Tuesday, 4 March 2025
The Blob is the disease
A striking aspect of modern UK politics is the lack of political and official interest in maintenance in its widest sense. As our world becomes more complex, maintenance becomes more complex too, but the political class doesn’t want to know. They don’t even want to maintain our national borders.
From potholes in the road to bureaucratic standards, from education to software, from hospitals to cultural standards to public integrity - to run as it should it all requires some kind of maintenance.
A catalogue of maintenance required for a complex modern society would be impossibly huge, but in the past it was done by government, society, businesses and individuals at all levels, from the maintenance of justice to mowing the lawn.
Today, government bureaucracy has waded into crushing levels of maintenance it simply doesn’t understand. It absorbs the power but not the capacity to maintain. The required maintenance is too complex, too diffuse and too subtle for the rigidities of bureaucratic processes.
Here in the UK we see the results of over-centralised maintenance which doesn't work or isn't being done. Roads pocked with potholes are a symptom of something wider and incurable because the potholes themselves are not the disease. The Blob is the disease.
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10 comments:
To my mind, as I just put across the way, the whole thing is designed-in incompetence, pleading lack of funds. The mendacity level is off the charts.
Yes, I remember thinking about this issue a couple of years ago - it might have been raised here. When you see people pushing their pet projects at work and presumably in politics, they try to talk things up, and focus on all the benefits. They deal in images of things working and being new. There's no focus on how long it will last, and what needs doing to keep it going. Perhaps it was always like that, and everyone from the Victorians onwards threw up impressive edifices without much thought for the future, and only now do we find that the number of crumbling edifices outstrips the number of plodders and planners who humbly fix them.
David McGrogan did a very nice article on the mess that neglecting Newcastle's bridges has got the city into.
https://substack.com/@newsfromuncibal/p-156736382
His articles on substack are always good, and usually free.
Of course, it's not just bridges and physical stuff that needs maintaining. Software, administrative systems, relationships, and possibly the whole culture.
In decreasing order of importance:
Scoring points off a political or bureaucratic opponents
Achieving recognition for a budget defended
Achieving recognition for a project delivered
.
.
.
Maintenance (provides no opportunity for recognition)
James - yes it is off the charts, mendacity is now the standard approach to anything mainstream political.
Sam - thanks, interesting link. As we know, the problem can be seen all over the place and it's not easy to retain enough optimism to see how a positive future could emerge from it all. Having to look past Starmer and co. doesn't help. We need leaders to create a mood where the pendulum is seen to have gone too far and has to start swinging back.
DJ - that's it, maintenance is for quiet people who just get on with things.
My old Dad was sound on this. He used to say that a fair part of our infrastructure (though that wasn't the word used then) was inherited from the Victorian and Edwardians. Politicians would let it crumble, preferring to spend money on new projects that would appeal to "interests", that would get headlines, and would therefore let them harvest votes. (And perhaps harvest bribes.)
I've just received a reply to a letter I sent to HMRC in June '24.
On the one hand it signifies the total incompetence of the civil service but on the other such bad mismanagement makes tax-avoidance so much easier for which I am extremely grateful. I always make a point of saluting our working from home Peleton pricks as I raise a maragrita on some distant sunny beach.
Marvellous.
dearieme - your old Dad was right. I don't know when it arose, but decades ago, 'new' became synonymous with 'better' even when it wasn't. I'm reminded of the library in a town where we used to live. Built in the sixties, it was falling apart after fifty years and had to be replaced with a building which is no improvement, but is new and isn't yet falling apart.
Professor - I hope the HMRC letter was full of apologies for being absurdly late. No? Thought not.
I wonder if an exacerbation of this Civil Service attitude is partly due to the fact they have been able to devolve their decision making to the EU for so long, that they are finding it hard to act and make plans, because they are not used to it.
Tammly - it could well be so, the Civil Service may now be full of people with buck-passing skills and no clear way back to a culture of decision making.
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