Identikit management consultant/Tory adviser/estate agent.

This is Matthew Sinclair, recently appointed by the Prime Minister as Chief Economic Advisor to No.10. In one respect, he seems alarmingly unqualified for the job, since he actually has a degree from the LSE in economics and economic history, and is therefore open to the accusation of being an ‘expert’ (of sorts). This at a time when the Treasury’s own top expert, Permanent Secretary Tom Scholar, had to be removed by the incoming Prime Minister, lest his expertise lead him to cast doubt on her strikingly original policies. But the second part of his degree title will come in handy, since is certain that Truss is going to contribute to economic history, indeed it has already done so.

In other respects, though, his CV is reassuring. He spent six a half  years at the imaginatively-named right-wing policy group,  the “Taxpayers’ Alliance”, latterly as its chief executive, and also worked for Deloittes and as a lobbyist for various economic interests. For example, he campaigned against renewable energy and green taxes, and in favour of more use of coal.
He may indeed already have contributed to Truss’s policies – albeit very briefly. During her campaign for the Tory  leadership, Truss committed herself to ending national pay negotiations for public servants, and replacing it with regional or local pay, in order to drive down pay levels outside London.  Some 15 hours later, she was forced to abandon that policy as unacceptable and unworkable. Someone interested in electability had noticed that it hardly seemed compatible with ‘levelling up’. Ending national pay was in fact previously a brilliant idea advocated  previously by……Matthew Sinclair. [Truss has already patented her ‘launch and recall’ policy system, and we’re going to see a lot more of these ephemeral  policies, with life spans shorter than a mayfly.]

Sinclair’s chief claimed fame is to have been chief executive of the Taxpayers Alliance or TPA. For an outfit so insistent on transparency in public finances, the TPA is quite extraordinarily shy about its own – indeed, about everything about itself.  It’s actually a company, founded by the right-wing lobbyist Matthew Elliott and operating out of that battery farm of  right wing Tory policy groups, 55 Tufton Steet, home also to the Adam Smith Institute, and for those who find the Adam Smith Institute worryingly left wing, the Institute of Economic Affairs, like minded outfits that work  closely together.

There about 32 million taxpayers in this country. How many, you may wonder, are members of the TPA? Wonder on, because that EPA doesn't seem to have anything as definite as membership. Its accounts don't say anything about its income, or where it comes from. On their website, they say they raised £815,000 in 2020. Then: “we have over 3000 supporters who have given us money” - a rather strange phrasing,  which seems designed to avoid any clue about over what period this money was collected. Clearly it's over some years, since they say  the average donation was £497. In short,  they reveal almost nothing about their money and who funds them.  And there's nothing about at all about corporate governance, other than the names of the company’s directors.  Apparently, it’s just run by a few Tory chums, as they think fit.

Compare and contrast with the Centre Left think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, which names its funders and in broad bands, how much each contributes, and has a named board of trustees, as well as paying members.  Secret v open. But why the secrecy? Mm?

So the title,“Taxpayers Alliance”, is utterly bogus. At most,  around one hundredth of a percent of them have ever contributed to  the TPA - fewer than that, if you assume that those who support the TPA may not pay tax, or not in the UK. And of course, it’s quite absurd, anyway, to think that 32 million taxpayers share a view on anything, even tax. After all, on recent polls consistently showing about twice as many people planning to vote  for the Centre Left, as  for the Right. And polls show a majority of the population actually favour higher  taxes  to make good the underfunding of the NHS and social care, after a decade of Tory austerity. And that includes nearly half of Tory voters! (1)  (Curiously, given its title, the one area that the Taxpayers Alliance doesn't seem to conduct research into, is what taxpayers actually want or  think.)

