Ian Waine's Observations

It’s been a while, but recent events have persuaded me to dust off the old quill pen.

I have a degree of sympathy for Gillian Keegan. Her post-interview outburst may have been "unministerial", but you can understand the frustration of someone who has inherited a situation that has been several years in the making and who has had to do something about it that has not been popular. Indeed, her reward has been to put her firmly in the crosshairs of parents and a hostile political press alike. But if you look underneath the immediate issue of deteriorating RAAC in buildings, a deeper issue is lurking, something which has been exposed by the problems with RAAC but is also manifest in other problems that have caused commentators to speak of a feeling of everything being broken.

That issue is a lack of clarity as to what the job of central government really is. Let me say at this point that I am not aiming to be partisan, and I am not aiming to criticise this government over any other or to advocate smaller government, bigger government, or any point in between. But we have seen a repeated pattern of things going wrong in our national infrastructure (think, for example, of RAAC, the failure of Bulb, and the gradual renationalisation of our rail system) and central government as both the ultimate authority and revenue-raising body having to step in. We have also seen a series of bold policy announcements that have proved to be impossible to deliver, in some cases at all and in other cases within anything like their set timeframe. As an illustration, stopping the exploitation of migrants by people smugglers whose lives are ruthlessly endangered day in, day out all over the world is a global problem that needs a wider solution. Its isolation by major policy announcement as a domestic issue that can quickly and neatly be excised is highly unlikely to be effective.

At the root of all this is a flawed relationship between politicians and the electorate. We on our part have a tendency to want to make our own decisions but grumble about government when it doesn’t jump to our aid when things go wrong. Government can be tempted to try to address risks which are incidents of everyday life by legislation which is bound to fail because it applies to situations which, unhappy though they are, will inevitably exist. In other circumstances, government will deny responsibility for something which has gone wrong on the basis that the particular function has been outsourced. When you look a little closer, the problem has not been caused by poor management and those to whom it has been outsourced haven’t been able to address the problem because central government won’t give them the money to do it.

I can’t help but think that things would be improved if our relationship with government was one in which they were allowed to admit mistakes, some issues were more publicly acknowledged to be hard to solve and we stopped expecting government to bale us out when some of our poor personal decisions go wrong. So what’s getting in the way? Whilst we seem for the moment to have shrugged off the march of populism that is still at large in various parts of the globe, there is still an overwhelming tendency for our politicians to be driven by the need to be re-elected and to create the right cosmetic appearance to achieve that. The electorate in turn is prepared to play the focus group and soundbite game. And so it goes on.

Do I have an answer as to how to do it? I’m afraid I don’t, and with a general election around the corner, I’m not sure that things are going to change any time soon. But it’s a lovely day in the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, and, as a lifelong supporter of Everton can testify, there is always hope…