The art of muddling through

Today I wish to begin with four famous quotations.

Whilst we are all aware of Lord Acton’s famous statement ‘Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ we sometimes forget that it continued ‘Great men are almost always bad men’’.

The American journalist and social critic H.L. Mencken offered two that often do the rounds: ‘Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard’ and [I thought this one was a P.T. Barnum quip but it seems I’m wrong on that] of course the classic ‘No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public’.

This far on I cannot recall exactly whether it was apocryphal, or a satirically-invented quip from the makers of Spitting Image, or even whether it was actually Saint or Greavsie [it says on Wikipedia that their own eponymous show ran on ITV from 1985 to 1992] that regularly used to comment “it’s a funny old game …” in the context of football matches, but it’s a saying that could equally apply to politics.

Brexit. Jeremy Corbyn. Boris Johnson. Nigel Farage being the first overseas politician to visit President-elect Trump. David Cameron’s decision to promise the UK electorate a straightforward ‘In/Out’ EU Referendum.

Occasionally ‘You couldn’t make it up’ doesn’t seem to cover the half of it.

In terms of getting things done – whether any specific act or initiative be right or wrong – it is almost a truism that democracy is complicated and probably a hindrance to decisiveness and efficiency. It seems that being in power is less a threshold to good government than an exercise in the art of achieving the possible rather than applying principles in the raw. I guess it has to be when there is such an obvious disconnect between making a decision and persuading all those (and not just the voters) who need to be onside before you can implement it.

‘Muddling through’ so often becomes the order of the day. Should we be surprised?

Sometimes I find myself wondering how it is possible that different groups of supposedly highly-educated and intelligent people (for example, those at the top of the Tory and Labour parties) can come to such opposing and trenchantly different views on how to go forward. And then stick to them, irrespective of whatever events, developments and crises later unfold.

Take austerity. Applying a programme of it in 2010 was a necessary evil designed to rein in the ever-expanding costs of the public sector and ‘balance the books’ so that we didn’t leave future generations in hock before they’d even grown up (Tory view) … or, alternatively, it was a misguided, vindictive and disastrously cack-handed, and ultimately bound-to-fail, attempt to getting the UK back on its feet which would – as night follows day – inflict untold misery on the weakest and most vulnerable (Labour view). Both could not possibly be right, but that didn’t stop either of them believing they were and continuing to claim it ad nauseam to this day.

American politics, of course, remains endlessly fascinating. We read that President-elect Trump is enduring a hurried ‘cold shower, wake up and smell the coffee’ initiation into the complications of what life is like in the White House and the real world, (we can presume with each new briefing) learning that his hitherto generalised ‘black and white, Good Guy/Bad Guy’ assumptions – especially for him, never having previously held public office – could scarcely have been wider from the mark if he’d tried.

Occasionally in the past week I’ve come back to the possibility that none of this actually matters. There’s a limited amount that anyone, even Trump, can do in 24 hours. More likely – soon to become the most powerful man in the world – he’ll spend most of his time fire-fighting or dealing with a succession of little and big crises arising from within governmental departments that hitherto he didn’t even know existed, still less understood exactly what it is they do.

And then then there’s sheer, unadulterated incompetence and inefficiency.

Below is a link to a strangely amusing but typical ‘Look what they’re up to now!’ article that appears today on the website of the Daily Mail. The UK Ministry of Defence traditionally has a dreadful record of procurement cock-ups and overspends. For quite a while now our two new big aircraft carriers costing over £6 billion have been labouring under the revelation that their chosen fighter aircraft for some reason (I cannot recall which one) are not going to be able to land on – or was it fly from? – said air craft carrier decks.

Now Daniel Martin writes that the National Audit Office has issued a report saying we won’t even be able to ‘plug in’ either of them to the mains electricity supply when they return to their home ports because the MOD’s land cables are 80 year old and falling apart – see here – DAILY MAIL