The Department for Education is like David Cameron’s Bullingdon club. It keeps
opening people’s windows and vomiting through them. You are in your office
wrestling with a problem when a minister, say Alan Johnson, spews a £5m
consultants’ dossier on how to solve it. It might be how to reorganise the
upper sixth, recruit a new French teacher, replant the school flower bed or
boost the league-table ranking by kicking out more truants. The government
will have an answer, even if it takes all day to read.
Various thoughts pass through your mind. Who is this idiot? Has he nothing
better to do with his time and your taxes? What makes him think he can do
your job better than you? But the answer is simple. He is big government. He
has unlimited money and absolute power. He rules.
Last week Johnson decided to outdo Saparmurat Niyazov, the late dictator of
Turkmenistan who banned dogs and renamed bread loaves after
Gurbansoltanedzhe, his mother. Johnson’s idea was to write to teachers
telling them how to deal with unruly pupils. He ordained that the national
praise/blame ratio should be fixed at 5:1, with appropriate adjustments for
skin colour. Punishments included Saturday detention (his consultants
clearly went to public school) and the rewards ranged from postcards to
iPods.
This man’s office clearly has a head problem. It was from here that David
Blunkett ordered national story times and homework schedules. Here, as
schools minister, the currently sainted David Miliband imposed 350 “policy
targets” and 175 “efficiency targets” one of which, hilariously, was to
“reduce red tape”. The new government academies, supposed to show the world
how to build better schools, have proved only that they are four times more
expensive if built by a big organisation than a small one (a local council).
Whatever happened to the great E F Schumacher and small is beautiful? One of
his tenets was that economics, and by association government, should be
studied “as if people mattered”. It is a phenomenon of Tony Blair’s cabinet
that almost nobody in it has run an organisation composed of people. When
ministers found themselves in charge of the biggest corporation in Britain,
they did what they did in opposition: make wish speeches and rambling
pledges. They had no conception of how organisations work, which is why they
have become obsessed with consultants, who have no obligation to deliver.
Johnson’s adventure into pop educational psychology came on the same day that
an inspectors’ report indicated something he never mentioned: that the
bigger the school, the worse its discipline. Exclusions are 10% in schools
above 1,000 pupils and 3% in those with fewer. In the largest, above 1,500,
they have risen by almost a third since Labour came to power. Big is bad for
the simple reason that teachers cannot know all the pupils and establish a
relationship with them and their parents. Corridor and playground anarchy is
less easy to control. Bigness breeds alienation and community anomie. This
is common sense everywhere but in Whitehall. Small schools work better.
Over the road some 80 hospitals are being closed or “reconfigured” as being
too small, defined as being unable to afford the expensive kit and computers
being sold hand-over-fist to Patricia Hewitt, the gullible minister. She has
not only removed out-of-hours GP cover to call centres, but patients must
wait longer for an ambulance, drive further, suffer more pain and
inconvenience and widen the NHS carbon footprint. She has put the patience
back into patients. All this comes at triple the cost to taxpayers. The
reason is that Hewitt is spellbound by the great god size.
All over Britain bigness is seen as a virtue and smallness a vice in defiance
of all evidence to the contrary. The new farm payments regime remains a
shambles where it is big in England — and works, where small, in Wales. The
Home Office has set up two nationalised police forces since Labour came to
power. The latest, the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), was ordered by
Blair “to make life hell for organised crime”. With 4,000 officers removed
from the front line and £400m to spend on 360 different IT systems, it
appears to have done nothing but bureaucratise itself. Local police regard
Soca, “Britain’s FBI”, as a joke and prefer to handle out-of-area crime
bilaterally as before.
As Schumacher realised, the syndrome is related to all forms of work and
organisation. Last week the world’s largest bank, Citigroup, was told by its
Saudi shareholders to cut back on overheads that had soared 15% in a year.
Peter Drucker, the management guru, pointed out that at a certain size the
bloodstream of any organisation clogs and internal control comes to
overwhelm external purpose. With 327,000 staff Citigroup had lost the
ability to be led. Three of Britain’s biggest companies, Shell, BP and BAE
Systems, have experienced similar leadership traumas, the first for
deceiving its shareholders, the second for overpaying its boss and the last
for corruption.
We have been here before. Decentralisation into agencies and quangos was one
of the many Thatcherisms that Blair and Gordon Brown espoused. But they did
not obey the other half of Thatcherism’s message, to “fund and forget” these
smaller units. Big must be beautiful, says Brown, because small is
uncontrollable. In Schumacher’s terms the long documented diseconomies and
inefficiencies of scale are more than compensated for by the glories of
control. How else could Brown build 80% of all new hospitals in Labour
areas? Or enforce his national £15m “family intervention programme” to put
572 problem families in the “national sin bin”? Or, come to that, cure world
poverty and save the planet? We may live in the age of nano-technology but
certainly not nano-government.
My favourite survey of the week, from the City & Guilds, revealed
startling differences in contentment between groups of workers. The happiest
were the poorest, earning below £15,000, who as a group were 12 times more
contented than those earning above £45,000.
Beauticians, chefs, clergy and plumbers were happiest while lawyers, bankers
and managers were most wretched. Set aside the possibility that happiness
lies in making people feel better and misery in the opposite, it is hard to
avoid the conclusion that happiness relates to being in small firms and in
control of one’s own work, not being subject to big and distant
organisations.
Since this has probably always been true — and the campaign against bigness is
as old as the hills — why has the cure been so elusive? The answer, as
Kipling wrote, is that no force on earth is greater than “women and horses
and power and war”. Leaving the first two aside for today, war is Blair’s
addiction and power is Brown’s. “Small is beautiful” was not an intellectual
gimmick of Schumacher’simagination, any more than the dictums of Cyril
Northcote Parkinson, Drucker and Tom Peters, the management gurus, are good
only for after-dinner speeches. They were real arguments, supportable by
evidence, weapons for the weak against the strong, for the little platoons
against the armies of power.
They need constant reinforcement. They are getting it from the 50 campaigns
protesting against Hewitt’s big-is-beautiful hospital closures, which deny
voters and taxpayers the freedom to pay to keep hospitals open if they wish.
They are getting it from communities banding together to buy their own
neighbourhood policing, because big bureaucracy has withdrawn most officers
to base.
Small government should be the response to Blair’s patronising lecture to
black leaders last week, demanding that “black communities must be
mobilised” against knife and gun crime. How can communities be “mobilised”
when they have been disempowered and stripped of self-government and civic
pride by 10 years of Blair’s centralisation?
Going for small means smashing bigness, not just making speeches about it as
political parties always do. It means withdrawing government from intruding
on people’s lives, not extending it with daily initiatives, taskforces
and enforcement regimes. It means trusting communities to decide on their
public services, as they may in other countries. It means governing as if
citizens mattered more than a hyperactive state. That way lies not only
efficiency but also, we are now told, human happiness.
