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The ridiculous incompetence of the British Ruling Class
How is Britain really governed? Read, and find out...
THE RIDICULOUS INCOMPETENCE OF THE BRITISH RULING CLASS
And its causes
If any of my readers (granted, of course, that anyone is reading this) are familiar with current British events, then there are two words that will cause laughter (maybe slightly bitter laughter) merely by being pronounced; and the words are. DIANA. FOUNTAIN.
To sum it up, after the death of Diana Princess of Wales, the issue of a memorial came up. A committee of friends of her and generic Great and Good, such as the British ruling class tends to form in these circumstances, passed on the obvious idea of a statue in favour of a gardening feature - a ground-level ring-shaped fountain in one of London's major parks. This was a bizarre enough idea in the first place; the kind of thing that says to the ordinary person "we have an insight into things that you do not understand; our sensitivities are on a higher level than yours." The ordinary person can hardly see the connection between the chic and attractive young aristocrat who did so well out of marriage and divorce and a water feature such as many of them build in their gardens. But then, the ordinary person does not get to serve on committees of the Great and the Good.
The water feature took an unconscionable amount of time to build. Certainly most of Britain's amateur gardeners would have taken less to install one in their own back yards. But in time and season, it was built. And then the news started spreading - first in little dubitative news items about rumours, then in front-page stories: the fountain did not work. It was a disaster on half a dozen grounds, from children paddling in it only to slip and hurt themselves, to disease-carrying algae festering in the water (in spite of the fact that this was a RUNNING water feature, which should have prevented the growth of static vegetation). The whole thing was a bust. And then a cabinet minister had the bright idea of blaming the public for the mess: they should not have paddled their dirty feet in the nice clean water. (Why is it that the name Tybalt-Quin always comes to mind in connection with this unbrilliant person?)
A-a-a-a-anyway, the thing is that this sort of debacle is not very surprising to the average British citizen; in fact, it is so regularly typical of what our beloved ruling classes routinely do with taxpayers' and lottery-players' money, that we are not even shocked any more. Again and again, some big project is splashed all over the newspapers, only to result in enormous amounts of wasted money, increased inefficiency, long and weary labour to repair it, and finally something that could have been done - if it was worth doing at all - in a tenth of the time and at a tenth of the expense. For instance, the British Army's new rifles (a kind that no other NATO army uses) were supposed to be full of brilliant new features; they turned out to be absurdly sensitive to sand and heat, which, given that much of the Army's activity tends to take place in places like the Middle East, showed a certain amount of lack of practical sense. (Successful brands such as Beretta, Kalashnikov and Uzi are all famous for being able to shoot in any temperature and even if they have just been dunked in mud - let alone sand.) And guess what? A lot of money had to be set aside to bring them up to scratch. Likewise, there was the now-legendary wobbly footbridge over the Thames. Personally, I thought that people showed a shortage of imagination there. They should have left it as it was. If Pisa can have a leaning tower, why should London not have a wobbly bridge? (However, unlike most of the projects I am discussing, the footbridge does happen to be really beautiful. The money was worth spending, althought perhaps not as much as was spent.)
Computer systems are a particular favourite. There has been a drive to computerize(often at the same time as privatizing) every branch of the State; and I think that the projects that have not been bollocksed-up big time, often disastrously, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There was a police office that ran checks on the police records of candidates to jobs working with children - teachers, etc. - efficiently and to the satisfaction of all concerned; an important enough job, one would think, given the attraction of such jobs to paedophiles. It was privatized AND computerized; and suddenly checks that had taken the inefficent public institution called the police two weeks to perform, were taking a year. A whole year's intake of new teachers and child workers was blocked across Britain - or people had to be taken on without any checks - because a privatized authority could not get its computer system right. Or there were the computer systems of the Inland Revenue, the probation service, the passport office, the NHS, the... [insert name of public service, ad lib]. The money needed to straighten out these computer disasters must have run into tens of billions of pounds; the societal nuisance and harm, quite incalculable. Think, for instance, of the effect upon society at large of a near-collapse of the probation service, which must manage the re-insertion of former offenders into society. This - take it from me, ladies and gentlemen - this happened. This is still happening.
