If we don’t get ahead of the game we lose

The chattering classes continue to chatter but fail to reach conclusions. But more chatter is a luxury we can’t afford; we need answers, we need action and we need some savvy.

The governing classes in both Scotland and the UK as a whole are now so far behind the game it is becoming questionable whether they can ever catch up. We should be five steps ahead of where we are. Unless someone can get ahead of the game, this will keep happening. I want to explain what 'ahead of the game' looks like.

There is a lot to get through here so I will use some shortcuts. From this point on I will refer to the coterie of politicians, civil servants, quango and agency staff, consultants, suppliers and lobbyists who run policy in Scotland and the journalists, commentators, academics and think tanks who are supposed to understand what is happening and explain it to you simply as 'the ruling classes'.

And they're at it again this week. A quick summary of what 'behind the game' looks like starts with their confusion at the Hamilton by-election loss, morphs through a letter from a think tank saying 'we ought to do something about the NHS' and then into a generic it-could-be-any-of-them Spending Review.

The Spending Review is particularly revealing. Cover the top of the screen, read the highlights and try and guess which group of mission-light technocrats have been selecting options from among the corporate lobbying requests on their desk. The highlights of this one are bombs, guns, nukes and bashing immigrants not Flamingos, bombs, guns, carbon capture and storage and getting rid of rent controls, so it probably isn't the SNP. But it says 'social housing' so I'm going to guess.... Labour?

Here's the thing; they have literally been doing all this and talking about it for nearly two decades. The last time they weren't talking about how 'something should be done' was in 2006 before the banks crashed the economy. Twenty years should have been enough to formulate a proper understanding of what is going wrong and why, a programme for how to change it and a plan for implementing it.

Or, put another way, if 20 years isn't enough, another five isn't going to help them. If this is how far behind the game the ruling classes are, they definitely aren't the solution.

To get to where I think we ought to be right now I need to whip through what's going wrong, why and what to do about it. Basically our economic system doesn't do what it claims to do, democracy has been distorted around our economic system so it doesn't do what it's supposed to do either, and the outcome is a system in which extractive 'termites' have been allowed to insert themselves into every stage of economic and governmental process.

Process is another key part of the problem. A wrong-headed management ethos has taken over the public sector and sees process adjustment rather than frontline delivery as the means to correct failings. This is 100 per cent the wrong way round. So basically New Public Management and neoliberal economics have clashed with triangulated third-way politics and the barely-regulated power of commercial influencers everywhere in government – and it is a disaster.

Trickle down doesn't work; nor does trickle up (GDP growth is now only put forward as a means to increase tax take, not pay). Inserting yourself in a productive process and taking value out of it is harmful, not positive (that includes foreign direct investment). Management consultants do not run public services well. Bureaucracies should not be left to run wild and build empires in the public sector.

The outcome is that investment in a better society doesn't work because the economy is undermining it faster than the investment can work (count the healthy eating adverts versus then junk food adverts), because economic inequality undermines absolutely everything, because waaaaay too much of the investment is pocketed by pointless intermediaries, because the management class that spends the investment are the problem and not the solution...

To fix this we need to break down these long-standing orthodoxies and replace them. Trickle-down economics doesn't work so we need to make economic equality the goal (not 'raise all boats' but 'raise the boats that have sunk or are sinking'). Interventions in the domestic economy are our only hope. We must regulate harm which means we must expel the lobbyists from the temple.

We need to let frontline professionals lead public services, not the management class. We must be ruthless in hunting out unnecessary intermediaries in the governmental process (like quangos or consultants or over-powerful suppliers) and then ruthless in cutting them out of the system. And lots more.

I don't have space to tell you what the policies all are that deliver this but we've been working on them for a decade and wrote a book about it so if you want to go into the detail...

And that, all of that, all of that process, should have happened at a national scale by now. We have known for a long time that public services are under extreme strain and that the economy simply isn't working for a very significant proportion of the population. We shouldn't still be staring blankly at this.

“Put simply, you need to be running your department, not drinking wine at receptions while ‘the machine’ runs your department”

So where should we be? It is late in the day for what and why and how. We should have a plan and, by this stage, be looking at the barriers to implementation. That is what I personally have been thinking about as a majority of my thinking about current public policy in Scotland.