What the TPA is, really, is just a tiny  clique of Tory chums. And what it stands for, really, is a sort of Poujadism (2). Thus: taxes are far too high. They are always too high. They are always unfair. In fact, there's really something deeply wrong about taxation, as such. Why are taxes so high? Because of huge waste in  spending  public money. And because governments are seized with urge are to do good through public spending,  for example protecting the environment  or helping the desperately poor or overseas aid. Sometimes they don’t succeed. Better that they do  not try. The public sector is incredibly inefficient, feathers its own nest, is full of over-paid incompetents. Foreigners are to be avoided - the founder of the TPA,  Matthew Elliott, headed Vote Leave in the Brexit campaign. But not all foreigners – he was a founder member of Conservative Friends of Russia.

The TPA publishes what it calls ‘research’ which tends  to target the same issues again and again. People at the top of the public sector are paid far too much. For the TPA, there's something triggering about public officials earning over £100,000, or even worse, earning more than the Prime Minister. It seems to be the one area where these Tories fully suspended their belief in labour  markets! Other ‘research’ targets  such as public sector sickness rates, union facility time and so on. The TPA also loathe  taxation with green objectives, such as the  charge for plastic bags, and renewable energy. Sometimes the targets can be combined: for example some devastating research shows that over four years, four  government departments spent £209, 552 on cycle to work schemes and cycle racks. Over £10,000 per Department a  year. Another shocking revelation: the FCO takes 24 copies of The Times.  No wonder taxation is so high!

Only other hand, there are some flagrant examples of waste of public money somehow or other the TPA didn't get round to researching’. For example, Boris Johnsons spending £43 million on the ‘garden bridge’ across the Thames, when he was Mayor of London,  through procurement processes later found not to be open, fair or competitive, and for which nothing was ever constructed. Or Chris Grayling letting a ferry contract to a company which owned no ships and had never run ferries, through a  procurement process so flawed that Eurotunnel later  obtained £33 million in an out of court settlement.

Some scandals involving Tory politicians are criticised, but in somewhat muted tones. Take the 3.6 billion items of personal protective equipment which the  Government bought during COVID and which were later found to be unusable, much of it  bought through the bizarre ‘VIP route’ open to ministers, their advisers and MPs. In many cases with  contracts were  let to companies that had never produced PPE, some of them tiny:  a Jeweller from Florida gor a £250m contract, £108m went to a tiny pest control company with net assets of £18,000,another £108m went to a modestly sized confectioner in Northern Ireland. This VIP route was later challenged in court, and found to be unlawful. £8.7bn worth had to be written off and much of it is to be burned. But say the TPA, “Before we delve into the NAO’s damaging findings, it's worth congratulating the government on some aspects of their handling of PPE procurement. The government was malleable” [that’s a way of putting it]. “32 billion items of PPE was procured between February and July…. A testament to the UK’s ability to acquire large amounts of PPE in a relatively short period of time. “ Uhuh, and if it was unusable, what is that a testament to? The TPA concede, “The procurement of PPE has allowed the impression of chumocracy to blight the tender process and waste taxpayers’ money.” Just the ‘impression’, note.

The TPA is particularly taciturn when it comes to public money spent on private sector services which are then not delivered. For example Chris Grayling’s insistence on rapid contracting out of probation services, which subsequently led to the complete collapse of the contracts and subsequent costly re-nationalisation of the service, or the contracting out of facilities management in prisons which also led to collapse of the contract and renationalisation, or the contract with G4S for Birmingham prison which also collapsed leading to the public prison service taking over. Likewise the fate of G4S’s  contract for securities at the 2012 Olympics, which led the army being brought in. Or the theft by SRRCO and G4S of £200m on tagging contracts by fraudulently misrepresenting their finances to Government (a fraud admitted as such by both companies, but no-one convicted!).  Or the endless sage of MoD cock ups; destroyer costing £1bn each which when launched, turn out to have engines that cut out if the sea is warm, so the engines had to be ripped out and replaced at £50m a pop. Or the Ajax armoured vehicle, 5 years later, too much noise and vibration for humans to use them, £3.2bn spent and no likelihood it will ever work.

You get the picture. Bicycle racks for civil servants are an appalling waste, and must be exposed. Millions, or billions, wasted on contracts, some dubious or even unlawful, with suppliers who don’t deliver, well let’s not make too much fuss, eh?