There is one structure which is symbolic of this way of wasting money, one which every Briton knows about and that every Briton regards as the very type and archetype of the botched public work: the Millennium Dome. And I think that if we look at the reasons that made this enormous semi-permanent tent-like structure the disaster it was, we will see what exactly it is that makes the British ruling class such a maker of disasters.
When compared with the Diana Fountain, one thing becomes clear: that both structures are the result of wanting to do something without knowing what or why. Actually, both structures are the result of wanting to do something while positively refusing to acknowledge the central issue of what they wanted to do something about.
Take the Diana memorial. Why should Diana be memorialized at all? It was already becoming clear while she was alive, and it has become overwhelmingly certain since her death, that this handsome woman was a spoilt and damaged, selfish, unstable brat, prone to tantrums, who made her way by throwing herself at the Prince of Wales until his father practically forced him to marry her, and then found the arrangements unsatisfactory; that she had adulterous affairs while still married, and showed, after her divorce, a taste for tarty behaviour and unsuitable lovers; and that, er, that was it. She was, one supposes, a loving mother; her children certainly do seem to cherish her memory; but one wonders whether she was a wise one. The anecdote that she took a softcore porn mag and divided it between them does not testify in her favour. Sure, she took part in charity work; so do a lot of people who want to buy their way to respectability. In fact, Diana was a specimen of something modern and, to my way of thinking, undesirable: the phenomenon of the pretty woman famous purely for being pretty.
That being the case, the committee had two choices. They could frankly admit, under whatever dignified guise, that all that had made Diana famous, and, let us say, memorable, was her beauty; they could find a good figurative sculptor (they must be rare, since they could not even find one for Margaret Thatcher - the lifeless dummy they placed in the House of Commons may be a just reward for one of the most baleful political careers of recent times, but it is an artistic failure of the first water) and ask for a statue that embodied her grace and beauty. Beauty, after all, may not be a moral virtue, but it is a good thing in itself, and I have no objection to celebrating it. Or they could take the desperate road: pretend that there was something else other than beauty to celebrate. And that is what they did. Of course, since there was in fact nothing else, this meant reaching into the void; and, guess what, they produced something altogether arbitrary and unmeaning - the fountain.
The same thing happened with the Millennium Dome. As the imposing date 2000AD approached, the feeling grew among the People Who Matter that Britain had to do something to celebrate it. To celebrate what, however, is not clear. If the date 2000 means anything at all, it means 2000 years since the birth of Jesus Christ (and it is wrong in any case, since Our Lord was probably born some time at or before 4BC). But the very last thing that the Great and the Good want to do is celebrate 2000 years of Christian civilization; they might lose some Muslim votes (although in fact what baffles Muslim immigrants most is the lack of faith and interest in Christianity in this country). So what do we celebrate? The result: another festival of the arbitrary and inconcludent.
The important thing is that this mental escapism, this inventing things out of thin air and with no relation to reality, does not exhaust itself with the basic idea. It becomes a feature of everything that is thought and done about the idea. To speak of only one central feature of the Dome, the planners worked on the notion that it would have 30 million visitors in one year. The man called in to rescue it after the opening had proved a disaster, the Frenchman P-Y Gerbaux - a former manager at Paris Disneyland - said that it had taken Disneyland, with all the prestige and built-in advertising value of the name, no less than five years to get to that level. Nobody had even bothered to investigate the realities of running a tourist attraction; they had invented the 30 million forecast, like they had invented the very concept of the Dome, arbitrarily, with no reference to reality.
Let me synthetize what I think is the case: the Ruling Class feels a need to do a certain thing. At the same time, it positively does not want to acknowledge the central feature of the thing. The result is utter, empty-air arbitrariness. And this habit of thinking entirely outside reality infects all aspects of the process of realizing the project, with disastrous and expensive results.
