In 1962 I became editor of Tonight, a nightly topical programme on BBC
television. My first crisis was Don Haworth’s decision to apply for a
producer post in Manchester. It was a crisis because Don was our best film
director. He did not want to leave, but he needed the extra money. I tried
to get his salary increased, but he was already at the upper limit of his
grade, so I failed.
On the same day, I had a visit from Administration. They had a crisis, too:
they had underspent on their office furnishing budget. Would I like new
carpets, curtains and chairs? The amount available was more than it would
have taken to keep Don in London, and, since our furnishings were fine, I
asked if Don could have the money instead. As anyone who has worked in a
government bureaucracy could have foretold, it was completely out of the
question. Administration would never transfer a penny to Personnel, and even
if they would, Personnel was handcuffed by the BBC’s grade structure and
remuneration policy.
I mention this incident because it was the point at which I realised the
folly, waste and destructive nature of bureaucracy. The higher up decisions
are made, the worse they are likely to be. The higher up money is spent, the
more likely it is to be wasted.
Bureaucratic empire-building is not a distortion of the natural order, but a
response to a basic human need. People in large organisations will always
strive to enlarge their staff, increase their budgets and widen their areas
of authority and jurisdiction. It is a cancerous growth.
Over the past 200 years, central government has sucked authority,
decision-making and independence out of local communities. It has drained
money out of the pockets of citizens, and has created a vast proliferation
of tribunals, inspectorates, regulatory authorities, quangos and councils.
In addition, central government has taken on an army of consultants,
advisory committees, czars, action groups and task forces, and printed
millions of questionnaires, guidance notes, instructions, licences, tick
boxes and leaflets that, between them, have created the bureaucratic
nightmare of 21st-century Britain.
What is remarkable about this change is that no one set out to make it happen.
No plan, no plot, no conspiracy. But the effect is, as more and more
observers have been pointing out, that the people of Britain are not
represented in Parliament, but governed by a self-serving, almost
unaccountable political class. It may be that the parliamentary expenses
scandal will provide the impetus for change. But what change?
If we are to reform our inefficient and unrepresentative political system, we
must rediscover and reinstate the personal knowledge, the common interest,
the trust and the day-to-day, face-to-face familiarity that holds groups
together and enables them to function as political units. And over the past
50 years or so, it has become apparent that we carry the answer within us.
The study of evolution, in particular of the social evolution of the great
apes, has revealed that we have a natural group size — or to be more exact,
a number of natural group sizes — which have taken us down from the trees
and up to the Moon. Any system that is to work must follow our evolutionary
nature.
For millions of years, we evolved as primates in groups of 50 or so, which is
still the size of a normal group of our nearest relatives, the gorillas and
chimpanzees. Although we split from them about six million years ago, this
group size persisted. It is found everywhere: small businesses, departments
of larger ones, common rooms, military squadrons. It is a size people are
happy with. You know everyone, you know what they do and how well they do
it; you notice when they are not there.
Any system of representative government must re-create these evolutionary
groups. It is not a big deal. All that is required is a street
representative for each group of 20 to 30 households, available to hear
queries, complaints or suggestions, and calling occasionally to give
information or warnings. Through their street representative they are locked
into the community.
This platform of existence, many millions of years old, continues today with
the gorillas and chimpanzees. But some time after our ancestors, the
hominims, split from them, a profound change took place. That change was the
emergence of the tribe. It did not mean losing the primate group; that is
still within us all. It meant the coming together of a number of groups, so
that instead of rival groups of 50 to 60 individuals roaming the area, the
landscape was dominated by co-operative groups of 500 to 600, who formed a
single social unit.This number of around 600 is firmly in our nature. It is
as large a group as we can belong to, where we can all know each other.
When the hunting tribes turned to agriculture 10,000 years ago, it became the
farming village. As industry developed, it became the mill or pit village.
Right into the 19th and 20th centuries, tribe membership was lifelong:
cities grew up, but around and within them, the tribe where you were born
and raised, where you lived, worked and died, formed the limits of the human
world that supported your existence and defined your identity.
Look around the developed world and you find tribes everywhere. Not
birth-to-death tribes, but working communities of a few hundred people
(often within large organisations) who spend most of the week in contact
with each other. Armies come in all shapes and sizes, but the building
blocks are battalions and regiments of 500 to 600. That most decimal of
people, the Romans, had a tent of 10, and 100 men under a centurion, but
each unit was the cohort of 600.
Practical businessmen will tell you that 400 to 750 is the largest number that
a single boss can run. Private schools that are free to choose their own
numbers usually stop at 600, even if it is profitable to accept more. Actors
will tell you that a full house of 600 is the most satisfying to play to;
something is lost when the audience gets bigger than 1,000 (indeed, a few
hundred is the largest number that can reasonably be addressed by the
unaided human voice in the open air).
So a tribe of 600 members is the largest possible natural unit of the human
community. And yet, outside rural areas, this ancient grouping has no
administrative recognition.
There is no problem about putting this right, since outside large towns and
cities, the basic structure is retained in parish councils. So the first
necessary reform is to create city villages, areas of some two or three
hundred households, electing their own village councils (the street
representatives).
Any reform that leaves money and power in the same hands will be ineffectual
tinkering. The city village councils must have a budget, and they must have
the authority to make some decisions — on their playschools or parking
restrictions — that affect the community.
Some experts believe there is one other unit which has its genetic base in
human evolutionary history. They put this last unit, the supertribe, at
6,000. This would comprise ten tribes, ten being the largest practicable
number for the ancient- human hunting band or the modern committee. The
leaders of the tribes form the supertribe’s leadership.
The supertribe, the market town of a few thousand, is a number we have been
happy with over the centuries. It can be self-sufficient in a way that a
village of a few hundred cannot. Our cities are full of these potential
market towns; 6,000 is the sort of number that can support a shopping
parade, a school and all the services for everyday living. It is not that
long — a few hundred years — since towns that size ran themselves with
minimum help or interference from above. They still could.
Six thousand may sound a small number, but a government budget of £600 billion
means that such a group contributes and consumes £100 million a year. At the
moment, each citizen deals separately with an absurd range of government
institutions, whereas almost all of these transactions could be carried out
at the offices of his city township.
Creating suburban townships would not simply involve removing work from the
bloated centralised agencies. It would mean turning the whole system on end
and running Britain from the bottom up. Of course, there will be services
the city townships will need higher authorities to provideand there will
have to be equalisation payments from rich areas to poor areas. And the
State will need armed services, a foreign service, a Treasury.
But once the huge mass of work dealing with individuals has been handed back
to the townships, the size, cost and complexity of the higher levels of
government would be drastically reduced. Central taxation would be slashed
and replaced by local taxation, raised and spent by the townships. Local
people have a strong incentive to economise — it reduces their tax payments.
All this may sound like abstract theorising. In fact, it is the rediscovery of
something we have known and possessed for a long time, but have
unintentionally lost.
The restoration of city villages and townships means getting government back
in line with our evolutionary nature — humanising it. It’s time to
rediscover lost truths. The time for a new Great Reform Act has come.
— A New Great Reform Act by Antony Jay will be published
by the Centre for Policy Studies on 17 July. A full version can be read at www.cps.org.uk
