Your eye will first have rested not on this opening paragraph, but on the chart with which the column is illustrated. Please do not feel sheepish about that. Graphics do catch people’s attention. So take a second and unapologetic look, now, at that neat circle with its pleasing symmetry and gaily designed segments, and ask yourself what such a pattern is saying to us about the mind (or minds) responsible for this thing. A picture can say a thousand words: among them, which words are we likely to choose?
Here is just a selection: “daft”, “facile”, “stupid”, “simplistic”, “anal” and “trite”. Among the expletives will be “bulls**t”, and “bumph”. Among the nouns will be “moron”, “imbecile” and “management consultant”.
And maybe thoughts like “politician” and “new Labour” have also sprung to your mind. If so, you would be right. The chart is to be found in a 41-page document, released by Downing Street this week, entitled Policy Review: Public Services and published by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit at the Cabinet Office.
So far as this document is supposed to mean anything, I think it is a sort of power-point-style presentation, packed with cod statistics, misleading graphs and dubious claims, to summarise — and lend a spurious patina of “research” — to official boasts about public service improvements that the present Government has delivered. At this rate the Labour Party should be able to accept a spending cap on party-political campaigning of zero: we taxpayers are doing the spending for them. The report is party propaganda masquerading as government information, and paid for out of public funds.
It is also transparent balderdash, infantile to a degree where you might have thought professional self-respect, if not ethical standards, would have intervened to shred the project. The report is headed with the British crest: the lion and the unicorn. If unicorns could blush, the printers would have been in need of red ink.
It would be comforting to be able to report that this ridiculous chart was an embarrassing afterthought to the report, tucked away in the appendices to the policy review: a silly little graphic slipped in by a young member of staff, which had escaped the attention of those who lead the unit, been overlooked by the Prime Minister when he cast his own eye over the draft and failed therefore to be ripped out and binned.
Alas, I can offer no such comfort. The pie chart is the first thing in the review, after the lion and the unicorn, the title page and the contents. You will find it on page 3. It is supposed to summarise and illustrate the whole document. It does. It says “hot air”.
This is a keynote chart. The circle appears beneath the strap headline: “The Government has clear aims and objectives for public services”. Not just “aims” — mark you — but “objectives” too. Strong stuff. A pity they forgot to mention goals.
These, then, are the Government’s aims, as discovered and framed by the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit. These are the zappiest, most telling, most profound summaries anyone could think of, of the Government’s approach to public services.
* Equitable; * Efficient and value for money; * Empowering; * Excellent and innovative; * Universal; * Responsive.
Plainly whoever framed the chart had wanted all six aims to start with E, but at universality and responsiveness his or her thesaurus failed.
Poor show. What about “Everywhere” for Universal, and “Empathetic” for Responsive? And why not add “Energetic,” “Evolutionary,” “Easily understood,” “E-accessible,” “Ethnically monitored” and “Environmentally sound” — making it 12? This took me only a few minutes and the Government has had ten years to come up with their aims (and objectives). Perhaps I should apply for a job with the strategy unit.
Don’t you love the way each objective goes kneeing its way into the next in a chevron-arrow design, all pointing clockwise and imparting a sense of dynamism (maybe we should call it spin) to the wheel. Note, too, how these six aims (and objectives) go wheeling purposefully around the hub of “Citizen-centred public services”. What immortal hand or eye framed this fearful symmetry? Evidently the mind in which this diagram and report was conceived is neat, spatially aware and loves lines, shapes and geometry (and alliteration and little rhymes, too) for on page 11 comes this: “But there are downsides to an over-reliance on top-down performance management and funding alone, and so a new phase of public service reform has evolved . . . This seeks to: Combine top-down approaches of inspection, regulation and targets . . . With horizontal pressure from competition and contestability . . . And bottom up incentives of choice and voice . . . Supported by improvements in capability and capacity . . . to create a ‘Self improving System’ . . . Clearly, the way in which these four elements (top down; bottom up; horizontal) . . . (four?) are combined will differ depending on the nature of the service in question (eg, police services or schools).” Yes, clearly.
We are looking at a brain, one suspects, filled with little lines and arrows going this way and that. In Ancient Egypt this person would have been involved in designing the pyramids. But the pyramids were real and still here. This is not and will be forgotten next week.
I could have fun putting two fingers up to almost every diagram, graph, and paragraph. Gravely (for instance) after boasting about “increased investment” in public services, the blurb explains that for the first two years after 1997, this Government stuck to the last Government’s spending limits. But most of the “performance” graphs indicate steep rises during those two years, some of them flattening off later. This suggests that either the present administration inherited sharply rising trends from its predecessors, or that there hasn’t been any simple relationship between money and results.
But cleverer men than me are best placed to make hay with the substance of it. I have a different question. To almost every observer unconnected with new Labour, this project is palpable nonsense. It isn’t even clever nonsense. It’s just pathetic. It doesn’t work. It won’t convince anyone. It’s embarrassing. Yet at Downing Street there must be committees who have sat for hours — days, months, years — devising and overseeing this work. The report itself must have gone through many drafts, been discussed solemnly, been scrutinised by Tony Blair himself, before being pronounced fit, useful and appropriate. High-powered men and women must have seen and approved that chart.
What, then, has gone wrong in their heads, and in the collective brain of a governing party, to allow this kind of exercise to impress them, and for them not to be able to see their work won’t impress anyone else?
It is, I believe, this. For new Labour, facts have gone soft and presentation has gone hard. Communication has become their world. It spins against reality like the wheels of a train spinning on a leaf-sodden track. Friction has gone. Two worlds are slipping tractionless against each other, and only the world of appearances is hard. But because, for them, reality is so soft, they cannot see the problem. Truly, as Paul Flynn, MP, has said, “for new Labour only the future is certain. The past is always changing.”