It may be thought that this could not be the case with the essentials services of the State - defence, justice, administration; but in fact it is. There is a sense in which the Ruling Class is simply blinding itself as to what it is actually doing and why.
The central issue is the monstrosity called Thatcherism. Now what is not commonly perceived is that Thatcherism is simply the biggest sell and the biggest lie ever foisted upon a donkey nation. It is a fraud in terms of its own central tenets. Thatcherism comes out of the silly superstition that some Americans and a few other idiots around the world like to indulge in: that they are self-made men, that they owe nothing to anybody, that virtue is in self-reliance... that self-reliance is even possible. If people obeyed and accepted reason, the death-blow to this pose-striking nonsense would have been given 1900 years ago by Saul of Tarsus: "What have you got that you were not given?" Your talents and your looks, your strength and your stamina, are not things for which you are responsible. And from the moment you are born to the moment you die, you rely on others for everything from food to protection to learning to healing. The notion that people can build a life by themselves is pernicious, self-flattering, and dowright Satanic nonsense; after all, was not the idea of "existing by itself" and owing nothing to any external self the central issue of the Miltonic Satan?
That being the case, the notion that the State ought to be cut back on principle is disastrous. The State should certainly be controlled, as the interference of any human being or group of human beings in others' lives ought to be controlled. But to imagine that there is any inherent superiority in "private initiative" is, to be polite, groundless.
The central point, however, is that it is only rhetoric. There has been no attempt whatever to roll back the public power, and no more can there be. What there has been is a massive transfer of State power, from the direct and identifiable public sector, to a massive amount of faceless private contractors. Nobody is mad enough to really dismantle the social state; the decent part of politicians' soul knows that this would result in a violent increase in poverty and public unhappiness, and the indecent part knows that the very middle classes who are supposed to support the pose-striking nonsense about self-reliance and independence would scream to the heavens if such things as socialized medicine and unemployment support were really removed and people were really expected - even with whatever reduction in tax - to stand on what passes as their own two feet.
What happens, then? That, in order to give the impression that the pernicious and socialistic public power is being rolled back, service after service is privatized - or, to use the old and correct term, farmed out to contractors. The service does not change. But, owing to the need of contractors to make a profit, it becomes more expensive. There is pressure to reduce costs, that is to cut staff. People begin to go mad on computer systems. Computers should replace people. Only they don't; because the disease of thinking outside reality affects, as I said, everything, and computer systems are designed that can neither do what they are asked to nor replace the employees they are supposed to replace. The people who suffer are the employees, whose work is casualized; and the citizens, who receive the kind of service one can expect in such cases. But the citizens are not part of the circle of the Great and the Good. The contractors are.
And here is the final result of the whole sorry story of not wanting to see what you are actually doing. The fine rhetoric and pose-striking of self-reliance and ending the Nanny State (it does make you wonder about the relationship of the average Thatcherite with his/her parents; perhaps it is significan that the so-called Conservatives presided over an unprecedented crisis in the institution of the family - perhaps some of them did not quite mind the idea of having kids grow up without parents) results in this: money flowing out of the state coffers into the hands of private contractors, worse services, and less accountability. In every way, the citizen is deprived of power and independence, not given it. And the member of the Ruling Class becomes an accomplice to the looting of the public purse and to the removal of State power from the public field into unaccountable private hands - an accomplice, in short, to robbery and tyranny.
The horrendous abuse of the public purse by private contractors can be seen as pure corruption; at least, this is my first instinct. But I think the rot goes deeper. If the Great and the Good were all conscious of a will to loot the State, there would at least be some clarity of mind; and, in the intervals of filling their pockets, they might at least have the clarity of mind not to supply, say, the army with rifles designed the wrong way. The evidence, in my view, is that the Ruling Class has its collective head in the clouds. The refusal to consider the reality of what you are doing has become a social institution. And the unhappy result of this is that it is practically impossible to break through to them. Clear-headed scoundrelism can be reasoned with; collective infatuation and delusion cannot, because it is the collective that reinforces it.
