Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Sheilbh]

Quite funny that government for some reason decided to offer a free photo portrait of King Charles to various institutions - some you kind of expect like courts and otherwise it's a bit of a grab-bag.

Anyway the union for university academics have called it "culture war nonsense", while the association representing imams has said that they're frustrated that mosques are not entitled to a free portrait (but CofE churches are) as they would quite like one

[Sheilbh]

Yes, GDS used to be brilliant. Not just for government brilliant, but actually brilliant-brilliant. It set a lot of standards which became the norm across the field.
And yup...they decided penny pinching was the way forward and now bring on consultants for thrice the price on isolated projects, not continuously building and being engaged in something.

Yeah but it's not just penny pinching and basically this government.

I think there's too separate trends that are kind of coalescing in this.

One is the way the civil service works - as I say, since at least Harold Wilson's government 60 years ago there have been numerous independent reports highlighting the problem of the civil service preference for generalists and disdain for deep, specialist expertise. That everything is really understood through their own career ladder and structure - so the idea of someone staying in the same area of policy (like energy market regulation) or practice (like procurement, digital services) is just absolutely alien to the civil service and they cannot accommodate it - I think it's striking that the one area I think that does happen is for lawyers, who basically have their own guild privileges. To that I'd add that basically every minister in all parties who either knows their area very well or tries to do something quite big, has found the civil service is a bit of an obstacle (Tony Blair's "scars on my back" speech). I think those two things are possibly linked.

The other big trend that I think has happened around consultancy is similar but a little different which is that the civil service focus is policy not delivery. It's not doing things and I think part of that is also simply because of the peace dividend. I think lots of people would point to neo-liberalism/Thatcher but I'm not so sure - I think the shift was the 90s and in the 80s the British state still did things (and had to), if only because of the Cold War. I think it's in the 90s when it's the other layer of peace dividend that you get more efficiency from outsourcing, from external expertise etc - which is all true (but as all systems contain the seeds of their own end) also means that the internal capacity was diminished over time.

I can't help but wonder about this in Ukraine. Broadly speaking in Europe there is overwhelming public support for Ukraine, strong statements of support from political leaders and I think intent - but we are failing in a war of production. And I can't help but wonder if part of that is fundamentally that we have, in Europe, basically diminished our state capacity from that maximalist version of the mid-20th century with expansive welfare states/social systems and Cold War responsibilities? And that we're now at the stage where it is very difficult to do things if it hasn't already been set up? The industries that existed to support that state, but was subordinate to it (like Europe's multi-billion dollar arms industry) now are primarily export sectors.

I wonder if the combination of the peace dividend, the impact of China and Eastern Europe helping cut inflation in the 90s and 00s (despite energy challenges) but also generally available energy means there's a generation of leaders but also civil servants who simply have no experience of really thinking about the world, the state and their job in material terms of production, supply etc. I think of Rory Stewart's (as a former civil servant and then politician) line about the shock of being back in a "19th century style world" where ownership of raw materials, production capacity etc is really important and politicised - and I just think that it always was, it's just that on the end of benign impacts of that for most of the last 30 years European states (with the partial exceptions of France and Italy) kind of forgot about it/pretended it wasn't and inadvertently hollowed themselves.