The Taxpayers Alliance is a phony. It doesn’t, and can’t possibly, represent ‘taxpayers’, that huge, amorphous group, most of the adult population of the UK, in fact.  It’s not really concerned with waste or value for money. It’s a distraction machine, pressing the buttons of Express readers prejudices.

The kind of contribution Sinclair can make to saving public money is evidenced in his book,  “How to cut public spending (and still win an election”(2010). Sadly, not only is it out of print, but there’s not a single second copy to be found anywhere.  You know, it's almost as though somebody's been busy buying up all those second hand copies! So for knowledge of its contents, I am  dependant on two sources. First,  reviews on Amazon. The first by ‘responsible citizen’ gives it top marks:  “in essence it is simple - the UK spends more money than we take in tax revenue. This has to stop or we will become bankrupt”. I'm thinking that “responsible citizen” probably didn't get a degree from the LSE. The review by “manager” is even more pithy: “Just a pile of badly-written, poorly-edited rubbish by a bunch or swivel-eyed right-wing buffoons”.

The other information about the book is a recent ‘Guardian’ article. According to this, Sinclair’s big ideas included freezing state pensions, which I am  sure will enable Truss to win  handsomely in 2024.  Also cutting what is called ‘non frontline’ staff from the NHS and schools. This would include staff dealing with buildings, and the ever-hated ‘ managers’. I mean who would ever think that the biggest organisation in Europe, and one of the most  complicated, would  need something as superfluous  as ‘managers’? (3)

The intellectual poverty of this man, his tired, worn and unfeasible ideas for  saving money, perfectly illustrate the bankruptcy of this brand of Poujadist Toryism.

If you really want to save big money, I can do a lot better than that. (I’m hireable through Deloites at $20,000 a day).
 
Notes

1. NatCen British Social Attitudes 39, just published.
2. Pierre Poujade, French shopkeeper, started an anti-tax movement in the 1950s, which 52 won seats in the Assemblee Nationale in the 1956 elections but rapidly faded from view after De Gaulle established the Fifth Republic.
   
3. By the way since the right drone on about NHS being staffed almost entirely by administrators,  it's worth pointing out that every credible international comparison shows that exactly the reverse is true, that the NHS has  one of the smallest proportions of spends on administrative staff, compared to almost any other healthcare system. In particular, the United states, so  loved by modern Tories, spends 10 times as much per capita on healthcare administration as does the NHS. For those  hard of hearing at the back, I'll say that again in capitals  “THE UNITED STATES SPENDS 10 TIMES AS MUCH PER HEAD ON HEALTHCARE ADMIN AS DOES THE NHS”.
   

Sporadic conversations with neighbours on the allotment about last week's brutal heat wave - inadequate term - reminded me of something.  I've remembered what.

In  the apocaplyptic science fictions stories I devoured as a kid - John Whyndam's The Kraken Wakes, John Christopher's The Death of Grass and The World in Winter, for example - there were four stages to  whatever it was that was going to end  Life As We Know it.

At first, only the maverick boffin sees what's coming, no one pays any attention. Stage 2: the Powers That Be accept what he says, but are able to discguise what is happening and reassure a gullible public. Stage 3: dawning realisation by Ordinary People of what is happening - but it is still contained, normal life continues, there's no panic as yet and people still plan their lives as before.

We're at Stage 3, now. That's what happened last week.  Ordinary people now know that a quite unprecedented, incredible change is coming that threatens everything, in ways they still cant imagine - but still they jet off the Spain 'to get some sun', they grumble about politicians and wonder how to meet their gas bills....

Stage 4?  Well: you know what stage 4 is.  Don't you.

​We live in an age saturated with corporate scandals, public and private sector both, marked by greed, lies, callousness and cover up. But amongst them all, the Post Office scandal stands out.

It has lasted the best part of two decades and has destroyed the lives of many hundreds of innocent people. But what most distinguishes it is the ferocious, secretive and completely pointless cruelty of the Post Office towards its own people. It’s rightly been called the greatest miscarriage of justice in modern British history. I was wondering what it reminded me of: of course, it's Stalin's Great Terror, as recounted by Orlando Figes. Of course, these victims were not being tortured or executed, but there’s the same sense of loyal, innocent servants of the State being hounded by the State towards oblivion, for no reason whatsoever.