THE RIDICULOUS INCOMPETENCE OF THE BRITISH RULING CLASS
And its causes
If any of my readers (granted, of course, that anyone is reading this) are familiar with current British events, then there are two words that will cause laughter (maybe slightly bitter laughter) merely by being pronounced; and the words are. DIANA. FOUNTAIN.
To sum it up, after the death of Diana Princess of Wales, the issue of a memorial came up. A committee of friends of her and generic Great and Good, such as the British ruling class tends to form in these circumstances, passed on the obvious idea of a statue in favour of a gardening feature - a ground-level ring-shaped fountain in one of London's major parks. This was a bizarre enough idea in the first place; the kind of thing that says to the ordinary person "we have an insight into things that you do not understand; our sensitivities are on a higher level than yours." The ordinary person can hardly see the connection between the chic and attractive young aristocrat who did so well out of marriage and divorce and a water feature such as many of them build in their gardens. But then, the ordinary person does not get to serve on committees of the Great and the Good.
The water feature took an unconscionable amount of time to build. Certainly most of Britain's amateur gardeners would have taken less to install one in their own back yards. But in time and season, it was built. And then the news started spreading - first in little dubitative news items about rumours, then in front-page stories: the fountain did not work. It was a disaster on half a dozen grounds, from children paddling in it only to slip and hurt themselves, to disease-carrying algae festering in the water (in spite of the fact that this was a RUNNING water feature, which should have prevented the growth of static vegetation). The whole thing was a bust. And then a cabinet minister had the bright idea of blaming the public for the mess: they should not have paddled their dirty feet in the nice clean water. (Why is it that the name Tybalt-Quin always comes to mind in connection with this unbrilliant person?)
A-a-a-a-anyway, the thing is that this sort of debacle is not very surprising to the average British citizen; in fact, it is so regularly typical of what our beloved ruling classes routinely do with taxpayers' and lottery-players' money, that we are not even shocked any more. Again and again, some big project is splashed all over the newspapers, only to result in enormous amounts of wasted money, increased inefficiency, long and weary labour to repair it, and finally something that could have been done - if it was worth doing at all - in a tenth of the time and at a tenth of the expense. For instance, the British Army's new rifles (a kind that no other NATO army uses) were supposed to be full of brilliant new features; they turned out to be absurdly sensitive to sand and heat, which, given that much of the Army's activity tends to take place in places like the Middle East, showed a certain amount of lack of practical sense. (Successful brands such as Beretta, Kalashnikov and Uzi are all famous for being able to shoot in any temperature and even if they have just been dunked in mud - let alone sand.) And guess what? A lot of money had to be set aside to bring them up to scratch. Likewise, there was the now-legendary wobbly footbridge over the Thames. Personally, I thought that people showed a shortage of imagination there. They should have left it as it was. If Pisa can have a leaning tower, why should London not have a wobbly bridge? (However, unlike most of the projects I am discussing, the footbridge does happen to be really beautiful. The money was worth spending, althought perhaps not as much as was spent.)
Computer systems are a particular favourite. There has been a drive to computerize(often at the same time as privatizing) every branch of the State; and I think that the projects that have not been bollocksed-up big time, often disastrously, can be counted on the fingers of one hand. There was a police office that ran checks on the police records of candidates to jobs working with children - teachers, etc. - efficiently and to the satisfaction of all concerned; an important enough job, one would think, given the attraction of such jobs to paedophiles. It was privatized AND computerized; and suddenly checks that had taken the inefficent public institution called the police two weeks to perform, were taking a year. A whole year's intake of new teachers and child workers was blocked across Britain - or people had to be taken on without any checks - because a privatized authority could not get its computer system right. Or there were the computer systems of the Inland Revenue, the probation service, the passport office, the NHS, the... [insert name of public service, ad lib]. The money needed to straighten out these computer disasters must have run into tens of billions of pounds; the societal nuisance and harm, quite incalculable. Think, for instance, of the effect upon society at large of a near-collapse of the probation service, which must manage the re-insertion of former offenders into society. This - take it from me, ladies and gentlemen - this happened. This is still happening.
