer to the ground, nurturing capacities and relationships,

oriented to a future in which existing trajectories of technological progress, economic

growth and development will not be sustained, but where the possibility of a ‘world 

worth living for’ nonetheless remains. Humble as it looks, as your eyes adjust, you may

recognise just how many feet have walked this way and how many continue to do so, even now.

Which of these paths I would have us take is clear enough. The big path is a fast track to 

nowhere. We will not arrive at the world of fossil-free jumbo jets promised by the airport 

adverts. The entitlements of late modernity are not compatible with the realities of 

life on a finite planet and they do not even make us happy. But we may well follow that 

path for a while longer, as it leads us deeper into dystopia and leaves us more dependent

on fragile technological systems that few of us understand or can imagine living without. 

And what I think I can see now is that the very language of climate change will be owned, 

from here on out, by the engineers and marketeers of the big path. Any conversation about 

the trouble we are in, so long as it starts within the newly politicised frame of science, 

will lead inexorably to their solutions.

A critical review of the book can be found here  

Further video discussions about the book

https://www.youtube.com/@dougald

Feb Leeds https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iCzlw9e2hM&ab_channel=DougaldHine better sound

April 2023 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-B42sHf9p80&ab_channel=JohnGIClarke

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaCatcin7n8&ab_channel=DougaldHine

A CALL TO ARMS

I’m re-reading an important book about Artificial Intelligence - all the more important since it comes out of the conversations had by 3 individuals teaching a course on the subject - System Error – how big tech went wrong and how we can reboot (2021) by a philospher, a top-level computer scientist and a political adviser/”scientist”. Such a multi-disciplinary authorship gives me more confidence in the book although its emphasis on the importance of values is perhaps an indication of the philosopher’s influence. I had forgotten that I had posted about it a couple of years ago

At 400 pages it could and should be much shorter and fails two of the tests I set some 3 years ago for non-fiction books

• its intro doesn’t summarise each chapter to allow the reader to get a sense of the book’s thrust (some chapter subheadings do give hints)

• it lacks the short guide to further reading which might help the reader understand any author bias

The chapters headings do give some guidance about the book’s argument-

1. The Optimisation Mindset – where tech engineers are set up as the bogeymen

2. the Unholy Marriage of Hackers and Venture Capitalists

3. The Race between Disruption and Democracy

4. Can Algorithmic decisions ever be fair?

5. What’s your Privacy worthwhile?

6. Can Humans flourish in a world of smart machines?

7. Will free speech survive the Internet?

8. Can Democracie rise to the challenge?

Here are some excerpts -

When we uncritically celebrate technology or unthinkingly criticize it, the end result is to leave technologists in charge of our future. This book was written to provide an understanding of how we as individuals, and especially together as citizens in a democracy, can exercise our agency, reinvigorate our democracy, and direct the digital revolution to serve our best interests

We must resist the temptation to think in extremes. Both techno-utopianism and -dystopianism are all too facile and simplistic outlooks for our complex age. Instead of taking the easy way out or throwing our hands up in the air, we must rise to the defining challenge of our era: harnessing technological progress to serve rather than subvert the interests of individuals and societies. We can’t leave our technological future to engineers, venture capitalists, and politicians. This book lays out the dangers of leaving the optimizers in charge and empowers all of us to make the difficult decisions that will determine how technology transforms our society.

There are few more important tasks before us in the twenty-first-century. When we act collectively, we not only take charge of our own destiny, we also make it far likelier that our technological future will be one in which individuals will flourish alongside, and because of, a reinvigorated democracy.

Concluding Chapter In the blink of an eye, our relationship with technology changed. We once connected with family and friends on social networks. Now they’re viewed as a place for disinformation and the manipulation of public health and elections. We enjoyed the convenience of online shopping and the unfettered communication that smartphones brought us. Now they’re seen as a means to collect data from us, put local stores out of business, and hijack our attention. We shifted from a wide-eyed optimism about technology’s liberating potential to a dystopian obsession with biased algorithms, surveillance capitalism, and job-displacing robots. It’s no surprise, then , that trust in technology companies is declining. Yet too few of us see any alternative to accepting the onward march of technology. We have simply accepted a technological future designed for us by technologists. 

It need not be so. There are many actions we can take as an initial line of defense against the disruptions of big tech in our personal, professional, and civic lives. Perhaps the most important first step is one you’ve already taken by getting to this point in the book, which is to inform yourself about the myriad ways technology impacts your life. To fight for your rights in high-stakes decisions, you need to understand whether an algorithm is involved. In contexts such as being denied a mortgage, losing access to social services, or encountering the criminal justice system, you may have a right to seek more transparency into the processes.

