Why you should learn the Iron Rule of Oligarchy

All bureaucratic systems tend further and further towards centralised control, and there are no exceptions. The only protection against this is checks and balances, and the only protection for those comes from our determination to keep officials honest.

Do you know the Iron Law of Oligarchy? I think it should be compulsory learning for all citizens. It was devised in 1911 by an Italian/German sociologist called Robert Michels. His rule is simple; all bureaucracies will, by their nature, tend towards increasing centralised control, expanded power and reduced transparency and accountability.

This is one of the big battles of our era. The Iron Law of Oligarchy used to be something that people paid attention to. Centuries and centuries of experience shows that when you create bureaucratic structures the same thing happens over and over again – the people at the top pull more and more power towards them and make it harder and harder for the rest of us to see what they're doing.

It literally doesn't matter whether we're talking about the medieval church or your local bowling club, either some faction is trying to take control and cut others out, or those in control are trying to expand their power, or they are amassing ever larger and larger empires, and they're always trying to make it harder for them to be caught doing things they shouldn't.

The point is that you don't need to be dishonest or a crook to want to shrug off accountability. In fact it is generally precisely because someone thinks they are an 'honest kind of person' that they conclude they can just skip a step which was put there to constrain them.

By the time someone finds this out and the person concerned starts trying to cover it up by trying to prevent the information coming out, it's miles too late. You're now on a path where that 'honest' person is trapped in a cycle of doing more things they shouldn't to cover up the last thing they were covering up. Bit by bit the checks and balances get eroded – and you end up with oligarchy.

So you can spend all the time you want telling yourself that if you just appoint 'the right people' it'll be OK. But that is back missing the Iron part of this Law: all bureaucratic systems inherently tend towards unaccountable authoritarianism overseen by a small elite at the top.

The dynamic really is unavoidable; it is the combination of the way bureaucracies work (they control their own information flow), how power is distributed (bureaucracies are always hierarchical) and the human condition (we all think we're good people who'd shouldn't be questioned.)

They almost always control their own process – they get to change the rules they play by. They inevitably make mistakes, and they always have means and motive to prevent scrutiny of the mistakes. Bureaucracies confer both power and wealth, and those are dreadfully addictive substances.

Someone operating in a bureaucracy will always find that bureaucracy generates friction – it slows things down. Often this is just bad bureaucracy, but that is also a fundamental feature of scrutiny. Scrutiny deliberately slows you down so people get a chance to see what you're doing before you do it. In the short term, honesty is fundamentally inefficient.

But it isn't it the long term. Everything I describe above is a downwards spiral. At first skipping some accountability steps enables you to deliver something a bit faster. But once accountability is weak enough you get Covid VIP lanes. Scrutiny takes time but it helps prevent corruption, and corruption is always less efficient than the cost of scrutiny.

By the time you get to the farcical, petty bureaucratic oligarchy we have in Scotland the whole process is self-fuelled. Elsewhere I have been writing about how the codes of conduct in the public sector have been written by bureaucrats to make sure they aren't held to account but that anyone who tries to hold them to account is punished for it.

For example, you know data protection laws that were put in place to regulate what was becoming an industrial-scale free-for-all among the corporate sector who were scraping our data and using it to target and manipulate us without limit? Well could you have possibly imagined that this would become a blanket policy of immunity for senior bureaucrats? Revealing that they were corrupt is regularly defined as breaching their data protection rights.

Would you ever have imagined that a democratically-elected politician could be suspended from office for trying to find out how a senior bureaucrat broke a rule, or acted in a manner that was against the public interest? This is the rules as created by people who are using those rules to prevent scrutiny of them.

“Every time I think I’ve got a grip on how bad it has got, someone comes along and tells me a story of rampant bureaucratic abuse and my jaw goes slack yet again”

I've seen this Law of Oligarchy operate many, many times. I've been on committees where we found that one of us had made a mistake or had done something via the wrong procedure to hear those inevitable words 'let's not minute that'. The best of us have an authoritarians inside waiting for the opportunity to suppress that which threatens us in any way. It is categorically not 'a Stalin thing'.

There is a sum total of one way to stop this happening; a constitution (in the broadest sense). A constitution is a set of conditions imposed on a bureaucracy which it is not allowed to change (or not easily). It creates barriers to oligarchy and corruption. It might be the written document you probably think of when you hear 'constitution', but it is wider than that.

It is any set of rules, conventions, structures, expectations, routes of scrutiny and accountability, procedures, proper recording and the right for others to gain information. Transparency is all that stops bureaucracies moving to oligarchy faster than they do.

Having an independent media able to scrutinise government is an example of a version of the kinds of checks and balances on power which are not created by a constitution but are protected by them. Providing citizens with a clear right to information does not solve the problem – they have to ask for it and find out where there has been failure. But simply providing the right to that is powerful.

All of those above conditions are under assault in Scotland. Every means we have for holding public sector bureaucracies to account is being weakened, removed or subverted. Freedom of Information laws are routinely ignored, dragged out, appealed. Redactions are everywhere. Accountable processes (government) are replaced with unaccountable ones (quangos).

Power is centralised, declining media scrutiny is secretly celebrated (Scottish news media has collapsed over the last 20 years and not a single politician gives a monkeys) and procedures are revised and weakened. Commissions and committees and inquiries are packed with 'friends and family'. Most of it takes place in the dark (what could you actually tell me about, say, the Scottish Futures Trust, the privatisation body built into the heart of government).

And then the worst thing of all happens; the message is sent out clearly that 'no matter what you do, no matter what happens, you will be protected'. The moral hazard in Scotland's public empires is shocking.

Every single senior official in Scotland now knows they can called south Asian waiters 'the chocolates' and face no consequence, or they can organise themselves illegitimate golden goodbye payments and, even if auditors are shocked and outraged, you'll be allowed to keep it and face no consequence. You can do whatever you want and nothing will happen to you. Knowing that is late-stage oligarchy.

I grew up in a certain kind of Scotland. The Iron Law was always there. My mother was a councillor in the old Glasgow Corporation in the 1960s and I hear her tales. When I grew up it sounded like power-hungry pen-pushers trying to control everyone; looking back now they seem like particularly abstemious monks in comparison to the current situation.

Every time I think I've got a grip on how bad it has got, someone comes along and tells me a story of rampant bureaucratic abuse and my jaw goes slack yet again. I held a meeting on this subject today with three people who have all been the subject of the abuse of bureaucratic powers. Their everyday stories would curl your hair. It is truly out of control.

The good news is that rather a lot of people have had enough of this. I was in the meeting I mention because we've now been approach by so many people who want to do 'something' about some aspect of this or other (freedom of information, conflict of interest registers, data protection reforms, public inquiry reforms, oversight structures...) that it is becoming irresistible.

We are going to pull all of this together into a very substantial programme of action for a war on our bureaucratic oligarchies. Because this is all cyclical – the the Iron Law of The Rest Of Us is that we will sleep through the first steps towards oligarchy, shrug through the next steps, get annoyed by the steps after that – then we get furious, and we reform the whole bloody system.

Of course, at that point the Iron Law of Oligarchy kicks in again, because humans are humans. But Scotland is now long due a very, very substantial reset - and we're on the case.