Jonathan Freedland

Something of a surprise today, an interesting article by one J. Freedland:

That is not because Labour ministers were useless or that a different group of people would have done the job fine. It is rather a structural problem with the British state. Its machinery was designed for a 20th-century world that no longer exists. Today's citizens are used to fast, efficient, wireless services that give them a high degree of personal choice; the lumbering bureaucracy of the state cannot catch up. Nor will aping the private sector, pretending government can be run like Domino's Pizza or DHL, work - because health, education and public safety are not like garlic bread or packages. They are much more complex to deliver.

That stands as an indictment of the specific Blairist approach to the state. This week I took part in a Radio 4 discussion, to be broadcast at 8pm tonight, asking what the left stands for today. The former Downing Street adviser Charles Leadbeater made a striking point. He said we were witnessing the failure of the "McKinsey state", the Blair experiment in trying to run government like a big company, complete with management consultants and their expensive advice. "They wanted to make the sausage machine deliver a better product," Leadbeater explains. "But that approach, of target-driven public-service reform, that Blair and [John] Birt bought into in a big way, is just exhausted."

This truth has not just dawned on people in government in the last few weeks. Before his appointment, Matthew Taylor, head of policy at Downing Street, used to say that the government risked becoming a parent that told his child when to go to bed - but could not cook him lunch or dinner. Labour was all too ready to meddle, intrude and boss about, with one eye-catching initiative after another, but it fell down on basic competence.

Blairism's great contribution was its assertion that it was not just private value that mattered, but public value too. It tried to make that work, but failed by too often imagining that public goods could be delivered by quasi-private means. On this logic, the next stage in the journey will be nothing less than a refashioning of the state - replacing the top-down, centralised behemoth of today with a looser, more diffuse, even "organic" (Taylor's word) network of services that fit the people who use them. Citizens won't be passive recipients, but direct participants.

Well, yes, entirely correct. The centralized, bureaucratic state has indeed failed. All the McKinsey consultants in the world cannot make it work efficiently because the incentives aren’t there to guide people’s behaviour.  What we do need is a system which provides the correct incentives.

Now obviously, here I’m going to recommend markets and indeed I do. But this is rather different from simply saying "the free market" and all will be well.  Markets are constructed, they don’t simply exist ab initio. Markets can also be powered by inventives other than money.

We have, for example, an extremely good lifeboat system in the UK. There’s no government or State involvement at all. Purely private charity finances the whole thing. What motivates those who actually climb into the boats to do so? Not money (as far as I’m aware it’s only the Coxswain who actually gets paid), but a sense of community perhaps? The respect one gets in a seaside town from being willing to risk your life for others? Whatever that driving force is it doesn’t seem to scale up very well. It’s very much a product of small groups...we see it all over the place, in troops in battle ("well, I can’t let the lads down can I"?) and so on.

Send the power right down the system, clear out the utopian idea that the centre knows best. See what the people themselves do when they’re actually allowed to do so.

Rather what Margaret Thatcher called the small battalions. The things which do make up society.

Good God! You don’t think Freedland has become a Thatcherite do you?