I have been trying to judge how bad things are in Scotland’s public sector. Piecing this together is harder than you think. What is wrong in one hospital may not be wrong in another, not everyone is in crisis at the same time and not every crisis is the same. But my tentative conclusions suggest that ‘pretty grim’ is not far from the mark. The problem is that people keep asking me to explain why it is happening…
I was going to write about Dundee University today. It is such a case study of everything I’ve been arguing is going wrong in higher education and it is going wrong in precisely the way I have been saying it was going to go wrong. I was frankly going to dissect it and take a lap of honour. But people want to know not only ‘how?’ but ‘why?’. It is the why a lot of people struggle with.
It was reflected in another conversation I had with a friend. They were struggling with a bit of public sector bureaucracy and they could see what was happening but they were pushing me to explain why it was happening. I tried to think of how to get it across to them. I asked if they had ever read Kafka’s The Trial. They had.
Great, I said, then this is easy. You’re in the lumber room*. There is no reason. You just are. The more you torture yourself trying to work out the logic of why you’re there the worse you’ll feel. You think there is logic to this but there isn’t. It just is.
Dundee University is virtually bankrupt because it just is, because those at the top of institutions are allowed to do literally anything they want, any time they want, no questions asked. The only question is who will bail them out if they fail.
They are in a position to do that because they are. No-one voted for this system, no-one in any university anywhere wanted this (other than those who got it). No politician stood before the public and said ‘in my five years in office I plan to strip the accountability from senior public sector leaders, reduce transparency and bring an end to democratic governance’. They just did.
Or someone did. I’m now getting whistle blowers contacting me at an ever-increasing rate and every conversation I have with anyone in the public sector leads to the same place.
A surgeon tells me that a manager tells her how many patients she will see in a day and how much time she’s allowed to spend with then. A senior official asks me why the policy area she is responsible for gets worse no matter what they try to do. A procurement officer describes the collapsing system of distributing resources.
A care worker explains the Kafka-esque state of trying to do their job. A teacher, on a Board of a charity with me, describes life as being a process of trying to teach kids in between filling out paperwork. All of them can see the same things going wrong in the same ways. All of them desperately want to stop it, or for it to stop.
It seems the number one rule about Scotland’s public sector is that under no circumstances do you ever suggest that everything isn’t brilliant all the time forever
None of them seem certain exactly how, but perhaps more than that, most of them ask me plaintively ‘why is this happening?‘. I kind of want to say ‘that’s what I hoped you would explain to me’. But there is a strange thing that happens every time (if in person) and it is really unsettling.
If someone works in the public sector and wants to explain to you that something is going badly wrong they will always do the same thing. First of all they glance left and right to scan the area. Then they lean forward, drop their voice and whisper. Sometimes they glance furtively throughout the conversation.
This happened to me with someone the other week. That person realised that it was odd to do this (we were in a cafe) and said sorry. I told them not to worry, that literally everyone I have ever spoken to does this. It seems the number one rule about Scotland’s public sector is that under no circumstances do you ever suggest that everything isn’t brilliant all the time forever.
Really, it’s like the Stasi are watching. Everyone is scared. Everyone looks over their shoulder. No-one speaks freely. I find myself thinking ‘well if everyone is is afraid to speak, no wonder this is a mess’. Why is everyone afraid to speak?
Because when everyone concludes there is a controlling intellect behind this, they’re right. All of this is happening because of systems that someone has put in place. Who? Doesn’t matter. Why? They just have. What are the systems? Too numerous to count. Do they work? Well, according to their own internal logic.
The outcome? Stupendous amounts of waste, large swathes of wealth transfer, deteriorating conditions for virtually everyone who works in the system, regular bail-outs for those responsible for massive failure. The Scottish Government says the £40m bailout of Dundee University isn’t a reward for failure. That is nearly true – it’s a clear statement of total indemnity for failure.
