This elegant analysis by Theodore Dalrymple on the horrible Baby P story – read it, overseas readers, and despair about modern British underclass life – looks hard at why many of our bureaucratic structures are dysunctional.

Including this fierce passage:

 … [the] purpose of the British public service is to provide a meal-and-mortgage-ticket for those who work in it, especially at management level. The ostensible purpose of an organisation is rarely its real purpose. I know this from my experience in the Health Service.

Which leads him to point this out too:

When procedures become so exacting and time-consuming, the exercise of judgment is deemed neither necessary nor possible. Indeed, it will get you into trouble, because it is not part of the procedure. There is simply no contest between the most obvious reality, staring you in the face, and what the form says. The form says it all, and wins every time.

Any government here now faces almost impossible problems in dismantling these sprawling empires of unproductive entrenched shifty irresponsibility which successive Governments’ own sloppy thinking has created.

Thus, when a problem reveals itself, the response is a curious one, that is to say simultaneously one of work creation and work avoidance.

The work creation consists of instituting ever more “failsafe” and “best-practice” procedures, usually with all their associated paperwork, which are then bowed down to and worshipped like the Golden Calf. Of course, this creates the impression of terrific pressure of work, that can be relieved only by the employment of more and more staff with strange titles such as Compliance Manager and Best-Practice Co-ordinator.

This work creation is dialectically related to the work avoidance. So much effort goes into the procedure that no time, energy or inclination is left over to secure the alleged purpose of the procedure.