In brief: the Post Office introduced a new computerised accounting system, Horizon, around 2000, rolling it out without proper testing, and knowing it to be highly defective, operating it in a way that was both chaotic and secretive, and then when it generated false balances in sub Post Offices, hounding hapless and innocent sub postmasters by demanding they make good the difference from their own funds, then terminating their contracts, prosecuting them, sending many to prison and seizing everything they own, all the while denying that there were any problems with Horizon and - this was truly diabolical - telling each sub postmaster that nobody else had any problems with the system.

The Post Office was able to do this because they retained their own private prosecution system in house. For all other crimes the decision to prosecute and handling of prosecution had long been separated out from the police and given to the Crown Prosecution Service, and one sees from this story how necessary that separation is. The Post Office refused to give those accused access to the data that might have saved them and made use of an absurdly oppressive and unfair contract which few of them had seen in full, or if seen, understood.

As prosecutions mounted, and innocent sub postmasters and pace mistresses were driven into bankruptcy, mental illness, shame, imprisonment, ill health and in some cases suicide, the Post Office lied and lied and lied. It denied that they had retained the ability to change figures in individual sub Post Office accounts centrally, without telling the account holder. It denied there was any problem with Horizon, but in fact it was overwhelmed bad tsunami of errors and bugs. It deliberately suppressed all mention of independent reports which confirmed that there were serious problems. It deliberately failed to disclose material in its possession which was its duty to disclose in proceedings. The conduct of the Post office at senior and middle management levels was truly wicked.

Gradually and over many years a series of curious reporters, most of all Wallis, were drawn into investigating and eventually exposing and overturning these injustices. But one is not left with a sense of wrongs righted for two reasons. Too many people have had their lives shattered , their reputations destroyed, years spent in prison, savings and houses seized. Compensation cannot compensate for all that. And secondly there is at the end of it no justice: of a wide cast of wicked people at senior and middle management levels in the Post Office and in Fujitsu and in in the sub post masters own representative body, which took the side of the Post Office against its members, none have been brought to justice in any way. They simply retired on nice pensions and averted their eyes from the evil they had done. The current statutory inquiry will one hopes give some of these people a very unpleasant public grilling, but probably no more than that. Some of them deserve to be imprisoned: they wont be.

This account of the scandal is outstanding in every way. It is long - some 800 pages on Kindle - because the scandal went on for long time, and was endlessly complicated, but it is a surprisingly easy read. Wallis breaks it up into quite short chapters, without breaking the narrative flow telling the stories of many of the individual victims in a way that is simply devastating. You cannot believe that such things could be allowed to happen: nor did the victims themselves, until they did happen.

Wallis sets out to explain 2 sets of complicated, technical things: the operation and faults of the Horizon system itself, and the intricacies of the many court cases, one on top of the other. He does so very fully, without dumbing down come up but in a way that's surprisingly easy to follow. This is a very great skill. On top of that there's the thrill of the chase, with false turns, blocked routes and sudden breakthroughs, as a motley crew of reporters gradually begin to uncover the true horror and scale of the scandal. (One of the things I very much like about the account is the way the author gives full credits to other journalists.)

One is left wondering, as ever, why people behave this badly? After all there was no question of financial gain, either to individuals, or the Post Office as an organisation (the same cannot be said of Fujitsu, whose appalling behaviour has not been fully recognised, and seems to have been motivated basically by money).

No, the main motivator seems to have been that old, old vice, tribal or group thinking, us against them, ‘them’ the outsiders who don't understand our problems, who want to do us down, when we're doing our best, ‘them’ who have only bad motivations and who must be defeated at any cost.

A warning from history indeed.

Execution of disgraced mandarin. No Oxbridge College for him!

