Having worked for the FCO for nearly 30 years, I now tend to brood in a maudlin sort of way on the Big Picture.
Not for me any more the excitement of the next Ministerial visit or the latest meeting of world leaders.
See for example the outcome of the recent Progressive (sic) Governance (sic) Summit (sic). It shows once and for all how it is better to stick to old-fashioned methods and use humans to draft a communique, rather than let loose a new-fangled bureaucratic version of the legendary Postmodernism Generator:
These changes present both unprecedented new opportunities for all, as well as new threats and challenges. In particular, we meet at a time of global economic uncertainty, and at a time when the need for coordinated action to respond to economic, environmental and security challenges has never been greater. We believe that progressives are well-placed to take a lead in providing a more coordinated international response to these challenges including through effective action by multilateral organisations. We also need to involve all relevant players in our efforts to address global issues effectively.
The thing about Big Pictures is that they are … big. Patterns emerge which one does not notice in the heat of immediate action. What looks right now may turn out to have been a significant mistake years later. Small good almost incidental ideas may grow into large successful projects. What is ‘success’ anyway?
This has implications for policy. And above all for Objectives.
One grim consequence of Thatcherism as rebooted by New Labour has been a neurotic and distorting attempt across government to make official processes more ‘businesslike’, with proliferating targets for this and that and feeble attempts to incentivise civil servants to meet them.
But what is not grasped is that the government in fact is in many different ‘businesses’ simultaneously. It is a service provider (NHS). It is an investor (taxes). It is an insurance manager (long-term pensions decisions). It is in marketing/PR (selling new ideas to foreign governments and global public opinion).
It is also about doing things which may have no immediate or obvious benefit at all, but are all about keeping things in reserve in case of sudden need.
That is why diplomats work on patiently ‘getting to know people’ overseas – as and when HMG suddenly need to win someone round when vital national interests are at stake, these high-level personal relationships and our knowledge of how best to influence capitals may play a vital role.
Under current FCO management thinking as driven by Treasury targets, those skills and the long-term investment they represent are almost sneered at. Bilateral work is being downgraded across Europe and beyond, even though EU norms play a growing role in UK life. A profound blunder.
Suffice to say that what works in one area of government does not work in another. So the sort of highly centralised busybodyingly intrusive one-size-fits-all target-setting Treasury control over Whitehall which has intensified over the past decade or so is exactly the wrong way to run things. And it shows.
The consulting industry of course is not complaining, as one footling new expensive official scheme after another is invented then slumps under the weight of its own and other contradictions.
Why actually is all this activity likely to fail to deliver sustained improvements, and/or likely to create new unexpected problems somewhere else?
I think it is because the very idea of ‘targets’ is philosphically incoherent.
This flows from the fact that governments (and the public) have no way of deciding how to manage risk, in the sense of reasonably calculating the likelihood of policies (a) being properly implemented and (b) producing the good results we expect over (c) a realistic timescale, while (d) keeping an eye on the opportunity cost of not doing something else.
Thus no-one can tell us which is better:
- short-term likely-to-work quick wins
- medium-term, maybe-less-likely-to-work significant wins
- longer-term, medium risk, potentially huge wins
Government thrashing around in this conceptual morass is now horrible to behold. Not surprisingly the public get fed up and confused. Populist noises and a Sense of Looming Unease grow in parallel.
Basically, if government is faced with the sheer complexity of modern life and so with all the best intentions can not work out what is Cause and what is Effect in policy-making, maybe the best thing to do is … a lot less, but try to get it right?
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