Centralisation, it's causes and culprits

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Interesting little piece (and discussion) here: http://nevertrustahippy.blogspot.com/2008/03/centralisation-its-causes-and-culprits.html

[Ban my account ffs!]

Interesting little piece (and discussion) here: http://nevertrustahippy.blogspot.com/2008/03/centralisation-its-causes-and-culprits.html

Oooooh... oh oh.. *now* I get it... you're talking about centraliZation... boy, did I feel like an idiot there for a second.  I honestly had NO idea what you were talking about until *BAM* it hit me "this poor fellow means 'centralization!'"

Oh, and just in case you didn't quite catch my drift:

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Are you drunk or are you always this much a mindless dick-waving chauvinist?

[minionofmidas]

*likes*

Some blind spots though. Mostly due to being written by an Englishman.

[afleitch]

1..2..3...10 paragraphs to get to Mrs T. He makes a few good point but there is alot of chaff in there. Unfortunately he ignores the fact that the current government spent £70bn on getting outsourced professionals to duplicate the work of the civil service through consultancy contracts. If he has concern for the concentration of both power and money he should really have adressed that.

EDIT: Actually the direction of his centralisation argument period is a little off. I'll write something up about that.

[afleitch]

'but mandarins that were well-disposed to blend what they'd learned at the hands of their Thatcherite nannies with Labour's priorities. So political centralisation isn't even the hoovering up of power into the hands of the current Prime Minister.'

My general complaint is with the above statement.

The whole civil service rests on the principle of 'access.' Now of course the upper tiers of the civil service, at Whitehall and close to the government should not operate as a hierarchy; there is a triangular relationship between the ministers, their special 'advisers' and their permanent secretaries. However increasingly under Labour, the permanent secretary is somewhat cut out of this relationship. The permanent secretary is the main link with lower tiers of the civil service; those who actually do the work but the personal-professional relationship between the minister and the adviser is far stronger than the professional relationship between the minister and the permanent secretary. As such the advisor can block, or filter the path of access between the minister and the permanent secretary and those below them for political purposes.

The autonomous agencies which the blogger seems to be interested out are not the problem, nor were the reforms implemented in the 80's. Such agencies no longer run autonomously; they are targeted by directives and pronouncements and at higher access levels are inhibited by constant departmental changes enacted by Number 10 on the advice of external consultants.

As a civil servant myself on one of the lower rungs of the ladders no one has an effing clue what the hell is going on. We have internal processes which are then checked by civil service processes which are then further checked by consultancy processes. And who do the ministers listen to? The consultants. Who tends to the consultants? The advisors to the minister.

It's naïve for the blogger to think that power is not being 'vacuumed' up to the Prime Minister. That's exactly where it goes when the permanent secretary is denied access. The differences between Brown and Blair, what may in fact be the source of Browns problems is that he doesn't know what to do with that authority. Blair delegated it. So much so in fact that if anything fell off the wagon it was so far away from him that he emerged unscathed with little tangable connection to the problem in the first place. Brown however centralises the delegation process even further; he runs by cabal. He runs Number 10 in the same way he ran the Treasury. Now you can get away with that in the Treasury such is the internal culture of responsibility within (which is why he knows better than some in his party not to make silly links between David Cameron and Norman Lamont, as he knows Cameron had as much access to to the Treasury mandarins as people in the mail room would have) and Browns been a Treasury man whether in power or in opposition all his parliamentary career. Secondly Blair let him get on with it; he kept his enemies busy.

Brown does what comes naturally to him. Unfortunately he picked up some of Blair's old nasty habits. While he doesn't have the infamous '7am policy', he does operate policy by decree rather than by planning and this will only be exacerbated in a government that appears to be in terminal decline. Ultimately, civil servants are now in a position of being told to instigate and operate policies of which they knew nothing until they appear in a newspaper or hear them on the GMTV sofa (at the request of ministerial and prime ministerial special advisors). This process is now being used in reverse with policies being pulled at the 11th hour (such as extra fees on household waste collection) because at the 12th hour that policy ceases to be the civil service's baby and is the immediate responsibility of the government and a self conscious PM. It leaves the Civil Service in a shambles on the short term as well the long term.

The final point, and probably the most concerning for this government is that no one is blaming the civil service anymore. And the apples are landing closer to the tree now than they did under Blair.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

1..2..3...10 paragraphs to get to Mrs T. He makes a few good point but there is alot of chaff in there. Unfortunately he ignores the fact that the current government spent £70bn on getting outsourced professionals to duplicate the work of the civil service through consultancy contracts. If he has concern for the concentration of both power and money he should really have adressed that.

EDIT: Actually the direction of his centralisation argument period is a little off. I'll write something up about that.

I didn't post this because of what it said about current domestic politics in Britain specifically, but because of the general arguments about centralisation and why it happens. Which is why it was posted in this board.

In any case you can hardly write a piece on centralisation in Britain and not mention the government that abolished the GLC and the Met Councils and which generally did more damage to local government than any since the introduction of local democracy in the 19th century. From a historical perspective a more valid complaint would be a failure to mention the proposals for local government reform in the '50's, 60's and early '70's and what kind of reform was actually introduced (after all, the GLC itself was the product of centralisation; despite covering a larger area than the LCC it was actually less powerful).

[afleitch]

1..2..3...10 paragraphs to get to Mrs T. He makes a few good point but there is alot of chaff in there. Unfortunately he ignores the fact that the current government spent £70bn on getting outsourced professionals to duplicate the work of the civil service through consultancy contracts. If he has concern for the concentration of both power and money he should really have adressed that.

EDIT: Actually the direction of his centralisation argument period is a little off. I'll write something up about that.

I didn't post this because of what it said about current domestic politics in Britain specifically, but because of the general arguments about centralisation and why it happens. Which is why it was posted in this board.

In any case you can hardly write a piece on centralisation in Britain and not mention the government that abolished the GLC and the Met Councils and which generally did more damage to local government than any since the introduction of local democracy in the 19th century. From a historical perspective a more valid complaint would be a failure to mention the proposals for local government reform in the '50's, 60's and early '70's and what kind of reform was actually introduced (after all, the GLC itself was the product of centralisation; despite covering a larger area than the LCC it was actually less powerful).

Well the main issue I had was with power and centralisation within the civil service and that's what I responded to.

As for local government, considering the same principles and hierarchies are becoming more prevailant within local authorites (I'm not going to insult your intelligence by asking if you read Rotten Boroughs in Private Eye, my favourite part of the magazine ) Such structures operating in local or national government still result in a centralisation of power to the same people and the same fashions in which I talked about.

Therefore creating smaller units of local government on the map with the pretence of 'decentralisation' (not that I'm saying that is a bad thing as I am a proponent of root and branch reorganisation of local government) may simply lead to replication of the practice over a wider scale. Power is then centralised in the hands of them same sorts of people.

It's a culture of that will survive and operate regardless of the re-organisation of power bodies into smaller or larger units (as we have seen with reorganisation of government departments and ministries since '97) Thats a wider problem in the democratic process than simply 'how many councils you have'.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Power is then centralised in the hands of them same sorts of people.

To turn a specific point into a general one, from my point of view it doesn't really matter in who's hands power is centralised into; whether the power flows to old fashioned manderins or newer more partisan-political figures isn't the point. The point is that power moves away from local government and other alternative centres of power (and, ultimately, from ordinary people) towards unaccountable and undemocratic institutions in the main power centre (or centres).