Someone asked me the other day, in relation to my recent posts about the ghastly mix of incompetence and cruelty in the Home Office, whether I thought civil servants who failed should be sacked. 

in general, no. I saw that policy or I should see instinct at work under Michael Howard, a man whose first thought under fire was to interpose the body of one of his servants between himself and the bullets.

It is a bad policy for several reasons. As Putin has discovered, it leads to people telling you what you  want to hear rather than what you need to know, and to people doing what is safe rather than what is necessary. 

Moreover, in large complicated organisations dealing with complicated matters, failure usually involves many people in varying degrees of culpability.

Moreover , if somebody is in a role where they are completely incompetent, there are questions about the person who appointed them and the person who managed them.  

Moreover, the emphasis needs to be on learning from failure not on  punishing it, and the second tends to get in the way of the first 

Sometimes, too, failure at a very senior level is inseparable from ministerial failure, eg failure to  set the right priorities or provide necessary resources.

But equally I do not think it is healthy for there to be no consequences whatsoever in the case of egregious failure, which  is what happens in the civil service. At senior level, it is almost unknown for anybody to pay any penalty whatsoever. As far as I can ascertain no permanent secretary has been made to resign or be demoted since before WW2.  Usually a senior civil servant who has failed on a big scale is promoted at exactly the same pace as if they had succeeded. That can't be right.

(Case in point, Antonia Romeo, Senior Responsible Officer for the single greatest disaster in justice policy in a generation, the probation privatisation programme, that had to be expensively cancelled after years of critical inspection reports, has now become..... Permanent Secretary at the MoJ.  Equality of opportunity was not supposed to  mean promoting failure on an equal basis with success.)

The circumstances in which I think there should be a penalty of some sort for failure - I'm talking of failure to do the job or deliver a reasonable  service, not something like fraud, sexual harassment etc - are as follows. When someone does something or fails to do something which they ought to know will cause serious failure, or serious harm. When someone covers up or lies about serious failure. When someone allows a serious failure to continue over a period , without doing anything about it or reporting it . And when a senior person takes delivery of a report exposing serious failure and is charged with ensuring that there is an improvement, fails to do so.

Outside of those circumstances, failure should be treated as an inherent aspect of work. It should be acknowledged,  if necessary apology made, its causes should be ascertained and put right, which might mean more resources, doing things differently, retraining, or moving someone. But in most cases not punishment. But note that - public acknowledgement, public apology.

An anonymous email, probably from a civil servant, once accused me of believing I was always right.  He had obviously not read my book, of  which a few copies are still available incidentally, which is full of my reflections on what I did not get right, or not right enough. I've never had any in inhibition about owning up to my failures.

That is in part because I had the enormous privilege of working for three quite outstanding leaders, different in many ways, but united in their total integrity. Richard Tilt, Martin Narey, Phil Wheatley. These were not men who needed to be driven reluctantly to admit failure at. They were the first to announce it, driven by consciousness of the moral imperatives of their work,  and the need for leadership.

People at the top who cannot admit to and own failure are a danger to all around them. They are certainly not  leaders. Unfortunately the senior civil service is full of them, including  the Permanent Secretaries of the Home Office and of the Ministry of Justice.

(By the way, do you know that Antonia Romeo is widely tipped for the next Cabinet Secretary? I put that in here because, sadly, some journalists who profile her fail to mention this in the published article.  In point of fact, I think she has every qualification, in terms of how the job is now understood.)

My family has banked with First Direct, a subsidiary of HSBC, since it started and it's been a good bank.

Not any more.

Today the FT reports that not only has HSBC decided not to wind down its operations inside Russia, as most banks have done,  but it has edited its reprots to remove the word 'war' about Ukraine and replace it with 'conflict' and also talks of regretting casualties 'on both sides'. You know, like when Nazi soldiers were shot while executing Jewish partisans. 'On both sides'.

Apparently it's much more profitable to be the only big western bank still operating in Russia than to quit.

Well, I cant and wont stomach that and I'm closing all our accounts today. It's a bore, but when I look into the eyes of a child orphaned by HSBC's  client, what else can I do?

