ALBA - Unofficial Forum

If you’re a politician, think of this as a little late Christmas present from me. Many of you are busy writing articles trying to explore the question ‘what is fuelling the rise of anti-politics?’. What I think you really mean is ‘why does everyone hate me given that it’s definitely not my fault?’. If this enterprise is sincere, let me help you out.

Everyone hates you because you are making our lives worse all the time. And no, I don’t mean ‘things that happen which are beyond our control’ or ‘the general trend in the economy’. Another day I’ll explain why responding to events you can’t control and shaping the general trends in the economy is basically your job. For now, let me focus on what is definitely a you thing.

Here’s the problem; given the option to make people’s lives easier or to keep running things the way you’re convinced you’re supposed to run them, you do the latter every time. It keeps making our lives worse and you don’t care because you’ve been trained to believe that we are all wrong and you’re right.

I was going to use the Biggar Hogmanay Bonfire as a jumping-off point, a 500-year-old tradition which public officials have sought so assiduously to bring to an end that the organisers are half traumatised and self-censored the whole affair this year citing the legals around insurance as a reason for cancellation while in reality they were just to scared not to cancel after Edinburgh did in case they ‘got into trouble’.

There was zero real reason to cancel the bonfire this year and everyone knew it. I spoke to dozens of people that night and the one thing that united everyone is how much we hate the bureaucratic nonsense which is public life in Scotland – and those responsible.

But if it wasn’t the bonfire… Just before Christmas I had my daughter’s parent-teacher meeting and six out of eight of the teachers I met at some point made a comment which is best understood as ‘fucking SQA…’. Or I could have started with the experience of absolutely every person I know who works in the NHS or has to deal with a local authority.

In short, as a jumping-off point for explaining why you politicians are not flavour of the month you can pick almost any experience of a person interacting with Scotland’s public sector and, more specifically, its bureaucracy.

Small community trying to organise a farmers’ market? Charity trying to feed hungry poor people? Social worker trying to get home to their family after a long day? It doesn’t matter, we all interact with the public realm at some point or another and it is often teeth-grindingly tedious when we do.

Why? Because if there is one thing you definitely control oh politicians it is paperwork, and the only conclusion I can come up with is that you love the stuff. Want to improve teaching standards? Impose more paperwork. Want to reduce NHS waiting lists? Impose more paperwork. Want to hide the fact you spent half a million quid on seven PowerPoint slides? Impose more paperwork.

You do this because you’ve been trained in modern politics. Modern politics is a game of telling stories while what was going to happen anyway goes ahead and just happens anyway. Scotland is run by management-level officials who do pretty well whatever they please, recreating the same outcomes over and over irrespective of who citizens vote for.

So management-level officials crack on doing management-level official stuff and the politicians explain how this is all to the purpose of delivering a bunch of ‘lifelong missions’ these politicians never tire of telling you is the driving force of their lives, the reason they get up in the morning.

The thing is, if we citizens are to burrow down into your lifelong missions it seems to us that your lifelong missions are ‘to offer platitudes about poverty or climate change’ and then ‘to increase the amount of paperwork ordinary people have to do so that politicians can produce management statistics to prove that we’re fixing poverty or climate change’.

If you’re a politician you are recoiling from this just now. You are telling yourself some combination of ‘fools, they think you can change things through government but it’s a lot more complicated than that’ or ‘how am I supposed to improve X without loads of management information’ or ‘we’re keeping vulnerable people safe by making you fill in forms’ or whatever.

Or, let me put it another way, politicians honestly, genuinely believe you make teachers better teachers by making them fill in more paperwork. This might seem counterintuitive to the rest of us, but the rest of us are wrong. It is by focussing the minds of teachers on their need to improve that they will improve. They wouldn’t do it otherwise.

Politicians will talk about how ‘failure demand’ is making things harder for them, or how they’d like to invest more. But they don’t invest more, and they seldom take failure demand as a legitimate reason for frontline staff to miss their targets.

Because that is the whole point of modern government. It passes laws and it sets targets. Those are its functions. Laws manage the public, targets manage public services and the rest of the time is for electioneering. If, to a member of the public, it ever feels like this mountain of bureaucracy is actually counterproductive, that just shows why we need a professional governing class that understands this stuff for you.

So here is my gift to you politicians; targets don’t improve lives for anyone. Targets are a scam. They are set to make you, the politician, look purposeful and they are imposed on people who have no capability of meeting the targets because they weren’t underperforming because they wanted to underperform but because you’ve diverted the cash that should be invested in their services into processing performance indicator data.

Here is a challenge; if a single one of you politicians is confident that you can present meaningful data to show that targets improve performance then drop me an email and we can set up a debate and I’ll show you that they don’t. You can bring all the information you can glean with you and I’ll bring mine.

You can crib up on all the management-speak you want and explain how modern management is driving up efficiency and standards through blah-de-blah-de-blah and I’ll show you outcome measures that show that the more targets you set, the worse public services get. You’ll then argue that it would have been even worse if it wasn’t for the targets. I’ll ask for evidence of this and you won’t have any.

But on you will go, explaining to a nation of people who all know you’re wrong and who are all suffering as a result that this is how you run a government, because this is how car manufacturers run a production line. Except in a millions ways it isn’t how car manufacturers run anything, because manufacturers have invested massively in modernisation and because no engineer at a car manufacturer spends 30 per cent of their time filling in pointless paperwork.

And I don’t just mean targets, I mean getting FoI information out of you, understanding why our children have failed their history exam, discovering that a community who wants a road closed for a local festival and which has already paid extensive tax as citizens must now pay a commercial company commercial rates to close the road.

I mean closing local police stations for efficiency, telling primary school teachers they must risk assess a sandpit, expecting the NHS to get old people out of hospital beds without funding anywhere for them to go, asking a small business to submit a 34 page tender to sell some sausages to a local authority, expecting a local youth club to have in place a dozen complex ‘compliance’ documents.

Now I know many of you, I have coffee with you or bump into you at events. You tell me you’re as frustrated with all of this as the rest of us. Except by next week you’ll be back at your desk imposing this stuff on us and we’ll be back at our work dealing with the results. The results are always more bureaucracy and an ever-greater feeling that someone, somewhere wants to fire us if we don’t pull the ‘right’ performance indicators out of a hat.

I’d love to continue this and shall do so throughout the year because I’m utterly, utterly sick of it all. I’d like here to collate a number of the comments that I have heard from people about all of this. I’d like to hammer home that your managerial culture makes our day-to-day experience of life worse and worse by giving you a tone of what is really said about you.

But for space, let me recount only one. I am drinking with a friend who works in the NHS. I ask him how work is. He basically gives me a version of the above article. He concludes by saying ‘they should hire someone to come in here and fire anyone who isn’t treating patients or actually helping those who are’.

I ask him what he thinks would happen if they really did bring someone in to do that. ‘Oh dear Christ’ he said in realisation, ‘they’ll set up a new department, hire admin staff and create a new set of indicators, won’t they?’. I nod. ‘So that’s just more of the bastards, isn’t it?’. I nod. ‘You know what, fuck them all – I’m looking at early retirement’.

His early retirement helps blow a hole in another set of targets, so you politicians get together to decide what to do about it. So you create more targets and hire more consultants to find out why people keep leaving the NHS.

If you’re a politician and you’re trying to work out why literally everyone is sick to the back teeth of the whole lot of you, work your way through this article a few times and see if you can get to the end of it without saying ‘oh god, this is actually right, isn’t it? We better set up a commission.’

You can’t, can you? And that is a you problem.