This is how it works. A party comes to power promising to ‘do something’ about, for example, education. The new minister sits down with the head of his civil service to ‘sort out’ education. The Sir Humphrey concerned has seen this all before and has a ready answer. “Of course education can be improved, minister.” He says, “All we need is more money and more power.” The minister gives in. Exactly the same thing happens if you try to do something about law and order or immigration. Let the system run for a few decades and you have our current, bloated bureaucracy.
Each department simply tries to be as big and powerful as it can be. A few seconds thought shows this to be a suicidal plan. If the bureaucracy controlled everything, then as the Soviet experiment shows, economic activity would cease and there would be nothing to control. But the bureaucracy is not self aware. It is a cancer, not a parasite; it is indifferent to the health of its host. There is no controlling intelligence, no master plan. It cannot understand that the only reason we are all still here is because it does not control everything.
This is the system that is controlling our country. Ministers are largely ceremonial appointments, figureheads to send off to conferences and appear in the photos. Ministers have very little control over their departments and the reason is quite simple. Giving people orders only works if the people receiving the orders are working to broadly the same plan. Otherwise they will simply examine the order to see how it can be complied with to their own advantage. It is a standard part of folklore that summoning a demon and ordering it to do something will always backfire. That’s exactly how the bureaucracy works.
The bureaucracy has skilfully neutralised all those who would challenge it. It has captured the elected representatives supposed to control it; it has diluted the electorate so that those who actually pay for it lack the democratic power to limit it. Having removed all threats to its power, the cancer is free to make its host’s life a misery until both succumb to the inevitable.