Burn down an art school? The public will pay. Fuck up a ferry, the public will pay. Bankrupt a university, the public will pay. They’re trying to pretend that early retirement is someone ‘falling on their sword’. I know what their pensions look like and I know what they’ve been paid. Could someone please get me that sword to fall on too? It’s an awfully lucrative sword.
If any of these failures had been plebs, you and me, fucking up our jobs, there would be hell to pay. If you’re the ruling classes, there isn’t. Why? Just because, just because, just because.
Can this be brought to an end? Sure, but not by the people who created it. See the people who made all these rules? They’re now in charge of the Scottish Government cutting a billion pounds from public spending. Ivan McKee (the Minister responsible) is a former Common Weal Board member and a friend. I know he knows I’m right about all of this.
But let’s be honest, they’re is going to get rid of the waste caused by arbitrary targets by setting an arbitrary target for reducing waste. The Scottish Government clearly reads me because it is always pretending to do what I say needs done. In the time I was writing this a press release came out basically aping my ‘frontline first’ approach.
I am unconvinced. The problem is ideological and the people who claim they’re going to fix this are the most fervent advocates of the ideology. They know there is bloat and waste but they don’t understand why and won’t challenge the fundamental causes. It’s just more noise.
You can’t fix it or reform it or mend anything because everything is operating precisely like it is meant to and the fact that it doesn’t work at all is not a relevant observation
Can this be fixed? Sure. I am confident I could sort all this out in a couple of years. To understand my confidence, let me tell you two stories. These are people I crossed paths with in my own healthcare so if there are any repercussions for them from me writing this, I really hope you will all crowdfund me to sue the living fuck out of my health board for accessing my medical records illegally.
I was sitting with one professional. I asked him how his clinic was so effective, had no waiting lists, granted me so much time with him. He answered simply ‘I’m very senior and I can simply ignore them all and run my clinic my way and there’s nothing they can do about it’. I subsequently discovered that the same service in a neighbouring health board that received the same funding was in total crisis.
And when sitting with the surgeon I mentioned above I asked her what it was like working in the building we were in. It very much looked like it was only fit for demolition. She almost sprung forward and told me ‘this is the best clinic in the health board’. I asked her why and she told me that the place is so tatty the senior managers avoid the place and so they are free to get on running their clinic how they see fit.
Can you hear what I’m saying here? I’m saying that the recurring message from everyone I speak to is that things would be massively better if someone would just get rid of the managers. I mean, we’re all agreed that this is definitely the case in Dundee University. You think it is different anywhere else?
And is this because they’re incompetent or evil? Nope, it’s because they are fundamentally pointless and are largely unnecessary. They must create a reason for themselves or they would have to fire themselves. So they create rules and rules and rules which they administer and then they pay themselves a fortune because of how complex it is to manage their system of rules.
These rules are broadly random. They probably made sense to someone and some point, but add them all together and they make no sense at all. Someone recently asked me why they have to do a multi-page risk assessment to organise a game of badminton at local authority sports centre which itself was risk-assessed up the arse. The question answers itself.
Unless you’re in the lumber room. In the lumber room nothing makes sense. When you are in the lumber room you exist in a state outside rationality or sense or the rules of cause and effect. You are there because the rules set by a manager deems it necessary for you to be there. If you could find the manager and ask them to explain why, they’d put out a tender for a contract to come up with an answer while you waited patiently.
The point about a Kafka novel is that the more you try to rationalise the rules you are faced with, the worse it gets for you. Just accept and surrender. You can’t fix it or reform it or mend anything because everything is operating precisely like it is meant to and the fact that it doesn’t work at all is not a relevant observation.
I am tired trying to explain this to people. We are stuck in an actual fucking nightmare and it is very much in complete control. If we could only wake up it would all go away. If only we could wake up. If only we could wake up…
*Just in case you’ve not read it, (a) you really should and (b) our lead character gets trapped in a bureaucracy that can’t explain why he’s trapped in it and as he is trying he ends up in a ‘lumber room’ which is the point at which everything becomes increasingly surreal and the madness of what is happening really becomes clear. No, I don’t know what a lumber room is either…