The Olympic Legacy

And so following a very successful Olympics, which despite my usual disinterest I actually rather enjoyed, the political conversation has now shifted towards a nebulous concept – the Olympic legacy. Needless to say, politicians of all shades will be promoting this with the full knowledge that they are unlikely to be held to account for its delivery. This is all about perceptions, not substance and so words are cheap and will no doubt be plentiful on this topic. Nonetheless, the Olympics are likely to have a real impact on the political scene and so it will be worth speculating as to what this actual impact will be. As for it influencing how Scottish voters will vote in the referendum in 2013, or how the UK votes in the election presumably in 2015 there is only one appropriate response – It is the economy stupid!

The first thing of course has to be the ‘feel good’ factor. As mentioned in a previous post, all politicians of all shades try to jump onto major sporting events to try to get the electorate to feel better about them and the world in general. No doubt Cameron’s promise to maintain the existing level of sports funding for Olympic sport is doing exactly that. Milliband’s call for an all-party consensus is another example. However, it does appear that the coalition (and Labour) has very much appeared to have been left out with the media giving lots of print and air time to Boris Johnson. Politically, it very much appears that Johnson has benefitted, with negligible benefits for anyone else in politics although there is a possibility the whole class war thing may benefit some fringe political commentators. From a political perspective, this implies that the power and momentum behind the London Olympics has very much stayed within the London power base, national politics has been very much marginalised. Is this a possible indication of future political power shifts from national to local level? Or is London , as always, unique and so this cannot be seen to be representative of the nation as a whole?

One definitely positive message that came out of the Olympics was the sense of ‘civic spirit’ particularly surrounding the volunteers. Maybe Cameron can take some satisfaction that the Olympics has demonstrated better than anything else, what his concept of Big Society is all about. It will be very obvious that the Olympics was a success that involved minimal government intervention (the call up of the military and the huge amounts of cash pumped in notwithstanding!). However, Cameron will have to be very careful before he makes this claim. GB managed to pull in a record number of medals. But then everyone knows that this is in part because there has been a real push to properly fund Olympic success. While the volunteers and the athletics may have made the whole event really uplifting, it is clear that this spirit can only flourish where properly supported. Big Society as a concept has failed to prove that it is about harnessing and supporting this sort of spirit rather than being more about trying to make cuts and shift the burden onto volunteers or charities. The old adage, “you get what you put in” has very much run true of this Olympics and the Conservatives are going to struggle to get this message across. Simply put, the Conservative brand has not been detoxified and the Olympics may well make the electorate further associate cuts as causing long term damage. The whole argument around the sell-off of playing fields is a very poignant part of this narrative.

On a less positive note, the Olympics has seemed to have encouraged the media to give lots of print to a sort of ‘class war’ and focussing on the number of medals won by people from private schools. This debate is highly divisive and I fear leaving a sour after-note. The reasons for so many medals being won by privately educated people are relatively clear and easy to understand, any solutions for correcting this imbalance are not. As with anything in politics, whenever someone is peddling black and white ‘truths’ the reality is that they are expressing biases and opinions. Nothing is simple to solve even if the problem is easy to understand. It would be a pity for the Olympic legacy to descend into a destructive narrative about the ‘toffs’ winning the medals rather than the focus being on how to improve sports and sporting achievement in the UK in a way that is accessible to everyone. While the coalition may be rightly castigated for having a cabinet widely seen as elitist, this does not mean the Olympic medal holders should be seen within the context of this debate.

If people do not want to see the Eton and Oxbridge brigade dominating the top of government, rather than whinging about it and trying to arbitrarily restrict entry, focus the narrative on improving access from the bottom so than anyone of ability who works hard has a chance. This is true of education, of the Olympics and pretty much any other area of life. If you really want to damage or properly criticise the ‘millionaire’s cabinet’, nothing is more damaging than a credible discussion about their lack of competence. The USA and China ruthlessly focus on supporting competence and success rather than class in their politically polar opposite quest for Olympic glory. The legacy that the British nation has to take away from the Olympics is that it needs to do the same in its own British way. It does not need to be massively state controlled ( China ) or fully capitalist ( USA ) as the GB athletes and volunteers quite vividly demonstrated.

A bloody awful idea

Worried about politicians not being able to implement their policies properly? Need government departments to improve their performance? Well the latest idea seems to be to routinely sack those at the top of their profession and replace them with people who know even less! Today’s story in the Independent is what caught my eye:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/ministers-plot-end-to-civil-service-neutrality-7995033.html

I am fully willing to concede that numerous top civil servants have done a poor job in many respects. However, some of them are brilliant and the ones you don’t hear about are the ones making government work despite all the handicaps thrown their way. Part of the problem is that the top of the civil service has become increasingly politicised. So making them even more political seems like a rather counter-productive move. More worrying still, this gives Ministers even more power at the top of their department, but does little to ensure that they receive good service and excellent advice. In short, it is more power with decreasing accountability.

