Liberty and Transparency

This story caught my notice recently, it's my own local Council, but it was the concept rather than the geography or even the specific issue that I found interesting. The Council - made up of elected representatives voted for by local people - made a decision which it (correctly) thought would be controversial, and so therefore it also took a policy position to not disclose which councillors had voted for it. Undoubtedly they were navigated through these waters by senior staff.

For a few days there was a minor media kerfuffle about it, but that seems to have fizzled out now.

However, Northern Ireland's obsession with politics makes us all think that politicians run the place, but they don't. Northern Ireland is mostly run by public sector 'officials', not unlike the colonial era British Raj which my father-in-law was born under in Lahore in 1942.

My (limited) experience of years interacting with the public sector here is that - when it deems it necessary - it specialises in anonymity, making decisions and issuing directions - but redacting and camouflaging the names of the individuals who did so. I have seen numerous examples of this.

Over the years, senior civil servants have openly told me how incapable they think most politicians here are. And no surprise – particularly at even a small local council like ours - the idea that 40 elected councillors (all of whom already have proper full time day jobs) can in their spare evenings somehow manage the labyrinthine policies and decisions and activities of say 900 full-time salaried staff is lunacy.

The local councillors that I know, and also those whose social media I follow, seem to spend most of their time as an interface between the public and 'the system' - roads, bins, environmental improvements, etc - a lot of the time expending their energies trying to get the people within 'the system' to do the jobs that they are already salaried to do. 

James Burnham wrote about The Managerial Revolution in 1941. This is our world. The politics is a sideshow.

PS: The German-American writer Hannah Arendt's superb definition of bureaucracy was "rule by nobody".