I've never actually sat through the whole of Yes Minister but have set about it this week. It's every bit as good now as then. In one of the early episodes Jim Hacker sets about streamlining the civil service. It is one of the oldest Tory canards that we have a bloated civil service in need of rationalisation and every new generation utters that same old refrain.
In the Yes Minister episode, Hacker finds himself in quite the pickle as it transpires than much of what is perceived to be waste actually serves a function and things work rather less well when you get rid of them - and has to be bailed out by Sir Humphrey. The man who knows the ropes.
This is all rather typical of politics and especially now. Everybody thinks they have an easy answer to problems that are more complicated than they appear. The Tory right wants to prune foreign aid and cut DfID, largely on the back of a few classic Daily Mail tropes ie funding India's space programme. And while there are, admittedly, some egregious examples of poorly focused aid, much of it is what buys us support for our initiatives in international forums. International development itself is key to tackling a number of long term problems including mass migration. It is a soft power instrument we need now more than ever.
There is a similarly simplistic view of trade. Much of the debate this week has centred around any potential trade deal with the USA and yet again we wearily return to the subject of chlorinated chicken where the point is missed by a country mile. It is less to do with whether such products are safe as the implications for our regulatory configuration and the subsequent reduction in access to EU markets it would lead to.
We could go into more detail on that but it's largely pointless. The right has convinced itself it is simply a matter of allowing customers to choose for themselves. But then it doesn't quite work like that either. Young mothers shopping to a budget don't have the luxury of choice. Food ethics is very much a middle class preoccupation. What you then get is a situation where the UK is a dumping ground for US surpluses at the expense of our domestic production and subsequently exports. If we are importing what is viewed by the EU as a system contaminant then UK produce will face more frequent inspections at the border.
This is the thing with trade. It's not just a matter of securing free trade deals like notches on the bed post. Every single decision has ramifications for existing trade and not all FTAs are necessarily beneficial. The danger is that we rush ahead with a deal for a quick propaganda win only to find it is detrimental to our own interests. As it happens, I think in the event of no deal the UK will soon be grovelling back to Brussels for any deal it can get which will see demands that squash any potential US deal. Between that and an outpouring of public opinion, it's a non-starter.
This is where we can put to bed the notion that the free traders in the Tory party are actual conservatives. Trade as a policy instrument is highly political and every decision in the process must be evaluated not just in terms of trade growth but also its social and environmental impact. Taking the ERG Tories at their word; that they seek a quickie deal with the USA and will also implement unilateral tariff cuts, unless there are safeguards for UK agriculture we end up turning our countryside into boondocks. Why go to the trouble of rearing livestock when you can turn the land over to a solar farm and cream off the subsidies? I know of no actual conservatives who want that.
This is where it helps to have a class of expert technocrats in the system as a line of defence against fundamentally bad ideas. The creaking bureaucracy of the civil service may well be something we all complain about but in most cases we are better with than without. Parliament may not be able to crush a bad idea but the civil service can.
That, though, has changed in recent years where experts who say the wrong things tend to find themselves out on their ear. We have seen Ivan Rogers effectively dismissed after having his inputs vetted by political advisers. This dynamic is not limited to Number Ten. Just about every senior minister has a political stooge appointed to senior advisory roles, very often knowing nothing at all about the subject matter and very often party apparatchiks rewarded for their loyalty.
If Yes Minister is anything to go by this has been the case for a long time but it certainly worsened under Blair and has now become the norm. Consequently politics is less about good governance as it is turning the whole apparatus of Whitehall into a political plaything for those with no knowledge and zero aptitude.
This then leads to the breakdown of parliamentary evidence gathering. We have seen since the referendum how parliamentary committees are largely toothless, with their findings going straight into the bin supposing they are read by anyone of influence at all. One wonders if there is any point in them continuing to exist.
To a large extent government has been hijacked by a wonkocracy based on political favours and good sense gets nowhere near the levers of power. This partly explains Theresa May's idiotic red lines and the marginalisation of genuine expertise. From that point onwards any chance of a workable Brexit deal went out the window.
The essential problem here is the gulf of understanding between the public and government. Demagogues and chancers will often promise to slash foreign aid, streamline the civil service, get us out of the EU with a single bound and kickstart British trade. It's all so very easy to say, and all very popular, but when politicians reach office they are often told a few of the facts of life. This is why parties very often do not make good on their manifestos and it's why the public become so very jaded with politics.
This makes for ample opportunity for populist upstarts, none of whom will actually get near power thus do not have to confront any of the realities of modern government. They will never go as far as actually detailing any of their policies because populist ideas never withstand the onslaught of serious scrutiny. Ukip tried in 2015 to much ridicule. I look forward to Ukip 2.0 making the same errors.
The short of it is that modern statecraft is inherently complex and every lever you pull on sets in motion a serious of events with consequences that cannot be anticipated. To be a serious proposition for government you need a joined up programme of policies toward specific outcomes, many of which will be counter-intuitive. In an age of ideological trench warfare it simply cannot compete with demagogues pushing simplistic mantras. They are revolutionary wreckers.
Arguably the system has become so ossified and set in its ways and so deeply corrupt that we perhaps are in need of wreckers, but right now it is hard to see how that will accomplish anything. It's also easy to tear down but I do not see any serious answers to difficult questions coming from the new right. Certainly where Brexit is concerned all we get is delf-deception and high fantasy. We're in serious trouble the moment it collides with the real world.
Still, though, the revolution as begun all the same. It is now unstoppable. There are forces at work beyond our control and the fever will just have to burn itself out in its own time. It will be left to the rest of us to pick up the pieces. All one can really do is batten down the hatches and do whatever it takes to survive it. Neither Labour or the Tories are in a fit state to govern so we are just as well letting the chips fall where they may. It seems the revolutionaries will have to discover for themselves that running a country is a lot more difficult than complaining about it.
For Britain this has been a long time coming. Government has become so remote and so out of touch and our collective involvement in the process of governing has diminished over the years. This is partly a consequence of EU membership which so much is out of reach of politics, but it is also a consequence of a born to rule political class which is singularly incapable of acknowledging that anything outside of its myopic concerns even exists at all.
At this point, one starts to sympathise with remainers whose chief argument seems to be that none of it is worth the hassle. They are all about the status quo which, for all its injustices and inadequacies, is perhaps preferable to the long and costly process of political renewal. I could almost talk myself into being a remainer. The point, though, is that these questions will not wait and to deny democracy to uphold a failing status quo only results in a more turbulent correction later down the line.
Ultimately we can only have a functioning economy if we have functioning politics and we simply cannot say that our politics is working as it should. Where this revolutionary process leads I don't know, but I do know that the old establishment has outstayed its welcome and its various corruptions need to be resolved. It won't be the upstart populists who do it in that they'll be equally or more corrupt at the first sniff of power, but we are at least opening the door to long overdue change - right about the time when the post war settlement and its institutions are dying of old age.
The world is entering a new and unpredictable age. British politics is based on a centuries old model which never anticipated the internet and social media and is far from fit for purpose. We are entering a new age of politics and economics where the old rules simply don't apply and our institutions are unable to cope. We have proved that centralised government in London cannot serve the whole nation and if there is to be renewal then it most be at the hands of the people deciding for themselves how to structure their own affairs. Westminster cannot be fixed. It is time we bypassed it entirely.
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