We Trusted the State

The Guardian, February 10 2008.

The British state is no longer trusted and for most people, the reason is not so much creeping authoritarianism, though that is a well-founded anxiety, as endemic disorganisation. We are now so used to erratic public services we forget that the post used to be delivered before nine and family GPs once routinely made home visits.

Older people struggling to secure pension credit find it hard to believe there was ever a time when collecting their pension did not involve filling in lengthy, jargon-ridden forms. No one any longer believes government departments have accurate information about the services they provide or can be relied on not to misplace our personal details.

There was a time when British government worked. The NHS came out of the Blitz and for half a century, people were content to rely on it for their basic medical needs. In economic terms, it was astonishingly efficient but, more importantly, it was part of a state that most people felt they could rely on. Where this confidence is lacking, as in Italy and Greece, where no one willingly entrusts the state with anything important, people turn their backs on public institutions and make their own arrangements.

Something like this may be starting to happen in this country. Nearly all of us continue to be heavily dependent on state services, but there can be few who would not opt out and use the private sector if they could afford it. In a similar way, we all benefit from the protection of British law. But now there are voices - not least that of the Archbishop of Canterbury - who argue that entire communities should be able to manipulate the legal system, the state's core function.

It is not that Britain is sliding towards tyranny, though the casual extension of police powers is alarming. Instead, British government seems no longer fit for any coherent purpose and its authority is slipping away. This is a remarkable turnabout, since for at least 60 years, the British state was accepted as being fundamentally decent and reasonably efficient.

The shift in attitude can be traced back to Margaret Thatcher's attempt to shrink the size of government, which has had the paradoxical effect of increasing its presence in our lives. We are all more intensely regulated by the state than was the case in pre-Thatcher Britain. At the same time, the state is less accountable and noticeably less effective. Anyone who has tried to make a doctor's appointment on a Saturday morning, track down an NHS dentist or obtain help in deciphering a letter from a benefit agency knows how hard it is to find someone who can operate the system. Yet it is to this rickety machine that we are being asked to commit sensitive medical records and - in the case of ID cards - an important part of our liberty.

How we arrived at this state of affairs is a tangled tale, but one strand sticks out - the belief that markets must be injected into every corner of society. The policies of all three parties have come to be based on the assumption that no one - teachers, doctors, social workers, senior civil servants or members of the armed forces - can be trusted to serve the public interest. Everyone must be watched, appraised and kept under continuous supervision by an apparatus of internal markets and government targets. Wherever possible, services should be outsourced and labour costs reduced to a minimum by the use of information technology. Honed in new right and New Labour think- tanks in the Nineties, this is the orthodoxy that has given us the British state as we have it today, an impenetrable chaos that ministers or watchdog bodies are unable to control.
The fiascos of 'e-government' are not anomalies that can be corrected by more rigorous procedures. The billions that have been squandered on unworkable computer networks in the NHS and the repeated loss of data throughout government are signs of a dysfunctional system. The disappearance of millions of learner drivers' details somewhere in the Midwest is par for the course. Nothing that has been announced by Gordon Brown will prevent similar debacles. Inevitably, there will be more such incidents - plenty more.

At one level, this is a political opportunity opposition parties are busily exploiting. David Cameron and Nick Clegg understand the shift in public perception of government. By espousing a sort of liberal populism - socially progressive and hostile to further expansion of the state - they are surfing a wave the Prime Minister seems bent on resisting. But there may not be much substance to this new style of politics, which at no point challenges the market-based model of government. Neither Cameron nor Clegg is willing to contemplate scrapping internal markets or dismantling the system of targets.

Yet the suspicion of state power they voice poses an increasing threat to Mr Brown. A belief in the capacity of the government machine to engineer good outcomes in society is central to his outlook and when these do not materialise, his response is to equip the machine with new powers. The fact that the system is dysfunctional is never admitted.

It may be that the Prime Minister has not grasped the measure of the challenge or is incapable of changing his ways. With the general election getting closer, it is difficult to see how his Canute-like pose can be maintained in the face of further examples of government failure. If Mr Brown does not respond, others in his cabinet surely will.

The British state that was demolished as a result of Thatcherism cannot be reinvented. It belongs to a country, in some ways more cohesive but also more hierarchical, that no longer exists. Even so, an effective state remains the most important precondition of anything that can be called a liberal society.

We should junk the idea that state services should always be run as businesses; this has left public services struggling with debt and fixated on targets. It would be better to hive off some functions from the state altogether while accepting that others should be managed on non-market lines. We should be ready to give back autonomy to institutions. Devolving power has become the catchword of the hour for the opposition parties, but it involves more than giving schools and hospitals more discretion to decide their budgets. It means leaving them free to manage themselves whether or not the result is efficient.

It should be easier for communities to set up new schools and run them according to their own values, even if these values are not those of the government or the British majority. But we cannot do without something like the national curriculum and it has to apply to every school that receives public money. It is a principle that applies not only to schools. Establishing a kind of legal separatism for different communities would be a retrograde step. Going down that road would be a tacit admission that the state is damaged beyond repair, a dangerous move at any time.

The consensus that emerged from the Eighties encouraged the belief that the state is not much more than an enormous public utility, most of whose functions could be safely outsourced. The result is the shambling leviathan we have today. Renovating the state is emerging as the political task of the age, for unless it is achieved, no other objective can be realised.