There is one structure which is symbolic of this way of wasting money, one which every Briton knows about and that every Briton regards as the very type and archetype of the botched public work: the Millennium Dome. And I think that if we look at the reasons that made this enormous semi-permanent tent-like structure the disaster it was, we will see what exactly it is that makes the British ruling class such a maker of disasters.
When compared with the Diana Fountain, one thing becomes clear: that both structures are the result of wanting to do something without knowing what or why. Actually, both structures are the result of wanting to do something while positively refusing to acknowledge the central issue of what they wanted to do something about.
Take the Diana memorial. Why should Diana be memorialized at all? It was already becoming clear while she was alive, and it has become overwhelmingly certain since her death, that this handsome woman was a spoilt and damaged, selfish, unstable brat, prone to tantrums, who made her way by throwing herself at the Prince of Wales until his father practically forced him to marry her, and then found the arrangements unsatisfactory; that she had adulterous affairs while still married, and showed, after her divorce, a taste for tarty behaviour and unsuitable lovers; and that, er, that was it. She was, one supposes, a loving mother; her children certainly do seem to cherish her memory; but one wonders whether she was a wise one. The anecdote that she took a softcore porn mag and divided it between them does not testify in her favour. Sure, she took part in charity work; so do a lot of people who want to buy their way to respectability. In fact, Diana was a specimen of something modern and, to my way of thinking, undesirable: the phenomenon of the pretty woman famous purely for being pretty.
That being the case, the committee had two choices. They could frankly admit, under whatever dignified guise, that all that had made Diana famous, and, let us say, memorable, was her beauty; they could find a good figurative sculptor (they must be rare, since they could not even find one for Margaret Thatcher - the lifeless dummy they placed in the House of Commons may be a just reward for one of the most baleful political careers of recent times, but it is an artistic failure of the first water) and ask for a statue that embodied her grace and beauty. Beauty, after all, may not be a moral virtue, but it is a good thing in itself, and I have no objection to celebrating it. Or they could take the desperate road: pretend that there was something else other than beauty to celebrate. And that is what they did. Of course, since there was in fact nothing else, this meant reaching into the void; and, guess what, they produced something altogether arbitrary and unmeaning - the fountain.
The same thing happened with the Millennium Dome. As the imposing date 2000AD approached, the feeling grew among the People Who Matter that Britain had to do something to celebrate it. To celebrate what, however, is not clear. If the date 2000 means anything at all, it means 2000 years since the birth of Jesus Christ (and it is wrong in any case, since Our Lord was probably born some time at or before 4BC). But the very last thing that the Great and the Good want to do is celebrate 2000 years of Christian civilization; they might lose some Muslim votes (although in fact what baffles Muslim immigrants most is the lack of faith and interest in Christianity in this country). So what do we celebrate? The result: another festival of the arbitrary and inconcludent.
The important thing is that this mental escapism, this inventing things out of thin air and with no relation to reality, does not exhaust itself with the basic idea. It becomes a feature of everything that is thought and done about the idea. To speak of only one central feature of the Dome, the planners worked on the notion that it would have 30 million visitors in one year. The man called in to rescue it after the opening had proved a disaster, the Frenchman P-Y Gerbaux - a former manager at Paris Disneyland - said that it had taken Disneyland, with all the prestige and built-in advertising value of the name, no less than five years to get to that level. Nobody had even bothered to investigate the realities of running a tourist attraction; they had invented the 30 million forecast, like they had invented the very concept of the Dome, arbitrarily, with no reference to reality.
Let me synthetize what I think is the case: the Ruling Class feels a need to do a certain thing. At the same time, it positively does not want to acknowledge the central feature of the thing. The result is utter, empty-air arbitrariness. And this habit of thinking entirely outside reality infects all aspects of the process of realizing the project, with disastrous and expensive results.