First, we need a group of politicians who understand how government is supposed to work and who are briefed up not on what tweet to put out on behalf of the leadership but on what the serious analysis says is wrong. If it was me, none of them would be getting summer holidays. I'd have them all at 'learn your job' bootcamp.

I have seen this from the inside (I did just such a bootcamp). Hire former insiders to explain to you precisely how their colleagues will prevent you from doing what you want to do. How do the civil servants manage you and how instead should you manage them? What are the tools to counter their power (they have the staff and the lawyers and the money, you're just a punter that got voted for)? How can you use your tools?

Politicians in Scotland act like mouthpieces for quangos and lobbyists, appear not to know that this isn't what they're meant to do, and don't seem to know how to do anything about it. Saying 'SQA, please stop being bad at exams' or 'CMal, could you sort the ferries out?' is clearly silly.

And yet that's the primary power the politicians choose to exert. They are allowed to send letters (which can basically be summed up as above) but not interfere in the running ('Quasi-Autonomous', if you didn't remember...). They can't actually do much but hope the bureaucrats do as asked.

But they won't. You will 100 per cent get resistance from the Chief Executive of the Scottish Water Small Animals Bigger Than Tadpoles But Smaller than Otters Unless they are Amphibians or Birds Or Molluscs Protection Commission (whose salary is £6 gazillion). You could certainly discuss the problem with him a little bit more. Our you could just abolish and make the function work better.

The irony is that this whole clanjamfrey of chancers was originally conceived as a way to take the pressure off politicians. It was sold (to the politicians) on the basis that 'you don't want to have to answer for everything that happens, do you? Leave it to us.' The idea was to offload responsibility to technocrats so politicians could stick to the 'big vision' thing.

Problem is you don't get to have a big vision if the foundations are crumbling. The technocrats in quangos make a lot of money and being on their boards confer you a lot of power, but they are not running public services well. The irony is that it has ended up being the politicians who are carrying the can for this.

I want to laugh at the idea that you can get elected to run schools, hand it off to a load of managers and run free in the fields while the public adores you. I feel schadenfreude that the people who abdicated their responsibility are now getting pummelled for what the people they abdicated to are doing. But it doesn't help.

Again, I've truncated this very greatly for simplicity. It is very much not just quangos. You've got dodgy consultants who appear to add no value writing most government policy. You've got dominant suppliers who can build an unopenable sports centre, burn down the Glasgow School of Art and sail on undeterred to the next public contract.

You've got IT firms designing the public sector IT systems not for you but for themselves. You have lobbyists constantly trying to scare you with you trying to sook up to them (it is supposed to be the other way round). You have 'policy snow', the annual dropping of new tangential policies onto failing delivery which pile up to no effect because the system doesn't work.

But you've got to understand exactly what I'm saying here. I am not in any way having a go at everyone who is a consultant or a supplier or a staff member at a quango or an IT consultant. If you know anything about government you will know that there are thousands of these people and a very high proportion of them are good, trying to do good things and as frustrated with things as you are.

This is the real trick. The whole system is slanted in the wrong direction – towards precisely the wrong kind of people, the kind of people who will protect their empire before they will do anything about their own failures. Clever leaders must know how to empower the right people, to incentivise the right people, give power to the right people.

You can't do that with press releases or speeches or letters. You need to understand what is going on enough that you can change it, and you need to get your hands dirty in the process. Put simply, you need to be running your department, not drinking wine at receptions while 'the machine' runs your department.

In the spy industry this is all known as 'tradecraft'. It is a set of unwritten rules and practices which become standard because they work. No-one writes them down and no-one teaches them. There is no apprenticeship and you can't do a degree in it. You need to learn on the job from those who already have tradecraft.

But no-one in Scotland’s governing classes has the tradecraft any more; there is no-one to learn from. It needs a 'revolution of understanding' on the part of the politicians because they're the only people who can do anything. What will do literally zero good is another chattering class conference at Dynamic Earth...

If we are to prevent everything falling down we need to get in front of the game. We don't need a conversation about solutions, we don't need a solutions options sheet, we need a coordinated plan of reform with a realistic implementation plan. The game is running away from us. We need to wake up.