BE CAREFUL what you wish for. When I wrote last week that enforcing the law and running prisons should be recognised by politicians and the media as a much more vital responsibility of government than managing the health service, educating children or paying pensions, I had no idea of the sea of troubles that was about to engulf Charles Clarke. Now everyone seems to have got the same idea.

Whatever improvements may or may not be achieved in health, education and pensions, a Government that does not even try to keep murderers and serial rapists off the streets automatically forfeits all respect and even the right to remain in power.

Indeed, the one piece of good news in this terrible week for the Government is that the Opposition is baying so loudly for the blood of the Home Secretary that the demands for Patricia Hewitt’s resignation have been rendered almost inaudible. And given that the NHS faces long-term problems that will ultimately prove even more intractable and expensive to deal with than those of the Home Office, this diversion of attention away from health could be considered a blessing. On the other hand, Mr Clarke is probably the most experienced, articulate, dynamic and morally unimpeachable Labour politician after Mr Blair himself and Gordon Brown. Thus the Home Secretary’s public humiliation, even if it does not lead to resignation, will do far more damage to the Government’s standing than any sacrificial offering of some lesser minister such as Ms Hewitt or a court jester such as John Prescott.

But whatever may be the fates of the individual ministers, the recent fiascos and scandals convey two more important messages about the “systemic flaws” not only of the Blair Government, but of the whole system of government in Britain.

The first flaw is the one I discussed last week: the loss of focus on the core responsibilities of government — the tasks that must be undertaken by the State because they cannot be left to individuals co-operating though private markets. These range from the law enforcement to poverty alleviation, environmental protection, the promotion of public culture and the financing of pure scientific research. The neglect of these tasks — or at least their relegation to secondary importance — is largely a consequence of the country’s obsession with maintaining a government-financed health service, an incubus that is draining the lifeblood, both in money and in ministerial attention, from every other government function.

The second systemic flaw is the growing propensity of the State to choose easy targets for expanding its power, while shying away from tasks where its intervention may be much more important, but is more difficult to organise and prone to failure. This week’s example is the prison system. Prisoners, especially persistent violent offenders, are difficult and expensive to deal with, so there is a strong bias in the Home Office in favour of letting them out of jail. At the same time, the jails are overflowing with minor offenders — fine defaulters and petty drug dealers — who should not be anywhere near a prison.

In general, the British State has a growing preference for prosecuting generally law-abiding citizens for minor infractions, ranging from parking and speeding fines to the occasional assault in self-defence, while allowing the protections of the legal system to be abused in circumstances for which they were never intended. This is exactly the opposite of the balance demanded by public opinion. The resulting disillusionment is starting to transform Mr Blair’s dream of an “ enabling” government into a nightmare of predatory government — a persecutor of ordinary citizens, yet a protector of outlaws.

In trying to understand the reasons for this divergence between what people want from government and what they are getting, we come to the third systemic flaw: the decoupling of power from accountability. This is the result of the parliamentary convention on ministerial responsibility that holds that ministers are responsible for everything that happens in their departments, while the civil servants who actually make most important decisions are shielded. Because government departments are far too big for any minister to know all that is going on inside them, the doctrine of ministerial responsibility is a fiction. By making politicians answerable for everything and civil servants for nothing, nobody is in practice responsible for anything at all.

The Opposition and the media are demanding that Home Secretary “takes responsibility” by resigning. But Mr Clarke is right to argue that his resignation, far from signalling his acceptance of responsibility, would actually be an abdication of it. This defence is justified partly by Mr Clarke being an energetic and ruthless operator, who is more likely to bang heads together at the Home Office than any plausible successor.

However, there is a much more important reason for sparing Mr Clarke. He is the wrong scapegoat. To blame him for the fiasco would effectively exonerate the real culprits — the civil servants running the Home Office, the Immigration Directorate and the Prison Service, who continue to enjoy their salaries, index-linked pensions and automatic knighthoods regardless of the blunders they make.

Civil servants on top of their job security enjoy a great deal of protection from parliamentary scrutiny, since ministers are expected to answer for all departmental mistakes. This divergence between decision-making and accountability is possibly the British Government’s biggest “systemic flaw”; not only because it is profoundly undemocratic, but because the lack of accountability fosters the culture of inefficiency so evident in the Home Office. Every time a minister resigns to take “responsibility” for a mistake committed by his civil servants, is a setback for both the efficiency and the accountability of the State.

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