THE TELEGRAPH: A new radio series called Slapdash Britain examines how we became swamped by bureaucracy and more incompetent than ever.
It’s an ordinary summer’s day. Over breakfast you glance hurriedly at the paper: the usual stuff about a missing civil service laptop and some social worker scandal in the north of England. Coming home after work, your train stuck for hours in the middle of nowhere, you kill time by reading a story about the latest spat between civil servants and special advisers. And that night, tossing fitfully in your sleep, you dream that you’re stuck in the corridor of some failing hospital, blood pouring from a gaping wound. The doctor is too busy to see you, but you can see him all right: through a glass window, literally buried under a mound of paperwork. In the background, a sepulchral voice intones again and again: 'Not fit for purpose. Not fit for purpose …’
Over the last few months, making a new Radio Four documentary series about the crisis in British government, I have had more than my fair share of nightmares about being trapped in the corridors of power. When I began work on the series, Gordon Brown’s government was in its dying agonies; when I finished, the new coalition ministers were just shaking hands with their new drivers. But after talking to civil servants, special advisers, local government executives and academic experts, I realised that the overexcited political reporters were missing the real story. For whoever calls the shots in the minister’s office, there is now a pervasive sense that government simply no longer works as it once did. To put it bluntly, it has become shockingly slapdash. 'It’s not good enough,’ the veteran political scientist Anthony King told me. 'There are too many mistakes.’ And perhaps surprisingly, the former civil servants I met almost universally agreed. >>> Dominic Sandbrook | Friday, June 11, 2010
