The inhumanity of bureaucracy

Reason in politics leads to the inhumanity of bureaucracy.

Allan Bloom

How many of his own people did Stalin kill during his bloody career as Soviet dictator? As we know it was tens of millions but it is worth reminding ourselves of the wider question - who actually killed all those millions of innocent people?

Who pulled the all those triggers or stole tons of crops needed to keep people alive? Who herded people onto trains bound for Siberia? Who organised it all – on the ground, behind the guns, the uniforms, the paperwork and in the offices? It was not Stalin personally but as leader he is usually given the responsibility. Quite right too – but who else was involved?

In its broadest sense it was various Soviet bureaucracies because that is what the Soviet communists built, an all-embracing totalitarian bureaucracy. Stalin was inhuman but so were his bureaucracies and to a lesser extent so were the Tsarist bureaucracies before them. Bureaucracies tend to become inhuman unless constrained by some kind of feedback, some humanising pressure from the outside world – pressure from people beyond the grey walls of officialdom. Democracy restrains, but undermine the democracy and we undermine the restraint.

Most of my career was a gradual progression from local to national to transnational bureaucracy, although the transnational aspect was only beginning by the time I retired. This long, interesting and at times frustrating experience suggests to me that Allan Bloom was right – there is a deep well of inhumanity in bureaucracies and the bigger they are, the more remote they are, the more inhuman they are. They try to insulate themselves from from external influences and to a significant degree the insulation is a deliberate and obvious strategy. It is an essential strategy in the bureaucratic game.

The EU is a good example of how the bureaucratic game is played. The EU could have copied the most successful federal constitution the world has ever seen – that of the USA. Here was an extremely successful template to be picked up and moulded into a European version but as we know this is not what happened.

Perhaps it could not have happened because Europe has too much baggage and too many barriers, but adapting the federal structure of the USA to a European situation was never the bureaucratic way. Bureaucracies do not gravitate towards measures of success which lie beyond their remit. They gravitate towards bureaucratic permanence, towards their own internal criteria of success as a bureaucracy. They do not seek democratic feedback and feedback is what a European version of US federal bureaucracy would have delivered. Minimal feedback was the preferred EU approach. Still is.

To my mind was probably a major factor in the Brexit referendum, the obvious inhumanity of EU bureaucracy. Indifference to southern EU unemployment, indifference to the structural problems caused by the euro – perhaps the most stupid political project since WWII. Indifference to problems and uncertainties caused by mass immigration. All these issues point to an inhuman EU bureaucracy. That is not to suggest that UK bureaucracy is any great improvement but UK bureaucracy is necessarily less remote, more exposed to UK feedback and with fewer internal barriers to surmount, language being the obvious one.

The NHS is a good example of a huge bureaucracy struggling against its inherent drift towards an inhuman ethos. It is not and never could be seriously inhuman because medical staff deal with patients every working day. They are subjected to a constant flow of external feedback from patients and other interested parties, much of which they do not seem to enjoy, but it all goes to make the NHS what it is.

Yet there is inhumanity in the NHS – that inevitable bureaucratic inhumanity. We see it in attempts to cover up gross incompetence, hide needless deaths, botched operations, botched diagnoses, wasted resources. We see it in attempts to stifle criticism and gag whistleblowers. The NHS is not inhuman but there is a strong element of bureaucratic inhumanity which it will never expunge.

Neither will it ever attempt to expunge it as long as we have the Labour party as one of our two main political parties. The Labour party is there to ensure an unending source of servile, politically motivated feedback which prevents the NHS from being as responsive towards its own failings as it should be.

We even see bureaucratic inhumanity in the BBC, in its indifference to financial hardship caused by the compulsory licence tax, its indifference to political balance, excellence, genuine debate or even education.

While we focus on political parties and personalities, bureaucracies are free to undermine what political parties are supposed to achieve. They are free to undermine democratic accountability which is merely human feedback injecting a drop or two of humanity into the game. As the game grows bigger so does the inhumanity. This is a significant factor, the size of the bureaucratic game. The EU and the UN are not your friends – never could be.