It may be thought that this could not be the case with the essentials services of the State - defence, justice, administration; but in fact it is. There is a sense in which the Ruling Class is simply blinding itself as to what it is actually doing and why.
The central issue is the monstrosity called Thatcherism. Now what is not commonly perceived is that Thatcherism is simply the biggest sell and the biggest lie ever foisted upon a donkey nation. It is a fraud in terms of its own central tenets. Thatcherism comes out of the silly superstition that some Americans and a few other idiots around the world like to indulge in: that they are self-made men, that they owe nothing to anybody, that virtue is in self-reliance... that self-reliance is even possible. If people obeyed and accepted reason, the death-blow to this pose-striking nonsense would have been given 1900 years ago by Saul of Tarsus: "What have you got that you were not given?" Your talents and your looks, your strength and your stamina, are not things for which you are responsible. And from the moment you are born to the moment you die, you rely on others for everything from food to protection to learning to healing. The notion that people can build a life by themselves is pernicious, self-flattering, and dowright Satanic nonsense; after all, was not the idea of "existing by itself" and owing nothing to any external self the central issue of the Miltonic Satan?
That being the case, the notion that the State ought to be cut back on principle is disastrous. The State should certainly be controlled, as the interference of any human being or group of human beings in others' lives ought to be controlled. But to imagine that there is any inherent superiority in "private initiative" is, to be polite, groundless.
The central point, however, is that it is only rhetoric. There has been no attempt whatever to roll back the public power, and no more can there be. What there has been is a massive transfer of State power, from the direct and identifiable public sector, to a massive amount of faceless private contractors. Nobody is mad enough to really dismantle the social state; the decent part of politicians' soul knows that this would result in a violent increase in poverty and public unhappiness, and the indecent part knows that the very middle classes who are supposed to support the pose-striking nonsense about self-reliance and independence would scream to the heavens if such things as socialized medicine and unemployment support were really removed and people were really expected - even with whatever reduction in tax - to stand on what passes as their own two feet.
What happens, then? That, in order to give the impression that the pernicious and socialistic public power is being rolled back, service after service is privatized - or, to use the old and correct term, farmed out to contractors. The service does not change. But, owing to the need of contractors to make a profit, it becomes more expensive. There is pressure to reduce costs, that is to cut staff. People begin to go mad on computer systems. Computers should replace people. Only they don't; because the disease of thinking outside reality affects, as I said, everything, and computer systems are designed that can neither do what they are asked to nor replace the employees they are supposed to replace. The people who suffer are the employees, whose work is casualized; and the citizens, who receive the kind of service one can expect in such cases. But the citizens are not part of the circle of the Great and the Good. The contractors are.
And here is the final result of the whole sorry story of not wanting to see what you are actually doing. The fine rhetoric and pose-striking of self-reliance and ending the Nanny State (it does make you wonder about the relationship of the average Thatcherite with his/her parents; perhaps it is significan that the so-called Conservatives presided over an unprecedented crisis in the institution of the family - perhaps some of them did not quite mind the idea of having kids grow up without parents) results in this: money flowing out of the state coffers into the hands of private contractors, worse services, and less accountability. In every way, the citizen is deprived of power and independence, not given it. And the member of the Ruling Class becomes an accomplice to the looting of the public purse and to the removal of State power from the public field into unaccountable private hands - an accomplice, in short, to robbery and tyranny.
The horrendous abuse of the public purse by private contractors can be seen as pure corruption; at least, this is my first instinct. But I think the rot goes deeper. If the Great and the Good were all conscious of a will to loot the State, there would at least be some clarity of mind; and, in the intervals of filling their pockets, they might at least have the clarity of mind not to supply, say, the army with rifles designed the wrong way. The evidence, in my view, is that the Ruling Class has its collective head in the clouds. The refusal to consider the reality of what you are doing has become a social institution. And the unhappy result of this is that it is practically impossible to break through to them. Clear-headed scoundrelism can be reasoned with; collective infatuation and delusion cannot, because it is the collective that reinforces it.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2004-08-20 07:42 am (UTC)(link)