If you bank with HSBC or First Direct I urge you to do likewise

Matthew Rycoft, head of the Home Office, a man who last year described the Home Office as 'a beacon of light for the vulnerable'. 

A thing that has become increasingly apparent, and is brought into sharp focus by the Ukrainian refugee crisis, is the astonishing incompetence, at the most basic level, of the British State. In the refugee context, it is incompetence mixed with carelessness.  (Conceivably, the two naturally go together. If you don’t care what happens to people, why care whether what you do works or not?)

A lot  of this, clearly, is due to ministers – Priti Patel,  a woman fired by pathological hatred of the most vulnerable, but who  is also surprisingly dense; and of course Johnson, who doesn't do detail and doesn't care about anything except himself.

But it's increasingly clear that there is a deep seated and very basic incompetence at official level also.
For example, the decision even some  weeks into the crisis that one official would be adequate at Calais, with  no need for a Ukrainian interpreter, and no need to set up a visa processing office there. Then the bizarre idea of setting up one at Lille but concealing its whereabouts, and the decision that  visa processing  did not need reinforcing at other locations in Europe, and that there was no  need for Ukrainian translation of the  visa documentation, are all surely  the actions of officials.

The new scheme for allowing  people to house  in their homes Ukrainian refugees not eligible for the previous scheme is equally shambolic. No thought was given to how hosts and refugees would be matched up. The idea that charities and faith groups could somehow do this was not brokered with them  at all before the announcement, and they are  simply not equipped or resourced to do. As a result all sorts of ad hoc arrangements are growing up, and I know  from my own experience of using them that they are wide open to abuse of various kinds, but equally worrying, there is nothing to support people whose immediate instinct  is to offer a home with thinking through what that will actually mean for them.

And very worryingly, nothing has been done to put in place the specialist resources needed to support refugees themselves, and hosts. Oxford council tell me that government did not talk to or even inform local government before the announcement - parts of a pattern of pathological centralization which is a mark this government. Or rather,  a pathological centralization of decision making, combined with the casual assumption that local authorities can always sweep up the mess thus created. And of course, many of the services most  urgently needed for refugees, such as housing, social care, mental health services, are precisely those services most badly damaged by Tory cuts. Nor is any source of help identified full cases where either host or refugee come unstuck, and a new home is needed urgently.

What is striking is that these are not complex or technical issues, but very basic and  very obvious, and exactly the sort of thing that an hours brainstorming would put up on the whiteboard as issues which simply had to be tackled. I mean, there was a room full of Home Office officials, and someone said, let’s allow people to welcome Ukrainians into their home, just as long as they already know the Ukrainian in question, and the person chairing that meeting said; good idea, that’ll work well.

The excellent reporting by Amelia Gentleman of the Guardian details what such breath-taking incompetence means for the traumatised war victims:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/25/ukrainian-refugees-frustration-grows-over-long-wait-times-for-uk-visas

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/09/anger-and-exhaustion-as-ukrainians-turned-away-by-uk-in-calais
 
Refugee families sleeping in cars at Calais, with little to eat. Being forced to go to Paris just to fill up a form. Some, God help us, leaving safety to return to Ukrainian cities under siege because their money has run out while waiting for dozy Home Office officials to process their applications or just to answer the question: how long?

The officials seem utterly without shame, and are – of course! - never held to account, never even named. Well, let’s make a start here:

Glynn Williams DG Migration and Borders
Amma Haddad DG Asylum protection
Tony Eastaugh Immigration Enforcement

(Since you ask: there are 10 ‘Director Generals’. And an unbelievably 68 Directors  - I’m quoting from the last official Home Office organisation chart. This from the Department that cut 20,000 police officers.)

The institutional incompetence of the British state, which is been growing this past decade or so, no doubt  has many causes, including the pathological hostility of ministers towards their own servants, their unwillingness to listen, consequent timidity of  civil servants, and a decline in the calibre of people who are willing to serve in such circumstances, so that third raters rise to the top. (I mean, which of us would choose to work for Priti Patel, rather quit and than do something useful – a dustman, for example.)

Yet the times are going to require much more of government, not less.

Expect more failure.