Ed,
At 10:09 09/07/01 -0400, Ed Weick wrote:
(KH)
>> So here's a short summary of my views of the Civil Service:
>>
>> The Civil Service in England (and undoubedly in all nation-states, too)
>was
>> started as a self-conscious top-down organisation and has remained so ever
>> since, meanwhile "capturing" the so-called democratic process of politics.
>> Essentially, even though it is an intellectual body rather than something
>> established by force -- as almost all other governing bodies have been
>> throughout history -- it suffers from not receiving sufficient feedback
>> from the masses. These days, when economic life is so much more complex
>> than ever before, hierarchical structures can't cope with the flow of
>> information that's necessary for optimal governance. The typical civil
>> services of nation-states are patently failing (as also mass membership of
>> political parties) and, as a consequence, we are already seeing the
>> emergence of powerful specialised pressure groups which are seeking to
>> influence political decision-making from the bottom upwards, aided by the
>> media and other devices (opinion polls, etc).
(EW)
>In my opinion, bureaucracies continually face two issues which severely
>curtail their ability to respond to emerging problems. One is that they are
>required to operate by fixed rules within fixed jurisdictional boundaries,
>while the problems they have to deal with do not respect fixed rules or
>boundaries. Within any bureaucratic agency, a great deal of time is spent
>on determining whether an emergent problem is properly within its purview or
>within that of another agency or indeed within that of any agency. As a
>former bureaucrat, I spent a lot of time at interdepartmental meetings
>sorting out how to deal with problems. Often, solving the problem was not
>the issue, who had the mandate to solve it was.
>
>The other problem is that government agencies do not ultimately respond to
>the public, they respond to the political party that happens to be in power.
Yes, they're "loyal" to their government ministers in that they don't let
them down, contradict them publicly or pursue contrary policies but, in
practice, the mandarins of any particular civil service department pay far
closer attention to the most powerful pressure group within its purview in
order to protect it and, in turn, themselves. For example, the Ministry of
Agriculture has more or less been following the policies of the National
Farmers' Union (mainly comprising the bigger farmers) for many years. (In
order to protect the big farmers' export trade, the Ministry adopted the
slaughter policy in the case of Foot-and-Mouth disease despite the fact
that the policy devastated the prospects of thousands of small farmers and
thousands of tourist-dependent businesses.) The Ministry of Education has
gone along with the teaching unions over the last several decades,
ratcheting up certification devices, adopting the latest pedagogic
fashions, imposing uniform methods, reducing standards for children and so
on. The Home Office has long been captured by the Prison Warders' trade
union, so that many large prisons and remand centres are now cesspits of
despair and drug-taking. (No Home Office Minister has ever publicly stated
the obvious fact that it is the warders who are actually taking the drugs
into the prisons.) The Defence Department are in hock to the large
armaments manufacturers. And so on and so on. A very significant proportion
of the most senior mandarins retire early and take up well-paid
directorships to add to their inflation-proofed pensions. (The civil
service has had inflation-proofed pensions since the 1950s. The civil
service mandarins made no attempt to persuade government Ministers that it
was only fair to pass legislation so that all company and national pensions
should be inflation-proofed, even during the period of super-inflation in
the 70s.)
(EW)
>Senior public servants are enormously conscious of protecting the asses of
>their political masters. It is not only their jobs that depend on it, but,
>I would argue, the integrity of the nation state depends on it as well. Can
>you imagine the chaos if bureaucrats openly disagreed with their political
>masters?
Yes, they look after their political masters to protect themselves. I am
not in any way suggesting that senior civil servants are uniformly
hypocritical or acting in bad faith. Since the formation of the CS in 1870s
we have had many outstanding mandarins, and many who were conscientious in
desiring to serve the public. But the main motivation of the CS is to look
after itself first and foremost.
A very good book on the UK civil service (that is, of the mandarins at the
very top) is "The Powers behind the Prime Minister: the hidden influence of
Number 10" (HarperCollins 1999) by Dennis Kavanagh (Prof of Politicis at
Liverpool U) and Anthony Seldon (Director of the Institute of Contemporary
British History). This is a scholarly book and written with great
restraint, but it clearly shows the immense power and virtual
untouchability of the senior officials and the way they use the system for
their own benefit.
(One would imagine that if politicians were the masters and civil servants
the servants then civil service pay would be less than that of politicians.
Instead, the payment of politicians is related to civil service pay at a
medium admin level [in the UK anyway, but probably much the same
elsewhere]. The fact of the matter is that, since the formation of the
modern civil service, the intellectual standard of the politician has been
declining and the gap between them and the senior civil service has become
considerable. More recently, however, the cream of the universities goes
elsewhere -- into academic life, into commerce, etc. So, today, the quality
of both is declining simultaneously. This is another uncomfortable augury
for the future for those who want to hang on to and "reform" what we have
now.)
During Noel Newsome's and my campaign against the annual dumping of 120,000
tons of industrial cyanide (and many other toxic metals) in the
watercourses and aquifers of England in 1971 I was actually threatened on
the telephone by an anonymous (but obviously highly placed) official of the
Department of the Environment that if we persisted we would be in danger of
being sued for defamation by the directors of the waste management company
we were pursuing "and you would lose every penny you possess" in court
damages. We called their bluff, TV came to our rescue and legislation was
passed the following year. The irony was that when an advisory
Environmental Pollution Committee was consequently established (by the
Department), the person who was appointed as Chairman was, in fact, the MD
of the very company that had been the most irresponsible dumper of toxic
wastes! No environmentalist (never mind Noel or me) was appointed onto that
committee!
(EW)
>I agree that the present system does not work very well. The fixed rules
>and jurisdictional boundaries were, in many cases, set a long time ago in a
>quieter and more containable world. Government agencies tend to be static,
>while the problems they must deal with are dynamic and increasingly
>difficult to define. We are seeing large vacuums develop around very
>difficult issues such as the privatization of public services, free trade,
>globalization, and environmental change, and new pressure groups arising to
>fill these vacuums. Whether or not one sees the nation state as being able
>to weather the storms and deal with these issues at least half-effectively
>depends on whether one is a pessimist or an optimist. I for one am not
>prepared to throw in the towel.
I am in danger of being very boring in my constant attacks on the
nation-state. I am not against the nation-state in the sense of its being a
coherent body of people born within a particular region with a common
language and culture. The love of one's region and homeland is poignant and
deeply instinctive and there's nothing wrong with that. All I am saying is
that the main fault of the nation-state today (and the civil service) is
that it is still retaining the organisational characteristics of its
formation when it took shape for mass war/imperialistic purposes (the
American historian William McNeill places this era at about the 1780--1800
with the rise of the artillery regiment and the need to pay for it).
What I am suggesting is that although nations (as cultures) will still
survive, the functions presently assumed by government and civil service
are now due for devolution to other functional bodies -- some smaller, some
larger -- more democratic, more lateral, more specialised. We are now
becoming increasingly embedded in a lateral global network in which
functional changes (environmental, social, economic, etc) in any one region
affect all others and cannot be contained within autonomous nation-states.
Keith H
___________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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