Chronicling the poison spreading through the British system is a bizarre alienating experience. One feels like one of HP Lovecraft’s narrators. The horror is unnamable; we lack the words to describe what is happpening; but horror it is. The independent souls of individuals and institutions are being inexorably, ineluctably, supplanted by something dark and destructive, mirroring and subordinate to the great evil beneath Whitehall.
Look here, if you dare. You may wish to comment on that site.
Jim Murphy MP offers up a chorus in The Times’ Public Agenda section:
Have we done enough to ensure that the children of today are not left behind tomorrow? The answer is surely no.
One way of doing this is by empowering service users through offering a choice of service and providers.
Measuring people’s experience of their local environment, school or the criminal justice system -and acting on it – is also key to securing improvement. In measuring satisfaction, however, we must ensure that we don’t hear again only from the already socially mobilised.
So we have more to do.
But we can achieve this only through greater co-operation. That’s why I welcome the Future Services Network, a partnership between the National Consumer Council, Acevo and the CBI. An important development, it will help to ensure that citizens are at the heart of all policy. That’s all of the people all of the time.
No word of the incantation has discernable meaning. But the effect on this reader was to make him feel suddenly icy, hollowed-out; and the floor beneath him appeared to heave and writhe with snakes.
What Jim means, I think, is that if you can articulate an idea clearly, you should be ignored. That’s because you’re already one of the ‘socially mobilised’ – i.e. the opposition.
Rather disappointed to see my posting deleted – was it due to the fact I was not in agreement with the premise of it being corporatism? I see it as Statism using corporatism as a front.
Deleted?
Guy,
You been at the LSD again? All those HP Lovecraft references make me wonder. I’m upset as to the direction of the UK. But I don’t see it as “unamable horror”, I see instead a complete shift to a mediocracy. It’s not as cute
The horror is unnamable; we lack the words to describe what is happpening; but horror it is. The independent souls of individuals and institutions are being inexorably, ineluctably, supplanted by something dark and destructive, mirroring and subordinate to the great evil beneath Whitehall.
Is this lifted verbatim from the blurb for the new series of Doctor Who?
This is another example of where Samizdatistas should get involved. It’s an open goal.
For example, the “views” section asks “How best can public services improve their customer service?” if a few dozen Samizdatistas go and argue for the libertarian / minarchist solution it could show them they do not have a monopoly of thought as they do other markets.
Struggling to get my sleeping back in synch, I wasted some of the small hours of yesterday (or was it today?) staring, with a similarly Lovecraftian sense of horror, at the Parliament channel.
The session being broadcast was, I imagine, the proceedings of the Transport Committee, in which a series of lobotomised ZaNuLabour MPs in suits, herded by the impossibly loathsome parliamentary dominatrix, Gywneth Dunwoody (perhaps the most arrogant person in the House – and that’s no mean feat!) were talked at by some young sprog from ACPO.
Fashionably trim, hair just right, this little monster certainly yacked the yack about traffic ‘enforcement’. He exuded all the certainty, all the smug self-assuredness of his type of policeman-who-never-walked-the-beat, as he trotted-out the clichés of modern policing.
Questioned (though that is hardly the word) by flabby, complaisant MPs, he had at his fingertips all the bogus wisdom which has turned this country into a nightmare, with large sections of the population angry and bewildered by their new status as criminalised milch cows, while child eaters and wife burners are treated with a gentleness usually reserved for the elderly and frail.
Not one of these creatures was really alive: not in any sense we might recognise. Ratiocination was not on display. Instead, it was sufficient to go through the motions of speaking pseudo-English (the language of our governing classes, so well displayed in that turgid passage Mr Herbert quotes from the entity calling itself Jim Murphy), trotting-out genuinely thought-free cant and passing it off as reason.
These fools rule us using false currency and we allow them to get away with it. Even Lovecraft would have been pressed to match that.
Guy Herbert, you are one hell of a writer. And so are you, GCooper.
