National Government

I haven't heard it mentioned yet but coudl a National Government be the fourth option...

We are at a moment when we have a number of issues that need handling above the fray of point scoring party politics. A long term approach and some degree of consensus are needed for:

• Dealing with the deficit
• The electoral system
• Pensions and long term care fro the ageing population
• Afghanistan

I don't know if there are any rules about when a National Government can be formed-- is there perhaps a catastrophe scale? Clearly we are not engaged in a full scale war with Hitler breathing down our necks. There are also many in Labour who shudder at the mention of Ramsay MacDonald's 1931-35 National Government. But these are surprising times...

Barking Sane

I will no longer associate Barking with "mad". The people of that consituency gave us a fresh blast of good sense in their voting this week. They showed the BNP it is not wanted and not part of the British way. Indeed it was a double humiliation for the Hate Party -- Nick Griffin helped Labour to a huge majority in the Westminster vote and on Barking and Dagenham Council the BNP lost all its twelve council seats.

I think we should introduce the phrase "Barking Sane" as our vote of thanks.

Best moment of the night was watching the buffoon Griffin bleating that his defeat was the electorate's fault for turning out to vote in such high numbers. No Nick that's democracy -- showing your true colours or just being thick? Perhaps if your party didn't spend the campaign infighting, candidates didn't brawl in the street, you didn't have one faction or another shutting down the party website or accusations from one of your own candidates about the Neo-Nazi links of party kameraden and perhaps, most of all, if you kept your mouth shut you might have got a few more votes. Not many though.

There will be tears before bedtime...

Domesday 2.0

Well that's all sorted then. Not. But we do, at least, have a big issue to discuss -- electoral reform.Unfortunately it is not the right one. Not right now anyway. Don't get me wrong I am broadly in favour of some sort of PR system. Not evangelically like the Lib Dems and -- now conveniently -- Labour. Even with its faults though PR it is still the least worst system. The real trouble for me is that it is a process issue, it is about how we choose governments not what governments actually do. I just can't get as excited about process as I can about policy and policy implementation. Probably my fault.

Anyway back to the big issue. The one we are still not discussing -- how we manage public finances -- the one all the three parties tried to skirt. It is more than a fiscal question, as I mentioned before this week, we need to be asking much more basic questions about what the state sector is for. A generation ago we could probably have answered this, even if we argued about which areas of activity should be in or out of the public sphere. Broadly speaking we had administrators, service practitioners like teachers, nurses or toilet attendants and those employed in the nationalised industries in our then "mixed" economy.

We still have teachers and nurses of course. But we have privatised or closed the mines, railways, car factories, in fact virtually all of the public side of the old mixed economy. You have to look very hard to find someone minding a public lavatory these days and the computer revolution is supposed to have automated much of the administration. Why then is the public sector still roughly the same size? It has clearly changed its role but it has undergone this change well out of view of the people at large. Did anyone ask us if we wanted to exchange park keepers for press officers, bus conductors for innovation managers, miners for leadership excellence champions? Anyone from outside who deals with the public sector will be able to regale you with tales of ridiculous non-jobs and then a millefeuille of managers administering them.  Anyone inside the public sector will tell you -- if they are being honest -- of waste and inefficiency, they will describe managerialism gone mad. Neither insiders nor outsiders can really define what so much of this is for, other than self-perpetuation. Looking back nationalised miners didn't dig the cheapest coal, British Leyland workers didn't make the world's best cars but at least they were doing something, they even created some wealth.

I am not being party political. Labour and Conservative have been equally guilty of encouraging or allowing this to happen.  It is nothing new. Bureaucracies have been creating work for themselves since human civilisation began. But our situation is new. Now we have to make cuts so we might as well make the right ones and yet we still haven't stopped to think properly what we are spending our £600 billion plus on every year. Spending reviews just do not cut it. They are run by insiders. Efficiency savings tend to create more waste and further layers of administration. The enormous state apparatus of measurement and targeting distorts every service it touches. So what do we do?

I propose a new Domesday exercise. A millennium after William of Normandy produced his grand and detailed report of the land he had conquered, I think we need a similar exercise.This time conducted on the public sector. A full, transparent and independent Domesday 2.0 survey of our public realm. A proper picture. Then we can start making our decisions about what we need, what we want and what we can get rid of.

Election Reading

I am reading Heather Brooke's new book The Silent State. Now is exactly the right time. She paints a very scary picture of how authority at all levels seeks to hide its activities -- whether nefarious, incompetent or run of the mill  -- from citizens. The only time the state shows any interest in voters' or taxpayers' opinons -- apart of course from the obsessive but secret snooping into every aspect of their lives -- is during the four week clamour of an election campaign. Once they have your vote, bugger off and don't ask any questions awkward or otherwise.