I think the myth that the civil servants block ministers from implementing policy is exactly that, a myth. I feel an important quote coming on so here goes:

Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.
Napoleon Bonaparte

Simply put, government as a whole is failing to implement its policies because departments are not being run properly, policies are not being scrutinised or tweaked effectively and implementation is inadequately monitored. Bringing in another layer of political management is not going to solve the problem. More apolitical and competent technocrats is what is really needed plus reform of the system so that political ideology and corruption do not override common sense. It short, it is the politicians’ (of the last three decades) bloody fault because they are the ones who have created the structural and cultural weaknesses which has resulted in a poor civil service trying to implement bad policies, in an unfavourable environment with inadequate resources or skill sets.

The Independent article stated that Ministers were looking to the US , New Zealand and Australia as good examples. Not good choices. As anyone with the knowledge of the US can tell you, the bureaucracy is huge and every time there is an election or political crisis, government effectively shuts down. My limited knowledge of the Australian and New Zealand system indicate they have similar problems. Political decisions are too frequently made in these countries on a short term basis and with a very partisan bias. That is not how the UK wanted to do things which is why this model was never imported previously. At least the US Congress and Senate scrutinises these political appointments and they can get a very bumpy ride when things go wrong. The UK does not have this separation of powers and so such appointees are barely politically accountable. Until Parliament has more clout and independence from Downing Street , this transfer of unaccountable power would be simply frightening and likely to lead to horrendous problems.

More politicisation of the civil service is not an answer to our current problems. Neither is anything proposed by Francis Maude!

Thinking the unthinkable, going GOCO

Cast your mind back to the 80s or 90s or even early 2000 (if you are old enough to remember that far which sadly I am). Now imagine that a politician said the following thing, “Let’s privatise defence.” Granted, there was a cold war on a while back, but can you imagine the hostile reception that such an idea would have got? Handing over weapons and national security to greedy, profit hungry arms dealers, never!

Fast forward to today and defence companies are very much part of the scenery in defence. This is true for many countries and there are many logical reasons for this. Yet, the UK is willing to go one step further than anyone else and seems willing to contemplate the idea of privatising defence procurement itself. The buzzword is Government Owned, Contractor Operated. Here is what RUSI has to say about this:

http://www.rusi.org/news/ref:N501674F3225F2/

http://www.rusi.org/downloads/assets/GOCO_Briefing.pdf

What caught my eye (apart from the bloody good questions asked in the briefing paper) was the list of people contributing to this discussion. Not only is the former head of defence procurement and other ex-MOD people there, so are significant captains of defence industry. Quite remarkably, there is a not very subtle message being put out here from a group of people that shouldn’t necessarily agree on this issue, “Are you crazy?!” This is very much a shot across the bows for Bernard Gray, a political appointee who was made head of Defence Equipment and Support by David Cameron. He has always openly stated that defence procurement is a mess, it needs fixing and he sees the private sector as the means by which this can happen.

In the best traditions of Yes Minister I am going to say that he is both right… and wrong!

Let’s first give Mr Gray his due. Defence procurement is a political nightmare. Despite what the media says, this is not because the civil servants in defence procurement cannot do their jobs properly, but rather because the whole system prevents them from doing a good job. It is too easy for politics to derail even a well run defence project many of which face significant technical challenges simply due to the nature of the business. There are countless stories to demonstrate this. Mr Gray has done a good job of diagnosing the problems. His medicine, however, has not been subjected to trials of any kind by anyone else and if it goes wrong the resulting mess would be horrendous. I will not go into all the issues that can arise because the RUSI briefing paper raises these critical questions.

What I will say though is that Mr Gray has failed to answer the critical question of how do you take the politics out of defence procurement? The answer may well be that you cannot, but expecting a private company to be able to manage or even to stand up to political forces seems naïve. How would a failing company even be properly punished? The government will never be able to properly transfer the risks associated with defence or national security. Any risk transfer can only be temporary. The whole G4s security issue with the Olympics and my recent post about PFIs repeatedly emphasise this point. Like the past failures to manage NHS finances through the private sector or safely privatise the rail network, the results of such experiments are that people will die. Network Rail was dragged into court and fined, will the same happen to the GOCO when soldiers are killed due to faulty equipment? The banks are too big to fail, well so is defence.

This really is a risky experiment and Mr Gray is quite willing to say that we must run some risks if we are to gain the benefits. My question is whether the risks associated with going GOCO are worth the anticipated benefits? It may well be that some of the benefits can be delivered by a less riskier option. Sometimes being sure that you will get a ‘good enough’ solution is a much better strategy that striving for a brilliant solution that you have no certainty if it will work, especially when people’s lives are on the line. This philosophy is what often separates the public sector from the private. Some things are just too important to fail, while a proper market is all about success and failure in order to thrive. Mixing the two is always risky, a lesson the civil service has learnt, but one that politicians all too often forget or ignore.

This may sound like a boring way to approach problem, but I tend to find that good government is exactly that, boring.