I would take issue with GCooper, though, on this: These fools rule us …
They’re not fools. Maybe the flabby-minded herd of backbenchers. But not Blair, Brown, Straw, the nasty young sprog from an acronym and legions of his ilk; not all ZaNuLab’s bossy, controlling women ministers who I cannot distinguish from one another and whose names meld … nor Ian Blair … Nor David Cameron … I believe there’s a deadly virus grips Britain, an AIDS of the soul.
What continues to mystify me is, why did the British let it take root?
Verity says “They’re not fools. Maybe the flabby-minded herd of backbenchers. But not Blair, Brown, Straw, the nasty young sprog from an acronym and legions of his ilk“. To which I add: that only makes them more Lovecraftian. Terrible intellect viewed as a mere tool in the project of madness, whose end is the extinction of intellect – including its own.
Guy Herbert, you nailed it for sure. Now I have a conceptual tag on which to hang my disquiet with the British Establishment. Lovecraft’s creeping horrors are a far closer fit than the usual libertarian references to fascism, the USSR and 1984 – by comparison, compact, simple monsters with all their teeth in the open.
BTW, that quote can be picked apart and it has a semantic meaning, just not a very nice one. After running it through CthulhuFish:
Does our meddling extend into the future completely? No, so we should do some more.
A way to do this is by letting people have a Hobson’s choice.
It’s important to poll people’s feelings about the various thing we’re meddling in. However we should concentrate on polling apathetic people.
Let’s meddle some more.
We are happy about our parnership with some other meddlers. They will help us listen to and then ignore everyone’s opinion.
(Yich, that stuff twists your brain. Meanings that slip away the harder you try to pin them down…)
Anyway, why not give them some feedback, like they ask for?
Just sent this to the Future Services Network;
I thoroughly agree with your principles but thoroughly disagree with your intended methods. The only real and genuine way they can be achieved is if the threat of violence is removed from the funding. What the principles are describing is exactly what would occur naturally in a truly free market. So if the principles were describing the market for vegetables;
1. The public has a voice in the provision of vegetables. We exercise this voice with our vegetable buying actions.
2. We need flexible provision of vegetables. Look around. There are market stalls, farmer’s markets, farms, supermarkets, green grocers, corner stores, frozen vegetables, raw vegetables, fully prepared but uncooked vegetables, etc. etc. etc.
3. Many services could be delivered in new ways… Apart from the above people are always dreaming up new ways to provide vegetables.
4. People need more of a choice….. they have tremendous choice because there isn’t a state monopoly on provision of vegetables and no one is forced to pay for vegetables they don’t want.
5. Public services need to focus on customer satisfaction!!!! That is precisely the point. Public services do not need to focus on customer satisfaction. There are no genuine customers of public services. A customer is someone who chooses to pay for a particular service from a particular provider when he has a choice of other providers and is not forced to pay for a service whether it is good, bad or contemptuously “provided” by the state.
6. Motivated staff…… If staff aren’t paid voluntarily by customers how can they be motivated to care for them?
And what I neglected to say at the end;
Imagine if vegetables were provided by the National Vegetable Service…
Bernie! Bernie Bernie! Don’t give them ideas! Soon we will have a compulsory 5-a-day tax and an ‘organic’ box delivered to each household and a fine if we throw any away. It is true what you say though They are re-inventing the free market in services – the voluntary sector – but it will not be free but a limited menu to suit their agenda.
New Labour have pretty much hobbled the big guns of the private sector by wooing them with fat, lazy contracts. Now it is the turn of the independent, free-thinking voluntary sector who regularly beat the State red raw with their inventiveness, economy, efficiency and spirit.
Perry – dunno what happened then. It was a rushed day so clearly my error. Sorry.
I have posted up ther, basically along the lines of:
To make people have a voice, people should be free to directly fund the services they desire without the state having a veto or acting as an intermediary. IE not funded via taxation.
If people have such direct control within themselves, the services will, by the very nature of things, respond to their needs.
If people have the voice and freedom, new ways will be tried, will either naturally wither or prosper depending on people’s wishes while also allowing existing, good methods to remain in place.