One of my criticisms of “System Error” is that it lacks a short guide on “further reading” for those who wanted to get guidance about key books in the field. This, of course, is not an easy task. It requires authors to put their prejudices aside and try to identify the most important texts – not just contemporary but in the field as a whole. These are my suggestions -

Background Reading on Technology
The Technological Society Jacques Ellul 1964

The Revolution of Hope - toward a humanized technology by Eric Fromm 1968

The Republic of Technology Daniel Boorstin 1978

Between two ages – america's role in the technetronic era Zbigniew Brzezinski 1980

The Technological System Jacques Ellul 1980.

The Impact of Science James Burke, Isaac Asimov (NASA 1985)

The Whale and the Reactor – a search for limits in the age of high technology Langdon 

Winner 1986

The Technological Bluff Jacques Ellul 1989

The Second Machine Age – work, progress and prosperity in a time of brilliant 

technologies; Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014

Interesting that I can find only a couple of critical books in the new millennium!! 

Were previous generations really that more critical??

Are Centrists Evil?

The older I get, the more radical my opinions become. This is not how its supposed to be – although this fascinating analysis of 40 years of plotting british attitudes does say that -

“The public first began to look to government rather more in the wake of the financial crash of 2008-9, though in the event that mood appears eventually to have dissipated. However, the same cannot be said, so far at least, of the COVID-19 pandemic. Expectations of government in the wake of that public health crisis have never been higher. The public shows no sign so far of wanting to row back on the increased taxation and spending that has been part of the legacy of the pandemic, not least perhaps because of their dissatisfaction with the state of the health service. Meanwhile, there are now also record levels of support for more defence spending. So far as the public are concerned at least, the era of smaller government that Margaret Thatcher aimed to promulgate – and which Liz Truss briefly tried to restore in the autumn of 2022 with her ill-fated ‘dash for growth’ – now seems a world away.”

Ultimately any political party that wants to survive has to respect these trends and work within them. Public opinion may well swing back in the other direction in the future, but for now anyone who thinks the Truss programme is one voters will buy is entirely delusional.

Duncan Green of Oxfam has a useful post about the report which focuses more on the increased libertarianism of the UK rather than on expectations about the State

This blog has, on occasion, confessed my erstwhile liberalism or “centrism”. For example I did recently find that this Rory Stewart video interview about “the truth about British politics” just before the UK general election of 2019 was “brilliantly thoughtful” – not least for the care with which he treated the questions; hardly the most common of a politician’s responses. But a devastating profile in The New Statesman about Stewart’s book tour promoting “Politics on the Edge” has made me realise how shallow that reaction was.

It’s a book of recrimination, anger, shame and oblivion. It is about the failures of the Conservative Party, the failures of Britain, and the failures of Rory Stewart who said “he kept coming back to Tacitus” as he wrote. The Roman historian’s Annals describe the eclipse of the senate: its powerlessness under successive emperors and its descent into servile degeneracy. “Politics on the Edge” has the same message: parliament once knew better days. Its members are squandering a precious inheritance. Their failures are moral. Stewart thinks it will “make a lot of people angry”.

Stewart’s big mate these days is, of course, Alastair Campbell – the two of them have presented for the past year what has become the UK’s favourite podcast “The Rest is Politics” which I find a bit too smug and self-satisfied but which does exude a good sense of the “centrism” which is the focus of my concerns. Campbell actively promotes The New European weekly which has gone so far as to feature an excerpt from Stewart’s new book

But why do I find this “centrism” so objectionable?

Is it just GUILT about my previous incarnation?

Perhaps this post from 12 years ago gives a sort of an answer

In 2011 I was invited by a Romanian journal to write a piece about the 10^th anniversary of 9/11. My article was entitled “The Dog that didn’t bark” but the editors carried the warning that it was “a view from the left”. At the time I posted that certain issues arose from such labelling -

• Do the editors not realise that use of such a label for one (only) of the articles is effectively an invitation to their readers to ignore it or treat it with suspicion? What does this say about freedom of expression?

• It has been recognised for a long time that the left-right labelling makes little sense. Wikipedia has an excellent briefing on this. And I recommend people do their own test on the political compass website - which uses two (not one) dimensions to try to situate people politically.

• Criticism of the logic and effects of “neo-liberalism” has come from a great variety of quarters – not least the ordo-liberalism which has been the backbone of the post-war German economy.

• Finally, there is the issue of whether I deserve the label which has been thrown at me – either from the article or from the range of beliefs I actually hold. The references in my article are impeccably mainstream academia (Colin Crouch; Henry Mintzberg) and a final section clearly signals that I have no truck with statism. All my political life I have supported community enterprise and been opposed to state ambitions. My business card describes me as an “explorer” – which refers not so much to the nomadic nature of my life in the last 20 years as the open nature for my search for both a satisfactory explanation of how societies and economies work; with what results; and the nature of relevant mechanisms for adjusting what societies judge (through democratic processes) to be unacceptable trends. I admit to having been attracted in my youth to the British New Left’s analysis of British inequality in the late 1950s - but I was profoundly influenced at University by people such as Karl Popper and his The Open Society and its Enemies, Schumpeter (his “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy” and Ralf Dahrendorf; and, at a more practical level, by Andrew Shonfield and Tony Crosland who were also writing then about the benefits of the “mixed economy”.