Choice springs out from the above, no further action is really needed to get choice if people are free to direct their own money.
Customer satisfaction will be met again without any special apparatus.
Working for an organisation to suit your own view on life naturally occurs.
Therefore, all the principles can be met with almost no effort by the state.
I agree with Verity (although I feel slightly uncomfortable about saying so): Nick Herbert and GCooper have written beautifully here.
Nor is their disquiet misplaced (see comment near the top by NickM):
In my professional capacity I have occasion to advise financial services firms about their obligations under the money-laundering legislation and, ‘regulations’.
Please note: scare quotes for ‘regulations’ because said regs. is not law in the sense that regs. usually is; instead they is aspirational guidance.
That’s right, aspirational. They don’t tell firms what to do in given situations in order to avoid falling foul of the actual law on money-laundering. Oh, no. Wanna know why?
1. Because, as Ayn Rand pointed out of subjective law-making, of its very nature its application is subject to the whim of an individual bureaucrat and its norms cannot be known in advance by ordinary people outside the privileged class of decision-makers.
2. Because, were the FSA to provide point-by-point advice on what to do in any given situation, for firms to avoid being caught up in money-laundering, did such advice then fail, the FSA as regulator would have failed. And we can’t have that, can we? Better instead to put the onus on firms and leave them hanging out to dry on the basis of a post facto determination that they failed to comply with the nebulous aspirations of the ‘regulations’.
It gets worse.
The FSA, gawd bless it, recognises that firms cannot guard 100% against being used by money-launderers. Innocent firms thus, potentially, have a defence to charges of failure to investigate. But note: failure to investigate a suspicion of money-laundering is an offence…yet the police cannot be prosecuted for failing to investigate their suspicions of a crime; in other words, the co-option of private life to the ends of the state is such that supposedly private individuals and firms can now be held to a higher standard of criminal diligence than can the official forces of law and order… but anyway, since the FSA recognises that firms cannot be 100% watertight against use by unscrupulous criminals, it allows them to use what it terms a ‘risk-based’ approach to their anti-money-laundering procedures.
This means they have to find a golden mean between the practical demands of their business and the aspirations set out in the ‘regulations’.
If a failure of anti-money-laundering procedures then emerges, and the FSA decides whether or not to prosecute, its post facto deliberations will be further informed by whether it considers that the firm’s risk-based approach erred too far on the side of business practicalities and too little in favour of anti-money-laundering caution.
Lengths of string, anyone?
So what we are left with is this:
1. Legislation co-opting private firms and individuals into a role as guardians of state morality.
2. On pain of criminal sanctions for failure so to do.
3. Where the supposed ‘regulator’ is in fact a sort of spineless sixth form prefect, taking credit for success and hiding in the loos when it all goes pear-shaped.
4. A nameless dread: NickM, you try advising an honest man how to obey a law which doesn’t exist until six months after he’s made a decision.
5. A sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach: so how do I advise? I tell them to leave a paper trail. Of everything. Everywhere. They have a choice. They can spend unproductive time on leaving a paper trail indicating their alertness and diligence and innocence, or they can leave themselves defenceless to a po-faced clipboard-wielder enjoying his power. They must always be looking over their shoulders.
It really is that bad. Innocent people are going to suffer and, indeed, under this legislation, it has undoubtedly already happened.
The language gets everywhere.
Near the start of the regulations for the latest “Assignment” in my teacher training course it says “in the dynamic world of Further Education”.
No question or anything like that. Just a lot of public relations corporate speak.
This idea of running government like a business always turns out to be copying the worst practices of cartoon bad guy corporations.
Of course some corporations are really like this (Capita springs to mind). But it is as if the various government ministers, and other “public sector mangers” had kept the Marxism of their youth at least in regards to what a business enterprise is.
They have a picture of business in their heads and they try create that picture in reality – both in the “public services” and in private enterprises (they try and do the latter viaboth their regulations and the influence their contracts buys them).
Guy I am impressed with your Lovecratian piece here. The suggestion of a brooding threat is well done.