More recently I have generally been a fan of the writings of Will Hutton (whose stakeholder analysis of UK society was disdained by Tony Bliar on becoming PM). As an academic I was convinced by the critical analysis of UK and US political scientists in the 1970s which went variously under the terms “Limits of the State” or “problems of implementation” and was the softer end of the “public choice school” of institutional economics.

But, unusually, the anarchistic/libertarian sweep of Ivan Illich and Paulo Freire also got to me in the 1970s (which is why I am (unusually) located in the south west quadrant of the political compass). I therefore not only disdained the injunctions of the dominant left and right extremes of British politics of the 1980s but, as an influential Scottish regional politican, used my role to create more open processes of policy-making. Indeed community activists and opposition politicians were more important partners for me than members of my own party.
I held on to my leading political position on the huge Regional Council simply because I belonged to neither the left or right factions amongst my colleagues but was their natural second choice! The definitions I give in Just Words - a glossary and bibliography for the fight against the pretensions and perversities of power reveal the maverick me.

For the past 20 years, however, since I left the UK to work as an adviser on institutional development in central europe and central asia , I have not been involved in politics. My interest is to find some common ground in all the critiques of the current social and economic malaise – and to develop some consensus about the actions which might be taken.

Conclusion;

The heading to this post was deliberately eye-catching – meant only to challenge the all-too-easy liberal acceptance of the way things are. “So isst die Welt und musst nicht so sein” is still my watchword. Rory Stewart may have too high a profile for me but still remains a very interesting guy – this interview has him parse UK politics in a quite fascinating way 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dw6ZyJ-3H8g&ab_channel=NovaraMedia

HOW CORPORATE POWER undermines democracy

1975 saw the publication of the infamous The Crisis of Democracy – report on the governability of democracies by the Trilateral Commission which argued that democracy had gone too far and was endangering the very stability of the system. It carried the names of Michel Crozier and Samuel Huntington; made respectable the phrases “state overload”; and effectively launched neoliberalism. Some 2 decades later – when communism collapsed in Central and Eastern Europe – the effort moved into a higher gear. “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy,” by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard is a rare book which charts the way the corporate coup d’état was orchestrated. It examines the use of an international legal system (International Centre for the Settlement of International Disputes or ICSID) to control and plunder the resources in the developing world, including the overthrow of governments that challenge corporate dominance. Although one of the authors has been a Financial Times journalist, the MSM has been remarkably quiet in its reviews. One of the few journals prepared to review the book was a leftist one

By mid-2014 it had heard nearly 500 cases almost all since the mid-1990s. This was 

the era when neoliberal free market capitalism was let off the leash following the 

collapse of the Stalinist states in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. This temporarily 

opened an era of a unipolar world dominated by US imperialism, which by the early 21st 

century gave way to the multipolar world we have today.
By 2021, the number of cases heard by the ICSID had risen to almost 900 – with more than 

one new case a week that year. This growth reflects the new multipolar world and the growth 

of the power of multinational giants. It is part of the international investor-state legal system.

Little-known legal system
What has developed over decades allows investor access to a little-known legal system. 

Through thousands of treaties, a state gives advance consent to allow foreign investors to 

take them to international tribunals, such as the ICSID. This means that countries that 

signed up contracts for foreign investors were also signing up to resolve any dispute between 

the national government and companies by agencies such as the ICSID – a subcommittee of 

the World Bank and other imperialist institutions. A huge lucrative legal industry has sprung 

up around this system.
In the early period of the ICSID, most cases were from companies taking legal action 

against countries in the neocolonial world. Now, as this book reveals, this is in the process 

of changing. German investors had filed cases against countries in the neocolonial world. 

But in 2009, Germany found itself in the dock, when the Swedish company Vattenfall filed 

a case against Germany with the World Bank’s ICSID over its controversial new coal-fired 

power plant near Hamburg. This change illustrates the growing power of these enterprises, 

to the point where they come into conflict with competing nation states.

The international investor-state dispute system has evolved over decades; possibly being traced back to a conference of international bankers held in San Francisco in 1957. Around 500 of the world’s senior bankers, industrialists, and politicians gathered together and began campaigning for a new ‘capitalist Magna Carta’ to enshrine and protect the rights of private investors worldwide. A key figure at this gathering was the German banker, Hermann Josef Abs, head of Deutsche Bank and director of several giant corporations like Daimler-Benz and Lufthansa. His rise in the financial world took place under the Nazi regime in Germany, but it didn’t end with its fall. Although he never joined the Nazi Party, Deutsche Bank had handled its accounts. World events in this era in the neocolonial world, such as the nationalisation of the oil fields in Iran in 1951 and the Suez Canal in 1956, were undoubtedly events that drove the ruling capitalist classes in the imperialist countries to instigate steps to muzzle democratic voice.

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